"My Novel" — Complete

CHAPTER VIII

Spring had come again; and one beautiful May day, Leonard Fairfield sat beside the little fountain which he had now actually constructed in the garden. The butterflies were hovering over the belt of flowers which he had placed around his fountain, and the birds were singing overhead. Leonard Fairfield was resting from his day’s work, to enjoy his abstemious dinner, beside the cool play of the sparkling waters, and, with the yet keener appetite of knowledge, he devoured his book as he munched his crusts.

A penny tract is the shoeing-horn of literature! it draws on a great many books, and some too tight to be very useful in walking. The penny tract quotes a celebrated writer—you long to read him; it props a startling assertion by a grave authority—you long to refer to it. During the nights of the past winter, Leonard’s intelligence had made vast progress; he had taught himself more than the elements of mechanics, and put to practice the principles he had acquired not only in the hydraulical achievement of the fountain, nor in the still more notable application of science, commenced on the stream in which Jackeymo had fished for minnows, and which Lenny had diverted to the purpose of irrigating two fields, but in various ingenious contrivances for the facilitation or abridgment of labour, which had excited great wonder and praise in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, those rabid little tracts, which dealt so summarily with the destinies of the human race, even when his growing reason and the perusal of works more classical or more logical had led him to perceive that they were illiterate, and to suspect that they jumped from premises to conclusions with a celerity very different from the careful ratiocination of mechanical science, had still, in the citations and references wherewith they abounded, lured him on to philosophers more specious and more perilous. Out of the tinker’s bag he had drawn a translation of Condorcet’s “Progress of Man” and another of Rousseau’s “Social Contract.” Works so eloquent had induced him to select from the tracts in the tinker’s miscellany those which abounded most in professions of philanthropy, and predictions of some coming Golden Age, to which old Saturn’s was a joke,—tracts so mild and mother-like in their language, that it required a much more practical experience than Lenny’s to perceive that you would have to pass a river of blood before you had the slightest chance of setting foot on the flowery banks on which they invited you to repose; tracts which rouged poor Christianity on the cheeks, clapped a crown of innocent daffodillies on her head, and set her to dancing a pas de zephyr in the pastoral ballet in which Saint-Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid it down as a preliminary axiom that—

substituted in place thereof M. Fourier’s symmetrical phalanstere, or Mr. Owen’s architectural parallelogram. It was with some such tract that Lenny was seasoning his crusts and his radishes, when Riccabocca, bending his long dark face over the student’s shoulder, said abruptly,—

“Diavolo, my friend! what on earth have you got there? Just let me look at it, will you?”

Leonard rose respectfully, and coloured deeply as he surrendered the tract to Riccabocca.

The wise man read the first page attentively, the second more cursorily, and only ran his eye over the rest. He had gone through too vast a range of problems political, not to have passed over that venerable Pons Asinorum of Socialism, on which Fouriers and Saint-Simons sit straddling, and cry aloud that they have arrived at the last boundary of knowledge!

“All this is as old as the hills,” quoth Riccabocca, irreverently; “but the hills stand still, and this—there it goes!” and the sage pointed to a cloud emitted from his pipe. “Did you ever read Sir David Brewster on Optical Delusions? No! Well, I’ll lend it to you. You will find therein a story of a lady who always saw a black cat on her hearth-rug. The black cat existed only in her fancy, but the hallucination was natural and reasonable,—eh, what do you think?”

“Why, sir,” said Leonard, not catching the Italian’s meaning, “I don’t exactly see that it was natural and reasonable.”

“Foolish boy, yes! because black cats are things possible and known. But who ever saw upon earth a community of men such as sit on the hearth-rugs of Messrs. Owen and Fourier? If the lady’s hallucination was not reasonable, what is his who believes in such visions as these?”

Leonard bit his lip.

“My dear boy,” cried Riccabocca, kindly, “the only thing sure and tangible to which these writers would lead you lies at the first step, and that is what is commonly called a Revolution. Now, I know what that is. I have gone, not indeed through a revolution, but an attempt at one.”

Leonard raised his eyes towards his master with a look of profound respect and great curiosity.

