Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 181
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
It may seem but a childish tale; but I cannot express with what loathings I was seized, when I was called upon to put in practice this lesson of humility. I remember an occasion when it was necessary to remove some logs of wood from one side of the farm-yard, the only creditable and well arranged appendage to our mansion, to another side. This appeared to my preceptor a desirable opportunity for the practical illustration of his lessons. I was yet a mere urchin; and the task assigned me was considerately apportioned to my strength. – After all, this was certainly an injudicious mode of inforcing moral truth. An accountable and voluntary being cannot be made better, but by enlightening his understanding. Morality has nothing to do, but with actions chosen by their performers. Where there is absolute command on one side, and unconditional submission on the other, a useful result as to external circumstances may be achieved; but there cannot be a particle of good moral sense implanted by what is thus done under the bare influence of authority.
No doubt I was a proud creature; and, as I have already said, I never was a boy. As I did not appear born to feel the hard hand of necessity, I expected to bend only to my own will, and to consult my own judgment, in every thing I did. I understood something of the importance of lessons, and I willingly complied in whatever related to that point. I was desirous of possessing all the advantages of education, and all the information that falls to the lot of an ingenuous youth, destined to fill an honourable station in life. And lessons, a progress to be made in languages or in science, possess all the character of a system of mechanism, and accordingly are as readily submitted to, as the order of our meals, or the putting on of our clothes. It is principally where the caprice of him who has authority shows itself, where the wand of command is exhibited in abrupt nakedness, that the heart of the proud one revolts. Whatever proceeds in unvaried uniformity, or in stated and regular progression, we subscribe to without a murmur. What is thus prescribed, we acknowledge to be intended for our benefit; and the reason of the thing having once been known, or supposed to be known, we continue to act upon that reason, without insisting that it should be submitted to an examination perpetually to be repeated. But when Mr Bradford, no longer seated in the chair of the pedagogue, issued his imperious mandates of Go there, or Do this, whenever what he required related not to my abstract advantage, but to the common usefulness of life, my spirit refused to submit; I felt convinced that I was treated in a manner unbecoming and unjust; and, my neck never having been bowed to the condition of a slave, my whole soul revolted at the usurpation. Hilkiah saw something, but imperfectly, of the state of my mind on these occasions; but, instead of modifying and adapting his proceedings to my tone of feeling, he took the contrary course. He held it for ‘stuff of the conscience’, that he should subdue my refractoriness, and bring down a stubbornness of soul, so opposite, as he imagined, to the temper of a true Christian. Alas, good man, he little understood the tendency and nature of the task he had undertaken! My pride was not perhaps so great, that it would not have yielded to severe calamity, or to ferocious and unmitigated tyranny: I cannot tell. But there was no power that could be exercised by Hilkiah, who was a man substantially of a gentle temper, and under the roof of my nearest relation, that had any chance of rendering him victorious in this contest. I submitted indeed outwardly, for my nature did not prompt me to scenes of violence; but I retained the principle of rebellion entire, shut up in the chamber of my thoughts. If at any time I manifested tardiness (and how could it be otherwise, when the soul was averse?), this called down from my preceptor a bitterness of remark, or a dryness of irony, that filled my bosom with tumults, and was calculated to make me understand something of the temper of a fiend. Hilkiah, as I have said, felt disposed to multiply his experiments in proportion as he found me restive. And it grieves me to confess that this ill-contrived and senseless proceeding, at length drove me into a rooted aversion of heart from this good man, to whose industry and care I owed so much, and the purity and zeal of whose intentions entitled him still more to my regard. It was Hilkiah, that first made me acquainted with the unsavouriness of an embittered soul. From time to time he filled all my thoughts with malignity. I can scarcely describe the frame of my temper towards him. I would not have hurt him; but I muttered harsh resentment against him in sounds scarcely articulate; and I came to regard him as my evil genius, poisoning my cup of life, thwarting my most innocent sallies, watching with a jaundiced eye for faults in me which my heart did not recognize, and blasting that sweet complacency, in which a virtuous mind is delighted to plunge itself and to play.
I said little; but this circumstance only deepened the effect on my mind. ‘Give sorrow words’, says the great master of the human soul. Whatever sentiment finds its way to the lips, and vents its energies through the medium of language, by that means finds relief. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh’; and we feel satisfied, if we have told, even to the desert air, but much more in the hearing of an intelligent creature, the story of our griefs. But my silent nature was an ever-living and incessant curse to me. My displeasures brooded, and heated, and inflamed themselves, at the bottom of my soul, and finding no vent, shook so my single frame of man, like to an earthquake.
