Chapter VII: Introduction (6)

The Knights of the Order of the Golden Calf have no formal ceremony of election; yet has brother knight almost instinctive knowledge of brother. In the solitude of his own thoughts is he made one of the community; in utter privacy he kisses the pulseless hand of Plutus, and swears to his supremacy. The oath divorces him from pauper-life—from its cares, its wants, its sympathies. He is privileged from the uneasiness of thought, the wear and tear of anxiety for fellow-man; he is compact and self-concentrated in his selfishness. Nought ruffles him that touches not that inmost jewel of his soul, his knighthood’s Order.

In the olden day the Knights of the Fleece, the Garter and other glories, won their rank upon the battlefield—blood and strife being to them the hand-maids of honour. The chivalry of the Golden Calf is mild and gentle. It splits no brain-pan, spills no blood; yet is it ever fighting. We are at the exchange. Look at that easy, peaceful man. What a serenity is upon his cheek! What a mild lustre in his eye! How plainly is he habited! He wears the livery of simplicity and the look of peace. Yet has he in his heart the Order of the Golden Calf. He is one of Mammon’s boldest heroes. A very soldier of fortune. He is now fighting—fighting valorously. He has come armed with a bran-new lie—a falsehood of surpassing temper, which with wondrous quietude he lays about him, making huge gashes in the money-bags of those he fights with. A good foreign lie, well finished and well mounted, is to this Knight of the Golden Calf as the sword of Faery to Orlando. With it he sometimes cuts down giant fortunes, and after “grinds their bones to make his bread.”

And there are small esquires and pages of the Order; men who, with heart-felt veneration, lick their lips at the Golden Calf, and with more than bridegroom yearning pant for possession. These small folk swarm like summer-gnats; and still they drone the praises of the Calf; and looking at no other thing, have their eyes bleared and dazzled to all beside.

The Knights of the Golden Calf shed no blood; that is, the wounds they deal bleed inwardly and give no evidence of homicide. They are, too, great consumers of the marrow of men; and yet they break no bones, but by a trick known to their Order extract without fracture precious nutriment. They are great alchemists, too; and turn the sweat of unrequited poverty, aye, the tears of childhood, into drops of gold.

Much wrong, much violence, much wayward cruelty—if the true history of knighthood were indicted—lies upon the Fleece, the Garter, yes, upon the Templar’s Lamb;—yet all is but as May-day pastime to the voracity, the ignorance, the wilful selfishness, the bestial lowings of the Golden Calf. And of this Order the oldest of the brotherhood are the most gluttonous. There is one whose every fibre is blasted with age. To the imagination his face is as a coffin-plate. Yet is he all belly. As cruel as a cat though toothless as a bird!

Oh, ye knights, great and small—whether expanding on the mart, or lying _perdu_ in back parlours—fling from your hearts the Order there, and feel for once the warmth of kindly blood! The brotherhood chuckle at the adjuration. Well, let us fight the Order with an Order.

The Order of Poverty against the Order of the Golden Calf!

Will it not be a merry time, when men, with a blithe face and open look, shall confess that they are poor? When they shall be to the world what they are to themselves? When the lie, the shuffle, the bland, yet anxious hypocrisy of seeming, and seeming only, shall be a creed forsworn? When Poverty asserts itself, and never blushes and stammers at its true name, the Knights of the Calf must give ground. Much of their strength, their poor renown, their miserable glory, lies in the hypocrisy of those who would imitate them. They believe themselves great, because the poor, in the very ignorance of the dignity of poverty, would ape their magnificence.

The Order of Poverty! How many sub-orders might it embrace! As the spirit of Gothic chivalry has its fraternities, so might the Order of Poverty have its distinct devices.

The Order of the Thistle! That is an order for nobility—a glory to glorify marquisate or earldom. Can we not, under the rule of Poverty, find as happy a badge?

Look at this peasant. His face bronzed with midday toil. From sunrise to sunset, with cheerful looks and uncomplaining words, he turns the primal curse to dignity, and manfully earns his bread in the sweat of his brow. Look at the fields around! Golden with blessed corn. Look at this bloodless soldier of the plough—this hero of the sickle. His triumphs are there, piled up in bread-bestowing sheaves. Is he not Sir Knight of the Wheat-Ear? Surely, as truly dubbed in the heraldry of justice, as any Knight of the Thistle.

And here is a white-haired shepherd. As a boy, a child, playful as the lambs he tended, he laboured. He has dreamed away his life upon a hillside—on downs—on solitary heaths. The humble, simple, patient watcher for fellow-men. Solitude has been his companion: he has grown old, wrinkled, bent in the eye of the burning sun. His highest wisdom is a guess at the coming weather: he may have heard of diamonds, but he knows the evening star. He has never sat at a congress of kings: he has never helped to commit a felony upon a whole nation. Yet is he to our mind a most reverend Knight of the Fleece. If the Herald object to this, let us call him Knight of the Lamb! In its gentleness and patience, a fitting type of the poor old shepherd.

