CHAPTER XIV.
All manners take a tincture from our own,
Or come discoloured through our passions shown.--POPE.
What! give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazeteer says, lie down
to be saddled with wooden shoes?--Vicar of Wakefield.
There was something in the melancholy and reflective character of
Warner resembling that of Mordaunt; had they lived in these days
perhaps both the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with
regard to the latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent
for deep thought or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though
unjustly condemned as artificial and meretricious in his style, had
infused into the scanty works which he has bequeathed to immortality a
pathos and a richness foreign to the literature of the age; and,
subsequently, Goldsmith, in the affecting yet somewhat enervate
simplicity of his verse, had obtained for Poetry a brief respite from
a school at once declamatory and powerless, and led her forth for a
"Sunshine Holiday" into the village green and under the hawthorn
shade. But, though the softer and meeker feelings had struggled into
a partial and occasional vent, those which partook more of passion and
of thought, the deep, the wild, the fervid, were still without "the
music of a voice." For the after century it was reserved to restore
what we may be permitted to call the spirit of our national
literature; to forsake the clinquant of the French mimickers of
classic gold; to exchange a thrice-adulterated Hippocrene for the pure
well of Shakspeare and of Nature; to clothe philosophy in the gorgeous
and solemn majesty of appropriate music; and to invest passion with a
language as burning as its thought and rapid as its impulse. At that
time reflection found its natural channel in metaphysical inquiry or
political speculation; both valuable, perhaps, but neither profound.
It was a bold, and a free, and an inquisitive age, but not one in
which thought ran over its set and stationary banks, and watered even
the common flowers of verse: not one in which Lucretius could have
embodied the dreams of Epicurus; Shakspeare lavished the mines of a
superhuman wisdom upon his fairy palaces and enchanted isles; or the
Beautifier [Wordsworth] of this common earth have called forth
"The motion of the spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought;"
or Disappointment and Satiety have hallowed their human griefs by a
pathos wrought from whatever is magnificent and grand and lovely in
the unknown universe; or the speculations of a great but visionary
mind [Shelley] have raised, upon subtlety and doubt, a vast and
irregular pile of verse, full of dim-lighted cells, and winding
galleries, in which what treasures lie concealed! That was an age in
which poetry took one path and contemplation another; those who were
addicted to the latter pursued it in its orthodox roads; and many,
whom Nature, perhaps intended for poets, the wizard Custom converted
into speculators or critics.
It was this which gave to Algernon's studies their peculiar hue;
while, on the other hand, the taste for the fine arts which then
universally prevailed, directed to the creations of painting, rather
than those of poetry, more really congenial to his powers, the intense
imagination and passion for glory which marked and pervaded the
character of the artist.
But as we have seen that that passion for glory made the great
characteristic difference between Clarence and Warner, so also did
that passion terminate any resemblance which Warner bore to Algernon
Mordaunt. With the former a rank and unwholesome plant, it grew up to
the exclusion of all else; with the latter, subdued and regulated, it
sheltered, not withered, the virtues by which it was surrounded. With
Warner, ambition was a passionate desire to separate himself by fame
from the herd of other men; with Mordaunt, to bind himself by charity
yet closer to his kind: with the one, it produced a disgust to his
species; with the other, a pity and a love: with the one, power was
the badge of distinction; with the other, the means to bless! But our
story lingers.
It was now the custom of Warner to spend the whole day at his work,
and wander out with Clarence, when the evening darkened, to snatch a
brief respite of exercise and air. Often, along the lighted and
populous streets, would the two young and unfriended competitors for
this world's high places roam with the various crowd, moralizing as
they went or holding dim conjecture upon their destinies to be. And
often would they linger beneath the portico of some house where,
"haunted with great resort," Pleasure and Pomp held their nightly
revels, to listen to the music that, through the open windows, stole
over the rare exotics with which wealth mimics the southern scents,
and floated, mellowing by distance, along the unworthy streets; and
while they stood together, silent and each feeding upon separate
thoughts, the artist's pale lip would curl with scorn, as he heard the
laugh and the sounds of a frivolous and hollow mirth ring from the
crowd within, and startle the air from the silver spell which music
had laid upon it. "These," would he say to Clarence, "these are the
dupes of the same fever as ourselves: like us, they strive and toil
and vex their little lives for a distinction from their race.