I know there are rugged and brutal natures, who would interrupt me here, and cry out, that there is an easy remedy for all this. The boy whose thoughts are here described, was too much indulged; an effusion of wholesome severity would soon have dispersed these clouds of the mind, and have caused him to know, that there was nothing but ground for congratulation, where he found so much occasion for complaint. And let these brutal natures go on in the exercise of their favourite discipline! There will always be crosses, and opposition, and mortifications enough in the march of human life, from the very principles upon which society is built, and from the impatience our imperfect nature is too apt to conceive, of the imputed untowardness and absurd judgments, of those that are placed under our control. But let those of happier spirit know, that this imperious discipline is not the wholesome element of the expanding mind, and that the attempt to correct the mistaken judgments of the young by violent and summary dealing, can never be the true method of fostering a generous nature; in a word, that to make the child a forlorn and pitiable slave, can never be the way to make the man worthy of freedom, and capable of drawing the noblest use from it!
I have said that I was habitually a visionary. My visions were frequently of long duration, and branched out into a variety of minuter circumstances. In these moods I sometimes imagined that every thing around me was engaged in a conspiracy against me, that I was, in some inexplicable way, a captive, whose genuine destiny led to higher things, but who, like some imperial bird that had fallen into the hands of lawless men, was shorn of its strongest feathers, and deprived of its genuine and heart-awakening element, shut out from the sublimer scenery for which its nature fitted it, and robbed of that mysterious and inestimable freedom in which it could feel at home, at its ease, and resting, so to express it, upon its proper centre.
However strange it may appear, I am almost inclined to say, that the boy, particularly in these visionary moods, feels a more earnest aspiring that even the man, after true freedom, with all its adjuncts and retinue of inexplicable events. The comparison is the same, as between the colt, whose mouth has never known control, who frolics in a thousand wild gestures and attitudes, and has nothing to do but to prance along the plains, – and the horse. Man by degrees has bowed the neck to the hard yoke of necessity, has looked through human life and the conditions of existence, and has reasoned himself into submission, to those distasteful, but inevitable evils which are inseparably interwoven in the web of mortal life. Not so the boy; he has seen nothing of this; nor have any considerations occurred to his mind, leading him to choose subjection, and voluntarily and resolutely to resign the sweets of liberty.
I am aware, that in what I now record I am relating a strange story; but it is necessary to the illustration of my future life. The moral of Aesop’s fable of the lion and the man is applicable here. We see every where the monuments of human achievements; but the lions have no historians and no statuaries of their own. All those persons who have produced practical treatises on the art of education, have been men. The books are always written by those who are the professors of teaching, never by the subjects. Every author indeed was once a boy; but he seems to abjure the recollection of what he was, when he puts on the manly gown, and to have no consideration and forbearance for that state through which every man has passed, but to which no man shall return. I have been obliged, by the tenour of what I have to record, to take a contrary course. It has been necessary for me, to resume the character of my early years, and to forget for the moment that those years have passed away. I have committed to paper what, during those years, passed through my mind; I have nothing to do with either vindicating or condemning that of which I am the historian. I may thus perhaps have performed a task of general utility; it surely is not unfitting, that that which forms one considerable stage in the history of man, should for once be put into a legible and a permanent form. Far be it from me to impute my own feelings during this period, to every youth that is placed under the direction of a preceptor. I know that my feelings were solitary, unsocial, exaggerated, wicked. Still I regard myself on the whole as a member of the great community of man; and I cannot be persuaded that feelings, which were so familiar and habitual with me, do not under some modification exist in the majority of human minds, during that period of life which in my own case I have been attempting to describe.
But to return. I may sum up the view of my situation, so far as Mr Bradford is concerned, by saying that it consisted of two features principally. I had the most unbounded deference for this good man in all his speculative decisions. His religion was my religion; his prejudices were my prejudices. As an essential characteristic of my nature was energy, I could have died for the faith in which he had instructed me; I could not bear to hear his tenets contradicted or opposed. At the age of which I am speaking I was but little of an intellectual gladiator; I therefore made up in zeal, what I wanted in skill; my blood boiled, my flesh trembled, and my indignation exceeded all ordinary pitch, when I heard sentiments uttered, which my education had taught me to regard as the pernicious suggestions of a blasphemous spirit. Yet, at the same time that I regarded Hilkiah in this point of view with unmingled reverence, I never wished to behold his face. His countenance, his figure, his gestures, the very tone of his voice, were all subjects of aversion to me. My understanding, my opinions, were at his devotion: but my heart took a different course. ‘It came not into his secret; and to his counsels it was not united.’ In all that was most cordial and consolatory to the spirit it stood off from him, as wide as the poles from each other. In my wishes and cherished visions he had no part. This was a peculium that I carefully shut up in my own bosom, and of which no creature that lived was a partaker.
CHAPTER VII
SUCH WAS THE monotony of my life during the years in which I resided under the roof of my uncle. Few were the occasions that were calculated to awaken in me the social affections, in their purest and most fascinating tone. To all this however there was one exception. I have already said that I had a sister. This sister I had scarcely seen; and I almost forgot that she existed. One morning Hilkiah communicated to me the intelligence that she was expected on a visit; my uncle had invited her to spend a week or ten days under his roof. It cannot be imagined what pleasure I derived from the information. The entrance of one stranger, and that stranger a visitor, under the battlements of our mansion, was an event as memorable, as a congress of half the sovereigns of Europe, and all the splendours of their reception, would be to the fashionable and the gay.
