Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 208
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
The reader may be surprised to find such ideas flowing from the lips of the wretched and worthless Mallison. But, if he is, I have failed in conveying to him the idea of his character. I have said that Mallison was an admirable mimic. He was an excellent actor, or indeed more than this, since he could compose the phrases and the sentences of the part he had to play. Without being any thing in himself intrinsically, superior to the dirt upon which he trod, he had that pliancy of disposition, that he could remove himself for the moment into the person he wished to represent, with a power something similar to that, with which Fadlallah in the Persian Tales, could shoot himself into any organized body that lay inanimate before him. By dint, in a certain degree, of imitating the tones and gestures of another, he could come to think his thoughts. Nor indeed is it at all uncommon, though not much observed in the world, that intensity of purpose shall, for the given occasion, convert a mere oaf into a man of wit and sagacity. When Atys saw a soldier raise his scymetar against the life of his father Croesus, the dumb man spoke; and assuredly an overpowering crisis has often loosed the tongue of the intellectually dumb, and made him discourse with a propriety and energy, of which the most favoured son of genius needed not to be ashamed. In the present instance, Mallison’s proceeding would have been impotent to his purpose, if he had not thought my thoughts, and expressed himself in my idiom.
The language thus held to me by Mallison was like a stroke of thunder. A thousand circumstances had communicated to my spirits an unaccustomed buoyancy. I had just recovered the free use of the members of my body, and could proceed to the right or the left, with a swift or a slow motion, as I pleased. I was like what I have somewhere read of a person issuing forth from the Thermae, or hot-baths of Egypt, where, after a copious perspiration, various attendants had been employed with a strenuous friction, in removing the various obstructions that usually stop up all the pores and outlets of the body. I felt, as if the power of gravitation that binds material substances to the earth on which they are placed, was removed, that my limbs and my whole frame had lost their cumbrousness, that I was in danger of mounting up in the air, and could sail as I pleased, sustained and cushioned upon the clouds of heaven.
Such was the state of my corporeal feelings; and the style in which Mallison had talked to me for weeks, wonderfully harmonized with the freedom of my spirits. I felt in my heart, though I confessed it as little as I could, that his language was that of a flatterer. But, for this very reason, I the more relied on its consistency; since, in this sense, you can never be sure of a man who speaks the truth, but you may depend upon a liar. On Mallison’s plan, as I understood it, he had nothing to do with the real phenomena, and the absolute merits of the case: he spoke from a principle, and steadily pursued a certain end that he proposed to himself. This it was in reality, that compensated for his want of sincerity. The human heart naturally revolts from delusion and imposture, from the impudence of a man who, with unabashed and unaltered front, asserts the thing that he knows to be false. But then this species of intercourse has its advantages. We are not more sure that wholesome food will nourish, and wine will intoxicate, than that the tongue of the flatterer will speak agreeable things. Nothing therefore could be more shocking to me, than the abrupt manner in which my companion now set before me the most loathsome and heart-appalling conceptions that ever were offered to the attention of a human being.
I made a strenuous effort to throw off the weight, with which Mallison was thus unexpectedly endeavouring to overwhelm me.
‘No, no, my good fellow said I, and a smile of bitterness came over me as I said it, ‘that is past. Perhaps you have not heard that Clifford has become reconciled to the church of Rome.’
Oh, yes, that fact is public and notorious.’
‘Well then, sir, the fate of every man that is put on his trial, depends on the character of the witness that is brought against him. I have suffered under certain enormous and unfounded accusations: but who is my antagonist? Oh, Mallison! you can have no conception what relief that has brought to my mind. Yes; I thank God, Clifford has settled the controversy between us. I have been charged with secreting and delighting myself with certain inhuman libels against our late illustrious and murdered sovereign. I have been accused of selling myself to the usurper, for the purpose of ruining Penruddock’s generous attempt to restore the royal exile, and of betraying this band of heroes to the scaffold. I will not talk of the malignity and the falsehood of these accusations. But what is all this, compared with the turpitude of Clifford? My antagonist is down, and I am up, for ever. You talk of revenge. But what place can there be for revenge against one, who has blotted himself out from the roll of living men and of honest reputation! He walks blasted among his fellow creatures; he bears on him the mark of reprobation; he is reserved for the wrath of God, and his case is beyond the reach of hope; the colour is driven from his cheeks, and his skin is already parched up and embrowned by the fire of hell that burns within him. Who will associate with an apostate? He is cut off from the common benefits of society: no one will harbour him; no one will give him a morsel of bread to eat, or a drop of water to drink. His very touch is contamination; and to breathe the same element with him, is to insure our destruction. His condition is similar to that which our ancestors awarded to a leper, who with a bell and a clap-dish warned those who passed by, not to approach, but to cast their alms by the road-side, which the afflicted sufferer was not allowed to gather up, till the traveller was already gone.’
