_ CHAPTER II. INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE
So, then, one chapter in my life had finished. Already, before the completion of my sixth year, this first chapter had run its circle, had rendered up its music to the final chord--might seem even, like ripe fruit from a tree, to have detached itself forever from all the rest of the arras that was shaping itself within my loom of life. No Eden of lakes and forest lawns, such as the _mirage_ suddenly evokes in Arabian sands,--no pageant of air-built battlements and towers, that ever burned in dream-like silence amongst the vapors of summer sunsets, mocking and repeating with celestial pencil "the fuming vanities of earth,"--could leave behind it the mixed impression of so much truth combined with so much absolute delusion. Truest of all things it seemed by the excess of that happiness which it had sustained: most fraudulent it seemed of all things, when looked back upon as some mysterious parenthesis in the current of life, "self-withdrawn into a wonderous depth," hurrying as if with headlong malice to extinction, and alienated by _every_ feature from the new aspects of life that seemed to await me. Were it not in the bitter corrosion of heart that I was called upon to face, I should have carried over to the present no connecting link whatever from the past. Mere reality in this fretting it was, and the undeniableness of its too potent remembrances, that forbade me to regard this burned-out inaugural chapter of my life as no chapter at all, but a pure exhalation of dreams. Misery is a guaranty of truth too substantial to be refused; else, by its determinate evanescence, the total experience would have worn the character of a fantastic illusion.
Well it was for me at this period, if well it were for me to live at all, that from any continued contemplation of my misery I was forced to wean myself, and suddenly to assume the harness of life. Else under the morbid languishing of grief, and of what the Romans called _desiderium_, (the yearning too obstinate after one irrecoverable face,) too probably I should have pined away into an early grave. Harsh was my awaking; but the rough febrifuge which this awaking administered broke the strength of my sickly reveries through a period of more than two years; by which time, under the natural expansion of my bodily strength, the danger had passed over.
In the first chapter I have rendered solemn thanks for having been trained amongst the gentlest of sisters, and not under "horrid pugilistic brothers." Meantime, one such brother I had, senior by much to myself, and the stormiest of his class: him I will immediately present to the reader; for up to this point of my narrative he may be described as a stranger even to myself. Odd as it sounds, I had at this time both a brother and a father, neither of whom would have been able to challenge me as a relative, nor I _him_, had we happened to meet on the public roads.
In my father's case, this arose from the accident of his having lived abroad for a space that, measured against _my_ life, was a very long one. First, he lived for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra; next in Madeira; then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in St. Kitt's; courting the supposed benefit of hot climates in his complaint of pulmonary consumption. He had, indeed, repeatedly returned to England, and met my mother at watering-places on the south coast of Devonshire, &c. But I, as a younger child, had not been one of the party selected for such excursions from home. And now, at last, when all had proved unavailing, he was coming home to die amongst his family, in his thirty-ninth year. My mother had gone to await his arrival at the port (whatever port) to which the West India packet should bring him; and amongst the deepest recollections which I connect with that period, is one derived from the night of his arrival at Greenhay.
It was a summer evening of unusual solemnity. The servants, and four of us children, were gathered for hours, on the lawn before the house, listening for the sound of wheels. Sunset came--nine, ten, eleven o'clock, and nearly another hour had passed--without a warning sound; for Greenhay, being so solitary a house, formed a _terminus ad quem_, beyond which was nothing but a cluster of cottages, composing the little hamlet of Greenhill; so that any sound of wheels coming from the winding lane which then connected us with the Rusholme Road, carried with it, of necessity, a warning summons to prepare for visitors at Greenhay. No such summons had yet reached us; it was nearly midnight; and, for the last time, it was determined that we should move in a body out of the grounds, on the chance of meeting the travelling party, if, at so late an hour, it could yet be expected to arrive. In fact, to our general surprise, we met it almost immediately, but coming at so slow a pace, that the fall of the horses' feet was not audible until we were close upon them. I mention the case for the sake of the undying impressions which connected themselves with the circumstances. The first notice of the approach was the sudden emerging of horses' heads from the deep gloom of the shady lane; the next was the mass of white pillows against which the dying patient was reclining. The hearse-like pace at which the carriage moved recalled the overwhelming spectacle of that funeral which had so lately formed part in the most memorable event of my life. But these elements of awe, that might at any rate have struck forcibly upon the mind of a child, were for me, in my condition of morbid nervousness, raised into abiding grandeur by the antecedent experiences of that particular summer night. The listening for hours to the sounds from horses' hoofs upon distant roads, rising and falling, caught and lost, upon the gentle undulation of such fitful airs as might be stirring--the peculiar solemnity of the hours succeeding to sunset--the glory of the dying day--the gorgeousness which, by description, so well I knew of sunset in those West Indian islands from which my father was returning--the knowledge that he returned only to die--the almighty pomp in which this great idea of Death apparelled itself to my young sorrowing heart--the corresponding pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life, rose, as if on wings, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries that seemed even _more_ solemn and pathetic than the vapory plumes and trophies of mortality,--all this chorus of restless images, or of suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which else had been fitted only to interpose one transitory red-letter day in the calendar of a child, the shadowy power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams. This, indeed, was the one sole memorial which restores my father's image to me as a personal reality; otherwise he would have been for me a bare _nominis umbra_. He languished, indeed, for weeks upon a sofa; and, during that interval, it happened naturally, from my repose of manners, that I was a privileged visitor to him throughout his waking hours. I was also present at his bedside in the closing hour of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches of delirious conversation with some imaginary visitors.
My brother was a stranger from causes quite as little to be foreseen, but seeming quite as natural after they had really occurred. In an early stage of his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. His genius for mischief amounted to inspiration; it was a divine _afflatus_ which drove him in that direction; and such was his capacity for riding in whirlwinds and directing storms, that he made it his trade to create them, as a _nephelaegereta Zeus_, a cloud-compelling Jove, in order that he _might_ direct them. For this, and other reasons, he had been sent to the Grammar School of Louth, in Lincolnshire--one of those many old classic institutions which form the peculiar [1] glory of England. To box, and to box under the severest restraint of honorable laws, was in those days a mere necessity of schoolboy life at _public_ schools; and hence the superior manliness, generosity, and self-control of those generally who had benefited by such discipline--so systematically hostile to all meanness, pusillanimity, or indirectness. Cowper, in his "Tyrocinium," is far from doing justice to our great public schools. Himself disqualified, by a delicacy of temperament, for reaping the benefits from such a warfare, and having suffered too much in his own Westminster experience, he could not judge them from an impartial station; but I, though ill enough adapted to an atmosphere so stormy, yet having tried both classes of schools, public and private, am compelled in mere conscience to give my vote (and, if I had a thousand votes, to give _all_ my votes) for the former.
