Book: My Novel, Volume 7.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> My Novel, Volume 7.



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BOOK SEVENTH.


INITIAL CHAPTER.

MR. CAXTON UPON COURAGE AND PATIENCE.

"What is courage?" said my uncle Roland, rousing himself from a revery
into which he had fallen, after the Sixth Book in this history had been
read to our family circle.

"What is courage?" he repeated more earnestly. "Is it insensibility to
fear? That may be the mere accident of constitution; and if so, there is
no more merit in being courageous than in being this table."

"I am very glad to hear you speak thus," observed Mr. Caxton, "for I
should not like to consider myself a coward; yet I am very sensible to
fear in all dangers, bodily and moral."

"La, Austin, how can you say so?" cried my mother, firing up; "was it not
only last week that you faced the great bull that was rushing after
Blanche and the children?"

Blanche at that recollection stole to my father's chair, and, hanging
over his shoulder, kissed his forehead.

MR. CAXTON (sublimely unmoved by these flatteries).--"I don't deny that I
faced the bull, but I assert that I was horribly frightened."

ROLAND.--"The sense of honour which conquers fear is the true courage of
chivalry: you could not run away when others were looking on,--no
gentleman could."

MR. CAXTON.--"Fiddledee! It was not on my gentility that I stood,
Captain. I should have run fast enough, if it had done any good. I
stood upon my understanding. As the bull could run faster than I could,
the only chance of escape was to make the brute as frightened as myself."

BLANCHE.--"Ah, you did not think of that; your only thought was to save
me and the children."

MR. CAXTON.--"Possibly, my dear, very possibly, I might have been afraid
for you too; but I was very much afraid for myself. However, luckily I
had the umbrella, and I sprang it up and spread it forth in the animal's
stupid eyes, hurling at him simultaneously the biggest lines I could
think of in the First Chorus of the 'Seven against Thebes.' I began with
ELEDEMNAS PEDIOPLOKTUPOS; and when I came to the grand howl of [A line in
Greek], the beast stood appalled as at the roar of a lion. I shall never
forget his amazed snort at the Greek. Then he kicked up his hind legs,
and went bolt through the gap in the hedge. Thus, armed with AEschylus
and the umbrella, I remained master of the field; but" (continued Mr.
Caxton ingenuously) "I should not like to go through that half-minute
again."

"No man would," said the captain, kindly. "I should be very sorry to
face a bull myself, even with a bigger umbrella than yours, and even
though I had AEschylus, and Homer to boot, at my fingers' ends."

MR. CAXTON.--"You would not have minded if it had been a Frenchman with a
sword in his hand?"

CAPTAIN.--"Of course not. Rather liked it than otherwise," he added
grimly.

MR. CAXTON.--"Yet many a Spanish matador, who does n't care a button for
a bull, would take to his heels at the first lunge /en carte/ from a
Frenchman. Therefore, in fact, if courage be a matter of constitution,
it is also a matter of custom. We face calmly the dangers we are
habituated to, and recoil from those of which we have no familiar
experience. I doubt if Marshal Turenue himself would have been quite at
his ease on the tight-rope; and a rope-dancer, who seems disposed to
scale the heavens with Titanic temerity, might possibly object to charge
on a cannon."

CAPTAIN ROLAND.--"Still, either this is not the courage I mean, or it is
another kind of it. I mean by courage that which is the especial force
and dignity of the human character, without which there is no reliance on
principle, no constancy in virtue,--a something," continued my uncle,
gallantly, and with a half bow towards my mother, "which your sex shares
with our own. When the lover, for instance, clasps the hand of his
betrothed, and says, 'Wilt thou be true to me, in spite of absence and
time, in spite of hazard and fortune, though my foes malign me, though
thy friends may dissuade thee, and our lot in life may be rough and
rude?' and when the betrothed answers, 'I will be true,' does not the
lover trust to her courage as well as her love?"

"Admirably put, Roland," said my father. "But a propos of what do you
puzzle us with these queries on courage?"

CAPTAIN ROLAND (with a slight blush).--"I was led to the inquiry (though
perhaps it may be frivolous to take so much thought of what, no doubt,
costs Pisistratus so little) by the last chapters in my nephew's story.
I see this poor boy Leonard, alone with his fallen hopes (though very
irrational they were) and his sense of shame. And I read his heart, I
dare say, better than Pisistratus does, for I could feel like that boy if
I had been in the same position; and conjecturing what he and thousands
like him must go through, I asked myself, 'What can save him and them?'
I answered, as a soldier would answer, 'Courage.' Very well. But pray;
Austin, what is courage?"