‘My dear Mandeville,’ rejoined my companion, ‘what you say is certainly of great weight; and all that can be alleged against it is, that the fact is otherwise. I doubt not, there was a time, when men were directed in their treatment of others by ideas of right and wrong, and apostacy was considered as the abhorred thing you so justly describe it. But unfortunately we do not live in those times; and the court of the exiled king, which will soon become the court of London, is the focus of all sorts of latitudinarianism and licentiousness. Lord Digby and his six companions immediately repaired from Ghent to king Charles at Cologne, where they were received with open arms, and almost stifled with the fervent embraces that were bestowed upon them. Clifford in particular was distinguished from all the rest; the large property he is destined to inherit, the beauty of his figure, the enchanting tone of his conversation, the elegance of his manners, the frank simplicity of his wit, were considered as entitling him to this distinction. The persons principally trusted by king Charles are indeed for the most part Protestants; but there seems to be a general opinion at his little court, that the Protestant episcopal religion is the faith that becomes an English politician, while the Catholic is the religion of a gendeman. There is no other creed to be found at the courts of Versailles, Madrid, and Vienna, the great receptacles of all that is magnificent and brilliant in civilised Europe; while the new religion is fain to take refuge with a beggarly and wandering sovereign, or in still more homely and shop-keeping republics
It is impossible to express what I felt, while Mallison related these particulars. It was as if my brain-pan had been laid open, and all the conceptions and knots of ideas which had been stored there, were given to irretrievable confusion. Man is the creature of experience. From infancy to age we accumulate from year to year a certain knowledge which serves us for the guide of our actions. We observe the succession of day and night, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, and regulate our conduct by the belief that that succession will take place in future. We conceive that fire will burn, and that water will drown. And there are certain expectations that we form respecting our fellow-men, their treatment of us, the power of motives, and their approbation and disapprobation, upon which we no less confidently rely, than upon these phenomena of nature. But, if what Mallison told me was true, all that I had learned, and the inferences I had been accustomed to draw from it, were to go for nothing. ‘The moon had come more near the earth than she was wont, and made men mad.’ Or rather, the whole harmony, and all the constellations of heaven, were moved from their place, and chaos was come again.
I know not that I can make any one that reads these pages, understand the sensation that thus came over me. From the day on which the Mercurius Politicus reached me, I in reality obtained a new life. To change one’s condition, from darkness to light, from imprisonment to liberty, from a sandy and sterile desert to all that nature pours out of profusion and resistless beauty on her most favoured spots, – no, these are metaphors, and do not at all come near the thing I would record. It was utter and entire hopelessness from which I had escaped, it was Tantalus’s thirst, it was the dream of the man who distinctly sees all that is most dear to him perishing before his face, and feels his joints unnerved as by some magician’s spell, and himself incapable of stretching out a finger to save them.
Till I was thus unexpectedly delivered, I did not understand the extent of my misery. Human nature does not enable us to suffer beyond a given point. When there is no longer hope, our sensations become deadened, our power of apprehending is benumbed, we are the statues of despair, and no more. A slow and nerveless fever comes over us; the skin is dry; the tongue is parched; the heart sinks within us; and every principle of life is deprived of its tension and its elasticity. We scarcely know this; we do but half lament it. But, once open the door of hope, once let in the fresh and living breeze to which the face of earth is indebted for all its graciousness, how we gasp and pant with the feeling of renovated existence! Then we perceive how wretched we were, and are astonished we should not have known it. Then first we apprehend the full meaning of all that can be expressed by the word Misery.
Well then; the obstacle that stood between me and the career of glory was removed. I was once more vested with the rights of man; and all that man, with talents, with favourable circumstances, and with diligence, could achieve, I might hope for. Clifford and I had changed places. It was thus that I understood the situation. But all this, if the report of Mallison were to be believed, was utterly reversed.
Now it was, that I truly hated. Now it was, that I felt that Clifford was my fate, and that, as long as he existed, I must give myself up to the last despair. For me the order of the universe was suspended; all that was most ancient and established in the system of created things was annulled; virtue was no longer virtue, and vice no longer vice. This utter subversion related to me, and me alone; every where else, in every corner of the many-peopled globe, things went on right; I, and I only, was shut out of the pale of humanised society. Whatever I might do, how pure and virtuous soever, was to be the meat for calumny to feed on: whatever Clifford might do, he was a privileged person; a circle of glory for ever surrounded his head; he might
— trace huge forests, and unharboured heaths;
Yea there, where very desolation dwells,
By grots, and caverns, shagged with horrid shades,
he might pass on unhurt, like queen Editha among the burning ploughshares, or the three children in the fiery furnace, when ‘not a hair of their head was singed, nor the colour of their garments was changed, and the smell of the fire had not passed upon them’. A condition like this is to be found only in the wild creations of fancy, or in the legends of a credulous and spectre-haunted superstition. But I can imagine how a champion would feel, who found his frail and human-conditioned limbs staked in mortal combat against one who ‘bore a charmed life’. And such feelings were mine. Preternatural horror, and deep despair; a rebellious spirit, blaspheming against fate and the Lord of all things, and fearfully impressed with the unjust and unequal measure that was dealt out to me. The blows I should strike seemed to be unaccompanied with the slightest hope of effect; but I was on that account, only incited to strike with more resolved aim, and a more desperate fury.