And here is a pauper, missioned from the workhouse to break stones at the road-side. How he strikes and strikes at that unyielding bit of flint! Is it not the stony heart of the world’s injustice knocked at by poverty? What haggardness is in his face! What a blight hangs about him! There are more years in his looks than in his bones. Time has marked him with an iron pen. He wailed as a babe for bread his father was not allowed to earn. He can recollect every dinner—they were so few—of his childhood. He grew up, and want was with him even as his shadow. He has shivered with cold—fainted with hunger. His every day of life has been set about by goading wretchedness. Around him, too, were the stores of plenty. Food, raiment, and money mocked the man made half mad with destitution. Yet, with a valorous heart, a proud conquest of the shuddering spirit, he walked with honesty and starved. His long journey of life hath been through thorny places, and now he sits upon a pile of stones on the wayside, breaking them for workhouse bread. Could loftiest chivalry show greater heroism—nobler self-control, than this old man, this weary breaker of flints? Shall he not be of the Order of Poverty? Is not penury to him even as a robe of honour? His grey workhouse coat braver than purple and miniver? He shall be Knight of the Granite if you will. A workhouse gem, indeed—a wretched, highway jewel—yet, to the eye of truth, finer than many a ducal diamond.

“He has dreamed his life upon a hillside—”
]

This man is a weaver; this a potter. Here, too, is a razor-grinder; here an iron-worker. Labour is their lot; labour they yearn for, though to some of them labour comes with miserable disease and early death. Have we not here Knights of the Shuttle, Knights of Clay, and Knights of Vulcan, who prepare the carcase of the giant engine for its vital flood of steam? Are not these among the noblest of the sons of Poverty? Shall they not take high rank in its Order?

We are at the mouth of a mine. There, many, many fathoms below us, works the naked, grimed, and sweating wretch, oppressed, brutalised, that he may dig us coal for our winter’s hearth; where we may gather round, and with filled bellies, well-clothed backs, and hearts all lapped in self-complacency, talk of the talked-of evils of the world, as though they were the fables of ill-natured men, and not the verities of bleeding life. That these men, doing the foulest offices of the world should still be of the world’s poorest, gives dignity to want—the glory of long-suffering to poverty.

And so, indeed, in the mind of wisdom, is poverty ennobled. And for the Knights of the Golden Calf, how are they outnumbered! Let us, then, revive the Order of Poverty. Ponder, reader, on its antiquity. For was not Christ Himself Chancellor of the Order, and the Apostles Knights Companions?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE

IN Surrey, some three miles from Chertsey, is a quiet, dull, sequestered nook, called Shepperton Green. Whether the new philanthropy of new pauper laws hath, of late years, sought out the spot I know not. At the time whereof I write, the olden charity dwelt in an old workhouse—a primitive abiding-place for the broken ploughman, the palsied shepherd, the old, old peasant, for whom nothing more remained in this world but to die. The governor of this abode of benevolence dwelt in the lower part of the building, and therein, as the village trade might fluctuate, made or mended shoes. Let the plain truth be said—the governor was a cobbler. Within a stone’s cast of the workhouse was a little white gate swung between two hedge-banks in the road to Chertsey. Here, pass when you would, stood an old man, whose self-imposed office it was to open the gate; for the which service the passenger would drop some small benevolence in the withered hand of the aged peasant. This man was a pauper—one of the almsmen of the village workhouse.

There was a custom—whether established by the governor aforesaid or by predecessors of a vanished century, I know not—that made it the privilege of the oldest pauper to stand the porter at the gate; his perquisite, by right of years, the halfpence of the rare pedestrian. As the senior died, the living senior succeeded to the office. Now the gate—and now the grave.

And this is all the history? All. The story is told—it will not bear another syllable. The “Old Man” is at the gate; the custom which places him there has been made known, and with it ends the narrative.

How few the incidents of life—how multitudinous its emotions! How flat, monotonous may be the circumstance of daily existence, and yet how various the thoughts which spring from it! Look at yonder landscape, broken into hill and dale, with trees of every hue and form, and water winding in silver threads through velvet fields. How beautiful—for how various! Cast your eye over that moor; it is flat and desolate—barren as barren rock. Not so. Seek the soil, and then, with nearer gaze, contemplate the wondrous forms and colours of the thousand mosses growing there; give ear to the hum of busy life sounding at every root of poorest grass. Listen! Does not the heart of the earth beat audibly beneath this seeming barrenness—audibly as where the corn grows and the grape ripens? Is it not so with the veriest rich and the veriest poor—with the most active and with apparently the most inert?

That “Old Man at the Gate” has eighty years upon his head—eighty years, covering it with natural reverence. He was once in London—only once. This pilgrimage excepted, he has never journeyed twenty miles from the cottage in which he was born; of which he became the master; whereto he brought his wife; where his children saw the light, and their children after; where many of them died; and whence, having with a stout soul, fought against the strengthening ills of poverty and old age, he was thrust by want and sickness out, and, with a stung heart, he laid his bones upon a workhouse bed.

Life to the “Old Man” has been one long path across a moor—a flat, unbroken journey; the eye uncheered, the heart unsatisfied. Coldness and sterility have compassed him round. Yet, has he been subdued to the blankness of his destiny? Has his mind remained the unwrit page that schoolmen talk of—has his heart become a clod? Has he been made by poverty a moving image—a plough-guiding, corn-thrashing instrument? Have not unutterable thoughts sometimes stirred within his brain—thoughts that elevated, yet confused him with a sense of eternal beauty—coming upon him like the spiritual presences to the shepherds? Has he not been beset by the inward and mysterious yearning of the heart towards the unknown and the unseen? He has been a ploughman. In the eye of the well-to-do, dignified with the accomplishments of reading and writing, is he of little more intelligence than the oxen treading the glebe. Yet, who shall say that the influence of nature—that the glories of the rising sun—may not have called forth harmonies of soul from the rustic drudge, the moving statue of a man!

