Shirley
"Ay, there it is. The lad is a mak' of an alien amang us. His father
would never have talked i' that way.--Go back to Antwerp, where you were
born and bred, mauvaise tête!"
"Mauvaise tête vous-même; je ne fais que mon devoir; quant à vos
lourdauds de paysans, je m'en moque!"
"En ravanche, mon garçon, nos lourdauds de paysans se moqueront de toi;
sois en certain," replied Yorke, speaking with nearly as pure a French
accent as Gérard Moore.
"C'est bon! c'est bon! Et puisque cela m'est égal, que mes amis ne s'en
inquiètent pas."
"Tes amis! Où sont-ils, tes amis?"
"Je fais écho, où sont-ils? et je suis fort aise que l'écho seul y
répond. Au diable les amis! Je me souviens encore du moment où mon père
et mes oncles Gérard appellèrent autour d'eux leurs amis, et Dieu sait
si les amis se sont empressés d'accourir à leur secours! Tenez, M.
Yorke, ce mot, ami, m'irrite trop; ne m'en parlez plus."
"Comme tu voudras."
And here Mr. Yorke held his peace; and while he sits leaning back in his
three-cornered carved oak chair, I will snatch my opportunity to sketch
the portrait of this French-speaking Yorkshire gentleman.
CHAPTER IV.
MR. YORKE (_continued_).
A Yorkshire gentleman he was, _par excellence_, in every point; about
fifty-five years old, but looking at first sight still older, for his
hair was silver white. His forehead was broad, not high; his face fresh
and hale; the harshness of the north was seen in his features, as it was
heard in his voice; every trait was thoroughly English--not a Norman
line anywhere; it was an inelegant, unclassic, unaristocratic mould of
visage. Fine people would perhaps have called it vulgar; sensible people
would have termed it characteristic; shrewd people would have delighted
in it for the pith, sagacity, intelligence, the rude yet real
originality marked in every lineament, latent in every furrow. But it
was an indocile, a scornful, and a sarcastic face--the face of a man
difficult to lead, and impossible to drive. His stature was rather tall,
and he was well made and wiry, and had a stately integrity of port;
there was not a suspicion of the clown about him anywhere.
I did not find it easy to sketch Mr. Yorke's person, but it is more
difficult to indicate his mind. If you expect to be treated to a
Perfection, reader, or even to a benevolent, philanthropic old gentleman
in him, you are mistaken. He has spoken with some sense and with some
good feeling to Mr. Moore, but you are not thence to conclude that he
always spoke and thought justly and kindly.
Mr. Yorke, in the first place, was without the organ of veneration--a
great want, and which throws a man wrong on every point where veneration
is required. Secondly, he was without the organ of comparison--a
deficiency which strips a man of sympathy; and thirdly, he had too
little of the organs of benevolence and ideality, which took the glory
and softness from his nature, and for him diminished those divine
qualities throughout the universe.
The want of veneration made him intolerant to those above him--kings and
nobles and priests, dynasties and parliaments and establishments, with
all their doings, most of their enactments, their forms, their rights,
their claims, were to him an abomination, all rubbish; he found no use
or pleasure in them, and believed it would be clear gain, and no damage
to the world, if its high places were razed, and their occupants crushed
in the fall. The want of veneration, too, made him dead at heart to the
electric delight of admiring what is admirable; it dried up a thousand
pure sources of enjoyment; it withered a thousand vivid pleasures. He
was not irreligious, though a member of no sect; but his religion could
not be that of one who knows how to venerate. He believed in God and
heaven; but his God and heaven were those of a man in whom awe,
imagination, and tenderness lack.
The weakness of his powers of comparison made him inconsistent; while he
professed some excellent general doctrines of mutual toleration and
forbearance, he cherished towards certain classes a bigoted antipathy.
He spoke of "parsons" and all who belonged to parsons, of "lords" and
the appendages of lords, with a harshness, sometimes an insolence, as
unjust as it was insufferable. He could not place himself in the
position of those he vituperated; he could not compare their errors with
their temptations, their defects with their disadvantages; he could not
realize the effect of such and such circumstances on himself similarly
situated, and he would often express the most ferocious and tyrannical
wishes regarding those who had acted, as he thought, ferociously and
tyrannically. To judge by his threats, he would have employed arbitrary,
even cruel, means to advance the cause of freedom and equality.
Equality! yes, Mr. Yorke talked about equality, but at heart he was a
proud man--very friendly to his workpeople, very good to all who were
beneath him, and submitted quietly to be beneath him, but haughty as
Beelzebub to whomsoever the world deemed (for he deemed no man) his
superior. Revolt was in his blood: he could not bear control; his
father, his grandfather before him, could not bear it, and his children
after him never could.
The want of general benevolence made him very impatient of imbecility,
and of all faults which grated on his strong, shrewd nature; it left no
check to his cutting sarcasm. As he was not merciful, he would sometimes
wound and wound again, without noticing how much he hurt, or caring how
deep he thrust.
