The Caxtons, Complete - Edward Bulwer Lytton
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Your grateful and devoted servant,
Pisistratus Caxton.
Letter From Albert Trevanion, Esq., M. P., To Pisistratus Caxton.
Library of the House of Commons, Tuesday Night.
My Dear Pisistratus, ------- is up; we are in for it for two mortal
hours! I take flight to the library, and devote those hours to
you. Don't be conceited, but that picture of yourself which you
have placed before me has struck me with all the force of an
original. The state of mind which you describe so vividly must be
a very common one in our era of civilization, yet I have never
before seen it made so prominent and life-like. You have been in
my thoughts all day. Yes, how many young men must there be like
you, in this Old World, able, intelligent, active, and persevering
enough, yet not adapted for success in any of our conventional
professions,--"mute, inglorious Raleighs." Your letter, young
artist, is an illustration of the philosophy of colonizing. I
comprehend better, after reading it, the old Greek colonization,--
the sending out, not only the paupers, the refuse of an over-
populated state, but a large proportion of a better class, fellows
full of pith and sap and exuberant vitality, like yourself,
blending, in those wise cleruchioe, a certain portion of the
aristocratic with the more democratic element; not turning a rabble
loose upon a new soil, but planting in the foreign allotments all
the rudiments of a harmonious state, analogous to that in the
mother country; not only getting rid of hungry, craving mouths, but
furnishing vent for a waste surplus of intelligence and courage,
which at home is really not needed, and more often comes to ill
than to good,--here only menaces our artificial embankments, but
there, carried off in an aqueduct, might give life to a desert.
For my part, in my ideal of colonization I should like that each
exportation of human beings had, as of old, its leaders and
chiefs,--not so appointed from the mere quality of rank (often,
indeed, taken from the humbler classes), but still men to whom a
certain degree of education should give promptitude, quickness,
adaptability; men in whom their followers can confide. The Greeks
understood that. Nay, as the colony makes progress, as its
principal town rises into the dignity of a capital,--a polls that
needs a polity,--I sometimes think it might be wise to go still
further, and not only transplant to it a high standard of
civilization, but draw it more closely into connection with the
parent state, and render the passage of spare intellect, education,
and civility, to and fro, more facile, by drafting off thither the
spare scions of royalty itself. I know that many of my more
"liberal" friends would pooh-pooh this notion; but I am sure that
the colony altogether, when arrived to a state that would bear the
importation, would thrive all the better for it. And when the day
shall come (as to all healthful colonies it must come sooner or
later) in which the settlement has grown an independent state, we
may thereby have laid the seeds of a constitution and a
civilization similar to our own, with self-developed forms of
monarchy and aristocracy, though of a simpler growth than old
societies accept, and not left a strange, motley chaos of
struggling democracy,-an uncouth, livid giant, at which the
Frankenstein may well tremble, not because it is a giant, but
because it is a giant half completed. (1) Depend on it, the New
World will be friendly or hostile to the Old, not in proportion to
the kinship of race, but in proportion to the similarity of manners
and institutions,--a mighty truth to which we colonizers have been
blind.
Passing from these more distant speculations to this positive
present before us, you see already, from what I have said, that I
sympathize with your aspirations; that I construe them as you would
have me: looking to your nature and to your objects, I give you my
advice in a word,--Emigrate!
My advice is, however, founded on one hypothesis; namely, that you
are perfectly sincere,--you will be contented with a rough life,
and with a moderate fortune at the end of your probation. Don't
dream of emigrating if you want to make a million, or the tenth of
a million. Don't dream of emigrating unless you can enjoy its
hardships,--to bear them is not enough!