Fresh from such a training as this, and at a time when his additional five or six years availed nearly to make _his_ age the double of mine, my brother very naturally despised me; and, from his exceeding frankness, he took no pains to conceal that he did. Why should he? Who was it that could have a right to feel aggrieved by this contempt? Who, if not myself? But it happened, on the contrary, that I had a perfect craze for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing. Why not? Wherefore should any rational person shrink from contempt, if it happen to form the tenure by which he holds his repose in life? The cases which are cited from comedy of such a yearning after contempt, stand upon a footing altogether different: _there_ the contempt is wooed as a serviceable ally and tool of religious hypocrisy. But to me, at that era of life, it formed the main guaranty of an unmolested repose; and security there was not, on any lower terms, for the _latentis semita vitae_. The slightest approach to any favorable construction of my intellectual pretensions alarmed me beyond measure; because it pledged me in a manner with the hearer to support this first attempt by a second, by a third, by a fourth--O Heavens! there is no saying how far the horrid man might go in his unreasonable demands upon me. I groaned under the weight of his expectations; and, if I laid but the first round of such a staircase, why, then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob's ladder towering upwards to the clouds, mile after mile, league after league; and myself running up and down this ladder, like any fatigue party of Irish hodmen, to the top of any Babel which my wretched admirer might choose to build. But I nipped the abominable system of extortion in the very bud, by refusing to take the first step. The man could have no pretence, you know, for expecting me to climb the third or fourth round, when I had seemed quite unequal to the first. Professing the most absolute bankruptcy from the very beginning, giving the man no sort of hope that I would pay even one farthing in the pound, I never could be made miserable by unknown responsibilities.
Still, with all this passion for being despised, which was so essential to my peace of mind, I found at times an altitude--a starry altitude--in the station of contempt for me assumed by my brother that nettled me. Sometimes, indeed, the mere necessities of dispute carried me, before I was aware of my own imprudence, so far up the staircase of Babel, that my brother was shaken for a moment in the infinity of his contempt; and before long, when my superiority in some bookish accomplishments displayed itself, by results that could not be entirely dissembled, mere foolish human nature forced me into some trifle of exultation at these retributory triumphs. But more often I was disposed to grieve over them. They tended to shake that solid foundation of utter despicableness upon which I relied so much for my freedom from anxiety; and therefore, upon the whole, it was satisfactory to my mind that my brother's opinion of me, after any little transient oscillation, gravitated determinately back towards that settled contempt which had been the result of his original inquest. The pillars of Hercules, upon which rested the vast edifice of his scorn, were these two--1st, my physics; he denounced me for effeminacy; 2d, he assumed, and even postulated as a _datum_, which I myself could never have the face to refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, and intellectually, he looked upon me as below notice; but, _morally_, he assured me that he would give me a written character of the very best description, whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're willing, though lazy; you _would_ pull, if you had the strength of a flea; and, though a monstrous coward, you don't run away." My own demurs to these harsh judgments were not so many as they might have been. The idiocy I confessed; because, though positive that I was not uniformly an idiot, I felt inclined to think that, in a majority of cases, I really _was_; and there were more reasons for thinking so than the reader is yet aware of. But, as to the effeminacy, I denied it _in toto_; and with good reason, as will be seen. Neither did my brother pretend to have any experimental proofs of it. The ground he went upon was a mere _a priori_ one, viz., that I had always been tied to the apron string of women or girls; which amounted at most to this--that, by training and the natural tendency of circumstances, I _ought_ to be effeminate; that is, there was reason to expect beforehand that I _should_ be so; but, then, the more merit in me, if, in spite of such reasonable presumptions, I really were _not_. In fact, my brother soon learned, by a daily experience, how entirely he might depend upon me for carrying out the most audacious of his own warlike plans--such plans, it is true, that I abominated; but _that_ made no difference in the fidelity with which I tried to fulfil them.
This eldest brother of mine was in all respects a remarkable boy. Haughty he was, aspiring, immeasurably active; fertile in resources as Robinson Crusoe; but also full of quarrel as it is possible to imagine; and, in default of any other opponent, he would have fastened a quarrel upon his own shadow for presuming to run before him when going westwards in the morning, whereas, in all reason, a shadow, like a dutiful child, ought to keep deferentially in the rear of that majestic substance which is the author of its existence. Books he detested, one and all, excepting only such as he happened to write himself. And these were not a few. On all subjects known to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English church down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magic, both black and white, thaumaturgy, and necromancy, he favored the world (which world was the nursery where I lived amongst my sisters) with his select opinions. On this last subject especially--of necromancy--he was very great: witness his profound work, though but a fragment, and, unfortunately, long since departed to the bosom of Cinderella, entitled "How to raise a Ghost; and when you've got him down, how to keep him down." To which work he assured us that some most learned and enormous man, whose name was a foot and a half long, had promised him an appendix, which appendix treated of the Red Sea and Solomon's signet ring, with forms of _mittimus_ for ghosts that might be refractory, and probably a riot act, for any _emeute_ amongst ghosts inclined to raise barricades; since he often thrilled our young hearts by supposing the case, (not at all unlikely, he affirmed,) that a federation, a solemn league and conspiracy, might take place amongst the infinite generations of ghosts against the single generation of men at any one time composing the garrison of earth. The Roman phrase for expressing that a man had died, viz., "_Abiit ad plures_" (He has gone over to the majority,) my brother explained to us; and we easily comprehended that any one generation of the living human race, even if combined, and acting in concert, must be in a frightful minority, by comparison with all the incalculable generations that had trot this earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly predecessors, by the awful apparition which at three o'clock in the afternoon, on the 18th of June, 1815, the mighty contest at Waterloo must have assumed to eyes that watched over the trembling interests of man. The English army, about that time in the great agony of its strife, was thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams, how frightfully narrow, how spectral, did its slender quadrangels appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war, between the harvest of possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it. And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one that has been _proved_ to exist at Waterloo. A British surgeon, indeed, in a work of two octavo volumes, has endeavored to show that a conspiracy was traced at Waterloo, between two or three foreign regiments, for kindling a panic in the heat of battle, by flight, and by a sustained blowing up of tumbrils, under the miserable purpose of shaking the British steadiness. But the evidences are not clear; whereas my brother insisted that the presence of sham men, distributed extensively amongst the human race, and meditating treason against us all, had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of all true philosophers. Who were these shams and make- believe men? They were, in fact, people that had been dead for centuries, but that, for reasons best known to themselves, had returned to this upper earth, walked about amongst us, and were undistinguishable, except by the most learned of necromancers, from authentic men of flesh and blood. I mention this for the sake of illustrating the fact, of which the reader will find a singular instance in the foot note attached, that the same crazes are everlastingly revolving upon men. [2]
This hypothesis, however, like a thousand others, when it happened that they engaged no durable sympathy from his nursery audience, he did not pursue. For some time he turned his thoughts to philosophy, and read lectures to us every night upon some branch or other of physics. This undertaking arose upon some one of us envying or admiring flies for their power of walking upon the ceiling. "Poh!" he said, "they are impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as it ought to be done. Ah! you should see _me_ standing upright on the ceiling, with my head downwards, for half an hour together, and meditating profoundly." My sister Mary remarked, that we should all be very glad to see him in that position. "If that's the case," he replied, "it's very well that all is ready, except as to a strap or two." Being an excellent skater, he had first imagined that, if held up until he had started, he might then, by taking a bold sweep ahead, keep himself in position through the continued impetus of skating. But this he found not to answer; because, as he observed, "the friction was too retarding from the plaster of Paris, but the case would be very different if the ceiling were coated with ice." As it was _not_, he changed his plan. The true secret, he now discovered, was this: he would consider himself in the light of a humming top; he would make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion of the human top would overpower the force of gravitation. He should, of course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis--perhaps he might even dream upon it; and he laughed at "those scoundrels, the flies," that never improved in their pretended art, nor made any thing of it. The principle was now discovered; "and, of course," he said, if a man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from doing so for five months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of," was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work--a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a _humming_ top that was required, but a peg top. Now, this, in order to keep up the _vertigo_ at full stretch, without which, to a certainty, gravitation would prove too much for him, needed to be whipped incessantly. But that was precisely what a gentleman ought not to tolerate: to be scourged unintermittingly on the legs by any grub of a gardener, unless it were father Adam himself, was a thing that he could not bring his mind to face. However, as some compensation, he proposed to improve the art of flying, which was, as every body must acknowledge, in a condition disgraceful to civilized society. As he had made many a fire balloon, and had succeeded in some attempts at bringing down cats by _parachutes_, it was not very difficult to fly downwards from moderate elevations. But, as he was reproached by my sister for never flying back again,--which, however, was a far different thing, and not even attempted by the philosopher in "Rasselas,"--(for