“Yes,” added Riccabocca, and the face on which the boy gazed exchanged its usual grotesque and sardonic expression for one animated, noble, and heroic. “Yes, not a revolution for chimeras, but for that cause which the coldest allow to be good, and which, when successful, all time approves as divine,—the redemption of our native soil from the rule of the foreigner! I have shared in such an attempt. And,” continued the Italian, mournfully, “recalling now all the evil passions it arouses, all the ties it dissolves, all the blood that it commands to flow, all the healthful industry it arrests, all the madmen that it arms, all the victims that it dupes, I question whether one man really honest, pure, and humane, who has once gone through such an ordeal, would ever hazard it again, unless he was assured that the victory was certain,—ay, and the object for which he fights not to be wrested from his hands amidst the uproar of the elements that the battle has released.”

The Italian paused, shaded his brow with his hand, and remained long silent. Then, gradually resuming his ordinary tone, he continued,—

“Revolutions that have no definite objects made clear by the positive experience of history; revolutions, in a word, that aim less at substituting one law or one dynasty for another, than at changing the whole scheme of society, have been little attempted by real statesmen. Even Lycurgus is proved to be a myth who never existed. Such organic changes are but in the day-dreams of philosophers who lived apart from the actual world, and whose opinions (though generally they were very benevolent, good sort of men, and wrote in an elegant poetical style) one would no more take on a plain matter of life, than one would look upon Virgil’s Eclogues as a faithful picture of the ordinary pains and pleasures of the peasants who tend our sheep. Read them as you would read poets, and they are delightful. But attempt to shape the world according to the poetry, and fit yourself for a madhouse. The farther off the age is from the realization of such projects, the more these poor philosophers have indulged them. Thus, it was amidst the saddest corruption of court manners that it became the fashion in Paris to sit for one’s picture with a crook in one’s hand, as Alexis or Daphne. Just as liberty was fast dying out of Greece, and the successors of Alexander were founding their monarchies, and Rome was growing up to crush in its iron grasp all States save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the world, to open them in his dreamy “Atlantis.” Just in the grimmest period of English history, with the axe hanging over his head, Sir Thomas More gives you his “Utopia.” Just when the world is to be the theatre of a new Sesostris, the sages of France tell you that the age is too enlightened for war, that man is henceforth to be governed by pure reason, and live in a paradise. Very pretty reading all this to a man like me, Lenny, who can admire and smile at it. But to you, to the man who has to work for his living, to the man who thinks it would be so much more pleasant to live at his ease in a phalanstere than to work eight or ten hours a day; to the man of talent and action and industry, whose future is invested in that tranquillity and order of a State in which talent and action and industry are a certain capital,—why, Messrs. Coutts, the great bankers, had better encourage a theory to upset the system of banking! Whatever disturbs society, yea, even by a causeless panic, much more by an actual struggle, falls first upon the market of labour, and thence affects prejudicially every department of intelligence. In such times the arts are arrested; literature is neglected; people are too busy to read anything save appeals to their passions. And capital, shaken in its sense of security, no longer ventures boldly through the land, calling forth all the energies of toil and enterprise, and extending to every workman his reward. Now, Lenny, take this piece of advice. You are young, clever, and aspiring: men rarely succeed in changing the world; but a man seldom fails of success if he lets the world alone, and resolves to make the best of it. You are in the midst of the great crisis of your life; it is the struggle between the new desires knowledge excites, and that sense of poverty which those desires convert either into hope and emulation, or into envy and despair. I grant that it is an up-hill work that lies before you; but don’t you think it is always easier to climb a mountain than it is to level it? These books call on you to level the mountain; and that mountain is the property of other people, subdivided amongst a great many proprietors, and protected by law. At the first stroke of the pickaxe, it is ten to one but what you are taken up for a trespass. But the path up the mountain is a right of way uncontested. You may be safe at the summit, before (even if the owners are fools enough to let you) you could have levelled a yard. Cospetto!” quoth the doctor, “it is more than two thousand years ago since poor Plato began to level it, and the mountain is as high as ever!”

Thus saying, Riccabocca came to the end of his pipe, and stalking thoughtfully away, he left Leonard Fairfield trying to extract light from the smoke.

