Speaker 1: On being found out by William Makepeace Thackeray at the clothes.
Let us say of Queen Anne's reign. When I was
a boy at a private and preparatory school for young gentlemen,
I remember the wise acre of a master ordering us
all one night to march into a little gordon at
the back of the house, and thence to proceed one
by one into a tool or hen house. I was
but a tender little thing, just put into short clothes,
and can't exactly say whether the house was for tools
or hens. And in that house to put our hands
into a sack which stood on a bench, a candle
burning beside it. I put my hand into the sack.
My hand came out quite black. I went and joined
the other boys in the schoolroom, and all their hands
were black too, by reason of my tent age. And
there are some critics who I hope will be satisfied
by my acknowledging that I am a hundred and fifty
six next birthday. I could not understand what was the
meaning of this night excursion, this candle, this tool house,
this bag of soot. I think we little boys were
taken out of our sleep to be brought to the ordeal.
We came then and showed our little hands to the master,
washed them or not? Most probably, I should say not,
And so went bewildered back to bed. Something had been
stolen in the school that day, and mister Wiseacre, having
read in a book of an ingenious method of finding
out a thief by making him put his hand into
a sack, which, if guilty, the rogue would shirk from doing,
all we boys were subjected to the trial. Goodness knows
what the lost object was or who stole it. We
all have black hands to show the master, and the thief,
whoever he was, was not found out that time. I
wonder if the rascal is alive. An elderly scoundrel he
must be by this time, and a hoary old hypocrite
to whom an old schoolfellow presents his kindest regards, parenthetically
remarking what a dreadful place that private school was, cold,
chill blained, bad dinners, not enough victuals, and caning awful.
Are you alive still? I say, you, nameless villain who
escaped discovery on that day of crime. I hope you
have escaped often since, old sinner, Ah, what a lucky thing.
It is for you and me, my man, that we
are not found out in all our pacadillos, and that
our backs can slip away from the master and the cane.
Just consider what life would be if every rogue was
found out and flogged corum pappulo. What a butchery, what
an indecency, what an endless swishing of the rod? Don't
cry out about my misanthropy, My good friend, mealy Mouth,
I will trouble you to tell me. Do you go
to church? When there? Do you say or do you not,
that you are a miserable sinner? And saying so, do
you believe or disbelieve it? If you are a miserable sinner,
don't you deserve correction? And aren't you grateful if you
were to be let off? I say again, what a
blessed thing it is that we are not all found out.
Just picture to yourself everybody who does wrong being found
out and punished accordingly. Fancy all the boys in all
the school being whipped, and then the assistants, and then
the head master Badford, let us call him fancy, the
Provost Marshal being tied up, having previously superintended the correction
of the whole army after the young gentlemen have had
their turn for their faulty exercises. Fancy Doctor Lincoln's inn
being taken up for certain faults in his essay and review,
after the clergyman has cried his PECUEVI. Suppose we hoist
up a bishop and give him a couple of dozen.
I see my Lord Bishop of Double Gloucester, sitting in
a very uneasy posture on his right reverend bench. After
we have cast off the bishop, what are we to
say to the minister who appointed him? My lord sinkwarden,
It is painful to have to use personal correction to
a boy of your age, but really, cist a tandem carnifex.
The butchery is too horrible. The hand drops powerless, appalled
at the quantity of birch which it must cut and brandish.
I am glad we are not all found out, I
say again, and protest, my dear brethren, against our having
our deserts to Fancy all men found out and punished
is bad enough, But imagine all the women found out
in the distinguished social circle in which you and I
have the honor to move. Is it not a mercy
that a many of these fair criminals remain unpunished and undiscovered.
There is Missus Longbow, who is forever practicing and who
shoots poisoned arrows too. When you meet her, you don't
call her a liar and charge her with the wickedness
she has done and is doing. There is Missus Painter,
who passes for a most respectable woman and a model
in society. There is no use in saying what you
really know regarding her and her goings on. There is
Diana Hunter. What a little haughty prude it is, and
yet we know stories about her which are not altogether edifying.
