you brought yourself to by work, work, work! You persisted in
working, you overdid it, Pressure came on, and you were done for!
This consideration was very potent in many quarters, but nowhere
more so than among the young clerks and partners who had never been
in the slightest danger of overdoing it. These, one and all
declared, quite piously, that they hoped they would never forget
the warning as long as they lived, and that their conduct might be
so regulated as to keep off Pressure, and preserve them, a comfort
to their friends, for many years.'
Just my case - if I had only known it - when I was quietly basking
in the sunshine in my Kentish meadow!
But while I so rested, thankfully recovering every hour, I had
experiences more odd than this. I had experiences of spiritual
conceit, for which, as giving me a new warning against that curse
of mankind, I shall always feel grateful to the supposition that I
was too far gone to protest against playing sick lion to any stray
donkey with an itching hoof. All sorts of people seemed to become
vicariously religious at my expense. I received the most
uncompromising warning that I was a Heathen: on the conclusive
authority of a field preacher, who, like the most of his ignorant
and vain and daring class, could not construct a tolerable sentence
in his native tongue or pen a fair letter. This inspired
individual called me to order roundly, and knew in the freest and
easiest way where I was going to, and what would become of me if I
failed to fashion myself on his bright example, and was on terms of
blasphemous confidence with the Heavenly Host. He was in the
secrets of my heart, and in the lowest soundings of my soul - he! -
and could read the depths of my nature better than his A B C, and
could turn me inside out, like his own clammy glove. But what is
far more extraordinary than this - for such dirty water as this
could alone be drawn from such a shallow and muddy source - I found
from the information of a beneficed clergyman, of whom I never
heard and whom I never saw, that I had not, as I rather supposed I
had, lived a life of some reading, contemplation, and inquiry; that
I had not studied, as I rather supposed I had, to inculcate some
Christian lessons in books; that I had never tried, as I rather
supposed I had, to turn a child or two tenderly towards the
knowledge and love of our Saviour; that I had never had, as I
rather supposed I had had, departed friends, or stood beside open
graves; but that I had lived a life of 'uninterrupted prosperity,'
and that I needed this 'check, overmuch,' and that the way to turn
it to account was to read these sermons and these poems, enclosed,
and written and issued by my correspondent! I beg it may be
understood that I relate facts of my own uncommercial experience,
and no vain imaginings. The documents in proof lie near my hand.
Another odd entry on the fly-leaf, of a more entertaining
character, was the wonderful persistency with which kind
sympathisers assumed that I had injuriously coupled with the so
suddenly relinquished pursuit, those personal habits of mine most
obviously incompatible with it, and most plainly impossible of
being maintained, along with it. As, all that exercise, all that
cold bathing, all that wind and weather, all that uphill training -
all that everything else, say, which is usually carried about by
express trains in a portmanteau and hat-box, and partaken of under
a flaming row of gas-lights in the company of two thousand people.
This assuming of a whole case against all fact and likelihood,
struck me as particularly droll, and was an oddity of which I
certainly had had no adequate experience in life until I turned
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that curious fly-leaf.
My old acquaintances the begging-letter writers came out on the
fly-leaf, very piously indeed. They were glad, at such a serious
crisis, to afford me another opportunity of sending that Postoffice
order. I needn't make it a pound, as previously insisted
on; ten shillings might ease my mind. And Heaven forbid that they
should refuse, at such an insignificant figure, to take a weight
off the memory of an erring fellow-creature! One gentleman, of an
artistic turn (and copiously illustrating the books of the
Mendicity Society), thought it might soothe my conscience, in the
tender respect of gifts misused, if I would immediately cash up in
aid of his lowly talent for original design - as a specimen of
which he enclosed me a work of art which I recognized as a tracing
from a woodcut originally published in the late Mrs. Trollope's
book on America, forty or fifty years ago. The number of people
who were prepared to live long years after me, untiring benefactors
to their species, for fifty pounds apiece down, was astonishing.
Also, of those who wanted bank-notes for stiff penitential amounts,
to give away:- not to keep, on any account.
Divers wonderful medicines and machines insinuated recommendations
of themselves into the fly-leaf that was to have been so blank. It
was specially observable that every prescriber, whether in a moral
or physical direction, knew me thoroughly - knew me from head to
heel, in and out, through and through, upside down. I was a glass
piece of general property, and everybody was on the most
surprisingly intimate terms with me. A few public institutions had
complimentary perceptions of corners in my mind, of which, after
considerable self-examination, I have not discovered any
indication. Neat little printed forms were addressed to those
corners, beginning with the words: 'I give and bequeath.'