MR. CAXTON (prudently backing out of a reply).--"/Papae/!' Brother, since
you have just complimented the ladies on that quality, you had better
address your question to them."

Blanche here leaned both hands on my father's chair, and said, looking
down at first bashfully, but afterwards warming with the subject, "Do you
not think, sir, that little Helen has already suggested, if not what is
courage, what at least is the real essence of all courage that endures
and conquers, that ennobles and hallows and redeems? Is it not PATIENCE,
Father? And that is why we women have a courage of our own. Patience
does not affect to be superior to fear, but at least it never admits
despair."

PISISTRATUS.--"Kiss me, my Blanche, for you have come near to the truth
which perplexed the soldier and puzzled the sage."

MR. CAXTON (tartly).--"If you mean me by the sage, I was not puzzled at
all. Heaven knows you do right to inculcate patience,--it is a virtue
very much required--in your readers. Nevertheless," added my father,
softening with the enjoyment of his joke,--"nevertheless Blanche and
Helen are quite right. Patience is the courage of the conqueror; it is
the virtue, /par excellence/, of Man against Destiny,--of the One against
the World, and of the Soul against Matter. Therefore this is the courage
of the Gospel; and its importance in a social view--its importance to
races and institutions--cannot be too earnestly inculcated. What is it
that distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon from all other branches of the human
family,--peoples deserts with his children and consigns to them the
heritage of rising worlds? What but his faculty to brave, to suffer, to
endure,--the patience that resists firmly and innovates slowly? Compare
him with the Frenchman. The Frenchman has plenty of valour,--that there
is no denying; but as for fortitude, he has not enough to cover the point
of a pin. He is ready to rush out of the world if he is bitten by a
flea."

CAPTAIN ROLAND.--"There was a case in the papers the other day, Austin,
of a Frenchman who actually did destroy himself because he was so teased
by the little creatures you speak of. He left a paper on his table,
saying that 'life was not worth having at the price of such torments.'"

MR. CAXTON (solemnly).--"Sir, their whole political history, since the
great meeting of the /Tiers Etat/, has been the history of men who would
rather go to the devil than be bitten by a flea. It is the record of
human impatience that seeks to force time, and expects to grow forests
from the spawn of a mushroom. Wherefore, running through all extremes of
constitutional experiment, when they are nearest to democracy they are
next door to a despot; and all they have really done is to destroy
whatever constitutes the foundation of every tolerable government. A
constitutional monarchy cannot exist without aristocracy, nor a healthful
republic endure with corruption of manners. The cry of equality is
incompatible with civilization, which, of necessity, contrasts poverty
with wealth; and, in short, whether it be an emperor or a mob I that is
to rule, Force is the sole hope of order, and the government is but an
army."

[Published more than a year before the date of the French empire
under Louis Napoleon.]

"Impress, O Pisistratus! impress the value of patience as regards man
and men. You touch there on the kernel of the social system,--the secret
that fortifies the individual and disciplines the million. I care not,
for my part, if you are tedious so long as you are earnest. Be minute
and detailed. Let the real Human Life, in its war with Circumstance,
stand out. Never mind if one can read you but slowly,--better chance of
being less quickly forgotten. Patience, patience! By the soul of
Epictetus, your readers shall set you an example."




CHAPTER II.

Leonard had written twice to Mrs. Fairfield, twice to Riccabocca, and
once to Mr. Dale; and the poor proud boy could not bear to betray his
humiliation. He wrote as with cheerful spirits,--as if perfectly
satisfied with his prospects. He said that he was well employed, in the
midst of books, and that he had found kind friends. Then he turned from
himself to write about those whom he addressed, and the affairs and
interests of the quiet world wherein they lived. He did not give his own
address, nor that of Mr. Prickett. He dated his letters from a small
coffee-house near the bookseller's, to which he occasionally went for his
simple meals. He had a motive in this. He did not desire to be found
out. Mr. Dale replied for himself and for Mrs. Fairfield, to the
epistles addressed to these two. Riccabocca wrote also.

Nothing could be more kind than the replies of both. They came to
Leonard in a very dark period in his life, and they strengthened him in
the noiseless battle with despair.

If there be a good in the world that we do without knowing it, without
conjecturing the effect it may have upon a human soul; it is when we show
kindness to the young in the first barren footpath up the mountain of
life.