Australia is the land for you, as you seem to surmise. Australia
is the land for two classes of emigrants: first, the man who has
nothing but his wits, and plenty of them; secondly, the man who has
a small capital, and who is contented to spend ten years in
trebling it. I assume that you belong to the latter class. Take
out L3,000, and before you are thirty years old you may return with
L10,000 or L12,000. If that satisfies you, think seriously of
Australia. By coach, tomorrow, I will send you down all the best
books and reports on the subject; and I will get you what detailed
information I can from the Colonial Office. Having read these, and
thought over them dispassionately, spend some months yet among the
sheep-walks of Cumberland; learn all you can from all the shepherds
you can find,--from Thyrsis to Menalcas. Do more,--fit yourself in
every way for a life in the Bush, where the philosophy of the
division of labor is not yet arrived at. Learn to turn your hand
to everything. Be something of a smith, something of a carpenter,
--do the best you can with the fewest tools; make yourself an
excellent shot; break in all the wild horses and ponies you can
borrow and beg. Even if you want to do none of these things when
in your settlement, the having learned to do them will fit you for
many other things not now foreseen. De-fine-gentlemanize yourself
from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot, and become
the greater aristocrat for so doing; for he is more than an
aristocrat, he is a king, who suffices in all things for himself,--
who is his own master, because he wants no valetaille. I think
Seneca has expressed that thought before me; and I would quote the
passage, but the book, I fear, is not in the library of the House
of Commons. But now (cheers, by Jove! I suppose ---- is down. Ah!
it is so; and C--- is up, and that cheer followed a sharp hit at me.
How I wish I were your age, and going to Australia with you!)--But
now--to resume my suspended period--but now to the important
point,--capital. You must take that, unless you go as a shepherd,
and then good-by to the idea of L10,000 in ten years. So, you see,
it appears at the first blush that you must still come to your
father; but, you will say, with this difference, that you borrow
the capital with every chance of repaying it instead of frittering
away the income year after year till you are eight and thirty or
forty at least. Still, Pisistratus, you don't, in this, gain your
object at a leap; and my dear old friend ought not to lose his son
and his money too. You say you write to me as to your own father.
You know I hate, professions; and if you did not mean what you say,
you have offended me mortally. As a father, then, I take a
father's rights, and speak plainly. A friend of mine, Mr. Bolding,
a clergyman, has a son,--a wild fellow, who is likely to get into
all sorts of scrapes in England, but with plenty of good in him
notwithstanding, frank, bold, not wanting in talent, but rather in
prudence, easily tempted and led away into extravagance. He would
make a capital colonist (no such temptations in the Bush!) if tied
to a youth like you. Now I propose, with your leave, that his
father shall advance him L1,500, which shall not, however, be
placed in his hands, but in yours, as head partner in the firm.
You, on your side, shall advance the same sum of L1,500, which you
shall borrow from me for three years without interest. At the end
of that time interest shall commence; and the capital, with the
interest on the said first three years, shall be repaid to me, or
my executors, on your return. After you have been a year or two in
the Bush, and felt your way, and learned your business, you may
then safely borrow L1,500 more from your father; and, in the mean
while, you and your partner will have had together the full sum of
L3,000 to commence with. You see in this proposal I make you no
gift, and I run no risk even by your death. If you die insolvent,
I will promise to come on your father, poor fellow; for small joy
and small care will he have then in what may be left of his
fortune. There--I have said all; and I will never forgive you if
you reject an aid that will serve you so much and cost me so
little.
I accept your congratulations on Fanny's engagement with Lord
Castleton. When you return from Australia you will still be a
young man, she (though about your own years) almost a middle-aged
woman, with her head full of pomps and vanities. All girls have a
short period of girlhood in common; but when they enter womanhood,
the woman becomes the woman of her class. As for me, and the
office assigned to me by report, you know what I said when we
parted, and--But here J---- comes, and tells me that "I am expected
to speak, and answer N----, who is just up, brimful of malice,"--the
House crowded, and hungering for personalities. So I, the man of
the Old World, gird up my loins, and leave you, with a sigh, to the
fresh youth of the New
"Ne tibi sit duros acuisse in prcelia dentes."
Yours affectionately,
Albert Trevanion.
CHAPTER VII.
So, reader, thou art now at the secret of my heart.
