Читать книгу The Fate: A Tale of Stirring Times - G. P. R. James - Страница 7

The father looked up from his book, and closed it with a slap, saying, "'Et tamen alter, si fecisset idem, caderet sub judice morum.' It is a bad book, and if another had written it he would have been put in the stocks or whipped at the cart's tail. But this man will get fame, and honor, and wealth by it; not that I am affected by the 'tristitia de bonis alienis.' Each man should rejoice when he sees a worthy neighbor successful, even if he may detect some flaw or fault in his performances, for envy is the basest and most destructive of passions. 'Nulla pestis humano generi pluris stetit;' but when one sees a man of some ability direct all his efforts to produce that which can only work evil to his fellow-creatures, gild vice, decorate folly, and corroborate falsehood, and yet be lauded and rewarded, it does excite anger, and produces a sad conviction of the unworthiness of our kind."

This was not a very auspicious commencement of the conversation to which the young man was looking with some anxiety for an opening to propound certain schemes and purposes of his own. Nevertheless, it was some satisfaction to him that his father had left off reading, for that was an occupation not to be interrupted; and he hastened to make a reply, in hopes that some turn would afford the opportunity he desired.

"Bad books are sometimes very useful, I think, sir," he said, with a good-humored smile.

"Ever in paradoxes, Ralph!" said his father "how may they be useful, boy?"

"By giving better men than their authors occasion to refute them," replied Ralph; "not that I mean to say"--he continued, knowing the peculiar argumentative character of his father's mind--"that the mere refutation would be sufficient, for that would leave matters just where they were before" (his father waved his hand), "but because, in the act of refutation, a thousand new arguments would be drawn forth in favor of truth and right, which might not occur to the multitude if no controversy ever elicited them."

"You have not put your case as strongly as you might have done, Ralph," replied his father; "complete refutation would not absolutely leave matters exactly where they were before. It is with a truth, with a principle, as with a sword-blade: its strength can not be fully known till it is tried. True, the strength, whatever it is, remains the same, but to those who have to use it, the trial adds confidence. It is not of half as much importance to be armed with a good sword as to have one and know that it is good from having proved it. The abstract truth of any proposition remains the same, whether it be assailed and defended or not; but the question before us involves another element, namely, the effect of the assault and defense upon the minds of men; and therefore, as you say, books assailing truth may sometimes be useful by calling forth a complete vindication of the truth. But the man who writes them is equally culpable; for even were we to admit that he might desire to establish truth more firmly by calling forth a strong defense, he would fall into the offense of promulgating falsehood with the knowledge that it was false, and truth refuses to be served by deceit."

He paused for the moment, and his son carefully abstained from furnishing new matter for subtle arguments, well knowing that his father had no mercy upon hobby-horses.

At length the old gentleman laid his hand, smilingly, upon the tome, saying, "I do not suppose that you intend to refute this work, Ralph: first, because I imagine that you do not know what it is, and, next, because I have remarked any thing but a vaulting ambition in you, my dear boy; indeed, perhaps too little. Now,

'Ambire semper stulta confidentia est,

Ambire nunquam deses arrogantia est,'

as has been said, in not the sweetest Latin that ever flowed--"

"Your pardon, dear father," replied Ralph, "I am very ambitious; not, indeed, of refuting the book of any author, living or dead; that I leave to you, in every way fitted for the task, if falsehood be the opponent. But anxious am I--most anxious, 'ambire palmam,' on the great stage of human life. To speak straightforwardly, I have been thinking for some time of asking your permission to go forth and try my fortune on a wider stage. I think I have not done ill at Cambridge" (the father nodded his head approvingly); "but yet none of the paths which a collegiate life opens to a man have temptations for me, and I would fain see whether I can not carve out one for myself."

"What, at the court?" asked the father, shaking his head; "Ralph, Ralph, you forget the means, and know not half the expenses which a court life requires even before the slightest advantage can be gained. With the rich and the courtly, only the rich and the courtly find favor. 'Sus sui, canis cani, bos bovi, et asinus asino, pulcherrimus videtur.'"

"Oh no!" cried Ralph, "no courtly life for me, sir. Some powerful friends I may need, but those I know you can procure me; for not only they who are connected with you by blood, but they also who have had the stronger bond of personal friendship with you in former years, will assuredly value your recommendation too highly to slight your son. As to means, the small sum I receive from my college, and a part of what you were kind enough to allow me there, will be ample."

His father shook his head with a somewhat doubtful air, and asked, "But if you should fail, Ralph?"

"I can but return here," said the young man, "and matters will be just where they were before."