Ambition comes to them, as to all: but they throw for a different
prize than we do; theirs is the honour of a day, ours is immortality;
yet they take the same labour and are consumed by the same care. And,
fools that they are, with their gilded names and their gaudy
trappings, they would shrink in disdain from that comparison with us
which we, with a juster fastidiousness, blush at this moment to
acknowledge."
From these scenes they would rove on, and, both delighting in
contrast, enter some squalid and obscure quarter of the city. There,
one night, quiet observers of their kind, they paused beside a group
congregated together by some common cause of obscene merriment or
unholy fellowship--a group on which low vice had set her sordid and
hideous stamp--to gaze and draw strange humours or a motley moral from
that depth and ferment of human nature into whose sink the thousand
streams of civilization had poured their dregs and offal.
"You survey these," said the painter, marking each with the curious
eye of his profession: "they are a base horde, it is true; but they
have their thirst of fame, their aspirations even in the abyss of
crime or the loathsomeness of famished want. Down in yon cellar,
where a farthing rushlight glimmers upon haggard cheeks, distorted
with the idiotcy of drink; there, in that foul attic, from whose
casement you see the beggar's rags hang to dry, or rather to crumble
in the reeking and filthy air; farther on, within those walls which,
black and heavy as the hearts they hide, close our miserable
prospect,--there, even there, in the mildewed dungeon, in the felon's
cell, on the very scaffold's self, Ambition hugs her own hope or
scowls upon her own despair. Yes! the inmates of those walls had
their perilous game of honour, their 'hazard of the die,' in which
vice was triumph and infamy success. We do but share their passion,
though we direct it to a better object."
Pausing for a moment, as his thoughts flowed into a somewhat different
channel of his character, Warner continued, "We have now caught a
glimpse of the two great divisions of mankind; they who riot in
palaces, and they who make mirth hideous in rags and hovels: own that
it is but a poor survey in either. Can we be contemptible with these
or loathsome with those? Or rather have we not a nobler spark within
us, which we have but to fan into a flame that shall burn forever,
when these miserable meteors sink into the corruption from which they
rise?"
"But," observed Clarence, "these are the two extremes; the pinnacle of
civilization, too worn and bare for any more noble and vigorous fruit,
and the base upon which the cloud descends in rain and storm. Look to
the central portion of society; there the soil is more genial, and its
produce more rich."
"Is it so, in truth?" answered Warner; "pardon me, I believe not: the
middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the
heart, of Avarice,--systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus
and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility
to the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly
vices, the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the
faculties and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker,
Gain,--these make the general character of the middling class, the
unleavened mass of that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the
shallow to applaud. Pah! we too are of this class, this potter's
earth, this paltry mixture of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we
will knead gold into our clay."
"But look," said Clarence, pointing to the group before them, "look,
yon wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest
accents of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her
infant, with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye,
which might shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon
wretch whom, in the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we
ourselves heard a few minutes since boast of his dexterity in theft,
and openly exhibit its token,--look, he is now, with a Samaritan's own
charity, giving the very goods for which his miserable life was risked
to that attenuated and starving stripling! No, Warner, no! even this
mass is not unleavened. The vilest infamy is not too deep for the
Seraph Virtue to descend and illumine its abyss!"
"Out on the weak fools!" said the artist, bitterly: "it would be
something, if they could be consistent even in crime!" and, placing
his arm in Linden's, he drew him away.
As the picture grew beneath the painter's hand, Clarence was much
struck with the outline and expression of countenance given to the
regicide Bradshaw.
"They are but an imperfect copy of the living original from whom I
have borrowed them," said Warner, in answer to Clarence's remark upon
the sternness of the features. "But that original--a relation of
mine, is coming here to-day: you shall see him."
While Warner was yet speaking, the person in question entered. His
were, indeed, the form and face worthy to be seized by the painter.
The peculiarity of his character made him affect a plainness of dress
unusual to the day, and approaching to the simplicity, but not the
neatness, of Quakerism. His hair--then, with all the better ranks, a
principal object of cultivation--was wild, dishevelled, and, in wiry
flakes of the sablest hue, rose abruptly from a forehead on which
either thought or passion had written its annals with an iron pen; the
lower part of the brow, which overhung the eye, was singularly sharp
and prominent; while the lines, or rather furrows, traced under the
eyes and nostrils, spoke somewhat of exhaustion and internal fatigue.
