Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

The butler returned, with the request that I would follow him. He led me up the grand staircase, through a passage at right angles to that which led to the old lady’s room, up a narrow circular staircase at the end of the passage, across a landing, then up a straight steep narrow stair, upon which two people could not pass without turning sideways and then squeezing. At the top of this I found myself in a small cylindrical lobby, papered in blocks of stone. There was no door to be seen. It was lighted by a conical skylight. My conductor gave a push against the wall. Certain blocks yielded, and others came forward. In fact a door revolved on central pivots, and we were admitted to a chamber crowded with books from floor to ceiling, arranged with wonderful neatness and solidity. From the centre of the ceiling, whence hung a globular lamp, radiated what I took to be a number of strong beams supporting a floor above; for our ancestors put the ceiling above the beams, instead of below them, as we do, and gained in space if they lost in quietness. But I soon found out my mistake. Those radiating beams were in reality book-shelves. For on each side of those I passed under I could see the gilded backs of books standing closely ranged together. I had never seen the connivance before, nor, I presume, was it to be seen anywhere else.

“How does Mr Stoddart reach those books?” I asked my conductor.

“I don’t exactly know, sir,” whispered the butler. “His own man could tell you, I dare say. But he has a holiday to-day; and I do not think he would explain it either; for he says his master allows no interference with his contrivances. I believe, however, he does not use a ladder.”

There was no one in the room, and I saw no entrance but that by which we had entered. The next moment, however, a nest of shelves revolved in front of me, and there Mr Stoddart stood with outstretched hand.

“You have found me at last, Mr Walton, and I am glad to see you,” he said.

He led me into an inner room, much larger than the one I had passed through.

“I am glad,” I replied, “that I did not know, till the butler told me, your unwillingness to be intruded upon; for I fear, had I known it, I should have been yet longer a stranger to you.”

“You are no stranger to me. I have heard you read prayers, and I have heard you preach.”

“And I have heard you play; so you are no stranger to me either.”

“Well, before we say another word,” said Mr Stoddart, “I must just say one word about this report of my unsociable disposition.—I encourage it; but am very glad to see you, notwithstanding.—Do sit down.”

I obeyed, and waited for the rest of his word.

“I was so bored with visits after I came, visits which were to me utterly uninteresting, that I was only too glad when the unusual nature of some of my pursuits gave rise to the rumour that I was mad. The more people say I am mad, the better pleased I am, so long as they are satisfied with my own mode of shutting myself up, and do not attempt to carry out any fancies of their own in regard to my personal freedom.”

Upon this followed some desultory conversation, during which I took some observations of the room. Like the outer room, it was full of books from floor to ceiling. But the ceiling was divided into compartments, harmoniously coloured.

“What a number of books you have!” I observed.

“Not a great many,” he answered. “But I think there is hardly one of them with which I have not some kind of personal acquaintance. I think I could almost find you any one you wanted in the dark, or in the twilight at least, which would allow me to distinguish whether the top edge was gilt, red, marbled, or uncut. I have bound a couple of hundred or so of them myself. I don’t think you could tell the work from a tradesman’s. I’ll give you a guinea for the poor-box if you pick out three of my binding consecutively.”

I accepted the challenge; for although I could not bind a book, I considered myself to have a keen eye for the outside finish. After looking over the backs of a great many, I took one down, examined a little further, and presented it.

“You are right. Now try again.”

Again I was successful, although I doubted.

“And now for the last,” he said.

Once more I was right.

“There is your guinea,” said he, a little mortified.

“No,” I answered. “I do not feel at liberty to take it, because, to tell the truth, the last was a mere guess, nothing more.”

Mr Stoddart looked relieved.

“You are more honest than most of your profession,” he said. “But I am far more pleased to offer you the guinea upon the smallest doubt of your having won it.”

“I have no claim upon it.”

“What! Couldn’t you swallow a small scruple like that for the sake of the poor even? Well, I don’t believe YOU could.—Oblige me by taking this guinea for some one or other of your poor people. But I AM glad you weren’t sure of that last book. I am indeed.”