"Revocare gradum, et _superas_ evadere ad auras
Hic labor, hoc opus est,")
he refused, under such poor encouragement, to try his winged parachutes any more, either "aloft or alow," till he had thoroughly studied Bishop Wilkins [3] on the art of translating right reverend gentlemen to the moon; and, in the mean time, he resumed his general lectures on physics. From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled out, by a concerted assault of my sister Mary's. He had been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next younger brother,--in subsequent times a little middy on board many a ship of H. M., and the most predestined rebel upon earth against all assumptions, small or great, of superiority,--she arranged a mutiny, that had the unexpected effect of suddenly extinguishing the lectures forever. He had happened to say, what was no unusual thing with him, that he flattered himself he had made the point under discussion tolerably clear; "clear," he added, bowing round the half circle of us, the audience, "to the meanest of capacities;" and then he repeated, sonorously, "clear to the most excruciatingly mean of capacities." Upon which, a voice, a female voice,--but whose voice, in the tumult that followed, I did not distinguish,--retorted, "No, you haven't; it's as dark as sin; "and then, without a moment's interval, a second voice exclaimed, "Dark as night;" then came my young brother's insurrectionary yell, "Dark as midnight;" then another female voice chimed in melodiously, "Dark as pitch;" and so the peal continued to come round like a catch, the whole being so well concerted, and the rolling fire so well sustained, that it was impossible to make head against it; whilst the abruptness of the interruption gave to it the protecting character of an oral "round robin," it being impossible to challenge any one in particular as the ringleader. Burke's phrase of "the swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping _fusillade_, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words _pearls_ and _swinish multitude_, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of some lurking consideration for the two young strangers. We all laughed in chorus at this parting salute; my brother himself condescended at last to join us; but there ended the course of lectures on natural philosophy.
As it was impossible, however, that he should remain quiet, he announced to us, that for the rest of his life he meant to dedicate himself to the intense cultivation of the tragic drama. He got to work instantly; and very soon he had composed the first act of his "Sultan Selim;" but, in defiance of the metre, he soon changed the title to "Sultan Amurath," considering _that_ a much fiercer name, more bewhiskered and beturbaned. It was no part of his intention that we should sit lolling on chairs like ladies and gentleman that had paid opera prices for private boxes. He expected every one of us, he said, to pull an oar. We were to _act_ the tragedy. But, in fact, we had many oars to pull. There were so many characters, that each of us took four at the least, and the future middy had six. He, this wicked little middy, [4] caused the greatest affliction to Sultan Amurath, forcing him to order the amputation of his head six several times (that is, once in every one of his six parts) during the first act. In reality, the sultan, though otherwise a decent man, was too bloody. What by the bowstring, and what by the cimeter, he had so thinned the population with which he commenced business, that scarcely any of the characters remained alive at the end of act the first. Sultan Amurath found himself in an awkward situation. Large arrears of work remained, and hardly any body to do it but the sultan himself. In composing act the second, the author had to proceed like Deucalion and Pyrrha, and to create an entirely new generation. Apparently this young generation, that ought to have been so good, took no warning by what had happened to their ancestors in act the first: one must conclude that they were quite as wicked, since the poor sultan had found himself reduced to order them all for execution in the course of this act the second. To the brazen age had succeeded an iron age; and the prospects were becoming sadder and sadder as the tragedy advanced. But here the author began to hesitate. He felt it hard to resist the instinct of carnage. And was it right to do so? Which of the felons whom he had cut of prematurely could pretend that a court of appeal would have reversed his sentence? But the consequences were distressing. A new set of characters in every act brought with it the necessity of a new plot; for people could not succeed to the arrears of old actions, or inherit ancient motives, like a landed estate. Five crops, in fact, must be taken off the ground in each separate tragedy, amounting, in short, to five tragedies involved in one.
Such, according to the rapid sketch which at this moment my memory furnishes, was the brother who now first laid open to me the gates of war. The occasion was this. He had resented, with a shower of stones, an affront offered to us by an individual boy, belonging to a cotton factory: for more than two years afterwards this became the _teterrima causa_ of a skirmish or a battle as often as we passed the factory; and, unfortunately, _that_ was twice a day on every day except Sunday. Our situation in respect to the enemy was as follows: Greenhay, a country house newly built by my father, at that time was a clear mile from the outskirts of Manchester; but in after years Manchester, throwing out the _tentacula_ of its vast expansions, absolutely enveloped Greenhay; and, for any thing I know, the grounds and gardens which then insulated the house may have long disappeared. Being a modest mansion, which (including hot walls, offices, and gardener's house) had cost only six thousand pounds, I do not know how it should have risen to the distinction of giving name to a region of that great town; however, it _has_ done so; [5] and at this time, therefore, after changes so great, it will be difficult for the _habitue_ of that region to understand how my brother and myself could have a solitary road to traverse between Greenhay and Princess Street, then the termination, on that side, of Manchester. But so it was. Oxford _Street_, like its namesake in London, was then called the Oxford _Road_; and during the currency of our acquaintance with it, arose the first three houses in its neighborhood; of which the third was built for the Rev. S. H., one of our guardians, for whom his friends had also built the Church of St. Peter's--not a bowshot from the house. At present, however, he resided in Salford, nearly two miles from Greenhay; and to him we went over daily, for the benefit of his classical instructions. One sole cotton factory had then risen along the line of Oxford Street; and this was close to a bridge, which also was a new creation; for previously all passengers to Manchester went round by Garrat. This factory became to us the _officina gentium_, from which swarmed forth those Goths and Vandals that continually threatened our steps; and this bridge became the eternal arena of combat, we taking good care to be on the right side of the bridge for retreat, _i.e._, on the town side, or the country side, accordingly as we were going out in the morning, or returning in the afternoon. Stones were the implements of warfare; and by continual practice both parties became expert in throwing them.
The origin of the feud it is scarcely requisite to rehearse, since the particular accident which began it was not the true efficient cause of our long warfare, but simply the casual occasion. The cause lay in our aristocratic dress. As children of an opulent family, where all provisions were liberal, and all appointments elegant, we were uniformly well dressed; and, in particular, we wore troussers, (at that time unheard of, except among sailors,) and we also wore Hessian boots--a crime that could not be forgiven in the Lancashire of that day, because it expressed the double offence of being aristocratic and being outlandish. We were aristocrats, and it was vain to deny it; could we deny our boots? whilst our antagonists, if not absolutely _sans culottes_, were slovenly and forlorn in their dress, often unwashed, with hair totally neglected, and always covered with flakes of cotton. Jacobins they were not, as regarded any sympathy with the Jacobinism that then desolated France; for, on the contrary, they detested every thing French, and answered with brotherly signals to the cry of "Church and king," or "King and constitution." But, for all that, as they were perfectly independent, getting very high wages, and these wages in a mode of industry that was then taking vast strides ahead, they contrived to reconcile this patriotic anti-Jacobinism with a personal Jacobinism of that sort which is native to the heart of man, who is by natural impulse (and not without a root of nobility, though also of base envy) impatient of inequality, and submits to it only through a sense of its necessity, or under a long experience of its benefits.
