We quitted the streets together for the neighbouring fields, and, after the natural interchange of mutual congratulations—“How is it,” I inquired, “that you do not seem to have a single acquaintance among all the gay and great of the country?”
“I lie under quarantine,” he replied; “tainted by the plague of liberalism. There is not one of the hundreds we passed to-night whom I could not once reckon among my intimates.”
The intelligence stunned and irritated me. “How infinitely absurd!” I said. “Do they dream of sinking you into a common man?”
“Even so,” he rejoined. “Do they not all know I have been a gauger for the last five years!”
The fact had both grieved and incensed me long before. I knew, too, that Pye enjoyed his salary as poet laureate of the time, and Dibdin, the song writer, his pension of two hundred a-year, and I blushed for my country.
“Yes,” he continued—the ill-assumed coolness of his manner giving way before his highly excited feelings—“they have assigned me my place among the mean and the degraded, as their best patronage; and only yesterday, after an official threat of instant dismission, I was told it was my business to act, not to think. God help me! what have I done to provoke such bitter insult? I have ever discharged my miserable duty—discharged it, Mr. Lindsay, however repugnant to my feelings, as an honest man; and though there awaited me no promotion, I was silent. The wives or sisters of those whom they advanced over me had bastards to some of the —— family, and so their influence was necessarily greater than mine. But now they crush me into the very dust. I take an interest in the struggles of the slave for his freedom; I express my opinions as if I myself were a free man; and they threaten to starve me and my children if I dare so much as speak or think.”
I expressed my indignant sympathy in a few broken sentences; and he went on with kindling animation:—
“Yes, they would fain crush me into the very dust! They cannot forgive me, that, being born a man, I should walk erect according to my nature. Mean-spirited and despicable themselves, they can tolerate only the mean-spirited and the despicable; and were I not so entirely in their power, Mr. Lindsay, I could regard them with the proper contempt. But the wretches can starve me and my children—and they know it; nor does it mend the matter that I know in turn, what pitiful, miserable, little creatures they are. What care I for the butterflies of to-night?—they passed me without the honour of their notice; and I, in turn, suffered them to pass without the honour of mine; and I am more than quits. Do I not know that they and I are going on to the fulfilment of our several destinies?—they to sleep, in the obscurity of their native insignificance, with the pismires and grasshoppers of all the past, and I to be whatever the millions of my unborn countrymen shall yet decide. Pitiful little insects of an hour! what is their notice to me! But I bear a heart, Mr. Lindsay, that can feel the pain of treatment so unworthy; and I must confess it moves me. One cannot always live upon the future, divorced from the sympathies of the present. One cannot always solace one’s self under the grinding despotism that would fetter one’s very thoughts, with the conviction, however assured, that posterity will do justice both to the oppressor and the oppressed. I am sick at heart; and were it not for the poor little things that depend so entirely on my exertions, I could as cheerfully lay me down in the grave as I ever did in bed after the fatigues of a long day’s labour. Heaven help me! I am miserably unfitted to struggle with even the natural evils of existence—how much more so when these are multiplied and exaggerated by the proud, capricious inhumanity of man!”
“There is a miserable lack of right principle and right feeling,” I said, “among our upper classes in the present day; but, alas for poor human nature! it has ever been so, and, I am afraid, ever will. And there is quite as much of it in savage as in civilized life. I have seen the exclusive aristocratic spirit, with its one-sided injustice, as rampant in a wild isle of the Pacific as I ever saw it among ourselves.”
“’Tis slight comfort,” said my friend, with a melancholy smile, “to be assured, when one’s heart bleeds from the cruelty or injustice of our fellows, that man is naturally cruel and unjust, and not less so as a savage than when better taught. I knew you, Mr. Lindsay, when you were younger and less fortunate; but you have now reached that middle term of life when man naturally takes up the Tory and lays down the Whig; nor has there been aught in your improving circumstances to retard the change; and so you rest in the conclusion that, if the weak among us suffer from the tyranny of the strong, ’tis because human nature is so constituted, and the case therefore cannot be helped.”