I took the guinea, and put it in my purse.

“But,” he resumed, “you won’t do, Mr Walton. You’re not fit for your profession. You won’t tell a lie for God’s sake. You won’t dodge about a little to keep all right between Jove and his weary parishioners. You won’t cheat a little for the sake of the poor! You wouldn’t even bamboozle a little at a bazaar!”

“I should not like to boast of my principles,” I answered; “for the moment one does so, they become as the apples of Sodom. But assuredly I would not favour a fiction to keep a world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth, yes, The Truth that saves the world.”

“You are right, I daresay. You are more sure about it than I am though.”

“Let us agree where we can,” I said, “first of all; and that will make us able to disagree, where we must, without quarrelling.”

“Good,” he said—“Would you like to see my work shop?”

“Very much, indeed,” I answered, heartily.

“Do you take any pleasure in applied mechanics?”

“I used to do so as a boy. But of course I have little time now for anything of the sort.”

“Ah! of course.”

He pushed a compartment of books. It yielded, and we entered a small closet. In another moment I found myself leaving the floor, and in yet a moment we were on the floor of an upper room.

“What a nice way of getting up-stairs!” I said.

“There is no other way of getting to this room,” answered Mr Stoddart. “I built it myself; and there was no room for stairs. This is my shop. In my library I only read my favourite books. Here I read anything I want to read; write anything I want to write; bind my books; invent machines; and amuse myself generally. Take a chair.”

I obeyed, and began to look about me.

The room had many books in detached book-cases. There were various benches against the walls between,—one a bookbinder’s; another a carpenter’s; a third had a turning-lathe; a fourth had an iron vice fixed on it, and was evidently used for working in metal. Besides these, for it was a large room, there were several tables with chemical apparatus upon them, Florence-flasks, retorts, sand-baths, and such like; while in a corner stood a furnace.

“What an accumulation of ways and means you have about you!” I said; “and all, apparently, to different ends.”

“All to the same end, if my object were understood.”

“I presume I must ask no questions as to that object?”

“It would take time to explain. I have theories of education. I think a man has to educate himself into harmony. Therefore he must open every possible window by which the influences of the All may come in upon him. I do not think any man complete without a perfect development of his mechanical faculties, for instance, and I encourage them to develop themselves into such windows.”

“I do not object to your theory, provided you do not put it forward as a perfect scheme of human life. If you did, I should have some questions to ask you about it, lest I should misunderstand you.”

He smiled what I took for a self-satisfied smile. There was nothing offensive in it, but it left me without anything to reply to. No embarrassment followed, however, for a rustling motion in the room the same instant attracted my attention, and I saw, to my surprise, and I must confess, a little to my confusion, Miss Oldcastle. She was seated in a corner, reading from a quarto lying upon her knees.

“Oh! you didn’t know my niece was here? To tell the truth, I forgot her when I brought you up, else I would have introduced you.”

“That is not necessary, uncle,” said Miss Oldcastle, closing her book.

I was by her instantly. She slipped the quarto from her knee, and took my offered hand.

“Are you fond of old books?” I said, not having anything better to say.

“Some old books,” she answered.

“May I ask what book you were reading?”

“I will answer you—under protest,” she said, with a smile.

“I withdraw the question at once,” I returned.

“I will answer it notwithstanding. It is a volume of Jacob Behmen.”

“Do you understand him?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“Well, I have made but little attempt,” I answered. “Indeed, it was only as I passed through London last that I bought his works; and I am sorry to find that one of the plates is missing from my copy.”

“Which plate is it? It is not very easy, I understand, to procure a perfect copy. One of my uncle’s copies has no two volumes bound alike. Each must have belonged to a different set.”

“I can’t tell you what the plate is. But there are only three of those very curious unfolding ones in my third volume, and there should be four.”

“I do not think so. Indeed, I am sure you are wrong.”

“I am glad to hear it—though to be glad that the world does not possess what I thought I only was deprived of, is selfishness, cover it over as one may with the fiction of a perfect copy.”