It was on an early day of our new _tyrocinium_, or perhaps on the very first, that, as we passed the bridge, a boy happening to issue from the factory [6] sang out to us derisively, "Hollo, bucks!" In this the reader may fail to perceive any atrocious insult commensurate to the long war which followed. But the reader is wrong. The word "_dandies_" [7] which was what the villain meant, had not then been born, so that he could not have called us by that name, unless through the spirit of prophecy. _Buck_ was the nearest word at hand in his Manchester vocabulary: he gave all he could, and let us dream the rest. But in the next moment he discovered our boots, and he consummated his crime by saluting us as "Boots! boots!" My brother made a dead stop, surveyed him with intense disdain, and bade him draw near, that he might "give his flesh to the fowls of the air." The boy declined to accept this liberal invitation, and conveyed his answer by a most contemptuous and plebian gesture, [8] upon which my brother drove him in with a shower of stones.
During this inaugural flourish of hostilities, I, for my part, remained inactive, and therefore apparently neutral. But this was the last time that I did so: for the moment, indeed, I was taken by surprise. To be called a _buck_ by one that had it in his choice to have called me a coward, a thief, or a murderer, struck me as a most pardonable offence; and as to _boots_, that rested upon a flagrant fact that could not be denied; so that at first I was green enough to regard the boy as very considerate and indulgent. But my brother soon rectified my views; or, if any doubts remained, he impressed me, at least, with a sense of my paramount duty to himself, which was threefold. First, it seems that I owed military allegiant to _him_, as my commander-in-chief, whenever we "took the field;" secondly, by the law of nations, I, being a cadet of my house, owed suit and service to him who was its head; and he assured me, that twice in a year, on _my_ birthday and on _his_, he had a right, strictly speaking, to make me lie down, and to set his foot upon my neck; lastly, by a law not so rigorous, but valid amongst gentlemen,--viz., "by the _comity_ of nations,"--it seems I owed eternal deference to one so much older than myself, so much wiser, stronger, braver, more beautiful, and more swift of foot. Something like all this in tendency I had already believed, though I had not so minutely investigated the modes and grounds of my duty. By temperament, and through natural dedication to despondency, I felt resting upon me always too deep and gloomy a sense of obscure duties attached to life, that I never _should_ be able to fulfil; a burden which I could not carry, and which yet I did not know how to throw off. Glad, therefore, I was to find the whole tremendous weight of obligations--the law and the prophets--all crowded into this one pocket command, "Thou shalt obey thy brother as God's vicar upon earth." For now, if, by any future stone levelled at him who had called me a "buck," I should chance to draw blood, perhaps I might not have committed so serious a trespass on any rights which he could plead; but if I _had_, (for on this subject my convictions were still cloudy,) at any rate, the duty I might have violated in regard to this general brother, in right of Adam, was cancelled when it came into collision with my paramount duty to this liege brother of my own individual house.
From this day, therefore, I obeyed all my brother's military commands with the utmost docility; and happy it made me that every sort of doubt, or question, or opening for demur was swallowed up in the unity of this one papal principle, discovered by my brother, viz., that all rights and duties of casuistry were transferred from me to himself. _His_ was the judgment--_his_ was the responsibility; and to me belonged only the sublime obligation of unconditional faith in _him_. That faith I realized. It is true that he taxed me at times, in his reports of particular fights, with "horrible cowardice," and even with "a cowardice that seemed inexplicable, except on the supposition of treachery." But this was only a _facon de parler_ with him: the idea of secret perfidy, that was constantly moving under ground, gave an interest to the progress of the war, which else tended to the monotonous. It was a dramatic artifice for sustaining the interest, where the incidents might happen to be too slightly diversified. But that he did not believe his own charges was clear, because he never repeated them in his "General History of the Campaigns," which was a _resume_, or recapitulating digest, of his daily reports.
We fought every day, and, generally speaking, _twice_ every day; and the result was pretty uniform, viz., that my brother and I terminated the battle by insisting upon our undoubted right to run away. _Magna Charta_, I should fancy, secures that great right to every man; else, surely, it is sadly defective. But out of this catastrophe to most of our skirmishes, and to all our pitched battles except one, grew a standing schism between my brother and myself. My unlimited obedience had respect to action, but not to opinion. Loyalty to my brother did not rest upon hypocrisy: because I was faithful, it did not follow that I must be false in relation to his capricious opinions. And these opinions sometimes took the shape of acts. Twice, at the least, in every week, but sometimes every night, my brother insisted on singing "Te Deum" for supposed victories which he had won; and he insisted also on my bearing a part in these "Te Deums." Now, as I knew of no such victories, but resolutely asserted the truth,--viz., that we ran away,--a slight jar was thus given to the else triumphal effect of these musical ovations. Once having uttered my protest, however, willingly I gave my aid to the chanting; for I loved unspeakably the grand and varied system of chanting in the Romish and English churches. And, looking back at this day to the ineffable benefits which I derived from the church of my childhood, I account among the very greatest those which reached me through the various chants connected with the "O, Jubilate," the "Magnificat," the "Te Deum," the "Benedicite," &c. Through these chants it was that the sorrow which laid waste my infancy, and the devotion which nature had made a necessity of my being, were profoundly interfused: the sorrow gave reality and depth to the devotion; the devotion gave grandeur and idealization to the sorrow. Neither was my love for chanting altogether without knowledge. A son of my reverend guardian, much older than myself, who possessed a singular faculty of producing a sort of organ accompaniment with one half of his mouth, whilst he sang with the other half, had given me some instructions in the art of chanting; and, as to my brother, he, the hundred-handed Briareus, could do all things; of course, therefore, he could chant.
Once having begun, it followed naturally that the war should deepen in bitterness. Wounds that wrote memorials in the flesh, insults that rankled in the heart,--these were not features of the case likely to be forgotten by our enemies, and far less by my fiery brother. I, for my part, entered not into any of the passions that war may be supposed to kindle, except only the chronic passion of anxiety. _Fear_ it was not; for experience had taught me that, under the random firing of our undisciplined enemies, the chances were not many of being wounded. But the uncertainties of the war; the doubts in every separate action whether I could keep up the requisite connection with my brother, and, in case I could not, the utter darkness that surrounded my fate; whether, as a trophy won from Israel, I should be dedicated to the service of some Manchester Dagon, or pass through fire to Moloch,--all these contingencies, for me that had no friend to consult, ran too violently into the master current of my constitutional despondency ever to give way under any casual elation of success. Success, however, we really had at times; in slight skirmishes pretty often; and once, at least, as the reader will find to his mortification, if he is wicked enough to take the side of the Philistines, a most smashing victory in a pitched battle. But even then, and whilst the hurrahs were yet ascending from our jubilating lips, the freezing remembrance came back to my heart of that deadly depression which, duly at the coming round of the morning and evening watches, travelled with me like my shadow on our approach to the memorable bridge. A bridge of sighs [9] too surely it was for me; and even for my brother it formed an object of fierce yet anxious jealousy, that he could not always disguise, as we first came in sight of it; for, if it happened to be occupied in strength, there was an end of all hope that we could attempt the passage; and _that_ was a fortunate solution of the difficulty, as it imposed no evil beyond a circuit; which, at least, was safe, if the world should choose to call it inglorious. Even this shade of ignominy, however, my brother contrived to color favorably, by calling us--that is, me and himself--"a corps of observation;" and he condescendingly explained to me, that, although making "a lateral movement," he had his eye upon the enemy, and "might yet come round upon his left flank in a way that wouldn't, perhaps, prove very agreeable." This, from the nature of the ground, never happened. We crossed the river at Garrat, out of sight from the enemy's position; and, on our return in the evening, when we reached that point of our route from which the retreat was secure to Greenhay, we took such revenge for the morning insult as might belong to extra liberality in our stone donations. On this line of policy there was, therefore, no cause for anxiety; but the common case was, that the numbers might not be such as to justify this caution, and yet quite enough for mischief. To my brother, however, stung and carried headlong into hostility by the martial instincts of his nature, the uneasiness of doubt or insecurity was swallowed up by his joy in the anticipation of victory, or even of contest; whilst to myself, whose exultation was purely official and ceremonial, as due by loyalty from a cadet to the head of his house, no such compensation existed. The enemy was no enemy in _my_ eyes; his affronts were but retaliations; and his insults were so inapplicable to my unworthy self, being of a calibre exclusively meant for the use of my brother, that from me they recoiled, one and all, as cannon shot from cotton bags.
