Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 192
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
‘Lisle,’ I replied, ‘if you entertain a different opinion of me from your former one, you are bound, as a soldier and a gentleman, to account to me for that difference
‘You were, not long ago, absent for several weeks from the university. You told me that you spent that time at Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper’s. Why did you impose upon me?’
While these questions and rejoinders were passing, I advanced further into the apartment, and shut the door as I advanced.
‘You question me somewhat rudely,’ I answered. ‘The reason of my silence was, that the adventure I had passed through was a painful one; and I know of no right that any one has to demand the history of another’s sorrows, unless so far as he chooses to disclose it.’
‘Your adventure was a painful one! Call it by a fitter name, and say, it was disgraceful. I do not complain of your silence; I complain that you deceived me. But I am in the wrong to mention that. Your adventure, as you call it, has fastened upon you an irretrievable infamy; and why should any man be called on to be the historian of his own dishonour?’
‘Your language is too harsh, Sir. It is true, I have suffered much: my lot has been to encounter injustice, bitter, barbarous, inexpiable. But then, Sir’ and I struck my hand upon my bosom as I spoke, ‘I have no fault of which to accuse myself.’
‘Humph! Yes, I have been told that every man has a way of colouring his own actions, so as to make them to himself as bright as the sun, and as beautiful as the rainbow.
‘But you say, I am bound to account to you for my present opinion. I will therefore ask a few questions. Did you not go, and offer to enlist yourself in the troop of the illustrious unfortunate, Colonel Penruddock? Were you not received for a time, and afterwards, upon further information, were you not dismissed from the troop?’
‘No, Sir, I was never dismissed. I withdrew myself.’
Oh, you were only a deserter! And you hope to found the vindication of your character, upon an allegation, that you, coward-like, withdrew from this generous, immortal band, a short time before they fell victims, in the purest of all causes, to the foul tyranny of Cromwel? An admirable account you give of yourself! that you enlisted yourself under the royal banner, and, a few days after (before the shock and conflict came), repented of your loyalty! that, like that noble animal, the rat, you had an instinct, that apprised you beforehand, of a falling cause! Sir, in the troop of the heroic Penruddock there were no deserters: they were all patriots: they resolved, to a man, to succeed in the enterprise they had undertaken, or to sink with a sinking state.
‘But I am a little better informed respecting your engagement with Penruddock, than you are apt to imagine. They found you out to be a spy of the protector. They discovered, that your motive for becoming so zealous a loyalist, was, that you might be the better enabled to give information to your employers, of all the motions of the insurgents. You wished, forsooth, to be secretary to the commander-in-chief; and you brought a letter from that well-known character, Sir Anthony, recommending you for the employment. But, fortunately, the gallant Clifford came just in the nick of time, and disclosed the reputation you had acquired at Winchester College. He told the story of the pictures, Sir, – the pictures!
‘The step you have taken, Mandeville, can never be recovered. The ambiguous adventure in which you have been involved, admits of no honourable explanation. Choose which side you will, between the alternative of treachery and cowardice. You were either a spy, always a king-killer in your heart, and prepared at the pupil age of seventeen, to play the part of a fox, eluding the most wary observation, and of a serpent, piercing with mortal sting the bosom that cherished you: and that is the interpretation in which I firmly believe. Or, you skulked away in the hour of danger, and hid your inglorious head from the chance of military warfare, and from the honourable sentence, which the usurper’s courts of justice award against the honest, and which every man who draws his sword in the cause of virtue should be prepared to meet with dauntless serenity. On the day that Penruddock entered Salisbury, you returned to the university. On the day that his head rolled on the scaffold, you, totally careless of these things, were employed in practising your deceits on me, and endeavouring to make me believe you every thing the reverse of your character.’
I listened with astonishment to the invective of Lisle. I had made things, I thought, bad enough for myself in my secret ruminations. I had even a confused unaccredited suspicion that I was guilty of exaggeration. I doubted that that was the leaning of my temper. How greatly was I deceived! My gall rose as he spoke; my mouth was filled with its bitterness. I loathed the sight of the insolent youngster that dared thus to address me; I loathed the light of the sun; principally, I loathed myself, and the perception that I existed under all this. I would not have consented to live another hour, but that my death would have given advantage to my calumniators.