CHAPTER IX

Shortly after this discourse of Riccabocca’s, an incident occurred to Leonard that served to carry his mind into new directions. One evening, when his mother was out, he was at work on a new mechanical contrivance, and had the misfortune to break one of the instruments which he employed. Now it will be remembered that his father had been the squire’s head carpenter: the widow had carefully hoarded the tools of his craft, which had belonged to her poor Mark; and though she occasionally lent them to Leonard, she would not give them up to his service. Amongst these Leonard knew that he should find the one that he wanted; and being much interested in his contrivance, he could not wait till his mother’s return. The tools, with other little relies of the lost, were kept in a large trunk in Mrs. Fairfield’s sleepingroom; the trunk was not locked, and Leonard went to it with out ceremony or scruple. In rummaging for the instrument his eye fell upon a bundle of manuscripts; and he suddenly recollected that when he was a mere child, and before he much knew the difference between verse and prose, his mother had pointed to these manuscripts, and said, “One day or other, when you can read nicely, I’ll let you look at these, Lenny. My poor Mark wrote such verses—ah, he was a schollard!” Leonard, reasonably enough, thought that the time had now arrived when he was worthy the privilege of reading the paternal effusions, and he took forth the manuscripts with a keen but melancholy interest. He recognized his father’s handwriting, which he had often seen before in account-books and memoranda, and read eagerly some trifling poems, which did not show much genius, nor much mastery of language and rhythm,—such poems, in short, as a self-educated man, with poetic taste and feeling rather than poetic inspiration or artistic culture, might compose with credit, but not for fame. But suddenly, as he turned over these “Occasional Pieces,” Leonard came to others in a different handwriting,—a woman’s handwriting, small and fine and exquisitely formed. He had scarcely read six lines of these last, before his attention was irresistibly chained. They were of a different order of merit from poor Mark’s; they bore the unmistakable stamp of genius. Like the poetry of women in general, they were devoted to personal feeling,—they were not the mirror of a world, but reflections of a solitary heart. Yet this is the kind of poetry most pleasing to the young. And the verses in question had another attraction for Leonard: they seemed to express some struggle akin to his own,—some complaint against the actual condition of the writer’s life, some sweet melodious murmurs at fortune. For the rest, they were characterized by a vein of sentiment so elevated, that, if written by a man, it would have run into exaggeration; written by a woman, the romance was carried off by so many genuine revelations of sincere, deep, pathetic feeling, that it was always natural, though true to a nature for which you would not augur happiness.

Leonard was still absorbed in the perusal of these poems when Mrs. Fairfield entered the room.

“What have you been about, Lenny,—searching in my box?”

“I came to look for my father’s bag of tools, Mother, and I found these papers, which you said I might read some day.”

“I does n’t wonder you did not hear me when I came in,” said the widow, sighing. “I used to sit still for the hour together, when my poor Mark read his poems to me. There was such a pretty one about the ‘Peasant’s Fireside,’ Lenny,—have you got hold of that?”

“Yes, dear mother; and I remarked the allusion to you: it brought tears to my eyes. But these verses are not my father’s; whose are they? They seem in a woman’s handwriting.”

Mrs. Fairfield looked, changed colour, grew faint and seated herself.

“Poor, poor Nora!” said she, falteringly. “I did not know as they were there; Mark kep’ ‘em; they got among his—”

LEONARD.—“Who was Nora?”

MRS. FAIRFIELD.—“Who?—child—who? Nora was—was my own—own sister.”

LEONARD (in great amaze, contrasting his ideal of the writer of these musical lines, in that graceful hand, with his homely uneducated mother, who could neither read nor write).—“Your sister! is it possible! My aunt, then. How comes it you never spoke of her before? Oh, you should be so proud of her, Mother!”

MRS. FAIRFIELD (clasping her hands).—“We were proud of her, all of us,—father, mother, all! She was so beautiful and so good, and not proud she! though she looked like the first lady in the land. Oh, Nora, Nora!”

LEONARD (after a pause).—“But she must have been highly educated?”

MRS. FAIRFIELD.—“‘Deed she was!”

LEONARD.—“How was that?”

MRS. FAIRFIELD (rocking herself to and fro in her chair).—“Oh, my Lady was her godmother,—Lady Lansmere I mean,—and took a fancy to her when she was that high, and had her to stay at the Park, and wait on her Ladyship; and then she put her to school, and Nora was so clever that nothing would do but she must go to London as a governess. But don’t talk of it, boy! don’t talk of it!”

