Young Benjamin Franklin; or, The right road through life, A boy's book on a boy's own subject

Front matter

.^0 r fl f

EATIOJIAL ANIMaI.8.

A STORY TO SHOW HOW YOUNG BENJAMIN LEARNED THE PRINCIPLES

Preface

It was Walter Scott who first raised his voice against the folly of writing down to the child, saying, wisely enough, that the true object among authors for th^ young should be to write the child up to the man. As people talk broken EngHsh to Frenchmen, and nurses prattle the baby dialect to babies, so it was once thought that boys' books should be essentially puerile — as puerile in subject and puerile in style as the tales about "Don't-care Harry" (who was torn to pieces by a hungry lion merely because he would persist in declaring that he "didn't care" about certain things in life), and such-like tender bits of verdure that used to grace the good old English spelling-books of some quarter of a century back.

Conformably to the Walter Scott theory, this volume has not been penned with the object of showing boys the dehght of slaying a buffalo or a bison, nor yet with the view of impressing upon them the nobility of fighting or fagging at school. The one purpose of the book is to give young men some sense of the principles that should guide a prudent, honorable, generous, and refined gentleman through the world. It does not previii PREFACE.

tend to teach youth the wonders of optics, chemistry, or astronomy, but to open young eyes to the universe of beauty that encompasses every enlightened spirit, and to give the young knights of the present day some faint idea of the chivahy of Hfe, as well as to develop in them, some little sense of, and taste for, the poetry of action and the grace of righteous conduct.

It has long appeared to the author that the modern system of education is based on the fallacy that to manufacture a wise man is necessarily to rear a good one. The intellect, however, is but the servant of the conscience (the impulses or propensities of mankind being merely the executive^ rather than the governing and originating faculty of our natures) ; and hence the grand mistake of the teachers of our time has been to develop big brains at the cost of little hearts — to cram with science and to ignore poetry — to force the scholar with a perfect hot-bed of languages, and yet to stunt the worthy with an utter want of principle ; in fine, to rear Palmers, Dean Pauls, Kedpaths, Davisons, Robsons, Hughes, Watts, and a whole host of well-educated and hypocritical scoundrels, rather than a race of fine upright gentlemen. Society, however, seems to have had its fill of the mechanics' institute mania ; the teachy-preachy fever appears to have come to a crisis ; and, in the lull of the phrensy, the author of the i^reseut book wishes to say his say upon the means of worldly welfare, the laws of worldly

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happiness, and the rules of worldly duty to the young men of the present generation.

As to the handling of the subject, some explanation is needed. Uncle Benjamin, who is made the expounder of the Franklinian philosophy to the boy Benjamin himself, is not a purely imaginary character. He has been elaborated into greater importance here, certainly, than he assumes in the biography of his nephew ; but this has been done upon that Shaksperian rule of art, which often throws an internal moral princi|)le into an external dramatis 2^erso7ia / and as the witches in Macbeth are merely the outward embodiment, in a weird and shadowy form, of Macbeth's own ambition, and have obviously been introduced into the play with the view of giving a kind of haunted and fatalistic air to a bloody and devouring passion (a passion, indeed, that, if represented really and crudely, rather than ideally and grandly, as it is, would have made the tragedy an object of execration instead of sympathy — a bit of filthy literality out of the Royal Newgate Calendar, instead of a fine supernatural bit of fate, overshadowed with the same sense of doom as an old Greek play) ; even so, in a small way, has Uncle Ben here been made the exponent of the Franklin view of life, rather than his nephew Benjamin to be the first to conceive and develop it. Some may urge that, by this means, the genius of Franklin is reduced from its original, cast-iron, economic character, to a mere sec-

PREFACE.