I say it best for the sake of the good
that the bad should not all be found out. You
don't want your children to know the history of that
lady in the next box, who is so handsome and
whom they admire so ah me, what would life be
if we were all found out and punished for all
our faults? Jack Ketch would be in permanence, and then
who would hang jack Ketch? They talk of murderers being
pretty certainly found out. Pshah, I have heard an authority
awfully confident thou and declare that scores and hundreds of
murders are committed, and nobody is the wiser that terrible
man mentioned one or two ways of committing murder, which
he maintained were quite common and were scarcely ever found out.
A man, for instance, comes home to his wife, and
but I pause. I know that this magazine has a
very large circulation, hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Why not,
say a million of people at once, well, say a
million read it. And among these countless readers, I might
be teaching some monster how to make a way with
his wife without being found out, some fiend of a
woman how to destroy her dear husband. I will not
then tell this easy and simple way of murder, as
communicated to me by a most respectable party in the
confidence of private intercourse. Suppose some gentle reader were to
try this most simple and easy receipt, it seems to
me almost infallible, and come to grief in consequence, and
be found out and hanged. Should I ever pardon myself
for having, in the means of doing injury to a
single one of our esteemed subscribers. The prescription whereof I speak,
that is to say, whereof I don't speak, shall be
buried in this bosom. No, I am a humane man.
I am not one of your bluebeards to go and
say to my wife, my dear, I am going away
for a few days to Brighton. Here are all the
keys to the house. You may open every door in closet,
except the one at the end of the oak room,
opposite the fireplace, with the little bronze Shakespeare on the mantelpiece,
or what not. I don't say this to a woman
unless to be sure I want to get rid of her,
because after such a caution, I know she'll peep into
the closet. I say nothing about the closet at all.
I keep the key in my pocket, and a being
whom I love, but who as I know, has many
weaknesses out of harm's way. You toss up your head,
dear angel, drub on the ground with your lovely little
feet on the table, with your sweet rosy fingers, and cry, oh, sneerer,
You don't know the depth of woman's feeling, the lofty
scorn of all deceit, the entire absence of mean curiosity
in the sex or never, never would you liebel us
so ah Delia, dear dear Dahlia. It is because I fancy.
I do know something about you, not all mind, no, no,
no man knows that. Ah, my bride, my ring, my rose,
my poppet. Choose in fact, whatever name you like, bulbul
of my grove, fountain of my desert, sunshine of my
darkling life, and joy of my dungeons existence. It is
because I do know a little about you that I
can who to say nothing of that private closet and
keep my key in my pocket. You take away that
closet key, then, and the house key you lock Delia in.
You keep her out of harm's way and gadding, and
so she never can be found out. And yet, by
little strange accidents and coincidence, how we are being found
out every day. You remember that old story of the
Abbe Coccados, who told the company at supper one night,
how the first confession he ever received was from a murderer.
Let us say, presently enters to supper the Marquis de
Croquet Metaine pass blue Abby, says the brilliant marquis, taking
a pinch of snuff. Are you here, gentlemen and ladies.
I was the Abby's first penitent, and I made him
a confession which I promise you astonished him. To be sure,
how queerly things are found out. Here is an instance.
Only the other day I was writing in these roundabout
papers about a certain man whom I facetiously called Bags,
and who had abused me to my friends, who of
course told me. Shortly after that paper was published. Another friend, Sachs,
let us call him, scowls fiercely at me as I
am sitting in a perfect good humor at the club,
and passes on without speaking a cut a quarrel. Sachs
thinks it is about him that I was writing, whereas,
upon my honor and conscience, I never had him once
in my mind, and was pointing my moral from quite
another man. But don't you see by this wrath of
the guilty conscienced Sacks that he had been abusing me too.
He has owned himself guilty, never having been accused. He
has winced when nobody thought of hitting him, I did
but put the cap out, and madly, budding and chafing, Behold,
my friend rushes out to put his head into it.
Never mind, sex, you are found out, But I bear
you no malice, my man, And yet to be found out,
I know from my own experience, must be painful and
odious and cruelly mortifying to the inward vanity. Suppose I
am a poltroon. Let us say, with fierce mustache, loud talk,
plentiful oaths, and an immense stick I keep up nevertheless
a character for courage. I swear fearfully at cabmen and women,
brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man
or two with it. Brag of the images which I
break at the shooting gallery, and pass among my friends
for a whiskey fire eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon.