My sister was one year younger than myself. She had regular features, a transparent complexion, and a most prepossessing countenance. ‘Her pure and eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks.’ Her eyes were dark and expressive; and her smiles were bewitching. Her form was light and airy, like that of a sylph. Her motions had a naiveté and grace, that I cannot conceive to be exceeded. She made me a painter. Whenever I shut my eyes, I saw her: whenever I let my thoughts loose in imagination, I pictured to myself her gestures and her air. The tone of her voice was thrilling; and there was a beauty in her articulation, that made my soul dance within me, and without the labour and weight of emphasis, gave to every thing she said an impression beyond the power of emphasis to convey. Oh, Henrietta, thou dearest half of my soul, how can I recollect thee, such as I now saw thee, without rapture!
There is something in the prejudice of kindred, that has an uncontrolable power over the soul. I was alone in the world; I had neither father, nor mother, nor brother; but Henrietta was father, and mother, and every thing to me in one. We had a thousand things to talk about; and it seems to me, at this distance of time, as if we had possessed a power of dividing and multiplying the thoughts we expressed, and of giving to every one a fineness and subtlety, that the grossness and earthiness of more advanced years can never reach. We delivered our ideas with frankness; we had none of the false reserve, that makes older persons warily examine the recollections and sallies that press to the tongue, and throw away one, and mangle another; lest they should say any thing, that should subtract from the consideration they aim at, and of which afterward they might see reason to repent.
We walked together; and wherever we walked, the place seemed to invest itself in inexpressible charms. Nothing could be more dreary and desolate than the scenery in the midst of which I lived; but the presence of Henrietta gave to it the beauty of the Elysian fields; and when she was gone, yet I could not visit the well-known haunts without their reviving in me the same ravishing sensation. She talked; and my soul hung on the enchanting sounds. To the little tales of the place from whence she came and its inhabitants, I could listen for ever. Her observations were so unlike to any thing I had ever heard before. What a contrast to Hilkiah, and my uncle, and the gloomy and formal establishment of Mandeville House! My sensations were not less surprising, than those of Shakespear’s maiden in the desert island, when first she saw and contrasted the features and figure of the graceful Prince Ferdinand, with those of the aged Prospero and the hag-born Caliban. I seemed now for the first time to associate with a being, with whom I felt an affinity, and whom I recognized as of the same species as myself. This was indeed a memorable era in my existence. I was never weary of my sister’s company; no sooner by any accident did I lose it, but I instantly felt as if some insupportable period of separation had intervened, and I sought her presence again with uncontrolable eagerness; by night in my dreams Henrietta was sure to appear, and in some way to be the principal personage in their incoherent and fantastical drama.
The character of my preceptor was entirely artificial, and yet of an artifice difficult to express. Nothing on earth could be more void of what,is commonly understood by artifice and design; he was of a simplicity the most perfect and unsoiled; he stood defenceless and unarmed, the ready prey of any one who should think it worth while to play upon the unsuspiciousness of his nature. But his character was the creature of colleges and of books, of monastic discipline and theological debates, and bore little resemblance to nature, as she shows herself in those parts of the world, or those classes of society, where these causes have no operation. My uncle was a mere shadow, the semblance of a man, where nothing seemed to bear the impression of substance. But the sallies of Henrietta were the pure effusions of an unsophisticated spirit, and were like the first breathings of the morning in nature’s sweetest climate; they carried with them the freshness of untainted air, the mild moisture of the dew, and the resistless charm of a thousand odours and perfumes. I know, that in thus describing them I may seem to rave, and that the majority of readers will consider all this, as mere bombast, and high sounding words without a meaning. But, in fact, the sensations I felt were such as all words that I have the power to command, must sink under the endeavour to convey to another.
My uncle, being duly informed of the arrival of his niece, in a day or two after sent to summon her to his apartment. Henrietta, curious about so near a relation, the representative of the elder branch of our family, tasked me to give her a faithful account of his manner, his character, and all those peculiarities of which she had not failed already to hear so much. They had of course been greatly the object of my youthful wonder and remark; and, to gratify so dear a friend, I conquered the natural brevity of my sentences, and placed before her in a vivid light, those circumstances, which had impressed so strong a picture in my mind. When she received the summons I have mentioned, she exclaimed, ‘Must I go alone? And will not you, Charles, accompany me to my uncle?’ But she was speedily convinced, that his directions must be literally obeyed, and that his spirits were too tender to enable him to sustain an interview with both of us at once. When Henrietta was introduced to him, he uttered a few short sentences, with apparent effort, and with intervals between, ‘You are welcome’ – ‘I am glad to see you’ – ‘A fine girl!’ while the singularity and mournfulness of his manner bereaved her of speech: and thus the interview ended.
