Basil | Page 5

life was sunshine without a
cloud!
I might attempt, in this place, to sketch my own character as it was at
that time. But what man can say--I will sound the depth of my own
vices, and measure the height of my own virtues; and be as good as his
word? We can neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but
cannot know us: God alone judges and knows too. Let my character
appear--as far as any human character can appear in its integrity, in this
world--in my actions, when I describe the one eventful passage in my
life which forms the basis of this narrative. In the mean time, it is first
necessary that I should say more about the members of my family. Two
of them, at least, will be found important to the progress of events in
these pages. I make no attempt to judge their characters: I only describe
them--whether rightly or wrongly, I know not--as they appeared to me.
III.
I always considered my father--I speak of him in the past tense, because
we are now separated for ever; because he is henceforth as dead to me
as if the grave had closed over him--I always considered my father to
be the proudest man I ever knew; the proudest man I ever heard of. His
was not that conventional pride, which the popular notions are fond of

characterising by a stiff, stately carriage; by a rigid expression of
features; by a hard, severe intonation of voice; by set speeches of
contempt for poverty and rags, and rhapsodical braggadocio about rank
and breeding. My father's pride had nothing of this about it. It was that
quiet, negative, courteous, inbred pride, which only the closest
observation could detect; which no ordinary observers ever detected at
all.
Who that observed him in communication with any of the farmers on
any of his estates--who that saw the manner in which he lifted his hat,
when he accidentally met any of those farmers' wives--who that noticed
his hearty welcome to the man of the people, when that man happened
to be a man of genius--would have thought him proud? On such
occasions as these, if he had any pride, it was impossible to detect it.
But seeing him when, for instance, an author and a new-made peer of
no ancestry entered his house together--observing merely the entirely
different manner in which he shook hands with each--remarking that
the polite cordiality was all for the man of letters, who did not contest
his family rank with him, and the polite formality all for the man of
title, who did--you discovered where and how he was proud in an
instant. Here lay his fretful point. The aristocracy of rank, as separate
from the aristocracy of ancestry, was no aristocracy for him. He was
jealous of it; he hated it. Commoner though he was, he considered
himself the social superior of any man, from a baronet up to a duke,
whose family was less ancient than his own.
Among a host of instances of this peculiar pride of his which I could
cite, I remember one, characteristic enough to be taken as a sample of
all the rest. It happened when I was quite a child, and was told me by
one of my uncles now dead--who witnessed the circumstance himself,
and always made a good story of it to the end of his life.
A merchant of enormous wealth, who had recently been raised to the
peerage, was staying at one of our country houses. His daughter, my
uncle, and an Italian Abbe were the only guests besides. The merchant
was a portly, purple-faced man, who bore his new honours with a
curious mixture of assumed pomposity and natural good-humour The

Abbe was dwarfish and deformed, lean, sallow, sharp-featured, with
bright bird-like eyes, and a low, liquid voice. He was a political refugee,
dependent for the bread he ate, on the money he received for teaching
languages. He might have been a beggar from the streets; and still my
father would have treated him as the principal guest in the house, for
this all-sufficient reason--he was a direct descendant of one of the
oldest of those famous Roman families whose names are part of the
history of the Civil Wars in Italy.
On the first day, the party assembled for dinner comprised the
merchant's daughter, my mother, an old lady who had once been her
governess, and had always lived with her since her marriage, the new
Lord, the Abbe, my father, and my uncle. When dinner was announced,
the peer advanced in new-blown dignity, to offer his arm as a matter of
course to my mother. My father's pale face flushed crimson in a
moment. He touched the magnificent merchant-lord on the