The Oxford Book of American Essays
by unknown · English · Gutenberg #40196 · 957,603 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Oxford Book of American Essays
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Oxford Book of American Essays
Editor: Brander Matthews
Contributor: W. C. Brownell
John Burroughs
Nicholas Murray Butler
Samuel McChord Crothers
George William Curtis
Richard Henry Dana
Charles William Eliot
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Benjamin Franklin
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Oliver Wendell Holmes
William Dean Howells
Washington Irving
Henry James
Clarence King
Henry Cabot Lodge
James Russell Lowell
Hamilton Wright Mabie
Edward Sandford Martin
Edgar Allan Poe
Theodore Roosevelt
Henry David Thoreau
William P. Trent
Charles Dudley Warner
Walt Whitman
Theodore Winthrop
Release date: July 10, 2012 [eBook #40196]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40196
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet
Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN ESSAYS ***
Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet
Archive/American Libraries.)
THE OXFORD BOOK OF
AMERICAN ESSAYS
CHOSEN BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
Professor in Columbia University
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH: 35 WEST 32ND STREET
LONDON, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, AND BOMBAY
HUMPHREY MILFORD
1914
_ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_
_Copyright_, 1914
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMERICAN BRANCH
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
THE EPHEMERA: AN EMBLEM OF HUMAN LIFE 1
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
THE WHISTLE 4
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
DIALOGUE BETWEEN FRANKLIN AND THE GOUT 7
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
CONSOLATION FOR THE OLD BACHELOR 15
Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791).
JOHN BULL 21
Washington Irving (1783-1859).
THE MUTABILITY OF LITERATURE 34
Washington Irving (1783-1859).
KEAN'S ACTING 47
Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879).
GIFTS 62
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).
USES OF GREAT MEN 67
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).
BUDS AND BIRD-VOICES 88
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864).
THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION 99
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).
BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER 114
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894).
WALKING 128
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS 166
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891).
PREFACE TO "LEAVES OF GRASS" 194
Walt Whitman (1819-1892).
AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 213
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911).
THACKERAY IN AMERICA 229
George William Curtis (1824-1892).
OUR MARCH TO WASHINGTON 241
Theodore Winthrop (1828-1861).
CALVIN (A Study of Character) 268
Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900).
FIVE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION 280
Charles William Eliot (1834- ).
I TALK OF DREAMS 308
William Dean Howells (1837- ).
AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE 331
John Burroughs (1837- ).
CUT-OFF COPPLES'S 351
Clarence King (1842-1901).
THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS 368
Henry James (1843- ).
THEOCRITUS ON CAPE COD 394
Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846- ).
COLONIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES 410
Henry Cabot Lodge (1850- ).
NEW YORK AFTER PARIS 440
William Crary Brownell (1851- ).
THE TYRANNY OF THINGS 467
Edward Sandford Martin (1856- ).
FREE TRADE VS. PROTECTION IN LITERATURE 475
Samuel McChord Crothers (1857- ).
DANTE AND THE BOWERY 480
Theodore Roosevelt (1858- ).
THE REVOLT OF THE UNFIT 489
Nicholas Murray Butler (1862- ).
ON TRANSLATING THE ODES OF HORACE 497
William Peterfield Trent (1862- ).
INTRODUCTION
The customary antithesis between "American" literature and "English"
literature is unfortunate and misleading in that it seems to exclude
American authors from the noble roll of those who have contributed to
the literature of our mother-tongue. Of course, when we consider it
carefully we cannot fail to see that the literature of a language is one
and indivisible and that the nativity or the domicile of those who make
it matters nothing. Just as Alexandrian literature is Greek, so American
literature is English; and as Theocritus demands inclusion in any
account of Greek literature, so Thoreau cannot be omitted from any
history of English literature as a whole. The works of Anthony Hamilton
and Rousseau, Mme. de Staël and M. Maeterlinck are not more indisputably
a part of the literature of the French language than the works of
Franklin and Emerson, of Hawthorne and Poe are part of the literature of
the English language. Theocritus may never have set foot on the soil of
Greece, and Thoreau never adventured himself on the Atlantic to visit
the island-home of his ancestors; yet the former expressed himself in
Greek and the latter in English,--and how can either be neglected in any
comprehensive survey of the literature of his own tongue?
None the less is it undeniable that there is in Franklin and Emerson, in
Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, whatever their mastery of the idiom they
inherited in common with Steele and Carlyle, with Browning and Lamb, an
indefinable and intangible flavor which distinguishes the first group
from the second. The men who have set down the feelings and the
thoughts, the words and the deeds of the inhabitants of the United
States have not quite the same outlook on life that we find in the men
who have made a similar record in the British Isles. The social
atmosphere is not the same on the opposite shores of the Western ocean;
and the social organization is different in many particulars. For all
that American literature is,--in the apt phrase of Mr. Howells,--"a
condition of English literature," nevertheless it is also distinctively
American. American writers are as loyal to the finer traditions of
English literature as British writers are; they take an equal pride that
they are also heirs of Chaucer and Dryden and subjects of King
Shakspere; yet they cannot help having the note of their own
nationality.
Green, when he came to the Fourth of July, 1776, declared that
thereafter the history of the English-speaking people flowed in two
currents; and it is equally obvious that the stream of English
literature has now two channels. The younger and the smaller is
American--and what can we call the older and the ampler except British?
A century ago there were published collections entitled the _British
Poets_, the _British Novelists_, and the _British Essayists_; and the
adjective was probably then chosen to indicate that these gatherings
included the work of Scotch and Irish writers. Whatever the reason, the
choice was happy; and the same adjective would serve to indicate now
that the selections excluded the work of American writers. The British
branch of English literature is the richer and the more various; yet the
American branch has its own richness and its own variety, even if these
qualities have revealed themselves only in the past hundred years.
It may be noted also that although American literature has not been
adorned by so great a galaxy of brilliant names as illumined British
literature in the nineteenth century, it has had the good fortune to
possess more authors of cosmopolitan fame than can be found in the
German literature of the past hundred years, in the Italian, or in the
Spanish. A forgotten American essayist once asserted that "foreign
nations are a contemporaneous posterity," and even if this smart saying
is not to be taken too literally, it has its significance. There is
therefore food for thought in the fact that at least half a dozen, not
to say half a score, of American authors have won wide popularity
outside the limits of their own language,--a statement which could not
be made of as many German or Italian or Spanish authors of the
nineteenth century. From the death of Goethe to the arrival of the
playwrights of the present generation, perhaps Heine is the sole German
writer either of prose or of verse who has established his reputation
broadly among the readers of other tongues than his own. And not more
than one or two Spanish or Italian authors have been received even by
their fellow Latins, as warmly as the French and the Germans have
welcomed Cooper and Poe, Emerson and Mark Twain.
It is to present typical and characteristic examples of the American
contribution to English literature in the essay-form that this volume
has been prepared. Perhaps the term "essay-form" is not happily chosen
since the charm of the essay lies in the fact that it is not formal,
that it may be whimsical in its point of departure, and capricious in
its ramblings after it has got itself under way. Even the Essay is
itself a chameleon, changing color while we study it. There is little in
common between Locke's austere _Essay on the Human Understanding_ and
Lamb's fantastic and frolicsome essay on _Roast Pig_. He would be bold
indeed who should take compass and chain to measure off the precise
territory of the Essay and to mark with scientific exactness the
boundaries which separate it from the Address on the one side and from
the Letter on the other.
"Some (there are) that turn over all books and are equally searching in
all papers," said Ben Jonson; "that write out of what they presently
find or meet, without choice.... Such are all the Essayists, ever their
master Montaigne." Bacon and Emerson followed in the footsteps of
Montaigne, and present us with the results of their browsings among
books and of their own dispersed meditations. In their hands the essay
lacks cohesion and unity; it is essentially discursive. Montaigne never
stuck to his text, when he had one; and the paragraphs of any of
Emerson's essays might be shuffled without increasing their fortuitous
discontinuity.
After Montaigne and Bacon came Steele and Addison, in whose hands the
essay broadened its scope and took on a new aspect. The eighteenth
century essay is so various that it may be accepted as the forerunner of
the nineteenth century magazine, with its character-sketches and its
brief tales, its literary and dramatic criticism, its obituary
commemorations and its serial stories--for what but a serial story is
the succession of papers devoted to the sayings and doings of Sir Roger?
It was a new departure, although the writers of the _Tatler_ and of the
_Spectator_ had profited by the _Conversations_ of Walton and by the
_Characters_ of La Bruyère, by the epistles of Horace and by the
comedies of Molière. (Has it ever been pointed out that the method of
Steele and Addison in depicting Sir Roger is curiously akin to the
method of Molière in presenting M. Jourdain?)
The delightful form of poetry which we call by a French name, _vers de
société,_ (although it has flourished more abundantly in English
literature than in French) and which Mr. Austin Dobson, one of its
supreme masters, prefers to call by Cowper's term, "familiar verse," may
be accepted as the metrical equivalent of the prose essay as this was
developed and expanded by the English writers of the eighteenth century.
And as the familiar verse of our language is ampler and richer than that
of any other tongue, so also is the familiar essay. Indeed, the essay is
one of the most characteristic expressions of the quality of our race.
In its ease and its lightness and its variety, it is almost unthinkable
in German; and even in French it is far less frequent than in English
and far less assiduously cultivated.
As Emerson trod in the footsteps of Bacon so Washington Irving walked in
the trail blazed by Steele and Addison and Goldsmith; and Franklin
earlier, although his essays are in fact only letters, had revealed his
possession of the special quality the essay demands,--the playful wisdom
of a man of the world who is also a man of letters. Indeed, Dr. Franklin
was far better fitted to shine as an essayist than his more ponderous
contemporary, Dr. Johnson; certainly Franklin would never have "made
little fishes talk like whales." And in the nineteenth century the
American branch of English literature has had a group of essayists less
numerous than that which adorned the British branch, but not less
interesting or less important to their own people.
Among these American essayists we may find all sorts and conditions of
writers,--poets adventuring themselves in prose, novelists eschewing
story-telling, statesmen turning for a moment to matters of less weight,
men of science and men of affairs chatting about themselves and airing
their opinions at large. In their hands, as in the hands of their
British contemporaries, the essay remains infinitely various, refusing
to conform to any single type, and insisting on being itself and on
expressing its author. We find in the best of these American essayists
the familiar style and the everyday vocabulary, the apparent simplicity
and the seeming absence of effort, the horror of pedantry and the scorn
of affectation, which are the abiding characteristics of the true essay.
We find also the flavor of good talk, of the sprightly conversation that
may sparkle in front of a wood fire and that often vanishes with the
curling blue smoke.
It is the bounden duty of every maker of an anthology to set forth the
principles that have guided him in the choice of the examples he is
proffering to the public. The present editor has excluded purely
literary criticism, as not quite falling within the boundaries of the
essay, properly so-called. Then he has avoided all set orations,
although he has not hesitated to include more than one paper originally
prepared to be read aloud by its writer, because these examples seemed
to him to fall within the boundaries of the essay. (Nearly all of
Emerson's essays, it may be noted, had been lectures in an early stage
of their existence.) Furthermore he has omitted all fiction, strictly to
be so termed, although he would gladly have welcomed an apologue like
Mark Twain's "Traveling with a Reformer," which is essentially an essay
despite its use of dialogue. He has included also Franklin's "Dialogue
with the Gout," which is instinct with the true spirit of the essay; and
he has accepted as essays Franklin's "Ephemera" and "The Whistle,"
although they were both of them letters to the same lady. As the essay
flowers out of leisure and out of culture, and as there has been in the
United States no long background of easy tranquillity, there is in the
American branch of English literature a relative deficiency in certain
of the lighter forms of the essay more abundantly represented in the
British branch; and therefore the less frequent examples of these
lighter forms have here been companioned by graver discussions, never
grave enough, however, to be described as disquisitions. Finally, every
selection is presented entire, except that Dana's paper on Kean's acting
has been shorn of a needless preparatory note.
BRANDER MATTHEWS.
[The essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Henry D. Thoreau, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Charles Dudley Warner, and John Burroughs, are used by permission
of, and by arrangement with, The Houghton Mifflin Company, the
authorized publishers of their works. The essays by George William
Curtis and by William Dean Howells are used by permission of Harper
and Brothers. The essays by William Crary Brownell, Edward Sanford
Martin, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Theodore Roosevelt are printed
by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, the essay by Charles
William Eliot by permission of The Century Company, and that by
Henry James by permission of The Macmillan Company.]
THE EPHEMERA: AN EMBLEM OF HUMAN LIFE
TO MADAME BRILLON, OF PASSY
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy
day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I
stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the
company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly,
called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told, were
bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of
them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I
understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great application to
the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress
I have made in your charming language. I listened through curiosity to
the discourse of these little creatures; but as they, in their national
vivacity, spoke three or four together, I could make but little of their
conversation. I found, however, by some broken expressions that I heard
now and then, they were disputing warmly on the merit of two foreign
musicians, one a _cousin_, the other a _moscheto_; in which dispute they
spent their time, seemingly as regardless of the shortness of life as if
they had been sure of living a month. Happy people! thought I; you are
certainly under a wise, just, and mild government, since you have no
public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the
perfections and imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from
them to an old gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and
talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in
writing, in hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much
indebted for the most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company
and heavenly harmony.