ond-rate form of prudential mind. Nevertheless, there must have been soine reason for the printerembassador's " Poor Richardism ;" say it was organization, temperament, or idiosyncrasy, if you will, that made him the man he was ; still the replication to such a plea is, that even these are now acknowledged to be more or less derivative qualities, in which the family type is often found either exaggerated into genius or dwarfed into idiocy. Hence it is believed that no very great historic violence has been committed here in making a member of the Franklin family the father of Benjamin Franklin's character, even as his parents were assuredly the progenitors of his " lithiasisJ^ Moreover, Uncle Benjamin was his godfather, and that in the days when godfathership was regarded as a far different duty (the duty of moral and religious supervision) from the mere bit of silver-spoon-and-fork-odand that it is now. Again, from the printer's own description of the character of his uncle, it is plain that Uncle Ben was not the man to ignore any duty he had taken upon himself Besides, the old man lived in the house with Benjamin's father, and had himself only one son (who was grown up and settled as a cutler in the town) ; so that, as the uncle was comparatively childless, it has been presumed that the instinctive fondness of age for youth might have led the old boy to be taken with the budding intellect and principles of his little nephew . and namesake, and thus to have exceeded his

PREFACE. xi

sponsorial duties so far as to have become the boy's best friend and counselor, loving him like a son, and training him like a novice. -Farther we know that Uncle Benjamin was a man of some observation and learning ; he appears also to have been a person of considerable leisure, and perhaps of some little means (for we do not hear of his following any occupation in America) ; so that, when we remember how slight is the addition that even the profoundest geniuses make to the knowledge-fund of the world, and how little advance those who take even the longest strides make upon such as have gone before them, we can not but admit that Franklin must have got the substratum of his knowledge and principles somewhere — since, born under different circumstances, he would have been a wholly different man. Surely, then, there is no great offense offered to truth in endeavoring to explain artistically how Benjamin Franklin became the man he was, nor any great wrong done to history in using Uncle Ben as the means of making out to youths what was the peculiar " Old Richard" philosophy that distinguished the printer-sage in after life. The main object was to give the young reader a sense of the early teachings Benjamin Franklin when a boy might have received (and doubtlessly did receive) from his old Non-conformist uncle, and accordingly the latter has been made, if not the virtual hero, at least the prime mover of the incidents in the present book.

xii PREFACE.

Those critics who know the difficulties of the problem with which the author has had to deal — who are acquainted with the many speculations that have been advanced as to the seat and sources of the intellectual and other pleasures of our nature, will readily discern that the principles here enunciated have not been " decanted" out of previous aesthetic treatises, but are peculiar to the present work, and spring — naturally, it is hoped — from the idiosyncrasy of the characters enunciating them. Again, it is but fair to enforce that the views here given as to the means by which labor is made pleasant have sprung out of the author's previous investigations rather than his readings, and so, indeed, has that part of the book which seeks to impress the reader with a livelier sense of the claims of the luckless, and even the criminal, to our respect and earnest consideration. Principles, in fine, that have cost the author a life to acquire, are often expressed in a chapter, and expressed, it is hoped, sufficiently in keeping with the current of the story to render it difficult for the reader to detect where the function of dramatizing ends and that of propounding begins.

The "jail 23roper" described in this book is hardly the jail proper belonging to little Benjamin Franklin's time.

Nor has the deviation from historic propriety been made unadvisedly. It is generally as idle as it is morbid to paint past horrors. To have set forth the atrocities and iniquities practiced in the

PREFACE. xili

British jails a century and a half ago would have been following in the track of the pernicious French school of literature, where every thing is sacrificed to melodramatic intensity, and which is forever striving to excite a spasm rather than gratify a taste.

The genius of true English landscape painting, on the contrary, is " repose ;" and the genius of modern English jDoetry is " repose" too — a kind of Sabbath feeling which turns the heart from the grossnesses and vanities of human life, and lets the work-day spirit loose among the quiet, shady, and healthful beauties of nature. The intense school and the repose school are the two far-distant extremes of all art, and they differ as much from each other as the sweet refreshment of an evening by one's own fireside does from the heated stimulus of a tavern debauch.

