Mark Rutherfords Deliverance | Page 4

matter how ill they may be they
must maintain the liveliness of manner which is necessary to procure
acceptance. I fell in with one poor fellow whose line was something
like my own. I became acquainted with him through sitting side by side
with him at the House. He lived in lodgings in Goodge Street, and
occasionally I walked with him as far as the corner of Tottenham Court
Road, where I caught the last omnibus northward. He wrote like me a
"descriptive article" for the country, but he also wrote every now and
then--a dignity to which I never attained--a "special" for London. His
"descriptive articles" were more political than mine, and he was obliged
to be violently Tory. His creed, however, was such a pure piece of
professionalism, that though I was Radical, and was expected to be so,
we never jarred, and often, as we wandered homewards, we exchanged
notes, and were mutually useful, his observations appearing in my
paper, and mine in his, with proper modifications. How he used to roar
in the Gazette against the opposite party, and yet I never heard anything
from him myself but what was diffident and tender. He had acquired, as
an instrument necessary to him, an extraordinarily extravagant style,
and he laid about him with a bludgeon, which inevitably descended on
the heads of all prominent persons if they happened not to be
Conservative, no matter what their virtues might be. One peculiarity,
however, I noted in him. Although he ought every now and then, when
the subject was uppermost, to have flamed out in the Gazette on behalf
of the Church, I never saw a word from him on that subject. He drew
the line at religion. He did not mind acting his part in things secular, for
his performances were, I am sure, mostly histrionic, but there he
stopped. The unreality of his character was a husk surrounding him, but
it did not touch the core. It was as if he had said to himself, "Political
controversy is nothing to me, and, what is more, is so uncertain that it
matters little whether I say yes or no, nor indeed does it matter if I say
yes AND no, and I must keep my wife and children from the

workhouse; but when it comes to the relationship of man to God, it is a
different matter." His altogether outside vehemence and hypocrisy did
in fact react upon him, and so far from affecting harmfully what lay
deeper, produced a more complete sincerity and transparency extending
even to the finest verbal distinctions. Over and over again have I heard
him preach to his wife, almost with pathos, the duty of perfect
exactitude in speech in describing the commonest occurrences. "Now,
my dear, IS that so?" was a perpetual remonstrance with him; and he
always insisted upon it that there is no training more necessary for
children than that of teaching them not merely to speak the truth in the
ordinary, vulgar sense of the term, but to speak it in a much higher
sense, by rigidly compelling, point by point, a correspondence of the
words with the fact external or internal. He never would tolerate in his
own children a mere hackneyed, borrowed expression, but demanded
exact portraiture; and nothing vexed him more than to hear one of them
spoil and make worthless what he or she had seen, by reporting it in
some stale phrase which had been used by everybody. This refusal to
take the trouble to watch the presentment to the mind of anything
which had been placed before it, and to reproduce it in its own lines and
colours was, as he said, nothing but falsehood, and he maintained that
the principal reason why people are so uninteresting is not that they
have nothing to say. It is rather that they will not face the labour of
saying in their own tongue what they have to say, but cover it up and
conceal it in commonplace, so that we get, not what they themselves
behold and what they think, but a hieroglyphic or symbol invented as
the representative of a certain class of objects or emotions, and as
inefficient to represent a particular object or emotion as x or y to set
forth the relation of Hamlet to Ophelia. He would even exercise his
children in this art of the higher truthfulness, and would purposely
make them give him an account of something which he had seen and
they had seen, checking them the moment he saw a lapse from
originality. Such was the Tory correspondent of the Gazette.
I ought to say, by way of apology for him, that in his day it signified
little or nothing whether Tory or Whig was in power.