Leonard's face resumed its serenity in his intercourse with his employer;
but he did not recover his boyish ingenuous frankness. The under-
currents flowed again pure from the turbid soil and the splintered
fragments uptorn from the deep; but they were still too strong and too
rapid to allow transparency to the surface. And now he stood in the
sublime world of books, still and earnest as a seer who invokes the dead;
and thus, face to face with knowledge, hourly he discovered how little he
knew. Mr. Prickett lent him such works as he selected and asked to take
home with him. He spent whole nights in reading, and no longer
desultorily. He read no more poetry, no more Lives of Poets. He read
what poets must read if they desire to be great--/Sapere principium et
fons/,--strict reasonings on the human mind; the relations between motive
and conduct, thought and action; the grave and solemn truths of the past
world; antiquities, history, philosophy. He was taken out of himself; he
was carried along the ocean of the universe. In that ocean, O seeker,
study the law of the tides; and seeing Chance nowhere, Thought presiding
over all, Fate, that dread phantom, shall vanish from creation, and
Providence alone be visible in heaven and on earth!




CHAPTER III.

There was to be a considerable book-sale at a country house one day's
journey from London. Mr. Prickett meant to have attended it on his own
behalf, and that of several gentlemen who had given him commissions for
purchase; but on the morning fixed for his departure, he was seized with
a severe return of his old foe the rheumatism. He requested Leonard to
attend instead of himself. Leonard went, and was absent for the three
days during which the sale lasted. He returned late in the evening, and
went at once to Mr. Prickett's house. The shop was closed; he knocked at
the private entrance; a strange person opened the door to him, and in
reply to his question if Mr. Prickett was at home, said, with a long and
funereal face, "Young man, Mr. Prickett senior is gone to his long home,
but Mr. Richard Prickett will see you."

At this moment a very grave-looking man, with lank hair, looked forth
from the side-door communicating between the shop and the passage, and
then stepped forward. "Come in, sir; you are my late uncle's assistant,
Mr. Fairfield, I suppose?"

"Your late uncle! Heavens, sir, do I understand aright, can Mr. Prickett
be dead since I left London?"

"Died, sir, suddenly, last night. It was an affection of the heart. The
doctor thinks the rheumatism attacked that organ. He had small time to
provide for his departure, and his account-books seem in sad disorder: I
am his nephew and executor."

Leonard had now--followed the nephew into the shop. There still burned
the gas-lamp. The place seemed more dingy and cavernous than before.
Death always makes its presence felt in the house it visits.

Leonard was greatly affected,--and yet more, perhaps, by the utter want
of feeling which the nephew exhibited. In fact the deceased had not been
on friendly terms with this person, his nearest relative and heir-at-law,
who was also a bookseller.

"You were engaged but by the week, I find, young man, on reference to my
late uncle's papers. He gave you L1 a week,--a monstrous sum! I shall
not require your services any further. I shall move these books to my
own house. You will be good enough to send me a list of those you bought
at the sale, and your account of travelling expenses, etc. What may be
due to you shall be sent to your address. Good-evening."

Leonard went home, shocked and saddened at the sudden death of his kind
employer. He did not think much of himself that night; but when he rose
the next day, he suddenly felt that the world of London lay before him,
without a friend, without a calling, without an occupation for bread.

This time it was no fancied sorrow, no poetic dream disappointed. Before
him, gaunt and palpable, stood Famine. Escape!--yes. Back to the
village: his mother's cottage; the exile's garden; the radishes and the
fount. Why could he not escape? Ask why civilization cannot escape its
ills, and fly back to the wild and the wigwam.

Leonard could not have returned to the cottage, even if the Famine that
faced had already seized him with her skeleton hand. London releases not
so readily her fated step-sons.




CHAPTER IV.

One day three persons were standing before an old bookstall in a passage
leading from Oxford Street into Tottenham Court Road. Two were
gentlemen; the third, of the class and appearance of those who more
habitually halt at old bookstalls.

"Look," said one of the gentlemen to the other, "I have discovered here
what I have searched for in vain the last ten years,--the Horace of 1580,
the Horace of the Forty Commentators, a perfect treasury of learning, and
marked only fourteen shillings!"

"Hush, Norreys," said the other, "and observe what is yet more worth your
study;" and he pointed to the third bystander, whose face, sharp and
attenuated, was bent with an absorbed, and, as it were, with a hungering
attention over an old worm-eaten volume.