"It was," said he, "the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who
lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the
Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours; and I
think there was some foundation for that opinion, since, by the apparent
motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in
my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end
of our earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the
waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness,
necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived
seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than four hundred and
twenty minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen
generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the
children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now,
alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for, by the course of
nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above seven or
eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor in amassing
honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political
struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriot
inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of
our race in general! for in politics what can laws do without morals?
Our present race of ephemeræ will in a course of minutes become
corrupt, like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as
wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long,
and life is short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name
they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long
enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who
no longer exists? And what will become of all history in the eighteenth
hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to
its end and be buried in universal ruin?"
To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but
the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible
conversation of a few good lady ephemeræ, and now and then a kind smile
and a tune from the ever amiable _Brillante_.
THE WHISTLE
TO MADAME BRILLON
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
I received my dear friend's two letters, one for Wednesday and one for
Saturday. This is again Wednesday. I do not deserve one for to-day,
because I have not answered the former. But, indolent as I am, and
averse to writing, the fear of having no more of your pleasing epistles,
if I do not contribute to the correspondence, obliges me to take up my
pen; and as Mr. B. has kindly sent me word that he sets out to-morrow to
see you, instead of spending this Wednesday evening, as I have done its
namesakes, in your delightful company, I sit down to spend it in
thinking of you, in writing to you, and in reading over and over again
your letters.
I am charmed with your description of Paradise, and with your plan of
living there; and I approve much of your conclusion, that, in the
meantime, we should draw all the good we can from this world. In my
opinion we might all draw more good from it than we do, and suffer less
evil, if we would take care not to give too much for _whistles_. For to
me it seems that most of the unhappy people we meet with are become so
by neglect of that caution.
You ask what I mean? You love stories, and will excuse my telling one of
myself.
When I was a child of seven years old, my friends, on a holiday, filled
my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys
for children; and being charmed with the sound of a _whistle_, that I
met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and
gave all my money for one. I then came home, and went whistling all over
the house, much pleased with my _whistle_, but disturbing all the
family. My brothers, and sisters, and cousins, understanding the bargain
I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was
worth; put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the rest
of the money; and laughed at me so much for my folly, that I cried with
vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the _whistle_
gave me pleasure.
This, however, was afterwards of use to me, the impression continuing on
my mind; so that often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary
thing, I said to myself, _Don't give too much for the whistle_; and I
saved my money.
As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I
thought I met with many, very many, _who gave too much for the whistle_.
When I saw one too ambitious of court favor, sacrificing his time in
attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps
his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, _This man gives too
much for his whistle_.
When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in
political bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by that
neglect, _He pays, indeed_, said I, _too much for his whistle_.
If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the
pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow-citizens,
and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake of accumulating
wealth, _Poor man_, said I, _you pay too much for your whistle_.
When I met with a man of pleasure, sacrificing every laudable
improvement of the mind, or of his fortune, to mere corporeal
sensations, and ruining his health in their pursuit, _Mistaken man_,
said I, _you are providing pain for yourself, instead of pleasure; you
give too much for your whistle_.
If I see one fond of appearance, or fine clothes, fine houses, fine
furniture, fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he contracts
debts, and ends his career in a prison, _Alas!_ say I, _he has paid
dear, very dear, for his whistle_.
When I see a beautiful sweet-tempered girl married to an ill-natured
brute of a husband, _What a pity_, say I, _that she should pay so much
for a whistle_!
In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are
brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of
things, and by their _giving too much for their whistles_.
Yet I ought to have charity for these unhappy people, when I consider
that, with all this wisdom of which I am boasting, there are certain
things in the world so tempting, for example, the apples of King John,
which happily are not to be bought; for if they were put to sale by
auction, I might very easily be led to ruin myself in the purchase, and
find that I had once more given too much for the _whistle_.
Adieu, my dear friend, and believe me ever yours very sincerely and with
unalterable affection.
DIALOGUE BETWEEN FRANKLIN AND THE GOUT
Midnight, 22 October, 1780.
FRANKLIN. Eh! Oh! eh! What have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?
GOUT. Many things; you have ate and drank too freely, and too much
indulged those legs of yours in their indolence.
FRANKLIN. Who is it that accuses me?
GOUT. It is I, even I, the Gout.
FRANKLIN. What! my enemy in person?
GOUT. No, not your enemy.
FRANKLIN. I repeat it, my enemy; for you would not only torment my body
to death, but ruin my good name; you reproach me as a glutton and a
tippler; now all the world, that knows me, will allow that I am neither
the one nor the other.
GOUT. The world may think as it pleases; it is always very complaisant
to itself, and sometimes to its friends; but I very well know that the
quantity of meat and drink proper for a man, who takes a reasonable
degree of exercise, would be too much for another, who never takes any.
FRANKLIN. I take--eh! oh!--as much exercise--eh!--as I can, Madam Gout.
You know my sedentary state, and on that account, it would seem, Madam
Gout, as if you might spare me a little, seeing it is not altogether my
own fault.
GOUT. Not a jot; your rhetoric and your politeness are thrown away; your
apology avails nothing. If your situation in life is a sedentary one,
your amusements, your recreation, at least, should be active. You ought
to walk or ride; or, if the weather prevents that, play at billiards.
But let us examine your course of life. While the mornings are long, and
you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining
an appetite for breakfast, by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with
books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the
reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four dishes of tea, with
cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I
fancy are not things the most easily digested. Immediately afterwards
you sit down to write at your desk, or converse with persons who apply
to you on business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of
bodily exercise. But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you say, to
your sedentary condition. But what is your practice after dinner?
Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have
dined would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to
chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours! This is your
perpetual recreation, which is the least eligible of any for a sedentary
man, because, instead of accelerating the motion of the fluids, the
rigid attention it requires helps to retard the circulation and obstruct
internal secretions. Wrapt in the speculations of this wretched game,
you destroy your constitution. What can be expected from such a course
of living, but a body replete with stagnant humors, ready to fall prey
to all kinds of dangerous maladies, if I, the Gout, did not occasionally
bring you relief by agitating those humors, and so purifying or
dissipating them? If it was in some nook or alley in Paris, deprived of
walks, that you played awhile at chess after dinner, this might be
excusable; but the same taste prevails with you in Passy, Auteuil,
Montmartre, or Sanoy, places where there are the finest gardens and
walks, a pure air, beautiful women, and most agreeable and instructive
conversation; all which you might enjoy by frequenting the walks. But
these are rejected for this abominable game of chess. Fie, then, Mr.
Franklin! But amidst my instructions, I had almost forgot to administer
my wholesome corrections; so take that twinge,--and that.
FRANKLIN. Oh! eh! oh! Ohhh! As much instruction as you please, Madam
Gout, and as many reproaches; but pray, Madam, a truce with your
corrections!
GOUT. No, Sir, no,--I will not abate a particle of what is so much for
your good,--therefore----
FRANKLIN. Oh! ehhh!--It is not fair to say I take no exercise, when I do
very often, going out to dine and returning in my carriage.
GOUT. That, of all imaginable exercises, is the most slight and
insignificant, if you allude to the motion of a carriage suspended on
springs. By observing the degree of heat obtained by different kinds of
motion, we may form an estimate of the quantity of exercise given by
each. Thus, for example, if you turn out to walk in winter with cold
feet, in an hour's time you will be in a glow all over; ride on
horseback, the same effect will scarcely be perceived by four hours'
round trotting; but if you loll in a carriage, such as you have
mentioned, you may travel all day and gladly enter the last inn to warm
your feet by a fire. Flatter yourself then no longer, that half an
hour's airing in your carriage deserves the name of exercise. Providence
has appointed few to roll in carriages, while he has given to all a pair
of legs, which are machines infinitely more commodious and serviceable.
Be grateful, then, and make a proper use of yours. Would you know how
they forward the circulation of your fluids, in the very action of
transporting you from place to place; observe when you walk, that all
your weight is alternately thrown from one leg to the other; this
occasions a great pressure on the vessels of the foot, and repels their
contents; when relieved, by the weight being thrown on the other foot,
the vessels of the first are allowed to replenish, and, by a return of
this weight, this repulsion again succeeds; thus accelerating the
circulation of the blood. The heat produced in any given time depends on
the degree of this acceleration; the fluids are shaken, the humors
attenuated, the secretions facilitated, and all goes well; the cheeks
are ruddy, and health is established. Behold your fair friend at
Auteuil; a lady who received from bounteous nature more really useful
science than half a dozen such pretenders to philosophy as you have been
able to extract from all your books. When she honors you with a visit,
it is on foot. She walks all hours of the day, and leaves indolence, and
its concomitant maladies, to be endured by her horses. In this, see at
once the preservative of her health and personal charms. But when you go
to Auteuil, you must have your carriage, though it is no farther from
Passy to Auteuil than from Auteuil to Passy.
FRANKLIN. Your reasonings grow very tiresome.
GOUT. I stand corrected. I will be silent and continue my office; take
that, and that.
FRANKLIN. Oh! Ohh! Talk on, I pray you.
GOUT. No, no; I have a good number of twinges for you to-night, and you
may be sure of some more to-morrow.
FRANKLIN. What, with such a fever! I shall go distracted. Oh! eh! Can no
one bear it for me?
GOUT. Ask that of your horses; they have served you faithfully.
FRANKLIN. How can you so cruelly sport with my torments?
GOUT. Sport! I am very serious. I have here a list of offenses against
your own health distinctly written, and can justify every stroke
inflicted on you.
FRANKLIN. Read it then.
GOUT. It is too long a detail; but I will briefly mention some
particulars.
FRANKLIN. Proceed. I am all attention.
GOUT. Do you remember how often you have promised yourself, the
following morning, a walk in the grove of Boulogne, in the garden de la
Muette, or in your own garden, and have violated your promise, alleging,
at one time, it was too cold, at another too warm, too windy, too moist,
or what else you pleased; when in truth it was too nothing, but your
insuperable love of ease?
FRANKLIN. That I confess may have happened occasionally, probably ten
times in a year.
GOUT. Your confession is very far short of the truth; the gross amount
is one hundred and ninety-nine times.
FRANKLIN. Is it possible?
GOUT. So possible, that it is fact; you may rely on the accuracy of my
statement. You know M. Brillon's gardens, and what fine walks they
contain; you know the handsome flight of an hundred steps, which lead
from the terrace above to the lawn below. You have been in the practice
of visiting this amiable family twice a week, after dinner, and it is a
maxim of your own, that "a man may take as much exercise in walking a
mile, up and down stairs, as in ten on level ground." What an
opportunity was here for you to have had exercise in both these ways!
Did you embrace it, and how often?
FRANKLIN. I cannot immediately answer that question.
GOUT. I will do it for you; not once.
FRANKLIN. Not once?
GOUT. Even so. During the summer you went there at six o'clock. You
found the charming lady, with her lovely children and friends, eager to
walk with you, and entertain you with their agreeable conversation; and
what has been your choice? Why, to sit on the terrace, satisfy yourself
with the fine prospect, and passing your eye over the beauties of the
garden below, without taking one step to descend and walk about in them.
On the contrary, you call for tea and the chess-board; and lo! you are
occupied in your seat till nine o'clock, and that besides two hours'
play after dinner; and then, instead of walking home, which would have
bestirred you a little, you step into your carriage. How absurd to
suppose that all this carelessness can be reconcilable with health,
without my interposition!
FRANKLIN. I am convinced now of the justness of Poor Richard's remark,
that "Our debts and our sins are always greater than we think for."
GOUT. So it is. You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in
your conduct.
FRANKLIN. But do you charge among my crimes, that I return in a carriage
from M. Brillon's?
GOUT. Certainly; for, having been seated all the while, you cannot
object the fatigue of the day, and cannot want therefore the relief of a
carriage.
FRANKLIN. What then would you have me do with my carriage?
GOUT. Burn it if you choose; you would at least get heat out of it once
in this way; or, if you dislike that proposal, here's another for you;
observe the poor peasants, who work in the vineyards and grounds about
the villages of Passy, Auteuil, Chaillot, etc.; you may find every day
among these deserving creatures, four or five old men and women, bent
and perhaps crippled by weight of years, and too long and too great
labor. After a most fatiguing day, these people have to trudge a mile or
two to their smoky huts. Order your coachman to set them down. This is
an act that will be good for your soul; and, at the same time, after
your visit to the Brillons, if you return on foot, that will be good for
your body.
FRANKLIN. Ah! how tiresome you are!
GOUT. Well, then, to my office; it should not be forgotten that I am
your physician. There.
FRANKLIN. Ohhh! what a devil of a physician!
GOUT. How ungrateful you are to say so! Is it not I who, in the
character of your physician, have saved you from the palsy, dropsy, and
apoplexy? one or other of which would have done for you long ago, but
for me.