For these artistic reasons, then, the dead bones of the old jail iniquities and cruelties have not been disinterred and set up as a bugaboo here. Such a picture might have been true to the time, but mere Uteral truth is a poor thing after all. Why, Gustave le Gray's wonderful photograph of the Sunlight on the Sea, that is hanging before our eyes as we write, is as true as " Mangnall's Questions;" and yet what a picturesque barbarism, and even falsity it is ! It no more renders what only human genius can seize and paint — the expression, the feeling, the soul of such a scene — than the camera obscura can fac-simile the human xiv PREFACE.

eye in a portrait, or give us the faintest glimmer of the high Vandyke quality — the profound thinking, talking pupils of that grand old countenance in our National Gallery.

But the real object which the author of this book had in view was to wake not only his boy hero up to a sense of duty, but other boys also, and to let them know (even without doing any great violence to the natural truth of things) what prison iniquities are still daily wrought in the land in which we live. The jail proj^er of the present story (though the scene is laid in British America before the declaration of Indej)endence, and dates a century and a half back) is a mere transcrijit of a well-known jail now standing in the first city in the world in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty. The details given here are the bare literalities noted by tlie author only a few months back, and prmted in his account of the metropolitan prisons in that wretched fragment of a well-meant scheme, the " Great World of London." There, if the skeptic needs proof, he can get chapter and verse, and learn that many of the facts here given were recorded in the presence of some of the visiting justices themselves. Jails may have been bad a hundred years ago, but this plague-spot of the first city in the world seems to the author worse than all, because it still goes on after Howard's labors — after Brougham's reforms — after Sheriff Watson's fine industrial schools ; yes, there it stands, giving the

PEEFACE. XV

lie to all our May -day meetings, our ragged schools, our city missions, and pretended love of the destitute, the weak, and the suffering. We no longer wonder that the atrocities of the French Bastille roused the Parisian people to rush off in a body and tumble the old prison-citadel down into a heap of ruins ; and if Tothill Fields lay across the Channel, the same indignant outrage might perhaps be again enacted. But here, good easy citizens as we are, we pay our jDoor-rates ; we call ourselves miserable sinners, in a loud voice, once a week, from a cosy pew ; our " good lady" belongs to a district visiting society, and distributes tracts in the back slums ; we put our check into the plate, after a bottle or two of port, at a charity dinner; and, this done, we are selfcontent.

We once passed a quiet half hour with Mr. Calcraft, the hangman, and in the course of the conversation he alluded to 3frs. Calcraft ! The words no sooner fell upon the ear than a world of wonder filled the brain. Even Ae, then, had somebody to care about him. There was somebody to hug and caress him before he left his home in that scratch wig and fur cap in which we saw him come disguised to Newgate (for the "roughs" had threatened to shoot him), and carrying that small ominous satchel basket, at two in the morning, on the day of Bousfield's execution.

The wretched lads in Tothill Fields prison are worse off than Calcraft himself. They have nobody in the world to care about them.

xvi PREFACE.

Nobody ! Yet, stay, we forget ; there is this same Calcraft to look after a good many of them.

In fine — to drop the author and speak in prop7'id 2^ersond — I have attempted to write a book which, while it treated of some subject that a boy would be likely to attend to, should at the same time admit of enunciating such principles as I wished my oion boy, and other boys as good, and as honest, and earnest as he, to carry mth them through life ; and yet I have striven, while writing it, to do no positive violence to truth either in the love of one's art or in the heat of one's " purpose." In plain English, I have sought to be consistent to nature — true to the spirit, perhaps, rather than the letter of things — even though I had a peculiar scheme to work out. And now, such as it is, I give the present volume to the youth of the time, in the hope that it may serve them for what I myself felt the want of more than any thing after leaving "Westminster School, as a young man crammed to the tip of one's tongue with Latin and Greek and nothing else, viz., for something like a guide to what Uncle Ben calls " the right road through life."

Hy. M.

YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

PAKT I.

YOUNG ben's love OF THE SEA, AND HOW HE WAS AVEANED EKOM IT.