Most of all, I thought scorn of the idea of vindicating myself, of making appeal, as to the scales of a balance, casting the foul aspersions to which I had listened into one scale, and my own explanations and protestations into the other, and carefully watching which way the beam would turn. This, of all things, was the most contrary to my temper. Fierce impatience was the ruling passion of my soul. He that did not understand me from the impulse of his own mind, that did not find in his own heart the explanation of my conduct, and the true estimate of my thoughts, was unworthy to hear me. Slowly to win one’s way by special pleading into the good opinion of those who regarded one with aversion, was, I deemed, the basest of all degradations.
I gazed upon Lisle with eyes that sparkled with fury. ‘It is well, Sir,’ I said. ‘I am glad of it. Misanthropy at least, the God that I worship, is the gainer. You hate me, because I am calumniated; and I hate you because you are unjust. The hatred that existed this morning, has spread its empire wider, and has gained two additional subjects to exercise itself upon.’ Saying these words, I burst away from Lisle, and saw him no more.
Since that time I have often thought what would have been the conduct of an ordinary young man at college, under my situation. Lisle had called me treacherous, and had called me a coward: he had given me my choice between these two characters. The vulgar expedient in this conjuncture would have been, to have dared him to the field, and to have vindicated my honour with my sword. I call God to witness, that it was no lurking sentiment of fear, that restrained me from this proceeding. But, Good Heavens! how cold and inadequate a remedy did this appear in my eyes. The little appointments and arrangements of a duel, the measuring of weapons, and the display of skill, with all the technical science of a master of fence, might have suited a colder character, but were altogether discordant and intolerable to a temper like mine. Then, what should I have gained by defiance and a duel? Would that have cleared up my loyalty and integrity, or have dissipated the foul aspersions, that had by some means been so successfully propagated against me? If I could have thought of a duel, or of my sword buried to the hilts in the life’s blood of an antagonist, as a consolation, how enviable and how happy, would my condition have been! But I was incapable of being the dupe of so wretched a fallacy.
I stop myself for a moment in my narrative, to say, that Clifford was entirely innocent of having contributed in the slightest degree to the glosses on my conduct, which had reached the ears of Lisle. They were the sole production of the fruitful ingenuity of Mallison. But such was my fate, and thus I was hedged in on every side. I had a Clifford to cross all the prospects and views of my existence, a Mallison to ground on my disappointments the grossest calumnies, and a Lisle to give energy, and sharpness, and a venomed point, to all that Mallison had forged. It was still therefore, against Clifford that my hatred was directed. He was the source, the primal cause of all: and without him, such at least was my interpretation of the scene, neither Mallison nor Lisle would have had the power to disturb my serenity.
As I receded from the apartment of Lisle, I felt more and more distinctly that Oxford was no longer a place for me. The calumnies, which Lisle in such pitiless array had spread out before me, were universally propagated: I had seen that in the countenances of multitudes: Lisle had been the last straggler of the long file of demons prepared for my damnation.
But, if not Oxford, then was not England, then was not the world, a place for me. I was not the insignificant person, that could go into some new and obscure corner, and be no longer connected with the thing I had been. I was heir to estates of immense value. It is the nature of all civilized communities, that the aristocracy of the country, the few who are greatly elevated by rank or station, form a tribe by themselves, as distinct from the rest of their compatriots, as the tribe of Levi among the descendants of the rest of the twelve patriarchs. The cities of London or Paris, for example, contain, according to one mode of calculation, half a million of inhabitants respectively; but in another view, and in relation to the aristocracy of these capitals, they contain but a few hundreds each. London and Paris therefore, to the rich and the noble, are but two narrow villages; and the pest so often complained of in a village, the industrious propagation of scandal, and the malicious watchfulness of one neighbour over another, are equally to be found there. A man may hide himself in them; but a lord cannot. Strange condition of this gaudy and envied race of men! A lord, while he lives, is a great thing, with all the advantages, and all the miseries, attendant upon greatness. Death only abates the nuisance. This Omnipotent Phantom almost singly obtains the power, to turn a lord into nothing. What a remorseless tyrant, what a mighty leveller of all these extrinsic distinctions, is Death! How true is that solemn dictum of theology, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return to the dust!’ To instance in my own contemporaries only. Dryden dedicates his plays in a style of servile adulation to Lord Vaughan, and Lord Haughton, and Sir William Leveson Gower; Otway to Lord Viscount Eland, while he revelled in the frosty sunshine of the favour of Lord Plymouth; and Butler was happy in the countenance of Mr Longueville. And now, what place is occupied by these luxurious and pampered lords, and what place by the retiring and obsequious Dryden, Otway, and Butler? Truly, oh, Death, thou hast the attributes of a God, pulling down the mighty, and setting up the humble; and the pillars of the earth are in thy hands!
