And smug apprentice gulp their weekly air.”
The lines were bitter indeed! They had been written when he was still smarting under the lash of his earlier critics, in the first months of his journeyings, before the great wind of travel had swept his mind clear and sweet for the latter harmonies of his poesy. In them lay the hurt sneer of a personal resentment—the resentment that had been in his soul when he sailed from England; that had sprung alive again on his return, when he learned that his enemies had employed his absence to bespatter his name with lying tales.
Yet that was past. He had cast it behind him. And should he carry the old spirit into this better and nobler work, to deflect his message from its significance into cheaper channels of abuse? His thought recurred to the youth in the bare room of the Fleet. Even there, in a debtors’ prison, Shelley had forgot his own plight, and sunk individual resentment in desire for wider justice! Should he be less big in tolerance than that youth? So he asked himself, as the publisher casually fluttered the leaves of an uncut review which the clerk had laid on his desk.
All at once John Murray’s eyes stopped, fixed on a page. He made an exclamation of irritation and chagrin, and pushed it out toward Gordon. It was a fresh copy of the Scourge, and the leader Gordon read, while the publisher paced the floor with nervously angry strides, was the one in which had been steeped the anonymous venom of William Godwin the bookseller—a page whose caption was his own name:
“It may be asked whether to be a simple citizen is more disgraceful than to be the illegitimate descendant of a murderer; whether to labor in an honorable profession be less worthy than to waste the property of others in vulgar debauchery; whether to be the son of parents of no title be not as honorable as to be the son of a profligate father and a mother of demoniac temper, and, finally, whether a simple university career be less indicative of virtue than to be held up to the derision and contempt of his fellow students, as a scribbler of doggerel and a bear-leader, to be hated for repulsiveness of manners and shunned by every man who would not be deemed a profligate without wit and trifling without elegance.”
A cold dead look of mingled pain and savagery grew on his face as he read. Then he sprang up and went to the door. Behind him Dallas had seized the review and was reading it with indignation. The publisher was still pacing the floor: “What an unfortunate advertisement!” he was muttering.
Gordon stared out into the lamp-lighted street. The bitter malignancy which had spared not even the grave in its slander, numbed and maddened him. His breath came hard and a mist was before his eyes. Opposite the shop loomed the blackened front of the old church of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West; as he stood, the two wooden figures of wild men on the clock which projected over the street struck the hour with their clubs, and a late newsboy passed crying tiredly: “News and Chronicle! All about the Frame-Breakers shot in Nottingham!”
The volume the publisher had given him was still in Gordon’s hand. He turned into the room and flung it on the desk.
“No,” he said with harsh bluntness. “Not a line shall be altered! If every syllable were a rattlesnake and every letter a pestilence, they should not be expunged! Let those who cannot swallow, chew it. I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing, Murray. I will battle my way against them all, like a porcupine!”
Then he wheeled and plunged into the clack and babble of Fleet Street’s pedestrians.