Lavengro by George Borrow (read me a book txt) 📕

have recourse to extreme severity in order to protect themselves from the insolence and mutinous spirit of the men⁠—“He is no better than ourselves: shoot him, bayonet him, or fling him overboard!” they say of some obnoxious individual raised above them by his merit. Soldiers and sailors in general, will bear any amount of tyranny from a lordly sot, or the son of a man who has “plenty of brass”⁠—their own term⁠—but will mutiny against the just orders of a skilful and brave officer who “is no better than themselves.” There was the affair of the Bounty, for example: Bligh was one of the best seamen that ever trod deck, and one of the bravest of men; proofs of his seamanship he gave by steering, amidst dreadful weather, a deeply laden boat for nearly four thousand miles over an almost unknown ocean⁠—of his bravery, at the fight of Copenhagen, one of the most desperate ever fought, of which after Nelson he was the hero: he was, moreover, not an unkind man; but the crew of the Bounty, mutinied against him, and set him half naked in an open boat, with certain of his men who remained faithful to him, and ran away with the ship. Their principal motive for doing so was an idea, whether true or groundless the writer cannot say, that Bligh was “no better than themselves;” he was certainly neither a lord’s illegitimate, nor possessed of twenty thousand pounds. The writer knows what he is writing about, having been acquainted in his early years with an individual who was turned adrift with Bligh, and who died about the year ’22, a lieutenant in the navy, in a provincial town in which the writer was brought up.374 The ringleaders in the mutiny were two scoundrels, Christian and Young, who had great influence with the crew, because they were genteelly connected. Bligh, after leaving the Bounty, had considerable difficulty in managing the men who had shared his fate, because they considered themselves “as good men as he,” notwithstanding, that to his conduct and seamanship they had alone to look, under Heaven, for salvation from the ghastly perils that surrounded them. Bligh himself, in his journal, alludes to this feeling. Once,375 when he and his companions landed on a desert island, one of them said, with a mutinous look, that he considered himself “as good a man as he;” Bligh, seizing a cutlass, called upon him to take another and defend himself, whereupon the man said that Bligh was going to kill him, and made all manner of concessions; now why did this fellow consider himself as good a man as Bligh? Was he as good a seaman? no, nor a tenth part as good. As brave a man? no, nor a tenth part as brave; and of these facts he was perfectly well aware, but bravery and seamanship stood for nothing with him, as they still stand with thousands of his class; Bligh was not genteel by birth or money, therefore Bligh was no better than himself. Had Bligh, before he sailed, got a twenty-thousand pound prize in the lottery, he would have experienced no insolence from this fellow, for there would have been no mutiny in the Bounty. “He is our betters,” the crew would have said, “and it is our duty to obey him.”

The wonderful power of gentility in England is exemplified in nothing more than in what it is producing amongst Jews, Gypsies and Quakers. It is breaking up their venerable communities. All the better, someone will say. Alas! alas! It is making the wealthy Jews forsake the synagogue for the opera-house, or the gentility chapel, in which a disciple of Mr. Platitude, in a white surplice, preaches a sermon at noonday from a desk, on each side of which is a flaming taper. It is making them abandon their ancient literature, their Mischna, their Gemara, their Zohar, for gentility novels, The Young Duke, the most unexceptionably genteel book ever written, being the principal favourite. It makes the young Jew ashamed of the young Jewess, it makes her ashamed of the young Jew. The young Jew marries an opera dancer, or if the dancer will not have him, as is frequently the case, the cast-off Miss of the honourable Spencer So-and-so. It makes the young Jewess accept the honourable offer of a cashiered lieutenant of the Bengal Native Infantry; or, if such a person does not come forward, the dishonourable offer of a cornet of a regiment of crack hussars. It makes poor Jews, male and female, forsake the synagogue for the sixpenny theatre or penny hop; the Jew to take up with an Irish female of loose character, and the Jewess with a musician of the Guards, or the Tipperary servant of Captain Mulligan. With respect to the gypsies, it is making the women what they never were before⁠—harlots; and the men what they never were before⁠—careless fathers and husbands. It has made the daughter of Ursula, the chaste, take up with the base drummer of a wild-beast show. It makes Gorgiko Brown, the gypsy man, leave his tent and his old wife, of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. “Brother,” said Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, “there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a teakettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and water, and attempts to enter into conversation with the company about politics and business; the company flout him or give him the cold shoulder, or perhaps complain to the landlord, who comes and asks him what business he has in the parlour, telling him if he wants to drink