The ordinary course of our day's warfare was this: between nine and ten in the morning occurred our first transit, and, consequently, our earliest opportunity for doing business. But at this time the great sublunary interest of breakfast, which swallowed up all nobler considerations of glory and ambition, occupied the work people of the factory, (or what in the pedantic diction of this day are termed the "operatives,") so that very seldom any serious business was transacted. Without any formal armistice, the paramount convenience of such an arrangement silently secured its own recognition. Notice there needed none of truce, when the one side yearned for breakfast, and the other for a respite: the groups, therefore, on or about the bridge, if any at all, were loose in their array, and careless. We passed through them rapidly, and, on my part, uneasily; exchanging a few snarls, perhaps, but seldom or ever snapping at each other. The tameness was almost shocking of those who, in the afternoon, would inevitably resume their natural characters of tiger cats and wolves. Sometimes, however, my brother felt it to be a duty that we should fight in the morning; particularly when any expression of public joy for a victory,--bells ringing in the distance,--or when a royal birthday, or some traditional commemoration of ancient feuds, (such as the 5th of November,) irritated his martial propensities. Some of these being religious festivals, seemed to require of us an _extra_ homage, for which we knew not how to find any natural or significant expression, except through sharp discharges of stones, that being a language older than Hebrew or Sanscrit, and universally intelligible. But, excepting these high days of religious solemnity, when a man is called upon to show that he is not a pagan or a miscreant in the eldest of senses, by thumping, or trying to thump, somebody who is accused or accusable of being heterodox, the great ceremony of breakfast was allowed to sanctify the hour. Some natural growls we uttered, but hushed them soon, regardless
"Of the sweeping whirlpool's sway,
That, hushed in grim repose, looked for his evening prey."
_That_ came but too surely. Yes, evening never forgot to come; this odious necessity of fighting never missed its road back, or fell asleep, or loitered by the way, more than a bill of exchange or a tertian fever. Five times a week (Saturday sometimes, and Sunday always, were days of rest) the same scene rehearsed itself in pretty nearly the same succession of circumstances. Between four and five o'clock we had crossed the bridge to the safe, or Greenhay side; then we paused, and waited for the enemy. Sooner or later a bell rang, and from the smoky hive issued the hornets that night and day stung incurably my peace of mind. The order and procession of the incidents after this were odiously monotonous. My brother occupied the main high road, precisely at the point where a very gentle rise of the ground attained its summit; for the bridge lay in a slight valley, and the main military position was fifty or eighty yards above the bridge: then--but having first examined my pockets, in order to be sure that my stock of ammunition, stones, fragments of slate, with a reasonable proportion of brickbats, was all correct and ready for action--he detached me about forty yards to the right, my orders being invariable, and liable to no doubts or "quibbling." Detestable in _my_ ears was that word "_quibbling_," by which, for a thousand years, if the war had happened to last so long, he would have fastened upon me the imputation of meaning, or wishing, at least, to do what he called "pettifogulizing"--that is, to plead some distinction, or verbal demur, in bar of my orders, under some colorable pretence that, according to their literal construction, they really did not admit of being fulfilled, or perhaps that they admitted it too much as being capable of fulfilment in two senses, either of them a practicable sense. True it was that my eye was preternaturally keen for flaws of language, not from pedantic exaction of superfluous accuracy, but, on the contrary, from too conscientious a wish to escape the mistakes which language not rigorous is apt to occasion. So far from seeking to "pettifogulize"--_i.e._, to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster's minute tortuosities of construction--exactly in the opposite direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost every body's words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations. Undesigned equivocation prevails every where; [10] and it is not the cavilling hair splitter, but, on the contrary, the single-eyed servant of truth, that is most likely to insist upon the limitation of expressions too wide or too vague, and upon the decisive election between meanings potentially double. Not in order to resist or evade my brother's directions, but for the very opposite purpose--viz., that I might fulfil them to the letter; thus and no otherwise it happened that I showed so much scrupulosity about the exact value and position of his words, as finally to draw upon myself the vexatious reproach of being habitually a "pettifogulizer."
Meantime, our campaigning continued to rage. Overtures of pacification were never mentioned on either side. And I, for _my_ part, with the passions only of peace at my heart, did the works of war faithfully and with distinction. I presume so, at least, from the results. It is true, I was continually falling into treason, without exactly knowing how I got into it, or how I got out of it. My brother also, it is true, sometimes assured me that he could, according to the rigor of martial justice, have me hanged on the first tree we passed; to which my prosaic answer had been, that of trees there _were_ none in Oxford Street--[which, in imitation of Von Troil's famous chapter on the snakes of Lapland, the reader may accept, if he pleases, as a complete course of lectures on the "dendrology" of Oxford Street.] But, notwithstanding such little stumblings in my career, I continued to ascend in the service; and, I am sure, it will gratify my friendly readers to hear, that, before my eighth birthday, I was promoted to the rank of major general. Over this sunshine, however, soon swept a train of clouds. Three times I was taken prisoner, and with different results. The first time I was carried to the rear, and not molested in any way. Finding myself thus ignominiously neglected, I watched my opportunity; and, by making a wide circuit, easily effected my escape. In the next case, a brief council was held over me; but I was not allowed to hear the deliberations; the result only being communicated to me--which result consisted in a message not very complimentary to my brother, and a small present of kicks to myself. This present was paid down without any discount, by means of a general subscription amongst the party surrounding me--that party, luckily, not being very numerous; besides which, I must, in honesty, acknowledge myself, generally speaking, indebted to their forbearance. They were not disposed to be too hard upon me. But, at the same time, they clearly did not think it right that I should escape altogether from tasting the calamities of war. And this translated the estimate of my guilt from the public jurisdiction to that of the individual, sometimes capricious and harsh, and carrying out the public award by means of legs that ranged through all gradations of weight and agility. One kick differed exceedingly from another kick in dynamic value; and, in some cases, this difference was so distressingly conspicuous as to imply special malice, unworthy, I conceive, of all generous soldiership.
