This hypothesis, however, like a thousand others, when it happened that they engaged no durable sympathy from his nursery audience, he did not pursue. For some time, he turned his thoughts to philosophy, and read lectures to us every night upon some branch or other of physics. This undertaking arose upon some one of us envying or admiring flies for their power of walking upon the ceiling. "Pooh!" he said, "they are impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as it ought to be done. Ah! you should see me standing upright on the ceiling, with my head downward, for half-an-hour together, and meditating profoundly." My second sister remarked, that we should all be very glad to see him in that position. "If that's the case," he replied, "it's very well that all is ready, except as to one single strap." Being an excellent skater, he had first imagined that, if held up until he had started, by taking a bold sweep ahead, he might then keep himself in position through the continued impetus of skating. But this he found not to answer, because, as he observed, "the friction was too retarding from the plaster of Paris, but the ease would be very different if the ceiling were coated with ice." As it was not, he changed his plan. The true secret, he said, was this: he would consider himself in the light of a humming-top: he would make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion of the human top would overpower the force of gravitation. He should, of course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his axis—perhaps he might even dream upon it; and he laughed at "those scoundrels, the flies," that never improved in their pretended art, nor made any thing of it. The principle was now discovered; "and, of course," he said, "if a man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from going on for five months?" "Certainly," my sister replied, whose skepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, would not work: a fact which was evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some among us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a humming-top that was required, but a peg-top; and this, in order to keep up the vertigo at full stretch, without which to a certainty, gravitation would prove too much for him, needed to be whipped incessantly. Now, that was what a gentleman ought not to tolerate: to be scourged unintermittingly on the legs by any grub of a gardener, unless it were Father Adam himself, was a thing that he could not bring his mind to endure. However, as some compensation, he proposed to improve the art of flying, which was, as every body must acknowledge, in a condition quite disgraceful to civilized society. As he had made many a fire balloon, and had succeeded in some attempts at bringing down cats by parachutes, it was not very difficult to fly downward from moderate elevations. But, as he was reproached by my sister for never flying back again, which, how ever, was a far different thing, and not even attempted by the philosopher in "Rassel as" (for
Revocare gradum et superas evadere ad auras,
Hic labor, hoc opus est),
he refused, under such poor encouragement, to try his winged parachutes any more, either "aloft or alow," till he had thoroughly studied Bishop Wilkins[12] on the art of translating right reverend gentlemen to the moon; and, in the mean time, he resumed his general lectures on physics. From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled out, by a concerted assault of my sister's. He had been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and, accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next younger brother—in subsequent times a little middy on board many a ship of H.M., and the most predestined rebel upon earth against all assumptions, small or great, of superiority—she arranged a mutiny, that had the unexpected effect of suddenly extinguishing the lectures forever. He had happened to say, what was no unusual thing with him, that he flattered himself he had made the point under discussion tolerably clear; "clear," he added, bowing round the half-circle of us, the audience, "to the meanest of capacities;" and then he repeated, sonorously, "clear to the most excruciatingly mean of capacities." Upon which a voice, a female one, but whose I had not time to distinguish, retorted: "No, you haven't; it's as dark as sin;" and then, without a moment's interval, a second voice exclaimed, "Dark as night;" then came my young brother's insurrectionary yell, "Dark as midnight;" then another female voice chimed in melodiously, "Dark as pitch;" and so the peal continued to come round like a catch, the whole being so well concerted, and the rolling fire so well sustained, that it was impossible to make head against it; while the abruptness of the interruption gave to it the protecting character of an oral "round robin," it being impossible to challenge any one in particular as the ring-leader. Burke's phrase of "the swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this insurrection, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words pearls and swinish multitude, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of regard to the two young strangers. We all laughed in chorus at this parting salute: my brother himself condescended at last to join us; but there ended the course of lectures on natural philosophy.
As it was impossible, however, that he should remain quiet, he announced to us, that for the rest of his life he meant to dedicate himself to the intense cultivation of the tragic drama. He got to work instantly; and very soon he had composed the first act of his "Sultan Selim;" but, in defiance of the metre, he soon changed the title to "Sultan Amurath," considering that a much fiercer name, more bewhiskered and beturbaned. It was no part of his intention that we should sit lolling on chairs like ladies and gentlemen that had paid opera prices for private boxes. He expected every one of us, he said, to pull an oar. We were to act the tragedy. But, in fact, we had many oars to pull. There were so many characters, that each of us took four, at the least, and the future middy had six. He, this wicked little middy,[13] caused the greatest affliction to Sultan Amurath, forcing him to order the amputation of his head six several times (that is, once in every one of his six parts), during the first act. In reality, the sultan, though a decent man, was too bloody. What by the bowstring, and what by the scimetar, he had so thinned the population with which he commenced business, that scarcely any of the characters remained alive at the end of act the first. Sultan Amurath found himself in an awkward situation. Large arrears of work remained, and hardly any body to do it but the sultan himself. In composing act the second, the author had to proceed like Deucalion and Pyrrha, and to create an entirely new generation. Apparently, this young generation, that ought to have been so good, took no warning by what had happened to their ancestors in act the first; one must conclude that they were quite as wicked, since the poor sultan had found himself reduced to order them all for execution in the course of this act the second. To the brazen age had succeeded an iron age; and the prospects were becoming sadder and sadder, as the tragedy advanced. But here the author began to hesitate. He felt it hard to resist the instinct of carnage. And was it right to do so? Which of the felons, whom he had cut off prematurely, could pretend that a court of appeal would have reversed his sentence? But the consequences were dreadful. A new set of characters in every act, brought with it the necessity of a new plot: for people could not succeed to the arrears of old actions, or inherit ancient motives, like a landed estate. Five crops, in fact, must be taken off the ground in each separate tragedy, amounting, in short, to five tragedies involved in one.