That worn-out, threadbare remnant of humanity at the gate; age makes it reverend, and the inevitable—shall inevitable be said?—injustice of the world invests it with majesty, the majesty of suffering meekly borne and meekly decaying. “The poor shall never cease out of the land.” This text the self-complacency of competence loveth to quote: it hath a melody in it, a lulling sweetness to the selfishness of our nature. Hunger, and cold, and nakedness, are the hard portion of man; there is no help for it; rags must flutter about us; man, yes, even the strong man, his only wealth (the wealth of Adam) wasting in his bones, must hold his pauper hand to his brother of four meals _per diem_; it is a necessity of nature, and there is no help for it. And thus some men send their consciences to sleep by the chinking of their own purses. Necessity of evil is an excellent philosophy applied to everybody but—ourselves.

These easy souls will see nothing in our “Old Man at the Gate” but a pauper, let out of the workhouse for the chance of a few halfpence. Surely, he is something more? He is old; very old. Every day, every hour, earth has less claim in him. He is so old, so feeble, that even as you look he seems sinking. At sunset he is scarcely the man who opened the gate to you in the morning. Yet there is no disease in him—none. He is dying of old age. He is working out that most awful problem of life—slowly, solemnly. He is now the badged pauper—and now in the unknown country with Solomon!

Can man look upon a more touching solemnity? There stands the old man, passive as a stone, nearer every moment to churchyard clay! It was only yesterday that he took his station at the gate. His predecessor held the post for two years; he too daily, daily dying:—

“Till like a clock, worn out with eating time,
The weary wheels of life at length stood still.”

How long will the present watcher survive? In that very uncertainty—in the very hoariness of age which brings home to us that uncertainty—there is something that makes the old man sacred; for, in the course of nature, is not the oldest man the nearest to the angels?

Yet, away from these thoughts, there is reverence due to that old man. What has been his life? A war with suffering. What a beautiful world is this! How rich and glorious! How abundant in blessings—great and little—to thousands! What a lovely place hath God made it; and how have God’s creatures darkened and outraged it to the wrong of one another! Well, what had this man of the world? What stake, as the effrontery of selfishness has it? The wild fox was better cared for. Though preserved some day to be killed, it _was_ preserved until then. What did this old man inherit? Toil, incessant toil, with no holiday of the heart: he came into the world a badged animal of labour; the property of animals. What was the earth to him?—a place to die in.

“The poor shall never cease out of the land.” Shall we then, accommodating our sympathies to this hard necessity, look serenely down upon the wretched? Shall we preach only comfort to ourselves from the doomed condition of others? It is an easy philosophy; so easy there is but little wonder it is so well exercised.

But “The Old Man at the Gate” has, for seventy years, worked and worked; and what his closing reward? The workhouse. Shall we not, some of us, blush crimson at our own world-successes, considering the destitution of our worthy, single-hearted fellows? Should not affluence touch its hat to “The Old Man at the Gate” with a reverence for the years upon him; he—the born soldier of poverty, doomed for life to lead life’s forlorn hope? Thus considered, surely Dives may unbonnet to Lazarus.

To our mind the venerableness of age made “The Old Man at the Gate” something like a spiritual presence. He was so old, who could say how few the pulsations of his heart between him and the grave! But there he was with a meek happiness upon him; gentle, cheerful. He was not built up in bricks and mortar; but was still in the open air, with the sweetest influences about him; the sky—the trees—the green sward—and flowers with the breath of God in them!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The fifes and drums of her Majesty’s Grenadiers
]

THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD

MAY we ask the reader to behold with us a melancholy show—a saddening, miserable spectacle? We will not take him to a prison, a workhouse, a Bedlam, where human nature expiates its guiltiness, its lack of worldly goods, its most desolate perplexity; but we will take him to a wretchedness, first contrived by wrong and perpetrated by folly. We will show him the embryo mischief that in due season shall be born in the completion of its terror, and shall be christened with a sounding name,—Folly and wickedness standing its sponsors.

We are in St James’s Park. The royal standard of England burns in the summer air—the Queen is in London. We pass the Palace, and in a few paces are in Birdcage Walk. There, reader, is the miserable show we promised you. There are some fifty recruits, drilled by a sergeant to do homicide, killingly, handsomely. In Birdcage Walk Glory sits upon her eggs, and hatches eagles!

How very beautiful is the sky above us! What a blessing comes with the fresh, quick air! The trees, drawing their green beauty from the earth, quicken our thoughts of the bounteousness of this teeming world. Here in this nook, this patch, where we yet feel the vibrations of surrounding London—even here Nature, constant in her beauty, blooms and smiles, uplifting the heart of man—if the heart be his to own her.