But this expression was contrasted and contradicted by the firmly
compressed lip; the lighted, steady, stern eye; the resolute and even
stubborn front, joined to proportions strikingly athletic and a
stature of uncommon height.
"Well, Wolfe," said the young painter to the person we have described,
"it is indeed a kindness to give me a second sitting."
"Tusk, boy!" answered Wolfe, "all men have their vain points, and I
own that I am not ill pleased that these rugged features should be
assigned, even in fancy, to one of the noblest of those men who judged
the mightiest cause in which a country was ever plaintiff, a tyrant
criminal, and a world witness!" While Wolfe was yet speaking his
countenance, so naturally harsh, took a yet sterner aspect, and the
artist, by a happy touch, succeeded in transferring it to the canvas.
"But, after all," continued Wolfe, "it shames me to lend aid to an art
frivolous in itself, and almost culpable in times when Freedom wants
the head to design, and perhaps the hand to execute, far other and
nobler works than the blazoning of her past deeds upon perishable
canvas."
A momentary anger at the slight put upon his art crossed the pale brow
of the artist; but he remembered the character of the man and
continued his work in silence. "You consider then, sir, that these
are times in which liberty is attacked?" said Clarence.
"Attacked!" repeated Wolfe,--" attacked!" and then suddenly sinking
his voice into a sort of sneer, "why, since the event which this
painting is designed to commemorate, I know not if we have ever had
one solitary gleam of liberty break along the great chaos of jarring
prejudice and barbarous law which we term forsooth a glorious
constitution. Liberty attacked! no, boy; but it is a time when
liberty may be gained."
Perfectly unacquainted with the excited politics of the day, or the
growing and mighty spirit which then stirred through the minds of men,
Clarence remained silent; but his evident attention flattered the
fierce republican, and he proceeded.
"Ay," he said slowly, and as if drinking in a deep and stern joy from
his conviction in the truth of the words he uttered,--"ay, I have
wandered over the face of the earth, and I have warmed my soul at the
fires which lay hidden under its quiet surface; I have been in the
city and the desert,--the herded and banded crimes of the Old World,
and the scattered but bold hearts which are found among the savannahs
of the New; and in either I have beheld that seed sown which, from a
mustard grain, too scanty for a bird's beak, shall grow up to be a
shelter and a home for the whole family of man. I have looked upon
the thrones of kings, and lo, the anointed ones were in purple and
festive pomp; and I looked beneath the thrones, and I saw Want and
Hunger, and despairing Wrath gnawing the foundations away. I have
stood in the streets of that great city where Mirth seems to hold an
eternal jubilee, and beheld the noble riot while the peasant starved;
and the priest built altars to Mammon, piled from the earnings of
groaning Labour and cemented with blood and tears. But I looked
farther, and saw, in the rear, chains sharpened into swords, misery
ripening into justice, and famine darkening into revenge; and I
laughed as I beheld, for I knew that the day of the oppressed was at
hand."
Somewhat awed by the prophetic tone, though revolted by what seemed to
him the novelty and the fierceness of the sentiments of the
republican, Clarence, after a brief pause, said,--
"And what of our own country?"
Wolfe's brow darkened. "The oppression here," said he, "has not been
so weighty, therefore the reaction will be less strong; the parties
are more blended, therefore their separation will be more arduous; the
extortion is less strained, therefore the endurance will be more meek;
but, soon or late, the struggle must come: bloody will it be, if the
strife be even; gentle and lasting, if the people predominate."
"And if the rulers be the strongest?" said Clarence.
"The struggle will be renewed," replied Wolfe, doggedly.
"You still attend those oratorical meetings, cousin, I think?" said
Warner.
"I do," said Wolfe; "and if you are not so utterly absorbed in your
vain and idle art as to be indifferent to all things nobler, you will
learn yourself to take interest in what concerns--I will not say your
country, but mankind. For you, young man" (and the republican turned
to Clarence), "I would fain hope that life has not already been
diverted from the greatest of human objects; if so, come to-morrow
night to our assembly, and learn from worthier lips than mine the
precepts and the hopes for which good men live or die."
"I will come at all events to listen, if not to learn," said Clarence,
eagerly, for his curiosity was excited. And the republican, having
now fulfilled the end of his visit, rose and departed.
