CHAPTER VII.
Now from that day the humble Lenny and the regal Violante became great
friends. With what pride he taught her to distinguish between celery and
weeds,--and how proud too was she when she learned that she was useful!
There is not a greater pleasure you can give children, especially female
children, than to make them feel they are already of value in the world,
and serviceable as well as protected. Weeks and months rolled away, and
Lenny still read, not only the books lent him by the doctor, but those he
bought of Mr. Sprott. As for the bombs and shells against religion which
the tinker carried in his bag, Lenny was not induced to blow himself up
with them. He had been reared from his cradle in simple love and
reverence for the Divine Father, and the tender Saviour, whose life
beyond all records of human goodness, whose death beyond all epics of
mortal heroism, no being whose infancy has been taught to supplicate the
Merciful and adore the Holy, yea, even though his later life may be
entangled amidst the thorns of some desolate pyrrhonism, can ever hear
reviled and scoffed without a shock to the conscience and a revolt of the
heart. As the deer recoils by instinct from the tiger, as the very look
of the scorpion deters you from handling it, though you never saw a
scorpion before, so the very first line in some ribald profanity on which
the tinker put his black finger made Lenny's blood run cold. Safe, too,
was the peasant boy from any temptation in works of a gross and
licentious nature, not only because of the happy ignorance of his rural
life, but because of a more enduring safeguard,--genius! Genius, that,
manly, robust, healthful as it be, is long before it lose its instinctive
Dorian modesty; shamefaced, because so susceptible to glory,--genius,
that loves indeed to dream, but on the violet bank, not the dunghill.
Wherefore, even in the error of the senses, it seeks to escape from the
sensual into worlds of fancy, subtle and refined. But apart from the
passions, true genius is the most practical of all human gifts. Like the
Apollo, whom the Greek worshipped as its type, even Arcady is its exile,
not its home. Soon weary of the dalliance of Tempe, it ascends to its
mission,--the Archer of the silver bow, the guide of the car of light.
Speaking more plainly, genius is the enthusiasm for self-improvement; it
ceases or sleeps the moment it desists from seeking some object which it
believes of value, and by that object it insensibly connects its self-
improvement with the positive advance of the world. At present Lenny's
genius had no bias that was not to the Positive and Useful. It took the
direction natural to its sphere, and the wants therein,--namely, to the
arts which we call mechanical. He wanted to know about steam-engines and
Artesian wells; and to know about them it was necessary to know something
of mechanics and hydrostatics; so he bought popular elementary works on
those mystic sciences, and set all the powers of his mind at work on
experiments.
Noble and generous spirits are ye, who, with small care for fame, and
little reward from pelf, have opened to the intellects of the poor the
portals of wisdom! I honour and revere ye; only do not think ye have
done all that is needful. Consider, I pray ye, whether so good a choice
from the tinker's bag would have been made by a boy whom religion had not
scared from the Pestilent, and genius had not led to the self-improving.
And Lenny did not wholly escape from the mephitic portions of the motley
elements from which his awakening mind drew its nurture. Think not it
was all pure oxygen that the panting lip drew in. No; there were still
those inflammatory tracts. Political I do not like to call them, for
politics means the art of government, and the tracts I speak of assailed
all government which mankind has hitherto recognized. Sad rubbish,
perhaps, were such tracts to you, O sound thinker, in your easy-chair!
or to you, practised statesman, at your post on the Treasury Bench; to
you, calm dignitary of a learned Church; or to you, my lord judge, who
may often have sent from your bar to the dire Orcus of Norfolk's Isle the
ghosts of men whom that rubbish, falling simultaneously on the bumps of
acquisitiveness and combativeness, hath untimely slain! Sad rubbish to
you! But seems it such rubbish to the poor man, to whom it promises a
paradise on the easy terms of upsetting a world? For, ye see, those
"Appeals to Operatives" represent that same world-upsetting as the
simplest thing imaginable,--a sort of two-and-two-make-four proposition.