Now, look aside and contemplate God’s image with a musket. Your bosom duly expanding with gratitude to nature for the blessings she has heaped about you, behold the crowning glory of God’s work managed, like a machine, to slay the image of God—to stain the teeming earth with homicidal blood—to fill the air with howling anguish! Is not yonder row of clowns a melancholy sight? Yet are they the sucklings of Glory—the baby mighty ones of a future _Gazette_. Reason beholds them with a deep pity. Imagination magnifies them into fiends of wickedness. There is carnage about them—carnage, and the pestilential vapour of the slaughtered. What a fine-looking thing is war! Yet dress it as we may, dress and feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it and sing swaggering songs about it—what is it, nine times out of ten—but murder in uniform? Cain, taken the sergeant’s shilling?

And now we hear the fifes and drums of her Majesty’s Grenadiers. They pass on the other side; and a crowd of idlers, their hearts jumping to the music, their eyes dazzled, and their feelings perverted, hang about the march and catch the infection—the love of glory! And true wisdom thinks of the world’s age, and sighs at its slow advance in all that really dignifies man—the truest dignity being the truest love for his fellow. And then hope, and faith in human progress, contemplate the pageant, its real ghastliness disguised by outward glare and frippery, and know the day will come when the symbols of war will be as the sacred beasts of old Egypt—things to mark the barbarism of bygone war; melancholy records of the past perversity of human nature.

We can imagine the deep-chested laughter—the look of scorn which would annihilate, and then the smile of compassion—of the man of war at this, the dream of folly and the wanderings of an inflamed brain. Yet, oh, man of war! at this very moment are you shrinking, withering like an aged giant. The fingers of Opinion have been busy at your plume—you are not the feathered thing you were; and then that little tube, the goose quill, has sent its silent shot into your huge anatomy; and the corroding INK, even whilst you look at it, and think it shines so brightly, is eating with a tooth of rust into your sword.

That a man should kill a man and rejoice in the deed—nay, gather glory from it—is the act of a wild animal. The force of muscle and the dexterity of limb which make the wild man a conqueror are deemed, in savage life, man’s highest attributes. The creature whom, in the pride of our Christianity, we call heathen and spiritually desolate, has some personal feeling in the strife—he kills his enemy, and then, making an oven of hot stones, bakes his dead body, and, for crowning satisfaction, eats it. His enemy becomes a part of him; his glory is turned to nutriment; and he is content. What barbarism! Field-marshals sicken at the horror; nay, troopers shudder at the tale, like a fine lady at a toad.

In what, then, consists the prime evil? In the murder, or in the meal? Which is the most hideous deed—to kill a man, or to cook and eat the man when killed?

But, softly, there is no murder in the case. The craft of man has made a splendid ceremony of homicide—has invested it with dignity. He slaughters with flags flying, drums beating, trumpets braying. He kills according to method, and has worldly honours for his grim handiwork. He does not, like the unchristian savage, carry away with him mortal trophies from the skulls of his enemies. No, the alchemy and magic of authority turns his well-won scalps into epaulets, or hangs them in stars and crosses at his button-hole; and then, the battle over, the dead not eaten, but carefully buried—and the maimed and mangled howling and blaspheming in hospitals—the meek Christian warrior marches to church, and reverently folding his sweet and spotless hands, sings _Te Deum_. Angels wave his fervent thanks to God, to whose footstool—in his own faith—he has so lately sent his shuddering thousands. And this spirit of destruction working within him is canonised by the craft and ignorance of man and worshipped as glory!

And this religion of the sword—this dazzling heathenism, that makes a pomp of wickedness—seizes and distracts us even on the threshold of life. Swords and drums are our baby playthings; the types of violence and destruction are made the pretty pastimes of our childhood; and as we grow older, the outward magnificence of the ogre Glory—his trappings and his trumpets, his privileges, and the songs that are shouted in his praise—ensnare the bigger baby to his sacrifice. Hence slaughter becomes an exalted profession; the marked, distinguished employment of what in the jargon of the world is called a gentleman.

“Hodge, poor fellow, enlists”
]

But for this craft operating upon this ignorance, who—in the name of outraged God—would become the hireling of the Sword? Hodge, poor fellow, enlists. He wants work; or he is idle, dissolute. Kept, by the injustice of the world, as ignorant as the farmyard swine, he is the better instrument for the world’s craft. His ear is tickled with the fife and drum; or he is drunk; or the sergeant—the lying valet of glory—tells a good tale, and already Hodge is a warrior in the rough. In a fornight’s time you may see him at Chatham; or indeed he was one of those we marked in Birdcage Walk. Day by day the sergeant works at the block ploughman, and, chipping and chipping, at length carves out a true, handsome soldier of the line. What knew Hodge of the responsibility of man? What dreams had he of the self-accountability of the human spirit? He is become the lackey of carnage, the liveried footman, at a few pence per day, of fire and blood. The musket stock, which for many an hour he hugs—hugs in sulks and weariness—was no more a party to its present use than was Hodge. That piece of walnut is the fragment of a tree that might have given shade and fruit for another century; homely, rustic people gathering under it. Now it is the instrument of wrong and violence; the working tool of slaughter. Tree and man, are not their destinies as one?

And is Hodge alone of benighted mind? Is he alone deficient of that knowledge of moral right and wrong, which really and truly crowns the man king of himself? When he surrenders up his nature, a mere machine with human pulses to do the bidding of war, has he taken counsel with his own reflection—does he know the limit of the sacrifice? He has taken his shilling, and knows the facings of his uniform!