Ah me, Suppose some brisk little chap steps up and
gives me a Caning in Saint James Street, with all
the heads of my friends looking out of all the
club windows, my reputation is gone. I frighten no man more.
My nose is pulled by whipper snappers who jump up
on a chair to reach it. I am found out.
And in the days of my triumphs, when people were
yet afraid of me and were taken in by my swagger,
I always knew that I was a lily liver, and
expected that I should be found out some day. That
certainty of being found out must haunt and oppress many
a bold braggadocio spirit. Let us say it as a
clergyman who can pump copious floods of tears out of
his own eyes and those of his audience. He thinks
to himself, I am but a poor, swindling, chattering rogue.
My bills are unpaid. I've jilted several women whom I
have promised to marry. I don't know whether I believe
what I preach, and I know I have stolen the
very sermon over which I have been sniveling. Have they
found me out? Says he as his head drops down
on the cushion. Then your writer, poet, historian, novelist, or
what not. The Beacon says that Jones's work is one
of the first order. The lamp declares that Jones's tragedy
surpasses every work since the days of him of Avon.
The Comet asserts that Jay's Life of Goody two Shoes
is a noble and enduring monument to the fame of
that admirable englishwoman, and so forth. But then Jones knows
that he has lent the critic of the Beacon five
pounds that his publisher has half a share in the lamp,
and that the comet comes repeatedly to dine with him,
And it is all very well. Jones is immortal until
he has found out, and then down comes the extinguisher,
and the immortal is dead and buried. The idea of
discovery must hat many a man and make him uneasy.
As the trumpets are puffing in his triumph, Brown, who
has a higher place than he deserves, cowers before Smith,
who has found him out. What is the chorus of
critics shouting bravo, a public clapping hands and flinging garlands.
Brown knows that Smith has found him out. Puff trumpets,
wave banners, huzzer boys for the immortal Brown. This is
all very well, Brown thinks, bowing the while smiling, laying
his hand to his heart. But there stands Smith at
the window. He has measured me, and some day the
others will find me out too. It is a very
curious sensation to sit by a man who has found
you out, and who, as you know, has found you out,
or vice versa, to sit with a man whom you
have found out his talent bah his virtue. We know
a little story or two about his virtue, and he knows,
we know it. We are thinking over friend Robinson's antecedents
as we grin, bow and talk, and we are both
humbugs together. Robinson is a good fellow, is he? You
know how he behaved to Hicks? A good natured man?
Is he? Pray? Do you remember that little story of
missus Robinson's black eye? How men have to work to talk,
to smile, to go to bed and try and sleep
with this dread of being found out on their consciences. Bardolf,
who has robbed a church, and Nim who has taken
a purse, go to their usual haunts and smoke their
pipes with their companions. Mister detective Bull's eye appears and says, oh, Bardolf,
I want you about that there pick business. Mister Bardoff
knocks the ashes out of his pipe, puts out his
hands to the little steel cuffs, and walks away quite meekly.
He is found out. He must go. Goodbye doll, tear sheet,
goodbye missus quickly, ma'am. The other gentlemen and ladies de
la society look on and exchange mute adieu with the
departing friends, and an assured time will come when the
other gentlemen and ladies will be found out too. What
a wonderful and beautiful provision of nature. It has been that,
for the most part our womankind are not endowed with
the faculty of finding us out. They don't doubt and probe,
and weigh and take your measure. Lay down this paper,
my benevolent friend and reader. Go into your drawing room
now and utter a joke ever so old, and I
wager sixpence the ladies there will all begin to laugh.
Go to Brown's house and tell Miss Brown and the
young ladies what you think of him, and see what
a welcome you will get in like manner. Let him
come to your house and tell your good lady his
candid opinion of you, and fancy how she will receive him.
Would you have your wife and children know you exactly
for what you are, and esteem you precisely at your worth.
If so, my friend, you will live in a dreary house,
and you will have but a chilly fireside. Do you
suppose the people round it don't see your homely face
as under a glamor, and as it were, with a
halo of love round it? You don't fancy you are
as you seem to them no such thing my man.
Put away that monstrous conceit, and be thankful that they
have not found you out