Such, according to the rapid sketch which at this moment my memory furnishes, was the brother, who now first laid open to me the gates of war. The occasion was this, he had resented, with a shower of stones, an affront offered to us by an individual boy, belonging to a cotton-factory; for more than two years afterward, this became the teterrima causa of a skirmish, or a battle, as often as we passed the factory; and, unfortunately, that was twice a day on every day except Sunday. Our situation in respect to the enemy was as follows: Greenhay, a country-house newly built by my father, at that time was a clear mile from the outskirts of Manchester; but, in after years, Manchester, throwing out the tentacula of its vast expansions, absolutely enveloped Greenhay; and, for any thing I know, the grounds and gardens which then insulated the house, may have long disappeared. Being a modest mansion, which (including hot walls, offices, and gardener's house) had cost only six thousand pounds, I do not know how it should have risen to the distinction of giving name to a region of that great town; however, it has done so;[14] and, at this time, therefore, after changes so great, it will be difficult for the habitué of that region to understand how my brother and myself could have a solitary road to traverse between Greenhay and Princess-street, then the termination, on that side of Manchester. But so it was. Oxford-street, like its namesake in London, was then called the Oxford-road; and, during the currency of our acquaintance with it, arose the first three houses in its neighborhood; of which the third was built for the Rev. S. H., one of our guardians, for whom his friends had also built the church of St. Peters's—not a bowshot from the house. At present, however, he resided in Salford, nearly two miles from Greenhay; and to him we went over daily, for the benefit of his classical instructions. One sole cotton-factory had then risen along the line of Oxford-street; and this was close to a bridge, which also was a new creation; for, previously, all passengers to Manchester went round by Garrat. This factory became the officina gentium to us, from which swarmed forth those Goths and Vandals, that continually threatened our steps; and this bridge became the eternal arena of combat, we taking good care to be on the right side of the bridge for retreat, i.e., on the town side, or the country side, according as we were going out in the morning, or returning in the afternoon. Stones were the implements of warfare; and by continual practice we became expert in throwing them.
The origin of the feud it is scarcely requisite to rehearse, since the particular accident which began it was not the true efficient cause of our long warfare, but (as logicians express it) simply the occasion. The cause lay in our aristocratic dress: as children of an opulent family, where all provisions were liberal, and all appointments elegant, we were uniformly well-dressed, and, in particular, we wore trowsers (at that time unheard of, except in maritime places) and Hessian boots—a crime that could not be forgiven in the Lancashire of that day, because it expressed the double offense of being aristocratic, and being outlandish. We were aristocrats, and it was in vain to deny it; could we deny our boots? while our antagonists, if not absolutely sans culottes, were slovenly and forlorn in their dress, often unwashed, with hair totally neglected, and always covered with flakes of cotton. Jacobins they were, not by any sympathy with the French Jacobinism, that then desolated western Europe; for, on the contrary, they detested every thing French, and answered with brotherly signals to the cry of "Church and king," or, "King and constitution." But, for all that, as they were perfectly independent, getting very high wages, and in a mode of industry that was then taking vast strides ahead, they contrived to reconcile this patriotic anti-Jacobinism with a personal Jacobinism of that sort which is native to the heart of man, who is by natural impulse (and not without a root of nobility) impatient of inequality, and submits to it only through a sense of its necessity, or a long experience of its benefits.
It was on an early day of our new tyrocinium, or, perhaps, on the very first, that, as we passed the bridge, a boy happening to issue from the factory,[15] sang out to us, derisively—"Holloa, bucks!" In this the reader may fail to perceive any atrocious insult commensurate to the long war which followed. But the reader is wrong. The word "dandies," which was what the villain meant, had not then been born, so that he could not have called us by that name, unless through the spirit of prophecy. Buck was the nearest word at hand in his Manchester vocabulary; he gave all he could, and let us dream the rest. But, in the next moment, he discovered our boots, and he completed his crime by saluting us as "Boots! boots!" My brother made a dead stop, surveyed him with intense disdain, and bade him draw near, that he might "give his flesh to the fowls of the air." The boy declined to accept this liberal invitation, and conveyed his answer by a most contemptuous and plebeian gesture, upon which my brother drove him in with a shower of stones.
