o gentility; he will not receive
money from Francis Ardry, and go to Brighton with the sister of Annette
Le Noir, though there is nothing ungenteel in borrowing money from a
friend, even when you never intend to repay him, and something poignantly
genteel in going to a watering-place with a gay young Frenchwoman; but he
has no objection, after raising twenty pounds by the sale of that
extraordinary work 'Joseph Sell,' to set off into the country, mend
kettles under hedgerows, and make pony and donkey shoes in a dingle.
Here, perhaps, some plain, well-meaning person will cry--and with much
apparent justice--how can the writer justify him in this act? What
motive, save a love for what is low, could induce him to do such things?
Would the writer have everybody who is in need of recreation go into the
country, mend kettles under hedges, and make pony shoes in dingles? To
such an observation the writer would answer that Lavengro had an
excellent motive in doing what he did, but that the writer is not so
unreasonable as to wish everybody to do the same. It is not everybody
who can mend kettles. It is not everybody who is in similar
circumstances to those in which Lavengro was. Lavengro flies from London
and hack authorship, and takes to the roads from fear of consumption; it
is expensive to put up at inns, and even at public-houses, and Lavengro
has not much money; so he buys a tinker's cart and apparatus, and sets up
as tinker, and subsequently as blacksmith; a person living in a tent, or
in anything else, must do something or go mad; Lavengro had a mind, as he
himself well knew, with some slight tendency to madness, and had he not
employed himself, he must have gone wild; so to employ himself he drew
upon one of his resources, the only one available at the time.
Authorship had nearly killed him, he was sick of reading, and had besides
no books; but he possessed the rudiments of an art akin to tinkering; he
knew something of smithery, having served a kind of apprenticeship in
Ireland to a fairy smith; so he draws upon his smithery to enable him to
acquire tinkering, and through the help which it affords him, owing to
its connection with tinkering, he speedily acquires that craft, even as
he had speedily acquired Welsh, owing to its connection with Irish, which
language he possessed; and with tinkering he amuses himself until he lays
it aside to resume smithery. A man who has any innocent resource, has
quite as much right