Chapter Four.
My proximity to the clergy impels me to preach—I advocate the vulgar, and prove that neither the humble nor the low are necessarily the debased—Consequently this chapter need not be read.
What with dipping, port wine, bark, and Dr Buck, at the age of four years my limbs began to expand properly, and my countenance to assume the hue of health. I have recorded the death of my foster-sister Mary; but, about this time, the top-sawyer, wishing to perpetuate the dynasty of the Brandons, began to enact pater familias in a most reckless manner. He was wrong; but this must be said in extenuation of his impiously acting upon the divine command, “to increase and multiply,” that at that time, Mr Malthus had not corrected the mistake of the Omniscient, nor had Miss Harriet Martineau begun her pilgrimage after the “preventive check.” There was no longer any pretence for my remaining at Bath, or for my worthy foster-father abstaining from work; so we again removed, with a small family, in our search after saw-pits and happiness, to one of the best houses in Felix Street, somewhere near Lambeth Marsh. This place, after the experience of some time, proving not to be sufficiently blissful, we removed to Paradise Row; some furlongs nearer to the Father in God, his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have a laudable pride in showing that I had a respectable—I beg pardon, the word is inapplicable—I mean a grand neighbour. “I am not the rose,” said the flower in the Persian poem, “but I have lived near the rose.” I did not bloom in the archbishop’s garden, but I flourished under the wall, though on the outside. The wall is now down, and rows of houses up in its place.
In our location in Paradise Row, the house being larger than we required for our accommodation, we again received old Ford, the only paradise, I am rather afraid, that will ever own him as an inmate. An awful man was old Ford, my godfather. His mingled prayers and blasphemies, hymns and horrid songs, defiance and remorse, groans and laughter, made everyone hate and avoid him. Hell-fire, as he continually asserted, was ever roaring before his eyes; and, as there is a text in the New Testament that says, there is no salvation for him who curses the Holy Ghost, he would, in the frenzy of his despair, swear at that mysterious portion of the Trinity by the hour, and then employ the next in beating his breast in the agony of repentance. Many may think all this sheer madness; but he was not more mad than most of the hot-headed methodists, whose preachers, at that time, held uncontrolled sway over the great mass of people that toiled in the humbler walks of life. Two nights in the week we used to have prayer-meetings at our house; and, though I could not have been five years old at the time, vividly do I remember that our front room used, on those occasions, to be filled to overflow, with kneeling fanatics, old Ford in the centre of the room, and a couple of lank-haired hypocrites, one on each side of the reprobate, praying till the perspiration streamed down their foreheads, to pray the devil out of him. The ohs! and the groanings of the audience were terrible; and the whole scene, though very edifying to the elect, was disgraceful to any sect who lived within the pale of civilisation.
I must now draw upon my own memory. I must describe my own sensations. If I reckon by the toil and turmoil of the mind, I am already an old man. I have lived for ages. I am far, very far, on my voyage. Let me cast my eyes back on the vast sea that I have traversed; there is a mist settled over it, almost as impenetrable as that which glooms before me. Let me pause. Methinks that I see it gradually break, and partial sunbeams struggle through it. Now the distant waves rise, and wanton and play, pure and lucid. ’Tis the day-spring of innocency. How near to the sanctified heavens do those remote waves appear! They meet, and are as one with the far horizon. Those sparkling waves were the hours of my childhood—the blissful feelings of my infancy. As the sea of life rolls on, the waves swell and are turbid; and, as I recede from the horizon of my early recollections, so heaven recedes from me. The thunder-cloud is high above my head, the treacherous waters roar beneath me, before me is the darkness and the night of an unknown futurity. Where can I now turn my eyes for solace, but over the vast space that I have passed? Whilst my bark glides heedlessly forward, I will not anticipate dangers that I cannot see, or tremble at rocks that are benevolently hidden from my view. It is sufficient for me to know that I must be wrecked at last; that my mortal frame must be like a shattered bark upon the beach ere the purer elements that it contains can be wafted through the immensity of immortality. I will commune with my boyish days—I will live in the past only. Memory shall perform the Medean process, shall renovate me to youth. I will again return to marbles and an untroubled breast—to hoop and high spirits—at least, in imagination.
I shall henceforward trust to my own recollections. Should this part of my story seem more like a chronicle of sensations than a series of events, the reader must bear in mind that these sensations are, in early youth, real events, the parents of actions, and the directors of destiny. The circle in which, in boyhood, one may be compelled to move, may be esteemed low; the accidents all round him may be homely, the persons with whom he may be obliged to come in contact may be mean in apparel, and sordid in nature; but his mind, if it remain to him pure as he received it from his Maker, is an unsullied gem of inestimable price, too seldom found, and too little appreciated when found, among the great, or the fortuitously rich. Nothing that is abstractedly mental, is low. The mind that well describes low scenery is not low, nor is the description itself necessarily so. Pride, and contempt for our fellow-creatures, evince a low tone of moral feeling, and is the innate vulgarity of the soul; it is this which but too often makes those who rustle in silks and roll in carriages, lower than the lowest.
I have said this much, because the early, very early part of my life was passed among what are reproachfully termed “low people.” If I describe them faithfully, they must still appear low to those who arrogate to themselves the epithet of “high.” For myself; I hold that there is nothing low under the sun, except meanness. Where there is utility there ought to be honour. The utility of the humble artisan has never been denied, though too often despised, and too rarely honoured; but I have found among the “vulgar” a horror of meanness, a self-devotion, an unshrinking patience under privation, and the moral courage, that constitute the hero of high life. I can also tell the admirers of the great, that the evil passions of the vulgar are as gigantic, their wickedness upon as grand a scale, and their notions of vice as refined, and as extensive, as those of any fashionable roué that is courted among the first circles, or even as those of the crowned despot. Then, as to the strength of vulgar intellect: True, that intellect is rarely cultivated by the learning which consists of words. The view it takes of science is but a partial glance—that intellect is contracted, but it is strong. It is a dwarf; with the muscle and sinews of a giant; and its grasp, whenever it can lay hold of anything within its circumscribed reach, is tremendous. The general who has conquered armies and subjugated countries—the minister who has ruined them, and the jurist who has justified both, never at the crisis of their labours have displayed a tithe of the ingenuity and the resources of mind that many an artisan is forced to exert to provide daily bread for himself and family; or many a shopkeeper to keep his connection together, and himself out of the workhouse. Why should the exertions of intellect be termed low, in the case of the mechanic, and vast, profound, and glorious, in that of the minister? It is the same precious gift of a beneficent power to all his creatures. As well may the sun be voted as excessively vulgar, because it, like intellect, assists all equally to perform their functions. I repeat, that nothing that has mind is, of necessity, low; and nothing is vulgar but meanness.