Wonder not that I, a bookman's son, and at certain periods of my life a
bookman myself, though of lowly grade in that venerable class,--wonder
not that I should thus, in that transition stage between youth and
manhood, have turned impatiently from books. Most students, at one time
or other in their existence, have felt the imperious demand of that
restless principle in man's nature which calls upon each son of Adam to
contribute his share to the vast treasury of human deeds. And though
great scholars are not necessarily, nor usually, men of action, yet the
men of action whom History presents to our survey have rarely been
without a certain degree of scholarly nurture. For the ideas which books
quicken, books cannot always satisfy. And though the royal pupil of
Aristotle slept with Homer under his pillow, it was not that he might
dream of composing epics, but of conquering new Ilions in the East. Many
a man, how little soever resembling Alexander, may still have the
conqueror's aim in an object that action only can achieve, and the book
under his pillow may be the strongest antidote to his repose. And how the
stern Destinies that shall govern the man weave their first delicate
tissues amidst the earliest associations of the child! Those idle tales
with which the old credulous nurse had beguiled my infancy,--tales of
wonder, knight-errantry, and adventure,--had left behind them seeds long
latent, seeds that might never have sprung up above the soil, but that my
boyhood was so early put under the burning-glass, and in the quick
forcing house, of the London world. There, even amidst books and study,
lively observation and petulant ambition broke forth from the lush
foliage of romance,--that fruitless leafiness of poetic youth! And there
passion, which is a revolution in all the elements of individual man, had
called anew state of being, turbulent and eager, out of the old habits
and conventional forms it had buried,--ashes that speak where the fire
has been. Far from me, as from any mind of some manliness, be the attempt
to create interest by dwelling at length on the struggles against a rash
and misplaced attachment, which it was my duty to overcome; but all such
love, as I have before implied, is a terrible unsettler,--
"Where once such fairies dance, no grass doth ever grow."
To re-enter boyhood, go with meek docility through its disciplined
routine--how hard had I found that return, amidst the cloistered monotony
of college! My love for my father, and my submission to his wish, had
indeed given some animation to objects otherwise distasteful; but now
that my return to the University must be attended with positive privation
to those at home, the idea became utterly hateful and repugnant. Under
pretence that I found myself, on trial, not yet sufficiently prepared to
do credit to my father's name, I had easily obtained leave to lose the
ensuing college term and pursue my studies at home. This gave me time to
prepare my plans and bring round ----. How shall I ever bring round to my
adventurous views those whom I propose to desert? Hard it is to get on in
the world,--very hard; but the most painful step in the way is that which
starts from the threshold of a beloved home.
How--ah, how indeed! "No, Blanche, you cannot join me to-day; I am going
out for many hours. So it will be late before I can be home."
Home,--the word chokes me! Juba slinks back to his young mistress,
disconsolate; Blanche gazes at me ruefully from our favorite hill-top,
and the flowers she has been gathering fall unheeded from her basket. I
hear my mother's voice singing low as she sits at work by her open
casement. How,--ah, how indeed!
[END OF PRINT VOL 1.]
PART XIII.
CHAPTER I.
Saint Chrysostom, in his work on "The Priesthood," defends deceit, if for
a good purpose, by many Scriptural examples; ends his first book by
asserting that it is often necessary, and that much benefit may arise
from it; and begins his second book by saying that it ought not to be
called "deceit," but "good management." (1)
"Good management," then, let me call the innocent arts by which I now
sought to insinuate my project into favor and assent with my unsuspecting
family. At first I began with Roland. I easily induced him to read some
of the books, full of the charm of Australian life, which Trevanion had
sent me; and so happily did those descriptions suit his own erratic
tastes, and the free, half-savage man that lay rough and large within
that soldierly nature, that he himself, as it were, seemed to suggest my
own ardent desire, sighed, as the careworn Trevanion had done, that "he
was not my age," and blew the flame that consumed me, with his own
willing breath. So that when at last--wandering one day over the wild
moors--I said, knowing his hatred of law and lawyers: "Alas, uncle, that
nothing should be left for me but the Bar!" Captain Roland struck his
cane into the peat and exclaimed, "Zounds, sir! the Bar and lying, with
truth and a world fresh from God before you!"
"Your hand, uncle,--we understand each other. Now help me with those two
quiet hearts at home!"
"Plague on my tongue! what have I done?" said the Captain, looking
aghast. Then, after musing a little time, he turned his dark eye on me
and growled out, "I suspect, young sir, you have been laying a trap for
me; and I have fallen into it, like an old fool as I am."
"Oh, sir, I? you prefer the Bar!--"
"Rogue!"
"Or, indeed, I might perhaps get a clerkship in a merchant's office?"
"If you do, I will scratch you out of the pedigree!"
"Huzza, then, for Australasia!"