When the born and bred gentleman, to keep to coined and current terms, pays down his thousand pounds or so for his commission, what incites to the purchase? It may be the elegant idleness of the calling: it may be the bullion and glitter of the regimentals; or, devout worshipper, it may be an unquenchable thirst for glory. From the moment when his name stars the _Gazette_, what does he become? The bond-servant of war! Instantly he ceases to be a judge between moral right and moral injury. It is his duty not to think, but to obey. He has given up, surrendered to another the freedom of his soul: he has dethroned the majesty of his own will. He must be active in wrong, and see not the injustice: shed blood for craft and usurpation, calling bloodshed valour. He may be made, by the iniquity of those who use him, a burglar and a brigand; but glory calls him pretty names for his prowess, and the wicked weakness of the world shouts and acknowledges him. And is this the true condition of reasonable man? Is it by such means that he best vindicates the greatness of his mission here? Is he when he most gives up the free motions of his own soul—is he then most glorious?

A few months ago chance showed us a band of ruffians who, as it afterwards appeared, were intent upon most desperate mischief. They spread themselves over the country, attacking, robbing, and murdering all who fell into their hands. Men, women, and children all suffered alike. Nor were the villains satisfied with this. In their wanton ruthlessness they set fire to cottages, and tore up and destroyed plantations. Every footpace of their march was marked with blood and desolation.

Who were these wretches? you ask. What place did they ravage? Were they not caught and punished?

They were a part of the army of Africa; valorous Frenchmen, bound for Algiers to cut Arab throats; and, in the name of glory, and for the everlasting glory of France, to burn, pillage, and despoil; and all for national honour—all for glory!

But Glory cannot dazzle Truth. Does it not at times appear no otherwise than a highwayman with a pistol at a nation’s breast? a burglar with a crowbar entering a kingdom? Alas! in this world there is no Old Bailey for nations, otherwise where would have been the crowned heads that divided Poland? Those felon monarchs anointed to—steal? It is true the historian claps the cutpurse conqueror in the dock, and he is tried by the jury of posterity. _He_ is past the verdict, yet is not its damnatory voice lost upon generations? For thus is the world taught—albeit slowly taught—true glory; when that which passed for virtue is truly tested to be vile; when the hero is hauled from the car and fixed for ever in the pillory.

But war brings forth the heroism of the soul: war tests the magnanimity of man. Sweet is the humanity that spares a fallen foe; gracious the compassion that tends his wounds, that brings even a cup of water to his burning lips. Granted. But is there not a heroism of a grander mould—the heroism of forbearance? Is not the humanity that refuses to strike a nobler virtue than the late pity born of violence? Pretty is it to see the victor with salve and lint kneeling at his bloody trophy—a maimed and agonised fellow-man; but surely it had been better to withhold the blow than to have been first mischievous, to be afterwards humane.

That nations professing a belief in Christ should couple glory with war is monstrous blasphemy. Their faith, their professing faith, is—“Love one another”; their practice is to—cut throats; and more, to bribe and hoodwink men to the wickedness, the trade of blood is magnified into a virtue. We pray against battle, and glorify the deeds of death. We say beautiful are the ways of peace, and then cocker ourselves upon our perfect doings in the art of man-slaying. Let us then cease to pay the sacrifice of admiration to the demon—War; let us not acknowledge him as a mighty and majestic principle, but, at the very best, a grim and melancholy necessity.

But there always has been—there always will be—war. It is inevitable; it is a part of the condition of human society. Man has always made glory to himself from the destruction of his fellow; so it will continue. It may be very pitiable; would it were otherwise! But so it is, and there is no helping it.

Happily we are slowly killing this destructive fallacy. A long breathing time of peace has been fatal to the dread magnificence of glory. Science and philosophy—_povera e nuda filosofia!_—have made good their claims, inducing man to believe that he may vindicate the divinity of his nature otherwise than by perpetrating destruction. He begins to think there is a better glory in the communication of triumphs of the mind, than in the clash of steel and the roar of artillery. At the present moment a society, embracing men of distant nations—“natural enemies,” as the old wicked cant of the old patriotism had it—is at work plucking the plumes from Glory, unbracing his armour, and divesting the ogre of all that dazzled foolish and unthinking men, showing the rascal in his natural hideousness, in all his base deformity. Some, too, are calculating the cost of Glory’s table: some showing what an appetite the demon has, devouring at a meal the substance of these thousand sons of industry—yea, eating up the wealth of kingdoms. And thus by degrees are men beginning to look upon this god Glory as no more than a finely-trapped Sawney Bean—a monster and a destroyer—a nuisance—a noisy lie.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE GREENWICH PENSIONER

A GREENWICH pensioner! Did any of my readers ever ponder on that strange composition of battered humanity and blue serge? Did they never feel a something approaching very near gratitude on passing, in the metropolis, a Greenwich pensioner, who, with his honest, carved out, unabashed front, looks as bluntly and as wonderingly at the bustle and splendour around him as does an unsophisticated wether suddenly removed from South Downs to Cheapside, whilst shaking his woollen coat beneath the whip of the coachman to the Lord Mayor. What a mixture of gravity and wonderment is in the poor brute’s countenance! how with its meek, uplifted head it stares at the effulgent vehicle,—runs leaping at the coach-wheels, mistaking them for hurdles,—falls, awe-struck, back, at the gilt and beavered greatness of the footman’s cocked hat,—then, suddenly awakened from its amazement by the lurcher’s teeth, or the driver’s stick, makes an unlucky spring of some three feet into the air, catches a glance of its figure in the mirrored walls of a silk mercer, and, startled at the sight, dashes through the first court,—carrying perhaps a few yards upon its back some red-faced, nankeen-gaitered little stockbroker, whose spattered small clothes are for a time unregarded in the mighty rush of drovers, butchers, dogs, and idlers.

