3. III
A PARALLEL
(DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES
PEACE)
NOT a parallel, but a contrast, since at all points Peace is
Brodie's antithesis. The one is the austerest of Classics,
caring only for the ultimate perfection of his work. The other
is the gayest of Romantics, happiest when by the way he produces
a glittering effect, or dazzles the ear by a vain impertinence.
Now, it is by thievery that Peace reached magnificence. A
natural aptitude drove him from the fiddle to the centre-bit. He
did but rob, because genius followed the impulse. He had studied
the remotest details of his business; he was sternly professional
in the conduct of his life, and, as became an old gaol-bird,
there was no antic of the policeman wherewith he was not
familiar. Moreover, not only had he reduced house-breaking to a
science, but, being ostensibly nothing better than a picture-frame maker, he had invented an incomparable set of tools
wherewith to enter and evade his neighbour's house. Brodie, on
the other
hand, was a thief for distraction. His method was as slovenly as
ignorance could make it. Though by trade a wright, and therefore
a master of all the arts of joinery, he was so deficient in
seriousness that he stole a coulter wherewith to batter the walls
of the Excise Office. While Peace fought the battle in solitude,
Brodie was not only attended by a gang, but listened to the
command of his subordinates, and was never permitted to perform a
more intricate duty than the sounding of the alarm. And yet here
is the ironical contrast. Peace, the professional thief,
despised his brothers, and was never heard to patter a word of
flash. Brodie, the amateur, courted the society of all cross
coves, and would rather express himself in Pedlar's French than
in his choicest Scots. While the Englishman scraped Tate and
Brady from a one-stringed fiddle, the Scot limped a chaunt from
The Beggar's Opera, and thought himself a devil of a
fellow. The one was a man about town masquerading as a thief;
the other the most serious among housebreakers, singing psalms in
all good faith.
But if Peace was incomparably the better craftsman, Brodie
was the prettier gentleman. Peace would not have permitted
Brodie to drive his pony-trap the length of Evelina Road. But
Brodie, in revenge, would have cut Peace had he met him in the
Corn-market. The one was a sombre savage, the other a jovial
comrade, and it was a witty freak of fortune that impelled both
to follow the same
trade. And thus you arrive at another point of difference. The
Englishman had no intelligence of life's amenity. He knew naught
of costume: clothes were the limit of his ambition. Dressed
always for work, he was like the caterpillar which assumes the
green of the leaf, wherein it hides: he wore only such duds as
should attract the smallest notice, and separate him as far as
might be from his business. But the Scot was as fine a dandy as
ever took (haphazard) to the cracking of kens. If his refinement
permitted no excess of splendour, he went ever gloriously and
appropriately apparelled. He was well-mannered, cultured, with
scarce a touch of provincialism to mar his gay demeanour: whereas
Peace knew little enough outside the practice of burglary, and
the proper handling of the revolver.
Our Charles, for example, could neither spell nor write;
he dissembled his low origin with the utmost difficulty, and at
the best was plastered over (when not at work) with the
parochialism of the suburbs. So far the contrast is complete;
and even in their similarities there is an evident difference.
Each led a double life; but while Brodie was most himself among
his own kind, the real Peace was to be found not fiddle-scraping
in Evelina Road but marking down policemen in the dusky byways of
Blackheath. Brodie's grandeur was natural to him; Peace's
respectability, so far as it transcended the man's origin, was a
cloak of villainy.
Each, again, was an inventor, and while the more
innocent Brodie designed a gallows, the more hardened Peace would
have gained notoriety by the raising of wrecks and the patronage
of Mr. Plimsoll. And since both preserved a certain courage to
the end, since both died on the scaffold as becomes a man, the
contrast is once more characteristic. Brodie's cynicism is a
fine foil to the piety of Peace; and while each end was natural
after its own fashion, there is none who will deny to the Scot
the finer sense of fitness. Nor did any step in their career
explain more clearly the difference in their temperament than
their definitions of the gallows. For Peace it is `a short cut
to Heaven'; for Brodie it is `a leap in the dark.' Again the
Scot has the advantage. Again you reflect that, if Peace is the
most accomplished Classic among the housebreakers, the Deacon is
the merriest companion who ever climbed the gallows by the
shoulders of the incomparable Macheath.
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