"Well, well, well!" said my uncle,--
"With a smile on his lip, and a tear in his eye,"--
"the old sea-king's blood will force its way,--a soldier or a rover,
there is no other choice for you. We shall mourn and miss you; but who
can chain the young eagles to the eyrie?"
I had a harder task with my father, who at first seemed to listen to me
as if I had been talking of an excursion to the moon. But I threw in a
dexterous dose of the old Greek Cleruchioe cited by Trevanion, which set
him off full trot on his hobby, till after a short excursion to Euboea
and the Chersonese, he was fairly lost amidst the Ionian colonies of Asia
Minor. I then gradually and artfully decoyed him into his favorite
science of Ethnology; and while he was speculating on the origin of the
American savages, and considering the rival claims of Cimmerians,
Israelites, and Scandinavians, I said quietly: "And you, sir, who think
that all human improvement depends on the mixture of races; you, whose
whole theory is an absolute sermon upon emigration, and the transplanting
and interpolity of our species,--you, sir, should be the last man to
chain your son, your elder son, to the soil, while your younger is the
very missionary of rovers."
"Pisistratus," said my father, "you reason by synecdoche,--ornamental,
but illogical;" and therewith, resolved to hear no more, my father rose
and retreated into his study.
But his observation, now quickened, began from that day to follow my
moods and humors; then he himself grew silent and thoughtful, and finally
he took to long conferences with Roland. The result was that one evening
in spring, as I lay listless amidst the weeds and fern that sprang up
through the melancholy ruins, I felt a hand on my shoulder; and my
father, seating himself beside me on a fragment of stone, said earnestly;
"Pisistratus, let us talk. I had hoped better things from your study of
Robert Hall."
"Nay, dear father, the medicine did me great good: I have not repined
since, and I look steadfastly and cheerfully on life. But Robert Hall
fulfilled his mission, and I would fulfil mine."
"Is there no mission in thy native land, O planeticose and exallotriote
spirit?" (2) asked my father, with compassionate rebuke.
"Alas, yes! But what the impulse of genius is to the great, the instinct
of vocation is to the mediocre. In every man there is a magnet; in that
thing which the man can do best there is a loadstone."
"Papoe!" said my father, opening his eyes; "and are no loadstones to be
found for you nearer than the Great Australasian Bight?"
"Ah,--sir, if you resort to irony I can say no more!" My father looked
down on me tenderly as I hung my head, moody and abashed.
"Son," said he, "do you think that there is any real jest at my heart
when the matter discussed is whether you are to put wide seas and long
years between us?" I pressed nearer to his side, and made no answer.
"But I have noted you of late," continued my father, "and I have observed
that your old studies are grown distasteful to you; and I have talked
with Roland, and I see that your desire is deeper than a boy's mere whim.
And then I have asked myself what prospect I can hold out at home to
induce you to be contented here, and I see none; and therefore I should
say to you, 'Go thy ways, and God shield thee,'--but, Pisistratus, your
mother!"
"Ah, sir, that is indeed the question; and there indeed I shrink! But,
after all, whatever I were,--whether toiling at the Bar or in some public
office,--I should be still so much from home and her. And then you, sir,
she loves you so entirely that--"
"No," interrupted my father; "you can advance no arguments like these to
touch a mother's heart. There is but one argument that comes home there:
is it for your good to leave her? If so, there will be no need of further
words. But let us not decide that question hastily; let you and I be
together the next two months. Bring your books and sit with me; when you
want to go out, tap me on the shoulder, and say 'Come.' At the end of
those two months I will say to you 'Go' or 'Stay.' And you will trust me;
and if I say the last, you will submit?"
"Oh yes, sir, yes!"
(1) Hohler's translation.
(2) Words coined by Mr. Caxton from (Greek word), "disposed to roaming,"
and (Greek word), "to export, to alienate."
CHAPTER II.
This compact made, my father roused himself from all his studies, devoted
his whole thoughts to me, sought with all his gentle wisdom to wean me
imperceptibly from my one fixed, tyrannical idea, ranged through his wide
pharmacy of books for such medicaments as might alter the system of my
thoughts. And little thought he that his very tenderness and wisdom
worked against him, for at each new instance of either my heart called
aloud, "Is it not that thy tenderness may be repaid, and thy wisdom be
known abroad, that I go from thee into the strange land, O my father?"