Now such is the real Greenwich pensioner. When I say _real_, I mean one who abhors London worse than he does a Frenchman; who thinks there is nothing to be seen in it, unless, indeed, it be Nelson’s tomb, in St Paul’s, or the “Ship” public-house, in Tooley Street. London is to him a never-failing source of merriment; that is, whilst he is out of it. He sits at Greenwich, and looking as sagely as a starling ere he snaps at a fly, at the piled-up clouds of smoke hanging over the metropolis, or, indeed, almost propped upon its chimney-pots, and, stretching forth his stick, significantly points them out to his former shipmates, asking them if they do not think “there is something dark over there—something of an ‘ox-eye’ to the west?” He, indeed, never ventures to London, unless it be for a fresh supply of tobacco, or to pay a quarterly visit to his grand-daughter, the upper housemaid in a gentleman’s family,—and who, indeed, thinks with horror upon his call, because the neighbours laugh at the cocked hat and the shoe-buckles of her relative; but principally because Richard, the baker’s young man, declares he hates all sailors. The visit is never a very lengthened one, especially if the girl lives far to the west; for her grandfather has to call upon Will Somebody, who set up, with his prize-money, a public-house in Wapping. So off he starts, hurries up the Strand, touches his hat from a point of principle as he nears Somerset House; puts out more canvas, and away for Temple Bar. The pensioner has not yet, however, sat for his picture.

We have all read of crabs being despoiled of their claws, locusts of their entrails, and turtles of their brains, receiving in lieu thereof a pellet of cotton, and yet retaining life, and appearing, in the words of the experimentalising and soft-hearted naturalist, “very lively and comfortable.”[10] Now, the real Greenwich pensioner distances all these; he is, indeed, an enigma: nature knows not what to make of him. He hath been suspended, like a school-boy’s bob-cherry, a hundred times over the chaps of death, and yet still been snatched away by the hand of Providence—to whom, indeed, his many hurts and dangers have especially endeared him. Ye of the “_land_ interest,” ye soft-faced young sparks, who think with terror upon a razor on a frosty morning,—ye suffering old gentlemen, who pause at a linen-draper’s, and pass the flannel between your fingers, as time verges towards October—ye martyrs to a winter cough, ye racked with a quarterly toothache—all ye of household ailings, look upon this hacked, shivered piece of clay, this Greenwich pensioner:—consider of how many of his powers he is despoiled—see where the cutlass and the boarding-spike have ploughed up and pierced his flesh; see where the bullet has glanced, singeing by; and when you have reckoned up—if they are to be reckoned—his many scars, above all, look at his hard, contented, weather-barnacled face, and then, gentle spectators, complain of your rheums, your joint-twitchings, and your corns!

Footnote 10:

See _Vaillant_ and _Redi_.