“I don’t know,” she returned, without any response to what I said. “I should always like things perfect myself.”

“Doubtless,” I answered; and thought it better to try another direction.

“How is Mrs Oldcastle?” I asked, feeling in its turn the reproach of hypocrisy; for though I could have suffered, I hope, in my person and goods and reputation, to make that woman other than she was, I could not say that I cared one atom whether she was in health or not. Possibly I should have preferred the latter member of the alternative; for the suffering of the lower nature is as a fire that drives the higher nature upwards. So I felt rather hypocritical when I asked Miss Oldcastle after her.

“Quite well, thank you,” she answered, in a tone of indifference, which implied either that she saw through me, or shared in my indifference. I could not tell which.

“And how is Miss Judy?” I inquired.

“A little savage, as usual.”

“Not the worse for her wetting, I hope.”

“Oh! dear no. There never was health to equal that child’s. It belongs to her savage nature.”

“I wish some of us were more of savages, then,” I returned; for I saw signs of exhaustion in her eyes which moved my sympathy.

“You don’t mean me, Mr Walton, I hope. For if you do, I assure you your interest is quite thrown away. Uncle will tell you I am as strong as an elephant.”

But here came a slight elevation of her person; and a shadow at the same moment passed over her face. I saw that she felt she ought not to have allowed herself to become the subject of conversation.

Meantime her uncle was busy at one of his benches filing away at a piece of brass fixed in the vice. He had thick gloves on. And, indeed, it had puzzled me before to think how he could have so many kinds of work, and yet keep his hands so smooth and white as they were. I could not help thinking the results could hardly be of the most useful description if they were all accomplished without some loss of whiteness and smoothness in the process. Even the feet that keep the garments clean must be washed themselves in the end.

When I glanced away from Miss Oldcastle in the embarrassment produced by the repulsion of her last manner, I saw Judy in the room. At the same moment Miss Oldcastle rose.

“What is the matter, Judy?” she said.

“Grannie wants you,” said Judy.

Miss Oldcastle left the room, and Judy turned to me. “How do you do, Mr Walton?” she said.

“Quite well, thank you, Judy,” I answered. “Your uncle admits you to his workshop, then?”

“Yes, indeed. He would feel rather dull, sometimes, without me. Wouldn’t you, Uncle Stoddart?”

“Just as the horses in the field would feel dull without the gad-fly, Judy,” said Mr Stoddart, laughing.

Judy, however, did not choose to receive the laugh as a scholium explanatory of the remark, and was gone in a moment, leaving Mr Stoddart and myself alone. I must say he looked a little troubled at the precipitate retreat of the damsel; but he recovered himself with a smile, and said to me,

“I wonder what speech I shall make next to drive you away, Mr Walton.”

“I am not so easily got rid of, Mr Stoddart,” I answered. “And as for taking offence, I don’t like it, and therefore I never take it. But tell me what you are doing now.”

“I have been working for some time at an attempt after a perpetual motion, but, I must confess, more from a metaphysical or logical point of view than a mechanical one.”

Here he took a drawing from a shelf, explanatory of his plan.

“You see,” he said, “here is a top made of platinum, the heaviest of metals, except iridium—which it would be impossible to procure enough of, and which would be difficult to work into the proper shape. It is surrounded you will observe, by an air-tight receiver, communicating by this tube with a powerful air-pump. The plate upon which the point of the top rests and revolves is a diamond; and I ought to have mentioned that the peg of the top is a diamond likewise. This is, of course, for the sake of reducing the friction. By this apparatus communicating with the top, through the receiver, I set the top in motion—after exhausting the air as far as possible. Still there is the difficulty of the friction of the diamond point upon the diamond plate, which must ultimately occasion repose. To obviate this, I have constructed here, underneath, a small steam-engine which shall cause the diamond plate to revolve at precisely the same rate of speed as the top itself. This, of course, will prevent all friction.”

“Not that with the unavoidable remnant of air, however,” I ventured to suggest.

“That is just my weak point,” he answered. “But that will be so very small!”

“Yes; but enough to deprive the top of PERPETUAL motion.”