FRANKLIN. I submit, and thank you for the past, but entreat the
discontinuance of your visits for the future; for, in my mind, one had
better die than be cured so dolefully. Permit me just to hint, that I
have also not been unfriendly to _you_. I never feed physician or quack
of any kind, to enter the list against you; if then you do not leave me
to my repose, it may be said you are ungrateful too.
GOUT. I can scarcely acknowledge that as any objection. As to quacks, I
despise them; they may kill you indeed, but cannot injure me. And, as to
regular physicians, they are at last convinced that the gout, in such a
subject as you are, is no disease, but a remedy; and wherefore cure a
remedy?--but to our business,--there.
FRANKLIN. Oh! oh!--for Heaven's sake leave me! and I promise faithfully
never more to play at chess, but to take exercise daily, and live
temperately.
GOUT. I know you too well. You promise fair; but, after a few months of
good health, you will return to your old habits; your fine promises will
be forgotten like the forms of the last year's clouds. Let us then
finish the account, and I will go. But I leave you with an assurance of
visiting you again at a proper time and place; for my object is your
good, and you are sensible now that I am your _real friend_.
CONSOLATION FOR THE OLD BACHELOR
FRANCIS HOPKINSON
MR. AITKEN: Your Old Bachelor having pathetically represented the
miseries of his solitary situation, severely reproaching himself for
having neglected to marry in his younger days, I would fain alleviate
his distress, by showing that it is possible he might have been as
unhappy--even in the honorable state of matrimony.
I am a shoemaker in this city, and by my industry and attention have
been enabled to maintain my wife and a daughter, now six years old, in
comfort and respect; and to lay by a little at the year's end, against a
rainy day.
My good wife had long teased me to take her to New York, in order to
visit Mrs. Snip, the lady of an eminent taylor in that city, and her
cousin; from whom she had received many pressing invitations.
This jaunt had been the daily subject of discussion at breakfast,
dinner, and supper for a month before the time fixed upon for putting it
in execution. As our daughter Jenny could by no means be left at home,
many and great were the preparations to equip Miss and her Mamma for
this important journey; and yet, as my wife assured me, there was
nothing provided but what was _absolutely necessary_, and which we could
not possibly do without. My purse sweat at every pore.
At last, the long-expected day arrived, preceded by a very restless
night. For, as my wife could not sleep for thinking on the approaching
jaunt, neither would she suffer me to repose in quiet. If I happened
through wearisomeness to fall into a slumber, she immediately roused me
by some unseasonable question or remark: frequently asking if I was sure
the apprentice had greased the chair-wheels, and seen that the harness
was clean and in good order; often observing how surprised her cousin
_Snip_ would be to see us; and as often wondering how poor dear Miss
_Jenny_ would bear the fatigue of the journey. Thus past the night in
delightful discourse, if that can with propriety be called a discourse,
wherein my wife was the only speaker--my replies never exceeding the
monosyllables _yes_ or _no_, murmured between sleeping and waking.
No sooner was it fair daylight, but up started my notable wife, and soon
roused the whole family. The little trunk was stuffed with baggage, even
to bursting, and tied behind the chair, and the chair-box was crammed
with trumpery which _we could not possibly do without_. Miss _Jenny_ was
drest, and breakfast devoured in haste: the old negro wench was called
in, and the charge of the house committed to her care; and the two
apprentices and the hired maid received many wholesome cautions and
instructions for their conduct during our absence, all which they most
liberally promised to observe; whilst I attended, with infinite
patience, the adjustment of these preliminaries.
At length, however, we set off, and, turning the first corner, lost
sight of our habitation, with great regret on my part, and no less joy
on the part of Miss _Jenny_ and her Mamma.
When we got to Poole's Bridge, there happened to be a great concourse of
wagons, carts, &c., so that we could not pass for some time--Miss
_Jenny_ frightened--my wife very impatient and uneasy--wondered I did
not call out to those impudent fellows to make way for us; observing
that I had not the spirit of a louse. Having got through this
difficulty, we proceeded without obstruction--my wife in good-humor
again--Miss _Jenny_ in high spirits. At _Kensington_ fresh troubles
arise. "Bless me, Miss _Jenny_," says my wife, "where is the bandbox?"
"I don't know, Mamma; the last time I saw it, it was on the table in
your room." What's to be done? The bandbox is left behind--it contains
Miss _Jenny_'s new wire-cap--there is no possibility of doing without
it--as well no New York as no wire-cap--there is no alternative, we must
e'en go back for it. Teased and mortified as I was, my good wife
administered consolation by observing, "That it was my business to see
that everything was put into the chair that ought to be, but there was
no depending upon me for anything; and that she plainly saw I undertook
this journey with an ill-will, merely because she had set her heart upon
it." Silent patience was my only remedy. An hour and a half restored to
us this essential requisite--the wire-cap--and brought us back to the
place where we first missed it.
After innumerable difficulties and unparalleled dangers, occasioned by
ruts, stumps, and tremendous bridges, we arrived at Neshamony ferry: but
how to cross it was the question. My wife protested that neither she nor
_Jenny_ would go over in the boat with the horse. I assured her that
there was not the least danger; that the horse was as quiet as a dog,
and that I would hold him by the bridle all the way. These assurances
had little weight: the most forcible argument was that she must go that
way or not at all, for there was no other boat to be had. Thus
persuaded, she ventured in--the flies were troublesome--the horse
kicked--my wife in panics--Miss _Jenny_ in tears. _Ditto_ at
_Trenton-ferry_.
As we started pretty early, and as the days were long, we reached
Trenton by two o'clock. Here we dined. My wife found fault with
everything; and whilst she disposed of what I thought a tolerable
hearty meal, declared there was nothing fit to eat. Matters, however,
would have gone on pretty well, but Miss _Jenny_ began to cry with the
toothache--sad lamentations over Miss _Jenny_--all my fault because I
had not made the glazier replace a broken pane in her chamber window. N.
B. I had been twice for him, and he promised to come, but was not so
good as his word.
After dinner we again entered upon our journey--my wife in
good-humor--Miss _Jenny's_ toothache much easier--various chat--I
acknowledge everything my wife says for fear of discomposing her. We
arrive in good time at Princetown. My wife and daughter admire the
College. We refresh ourselves with tea, and go to bed early, in order to
be up by times for the next day's expedition.
In the morning we set off again in tolerable good-humor, and proceeded
happily as far as _Rocky-hill_. Here my wife's fears and terrors
returned with great force. I drove as carefully as possible; but coming
to a place where one of the wheels must unavoidably go over the point of
a small rock, my wife, in a great fright, seized hold of one of the
reins, which happening to be the wrong one, she pulled the horse so as
to force the wheel higher up the rock than it would otherwise have gone,
and overset the chair. We were all tumbled hickledy-pickledy, into the
road--Miss _Jenny's_ face all bloody--the woods echo to her cries--my
wife in a fainting-fit--and I in great misery; secretly and most
devoutly wishing cousin _Snip_ at the devil. Matters begin to mend--my
wife recovers--Miss _Jenny_ has only received a slight scratch on one of
her cheeks--the horse stands quite still, and none of the harness broke.
Matters grew worse again; the twine with which the bandbox was tied had
broke in the fall, and the aforesaid wire-cap lay soaking in a nasty
mudpuddle--grievous lamentations over the wire-cap--all my fault because
I did not tie it better--no remedy--no wire-caps to be bought at
_Rocky-hill_. At night my wife discovered a small bruise on her hip--was
apprehensive it might mortify--did not know but the bone might be broken
or splintered--many instances of mortifications occasioned by small
injuries.
After passing unhurt over the imminent dangers of _Passayack_ and
_Hackensack_ rivers, and the yet more tremendous horrors of
_Pawlas-hook_ ferry, we arrived, at the close of the third day, at
cousin _Snip's_ in the city of New York.
Here we sojourned a tedious week; my wife spent as much money as would
have maintained my family for a month at home, in purchasing a hundred
useless articles _which we could not possibly do without_; and every
night when we went to bed fatigued me with encomiums on her cousin
_Snip_; leading to a history of the former grandeur of her family, and
concluding with insinuations that I did not treat her with the attention
and respect I ought.
On the seventh day my wife and cousin _Snip_ had a pretty warm
altercation respecting the comparative elegancies and advantages of New
York and Philadelphia. The dispute ran high, and many aggravating words
past between the two advocates. The next morning my wife declared that
my business would not admit of a longer absence from home--and so after
much ceremonious complaisance--in which my wife was by no means exceeded
by her very polite cousin--we left the famous city of New York; and I
with heart-felt satisfaction looked forward to the happy period of our
safe arrival in Water-street, Philadelphia.
But this blessing was not to be obtained without much vexation and
trouble. But lest I should seem tedious I shall not recount the
adventures of our return--how we were caught in a thunderstorm--how our
horse failed, by which we were benighted three miles from our
stage--how my wife's panics returned--how Miss _Jenny_ howled, and how
very miserable I was made. Suffice it to say, that, after many
distressing disasters, we arrived at the door of our own habitation in
Water-street.
No sooner had we entered the house than we were informed that one of my
apprentices had run away with the hired-maid, nobody knew where; the old
negro had got drunk, fallen into the fire, and burnt out one of her
eyes; and our best china-bowl was broken.
My good wife contrived, with her usual ingenuity, to throw the blame of
all these misfortunes upon me. As this was a consolation to which I had
been long accustomed in all untoward cases, I had recourse to my usual
remedy, viz., silent patience. After sincerely praying that I might
never more see cousin _Snip_, I sat industriously down to my trade, in
order to retrieve my manifold losses.
This is only a miniature picture of the married state, which I present
to your _Old Bachelor_, in hopes it may abate his choler, and reconcile
him to a single life. But, if this opiate should not be sufficient to
give him some ease, I may, perhaps, send him a stronger dose hereafter.
JOHN BULL
WASHINGTON IRVING
"An old song, made by an aged old pate,
Of an old worshipful gentleman who had a great estate,
That kept a brave old house at a bountiful rate,
And an old porter to relieve the poor at his gate.
With an old study fill'd full of learned old books,
With an old reverend chaplain, you might know him by his looks,
With an old buttery hatch worn quite off the hooks,
And an old kitchen that maintained half-a-dozen old cooks.
Like an old courtier, etc."
--OLD SONG.
There is no species of humor in which the English more excel, than that
which consists in caricaturing and giving ludicrous appellations, or
nicknames. In this way they have whimsically designated, not merely
individuals, but nations; and, in their fondness for pushing a joke,
they have not spared even themselves. One would think that, in
personifying itself, a nation would be apt to picture something grand,
heroic and imposing, but it is characteristic of the peculiar humor of
the English, and of their love for what is blunt, comic, and familiar,
that they have embodied their national oddities in the figure of a
sturdy, corpulent old fellow, with a three-cornered hat, red waistcoat,
leather breeches, and stout oaken cudgel. Thus they have taken a
singular delight in exhibiting their most private foibles in a laughable
point of view; and have been so successful in their delineations, that
there is scarcely a being in actual existence more absolutely present to
the public mind than that eccentric personage, John Bull.
Perhaps the continual contemplation of the character thus drawn of them
has contributed to fix it upon the nation; and thus to give reality to
what at first may have been painted in a great measure from the
imagination. Men are apt to acquire peculiarities that are continually
ascribed to them. The common orders of English seem wonderfully
captivated with the _beau ideal_ which they have formed of John Bull,
and endeavor to act up to the broad caricature that is perpetually
before their eyes. Unluckily, they sometimes make their boasted Bull-ism
an apology for their prejudice or grossness; and this I have especially
noticed among those truly homebred and genuine sons of the soil who have
never migrated beyond the sound of Bow-bells. If one of these should be
a little uncouth in speech, and apt to utter impertinent truths, he
confesses that he is a real John Bull, and always speaks his mind. If he
now and then flies into an unreasonable burst of passion about trifles,
he observes, that John Bull is a choleric old blade, but then his
passion is over in a moment, and he bears no malice. If he betrays a
coarseness of taste, and an insensibility to foreign refinements, he
thanks heaven for his ignorance--he is a plain John Bull, and has no
relish for frippery and nicknacks. His very proneness to be gulled by
strangers, and to pay extravagantly for absurdities, is excused under
the plea of munificence--for John is always more generous than wise.
Thus, under the name of John Bull, he will contrive to argue every fault
into a merit, and will frankly convict himself of being the honestest
fellow in existence.
However little, therefore, the character may have suited in the first
instance, it has gradually adapted itself to the nation, or rather they
have adapted themselves to each other; and a stranger who wishes to
study English peculiarities, may gather much valuable information from
the innumerable portraits of John Bull, as exhibited in the windows of
the caricature-shops. Still, however, he is one of those fertile
humorists, that are continually throwing out new portraits, and
presenting different aspects from different points of view; and, often
as he has been described, I cannot resist the temptation to give a
slight sketch of him, such as he has met my eye.
John Bull, to all appearance, is a plain downright matter-of-fact
fellow, with much less of poetry about him than rich prose. There is
little of romance in his nature, but a vast deal of strong natural
feeling. He excels in humor more than in wit; is jolly rather than gay;
melancholy rather than morose; can easily be moved to a sudden tear, or
surprised into a broad laugh; but he loathes sentiment, and has no turn
for light pleasantry. He is a boon companion, if you allow him to have
his humor, and to talk about himself; and he will stand by a friend in a
quarrel, with life and purse, however soundly he may be cudgeled.