"You are fond of that phrase, Ralph," replied his father, "but you are mistaken--all are mistaken who use it; nothing that has passed through any change is ever the same as it was before. There is always something gained or something lost. It will be so with you; and who shall say, in all the various complexities of circumstance and character, of accident and conduct, which life in the great world implies, how the balance may incline when you visit this old dwelling again."

He fell into deep thought after uttering the last words, and his son would not disturb his revery; for the ice was broken, the first announcement made, and he was very certain of gaining his point in the end. Oh how eagerly did the youth long for the attainment of that point! What was it that attracted him so strongly? No truant disposition; no idle weariness of the spot where his ancestors had dwelt; no gilded dreams of sport and pleasure; no overcolored picture of the world's brightness. But it offered him hope; one small spark of that sacred fire, the extinction of which is death. He felt within him strong energies; he had proved somewhat severely his own abilities; he had a great purpose before him, a strong passion to lead him, and all he wanted was hope and opportunity. He dared not tell his father all that was in his heart, for there is a cold mist about age in which the flame of hope will hardly burn; and if prescience were equal to experience, youth would never struggle on so far and overcome so much, for want of sunshine on the way.

The father sat gazing thoughtfully into the fire; the son remained with his head leaning on his hand, till both started at a sharp rap upon the door of the house from the heavy iron knocker which I have mentioned.

There was, indeed, no need of starting, for both knew they were to have a visitor that night, to taste a bowl of punch and chat over the affairs of the country round. But they had been so deeply involved in personal feelings that they had forgotten the flight of time, and the guest was upon them ere either was aware that the usual hour of his visit on a Wednesday night was actually come.

The father buttoned up a portion of his waist coat, and drew on again a slipper which, under the pressure of cogitation, he had kicked off his foot. The son put straight several of the chairs, which somehow or another had got into a state of confusion; and in the mean while was heard a sound, such as might have proceeded from a seal new caught scrambling about in the bottom of a boat, but which, in reality, was caused by the movement through the passage of a short, fin-legged maid-servant, eager to open the door without delay to his reverence the parson, of whose weekly visitation she had been more mindful than her master. Hardly two minutes elapsed after the stroke upon the outer door when that of the little library opened, and not one visitor, but two, presented themselves, and both bedecked with cassocks.

I can not but regret the rubbing of the face off the coin wherever I see it in society. I love local color; I love class costume, though not class interests, however they may be disguised. Every profession, every calling, honorably exercised, is honorable, and there is nothing so vain as the vanity, nothing so pitiful as the pride which would conceal any external indication of a position we have no right to be ashamed of occupying. The Norman peasant girl, in love with her immemorial white cap, would feel herself degraded were you to dress her head up in hat and feathers. The New Haven fish-wife has an honest pride in her yellow petticoat. The doctor in former times could still be known by red roquelaur and gold-headed cane; the divine by the garments of his order. The soldier aped not the civilian, nor the civilian the soldier; each ship carried its own colors, and could be known by those that sailed by it. I see not those inconveniences of the system, which have produced a change in our day. However, in the times of which I write, each parson could be known by his clerical garments; and both the two gentlemen who now entered were evidently churchmen, though very different both in appearance and demeanor from each other.

The first was a fat, rosy personage, in a bran new cassock, glossy and black as a raven's wing. In personal appearance he was no mean representative of the old friar, wanting, however, the shaven crown and the bare feet. The glance he gave around the room had just such a degree of strangeness in it as might imply that he was not a frequent visitor there, though not altogether unknown.

The second was an older man, perhaps sixty years of age, tall, pale, and thin, with garments well worn, yet whole and decent. His hands, though they not unfrequently held the spade in his own garden, were peculiarly fine and delicate, and his face had seemingly been very handsome in early life.

Now, from the time of the suppression of monasteries and the reformation of the Church of England under Henry VIII. (if reformation that movement could be called which took place under the wife-slayer) to the present day, some five or six complete revolutions have occurred in the state and character of the clergy of Great Britain. Those are now living who remember one or two. By a very natural reaction, the fishing, and shooting, and hunting parson of the early part of the nineteenth century, the man unmindful of all outward observances, and very little careful of even the more solemn duties of his calling, has given place either to the man of forms and ceremonies, of surplices and genuflexions, of crosses and candlesticks, or to the eager, laborious, anxious evangelical minister, ever visiting the sick, attending to the school, or frightening the wicked with vivid pictures of damnation, and diversifying labors, almost too much in themselves for any one man, with missionary meetings, propagation of the Gospel societies, and tract and Bible distribution. The parson Trulliber (I know not if I spell the name aright, as I have no books with me), the parson Adams, the Vicar of Wakefield--although each certainly very much overdrawn, if we consider them as representatives of a class--give us some idea of the various phases of the clerical state in the last century; and innumerable memoirs, histories, and essays show the real condition of the clergy in the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. At none of these periods, be it however remembered, was there not among the clergy of the day an infinite difference, in manners, character, and condition, between different individuals, according to circumstances. The man placed at a distance from refined society, in some remote country parish, was apt to lose the more polished manners acquired at college. This was especially the case where, as sometimes happened, the shameful smallness of the stipend compelled the parish priest or curate to eke out the means of subsistence by hard manual labor. But even then it was not always the case; and hands that have held the plow or dug the glebe have often, washed and clean, during the evening hours, penned words of fire, which have not only found their way to the hearts of men, kindling a flame of pure religion in the breast, but have lighted the writer himself on the road to high preferment.