Why, this Greenwich pensioner is in himself a record of the last forty years’ war. He is a breathing volume of naval history: not an event but is somewhere indented in him with steel or lead: he has been the stick in which the English Mars has notched his cricket matches, when twenty-four pounders were balls, and mainmasts wickets. See, in his blinded eye is Howe’s victory on the glorious First of June; that stump of what was once an arm is Nile; and in his wooden leg read Trafalgar. As to his scars, a gallant action, or a desperate cutting out is noted in every one of them. And what was the old fellow’s only wish, as with a shattered knee he lay in the cock-pit under the surgeon’s hand—what was his earnest supplication to the wet-eyed messmate who bore him down the hatchway? Simply that he would save him one of the splinters of the mainmast of the _Victory_, to make of it a leg for Sundays! His wish was granted; and at Greenwich, always on the seventh day, and also on the 21st of October, is he to be seen, propped upon the inestimable splinter, which from labour, time, and beeswax, has taken the dark glossiness of mahogany. What a face he has! What a certain consciousness of his superiority on his own element at times puffs out his lip, and gives a sudden twitch to his head! But ask him in what quarter sets the wind—and note, how with his one eye he will glance at you from top to toe; and, without ever raising his head or hand to make a self-inquiry, answers you at once, as though it was a question he was already prepared for! And so, indeed, he is; it being his first business, on rising, to consult the weather. The only way to gain his entire confidence, is at once frankly to avow your utter ignorance, and his superiority; and then, after he has leered at you with an eye in which there is a meeting of contempt, good-humour, and self-importance, he is wholly your own; and will straightway launch into the South Seas, coast along the shores of Guinea,—where, by-the-bye, he will tell you he once fell in love with a negress, who, however, jilted him for the cook—and then he will launch out about Admiral Duncan—take you a voyage with him round Cape Horn, where a mermaid appeared, and sang a song to the ship’s crew; and who, indeed, blew aside all the musket shots that were ungallantly fired at her in requital of her melody. But our pensioner has one particular story; hear him through that, suffer yourself to be wholly astounded at its recital, and, if you were not a landsman, he would instantly greet you as his dearest friend. The heroes of this same story are, our pensioner and a shark: a tremendous shark that used to be the terror of the harbour of St Thomas’s. Upon this shark, and the piece of the mainmast of the _Victory_, is our pensioner content to rest all his importance during his life, and his fame with posterity. He will tell you that he, being caterer of the mess, let fall a piece of beef out at the port-hole, which this terrible shark received into its jaws, and twisted its body most provokingly at the delicious mouthful. Hereupon our pensioner—it was before, he reminds you, he had lost a limb—asks leave of the first lieutenant (for the captain was ashore) to have a bout with the shark: leave being granted, all the crew are quickly in the shrouds, and upon the hammock netting, to see Tom “tackle the shark.” Our pensioner now enters into a minute detail of how, having armed himself with a long knife, he jumped overboard, dived under the shark, whom he saw approaching with distended jaws, and inflicted a tremendous wound with the knife in the belly of the fish; this is repeated thrice, when the shark turns itself upon its back—a boat is let down, and both the conqueror and the conquered are quickly received upon deck. You are doubtless astonished at this; he, however, adds to your surprise by telling you that the mess regaled off the piece of beef recovered from the fish; be more astounded at this, although mingle no doubt in your astonishment, and he will straightway promise some day to treat your eyes with a sight of a set of chequer men, cut from the very dorsal bone of the immolated shark! To be the hearer of a sailor’s tale is something like undergoing the ancient ordeal of red-hot ploughshares; be innocent of unbelief, and you may, as was held, journey in safety; doubt the smallest point, and you are quickly withered into nought.

What an odd contrast to his early life is the state of a Greenwich pensioner! It is as though a part of the angry and foaming sea should lie stagnant in a bathing tub. All his business is to recount his former adventures—to plod about, and look with a disdainful eye at trees and bricks and mortar; or, when he would indulge in a serious fit of spleen, to walk down to the river’s side, and let his gall feed upon the mishaps of London apprentices, who, fearless of consequences, may have ventured some five miles from home in _not_ a “trim-built wherry.” A Greenwich pensioner fresh from sea is a most preposterous creature; he gets up every morning for a week, a month, and still finds himself in the same place; he knows not what to make of it—he feels the strangeness of his situation, and would, had he the patience and the wit, liken himself to a hundred unsettled things. Compare him to a hippopotamus in a gentleman’s park, and he would tell you he had in his day seen a hippopotamus, and then, with a good-natured grunt, acquiesce in the resemblance; or to a jolly-boat in a flower garden; or to a sea-gull in the cage of a canary; or to a porpoise upon a hearthrug; or to a boatswain’s whistle in a nursery; or to a marling-spike in a milliner’s workroom; or a tar-barrel in a confectioner’s; with any one or all of these misplaced articles would our unsettled pensioner sympathise, until time shall have reconciled him to his asylum; and even then his fancy, like the shells upon our mantelpiece, will sound of the distant and the dangerous ocean. At Greenwich, however, the mutilated old sailor has time enough to indulge in the recollection of his early days, and, with what wisdom he may, to make up his mind to meet in another world those whom his arm may have sent thither long before. Death, at length, gently lays the veteran upon his back—his last words, as the sailor puts his withered hand upon his heart, are “All’s well,” and sea and earth have passed away. His body, which had been for forty years a bulwark to the land, now demands of it but “two paces of the vilest earth”; and if aught could spring from the tomb characteristic of its inmate, from the grave of the pensioner would arise the stout, unbending oak—it would be his fitting monument; and the carolling of the birds in its branches would be his loud, his artless epitaph.

The Greenwich pensioner, wherever we meet with him, is a fine, quaint memento of our national greatness, and our fortunate locality. We should look upon him as the representative of Neptune, and bend our spirit towards him accordingly. But that is not sufficient; we have individual acknowledgments to make to him for the comforts of a long safety. Let us but consider, as we look at his wooden supporter, that if it had not been for his leg the cannon-ball might have scattered us in our tea parlour—the bullet which deprived him of his orb of vision might have stricken _Our Village_ from our hand whilst ensconced in our study; the cutlass which cleaved his shoulder might have demolished our china vase, or our globe of golden fish:—instead of which, hemmed round by such walls of stout and honest flesh, we have lived securely, participating in every peaceful and domestic comfort, and neither heard the roar of the cannon nor seen its smoke. Shakespeare has compared England to “a swan’s nest” in the “world’s pool”: let us be nautical in our similes, and liken her to a single lemon kernel in a huge bowl of punch: who is it that has prevented the kernel from being ladled down the throat of despotism, from becoming but an atom of the great, loathsome mass?—our Greenwich pensioner. Who has kept our houses from being transformed into barracks and our cabbage markets into parades?—again, and again, let it be answered, the Greenwich pensioner. Reader, if the next time you see the tar, you should perchance have with you your wife and smiling family, think that if their tenderness has never been shocked by scenes of blood and terror, you owe such quietude to a Greenwich pensioner. Indeed, I know not if a triennial progress of the Greenwich establishment through the whole kingdom would not be attended with the most beneficial effects—fathers would teach their little ones to lisp thanksgivings unto God that they were born in England, as reminded of their happy superiority by the withered form of every Greenwich pensioner.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE DRILL SERGEANT