During this inaugural flourish of hostilities, I, for my part, remained inactive, and, therefore, apparently neutral. But this was the last time that I did so: for the moment, I was taken by surprise. To be called a buck by one that had it in his choice to have called me a coward, a thief, or a murderer, struck me as a most pardonable offense; and, as to boots, that rested upon a flagrant fact that could not be denied, so that at first I was green enough to regard the boy as very considerate and indulgent. But my brother soon rectified my views or, if any doubts remained, he impressed me, at least, with a sense of my paramount duty to himself, which was threefold. First, it seems, I owed military allegiance to him, as my commander-in-chief, whenever we "took the field;" secondly, by the law of nations, I being a cadet of my house, owed suit and service to him who was its head; and he assured me, that twice in a year, on my birthday, and on his, he had a right, strictly speaking, to make me lie down, and to set his foot upon my neck; lastly, by a law not so rigorous, but valid among gentlemen—viz., "by the comity of nations," it seems I owed eternal deference to one so much older than myself, so much wiser, stronger, braver, more beautiful, and more swift of foot. Something like all this in tendency I had already believed, though I had not so minutely investigated the modes and grounds of my duty. As a Pariah, which, by natural temperament I was, and by awful dedication to despondency, I felt resting upon me always too deep and gloomy a sense of obscure duties, that I never should be able to fulfill—a burden which I could not carry, and which yet I did not know how to throw off. Glad, therefore, I was to find the whole tremendous weight of obligations—the law and the prophets—all crowded into this one brief command—"Thou shalt obey thy brother as God's vicar upon earth." For now, if, by any future stone leveled at him who had called me "a buck," I should chance to draw blood—perhaps I might not have committed so serious a trespass on any rights which he could plead: but, if I had (for, on this subject my convictions were still cloudy), at any rate, the duty I might have violated in regard to this general brother, in right of Adam, was canceled when it came into collision with my paramount duty to this liege brother of my own individual house.
From this day, therefore, I obeyed all my brother's military commands with the utmost docility; and happy it made me that every sort of distraction, or question, or opening for demur, was swallowed up in the unity of this one papal principle, discovered by my brother, viz., that all rights of casuistry were transferred from me to himself. His was the judgment—his was the responsibility; and to me belonged only the sublime duty of unconditional faith in him. That faith I realized. It is true, that he taxed me at times, in his reports of particular fights, with "horrible cowardice," and even with "a cowardice that seemed inexplicable, except on the supposition of treachery." But this was only a façon de parler with him: the idea of secret perfidy, that was constantly moving under-ground, gave an interest to the progress of the war, which else tended to the monotonous. It was a dramatic artifice for sustaining the interest, where the incidents might be too slightly diversified. But that he did not believe his own charges was clear, because he never repeated them in his "General History of the Campaigns," which was a resumé, or digest, of his daily reports.
We fought every day; and, generally speaking, twice every day; and the result was pretty uniform, viz., that my brother and I terminated the battle by insisting upon our undoubted right to run away. Magna Charta, I should fancy, secures that great right to every man; else surely it is sadly defective. But out of this catastrophe to most of our skirmishes, and to all our pitched battles except one, grew a standing schism between my brother and me. My unlimited obedience had respect to action, but not to opinion. Loyalty to my brother did not rest upon hypocrisy: because I was faithful, it did not follow that I must be false in relation to his capricious opinions. And these opinions sometimes took the shape of acts. Twice, at the least, in every week, but sometimes every night, my brother insisted on singing "Te Deum" for supposed victories which he had won; and he insisted also on my bearing a part in these "Te Deums." Now, as I knew of no such victories, but resolutely asserted the truth—viz., that we ran away—a slight jar was thus given to the else triumphal effect of these musical ovations. Once having uttered my protest, however, willingly I gave my aid to the chanting; for I loved unspeakably the grand and varied system of chanting in the Romish and English churches. And, looking back at this day to the ineffable benefits which I derived from the church of my childhood, I account among the very greatest those which reached me through the various chants connected with the "O, Jubilate," the "Magnificat," the "Te Deum," the "Benedicite," &c. Through these chants it was that the sorrow which laid waste my infancy, and the devotion which nature had made a necessity of my being, were profoundly interfused: the sorrow gave reality and depth to the devotion; the devotion gave grandeur and idealization to the sorrow. Neither was my love for chanting altogether without knowledge. A son of my reverend guardian, much older than myself, who possessed a singular faculty of producing a sort of organ accompaniment with one half of his mouth, while he sang with the other half, had given me some instructions in the art of chanting: and, as to my brother, he, the hundred-handed Briareus, could do all things; of course, therefore, he could chant. He could chant: he had a right to chant: he had a right, perhaps, to chant "Te Deum." For if he ran away every day of his life, what then? Sometimes the enemy mustered in over-powering numbers—seventy, or even ninety strong. Now, if there is a time for every thing in this world, surely that was the time for running away. But in the mean time I must pause, reserving what has to follow for another occasion.