"What is the book, my lord?" whispered Mr. Norreys. His companion
smiled, and replied by another question, "What is the man who reads the
book?"

Mr. Norreys moved a few paces, and looked over the student's shoulder.
"Preston's translation of Boethius's 'The Consolations of Philosophy,'"
he said, coming back to his friend.

"He looks as if he wanted all the consolations Philosophy can give him,
poor boy."

At this moment a fourth passenger paused at the bookstall, and,
recognizing the pale student, placed his hand on his shoulder, and said,
"Aha, young sir, we meet again. So poor Prickett is dead. But you are
still haunted by associations. Books, books,--magnets to which all iron
minds move insensibly. What is this? Boethius! Ah, a book written in
prison, but a little time before the advent of the only philosopher who
solves to the simplest understanding every mystery of life--"

"And that philosopher?"

"Is death!" said Mr. Burley. "How can you be dull enough to ask? Poor
Boethius, rich, nobly born, a consul, his sons consuls, the world one
smile to the Last Philosopher of Rome. Then suddenly, against this type
of the old world's departing WISDOM stands frowning the new world's grim
genius, FORCE,--Theodoric the Ostrogoth condemning Boethius the
schoolman; and Boethius in his Pavian dungeon holding a dialogue with the
shade of Athenian Philosophy. It is the finest picture upon which
lingers the glimmering of the Western golden day, before night rushes
over time."

"And," said Mr. Norreys, abruptly, "Boethius comes back to us with the
faint gleam of returning light, translated by Alfred the Great; and,
again, as the sun of knowledge bursts forth in all its splendour by Queen
Elizabeth. Boethius influences us as we stand in this passage; and that
is the best of all the Consolations of Philosophy,--eh, Mr. Burley?"

Mr. Burley turned and bowed.

The two men looked at each other; you could not see a greater contrast,--
Mr. Burley, his gay green dress already shabby and soiled, with a rent in
the skirts and his face speaking of habitual night-cups; Mr. Norreys,
neat and somewhat precise in dress, with firm, lean figure, and quiet,
collected, vigorous energy in his eye and aspect.

"If," replied Mr. Burley, "a poor devil like me may argue with a
gentleman who may command his own price with the booksellers, I should
say it is no consolation at all, Mr. Norreys. And I should like to see
any man of sense accept the condition of Boethius in his prison, with
some strangler or headsman waiting behind the door, upon the promised
proviso that he should be translated, centuries afterwards, by kings and
queens, and help indirectly to influence the minds of Northern
barbarians, babbling about him in an alley, jostled by passers-by who
never heard the name of Boethius, and who don't care a fig for
philosophy. Your servant, sir, young man, come and talk."

Burley hooked his arm within Leonard's, and led the boy passively away.

"That is a clever man," said Harley L'Estrange. "But I am sorry to see
yon young student, with his bright earnest eyes, and his lip that has the
quiver of passion and enthusiasm, leaning on the arm of a guide who seems
disenchanted of all that gives purpose to learning, and links philosophy
with use to the world. Who and what is this clever man whom you call
Burley?"

"A man who might have been famous, if he had condescended to be
respectable! The boy listening to us both so attentively interested me
too,--I should like to have the making of him. But I must buy this
Horace."

The shopman, lurking within his hole like a spider for flies, was now
called out. And when Mr. Norreys had bought the Horace, and given an
address where to send it, Harley asked the shopman if he knew the young
man who had been reading Boethius.

"Only by sight. He has come here every day the last week, and spends
hours at the stall. When once he fastens on a book, he reads it
through."

"And never buys?" said Mr. Norreys.

"Sir," said the shopman, with a good-natured smile, "they who buy seldom
read. The poor boy pays me twopence a day to read as long as he pleases.
I would not take it, but he is proud."

"I have known men amass great learning in that way," said Mr. Norreys.
"Yes, I should like to have that boy in my hands. And now, my lord, I am
at your service, and we will go to the studio of your artist."

The two gentlemen walked on towards one of the streets out of Fitzroy
Square.

In a few minutes more Harley L'Estrange was in his element, seated
carelessly on a deal table smoking his cigar, and discussing art with the
gusto of a man who honestly loved, and the taste of a man who thoroughly
understood it. The young artist, in his dressing robe, adding slow touch
upon touch, paused often to listen the better. And Henry Norrey s,
enjoying the brief respite from a life of great labour, was gladly
reminded of idle hours under rosy skies; for these three men had formed
their friendship in Italy, where the bands of friendship are woven by the
hands of the Graces.