On returning to our own frontiers, I had an opportunity of displaying my exemplary greenness. That message to my brother, with all its _virus_ of insolence I repeated as faithfully for the spirit as, and as literally for the expressions, as my memory allowed me to do; and in that troublesome effort, simpleton that I was, fancied myself exhibiting a soldier's loyalty to his commanding officer. My brother thought otherwise: he was more angry with me than with the enemy. I ought, he said, to have refused all participation in such _sans cullotes_ insolence; to carry it was to acknowledge it as fit to be carried. One, grows wiser every day; and on this particular day I made a resolution that, if again made prisoner, I would bring no more "jaw" (so my brother called it) from the Philistines. If these people _would_ send "jaw," I settled that, henceforwards, it must go through the post office.
In my former captures, there had been nothing special or worthy of commemoration in the circumstances. Neither was there in the third, excepting that, by accident, in the second stage of the case, I was delivered over to the custody of young women and girls; whereas the ordinary course would have thrown me upon the vigilant attentions (relieved from monotony by the experimental kicks) of boys. So far, the change was very much for the better. I had a feeling myself, on first being presented to my new young mistresses, of a distressing sort. Having always, up to the completion of my sixth year, been a privileged pet, and almost, I might say, ranking amongst the sanctities of the household, with all its female sections, whether young or old, (an advantage which I owed originally to a long illness, an ague, stretching over two entire years of my infancy,) naturally I had learned to appreciate the indulgent tenderness of women; and my heart thrilled with love and gratitude, as often as they took me up into their arms and kissed me. Here it would have been as every where else; but, unfortunately, my introduction to these young women was in the very worst of characters. I had been taken in arms--in arms against their own brothers, cousins, sweethearts, and on pretexts too frivolous to mention. If asked the question, it would be found that I should not myself deny the fact of being at war with their whole order. What was the meaning of _that_? What was it to which war pledged a man? It pledged him, in case of opportunity, to burn, ravage, and depopulate the houses and lands of the enemy; which enemy was these fair girls. The warrior stood committed to universal destruction. Neither sex nor age, neither the smiles of unoffending infancy nor the gray hairs of the venerable patriarch, neither the sanctity of the matron nor the loveliness of the youthful bride, would confer any privilege with the warrior, consequently not with me.
Many other hideous features in the military character will be found in books innumerable--levelled at those who make war, and therefore at myself. And it appears finally by these books, that, as one of my ordinary practices, I make a wilderness, and call it a pacification; that I hold it a duty to put people to the sword; which done, to plough up the foundations of their hearths and altars, and then to sow the ground with salt.
All this passing through my brain, when suddenly one young woman snatched me up in her arms, and kissed me: from _her_, I was passed round to others of the party, who all in turn caressed me, with no allusion to that warlike mission against them and theirs, which only had procured me the honor of an introduction to themselves in the character of captive. The too palpable fact that I was not the person meant by nature to exterminate their families, or to make wildernesses, and call them pacifications, had withdrawn from their minds the counterfact--that whatever had been my performances, my intentions had been hostile, and that in such a character only I could have become their prisoner. Not only did these young people kiss me, but I (seeing no military reason against it) kissed _them_. Really, if young women will insist on kissing major generals, they must expect that the generals will retaliate. One only of the crowd adverted to the character in which I came before them: to be a lawful prisoner, it struck her too logical mind that I must have been caught in some aggressive practices. "Think," she said, "of this little dog fighting, and fighting our Jack." "But," said another in a propitiatory tone, "perhaps he'll not do so any more." I was touched by the kindness of her suggestion, and the sweet, merciful sound of that same "_Not do so any more_" which really was prompted, I fear, much more by that charity in her which hopeth all things than by any signs of amendment in myself. Well was it for me that no time was allowed for an investigation into my morals by point-blank questions as to my future intentions. In which case it would have appeared too undeniably, that the same sad necessity which had planted me hitherto in a position of hostility to their estimable families would continue to persecute me; and that, on the very next day, duty to my brother, howsoever it might struggle with gratitude to themselves, would range me in martial attitude, with a pocketful of stones, meant, alas! for the exclusive use of their respectable kinsmen. Whilst I was preparing myself, however, for this painful exposition, my female friends observed issuing from the factory a crowd of boys not likely at all to improve my prospects. Instantly setting me down on my feet, they formed a sort of _cordon sanitaire_ behind me, by stretching out their petticoats or aprons, as in dancing, so as to touch; and then crying out, "Now, little dog, run for thy life," prepared themselves (I doubt not) for rescuing me, should my recapture be effected.
But this was not effected, although attempted with an energy that alarmed me, and even perplexed me with a vague thought (far too ambitious for my years) that one or two of the pursuing party might be possessed by some demon of jealousy, as eye witnesses to my revelling amongst the lips of that fair girlish bevy, kissing and being kissed, loving and being loved; in which case, from all that ever I had read about jealousy, (and I had read a great deal--viz., "Othello," and Collins's "Ode to the Passions,") I was satisfied that, if again captured, I had very little chance for my life. That jealousy was a green-eyed monster, nobody could know better than _I_ did. "O, my lord, beware of jealousy!" Yes; and my lord couldn't possibly have more reason for bewaring of it than myself; indeed, well it would have been had his lordship run away from all the ministers of jealousy--Iago, Cassio, and embroidered handkerchiefs--at the same pace of six miles an hour which kept me ahead of my infuriated pursuers. Ah, that maniac, white as a leper with flakes of cotton, can I ever forget him--_him_ that ran so far in advance of his party? What passion but jealousy could have sustained him in so hot a chase? There were some lovely girls in the fair company that had so condescendingly caressed me; but, doubtless, upon that sweet creature his love must have settled, who suggested, in her soft, relenting voice, a penitence in me that, alas! had not dawned, saying, "_Yes; but perhaps he will not do so any more._" Thinking, as I ran, of her beauty, I felt that this jealous demoniac must fancy himself justified in committing seven times seven murders upon me, if he should have it in his power. But, thank Heaven, if jealousy can run six miles an hour, there are other passions--as, for instance, panic--that can run, upon occasion, six and a half; so, as I had the start of him, (you know, reader,) and not a very short start,--thanks be to the expanded petticoats of my dear female friends!--naturally it happend that the green-eyed monster came in second best. Time, luckily, was precious with _him_; and, accordingly, when he had chased me into the by-road leading down to Greenhay, he turned back. For the moment, therefore, I found myself suddenly released from danger. But this counted for nothing. The same scene would probably revolve upon me continually; and, on the next rehearsal, Green-eyes might have better luck. It saddened me, besides, to find myself under the political necessity of numbering amongst the Philistines, and as daughters of Gath, so many kind-hearted girls, whom, by personal proof, I knew to be such. In the profoundest sense, I was unhappy; and, not from any momentary accident of distress, but from deep glimpses which now, and heretofore, had opened themselves, as occassions arose, into the inevitable conflicts of life. One of the saddest among such conflicts is the necessity, wheresoever it occurs, of adopting--though the heart should disown--the enmities of one's own family, or country, or religious sect. In forms how afflicting must that necessity have sometimes occurred during the Parliamentary war! And, in after years, amongst our beautiful old English metrical romances, I found the same impassioned complaint uttered by a knight, Sir Ywain, as early as A.D. 1240--
"But now, where'er I stray or go,
My heart SHE has that is my foe!"