The poor have only got to set their strong hands to the axle, and heave-
a-boy! and hurrah for the topsy-turvy! Then just to put a little
wholesome rage into the heave-a-hoy! it is so facile to accompany the
eloquence of "Appeals" with a kind of stir-the-bile-up statistics,--
"Abuses of the aristocracy," "Jobs of the Priesthood," "Expenses of the
Army kept up for Peers' younger sons," "Wars contracted for the villanous
purpose of raising the rents of the landowners,"--all arithmetically
dished up, and seasoned with tales of every gentleman who has committed a
misdeed, every clergyman who has dishonoured his cloth; as if such
instances were fair specimens of average gentlemen and ministers of
religion! All this, passionately advanced (and, observe, never answered,
for that literature admits no controversialists, and the writer has it
all his own way), may be rubbish; but it is out of such rubbish that
operatives build barricades for attack, and legislators prisons for
defence.
Our poor friend Lenny drew plenty of this stuff from the tinker's bag.
He thought it very clever and very eloquent; and he supposed the
statistics were as true as mathematical demonstrations.
A famous knowledge-diffuser is looking over my shoulder, and tells me,
"Increase education, and cheapen good books, and all this rubbish will
disappear!" Sir, I don't believe a word of it. If you printed Ricardo
and Adam Smith at a farthing a volume, I still believe that they would be
as little read by the operatives as they are nowadays by a very large
proportion of highly-cultivated men. I still believe that, while the
press works, attacks on the rich and propositions for heave-a-hoys will
always form a popular portion of the Literature of Labour. There's Lenny
Fairfield reading a treatise on hydraulics, and constructing a model for
a fountain into the bargain; but that does not prevent his acquiescence
in any proposition for getting rid of a National Debt, which he certainly
never agreed to pay, and which he is told makes sugar and tea so
shamefully dear. No. I tell you what does a little counteract those
eloquent incentives to break his own head against the strong walls of the
Social System,--it is, that he has two eyes in that head which are not
always employed in reading. And having been told in print that masters
are tyrants, parsons hypocrites or drones in the hive, and landowners
vampires and bloodsuckers, he looks out into the little world around him,
and, first, he is compelled to acknowledge that his master is not a
tyrant (perhaps because he is a foreigner and a philosopher, and, for
what I and Lenny know, a republican). But then Parson Dale, though High
Church to the marrow, is neither hypocrite nor drone. He has a very good
living, it is true,--much better than he ought to have, according to the
"political" opinions of those tracts! but Lenny is obliged to confess
that if Parson Dale were a penny the poorer, he would do a pennyworth's
less good; and comparing one parish with another, such as Rood Hall and
Hazeldean, he is dimly aware that there is no greater CIVILIZER than a
parson tolerably well off. Then, too, Squire Hazeldean, though as arrant
a Tory as ever stood upon shoe-leather, is certainly not a vampire nor
blood sucker. He does not feed on the public; a great many of the public
feed upon him: and, therefore, his practical experience a little staggers
and perplexes Lenny Fairfield as to the gospel accuracy of his
theoretical dogmas. Masters, parsons, and landowners! having, at the
risk of all popularity, just given a /coup de patte/ to certain sages
extremely the fashion at present, I am not going to let you off without
an admonitory flea in the ear. Don't suppose that any mere scribbling
and typework will suffice to answer the scribbling and typework set at
work to demolish you,--write down that rubbish you can't; live it down
you may. If you are rich, like Squire Hazeldean, do good with your
money; if you are poor, like Signor Riccabocca, do good with your
kindness.
See! there is Lenny now receiving his week's wages; and though Lenny
knows that he can get higher wages in the very next parish, his blue eyes
are sparkling with gratitude, not at the chink of the money, but at the
poor exile's friendly talk on things apart from all service; while
Violante is descending the steps from the terrace, charged by her mother-
in-law with a little basket of sago, and such-like delicacies, for Mrs.
Fairfield, who has been ailing the last few days.
Lenny will see the tinker as he goes home, and he will buy a most
Demosthenean "Appeal,"--a tract of tracts, upon the propriety of Strikes
and the Avarice of Masters. But, somehow or other, I think a few words
from Signor Riccabocca, that did not cost the signor a farthing, and the
sight of his mother's smile at the contents of the basket, which cost
very little, will serve to neutralize the effects of that "Appeal" much
more efficaciously than the best article a Brougham or a Mill could write
on the subject.
