Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/378

21, 1860.] to learn that it was a globe, in the first place. It seemed to fit into the history of our race in an age when soldiers were led to the coast of Portugal as to the bounds of creation, and told with awe to awe-struck listeners, on their return, how they had seen where the ocean poured over into hell, and had with their own eyes beheld the flames shooting up from the fiery gulf which surrounds our world. When a gorgeous sunset thus impressed the imagination of men on their travels, the age was sure to be one of exploration and wild adventure; and there could not but be a succession of adventurers till the rovers had at least sailed round the globe, and ascertained its great continents and main seas. The old mystery being cleared up to this point, the character of mere adventure would merge by degrees in that of travel and speculation for some definite purpose, till it assumed a thoroughly business-like aspect. So the matter seemed to be settled half a century ago. There were Christian missionaries in many wild regions of all continents, and all the world honoured them. There were men devoted to geographical discovery, and an enthusiastic sympathy attended them, whether struggling with the Ice-king in his Polar strongholds or with the fiery demons of the Desert, dealing sunstrokes and launching the simoom among tropical sands. Then more and more scientific objects arose; and more and more men went forth to accomplish them. Art also bethought itself of roving for subjects; and, where Burckhardt could make no notes but under cover of his burnouse, and knew that to show a scrap of paper would be destruction to his aims, if not to himself, artists now sit to sketch, even in the heart of Edom, and have only to choose their model figures out of the crowd that is admiring them. One painter is in despair at the colouring of the desert at Tadmor or the Great Oasis: and another suffers under the same chagrin among the Altaï mountains, and on the steppes of Tartary. But the artists, and the savans, and the missionaries, all go on business: and we had given up the idea of any man roving in unknown and perilous places for pleasure, or without any reason at all. In our century, however, an adventurer of the mediæval type has appeared—in a way very puzzling to some good people, very painful to a few others, and inexpressibly delightful to the genuine heart of Old England, which still enjoys sending forth St. Georges to fight dragons. Our Knight-Adventurer has been abundantly maligned in his time, as a singular specimen of any type of character always is. He was an “Ugly Duck” (as Andersen has it) to the last to some very literal-minded men who are now gone; and there are some left who cannot help being convinced that a man who goes among barbaric tribes, and becomes a ruler over some, and makes war upon others, must be a mammon-seeker or a man-hunter—a buccaneer who should not be countenanced by respectable society; but, on the whole, the hero has met with recognition. The Sovereign has honoured him; Parliament has repeatedly rebuked his accusers by rejecting their charges; and he has the noble following which attends upon all Representative Men.

It is possible that Sir James Brooke’s cast of mind may have been more or less determined by his being born on the other side of the world, and near the tropics, though his parents were English. His father was in the Civil Service of the East India Company; and a very business-like Englishman he seems to have been, having no notion of young men wandering about the world without knowing exactly what they aim at. The mother sympathised with her son, as the mothers of heroes usually do. When he did not see his way to the enterprise he had set his mind upon, he was wont to open his mind to his mother as they paced the garden-walk at South Broom, or sauntered by the brook among the wild flowers, which he remembered under the palms in Borneo. His “loved mother” was his nearest and dearest friend as long as she lived—a fact, by the way, which ought to have had some weight with the most prosaic of his critics. A man can hardly be devoured with the thirst for money and blood who has a “loved mother” for his bosom friend.

From these parents he was early separated for a time, as the children of the Company’s servants necessarily were fifty years ago. He went from school to school in England, not gaining much learning, it appears, nor probably much praise from the masters. Putting together the grammar of his compositions before he had cultivated his literary tastes by study, and the short time he was at certain schools, and his known roving propensities, and his peculiar laugh when his old school-mates claim the honour of intercourse with him at Norwich and other schools, one has an impression that he was perhaps a naughty boy,—fond of running away, and more given to Robinson Crusoe than the Latin grammar. His domestic and friendly correspondence in after life is perfectly charming,—in expression as well as in sense and sentiment; but all task-work with the pen, all formal statement to meet official eyes, or be read by the public, betrays the secret of the failure of the grammar-school part of his education. What appearance he made in his parents’ eyes when they renewed acquaintance with him on their return to England, we do not know. He was then fourteen; and we can easily imagine that he might be the pride and joy of his mother’s heart. His frank, healthful, eager, thoughtful face; his activity of frame; his guileless speech; his tenderness of heart;—all these things won everybody who came near him; and his father, we must hope, among the rest. The doubt was about his steadiness. It is a pity his father could not know that he would live to manifest a pertinacity like that of Columbus in pursuit of his enterprises—a pertinacity in action, I mean; for he has been wont to say, in letters to his intimates, that he would throw up all his objects, and fix himself for life beside some lake, or in some mountain in Italy or Switzerland, or in some retreat in England, and leave the struggle of life to other men. If Columbus had written as many letters as James Brooke, we might have found this sort of dream among the rest,—a dream of seclusion and repose haunting the harassed and disappointed man, who cannot make other men see the ground of his confidence. And if we had not seen Brooke’s letters, we should have supposed