To return. Could I submit to live an exile in a foreign clime, like a man charged with some enormous crime, the name of which nature revolts at? If I could, surely the reputation of my crime would pursue me. In this respect, the whole world is but a large village: and no foreigner can come and live in opulence and splendour in a country not his own, but that the enquiry will be bandied about, ‘Why has he abandoned his native soil?’ But what had I done to deserve this? My action with regard to Waller, was virtuous, at least it was generous: and, as to the affair with Penruddock, was I not driven away, by a loathsome necessity imposed upon me, from a place, where I felt it utterly impossible to remain an instant longer? Could I then sink, palsied and unresisting, under this oppression? Ambition, as I have said, was the vital spirit, that fed my life, and preserved my corporeal frame from putrefying. I looked forward to something great, and something good. I felt within me powers answerable to this destination. I could not therefore, if I might, retire into a corner. I would not bind myself, so my heart whispered to my head, to a vegetating, inglorious life. Better, a thousand times better were it, not to be at all. What; that I should walk about, a tarnished thing, a petty rascal that had had the word VILLAIN branded upon his forehead in the dock of a court of justice, or like Cain, with a mark set upon me, ‘lest any one finding me kill me and that I might live out my appointed years of expiation!
Such was the wretchedness and misery of my condition; and what was the cause of this? It all lay, I repeated a thousand times to myself, in one man. Fate, I was fully persuaded, had bound Clifford and me together with a chain, the links of which could never be dissolved. ‘Marriages it is said, ‘are made in heaven.’ The power that moulds us all according to his pleasure, divided the human species into male and female, and decreed that it was not good for man to remain without his mate. In his Providence he has fitted to every variety of the masculine character a female adapted to afford him satisfaction and felicity; and happy the man, to whose encounter fortune shall present the fair, that by the eternal decree was designated to become his partner. In the same manner as, in the world of human creatures, there exist certain mysterious sympathies and analogies, drawing and attracting each to each, and fitting them to be respectively sources of mutual happiness, so, I was firmly persuaded, there are antipathies, and properties interchangeably irreconcilable and destructive to each other, that fit one human being to be the source of another’s misery. Beyond doubt I had found this true opposition and inter-destructiveness in Clifford. Mezentius, the famous tyrant of antiquity, tied a living body to a dead one, and caused the one to take in, and gradually to become a partner of, the putrescence of the other. I have read of twin children, whose bodies were so united in their birth, that they could never after be separated, while one carried with him, wherever he went, an intolerable load, and of whom, when one died, it involved the necessary destruction of the other. Something similar to this, was the connection that an eternal decree had made between Clifford and me. I was deeply convinced, that his bare existence was essentially the bane of mine. Had he not extinguished me, from the first hour that we saw each other? Had not his wit, his gaiety, his perennial flow of amusement to others, and the angelic sweetness and urbanity of his temper, drawn all his fellows after him, as with a medicine, and left me to loneliness and contempt? Had not his poverty, and the charming way in which he declaimed respecting it, made my expected wealth, the unalterable gravity of my manners, and my sparingness of speech, the topics of endless derision? Because he was bred an adherent to the English government in church and state, was not I despised as a poor-spirited wretch and a Presbyterian? Then, in the affair of the pictures, to which Lisle had just alluded, had not he come off with additional and redoubled honours, while I sustained a blemish that could never be removed? Oh, the weary and loathsome days and months and years that I had passed, for his sake, within the cloisters of William of Wykeham! If it had ended here, I knew too well that the tortures then endured, had left a gaping and agonizing wound, had broken and disabled the members of my soul, in such a manner as no time could ever assuage or make whole. When however I quitted those hated walls, hated only because he had been an inmate there, I indulged a vain hope, that I had performed my penance, and that Clifford would approach me no more. How fond and senseless a dream! He had approached me; he had approached me as a rival, as a successful and resistless rival; he had driven me from the field I sought, driven me with ignominy, and with bifronted imputation of cowardice and treachery; he had revived against me all the miseries of my youth; and he had made me the outcast of mankind.