In this last respect, to tell the truth, he has a propensity to be
somewhat too ready. He is a busy-minded personage, who thinks not merely
for himself and family, but for all the country round, and is most
generously disposed to be everybody's champion. He is continually
volunteering his services to settle his neighbors' affairs, and takes it
in great dudgeon if they engage in any matter of consequence without
asking his advice; though he seldom engages in any friendly office of
the kind without finishing by getting into a squabble with all parties,
and then railing bitterly at their ingratitude. He unluckily took
lessons in his youth in the noble science of defense, and having
accomplished himself in the use of his limbs and his weapons, and become
a perfect master at boxing and cudgel-play, he has had a troublesome
life of it ever since. He cannot hear of a quarrel between the most
distant of his neighbors, but he begins incontinently to fumble with
the head of his cudgel, and consider whether his interest or honor does
not require that he should meddle in the broil. Indeed he has extended
his relations of pride and policy so completely over the whole country,
that no event can take place, without infringing some of his finely-spun
rights and dignities. Couched in his little domain, with these filaments
stretching forth in every direction, he is like some choleric,
bottle-bellied old spider, who has woven his web over a whole chamber,
so that a fly cannot buzz, nor a breeze blow, without startling his
repose, and causing him to sally forth wrathfully from his den.
Though really a good-hearted, good-tempered old fellow at bottom, yet he
is singularly fond of being in the midst of contention. It is one of his
peculiarities, however, that he only relishes the beginning of an
affray; he always goes into a fight with alacrity, but comes out of it
grumbling even when victorious; and though no one fights with more
obstinacy to carry a contested point, yet, when the battle is over, and
he comes to the reconciliation, he is so much taken up with the mere
shaking of hands, that he is apt to let his antagonist pocket all that
they have been quarreling about. It is not, therefore, fighting that he
ought so much to be on his guard against, as making friends. It is
difficult to cudgel him out of a farthing; but put him in a good humor,
and you may bargain him out of all the money in his pocket. He is like a
stout ship, which will weather the roughest storm uninjured, but roll
its masts overboard in the succeeding calm.
He is a little fond of playing the magnifico abroad; of pulling out a
long purse; flinging his money bravely about at boxing matches, horse
races, cock fights, and carrying a high head among "gentlemen of the
fancy:" but immediately after one of these fits of extravagance, he will
be taken with violent qualms of economy; stop short at the most trivial
expenditure; talk desperately of being ruined and brought upon the
parish; and, in such moods, will not pay the smallest tradesman's bill,
without violent altercation. He is in fact the most punctual and
discontented paymaster in the world; drawing his coin out of his
breeches pocket with infinite reluctance; paying to the uttermost
farthing, but accompanying every guinea with a growl.
With all his talk of economy, however, he is a bountiful provider, and a
hospitable housekeeper. His economy is of a whimsical kind, its chief
object being to devise how he may afford to be extravagant; for he will
begrudge himself a beefsteak and pint of port one day, that he may roast
an ox whole, broach a hogshead of ale, and treat all his neighbors on
the next.
His domestic establishment is enormously expensive: not so much from any
great outward parade, as from the great consumption of solid beef and
pudding; the vast number of followers he feeds and clothes; and his
singular disposition to pay hugely for small services. He is a most kind
and indulgent master, and, provided his servants humor his
peculiarities, flatter his vanity a little now and then, and do not
peculate grossly on him before his face, they may manage him to
perfection. Everything that lives on him seems to thrive and grow fat.
His house-servants are well paid, and pampered, and have little to do.
His horses are sleek and lazy, and prance slowly before his state
carriage; and his house-dogs sleep quietly about the door, and will
hardly bark at a housebreaker.
His family mansion is an old castellated manor-house, gray with age, and
of a most venerable, though weather-beaten appearance. It has been built
upon no regular plan, but is a vast accumulation of parts, erected in
various tastes and ages. The center bears evident traces of Saxon
architecture, and is as solid as ponderous stone and old English oak can
make it. Like all the relics of that style, it is full of obscure
passages, intricate mazes, and dusky chambers; and though these have
been partially lighted up in modern days, yet there are many places
where you must still grope in the dark. Additions have been made to the
original edifice from time to time, and great alterations have taken
place; towers and battlements have been erected during wars and tumults:
wings built in time of peace; and out-houses, lodges, and offices, run
up according to the whim or convenience of different generations, until
it has become one of the most spacious, rambling tenements imaginable.
An entire wing is taken up with the family chapel, a reverend pile, that
must have been exceedingly sumptuous, and, indeed, in spite of having
been altered and simplified at various periods, has still a look of
solemn religious pomp. Its walls within are stored with the monuments of
John's ancestors; and it is snugly fitted up with soft cushions and
well-lined chairs, where such of his family as are inclined to church
services, may doze comfortably in the discharge of their duties.
To keep up this chapel has cost John much money; but he is stanch in his
religion, and piqued in his zeal, from the circumstance that many
dissenting chapels have been erected in his vicinity, and several of his
neighbors, with whom he has had quarrels, are strong papists.
To do the duties of the chapel he maintains, at a large expense, a pious
and portly family chaplain. He is a most learned and decorous personage,
and a truly well-bred Christian, who always backs the old gentleman in
his opinions, winks discreetly at his little peccadilloes, rebukes the
children when refractory, and is of great use in exhorting the tenants
to read their Bibles, say their prayers, and, above all, to pay their
rents punctually, and without grumbling.
The family apartments are in a very antiquated taste, somewhat heavy,
and often inconvenient, but full of the solemn magnificence of former
times; fitted up with rich, though faded tapestry, unwieldy furniture,
and loads of massy gorgeous old plate. The vast fireplaces, ample
kitchens, extensive cellars, and sumptuous banqueting halls, all speak
of the roaring hospitality of days of yore, of which the modern
festivity at the manor-house is but a shadow. There are, however,
complete suites of rooms apparently deserted and time-worn; and towers
and turrets that are tottering to decay; so that in high winds there is
danger of their tumbling about the ears of the household.
John has frequently been advised to have the old edifice thoroughly
overhauled; and to have some of the useless parts pulled down, and the
others strengthened with their materials; but the old gentleman always
grows testy on this subject. He swears the house is an excellent
house--that it is tight and weather proof, and not to be shaken by
tempests--that it has stood for several hundred years, and, therefore,
is not likely to tumble down now--that as to its being inconvenient, his
family is accustomed to the inconveniences, and would not be comfortable
without them--that as to its unwieldy size and irregular construction,
these result from its being the growth of centuries, and being improved
by the wisdom of every generation--that an old family, like his,
requires a large house to dwell in; new, upstart families may live in
modern cottages and snug boxes; but an old English family should inhabit
an old English manor-house. If you point out any part of the building as
superfluous, he insists that it is material to the strength or
decoration of the rest, and the harmony of the whole; and swears that
the parts are so built into each other, that if you pull down one, you
run the risk of having the whole about your ears.
The secret of the matter is, that John has a great disposition to
protect and patronize. He thinks it indispensable to the dignity of an
ancient and honorable family, to be bounteous in its appointments, and
to be eaten up by dependents; and so, partly from pride, and partly from
kind-heartedness, he makes it a rule always to give shelter and
maintenance to his superannuated servants.
The consequence is, that, like many other venerable family
establishments, his manor is encumbered by old retainers whom he cannot
turn off, and an old style which he cannot lay down. His mansion is like
a great hospital of invalids, and, with all its magnitude, is not a whit
too large for its inhabitants. Not a nook or corner but is of use in
housing some useless personage. Groups of veteran beefeaters, gouty
pensioners, and retired heroes of the buttery and the larder, are seen
lolling about its walls, crawling over its lawns, dozing under its
trees, or sunning themselves upon the benches at its doors. Every office
and outhouse is garrisoned by these supernumeraries and their families;
for they are amazingly prolific, and when they die off, are sure to
leave John a legacy of hungry mouths to be provided for. A mattock
cannot be struck against the most mouldering tumble-down tower, but out
pops, from some cranny or loop-hole, the gray pate of some superannuated
hanger-on, who has lived at John's expense all his life, and makes the
most grievous outcry at their pulling down the roof from over the head
of a worn-out servant of the family. This is an appeal that John's
honest heart never can withstand; so that a man, who has faithfully
eaten his beef and pudding all his life, is sure to be rewarded with a
pipe and tankard in his old days.
A great part of his park, also, is turned into paddocks, where his
broken-down chargers are turned loose to graze undisturbed for the
remainder of their existence--a worthy example of grateful recollection,
which if some of his neighbors were to imitate, would not be to their
discredit. Indeed, it is one of his great pleasures to point out these
old steeds to his visitors, to dwell on their good qualities, extol
their past services, and boast, with some little vainglory, of the
perilous adventures and hardy exploits through which they have carried
him.
He is given, however, to indulge his veneration for family usages, and
family encumbrances, to a whimsical extent. His manor is infested by
gangs of gipsies; yet he will not suffer them to be driven off, because
they have infested the place time out of mind, and been regular poachers
upon every generation of the family. He will scarcely permit a dry
branch to be lopped from the great trees that surround the house, lest
it should molest the rooks, that have bred there for centuries. Owls
have taken possession of the dovecote; but they are hereditary owls, and
must not be disturbed. Swallows have nearly choked up every chimney with
their nests; martins build in every frieze and cornice; crows flutter
about the towers, and perch on every weathercock; and old gray-headed
rats may be seen in every quarter of the house, running in and out of
their holes undauntedly in broad daylight. In short, John has such a
reverence for everything that has been long in the family, that he will
not hear even of abuses being reformed, because they are good old family
abuses.
All those whims and habits have concurred woefully to drain the old
gentleman's purse; and as he prides himself on punctuality in money
matters, and wishes to maintain his credit in the neighborhood, they
have caused him great perplexity in meeting his engagements. This, too,
has been increased by the altercations and heart-burnings which are
continually taking place in his family. His children have been brought
up to different callings, and are of different ways of thinking; and as
they have always been allowed to speak their minds freely, they do not
fail to exercise the privilege most clamorously in the present posture
of his affairs. Some stand up for the honor of the race, and are clear
that the old establishment should be kept up in all its state, whatever
may be the cost; others, who are more prudent and considerate, entreat
the old gentleman to retrench his expenses, and to put his whole system
of housekeeping on a more moderate footing. He has, indeed, at times,
seemed inclined to listen to their opinions, but their wholesome advice
has been completely defeated by the obstreperous conduct of one of his
sons. This is a noisy, rattle-pated fellow, of rather low habits, who
neglects his business to frequent ale-houses--is the orator of village
clubs, and a complete oracle among the poorest of his father's tenants.
No sooner does he hear any of his brothers mention reform or
retrenchment, than up he jumps, takes the words out of their mouths, and
roars out for an overturn. When his tongue is once going nothing can
stop it. He rants about the room; hectors the old man about his
spendthrift practices; ridicules his tastes and pursuits; insists that
he shall turn the old servants out of doors; give the broken-down horses
to the hounds; send the fat chaplain packing, and take a field-preacher
in his place--nay, that the whole family mansion shall be leveled with
the ground, and a plain one of brick and mortar built in its place. He
rails at every social entertainment and family festivity, and skulks
away growling to the ale-house whenever an equipage drives up to the
door. Though constantly complaining of the emptiness of his purse, yet
he scruples not to spend all his pocket-money in these tavern
convocations, and even runs up scores for the liquor over which he
preaches about his father's extravagance.
It may readily be imagined how little such thwarting agrees with the old
cavalier's fiery temperament. He has become so irritable, from repeated
crossings, that the mere mention of retrenchment or reform is a signal
for a brawl between him and the tavern oracle. As the latter is too
sturdy and refractory for paternal discipline, having grown out of all
fear of the cudgel, they have frequent scenes of wordy warfare, which at
times run so high, that John is fain to call in the aid of his son Tom,
an officer who has served abroad, but is at present living at home, on
half-pay. This last is sure to stand by the old gentleman, right or
wrong; likes nothing so much as a racketing, roystering life; and is
ready at a wink or nod, to out saber, and flourish it over the orator's
head, if he dares to array himself against paternal authority.
These family dissensions, as usual, have got abroad, and are rare food
for scandal in John's neighborhood. People begin to look wise, and shake
their heads, whenever his affairs are mentioned. They all "hope that
matters are not so bad with him as represented; but when a man's own
children begin to rail at his extravagance, things must be badly
managed. They understand he is mortgaged over head and ears, and is
continually dabbling with money lenders. He is certainly an open-handed
old gentleman, but they fear he has lived too fast; indeed, they never
knew any good come of this fondness for hunting, racing, reveling and
prize-fighting. In short, Mr. Bull's estate is a very fine one, and has
been in the family a long time; but, for all that, they have known many
finer estates come to the hammer."
What is worst of all, is the effect which these pecuniary embarrassments
and domestic feuds have had on the poor man himself. Instead of that
jolly round corporation, and smug rosy face, which he used to present,
he has of late become as shriveled and shrunk as a frost-bitten apple.
His scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, which bellied out so bravely in those
prosperous days when he sailed before the wind, now hangs loosely about
him like a mainsail in a calm. His leather breeches are all in folds and
wrinkles, and apparently have much ado to hold up the boots that yawn on
both sides of his once sturdy legs.
Instead of strutting about as formerly, with his three-cornered hat on
one side; flourishing his cudgel, and bringing it down every moment with
a hearty thump upon the ground; looking everyone sturdily in the face,
and trolling out a stave of a catch or a drinking song; he now goes
about whistling thoughtfully to himself, with his head drooping down,
his cudgel tucked under his arm, and his hands thrust to the bottom of
his breeches pockets, which are evidently empty.
Such is the plight of honest John Bull at present; yet for all this the
old fellow's spirit is as tall and as gallant as ever. If you drop the
least expression of sympathy or concern, he takes fire in an instant;
swears that he is the richest and stoutest fellow in the country; talks
of laying out large sums to adorn his house or buy another estate; and
with a valiant swagger and grasping of his cudgel, longs exceedingly to
have another bout at quarter-staff.
Though there may be something rather whimsical in all this, yet I
confess I cannot look upon John's situation without strong feelings of
interest. With all his odd humors and obstinate prejudices, he is a
sterling-hearted old blade. He may not be so wonderfully fine a fellow
as he thinks himself, but he is at least twice as good as his neighbors
represent him. His virtues are all his own; all plain, homebred, and
unaffected. His very faults smack of the raciness of his good qualities.
His extravagance savors of his generosity; his quarrelsomeness of his
courage; his credulity of his open faith; his vanity of his pride; and
his bluntness of his sincerity. They are all the redundancies of a rich
and liberal character. He is like his own oak, rough without, but sound
and solid within; whose bark abounds with excrescences in proportion to
the growth and grandeur of the timber; and whose branches make a fearful
groaning and murmuring in the least storm, from their very magnitude and
luxuriance. There is something, too, in the appearance of his old family
mansion that is extremely poetical and picturesque; and, as long as it
can be rendered comfortably habitable, I should almost tremble to see it
meddled with, during the present conflict of tastes and opinions. Some
of his advisers are no doubt good architects, that might be of service;
but many, I fear, are mere levelers, who, when they had once got to work
with their mattocks on this venerable edifice, would never stop until
they had brought it to the ground, and perhaps buried themselves among
the ruins. All that I wish is, that John's present troubles may teach
him more prudence in future. That he may cease to distress his mind
about other people's affairs; that he may give up the fruitless attempt
to promote the good of his neighbors, and the peace and happiness of the
world, by dint of the cudgel; that he may remain quietly at home;
gradually get his house into repair; cultivate his rich estate according
to his fancy; husband his income--if he thinks proper; bring his unruly
children into order--if he can; renew the jovial scenes of ancient
prosperity; and long enjoy, on his paternal lands, a green, an
honorable, and a merry old age.
THE MUTABILITY OF LITERATURE
A COLLOQUY IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
WASHINGTON IRVING
"I know that all beneath the moon decays,
And what by mortals in this world is brought,
In time's great period shall return to nought.
I know that all the muse's heavenly lays,
With toil of sprite which are so dearly bought,
As idle sounds, of few or none are sought,
That there is nothing lighter than mere praise."
--DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.
There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind, in which we naturally
steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt, where we may
indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed. In such a
mood I was loitering about the old gray cloisters of Westminster Abbey,
enjoying that luxury of wandering thought which one is apt to dignify
with the name of reflection; when suddenly an interruption of madcap
boys from Westminster School, playing at football, broke in upon the
monastic stillness of the place, making the vaulted passages and
mouldering tombs echo with their merriment. I sought to take refuge from
their noise by penetrating still deeper into the solitudes of the pile,
and applied to one of the vergers for admission to the library. He
conducted me through a portal rich with the crumbling sculpture of
former ages, which opened upon a gloomy passage leading to the
chapter-house and the chamber in which doomsday book is deposited. Just
within the passage is a small door on the left. To this the verger
applied a key; it was double locked, and opened with some difficulty, as
if seldom used. We now ascended a dark narrow staircase, and, passing
through a second door, entered the library.
I found myself in a lofty antique hall, the roof supported by massive
joists of old English oak. It was soberly lighted by a row of Gothic
windows at a considerable height from the floor, and which apparently
opened upon the roofs of the cloisters. An ancient picture of some
reverend dignitary of the church in his robes hung over the fireplace.
Around the hall and in a small gallery were the books, arranged in
carved oaken cases. They consisted principally of old polemical writers,
and were much more worn by time than use. In the center of the library
was a solitary table with two or three books on it, an inkstand without
ink, and a few pens parched by long disuse. The place seemed fitted for
quiet study and profound meditation. It was buried deep among the
massive walls of the abbey, and shut up from the tumult of the world. I
could only hear now and then the shouts of the school-boys faintly
swelling from the cloisters, and the sound of a bell tolling for
prayers, echoing soberly along the roofs of the abbey. By degrees the
shouts of merriment grew fainter and fainter, and at length died away;
the bell ceased to toll, and a profound silence reigned through the
dusky hall.
I had taken down a little thick quarto, curiously bound in parchment,
with brass clasps, and seated myself at the table in a venerable
elbow-chair. Instead of reading, however, I was beguiled by the solemn
monastic air, and lifeless quiet of the place, into a train of musing.
As I looked around upon the old volumes in their mouldering covers, thus
ranged on the shelves, and apparently never disturbed in their repose, I
could not but consider the library a kind of literary catacomb, where
authors, like mummies, are piously entombed, and left to blacken and
moulder in dusty oblivion.
How much, thought I, has each of these volumes, now thrust aside with
such indifference, cost some aching head! how many weary days! how many
sleepless nights! How have their authors buried themselves in the
solitude of cells and cloisters; shut themselves up from the face of
man, and the still more blessed face of nature; and devoted themselves
to painful research and intense reflection! And all for what? to occupy
an inch of dusty shelf--to have the title of their works read now and
then in a future age, by some drowsy churchman or casual straggler like
myself; and in another age to be lost, even to remembrance. Such is the
amount of this boasted immortality. A mere temporary rumor, a local
sound; like the tone of that bell which has just tolled among these
towers, filling the ear for a moment--lingering transiently in echo--and
then passing away like a thing that was not.
While I sat half murmuring, half meditating these unprofitable
speculations with my head resting on my hand, I was thrumming with the
other hand upon the quarto, until I accidentally loosened the clasps;
when, to my utter astonishment, the little book gave two or three yawns,
like one awaking from a deep sleep; then a husky hem; and at length
began to talk. At first its voice was very hoarse and broken, being much
troubled by a cobweb which some studious spider had woven across it; and
having probably contracted a cold from long exposure to the chills and
damps of the abbey. In a short time, however, it became more distinct,
and I soon found it an exceedingly fluent conversable little tome. Its
language, to be sure, was rather quaint and obsolete, and its
pronunciation, what, in the present day, would be deemed barbarous; but
I shall endeavor, as far as I am able, to render it in modern parlance.
It began with railings about the neglect of the world--about merit being
suffered to languish in obscurity, and other such commonplace topics of
literary repining, and complained bitterly that it had not been opened
for more than two centuries; that the dean only looked now and then into
the library, sometimes took down a volume or two, trifled with them for
a few moments, and then returned them to their shelves. "What a plague
do they mean," said the little quarto, which I began to perceive was
somewhat choleric, "what a plague do they mean by keeping several
thousand volumes of us shut up here, and watched by a set of old
vergers, like so many beauties in a harem, merely to be looked at now
and then by the dean? Books were written to give pleasure and to be
enjoyed; and I would have a rule passed that the dean should pay each of
us a visit at least once a year; or if he is not equal to the task, let
them once in a while turn loose the whole school of Westminster among
us, that at any rate we may now and then have an airing."
"Softly, my worthy friend," replied I, "you are not aware how much
better you are off than most books of your generation. By being stored
away in this ancient library, you are like the treasured remains of
those saints and monarchs, which lie enshrined in the adjoining chapels;
while the remains of your contemporary mortals, left to the ordinary
course of nature, have long since returned to dust."
"Sir," said the little tome, ruffling his leaves and looking big, "I was
written for all the world, not for the bookworms of an abbey. I was
intended to circulate from hand to hand, like other great contemporary
works; but here have I been clasped up for more than two centuries, and
might have silently fallen a prey to these worms that are playing the
very vengeance with my intestines, if you had not by chance given me an
opportunity of uttering a few last words before I go to pieces."
"My good friend," rejoined I, "had you been left to the circulation of
which you speak, you would long ere this have been no more. To judge
from your physiognomy, you are now well stricken in years: very few of
your contemporaries can be at present in existence; and those few owe
their longevity to being immured like yourself in old libraries; which,
suffer me to add, instead of likening to harems, you might more properly
and gratefully have compared to those infirmaries attached to religious
establishments, for the benefit of the old and decrepit, and where, by
quiet fostering and no employment, they often endure to an amazingly
good-for-nothing old age. You talk of your contemporaries as if in
circulation--where do we meet with their works? what do we hear of
Robert Groteste, of Lincoln? No one could have toiled harder than he for
immortality. He is said to have written nearly two hundred volumes. He
built, as it were, a pyramid of books to perpetuate his name: but, alas!
the pyramid has long since fallen, and only a few fragments are
scattered in various libraries, where they are scarcely disturbed even
by the antiquarian. What do we hear of Giraldus Cambrensis, the
historian, antiquary, philosopher, theologian, and poet? He declined two
bishoprics, that he might shut himself up and write for posterity; but
posterity never inquires after his labors. What of Henry of Huntingdon,
who, besides a learned history of England, wrote a treatise on the
contempt of the world, which the world has revenged by forgetting him?
What is quoted of Joseph of Exeter, styled the miracle of his age in
classical composition? Of his three great heroic poems one is lost
forever, excepting a mere fragment; the others are known only to a few
of the curious in literature; and as to his love verses and epigrams,
they have entirely disappeared. What is in current use of John Wallis,
the Franciscan, who acquired the name of the tree of life? Of William of
Malmsbury;--of Simeon of Durham;--of Benedict of Peterborough;--of John
Hanvill of St. Albans;--of----"
"Prithee, friend," cried the quarto, in a testy tone, "how old do you
think me? You are talking of authors that lived long before my time, and
wrote either in Latin or French, so that they in a manner expatriated
themselves, and deserved to be forgotten;[1] but I, sir, was ushered
into the world from the press of the renowned Wynkyn de Worde. I was
written in my own native tongue, at a time when the language had become
fixed; and indeed I was considered a model of pure and elegant English."
(I should observe that these remarks were couched in such intolerably
antiquated terms, that I have had infinite difficulty in rendering them
into modern phraseology.)
"I cry your mercy," said I, "for mistaking your age; but it matters
little: almost all the writers of your time have likewise passed into
forgetfulness; and De Worde's publications are mere literary rarities
among book-collectors. The purity and stability of language, too, on
which you found your claims to perpetuity, have been the fallacious
dependence of authors of every age, even back to the times of the worthy
Robert of Gloucester, who wrote his history in rhymes of mongrel
Saxon.[2] Even now many talk of Spenser's 'well of pure English
undefiled,' as if the language ever sprang from a well or fountain-head,
and was not rather a mere confluence of various tongues, perpetually
subject to changes and intermixtures. It is this which has made English
literature so extremely mutable, and the reputation built upon it so
fleeting. Unless thought can be committed to something more permanent
and unchangeable than such a medium, even thought must share the fate of
everything else, and fall into decay. This should serve as a check upon
the vanity and exultation of the most popular writer. He finds the
language in which he has embarked his fame gradually altering, and
subject to the dilapidations of time and the caprice of fashion. He
looks back and beholds the early authors of his country, once the
favorites of their day, supplanted by modern writers. A few short ages
have covered them with obscurity, and their merits can only be relished
by the quaint taste of the bookworm. And such, he anticipates, will be
the fate of his own work, which, however it may be admired in its day,
and held up as a model of purity, will in the course of years grow
antiquated and obsolete; until it shall become almost as unintelligible
in its native land as an Egyptian obelisk, or one of those Runic
inscriptions said to exist in the deserts of Tartary. I declare," added
I, with some emotion, "when I contemplate a modern library, filled with
new works, in all the bravery of rich gilding and binding, I feel
disposed to sit down and weep; like the good Xerxes, when he surveyed
his army, pranked out in all the splendor of military array, and
reflected that in one hundred years not one of them would be in
existence!"
"Ah," said the little quarto, with a heavy sigh, "I see how it is; these
modern scribblers have superseded all the good old authors. I suppose
nothing is read now-a-days but Sir Philip Sydney's _Arcadia_,
Sackville's stately plays, and Mirror for Magistrates, or the fine-spun
euphuisms of the 'unparalleled John Lyly.'"