As to the paucity of ideality in his mind, that can scarcely be called a
fault: a fine ear for music, a correct eye for colour and form, left him
the quality of taste; and who cares for imagination? Who does not think
it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute, akin to weakness, perhaps
partaking of frenzy--a disease rather than a gift of the mind?
Probably all think it so but those who possess, or fancy they possess,
it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be
cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be
dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely
if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it
imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some
tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which you do not
feel. An illusion, of course; but the fanatics cling to their dream, and
would not give it for gold.
As Mr. Yorke did not possess poetic imagination himself, he considered
it a most superfluous quality in others. Painters and musicians he could
tolerate, and even encourage, because he could relish the results of
their art; he could see the charm of a fine picture, and feel the
pleasure of good music; but a quiet poet--whatever force struggled,
whatever fire glowed, in his breast--if he could not have played the man
in the counting-house, of the tradesman in the Piece Hall, might have
lived despised, and died scorned, under the eyes of Hiram Yorke.
And as there are many Hiram Yorkes in the world, it is well that the
true poet, quiet externally though he may be, has often a truculent
spirit under his placidity, and is full of shrewdness in his meekness,
and can measure the whole stature of those who look down on him, and
correctly ascertain the weight and value of the pursuits they disdain
him for not having followed. It is happy that he can have his own bliss,
his own society with his great friend and goddess Nature, quite
independent of those who find little pleasure in him, and in whom he
finds no pleasure at all. It is just that while the world and
circumstances often turn a dark, cold side to him--and properly, too,
because he first turns a dark, cold, careless side to them--he should be
able to maintain a festal brightness and cherishing glow in his bosom,
which makes all bright and genial for him; while strangers, perhaps,
deem his existence a Polar winter never gladdened by a sun. The true
poet is not one whit to be pitied, and he is apt to laugh in his sleeve
when any misguided sympathizer whines over his wrongs. Even when
utilitarians sit in judgment on him, and pronounce him and his art
useless, he hears the sentence with such a hard derision, such a broad,
deep, comprehensive, and merciless contempt of the unhappy Pharisees who
pronounce it, that he is rather to be chidden than condoled with. These,
however, are not Mr. Yorke's reflections, and it is with Mr. Yorke we
have at present to do.
I have told you some of his faults, reader: as to his good points, he
was one of the most honourable and capable men in Yorkshire; even those
who disliked him were forced to respect him. He was much beloved by the
poor, because he was thoroughly kind and very fatherly to them. To his
workmen he was considerate and cordial. When he dismissed them from an
occupation, he would try to set them on to something else, or, if that
was impossible, help them to remove with their families to a district
where work might possibly be had. It must also be remarked that if, as
sometimes chanced, any individual amongst his "hands" showed signs of
insubordination, Yorke--who, like many who abhor being controlled, knew
how to control with vigour--had the secret of crushing rebellion in the
germ, of eradicating it like a bad weed, so that it never spread or
developed within the sphere of his authority. Such being the happy state
of his own affairs, he felt himself at liberty to speak with the utmost
severity of those who were differently situated, to ascribe whatever was
unpleasant in their position entirely to their own fault, to sever
himself from the masters, and advocate freely the cause of the
operatives.
Mr. Yorke's family was the first and oldest in the district; and he,
though not the wealthiest, was one of the most influential men. His
education had been good. In his youth, before the French Revolution, he
had travelled on the Continent. He was an adept in the French and
Italian languages. During a two years' sojourn in Italy he had collected
many good paintings and tasteful rarities, with which his residence was
now adorned. His manners, when he liked, were those of a finished
gentleman of the old school; his conversation, when he was disposed to
please, was singularly interesting and original; and if he usually
expressed himself in the Yorkshire dialect, it was because he chose to
do so, preferring his native Doric to a more refined vocabulary, "A
Yorkshire burr," he affirmed, "was as much better than a cockney's lisp
as a bull's bellow than a raton's squeak."
Mr. Yorke knew every one, and was known by every one, for miles round;
yet his intimate acquaintances were very few. Himself thoroughly
original, he had no taste for what was ordinary: a racy, rough
character, high or low, ever found acceptance with him; a refined,
insipid personage, however exalted in station, was his aversion. He
would spend an hour any time in talking freely with a shrewd workman of
his own, or with some queer, sagacious old woman amongst his cottagers,
when he would have grudged a moment to a commonplace fine gentleman or
to the most fashionable and elegant, if frivolous, lady. His preferences
on these points he carried to an extreme, forgetting that there may be
amiable and even admirable characters amongst those who cannot be
original. Yet he made exceptions to his own rule. There was a certain
order of mind, plain, ingenuous, neglecting refinement, almost devoid of
intellectuality, and quite incapable of appreciating what was
intellectual in him, but which, at the same time, never felt disgust at
his rudeness, was not easily wounded by his sarcasm, did not closely
analyze his sayings, doings, or opinions, with which he was peculiarly