SHALL we view our subject through the glasses of philosophy? Precious microscopic glasses, by which we look into the exquisite order of a bee’s weapon, which shames the ruggedness of that vaunted wonder of man’s hands—a Whitechapel needle. By which the superfine coat of the unworthy appears but as a vile complication of coarse hemp-strings; by which we look into the heart that to the naked eye displays a tenanted cherub, with voice of music and wings of light, but find a weak-eyed little monster, with squeak of mouse and pinions of leather. O, glorious spectacles! which show palaces not entirely as resting-places for divinities—many laurels as nettles, stinging what they are fancied to adorn—Fame’s trumpet, a penny whistle blown by Asthma—the awful person of Ceremony, a Merry-Andrew stricken grave—a grand review-day, a game at ninepins on an extensive scale—a levee, a triumph of the laceman and jeweller—a court ode, a verbose receipt for wages—“honourable gentleman,” convicted scoundrel—“learned friend,” stupid opponent—a prison, a temporary retirement from noise—a glass of spring water, a “cup of sack”—an ugly face, God’s own handiwork—a handsome one, nothing more—noble blood, of the same hue as a carter’s—a black parish coffin, a couch of crystal—a grave, a place of rest—consecrated earth, the whole globe—a tombstone, work for the mason—a pompous epitaph, the toil of a liar! This transformation—or rather, this showing of reality—is the result of using the glasses of philosophy. Without the common microscope we could not know how certain insects respired, whether at the mouth or shoulders; wanting philosophy’s optic, we should be in like ignorance of the source of being in some men—for all exist not by the same laws. To the naked eye, indeed, there appears no difference; but to the spectacled orb of philosophy it is shown that many men respire, not by inward organisation, but by external and adventitious instruments. Let those who are sceptical on this position consider for a moment the bearing of a thorough-paced coxcomb: does he breathe from his lungs? No; but from his habiliments. His coat, cravat, boots—yea, his spurs, are the sources of his being, his dignity, his action. Nay, some men take all their life from a riband at their button-hole, or a garter at their leg.—Our Drill Sergeant takes it from his rattan.

I know that much of this may be deemed foreign to the purpose. To those who so conclude, I say—A common wire-dancer gives not his grand feat without many little nick-nack preparations. When we visit the Egyptian Hall, that grand emporium of monsters, we do not step from the pavement into the show-room, but are wisely made to thread two or three passages for the better excitation of our feelings. And shall my Drill Sergeant have not the common observance paid to a mermaid? I trust I have more respect for my subject, and the army in general. If any one of my readers, when he glanced at the title, thought to meet with the Sergeant standing bolt upright at the beginning of the line, like the sentinel at Buckingham Gate, I luxuriate in his disappointment.

To be candid: I had laid down no form for my beginning; so I thought a caper or two upon philosophy would not be amiss, trusting eventually to drop upon my subject. This is a trick frequently played by ——. However, to business.

We must contemplate the Drill Sergeant at a distance: there is no closing with him. A painter would decline a chair in the tiger’s den, asserting that he could take the animal’s stripes equally well through the bars. Even so will I take the stripes of our Sergeant. First, to consider his appearance, or rather the discipline by which his “thews and muscles” deport themselves. He has a vile, cat-like leer of the eye, that makes us retreat back a few paces, and rub our palms, to be assured the knave has not secretly placed in one of them a shilling. We tremble, and for once are afraid to meet the king’s countenance—(I am adding to the awful attributes of the Drill Sergeant the fearful privilege of recruiting). We shrink, lest he has mentally approved of us as being worthy of ball cartridge. He glances towards our leg, and we cannot but feel that he is thinking how it would look in a black gaiter. At this moment we take courage, and, valiantly lifting off our hat, pass our luxuriant curls through our four fingers—we are petrified; for we see by his chuckle that he has already doomed our tresses to the scissors of the barrack-barber. We are at once about to take to our legs, when, turning round, we see something under a middle-sized man, looking over our head. On this we feel our safety, and triumph in the glory of five feet one. Something must always be allowed for weakness—something for vanity; which, indeed, philosophers denominate the greatest weakness. Hence all these cogitations, foolishly attributed by the little individual to the Sergeant, arise from the civil man’s self-conceit; the Sergeant always treating with ineffable contempt persons of a certain size. And here may be remarked the astonishing capacity of our Sergeant in judging of human altitude. Ere George Bidder can enumerate the virtues of King Ferdinand, our Sergeant will sum up the exact height of a man, duly allowing for his pumps and silk stockings. Strive to mystify the question, and the ability of the Sergeant mocks the endeavour; for, he will, on a minute’s notice, resolve how many feet of martial flesh are in a complete square, after including the triangle, fife, and drummer lads, and deducting some of the boy officers. Thus, five-feet-eight reader, if thou wouldst enjoy the pranks of the Sergeant, unmolested by his eye, teach thy leg to mimic lameness: or, if easier, cough consumptively.