Will it seem exaggerative to state my belief that the most honest,
the most modest, and the least vain-glorious of all the records
upon this strange fly-leaf, was a letter from the self-deceived
discoverer of the recondite secret 'how to live four or five
hundred years'? Doubtless it will seem so, yet the statement is
not exaggerative by any means, but is made in my serious and
sincere conviction. With this, and with a laugh at the rest that
shall not be cynical, I turn the Fly-leaf, and go on again.
CHAPTER XXXVII - A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE
One day this last Whitsuntide, at precisely eleven o'clock in the
forenoon, there suddenly rode into the field of view commanded by
the windows of my lodging an equestrian phenomenon. It was a
fellow-creature on horseback, dressed in the absurdest manner. The
fellow-creature wore high boots; some other (and much larger)
fellow-creature's breeches, of a slack-baked doughy colour and a
baggy form; a blue shirt, whereof the skirt, or tail, was puffily
tucked into the waist-band of the said breeches; no coat; a red
shoulder-belt; and a demi-semi-military scarlet hat, with a
feathered ornament in front, which, to the uninstructed human
vision, had the appearance of a moulting shuttlecock. I laid down
the newspaper with which I had been occu
pied, and surveyed the
fellow-man in question with astonishment. Whether he had been
sitting to any painter as a frontispiece for a new edition of
'Sartor Resartus;' whether 'the husk or shell of him,' as the
esteemed Herr Teufelsdroch might put it, were founded on a jockey,
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on a circus, on General Garibaldi, on cheap porcelain, on a toy
shop, on Guy Fawkes, on waxwork, on gold-digging, on Bedlam, or on
all, - were doubts that greatly exercised my mind. Meanwhile, my
fellow-man stumbled and slided, excessively against his will, on
the slippery stones of my Covent-garden street, and elicited
shrieks from several sympathetic females, by convulsively
restraining himself from pitching over his horse's head. In the
very crisis of these evolutions, and indeed at the trying moment
when his charger's tail was in a tobacconist's shop, and his head
anywhere about town, this cavalier was joined by two similar
portents, who, likewise stumbling and sliding, caused him to
stumble and slide the more distressingly. At length this Gilpinian
triumvirate effected a halt, and, looking northward, waved their
three right hands as commanding unseen troops, to 'Up, guards! and
at 'em.' Hereupon a brazen band burst forth, which caused them to
be instantly bolted with to some remote spot of earth in the
direction of the Surrey Hills.
Judging from these appearances that a procession was under way, I
threw up my window, and, craning out, had the satisfaction of
beholding it advancing along the streets. It was a Teetotal
procession, as I learnt from its banners, and was long enough to
consume twenty minutes in passing. There were a great number of
children in it, some of them so very young in their mothers' arms
as to be in the act of practically exemplifying their abstinence
from fermented liquors, and attachment to an unintoxicating drink,
while the procession defiled. The display was, on the whole,
pleasant to see, as any good-humoured holiday assemblage of clean,
cheerful, and well-conducted people should be. It was bright with
ribbons, tinsel, and shoulder-belts, and abounded in flowers, as if
those latter trophies had come up in profusion under much watering.
The day being breezy, the insubordination of the large banners was
very reprehensible. Each of these being borne aloft on two poles
and stayed with some half-dozen lines, was carried, as polite books
in the last century used to be written, by 'various hands,' and the
anxiety expressed in the upturned faces of those officers, -
something between the anxiety attendant on the balancing art, and
that inseparable from the pastime of kite-flying, with a touch of
the angler's quality in landing his scaly prey, - much impressed
me. Suddenly, too, a banner would shiver in the wind, and go about
in the most inconvenient manner. This always happened oftenest
with such gorgeous standards as those representing a gentleman in
black, corpulent with tea and water, in the laudable act of
summarily reforming a family, feeble and pinched with beer. The
gentleman in black distended by wind would then conduct himself
with the most unbecoming levity, while the beery family, growing
beerier, would frantically try to tear themselves away from his
ministration. Some of the inscriptions accompanying the banners
were of a highly determined character, as 'We never, never will
give up the temperance cause,' with similar sound resolutions
rather suggestive to the profane mind of Mrs. Micawber's 'I never
will desert Mr. Micawber,' and of Mr. Micawber's retort, 'Really,
my dear, I am not aware that you were ever required by any human
being to do anything of the sort.'
