Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 206
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
This was the act of riding; the simply mounting upon my horse, and pushing him along the downs and the forest-paths at a rapid pace. I could not bear to join in the chace, or to make my appearance any where in the resorts of men. But the motion of a horseman was agreeable to me; it communicated a new alacrity to the circulation of the blood; it excited the animal spirits; and the way in which hills and plains and the clouds of heaven fly away and succeed each other, to him that travels swiftly, had something in it that brought nameless relief to my wearied spirit. The very fatigue that I felt resulting from this exercise, was grateful; and, while engaged in it, it often happened to me, though not always, that I forgot Clifford, and Lisle, and Penruddock, and every thing that again and again had planted a dagger in my soul.
From a love or the exercise of riding, I came, by a very natural transition, to a love of the animal by whom this pleasure was communicated to me. When once my mind had taken this turn, it produced a sensation soothing to my misanthropy. I said to myself, ‘At length I have found a noble animal, that has none of the vices of my own species. He will never flatter and deceive me; he will never form plots for my undoing; he will never conspire with the treacherous and the base, to rob me of my fair fame, and to level me without cause with the vilest.’ When I was not on horseback, 1 would often go out into the fields, on a sort of visit to the creatures for whom I had conceived this partiality. My harassed spirit was not in a tone to make the first overtures to this species of friendship; but it somehow happened, that my favourite mare saw me at a distance, uttered a neigh of pleasure, and trotted up to the spot where I stood. I was pleased with the circumstance, and determined to improve upon the opening that thus presented itself. I repeated my visits frequently about the same hour, patted the animal’s neck, and brought with me, sometimes one thing, and sometimes another, which the creature eagerly and proudly accepted at my hands. Perhaps all gregarious animals are imitative; the other horses in the field followed the example of the first, and seemed to emulate each other in courting my favour.
The more I addicted myself to horses and horse-exercise, the more curious I became in my choice of the animals I rode. The servant, who always accompanied me in my excursions of this sort, was himself an expert jockey. This circumstance produced a considerable degree of familiarity between us. I loved to speak of any thing that was not man; and the gnawing pain which the trials I had sustained produced in me about the region of the heart, was soothed, and its anguish suspended, while I talked, and heard this fellow talk, of this quadruped, his noble nature, and his extraordinary merits. My groom was of course not less charmed with a topic of this levelling sort, in which he was at least as good a man as I, or was in reality decisively my superior.
My love for this species of amusement (thanks to the communicative temper of my attendant!) soon became notorious through my own and several adjacent hundreds. Many a dealer in horses, when he conceived he had got an animal of more than ordinary value, came and offered his beast to the heir of the opulent house of Mandeville. My taste in this respect however was extremely limited: I never partook in the pleasures of the chace; I had no share in the passion felt by many of my wealthy contemporaries for the sports of Doncaster or Newmarket. I was therefore in no danger of falling into any injurious excess of expenditure.
One day an animal of this sort was brought to me, the most beautiful my eyes ever beheld. His figure was light; his limbs graceful; his coat of a bright chesnut, and of an uncommonly smooth and glossy appearance. His eyes seemed full of intelligence and fire; and the curve of his neck was peculiarly expressive of a proud and spirited character. He was young, and had hardly yet been sufficiently reduced from his coltish wildness. I bought this horse; and he became my favourite. There was something in the intellect of my new fourfooted friend, superior to that of any of his species that I had possessed before. By practice among these animals I became more skilful in my manner of addressing them, and knew better how to adapt my approaches to their taste. This young thing was of a nature peculiarly affectionate, and showed his attachment to me in a variety of ways that I had never witnessed in his fellows. Our mutual partiality had this effect, that he became more docile and conforming to all my wishes, and I the more completely understood his dispositions, and knew how to avail myself of them with gentleness and good humour. It was a spectacle that won the admiration of the rustics, to see me mounted on this beast, so spirited, and yet so tractable. The animal himself, as I have said, was uncommonly beautiful; nor did his rider any way misbecome him. My figure was slender, and my limbs tapering; loving the exercise, and confident in my skill, I sat my horse well; my locks shadowed my forehead and cheeks in wavy ringlets; the uncommon seriousness and sensibility of my temper gave a romantic interest to my visage; all together, I believe I may venture to say I was no ill model of a cavalier, at this period, when among multitudes a cavalier was held to be a name for the very abstract and quintessence of honour.