LEONARD.—“Why not, Mother? What has become of her; where is she?”

MRS. FAIRFIELD (bursting into a paroxysm of tears).—“In her grave,—in her cold grave! Dead, dead!”

Leonard was inexpressibly grieved and shocked. It is the attribute of the poet to seem always living, always a friend. Leonard felt as if some one very dear had been suddenly torn from his heart. He tried to console his mother; but her emotion was contagious, and he wept with her.

“And how long has she been dead?” he asked at last, in mournful accents.

“Many’s the long year, many; but,” added Mrs. Fairfield, rising, and putting her tremulous hand on Leonard’s shoulder, “you’ll just never talk to me about her; I can’t bear it, it breaks my heart. I can bear better to talk of Mark; come downstairs,—come.”

“May I not keep these verses, Mother? Do let me.”

“Well, well, those bits o’ paper be all she left behind her,—yes, keep them, but put back Mark’s. Are they all here,—sure?” And the widow, though she could not read her husband’s verses, looked jealously at the manuscripts written in his irregular, large scrawl, and, smoothing them carefully, replaced them in the trunk, and resettled over them some sprigs of lavender, which Leonard had unwittingly disturbed.

“But,” said Leonard, as his eye again rested on the beautiful handwriting of his lost aunt,—“but you called her Nora—I see she signs herself L.”

“Leonora was her name. I said she was my Lady’s god-child. We call her Nora for short—”

“Leonora—and I am Leonard—is that how I came by the name?”

“Yes, yes; do hold your tongue, boy,” sobbed poor Mrs. Fairfield; and she could not be soothed nor coaxed into continuing or renewing a subject which was evidently associated with insupportable pain.

CHAPTER X

It is difficult to exaggerate the effect that this discovery produced on Leonard’s train of thought. Some one belonging to his own humble race had, then, preceded him in his struggling flight towards the loftier regions of Intelligence and Desire. It was like the mariner amidst unknown seas, who finds carved upon some desert isle a familiar household name.

And this creature of genius and of sorrow-whose existence he had only learned by her song, and whose death created, in the simple heart of her sister, so passionate a grief, after the lapse of so many years—supplied to the romance awaking in his young heart the ideal which it unconsciously sought. He was pleased to hear that she had been beautiful and good. He paused from his books to muse on her, and picture her image to his fancy. That there was some mystery in her fate was evident to him; and while that conviction deepened his interest, the mystery itself by degrees took a charm which he was not anxious to dispel. He resigned himself to Mrs. Fairfield’s obstinate silence. He was contented to rank the dead amongst those holy and ineffable images which we do not seek to unveil. Youth and Fancy have many secret hoards of idea which they do not desire to impart, even to those most in their confidence. I doubt the depth of feeling in any man who has not certain recesses in his soul into which none may enter.

Hitherto, as I have said, the talents of Leonard Fairfield had been more turned to things positive than to the ideal,—to science and investigation of fact than to poetry, and that airier truth in which poetry has its element. He had read our greater poets, indeed, but without thought of imitating; and rather from the general curiosity to inspect all celebrated monuments of the human mind than from that especial predilection for verse which is too common in childhood and youth to be any sure sign of a poet. But now these melodies, unknown to all the world beside, rang in his ear, mingled with his thoughts,—set, as it were, his whole life to music. He read poetry with a different sentiment,—it seemed to him that he had discovered its secret. And so reading, the passion seized him, and “the numbers came.”

To many minds, at the commencement of our grave and earnest pilgrimage, I am Vandal enough to think that the indulgence of poetic taste and revery does great and lasting harm; that it serves to enervate the character, give false ideas of life, impart the semblance of drudgery to the noble toils and duties of the active man. All poetry would not do this,—not, for instance, the Classical, in its diviner masters; not the poetry of Homer, of Virgil, of Sophocles; not, perhaps, even that of the indolent Horace. But the poetry which youth usually loves and appreciates the best—the poetry of mere sentiment—does so in minds already over-predisposed to the sentimental, and which require bracing to grow into healthful manhood.