CHAPTER VII
I PASS OVER a considerable period of time in which I was a victim to the machinations of this precious pair of devils, Holloway and Mallison. They had me in their hands, to play upon me as they pleased. By turns they soothed, and by turns they irritated me. Their admiration of my high qualities knew no bounds; their professions of devotion to my service exceeded those of the most fervent loyalty, in that period of feudal history, when the vassal conceived himself born for no other end, than the use, the pleasure, the defence, and the glory of his lord. To do justice to the ardour of their attachment, these gentlemen, my guardians, or my keepers, found themselves reduced to borrow something of the language of religion, and to speak almost as a creature to the Creator.
All this affected me strangely. I never ceased to see these men in their true colours. For ever and for ever I hated them. I understood their motives. Never for an instant did I ascribe one particle of sincerity to their professions. They talked this well; their protestations were ample, full of energetic phrase, and rich in sentiment and adoration. Yet they stood before me as two finished scoundrels. I knew that they thought only of themselves. I knew that they were incapable of one impulse that did not centre in their own interests. I knew that this was not only the original constitution of their minds, but that they had worked it up into a system, that it was a principle by which they elaborately regulated all their actions.
Yet, such is the nature of the human mind, I received pleasure from the song of these hollow-hearted hypocrites. It required however an introduction and a prelude. When it had at first been addressed to me abruptly, I repelled it with scorn. For a long time I kept these abject wretches at a sufficient distance. I believe they would never have carried their point, if it had not been for my accident, which seemed to throw me, naked and defenceless, into their hands. By this my heart was ‘subdued even to the very quality of my keepers. I stood in need of Mallison, and could no longer do without him. He ‘took my pliant hour, and found good means’ to wrap me round with his snares. And it happened in this, as it does in a thousand other instances to frail human nature, that familiarity altered the appearances of things. What I had before thought of with impatience and contempt, I now learned to endure. The aggravated features, that had lately excited my aversion, by frequent perusal became less disagreeable. I listened; and the more I listened, the more the tale grew acceptable to me. At last the attentions and the flatteries of Mallison became necessary, and were a flavour and a diet that I knew not how to dispense with. I was like Mithridates, the celebrated King of Pontus, who is said by his perpetual labour to neutralise the effects of poisons upon him, to have found nourishment at last, in that which had originally the most virulent tendency to destroy. Praise is agreeable to every human organ. However fastidious we may be in the beginning, if we will persist in swallowing the draught we shall presently become passive and resigned. It will then exercise its natural attribute to soothe and titillate. It matters not from whom it comes; it matters not, however much we may be internally convinced of its insincerity and its falsehood; the pleasure will by degrees more and more predominate over the pain, till the unpleasing sensation is finally merged in that which is of an opposite character.
They turned and winded me at their pleasure. When by their flatteries they had laid me most naked to be assailed, that was the moment they chose to aim at me the most deadly wound. And I am ashamed to say, that experience scarcely made me wise in this point, and that I was weak enough to be again and again the dupe of their machinations. They told me tales of my future greatness. They told me what the family of Mandeville had been, and what it was qualified to be again. They convinced me, that no one was ever so largely endowed with powers to carry him forward in the paths of glory and of usefulness, as I was by nature. They told me tales of Clifford. They carried him from country to country, from employment to employment, and from honour to honour. 1 could not discover whether the things they described were real, or were the pure creatures of invention. I had no means of ascertaining; I had first voluntarily shut myself out from the world, and was now ‘benetted round with villainies’. First I believed all they related to me; then, upon révisai, the whole appeared so romantic, that I could not refrain from suspecting that I was made the dupe to a series of the grossest impostures. After that, circumstances came to my knowledge, sometimes by the public prints which were thrust in my way, and sometimes from other sources, which proved a few of the most material points, and scarcely left me power to doubt of the rest.
The comforters of the patriarch Job have grown into a proverb. But they were drivellers, compared with the two practitioners, inmates of the roof under which I resided. They had no such means, and no such opportunity to torment. These were, as I have said, my sworn and devoted friends. They lived but to oblige me. When they told of what I might have been, they spoke the language of an ardent admiration. When they related things that tortured me to agony, it was with the most fervent protesting, that with contentions inexpressible they conquered their unwillingness to distress me, but that with severity and stoicism they compelled their feelings to give way to their duty. At other times they contrived, that I should see they were suppressing something too terrible to be communicated. When they consoled me, phrases and insinuations were sure to creep in, that reduced me to a much more pitiable situation, than if I had not been consoled at all. They gave me no rest, day nor night. I cannot help believing, that, as regularly as the morning returned, they consulted together, as to what electuary of viper’s flesh should be administered to me to-day, that the darkness of the days that had gone before, might not laugh at the whiteness of this. Their object was to reduce me to so helpless and pitiable a state of mind, that I might finally be a passive instrument in their hands, to do with whatever they pleased.