The admiration of strangers did not much incommode me, for by the assistance of my monture I could easily escape from it; and my delight was in solitudes. It happened however unfortunately for Mallison, that this was the occasion, upon which he ventured to make his first essay of that system of flattery and insinuation that he had laid down to himself. He thought, poor, senseless coxcomb! that he understood the human heart, and how to take advantage of its weakness. As I excelled in horsemanship, he took it for granted that I was vain of my accomplishment, and he had learned from his precious instructor, that ‘flattery direct, seldom disgusts’. How true this maxim holds of others I cannot pretend to decide. I only know that the compliments of Mallison on this occasion excited in me inexpressible loathings, and that I manifested in a way sufficiently intelligible what was passing in my mind. I was astonished, that such a reptile should dare to profane my ears with his praise. I remembered, in an indistinct way, the gibes and scoffs and insults he had a hundred times tried to put upon me, when we were school-boys together. I say, in an indistinct way; for it has sufficiently appeared, that even at that time I never did him the honour to hate him. Yet, huddled and confused as the recollection was, it did not fail to spring up in my mind; and I was struck with no little wonder, that he, who a few years before had tried in vain to rise to the distinction of being my enemy, should now, without sinking into the earth with shame, venture to accost me with his nauseous approbation. But Mallison could say, like Shylock in the play, ‘Patience is the badge of all our tribe.’ He stomached the contempt with which I loaded him, and lost no whit of the serenity of his countenance, and the smiles of complacency and adulation with which he was at all times prepared to meet me.
I had already for some months addicted myself to this exercise, when an accident happened, which served, at least for some time to suspend its indulgence. I was riding rapidly along by the side of a bank, surrounded with osiers, and on the further side a hay-field. The haymakers, it seems, were reposing themselves for a short time in the shade, from the fatigue of their employment. One of them happened to catch a glance of the young squire and his favourite gelding, and named it to the rest. Four or five started up at once, stepped up the bank at the foot of which they were reclining, and began a sudden rustling among the osiers. My horse was frightened at the sound, leaped violently to the other side of the road, and I was thrown. This was no specimen of my good horsemanship. But it was the peculiarity of my nature, to be frequently wholly absorbed in reveries. At this moment I happened to be engaged in a thousand melancholy reflections on my condition, and had no consciousness of any of the objects by which I was actually surrounded. I was as little capable of helping myself upon this sudden emergency as a man asleep. My servant hastened to my assistance, and found that I had broken my leg. My horse stood motionless by my side, in an attitude the most expressive of grief and shame that could be conceived. I was not far from my home: a sort of litter was speedily procured; and the animal who without the least ill intention had been the cause of my casualty, followed the vehicle without a leader, with no less appearance of mourning than Homer describes in the horses of Achilles, when Patroclus had fallen beneath the spear of Hector.
This was the incident, that threw me at once into the hands of Mallison. I was for several weeks confined to my bed under the care of the surgeons. Mallison tended my couch with unwearied care; nor was there any species of tenderness and attention left by him undischarged. Oh, wretched condition of poor humanity! that all those demonstrations of love and attachment which the most ardent affection can prompt, should be so perfectly imitated by a creature without a heart, conscious only to the basest selfishness, and prompted by the most sordid motives that satire in all its bitterness could desire. Such is the condition of the rich. They can scarcely ever know the real inward workings of soul of the people about them. They live in the midst of a stage-play, where every one that approaches them is a personated actor, and the lord himself is the only real character, performing his part in good earnest, while the rest are employed in a mummery, and laugh in their hearts at the gross delusion they are practising upon him.
For fourteen days from the time I was conveyed to my bed, I was required to continue in one attitude, my body straitened, and my face turned towards the zenith. It is difficult for any one, who has not passed through an experiment of this sort, to conceive the tediousness, the weariness of spirit, and the restlessness and intolerable itching of the limbs, which such a situation produces. Human nature is capable of exhibiting a hero. But then heroism is a thing, that for the most part requires that the fire within the hero’s breast, should be cherished by the presence of one or a greater number of spectators; or, if not that, at least it is necessary, that the conception existing in the actor’s or sufferer’s mind, should be of something energising and great. It is less difficult to bear with serenity the bite of a scorpion, than the stinging of a thousand insects that are nearly invisible. It is next to impossible, that what wears away and utterly dissipates the electrical fluid within us, should leave in the human heart a sense of loftiness and pride.
If such will be found the actual experience of every one that has been placed in my situation, it will easily be imagined how grievous it was to me. I bore a wound in my heart, to which the fracture I had sustained in a limb was nothing. My mind was disturbed; the chambers and compartments of my understanding were broken up; and twenty times a day I had been accustomed to find it necessary, by change of place to dissipate the pressure of my inward agonies, and by the violence of bodily exertions to overcome, as for a short time I was generally able to do, the sufferings of my soul.
I know not how humiliating the confession may be considered by others, but I must ingenuously own, that my innate pride was wholly subdued and laid prostrate for the time, by my situation. I was unable to relieve myself even by the act of reading. The poorest creature, that would have come near me, and soothed me by his attentions, would have been received with an animated welcome. One of the gossips, that are hired in savage countries at so much an hour, to recite legendary stories, would have been hailed by me as an angel of light. Elaborate as are the distinctions of rank set up in civilised countries, and deeply as they are grafted into the hearts of their envied possessors, there are many other adversaries, besides Death, by which they are liable to be crumbled into dust.