"There you are again mistaken," said I; "the writers whom you suppose in
vogue, because they happened to be so when you were last in circulation,
have long since had their day. Sir Philip Sydney's _Arcadia_, the
immortality of which was so fondly predicted by his admirers,[3] and
which, in truth, is full of noble thoughts, delicate images, and
graceful turns of language, is now scarcely ever mentioned. Sackville
has strutted into obscurity; and even Lyly, though his writings were
once the delight of a court, and apparently perpetuated by a proverb, is
now scarcely known even by name. A whole crowd of authors who wrote and
wrangled at the time, have likewise gone down, with all their writings
and their controversies. Wave after wave of succeeding literature has
rolled over them, until they are buried so deep, that it is only now and
then that some industrious diver after fragments of antiquity brings up
a specimen for the gratification of the curious.
"For my part," I continued, "I consider this mutability of language a
wise precaution of Providence for the benefit of the world at large, and
of authors in particular. To reason from analogy, we daily behold the
varied and beautiful tribes of vegetables springing up, flourishing,
adorning the fields for a short time, and then fading into dust, to make
way for their successors. Were not this the case, the fecundity of
nature would be a grievance instead of a blessing. The earth would groan
with rank and excessive vegetation, and its surface become a tangled
wilderness. In like manner the works of genius and learning decline, and
make way for subsequent productions. Language gradually varies, and with
it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted
time; otherwise, the creative powers of genius would overstock the
world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes
of literature. Formerly there were some restraints on this excessive
multiplication. Works had to be transcribed by hand, which was a slow
and laborious operation; they were written either on parchment, which
was expensive, so that one work was often erased to make way for
another; or on papyrus, which was fragile and extremely perishable.
Authorship was a limited and unprofitable craft, pursued chiefly by
monks in the leisure and solitude of their cloisters. The accumulation
of manuscripts was slow and costly, and confined almost entirely to
monasteries. To these circumstances it may, in some measure, be owing
that we have not been inundated by the intellect of antiquity; that the
fountains of thought have not been broken up, and modern genius drowned
in the deluge. But the inventions of paper and the press have put an end
to all these restraints. They have made everyone a writer, and enabled
every mind to pour itself into print, and diffuse itself over the whole
intellectual world. The consequences are alarming. The stream of
literature has swollen into a torrent--augmented into a river--expanded
into a sea. A few centuries since, five or six hundred manuscripts
constituted a great library; but what would you say to libraries such as
actually exist, containing three or four hundred thousand volumes;
legions of authors at the same time busy; and the press going on with
fearfully increasing activity, to double and quadruple the number?
Unless some unforeseen mortality should break out among the progeny of
the muse, now that she has become so prolific, I tremble for posterity.
I fear the mere fluctuation of language will not be sufficient.
Criticism may do much. It increases with the increase of literature, and
resembles one of those salutary checks on population spoken of by
economists. All possible encouragement, therefore, should be given to
the growth of critics, good or bad. But I fear all will be in vain; let
criticism do what it may, writers will write, printers will print, and
the world will inevitably be overstocked with good books. It will soon
be the employment of a lifetime merely to learn their names. Many a man
of passable information, at the present day, reads scarcely anything but
reviews; and before long a man of erudition will be little better than a
mere walking catalogue."
"My very good sir," said the little quarto, yawning most drearily in my
face, "excuse my interrupting you, but I perceive you are rather given
to prose. I would ask the fate of an author who was making some noise
just as I left the world. His reputation, however, was considered quite
temporary. The learned shook their heads at him, for he was a poor
half-educated varlet, that knew little of Latin, and nothing of Greek,
and had been obliged to run the country for deer-stealing. I think his
name was Shakspeare. I presume he soon sunk into oblivion."
"On the contrary," said I, "it is owing to that very man that the
literature of his period has experienced a duration beyond the ordinary
term of English literature. There rise authors now and then, who seem
proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted
themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like
gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by
their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and
laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil
around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold
up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.
Such is the case with Shakspeare, whom we behold defying the
encroachments of time, retaining in modern use the language and
literature of his day, and giving duration to many an indifferent
author, merely from having flourished in his vicinity. But even he, I
grieve to say, is gradually assuming the tint of age, and his whole form
is overrun by a profusion of commentators, who, like clambering vines
and creepers, almost bury the noble plant that upholds them."
Here the little quarto began to heave his sides and chuckle, until at
length he broke out in a plethoric fit of laughter that had well nigh
choked him, by reason of his excessive corpulency. "Mighty well!" cried
he, as soon as he could recover breath, "mighty well! and so you would
persuade me that the literature of an age is to be perpetuated by a
vagabond deer-stealer! by a man without learning; by a poet, forsooth--a
poet!" And here he wheezed forth another fit of laughter.
I confess that I felt somewhat nettled at this rudeness, which, however,
I pardoned on account of his having flourished in a less polished age. I
determined, nevertheless, not to give up my point.
"Yes," resumed I, positively, "a poet; for of all writers he has the
best chance for immortality. Others may write from the head, but he
writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him. He is
the faithful portrayer of nature, whose features are always the same and
always interesting. Prose writers are voluminous and unwieldy; their
pages are crowded with commonplaces, and their thoughts expanded into
tediousness. But with the true poet everything is terse, touching, or
brilliant. He gives the choicest thoughts in the choicest language. He
illustrates them by everything that he sees most striking in nature and
art. He enriches them by pictures of human life, such as it is passing
before him. His writings, therefore, contain the spirit, the aroma, if I
may use the phrase, of the age in which he lives. They are caskets which
inclose within a small compass the wealth of the language--its family
jewels, which are thus transmitted in a portable form to posterity. The
setting may occasionally be antiquated, and require now and then to be
renewed, as in the case of Chaucer; but the brilliancy and intrinsic
value of the gems continue unaltered. Cast a look back over the long
reach of literary history. What vast valleys of dullness, filled with
monkish legends and academical controversies! what bogs of theological
speculations! what dreary wastes of metaphysics! Here and there only do
we behold the heaven-illuminated bards, elevated like beacons on their
widely-separate heights, to transmit the pure light of poetical
intelligence from age to age."[4]
I was just about to launch forth into eulogiums upon the poets of the
day, when the sudden opening of the door caused me to turn my head. It
was the verger, who came to inform me that it was time to close the
library. I sought to have a parting word with the quarto, but the worthy
little tome was silent; the clasps were closed: and it looked perfectly
unconscious of all that had passed. I have been to the library two or
three times since, and have endeavored to draw it into further
conversation, but in vain; and whether all this rambling colloquy
actually took place, or whether it was another of those odd day-dreams
to which I am subject, I have never to this moment been able to
discover.
KEAN'S ACTING
RICHARD HENRY DANA
"For, doubtless, that indeed according to art is most eloquent,
which turns and approaches nearest to nature, from whence it came."
--MILTON.
"_Professed diversions!_ cannot these escape?
.....
We ransack tombs for _pastime_; from the dust
Call up the sleeping hero; bid him tread
The scene for our amusement: How like Gods
We sit; and, wrapt in immortality,
Shed generous tears on wretches born to die;
Their fate deploring, to forget _our own!_"
--YOUNG.
I had scarcely thought of the theater for some years, when Kean arrived
in this country; and it was more from curiosity than from any other
motive, that I went to see, for the first time, the great actor of the
age. I was soon lost to the recollection of being in a theater, or
looking upon a great display of the "mimic art." The simplicity,
earnestness, and sincerity of his acting made me forgetful of the
fiction, and bore me away with the power of reality and truth. If this
be acting, said I, as I returned home, I may as well make the theater my
school, and henceforward study nature at second hand.
How can I describe one who is almost as full of beauties as nature
itself,--who grows upon us the more we become acquainted with him, and
makes us sensible that the first time we saw him in any part, however
much he may have moved us, we had but a partial apprehension of the
many excellences of his acting? We cease to consider it as a mere
amusement. It is an intellectual feast; and he who goes to it with a
disposition and capacity to relish it, will receive from it more
nourishment for his mind, than he would be likely to do in many other
ways in twice the time. Our faculties are opened and enlivened by it;
our reflections and recollections are of an elevated kind; and the voice
which is sounding in our ears, long after we have left him, creates an
inward harmony which is for our good.
Kean, in truth, stands very much in that relation to other players whom
we have seen, that Shakspeare does to other dramatists. One player is
called classical; another makes fine points here, and another there;
Kean makes more fine points than all of them together; but in him these
are only little prominences, showing their bright heads above a
beautifully undulated surface. A continual change is going on in him,
partaking of the nature of the varying scenes he is passing through, and
the many thoughts and feelings which are shifting within him.
In a clear autumnal day we may see, here and there, a massed white cloud
edged with a blazing brightness against a blue sky, and now and then a
dark pine swinging its top in the wind, with the melancholy sound of the
sea; but who can note the shifting and untiring play of the leaves of
the wood, and their passing hues, when each seems a living thing full of
sensations, and happy in its rich attire? A sound, too, of universal
harmony is in our ears, and a wide-spread beauty before our eyes, which
we cannot define; yet a joy is in our hearts. Our delight increases in
these, day after day, the longer we give ourselves to them, till at last
we become, as it were, a part of the existence without us. So it is with
natural characters. They grow upon us imperceptibly, till we become
bound up in them, we scarce know when or how. So, in its degree, it
will fare with the actor who is deeply filled with nature, and is
perpetually throwing off her beautiful evanescences. Instead of becoming
tired of him, as we do, after a time, of others, he will go on giving
something which will be new to the observing mind, and will keep the
feelings alive, because their action will be natural. I have no doubt,
that, excepting those who go to a play as children look into a show-box,
to admire and exclaim at distorted figures, and raw, unharmonious
colors, there is no man of a moderately warm temperament, and with a
tolerable share of insight into human nature, who would not find his
interest in Kean increasing with a study of him. It is very possible
that the excitement would lessen, but there would be a quieter pleasure,
instead of it, stealing upon him, as he became familiar with the
character of the acting.
Taken within his range of characters, the versatility of his playing is
striking. He seems not the same being, now representing Richard, and,
again, Hamlet; but the two characters alone appear before you, and as
distinct individuals who had never known or heard of each other. So does
he become the character he is to represent, that we have sometimes
thought it a reason why he was not universally better liked here, in
Richard; and that because the player did not make himself a little more
visible, he must needs bear a share of our dislike of the cruel king.
And this may be still more the case, as his construction of the
character, whether right or wrong, creates in us an unmixed dislike of
Richard, till the anguish of his mind makes him the object of pity; from
which time, to the close, all allow that he plays the part better than
anyone has done before him.
In his highest-wrought passion, when the limbs and muscles are alive and
quivering, and his gestures hurried and vehement, nothing appears
ranted or overacted; because he makes us feel, that, with all this,
there is something still within him struggling for utterance. The very
breaking and harshness of his voice, in these parts, help to this
impression, and make up, in a good degree, for this defect, if it be a
defect here.
Though he is on the very verge of truth in his passionate parts, he does
not fall into extravagance; but runs along the dizzy edge of the roaring
and beating sea, with feet as sure as we walk our parlors. We feel that
he is safe, for some preternatural spirit upholds him as it hurries him
onward; and while all is uptorn and tossing in the whirl of the
passions, we see that there is a power and order over the whole.
A man has feelings sometimes which can only be breathed out; there is no
utterance for them in words. I had hardly written this when the terrible
"Ha!" with which Kean makes Lear hail Cornwall and Regan as they enter
in the fourth scene of the second act, came to my mind. That cry seemed
at the time to take me up and sweep me along in its wild swell. No
description in the world could give a tolerably clear notion of it;--it
must be formed, as well as it may be, from what is here said of its
effect.
Kean's playing is sometimes but the outbreaking of inarticulate
sounds;--the throttled struggle of rage, and the choking of grief,--the
broken laugh of extreme suffering, when the mind is ready to deliver
itself over to an insane joy,--the utterance of over-full love, which
cannot and would not speak in express words, and that of wildering
grief, which blanks all the faculties of man.
No other player whom I have heard has attempted these, except now and
then; and should anyone have made the trial in the various ways in which
Kean gives them, probably he would have failed. Kean thrills us with
them, as if they were wrung from him in his agony. They have not the
appearance of study or artifice. The truth is, that the labor of a mind
of his genius constitutes its existence and delight. It is not like the
toil of ordinary men at their task-work. What shows effort in them comes
from him with the freedom and force of nature.
Some object to the frequent use of such sounds, and to others they are
quite shocking. But those who permit themselves to consider that there
are really violent passions in man's nature, and that they utter
themselves a little differently from our ordinary feelings, understand
and feel their language as they speak to us in Kean. Probably no actor
has conceived passion with the intenseness and life that he does. It
seems to enter into him and possess him, as evil spirits possessed men
of old. It is curious to observe how some, who have sat very
contentedly, year after year, and called the face-making, which they
have seen, expression, and the stage-stride, dignity, and the noisy
declamation, and all the rhodomontade of acting, energy and passion,
complain that Kean is apt to be extravagant; when in truth he seems to
be little more than a simple personation of the feeling or passion to be
expressed at the time.