Again, the chaplain of the lord or great landed proprietor, depending upon his patron for advancement in the Church, and sometimes even for his dinner, was often inclined to be subservient and lickspittle, to undertake degrading and sometimes shameless offices, to forget the dignity of his calling and the dignity of man. But this was merely occasionally; and occasionally, also, you would find a chaplain as stern and harsh as the most fierce reformer, keeping the whole household in awe, and even reproving the faults of his lord himself. These, however, were the extremes, and the general course lay between. There you would find the domestic priest, plodding on quietly in his duties, doing as much good as a not very zealous character could accomplish, bearing the crosses of his situation meekly, and looking forward to a better and a freer day when the long-expected living should be bestowed.

All the coarse caricature daubing in the world can not alter the lines of the picture left to us by the authentic records of those days, and, though it may make the idle smile and the ignorant applaud, yet it will not deceive those who are really conversant with the manners and customs of other times.

Two clergymen of the seventeenth century are now before us, reader, but they belong to neither extreme, and the difference between them, though very great, only serves to show that even the middle ground admitted of much variety. The first who entered advanced, after a momentary look around him, directly toward the master of the house, and took him by the hand with kindly warmth.

"Mr. Woodhall," he said, with the slightest possible touch on an Irish accent, "I am delighted to see you again. It is full six months since we last met, for I stayed behind my lord, being obliged to remain in London on account of having to go to Dublin about some little affairs of my own; my dear aunt having at length thought fit to take her departure for the realms of bliss, when, faith, I thought she had put off the journey altogether. She left me--God bless her!--a neat little comfortable income of two hundred pounds English, a large China bowl, and a pair of Tangier slippers. Heaven reward her, as I am sure it should, for she never troubled it till she could not help it."

"I am glad to see you back, Mr. M'Feely," replied the master of the house; "you have been much wanted to bless the venison up at the hall."

"Oh, the currant-jelly does that mighty well without me," replied the chaplain. "Mr. Ralph, I am right glad to see you. Alma Mater abandoned, I hear. Done with the old lady, eh? Well, it must be so with all fathers and mothers. Children will quit them, must quit them; and there is no use of going cackling about like a hen after a brood of young ducklings when first she sees them take to the water. Every animal knows its own element, and will find it sooner or later. My poor mother, rest her soul, was sadly afraid that I might fall into the errors of popery, and yield to the seductions of the scarlet woman; but, faith, I had no turn for vows of celibacy, and so I came over to England to be out of harm's way. No, no, wedlock is an honorable estate--especially when there is another estate to back it; and as to being married to the Church, upon my soul and conscience I never yet saw the church, be it stone or wood, that I would like to marry any how."

While this part of the worthy gentleman's discourse was going on, addressed to the son, the father had been welcoming his other guest, the parson of the parish.

"Good evening, doctor, give you good evening," he said; "you have caught me here, the lean and slippered pantaloon; but, good faith, Ralph and I were so earnest in talk that I forgot how time went. Nevertheless, 'tis well as it is. Conversation never walks so much at ease as when slipshod; and we will scant ceremony to-night. Come, lay aside your periwig, and we will have a bowl of punch anon."

We will pass over the brewing of the punch and the conversation which sweetened it, whether that conversation turned upon the decline of lemons, which the chaplain declared were not half as juicy as when he was a boy, or upon the enormous price of sugar, which the good parson mourned over sincerely. After the two first ladlefuls had passed round, however, other more important topics were started; rumors from London, tales from France, an epigram, a court ball, a passage of Lucan, and a newly-discovered method of solving some very puzzled questions connected with conic sections were all mentioned and discussed.

Ralph Woodhall had no interest in any of these things. Of some he was ignorant, of some he was tired; and at length he rose, saying he would go out and take a walk for half an hour.

"To study the stars, Ralph?" said his father.