I knew--I anticipated to a certainty--that my brother would not hear of any merit belonging to the factory population whom every day we had to meet in battle; on the contrary, even submission on _their_ part, and willingness to walk penitentially through the _Furcae Caudinae_, would hardly have satisfied his sense of their criminality. Often, indeed, as we came in view of the factory, he would shake his fist at it, and say, in a ferocious tone of voice, "_Delenda est Carthago!_" And certainly, I thought to myself, it must be admitted by every body, that the factory people are inexcusable in raising a rebellion against my brother. But still rebels were men, and sometimes were women; and rebels, that stretch out their petticoats like fans for the sake of screening one from the hot pursuit of enemies with fiery eyes, (green or otherwise,) really are not the sort of people that one wishes to hate.
Homewards, therefore, I drew in sadness, and little doubting that _hereafter_ I might have verbal feuds with my brother on behalf of my fair friends, but not dreaming how much displeasure I had already incurred by my treasonable collusion with their caresses. That part of the affair he had seen with his own eyes, from his position on the field; and then it was that he left me indignantly to my fate, which, by my first reception, it was easy to see would not prove very gloomy. When I came into our own study, I found him engaged in preparing a _bulletin_, (which word was just then travelling into universal use,) reporting briefly the events of the day. The art of drawing, as I shall again have occasion to mention, was amongst his foremost accomplishments; and round the margin of the border ran a black border, ornamented with cyprus and other funereal emblems. When finished, it was carried into the room of Mrs. Evans. This Mrs. Evans was an important person in our affairs. My mother, who never chose to have any direct communication with her servants, always had a housekeeper for the regulation of all domestic business; and the housekeeper, for some years, was this Mrs. Evans. Into her private parlor, where she sat aloof from the under servants, my brother and I had the _entree_ at all times, but upon very different terms of acceptance: he as a favorite of the first class; _I_, by sufferance, as a sort of gloomy shadow that ran after _his_ person, and could not well be shut out if _he_ were let in. Him she admired in the very highest degree; myself, on the contrary, she detested, which made me unhappy. But then, in some measure, she made amends for this, by despising me in extremity; and for _that_ I was truly thankful--I need not say _why_, as the reader already knows. Why she detested me, so far as I know, arose in part out of my thoughtfulness indisposed to garrulity, and in part out of my savage, Orson-like sincerity. I had a great deal to say, but then I could say it only to a very few people, amongst whom Mrs. Evans was certainly not one; and, when I _did_ say any thing, I fear that dire ignorance prevented my laying the proper restraints upon my too liberal candor; and _that could not prove acceptable to one who thought nothing of working for any purpose, or for no purpose, by petty tricks, or even falsehoods--all which I held in stern abhorrence that I was at no pains to conceal. The _bulletin_ on this occasion, garnished with this pageantry of woe, cypress wreaths, and arms reversed, was read aloud to Mrs. Evans, indirectly, therefore, to me. It communicated with Spartan brevity, the sad intelligence (but not sad to Mrs. E.) "that the major general had forever disgraced himself, by submitting to the ........ caresses of the enemy." I leave a blank for the epithet affixed to "caresses," not because there _was_ any blank, but, on the contrary, because my brother's wrath had boiled over in such a hubble-bubble of epithets, some only half erased, some doubtfully erased, that it was impossible, out of the various readings, to pick out the true classical text. "Infamous," "disgusting," and "odious" struggled for precedency; and _infamous_ they might be; but on the other affixes I held my own private opinions. For some days my brother's displeasure continued to roll in reverberating thunders; but at length it growled itself to rest; and at last he descended to mild expostulations with me, showing clearly, in a series of general orders, what frightful consequences must ensue, if major generals (as a general principle) should allow themselves to be kissed by the enemy.
About this time my brother began to issue, instead of occasional bulletins, through which hitherto he had breathed his opinions into the ear of the public, (viz., of Mrs. Evans,) a regular gazette, which, in imitation of the London Gazette, was published twice a week. I suppose that no creature ever led such a life as _I_ did in that gazette. Run up to the giddiest heights of promotion on on day, for merits which I could not myself discern, in a week or two I was brought to a court martial for offenses equally obscure. I was cashiered; I was restored "on the intercession of a distinguished lady;" (Mrs. Evans, to wit;) I was threatened with being drummed out of the army, to the music of the "Rogue's March;" and then, in the midst of all this misery and degradation, upon the discovery of some supposed energy that I had manifested, I was decorated with the Order of the Bath. My reading had been extensive enough to give me some vague aerial sense of the honor involved in such a decoration, whilst I was profoundly ignorant of the channels through which it could reach an individual, and of the sole fountain from which it could flow. But, in this enormity of disproportion between the cause and the effect, between the agency and the result, I saw nothing more astonishing than I had seen in many other cases confessedly true. Thousands of vast effects, by all that I had heard, linked themselves to causes apparently trivial. The dreadful taint of scrofula, according to the belief of all Christendom, fled at the simple touch of a Stuart [11] sovereign: no miracle in the Bible, from Jordan or from Bethesda, could be more sudden or more astoundingly victorious. By my own experience, again, I knew that a _styan_ (as it is called) upon the eyelid could be easily reduced, though not instantaneously, by the slight application of any golden trinket. Warts upon the fingers of children I had myself known to vanish under the _verbal_ charm of a gypsy woman, without any medicinal application whatever. And I well knew, that almost all nations believed in the dreadful mystery of the _evil eye_; some requiring, as a condition of the evil agency, the co-presence of malice in the agent; but others, as appeared from my father's Portuguese recollections, ascribing the same horrid power to the eye of certain select persons, even though innocent of all malignant purpose, and absolutely unconscious of their own fatal gift, until awakened to it by the results. Why, therefore, should there be any thing to shock, or even to surprise, in the power claimed by my brother, as an attribute inalienable from primogeniture in certain select families, of conferring knightly honors? The red ribbon of the Bath he certainly _did_ confer upon me; and once, in a paroxysm of imprudent liberality, he promised me at the end of certain months, supposing that I swerved from my duty by no atrocious delinquency, the Garter itself. This, I knew, was a far loftier distinction than the Bath. Even then it was so; and since those days it has become much more so; because the long roll of martial services in the great war with Napoleon compelled our government greatly to widen the basis of the Bath. This promise was never fulfilled; but not for any want of clamorous persecution on my part addressed to my brother's wearied ear and somewhat callous sense of honor. Every fortnight, or so, I took care that he should receive a "refresher," as lawyers call it,--a new and revised brief,--memorializing my pretensions. These it was my brother's policy to parry, by alleged instances of recent misconduct on my part. But all such offences, I insisted, were thoroughly washed away by subsequent services in moments of peril, such as he himself could not always deny. In reality, I believe his real motive for withholding the Garter was, that he had nothing better to bestow upon himself.