At intervals, a gloom would fall on the passing members of the
procession, for which I was at first unable to account. But this I
discovered, after a little observation, to be occasioned by the
coming on of the executioners, - the terrible official beings who
were to make the speeches by-and-by, - who were distributed in open
carriages at various points of the cavalcade. A dark cloud and a
sensation of dampness, as from many wet blankets, invariably
preceded the rolling on of the dreadful cars containing these
headsmen; and I noticed that the wretched people who closely
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followed them, and who were in a manner forced to contemplate their
folded arms, complacent countenances, and threatening lips, were
more overshadowed by the cloud and damp than those in front.
Indeed, I perceived in some of these so moody an implacability
towards the magnates of the scaffold, and so plain a desire to tear
them limb from limb, that I would respectfully suggest to the
managers the expediency of conveying the executioners to the scene
of their dismal labours by unfrequented ways, and in closely-tilted
carts, next Whitsuntide.
The procession was composed of a series of smaller processions,
which had come together, each from its own metropolitan district.
An infusion of allegory became perceptible when patriotic Peckham
advanced. So I judged, from the circumstance of Peckham's
unfurling a silken banner that fanned heaven and earth with the
words, 'The Peckham Lifeboat.' No boat being in attendance, though
life, in the likeness of 'a gallant, gallant crew,' in nautical
uniform, followed the flag, I was led to meditate on the fact that
Peckham is described by geographers as an inland settlement, with
no larger or nearer shore-line than the towing-path of the Surrey
Canal, on which stormy station I had been given to understand no
lifeboat exists. Thus I deduced an allegorical meaning, and came
to the conclusion, that if patriotic Peckham picked a peck of
pickled poetry, this WAS the peck of pickled poetry which patriotic
Peckham picked.
I have observed that the aggregate procession was on the whole
pleasant to see. I made use of that qualified expression with a
direct meaning, which I will now explain. It involves the title of
this paper, and a little fair trying of teetotalism by its own
tests. There were many people on foot, and many people in vehicles
of various kinds. The former were pleasant to see, and the latter
were not pleasant to see; for the reason that I never, on any
occasion or under any circumstances, have beheld heavier
overloading of horses than in this public show. Unless the
imposition of a great van laden with from ten to twenty people on a
single horse be a moderate tasking of the poor creature, then the
temperate use of horses was immoderate and cruel. From the
smallest and lightest horse to the largest and heaviest, there were
many instances in which the beast of burden was so shamefully
overladen, that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals have frequently interposed in less gross cases.
Now, I have always held that there may be, and that there
unquestionab
ly is, such a thing as use without abuse, and that
therefore the total abolitionists are irrational and wrong-headed.
But the procession completely converted me. For so large a number
of the people using draught-horses in it were so clearly unable to
use them without abusing them, that I perceived total abstinence
from horseflesh to be the only remedy of which the case admitted.
As it is all one to teetotalers whether you take half a pint of
beer or half a gallon, so it was all one here whether the beast of
burden were a pony or a cart-horse. Indeed, my case had the
special strength that the half-pint quadruped underwent as much
suffering as the half-gallon quadruped. Moral: total abstinence
from horseflesh through the whole length and breadth of the scale.
This pledge will be in course of administration to all teetotal
processionists, not pedestrians, at the publishing office of 'All
the Year Round,' on the 1st day of April, 1870.
Observe a point for consideration. This procession comprised many
persons in their gigs, broughams, tax-carts, barouches, chaises,
and what not, who were merciful to the dumb beasts that drew them,
and did not overcharge their strength. What is to be done with
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those unoffending persons? I will not run amuck and vilify and
defame them, as teetotal tracts and platforms would most assuredly
do, if the question were one of drinking instead of driving: I
merely ask what is to be done with them! The reply admits of no
dispute whatever. Manifestly, in strict accordance with teetotal
doctrines, THEY must come in too, and take the total abstinence
from horseflesh pledge. It is not pretended that those members of
the procession misused certain auxiliaries which in most countries
and all ages have been bestowed upon man for his use, but it is
undeniable that other members of the procession did. Teetotal
mathematics demonstrate that the less includes the greater; that
the guilty include the innocent, the blind the seeing, the deaf the
hearing, the dumb the speaking, the drunken the sober. If any of
the moderate users of draught-cattle in question should deem that
there is any gentle violence done to their reason by these elements
of logic, they are invited to come out of the procession next
Whitsuntide, and look at it from my window.
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