It has been so common a saying, that Lear is the most difficult of
characters to personate, that we had taken it for granted no man could
play it so as to satisfy us. Perhaps it is the hardest to represent. Yet
the part which has generally been supposed the most difficult, the
insanity of Lear, is scarcely more so than that of the choleric old
king. Inefficient rage is almost always ridiculous; and an old man, with
a broken-down body and a mind falling in pieces from the violence of its
uncontrolled passions, is in constant danger of exciting, along with our
pity, a feeling of contempt. It is a chance matter to which we may be
most moved. And this it is which makes the opening of _Lear_ so
difficult.
We may as well notice here the objection which some make to the abrupt
violence with which Kean begins in Lear. If this be a fault, it is
Shakspeare, and not Kean, who is to blame; for, no doubt, he has
conceived it according to his author. Perhaps, however, the mistake lies
in this case, where it does in most others, with those who put
themselves into the seat of judgment to pass upon great men.
In most instances, Shakspeare has given us the gradual growth of a
passion, with such little accompaniments as agree with it, and go to
make up the whole man. In Lear, his object being to represent the
beginning and course of insanity, he has properly enough gone but a
little back of it, and introduced to us an old man of good feelings
enough, but one who had lived without any true principle of conduct, and
whose unruled passions had grown strong with age, and were ready, upon a
disappointment, to make shipwreck of an intellect never strong. To bring
this about, he begins with an abruptness rather unusual; and the old
king rushes in before us, with his passions at their height, and tearing
him like fiends.
Kean gives this as soon as the fitting occasion offers itself. Had he
put more of melancholy and depression and less of rage into the
character, we should have been much puzzled at his so suddenly going
mad. It would have required the change to have been slower; and besides,
his insanity must have been of another kind. It must have been
monotonous and complaining, instead of continually varying; at one time
full of grief, at another playful, and then wild as the winds that
roared about him, and fiery and sharp as the lightning that shot by him.
The truth with which he conceived this was not finer than his execution
of it. Not for a moment, in his utmost violence, did he suffer the
imbecility of the old man's anger to touch upon the ludicrous, when
nothing but the justest conception and feeling of the character could
have saved him from it.
It has been said that Lear is a study for one who would make himself
acquainted with the workings of an insane mind. And it is hardly less
true, that the acting of Kean was an embodying of these workings. His
eye, when his senses are first forsaking him, giving an inquiring look
at what he saw, as if all before him was undergoing a strange and
bewildering change which confused his brain,--the wandering, lost
motions of his hands, which seemed feeling for something familiar to
them, on which they might take hold and be assured of a safe
reality,--the under monotone of his voice, as if he was questioning his
own being, and what surrounded him,--the continuous, but slight,
oscillating motion of the body,--all these expressed, with fearful
truth, the bewildered state of a mind fast unsettling, and making vain
and weak efforts to find its way back to its wonted reason. There was a
childish, feeble gladness in the eye, and a half-piteous smile about the
mouth at times, which one could scarce look upon without tears. As the
derangement increased upon him, his eye lost its notice of objects about
him, wandering over things as if he saw them not, and fastening upon the
creatures of his crazed brain. The helpless and delighted fondness with
which he clings to Edgar, as an insane brother, is another instance of
the justness of Kean's conceptions. Nor does he lose the air of
insanity, even in the fine moralizing parts, and where he inveighs
against the corruptions of the world. There is a madness even in his
reason.
The violent and immediate changes of the passions in Lear, so difficult
to manage without jarring upon us, are given by Kean with a spirit and
with a fitness to nature which we had hardly thought possible. These
are equally well done both before and after the loss of reason. The most
difficult scene, in this respect, is the last interview between Lear and
his daughters, Goneril and Regan,--(and how wonderfully does Kean carry
it through!)--the scene which ends with the horrid shout and cry with
which he runs out mad from their presence, as if the very brain had
taken fire.
The last scene which we are allowed to have of Shakspeare's Lear, for
the simply pathetic, was played by Kean with unmatched power. We sink
down helpless under the oppressive grief. It lies like a dead weight
upon our hearts. We are denied even the relief of tears; and are
thankful for the shudder that seizes us when he kneels to his daughter
in the deploring weakness of his crazed grief.
It is lamentable that Kean should not be allowed to show his unequaled
powers in the last scene of Lear, as Shakspeare wrote it; and that this
mighty work of genius should be profaned by the miserable, mawkish sort
of by-play of Edgar's and Cordelia's loves. Nothing can surpass the
impertinence of the man who made the change, but the folly of those who
sanctioned it.
* * * * *
When I began, I had no other intention than that of giving a few general
impressions made upon me by Kean's acting; but, falling accidentally
upon his Lear, I have been led, unawares, into particulars. It is only
to take these as some of the instances of his powers in Lear, and then
to think of him as not inferior in his other characters, and some notion
may be formed of the effect of Kean's playing upon those who understand
and like him. Neither this, nor anything I might add, would be likely to
reach his great and various powers.
If it could be said of anyone, it might be said of Kean, that he does
not fall behind his author, but stands forward, the living
representative of the character he has drawn. When he is not playing in
Shakspeare, he fills up where his author is wanting; and when in
Shakspeare, he gives not only what is set down, but whatever the
situation and circumstances attendant upon the being he personates would
naturally call forth. He seems, at the time, to have possessed himself
of Shakspeare's imagination, and to have given it body and form. Read
any scene in Shakspeare,--for instance, the last of _Lear_ that is
played,--and see how few words are there set down, and then remember how
Kean fills out with varied and multiplied expression and circumstances,
and the truth of this remark will be obvious enough. There are few men,
I believe, let them have studied the plays of Shakspeare ever so
attentively, who can see Kean in them without confessing that he has
helped them to a truer and fuller conception of the author,
notwithstanding what their own labors had done for them.
It is not easy to say in what character Kean plays best. He so fits
himself to each in turn, that if the effect he produces at one time is
less than at another, it is because of some inferiority in stage-effect
in the character. Othello is probably the character best adapted to
stage-effect, and Kean has an uninterrupted power over us in playing it.
When he commands, we are awed; when his face is sensitive with love and
love thrills in his soft tones, all that our imaginations had pictured
to us is realized. His jealousy, his hate, his fixed purposes, are
terrific and deadly; and the groans wrung from him in his grief have the
pathos and anguish of Esau's, when he stood before his old, blind
father, and sent up "an exceeding bitter cry."
Again, in Richard, how does he hurry forward to his object, sweeping
away all between him and it! The world and its affairs are nothing to
him, till he gains his end. He is all life, and action, and haste,--he
fills every part of the stage, and seems to do all that is done.
I have before said that his voice is harsh and breaking in his high
tones, in his rage, but that this defect is of little consequence in
such places. Nor is it well suited to the more declamatory parts. This,
again, is scarce worth considering; for how very little is there of mere
declamation in good English plays! But it is one of the finest voices in
the world for all the passions and feelings which can be uttered in the
middle and lower tones. In Lear,--
"If you have poison for me, I will drink it."
And again,--
"You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss."
Why should I cite passages? Can any man open upon the scene in which
these are contained, without Kean's piteous looks and tones being
present to him? And does not the mere remembrance of them, as he reads,
bring tears into his eyes? Yet, once more, in Othello,--
"Had it pleased Heaven
To try me with affliction," &c.
In the passage beginning with
"O, now for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind,"--
there was "a mysterious confluence of sounds" passing off into infinite
distance, and every thought and feeling within him seemed traveling with
them.
How graceful he is in Othello! It is not a practiced, educated grace,
but the "unbought grace" of his genius, uttering itself in its beauty
and grandeur in the movements of the outward man. When he says to Iago
so touchingly, "Leave me, leave me, Iago," and, turning from him, walks
to the back of the stage, raising his hands, and bringing them down upon
his head, with clasped fingers, and stands thus with his back to us,
there is a grace and majesty in his figure which we look on with
admiration.
Talking of these things in Kean is something like reading the _Beauties
of Shakspeare_; for he is as true in the subordinate as in the great
parts. But he must be content to share with other men of genius, and
think himself fortunate if one in a hundred sees his lesser beauties,
and marks the truth and delicacy of his under-playing. For instance,
when he has no share in the action going on, he is not busy in putting
himself into attitudes to draw attention, but stands or sits in a simple
posture, like one with an engaged mind. His countenance, too, is in a
state of ordinary repose, with but a slight, general expression of the
character of his thoughts; for this is all the face shows, when the mind
is taken up in silence with its own reflections. It does not assume
marked or violent expressions, as in soliloquy. When a man gives
utterance to his thoughts, though alone, the charmed rest of the body is
broken; he speaks in his gestures too, and the countenance is put into a
sympathizing action.
I was first struck with this in his Hamlet; for the deep and quiet
interest, so marked in Hamlet, made the justness of Kean's playing, in
this respect, the more obvious. And since then, I have observed him
attentively, and have found the same true acting in his other
characters.
This right conception of situation and its general effect seems to
require almost as much genius as his conceptions of his characters, and,
indeed, may be considered as one with them. He deserves praise for it;
for there is so much of the subtilty of nature in it, if one may so
speak, that while a few are able, with his help, to put themselves into
the situation, and perceive the justness of his acting in it, the rest,
both those who like him upon the whole, as well as those who profess to
see little in him, will be apt to let it pass by without observing it.
Like most men, however, Kean receives a partial reward, at least, for
his sacrifice of the praise of the many to what he feels to be the
truth. For when he passes from the state of natural repose, even into
that of gentle motion and ordinary discourse, he is immediately filled
with a spirit and life, which he makes everyone feel who is not
armor-proof against him. This helps to the sparkling brightness and
warmth of his playing, the grand secret of which, like that of colors in
a picture, lies in a just contrast. We can all speculate concerning the
general rules upon this; but when the man of genius gives us their
results, how few are there who can trace them out with an observant eye,
or look with a discerning satisfaction upon the great whole. Perhaps
this very beauty in Kean has helped to an opinion, which, no doubt, is
true, that he is, at times, too sharp and abrupt. I well remember, while
once looking at a picture in which the shadow of a mountain fell, in
strong outline, upon a part of a stream, I overheard some quite sensible
people expressing their wonder that the artist should have made the
water of two colors, seeing it was all one and the same thing.
Instances of Kean's keeping of situations were striking in the opening
of the trial scene in _The Iron Chest_, and in _Hamlet_, when the
father's ghost tells the story of his death.
The composure to which he is bent up, in the former, must be present
with all who saw him. And, though from the immediate purpose, shall I
pass by the startling and appalling change, when madness seized upon his
brain, with the swiftness and power of a fanged monster? Wonderfully as
this last part was played, we cannot well imagine how much the previous
calm, and the suddenness of the unlooked-for change from it, added to
the terror of the scene. The temple stood fixed on its foundations; the
earthquake shook it, and it was a heap. Is this one of Kean's violent
contrasts?
While Kean listened, in Hamlet, to the father's story, the entire man
was absorbed in deep attention, mingled with a tempered awe. His posture
was simple, with a slight inclination forward. The spirit was the spirit
of his father, whom he had loved and reverenced, and who was to that
moment ever present in his thoughts. The first superstitious terror at
meeting him had passed off. The account of his father's appearance given
him by Horatio and the watch, and his having followed him some distance,
had, in a degree, familiarized him to the sight, and he stood before us
in the stillness of one who was to hear, then or never, what was to be
told, but without that eager reaching forward which other players give,
and which would be right, perhaps, in any character but that of Hamlet,
who connects the past and what is to come with the present, and mingles
reflection with his immediate feelings, however deep.
As an instance of Kean's familiar, and, if I may be allowed to term,
domestic acting, the first scene in the fourth act of his Sir Giles
Overreach may be taken. His manner at meeting Lovell and through the
conversation with him, the way in which he turns his chair and leans
upon it, were as easy and natural as they could have been in real life,
had Sir Giles been actually existing, and engaged at that moment in
conversation in Lovell's room.
It is in these things, scarcely less than in the more prominent parts of
his playing, that Kean shows himself the great actor. He must always
make a deep impression; but to suppose the world at large capable of a
right estimate of his different powers, would be forming a judgment
against every-day proof. The gradual manner in which the character of
his playing has opened upon me satisfies me, that in acting, as in
everything else, however deep may be the first effect of genius upon us,
we come slowly, and through study, to a perception of its minute
beauties and delicate characteristics. After all, the greater part of
men seldom get beyond the first general impression.
As there must needs go a _modicum_ of fault-finding along with
commendation, it may be well to remark, that Kean plays his hands too
much at times, and moves about the dress over his breast and neck too
frequently in his hurried and impatient passages, and that he does not
always adhere with sufficient accuracy to the received readings of
Shakspeare, and that the effect would be greater, upon the whole, were
he to be more sparing of sudden changes from violent voice and
gesticulation to a low conversation-tone and subdued manner.
His frequent use of these in Sir Giles Overreach is with good effect,
for Sir Giles is playing his part; so, too, in Lear, for Lear's passions
are gusty and shifting; but, in the main, it is a kind of playing too
marked and striking to bear so frequent repetition, and had better
sometimes be spared, where, considered alone, it might be properly
enough used, for the sake of bringing it in at some other place with
greater effect.
It is well to speak of these defects, for though the little faults of
genius, in themselves considered, but slightly affect those who can
enter into its true character, yet such are made impatient at the
thought, that an opportunity is given those to carp who know not how to
commend.