"Nay, to write a sonnet to the pale-faced moon," replied his son, laughing, and away he went.

"The boy has lost his wits," said the Irish clergyman, "to leave such a bowl as this, and such edifying conversation for a green lane and a moonbeam. He must be melancholic."

"Indeed, he has been somewhat heavy and thoughtful of late," said the father, "but he always loved these rural walks, visere sæpè amnes nitidas."

"But not by darkness," replied the parson; "he was never a night-walker."

"The lad's in love," exclaimed the Irishman; "that is the plain truth, as sure as my name is M'Feely. You never see a lad of about twenty get moping and walking by moonlight, looking into babbling brooks, or sitting with his hat off under an elm-tree, but you may be sure that he is infected with that sauntering, heigh-ho, lamentable idleness, love, rightly called a passion, if passion means suffering, and as rightly called a madness or a disease by some doctors, whether the seat thereof be in the liver, or the midriff, or the brain, or the heart."

"Hold, hold, doctor," exclaimed Mr. Woodhall; "pray make some distinctions. There are various kinds of love: some honest, noble, ennobling, others base, evil, and degrading. To say nothing of divine love, holy love, and all kinds and descriptions of honest affection, even the love of man for woman is often too pleasing and blessing to be called a disease. It may perhaps be termed a sort of mental titillation, which, when not extravagant or in excess, is agreeable and even salutary. Many Eastern nations take the greatest delight in being gently tickled; the Chinese enjoy having the soles of their feet titillated either with the finger or a feather, and yet we know that, carried to excess, the tickling of the feet has produced convulsion and death. All depends upon moderation: every excess is evil, on whichever side it be committed: nay, I hold that an excess of abstinence is more sinful than an excess of indulgence, for the one is a despising of God's good gifts, while the other is merely a superfluous enjoyment of them. I can not but think that the saint who stood on a pillar, and the anchorites of the Thebaid, were not only great fools, but blasphemous fools; for, if they did not convey by speech, they signified by action, a foul and false imputation upon the character of the Deity, for which they deserved to be burned--if ever any men did merit such a fate."

"But if your son be in love, who is the person with whom he is in love?" asked the parson. "There is no one in the parish for whom I think it at all likely that he should conceive such a passion."

"He is not in love at all," replied the father; "the truth is, my reverend friend, he has conceived a strong desire to go forth and seek his fortune in the world, and we were speaking of that very subject when you came in. I had neither consented nor prohibited; and probably, doubt--the most painful of all modes or conditions of the mind--has made him wander forth to-night."

"The boy's in love!" grumbled Mr. M'Feely, authoritatively; "the boy's in love! But as to sending him forth to seek his fortune, that is the very best thing that can be done for him. It is the best remedy for love in the world. He'll puff and sigh like an angry cub for the first fortnight. Then he'll find there is something else to be done in life than sigh. Then he'll struggle on, all for the loved one's sake! Then he'll forget the loved one in the struggle. Then he'll find she has forgotten him, and he'll console himself by saying, 'There are more fish in the sea.' Bless your soul, Mr. Woodhall, when I left Ireland, with what I could scrape together, to study at your University of Oxford here, I was dying for love of no less than nine of the prettiest girls in all the north of Ireland. Not one of them didn't swear she would die a maid for my sake; and yet you see I'm a bachelor over forty, and they are all matrons--some of them grandmothers, I fancy."

"What do you say to it, my worthy friend Barry?" asked Mr. Woodhall, addressing the parson. "I do not like to part with my son so soon after his return from college; I do not like to throw a lad like that upon the wide world without any decided prospect before him. Yet if it be for his good, I will cast away parental fondness and parental anxiety, and let him go."

"You will let him go in the end, Woodhall, whatever you determine now," replied the clergyman, with a look of kindly meaning, "and it is better to do that graciously which you will do eventually. Besides, I think you will do right. The most important part of education is the education of the world. Those who keep their children back from this till they are themselves gone, leave them to receive the hard instruction, without any one at hand to render it more easy. You have given Ralph every preparation. His mind and his heart have been cultivated highly. Let him go to receive the lessons of experience, while you are still here to give aid in case of need."

"Well, he shall go," said Mr. Woodhall, with a sigh; "I have still some friends left in the great world who will lend a helping hand, and to them he shall have letters."

"I have but one," said Mr. Barry, "but he is a good and faithful one; and Ralph must know him."

"Bless your soul, I will get him twenty letters from my lord in a jiffy," exclaimed Dr. M'Feely; "the lad is a great favorite of his, and I have nothing to do but to write them, and my lord will sign and address them."

Thus was it determined that Ralph Woodhall should go forth to try the world.