CHAPTER VI
I QUITTED THE apartment of Lisle, and hastened to shut myself up in my own chamber. ‘At seventeen years,’ says Old Adam in the play, ‘many their fortunes seek.’ I was arrived at seventeen years; but my fortune was ended and done. I had no place in the world of mankind. I took to myself no accusation of vice or crime; but a sentence of proscription had gone out against me, and could never be revoked. As I rolled these considerations desperately in my mind, I felt myself successively a theatre for sensations before unknown. Lightnings flashed from my eyes. My head throbbed; my senses became giddy; all was confusion and uproar within me. Involuntarily I uttered loud cries and piercing shrieks. Again, I looked up, and saw the objects around me. Books, placed regularly on shelves, or thrown carelessly, after having been consulted, on the floor, a desk, papers, and the implements of study, with maps orderly arranged against the walls: What have I to do with these? I said. This is no place for me! Instantly I rushed from my chamber; I passed along with winged rapidity; I sallied out at the eastern avenue of the city, and presently plunged myself in the wildest and most savage recesses of the forest of Shotover. I felt ease, in proportion as I withdrew from the haunts of men. ‘Ah’ said I, ‘here I have room to be miserable! Man, that accursed thing, no longer hedges and represses me with the tyranny of his eye; and I am surrounded with Nature’s productions only, not with doors, and locks, and walls, and streets, the artifices of human ingenuity.’
I remember no more. The first sane and lucid sensation that followed, was that I saw myself in bed, and my sister seated by my bed-side. That sight had over me a magic empire. I was languid, and scarcely capable of exertion. I looked at her for some time in silence, and thought, ‘Surely I am not altogether a wretch; is it possible – Is it possible, that this lovely creature should be watching my health, and pouring out the aspirations of her soul for my safety? It is,’ exclaimed I;— ‘it is my Henrietta!’
‘My brother!’ returned she. ‘Ah, you know me now!’ I put out my hand, and took hold of hers. ‘While I have life, I can never cease to know you!’
‘And yet,’ said Henrietta, ‘I have sat for weeks by your bed-side without your seeming to know me!’
I had wandered into the forest of Shotover in a state of mind the most pitiable. All the events which preceded, had prepared me for distraction; and distraction presently followed. I roamed about in this desolate scene, till I was completely fatigued. I plunged into thickets, and climbed to the summits of rocks. In this occupation I had been observed by two or three wood-cutters; but I had drawn from them a very uncertain attention. They were accustomed to some degree to the frolics and vagaries of the younger students; and, though they wondered, and perhaps thought that I exceeded the usual limits of eccentricity and daring in persons of my class, they did not conceive themselves called on to interfere.
The next morning I was found by one of these woodmen, stretched at my length at the bottom of a pit, extenuated, vacant, scarcely able to help myself, yet with a grim expression of restless ferocity in my countenance. The uniform of a student, upon a person in this situation, carried more fully to the rustic’s mind, that I must not be so left, and that I stood in need of help. He was however frightened at the strangeness of the phenomenon, and went back to call another labourer to his aid. I no sooner saw them, and was aware of their purpose, than, weak as I was, I suddenly started from the ground, and endeavoured to rush by them, and escape. They seized, and detained me. I instantly became furious, struggled with them, and once more obtained my liberty. ‘Man shall never have power over me!’ I exclaimed. There were other labourers however a little further onward; and I was overpowered.