CHAPTER V.

Leonard and Mr. Burley walked on into the suburbs round the north road
from London, and Mr. Burley offered to find literary employment for
Leonard,--an offer eagerly accepted.

Then they went into a public-house by the wayside. Burley demanded a
private room, called for pen, ink, and paper; and placing these
implements before Leonard, said, "Write what you please, in prose, five
sheets of letter-paper, twenty-two lines to a page,--neither more nor
less."

"I cannot write so."

"Tut, 't is for bread."

The boy's face crimsoned.

"I must forget that," said he.

"There is an arbour in the garden, under a weeping-ash," returned Burley.
"Go there, and fancy yourself in Arcadia."

Leonard was too pleased to obey. He found out the little arbour at one
end of a deserted bowling-green. All was still,--the hedgerow shut out
the sight of the inn. The sun lay warm on the grass, and glinted
pleasantly through the leaves of the ash. And Leonard there wrote the
first essay from his hand as Author by profession. What was it that he
wrote? His dreamy impressions of London, an anathema on its streets and
its hearts of stone, murmurs against poverty, dark elegies on fate?

Oh, no! little knowest thou true genius, if thou askest such questions,
or thinkest that there under the weeping-ash the task-work for bread was
remembered; or that the sunbeam glinted but over the practical world,
which, vulgar and sordid, lay around. Leonard wrote a fairy tale,--one
of the loveliest you can conceive, with a delicate touch of playful
humour, in a style all flowered over with happy fancies. He smiled as he
wrote the last word,--he was happy. In rather more than an hour Mr.
Burley came to him, and found him with that smile on his lips.

Mr. Burley had a glass of brandy-and-water in his hand; it was his third.
He too smiled, he too looked happy. He read the paper aloud, and well.
He was very complimentary. "You will do!" said he, clapping Leonard on
the back. "Perhaps some day you will catch my one-eyed perch." Then he
folded up the manuscript, scribbled off a note, put the whole in one
envelope, and they returned to London.

Mr. Burley disappeared within a dingy office near Fleet Street, on which
was inscribed, "Office of the 'Beehive,'" and soon came forth with a
golden sovereign in his hand, Leonard's first-fruits. Leonard thought
Peru lay before him. He accompanied Mr. Burley to that gentleman's
lodging in Maida Hill. The walk had been very long; Leonard was not
fatigued. He listened with a livelier attention than before to Burley's
talk. And when they reached the apartments of the latter, and Mr. Burley
sent to the cookshop, and their joint supper was taken out of the golden
sovereign, Leonard felt proud, and for the first time for weeks he
laughed the heart's laugh. The two writers grew more and more intimate
and cordial. And there was a vast deal in Burley by which any young man
might be made the wiser. There was no apparent evidence of poverty in
the apartments,--clean, new, well-furnished; but all things in the most
horrible litter,--all speaking of the huge literary sloven.

For several days Leonard almost lived in those rooms. He wrote
continuously, save when Burley's conversation fascinated him into
idleness. Nay, it was not idleness,--his knowledge grew larger as he
listened; but the cynicism of the talker began slowly to work its way.
That cynicism in which there was no faith, no hope, no vivifying breath
from Glory, from Religion,--the cynicism of the Epicurean, more degraded
in his sty than ever was Diogenes in his tub; and yet presented with such
ease and such eloquence, with such art and such mirth, so adorned with
illustration and anecdote, so unconscious of debasement!

Strange and dread philosophy, that made it a maxim to squander the gifts
of mind on the mere care for matter, and fit the soul to live but as from
day to day, with its scornful cry, "A fig for immortality and laurels!"
An author for bread! Oh, miserable calling! was there something grand
and holy, after all, even in Chatterton's despair?




CHAPTER VI.

The villanous "Beehive"! Bread was worked out of it, certainly; but
fame, but hope for the future,--certainly not. Milton's Paradise Lost
would have perished without a sound had it appeared in the "Beehive."

Fine things were there in a fragmentary crude state, composed by Burley
himself. At the end of a week they were dead and forgotten,--never read
by one man of education and taste; taken simultaneously and indifferently
with shallow politics and wretched essays, yet selling, perhaps, twenty
or thirty thousand copies,--an immense sale; and nothing got out of them
but bread and brandy!

"What more would you have?" cried John Burley. "Did not stern old Sam
Johnson say he could never write but from want?"

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