In this situation Mallison, the wretched Mallison, became a favourite with me, and I was uneasy if he left my bed-side but for a moment. This fellow must be acknowledged to have been an admirable artist. He personated, as I have said, the utmost watchfulness and tenderness. He did not value my ‘life at a pin’s fee’; yet the part he acted proceeded from a passion as real and as deep, as if the term of his existence had been linked to mine, as closely as Meleager’s to the brand of Althea. All that he did was subordinate to an end; and every syllable that he uttered, was supplied by as profound a feeling as the most disinterested friendship could have inspired. The same study furnished to him as effectually, the means of amusing my weariness, as of soothing my paroxysms. We had both been bred at the same school; and every one who has had the experience of it, knows that there is a topography of language and topics – so that every Wintonian talks the same jargon, and to a certain degree thinks the same thoughts. It was not long enough since I had resided there, for me to have lost a particle of these recollections, or of my school-boy identity; at the same time that the scenes were sufficiently distant in months and years, to give the repetition of them a greater zest, and to interpose more of an aerial or poetic perspective between, than they would have had if recited to me in the first term after my admission at the university. In this respect my enjoyment was similar to that, when Englishman meets Englishman on the further side of the globe. Mallison likewise, though he had a mind wholly eunuch and ungenerative in matters of literature and taste, had retained with sufficient fidelity the discourses of Dr Pottinger, and could harangue like an accomplished commentator, upon the urbanities of Aristophanes, and the fragments of Menander. I have met with, though rarely, a memory of the same class as that of my present companion, a person who could recite words in all their identity and primitive arrangement, without seeming to have a particle of feeling of the spirit they contained. My memory in the affair of minuteness, was certainly very inferior to Mallison’s. I therefore felt grateful to him for reviving impressions, which had once been pleasant to me, but the traces of which in my mind had become indistinct and obscure; and for the sake of the pleasurable sensations he afforded me, I felt as if it would be a sort of injustice in me, not to believe that the sound observations I heard, were the genuine growth of the speaker’s understanding. By the same tenaciousness of memory he could also repeat to me many of those passages of the classics, which he had been accustomed to hear most highly applauded. Mallison too added to his other accomplishments, that of being an excellent mimic. In the pride of my soul, when in vigorous health, I had scorned so inglorious and plebeian a talent; but what will not a sick-bed reduce us to? Add to which, there is something in mimicry that is irresistible; and the generous hearer will sometimes find himself surprised by it into convulsions of laughter, even while he despises and hates himself for the degradation. Dr Pottinger himself, and all the inferior masters in turn, by this means passed in review before me; and it is perhaps an invariable rule, that schoolmasters, with their mock dignity, and self-satisfied airs of importance, furnish the richest field for this species of imitation. If there is a fund of real worth and superior understanding behind this curtain, it subtracts nothing, but on the contrary gives an additional richness and relish to the exhibition. To my great surprise I found Mallison abundant in anecdotes; and the dry, sarcastic, unemotioned, and seemingly half-unconscious way in which he detailed them, in some way operated so as to bring out the striking points more completely in relief. He had certainly a genuine talent for humour and comedy. And the malignity, which lay as a corner-stone of all his faculties, helped his performances. That malignity formerly found its favourite occupation in molesting my peace; now it was the smooth, and specious, and silky side of his nature, a side indeed which was purely the creature of the severest discipline and art, that was turned upon me; and the malice was all employed for my entertainment, serving perhaps occasionally to betray what its owner ‘could do, an if he would’.
Shall I say, that the helpless state to which this incident reduced me, sunk me below the genuine attitude of man, or that it merely brought me down to the true level and standard of my species? Before, I held myself aloof from the human race, and disdained their assistance; or, if I admitted it for the necessities of animal life, I sternly repelled it so far as related to our consolations and our pleasures. I was like a person, who, having read the narrative of some poor shipwrecked mariner, condemned to dwell for years in an uninhabited island, should buy himself a vessel, or procure himself a passage, and say, T will be that man’s successor.’ But now I came to the sound human feeling, and said, ‘It is good to have a companion. My companion shall be from among “the excellent of the earth”, if I can procure such, shall be a being who awakens all the best sentiments and the purest delights of our nature, shall be Henrietta, or the counterpart of Henrietta in my own sex, if that be possible: but still I know that a companion is necessary. I will therefore abstain from all romantic and Arcadian speculations; and if my companion is homely, thick in his apprehensions, and grovelling in his temper, and I can get no other, I will be content with that.’
Well then, I had Mallison, and no one else, except now and then his uncle, with the servants, and the periodical visits of my professional attendant, that came near the couch to which I was confined. By dint of studying my associate, I discerned in him powers and accomplishments of which I was not previously aware. The faults that he had, by familiarity became less offensive to me. I did not find them such ‘black and grained spots, as would not leave their tinct On the contrary, they presently ceased to be shocking to my taste, and by degrees seemed, like the dark parts of a picture, to add their share to the total excellence. They constituted the style of the artist, which had been a thousand times connected with agreeable sensations; and I should as soon have thought of finding fault with Rembrandt for the deepness and breadth of his shadows, as with Mallison for the hard and unsympathetic tone of his conversation. It is thus, that the chances of human life, as well as its ‘miseries, make us acquainted with strange companions’; and many a man, by the mere control of time and place, has poured out his soul to another, and made him the partner of his bosom, who would certainly never have admitted him to that function, if it had depended upon his spontaneous election.