“But suppose I could get over that difficulty, would the contrivance have a right to the name of a perpetual motion? For you observe that the steam-engine below would not be the cause of the motion. That comes from above, here, and is withdrawn, finally withdrawn.”

“I understand perfectly,” I answered. “At least, I think I do. But I return the question to you: Is a motion which, although not caused, is ENABLED by another motion, worthy of the name of a perpetual motion; seeing the perpetuity of motion has not to do merely with time, but with the indwelling of self-generative power—renewing itself constantly with the process of exhaustion?”

He threw down his file on the bench.

“I fear you are right,” he said. “But you will allow it would have made a very pretty machine.”

“Pretty, I will allow,” I answered, “as distinguished from beautiful. For I can never dissociate beauty from use.”

“You say that! with all the poetic things you say in your sermons! For I am a sharp listener, and none the less such that you do not see me. I have a loophole for seeing you. And I flatter myself, therefore, I am the only person in the congregation on a level with you in respect of balancing advantages. I cannot contradict you, and you cannot address me.”

“Do you mean, then, that whatever is poetical is useless?” I asked.

“Do you assert that whatever is useful is beautiful?” he retorted.

“A full reply to your question would need a ream of paper and a quarter of quills,” I answered; “but I think I may venture so far as to say that whatever subserves a noble end must in itself be beautiful.”

“Then a gallows must be beautiful because it subserves the noble end of ridding the world of malefactors?” he returned, promptly.

I had to think for a moment before I could reply.

“I do not see anything noble in the end,” I answered.

“If the machine got rid of malefaction, it would, indeed, have a noble end. But if it only compels it to move on, as a constable does—from this world into another—I do not, I say, see anything so noble in that end. The gallows cannot be beautiful.”

“Ah, I see. You don’t approve of capital punishments.”

“I do not say that. An inevitable necessity is something very different from a noble end. To cure the diseased mind is the noblest of ends; to make the sinner forsake his ways, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, the loftiest of designs; but to punish him for being wrong, however necessary it may be for others, cannot, if dissociated from the object of bringing good out of evil, be called in any sense a NOBLE end. I think now, however, it would be but fair in you to give me some answer to my question. Do you think the poetic useless?”

“I think it is very like my machine. It may exercise the faculties without subserving any immediate progress.”

“It is so difficult to get out of the region of the poetic, that I cannot think it other than useful: it is so widespread. The useless could hardly be so nearly universal. But I should like to ask you another question: What is the immediate effect of anything poetic upon your mind?”

“Pleasure,” he answered.

“And is pleasure good or bad?”

“Sometimes the one, sometimes the other.”

“In itself?”

“I should say so.”

“I should not.”

“Are you not, then, by your very profession, more or less an enemy of pleasure?”

“On the contrary, I believe that pleasure is good, and does good, and urges to good. CARE is the evil thing.”

“Strange doctrine for a clergyman.”

“Now, do not misunderstand me, Mr Stoddart. That might not hurt you, but it would distress me. Pleasure, obtained by wrong, is poison and horror. But it is not the pleasure that hurts, it is the wrong that is in it that hurts; the pleasure hurts only as it leads to more wrong. I almost think myself, that if you could make everybody happy, half the evil would vanish from the earth.”

“But you believe in God?”

“I hope in God I do.”

“How can you then think that He would not destroy evil at such a cheap and pleasant rate.”

“Because He wants to destroy ALL the evil, not the half of it; and destroy it so that it shall not grow again; which it would be sure to do very soon if it had no antidote but happiness. As soon as men got used to happiness, they would begin to sin again, and so lose it all. But care is distrust. I wonder now if ever there was a man who did his duty, and TOOK NO THOUGHT. I wish I could get the testimony of such a man. Has anybody actually tried the plan?”

But here I saw that I was not taking Mr Stoddart with me (as the old phrase was). The reason I supposed to be, that he had never been troubled with much care. But there remained the question, whether he trusted in God or the Bank?

I went back to the original question.