And the two months expired, and my father saw that the magnet had turned
unalterably to the loadstone in the Great Australasian Bight; and he said
to me, "Go, and comfort your mother. I have told her your wish, and
authorized it by my consent, for I believe now that it is for your good."
I found my mother in the little room she had appropriated to herself next
my father's study. And in that room there was a pathos which I have no
words to express; for my mother's meek, gentle, womanly soul spoke there,
so that it was the Home of Home. The care with which she had transplanted
from the brick house, and lovingly arranged, all the humble memorials of
old times dear to her affections,--the black silhouette of my father's
profile cut in paper, in the full pomp of academics, cap and gown (how
had he ever consented to sit for it?), framed and glazed in the place of
honor over the little hearth; and boyish sketches of mine at the Hellenic
Institute, first essays in sepia and Indian ink, to animate the walls,
and bring her back, when she sat there in the twilight, musing alone, to
sunny hours, when Sisty and the young mother threw daisies at each other;
and covered with a great glass: shade, and dusted each day with her own
hand, the flower-pot Sisty had bought with the proceeds of the domino-box
on that memorable occasion on which he had learned "how bad deeds are
repaired with good." There, in one corner, stood the little cottage piano
which I remembered all my life,--old-fashioned, and with the jingling
voice of approaching decrepitude, but still associated with such melodies
as, after childhood, we hear never more! And in the modest hanging
shelves, which looked so gay with ribbons and tassels and silken cords,
my mother's own library, saying more to the heart than all the cold wise
poets whose souls my father invoked in his grand Heraclea. The Bible over
which, with eyes yet untaught to read, I had hung in vague awe and love
as it lay open on my mother's lap, while her sweet voice, then only
serious, was made the oracle of its truths. And my first lesson-books
were there, all hoarded. And bound in blue and gold, but elaborately
papered up, Cowper's Poems,--a gift from my father in the days of
courtship: sacred treasure; which not even I had the privilege to touch,
and which my mother took out only in the great crosses and trials of
conjugal life, whenever some words less kind than usual had dropped
unawares from her scholar's absent lips. Ah! all these poor household
gods, all seemed to look on me with mild anger; and from all came a voice
to my soul, "Cruel, dost thou forsake us?" And amongst them sat my
mother, desolate as Rachel, and weeping silently.
"Mother! mother!" I cried, falling on her neck, "forgive me,--it is past;
I cannot leave you!"
CHAPTER III.
"No, no! it is for your good,--Austin says so. Go,--it is but the first
shock."
Then to my mother I opened the sluices of that deep I had concealed from
scholar and soldier. To her I poured all the wild, restless thoughts
which wandered through the ruins of love destroyed; to her I confessed
what to myself I had scarcely before avowed. And when the picture of
that, the darker, side of my mind was shown, it was with a prouder face
and less broken voice that I spoke of the manlier hopes and nobler aims
that gleamed across the wrecks and the desert and showed me my escape.
"Did you not once say, mother, that you had felt it like a remorse that
my father's genius passed so noiselessly away,--half accusing the
happiness you gave him for the death of his ambition in the content of
his mind? Did you not feel a new object in life when the ambition revived
at last, and you thought you heard the applause of the world murmuring
round your scholar's cell? Did you not share in the day dreams your
brother conjured up, and exclaim, 'If my brother could be the means of
raising him in the world!' And when you thought we had found the way to
fame and fortune, did you not sob out from your full heart, 'And it is my
brother who will pay back to his son all--all he gave up for me'?"
"I cannot bear this, Sisty! Cease, cease!"
"No; for do you not yet understand me? Will it not be better still if
your son--yours--restore to your Austin all that he lost, no matter how?
If through your son, mother, you do indeed make the world hear of your
husband's genius, restore the spring to his mind, the glory to his
pursuits; if you rebuild even that vaunted ancestral name which is glory
to our poor sonless Roland; if your son can restore the decay of
generations, and reconstruct from the dust the whole house into which you
have entered, its meek, presiding angel,--all, mother! if this can be
done, it will be your work; for unless you can share my ambition, unless
you can dry those eyes, and smile in my face, and bid me go, with a
cheerful voice, all my courage melts from my heart, and again I say, I
cannot leave you!"