"Now, look here," he would say, appealing to Mrs. Evans; "I suppose there's a matter of half a dozen kings on the continent, that would consent to lose three of their fingers, if by such a sacrifice they could purchase the blue ribbon; and here is this little scamp, conceiting himself entitled to it before he has finished two campaigns. "But I was not the person to be beaten off in this fashion. I took my stand upon the promise. A promise _was_ a promise, even if made to a scamp; and then, besides--but there I hesitated; awful thoughts interposed to check me; else I wished to suggest that, perhaps, some two or three among that half dozen kings might also be scamps. However, I reduced the case to this plain dilemma: These six kings had received a promise, or they had not. If they had not, my case was better than theirs; if they _had_, then, said I, "all seven of us"--I was going to add, "are sailing in the same boat," or something to that effect, though not so picturesquely expressed; but I was interrupted by his deadly frown at my audacity in thus linking myself on as a seventh to this _attelage_ of kings, and that such an absolute grub should dream of ranking as one in a bright pleiad of pretenders to the Garter. I had not particularly thought of that; but now, that such a demur was offered to my consideration, I thought of reminding him that, in a certain shadowy sense, I also might presume to class myself as a king, the meaning of which was this: Both my brother and myself, for the sake of varying our intellectual amusements, occupied ourselves at times in governing imaginary kingdoms. I do not mention this as any thing unusual; it is a common resource of mental activity and of aspiring energies amongst boys. Hartley Coleridge, for example, had a kingdom which he governed for many years; whether well or ill, is more than I can say. Kindly, I am sure, he would govern it; but, unless a machine had been invented for enabling him to write without effort, (as was really done for our fourth George during the pressure of illness,) I fear that the public service must have languished deplorably for want of the royal signature. In sailing past his own dominions, what dolorous outcries would have saluted him from the shore--"Hollo, royal sir! here's the deuse to pay: a perfect lock there is, as tight as locked jaw, upon the course of our public business; throats there are to be cut, from the product of ten jail deliveries, and nobody dares to cut them, for want of the proper warrant; archbishoprics there are to be filled; and, because they are _not_ filled, the whole nation is running helter skelter into heresy--and all in consequence of your majesty's sacred laziness." _Our_ governments were less remissly administered; since each of us, by continued reports of improvements and gracious concessions to the folly or the weakness of our subjects, stimulated the zeal of his rival. And here, at least, there seemed to be no reason why I should come into collision with my brother. At any rate, I took pains _not_ to do so. But all was in vain. My destiny was, to live in one eternal element of feud.
FOOTNOTES
[1] "_Peculiar_."--Viz., as _endowed_ foundations to which those resort who are rich and pay, and those also who, being poor, cannot pay, or cannot pay so much. This most honorable distinction amongst the services of England from ancient times to the interests of education--a service absolutely unapproached by any one nation of Christendom--is amongst the foremost cases of that remarkable class which make England, whilst often the most aristocratic, yet also, for many noble purposes, the most democratic of lands.
[2] Five years ago, during the carnival of universal anarchy equally amongst doers and thinkers, a closely-printed pamphlet was published with this title, "A New Revelation, or the Communion of the Incarnate Dead with the Unconscious Living. Important Fact, without trifling Fiction, by HIM." I have not the pleasure of knowing HIM; but certainly I must concede to HIM, that he writes like a man of extreme sobriety upon his extravagant theme. He is angry with Swedenborg, as might be expected, for his chimeras; some of which, however, of late years have signally altered their aspect; but. as to HIM, there is no chance that he should be occupied with chimeras, because (p. 6) "he has met with some who have acknowledged the fact of their having come from the dead"--_habes confitentem reum_. Few, however, are endowed with so much candor; and in particular, for the honor of literature, it grieves me to find, by p. 10, that the largest number of these shams, and perhaps the most uncandid, are to be looked for amongst "publishers and printers," of whom, it seems, "the great majority" are mere forgeries: a very few speak frankly about the matter, and say they don't care who knows it, which, to my thinking, is impudence, but by far the larger section doggedly deny it, and call a policeman, if you persist in charging them with being shams. Some differences there are between my brother and HIM, but in the great outline of their views they coincide.
[3] Charles II., notoriously wrote a book on the possibility of a voyage to the moon, which, in a bishop, would be called a translation to the moon, and perhaps it was _his_ name in combination with _his_ book that suggested the "Adventures of Peter Wilkins." It is unfair, however, to mention him in connection with that single one of his works which announces an extravagant purpose. He was really a scientific man, and already in the time of Cromwell (about 1656) had projected that Royal Society of London which was afterwards realized and presided over by Isaac Barrow and Isaac Newton. He was also a learned man, but still with a veil of romance about him, as may be seen in his most elaborate work-- "The Essay towards a Philosophic or Universal Language."
[4] "_Middy_."--I call him so simply to avoid confusion, and by way of anticipation; else he was too young at this time to serve in the navy. Afterwards he did so for many years, and saw every variety of service in every class of ships belonging to our navy. At one time, when yet a boy, he was captured by pirates, and compelled to sail with them; and the end of his adventurous career was, that for many a year he has been lying at the bottom of the Atlantic.
[5] "Green_heys_," with slight variation in the spelling, is the name given to that district of which Greenhay formed the original nucleus. Probably it was the solitary situation of the house which (failing any other grounds of denomination) raised it to this privilege.
[6] "_Factory_."--Such was the designation technically at that time. At present, I believe that a building of that class would be called a "mill."
[7] This word, however, exists in _Jack-a-dandy_--a very old English word. But what does _that_ mean?
[8] Precisely, however, the same gesture, plebian as it was, by which the English commandant at Heligoland replied to the Danes when civilly inviting him to surrender. Southey it was, on the authority of Lieutenant Southey, his brother, who communicated to me this anecdote.
[9] "_Bridge of sighs_."--Two men of memorable genius, Hood last, and Lord Byron by many years previously, have so appropriated this phrase, and reissued it as English currency, that many readers suppose it to be theirs. But the genealogies of fine expressions should be more carefully preserved. The expression belongs originally to Venice. This _jus postliminii_ becomes of real importance in many cases, but especially in the case of Shakspeare. Could one have believed it possible beforehand? And yet it is a fact that he is made to seem a robber of the lowest order, by mere dint of suffering robbery. Purely through their own jewelly splendor have many hundreds of his phrases forced themselves into usage so general, under the vulgar infirmity of seeking to strengthen weak prose by shreds of poetic quotation, that at length the majority of careless readers come to look upon these phrases as belonging to the language, and traceable to no distinct proprietor any more than proverbs: and thus, on afterwards observing them in Shakspeare, they regard him in the light of one accepting alms (like so many meaner persons) from the common treasury of the universal mind, on which treasury, meantime, he had himself conferred these phrases as original donations of his own. Many expressions in the "Paradise Lost," in "Il Penseroso," and in "L'Allegro," are in the same predicament. And thus the almost incredible case is realized which I have described, viz., that simply by having suffered a robbery through two centuries, (for the first attempt at plundering Milton was made upon his juvenile poems,) have Shakspeare and Milton come to be taxed as robbers. N. B.--In speaking of Hood as having appropriated the phrase _Bridge of Sighs_, I would not be understood to represent him as by possibility aiming at any concealment. He was as far above such a meanness by his nobility of heart, as he was raised above all need for it by the overflowing opulence of his genius.
[10] Geometry (it has been said) would not evade disputation, if a man could find his interest in disputing it: such is the spirit of cavil. But I, upon a very opposite ground, assert that there is not one page of prose that could be selected from the best writer in the English language (far less in the German) which, upon a sufficient interest arising, would not furnish matter, simply through its defects in precision, for a suit in Chancery. Chancery suits do not arise, it is true, because the doubtful expressions do not touch any interest of property; but what _does_ arise is this--that something more valuable than a pecuniary interest is continually suffering, viz., the interests of truth.
[11] "_Of a Stuart sovereign_," and by no means of a Stuart only. Queen Anne, the last Stuart who sat on the British throne, was the last of _our princes_ who touched for the _king's evil_, (as scrofula was generally called until lately;) but the Bourbon houses, on the thrones of France, Spain, and Naples, as well as the house of Savoy, claimed and exercised the same supernatural privilege down to a much later period than the year 1714--the last of Queen Anne: according to their own and the popular faith, they could have cleansed Naaman the Syrian, and Gehazi too. _