“But I should be very sorry you should think, that to give pleasure was my object in saying poetic things in the pulpit. If I do so, it is because true things come to me in their natural garments of poetic forms. What you call the POETIC is only the outer beauty that belongs to all inner or spiritual beauty—just as a lovely face—mind, I say LOVELY, not PRETTY, not HANDSOME—is the outward and visible presence of a lovely mind. Therefore, saying I cannot dissociate beauty from use, I am free to say as many poetic things—though, mind, I don’t claim them: you attribute them to me—as shall be of the highest use, namely, to embody and reveal the true. But a machine has material use for its end. The most grotesque machine I ever saw that DID something, I felt to be in its own kind beautiful; as God called many fierce and grotesque things good when He made the world—good for their good end. But your machine does nothing more than raise the metaphysical doubt and question, whether it can with propriety be called a perpetual motion or not?”

To this Mr Stoddart making no reply, I take the opportunity of the break in our conversation to say to my readers, that I know there was no satisfactory following out of an argument on either side in the passage of words I have just given. Even the closest reasoner finds it next to impossible to attend to all the suggestions in his own mind, not one of which he is willing to lose, to attend at the same time to everything his antagonist says or suggests, that he may do him justice, and to keep an even course towards his goal—each having the opposite goal in view. In fact, an argument, however simply conducted and honourable, must just resemble a game at football; the unfortunate question being the ball, and the numerous and sometimes conflicting thoughts which arise in each mind forming the two parties whose energies are spent in a succession of kicks. In fact, I don’t like argument, and I don’t care for the victory. If I had my way, I would never argue at all. I would spend my energy in setting forth what I believe—as like itself as I could represent it, and so leave it to work its own way, which, if it be the right way, it must work in the right mind,—for Wisdom is justified of her children; while no one who loves the truth can be other than anxious, that if he has spoken the evil thing it may return to him void: that is a defeat he may well pray for. To succeed in the wrong is the most dreadful punishment to a man who, in the main, is honest. But I beg to assure my reader I could write a long treatise on the matter between Mr Stoddart and myself; therefore, if he is not yet interested in such questions, let him be thankful to me for considering such a treatise out of place here. I will only say in brief, that I believe with all my heart that the true is the beautiful, and that nothing evil can be other than ugly. If it seems not so, it is in virtue of some good mingled with the evil, and not in the smallest degree in virtue of the evil.

I thought it was time for me to take my leave. But I could not bear to run away with the last word, as it were: so I said,

“You put plenty of poetry yourself into that voluntary you played last Sunday. I am so much obliged to you for it!”

“Oh! that fugue. You liked it, did you?”

“More than I can tell you.”

“I am very glad.”

“Do you know those two lines of Milton in which he describes such a performance on the organ?”

“No. Can you repeat them?”

“‘His volant touch, Instinct through all proportions, low and high, Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.’”

“That is wonderfully fine. Thank you. That is better than my fugue by a good deal. You have cancelled the obligation.”

“Do you think doing a good turn again is cancelling an obligation? I don’t think an obligation can ever be RETURNED in the sense of being got rid of. But I am being hypercritical.”

“Not at all.—Shall I tell you what I was thinking of while playing that fugue?”

“I should like much to hear.”

“I had been thinking, while you were preaching, of the many fancies men had worshipped for the truth; now following this, now following that; ever believing they were on the point of laying hold upon her, and going down to the grave empty-handed as they came.”

“And empty-hearted, too?” I asked; but he went on without heeding me.

“And I saw a vision of multitudes following, following where nothing was to be seen, with arms outstretched in all directions, some clasping vacancy to their bosoms, some reaching on tiptoe over the heads of their neighbours, and some with hanging heads, and hands clasped behind their backs, retiring hopeless from the chase.”

“Strange!” I said; “for I felt so full of hope while you played, that I never doubted it was hope you meant to express.”

“So I do not doubt I did; for the multitude was full of hope, vain hope, to lay hold upon the truth. And you, being full of the main expression, and in sympathy with it, did not heed the undertones of disappointment, or the sighs of those who turned their backs on the chase. Just so it is in life.”