Shirley (7 page)

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 at ease, and, consequently, which he peculiarly preferred. He was lord amongst such characters. They,

while submitting implicitly to his influence, never acknowledged, because they never reflected on, his

superiority; they were quite tractable, therefore, without running the smallest danger of being servile; and their unthinking, easy, artless insensibility was as acceptable, because as convenient, to Mr. Yorke as that of the chair he sat on, or of the floor he trod.

It will have been observed that he was not quite uncordial with Mr. Moore. He had two or three reasons for entertaining a faint partiality to that gentleman. It may sound odd, but the first of these was that Moore spoke English with a foreign, and French with a perfectly pure, accent; and that his dark,

thin face, with its fine though rather wasted lines, had a most anti-British and anti-Yorkshire look.

These points seem frivolous, unlikely to influence a character like Yorke's; but the fact is they recalled old, perhaps pleasurable, associations—they brought back his travelling, his youthful days.

He had seen, amidst Italian cities and scenes, faces like Moore's; he had heard, in Parisian cafés and

theatres, voices like his. He was young then, and when he looked at and listened to the alien, he seemed young again.

Secondly, he had known Moore's father, and had had dealings with him. That was a more

substantial, though by no means a more agreeable tie; for as his firm had been connected with Moore's in business, it had also, in some measure, been implicated in its losses.

Thirdly, he had found Robert himself a sharp man of business. He saw reason to anticipate that he

would, in the end, by one means or another, make money; and he respected both his resolution and

acuteness—perhaps, also, his hardness. A fourth circumstance which drew them together was that of

Mr. Yorke being one of the guardians of the minor on whose estate Hollow's Mill was situated; consequently Moore, in the course of his alterations and improvements, had frequent occasion to consult him.

As to the other guest now present in Mr. Yorke's parlour, Mr. Helstone, between him and his host

there existed a double antipathy—the antipathy of nature and that of circumstances. The free-thinker

hated the formalist; the lover of liberty detested the disciplinarian. Besides, it was said that in former years they had been rival suitors of the same lady.

Mr. Yorke, as a general rule, was, when young, noted for his preference of sprightly and dashing

women: a showy shape and air, a lively wit, a ready tongue, chiefly seemed to attract him. He never,

however, proposed to any of these brilliant belles whose society he sought; and all at once he seriously fell in love with and eagerly wooed a girl who presented a complete contrast to those he had

hitherto noticed—a girl with the face of a Madonna; a girl of living marble—stillness personified. No

matter that, when he spoke to her, she only answered him in monosyllables; no matter that his sighs

seemed unheard, that his glances were unreturned, that she never responded to his opinions, rarely smiled at his jests, paid him no respect and no attention; no matter that she seemed the opposite of everything feminine he had ever in his whole life been known to admire. For him Mary Cave was perfect, because somehow, for some reason—no doubt he had a reason—he loved her.

Mr. Helstone, at that time curate of Briarfield, loved Mary too—or, at any rate, he fancied her.