Though I have taken up a good deal of room, I must end without speaking
of many things which occur to me. Some will be of the opinion that I
have already said enough. Thinking of Kean as I do, I could not honestly
have said less; for I hold it to be a low and wicked thing to keep back
from merit of any kind its due,--and, with Steele, that "there is
something wonderful in the narrowness of those minds which can be
pleased, and be barren of bounty to those who please them."
Although the self-important, out of self-concern, give praise sparingly,
and the mean measure theirs by their likings or dislikings of a man, and
the good even are often slow to allow the talents of the faulty their
due, lest they bring the evil to repute; yet it is the wiser as well as
the honester course, not to disparage an excellence because it neighbors
upon a fault, nor to take away from another what is his of right, with a
view to our own name, nor to rest our character for discernment upon the
promptings of an unkind heart. Where God has not feared to bestow great
powers, we may not fear giving them their due; nor need we be
parsimonious of commendation, as if there were but a certain quantity
for distribution, and our liberality would be to our loss; nor should we
hold it safe to detract from another's merit, as if we could always keep
the world blind, lest we live to see him whom we disparaged, praised,
and whom we hated, loved.
Whatever be his failings, give every man a full and ready commendation
for that in which he excels; it will do good to our own hearts, while it
cheers his. Nor will it bring our judgment into question with the
discerning; for enthusiasm for what is great does not argue such an
unhappy want of discrimination as that measured and cold approval, which
is bestowed alike upon men of mediocrity and upon those of gifted
minds.
GIFTS
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Gifts of one who loved me,--
Twas high time they came;
When he ceased to love me,
Time they stopped for shame."
It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world
owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into
chancery, and be sold. I do not think this general insolvency, which
involves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of the
difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year, and other times, in
bestowing gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be generous, though
very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment lies in the choosing.
If, at any time, it comes into my head that a present is due from me to
somebody, I am puzzled what to give until the opportunity is gone.
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a
proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the
world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of
ordinary nature; they are like music heard out of a workhouse. Nature
does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond:
everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal
laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference
of love and beauty. Men used to tell us that we love flattery, even
though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of
importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure the
flowers give us: what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed?
Fruits are acceptable gifts because they are the flower of commodities,
and admit of fantastic values being attached to them. If a man should
send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him, and should set before
me a basket of fine summer fruit, I should think there was some
proportion between the labor and the reward.
For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day, and
one is glad when an imperative leaves him no option, since if the man at
the door have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you could
procure him a paint-box. And as it is always pleasing to see a man eat
bread, or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it is always a
great satisfaction to supply these first wants. Necessity does
everything well. In our condition of universal dependence, it seems
heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give
all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantastic
desire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing him. I
can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies.
Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift which one of my friends
prescribed is, that we might convey to some person that which properly
belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in
thought. But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part
barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for
gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.
Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer,
corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his
picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and
pleasing, for it restores society in so far to the primary basis, when a
man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an
index of his merit. But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to
the shops to buy me something, which does not represent your life and
talent, but a goldsmith's. This is fit for kings, and rich men who
represent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of gold
and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of
blackmail.
The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful
sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of a man to receive gifts.
How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite
forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being
bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of
receiving it from ourselves; but not from anyone who assumes to bestow.
We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something
of degrading dependence in living by it.
"Brother, if Jove to thee a present make,
Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take."
We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society if it
do not give us besides earth, and fire, and water, opportunity, love,
reverence, and objects of veneration.
He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or
sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I
think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a
gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes
from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and
if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor
should read my heart, and see that I love his commodity, and not him.
The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me,
correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level,
then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine
his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot of oil, or this flagon
of wine, when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this
gift seems to deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things
for gifts. This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the
beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at
all considering the value of the gift, but looking back to the greater
store it was taken from, I rather sympathize with the beneficiary than
with the anger of my lord Timon. For, the expectation of gratitude is
mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the
obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and
heart-burning, from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It
is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor
naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen
is that which I so admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and who
says, "Do not flatter your benefactors."
The reason for these discords I conceive to be that there is no
commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything to
a magnanimous person. After you have served him he at once puts you in
debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial
and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in
readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend,
and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit
it is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on each
other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can
seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a
benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a
direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have
the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly
received. But rectitude scatters favors on every side without knowing
it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people.
I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is the
genius and god of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to prescribe.
Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. There are persons
from whom we always expect fairy-tokens; let us not cease to expect
them. This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our municipal rules.
For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best
of hospitality and of generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. I
find that I am not much to you; you do not need me; you do not feel me;
then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No
services are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to
join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,--no
more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love
them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time.
USES OF GREAT MEN
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our
childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it
would not surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and the
circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount. In
the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth, and found it
deliciously sweet.
Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the
veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with
them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in
our belief in such society; and actually or ideally we manage to live
with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their names. Their
names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies
are in our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote
of them.
The search after the great is the dream of youth and the most serious
occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his
works--if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off with
fortune instead. You say the English are practical; the Germans are
hospitable; in Valencia the climate is delicious; and in the hills of
the Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel
to find comfortable, rich, and hospitable people, or clear sky, or
ingots that cost too much. But if there were any magnet that would point
to the countries and houses where are the persons who are intrinsically
rich and powerful, I would sell all, and buy it, and put myself on the
road to-day.
The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the city is
a man who invented the railroad raises the credit of all the citizens.
But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like
moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas--the more, the worse.
Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of
fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into
one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism,
Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind.
The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy
cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the
factory, he shall find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and
rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the pyramids of
Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint,
or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material
elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one
essence collected or distributed.
If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of service we derive from
others, let us be warned of the danger of modern studies, and begin low
enough. We must not contend against love, or deny the substantial
existence of other people. I know not what would happen to us. We have
social strengths. Our affection towards others creates a sort of vantage
or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I
cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks
those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their
kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the _otherest_. The stronger the
nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality pure. A little
genius let us leave alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether
they attend their own affair or not. Man is that noble endogenous plant
which grows, like the palm, from within outward. His own affair, though
impossible to others, he can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy
to sugar to be sweet, and to nitre to be salt. We take a great deal of
pains to waylay and entrap that which of itself will fall into our
hands. I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought,
into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open
his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations; whilst
they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many
sources of error. His service to us is of like sort. It costs a
beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how
splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his
quality to other men. And everyone can do his best thing easiest. "_Peu
de moyens, beaucoup d'effét._" He is great who is what he is from
nature, and who never reminds us of others.
But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise
of explanation. I cannot tell what I would know; but I have observed
there are persons who, in their character and actions, answer questions
which I have not skill to put. One man answers some questions which none
of his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and passing
religions and philosophies answer some other question. Certain men
affect us as rich possibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their
times,--the sport perhaps, of some instinct that rules in the air,--they
do not speak to our want. But the great are near; we know them at sight.
They satisfy expectation, and fall into place. What is good is
effective, generative; makes for itself room, food, and allies. A sound
apple produces seed--a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, he is
constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating armies with his purpose,
which is thus executed. The river makes its own shores, and each
legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome--harvests for food,
institutions for expression, weapons to fight with, and disciples to
explain it. The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the
adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his own
shoes.
Our common discourse respects two kinds of use or service from superior
men. Direct giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct
giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, eternal youth,
fine senses, arts of healing, magical power, and prophecy. The boy
believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe in
imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much cognizant of direct
serving. Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we
have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature
in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect
remains. Right ethics are central, and go from the soul outward. Gift is
contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving us. I
must absolve me to myself. "Mind thy affair," says the spirit; "coxcomb,
would you meddle with the skies, or with other people?" Indirect service
is left. Men have a pictorial or representative quality, and serve us in
the intellect. Behmen and Swedenborg saw that things were
representative. Men are also representative; first, of things, and
secondly, of ideas.
As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man
converts some raw material in nature to human use. The inventors of
fire, electricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk, cotton;
the makers of tools; the inventor of decimal notation; the geometer;
the engineer; the musician, severally make an easy way for all through
unknown and impossible confusions. Each man is, by secret liking,
connected with some district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he
is, as Linnæus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of lichens; Van Mons,
of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of
fluxions.
A man is a center for nature, running out threads of relation through
everything, fluid and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls;
every clod and stone comes to the meridian; so every organ, function,
acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the brain. It waits
long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each created
thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to
iron, to wood, to coal, to loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton; but
how few materials are yet used by our arts! The mass of creatures and of
qualities are still hid and expectant. It would seem as if each waited,
like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined human
deliverer. Each must be disenchanted, and walk forth to the day in human
shape. In the history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems to
have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be made man, in some
Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind can come to
entertain its powers.
If we limit ourselves to the first advantages: a sober grace adheres to
the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which in the highest moments comes up
as the charm of nature, the glitter of the spar, the sureness of
affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold,
hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us round
in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile the
day of life. The eye repeats every day the first eulogy on things--"He
saw that they were good." We know where to find them; and these
performers are relished all the more after a little experience of the
pretending races. We are entitled, also, to higher advantages. Something
is wanting to science, until it has been humanized. The table of
logarithms is one thing, and its vital play, in botany, music, optics,
and architecture, another. There are advancements to numbers, anatomy,
architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first, when, by union with
intellect and will, they ascend into the life, and reappear in
conversation, character, and politics.
But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them in
their own sphere, and the way in which they seem to fascinate and draw
to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing all his life
long. The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the
observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side;
has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary
sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other. And to
these, their ends, all things continually ascend. The gases gather to
the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows;
arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks. But
also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is
not only representative, but participant. Like can only be known by
like. The reason why he knows about them is, that he is of them; he has
just come out of nature, or from being a part of that thing. Animated
chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their quality
makes his career; and he can variously publish their virtues, because
they compose him. Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget
his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason.
Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we say that
quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von Buchs,
and Beaumonts; and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I
know not what Berzeliuses and Davys?
Thus we sit by the fire, and take hold on the poles of the earth. This
_quasi_ omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In one of
those celestial days, when heaven and earth meet and adorn each other,
it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once: we wish for a
thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith, we
are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors. Every
ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is a
debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane borrows the
genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all round with a zodiac of
sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point
of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist,
theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any science, is a definer
and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These
road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life,
and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new
property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.
We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material
aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step--we are
better served through our sympathy. Activity is contagious. Looking
where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the
charm which lured them. Napoleon said, "You must not fight too often
with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war." Talk much
with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of
looking at things in the same light, and, on each occurrence, we
anticipate his thought.
Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help, I
find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire, I
perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me as
it found me, neither better nor worse; but all mental and moral force is
a positive good. It goes out from you, whether you will or not, and
profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of personal
vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh resolution.
We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's saying of Sir Walter
Raleigh, "I know that he can toil terribly," is an electric touch. So
are Clarendon's portraits--of Hampden: "who was of an industry and
vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of
parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle and sharp, and of a
personal courage equal to his best parts;"--of Falkland: "who was so
severe an adorer of truth that he could as easily have given himself
leave to steal as to dissemble." We cannot read Plutarch without a
tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius:
"A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are
heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering, determined."
This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch
the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as long.
What is he whom I never think of? whilst in every solitude are those who
succor our genius, and stimulate us in wonderful manners. There is a
power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can,
and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship
so signal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us? We will
never more think cheaply of ourselves, or of life. We are piqued to
some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on the railroad will not
again shame us.
Under this head, too, falls that homage, very pure, as I think, which
all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus, down
to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the shouts in
the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight in a man.
Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! What eyes! Atlantean
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to
guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that which,
in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed, runs,
also, much higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in literary
genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the mountain
of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit may be conveyed in saying that he,
of all men, best understands the English language, and can say what he
will. Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates of expression are only
health or fortunate constitution. Shakspeare's name suggests other and
purely intellectual benefits.
Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords,
and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out of
a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This honor, which
is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius
perpetually pays; contented, if now and then, in a century, the proffer
is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded to a
sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the indicators of
ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible
regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of
activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as
the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.
We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and
beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and higher benefit, from
witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as feats of memory, of
mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the transmutings
of the imagination, even versatility and concentration, as these acts
expose the invisible organs and members of the mind, which respond,
member for member, to the parts of the body. For we thus enter a new
gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest marks, taught, with
Plato, "to choose those who can, without aid from the eyes or any other
sense, proceed to truth and to being." Foremost among these activities
are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections wrought by the
imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a
thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate
size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the
gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book or a word dropped in
conversation sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed
with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the pit. And this benefit
is real, because we are entitled to these enlargements, and, once having
passed the bounds, shall never again be quite the miserable pedants we
were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some imaginative
power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of
the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit
of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of
identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakspeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception
of these laws is a kind of meter of the mind. Little minds are little,
through failure to see them.
Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates
into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method
has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion of
Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bacon, of
Locke,--in religion, the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the
sects which have taken the name of each founder,--are in point. Alas!
every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting the
impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to
blind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from itself. True
genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a
wise man should appear in our village, he would create, in those who
conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes
to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable
equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as
everyone would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The rich
would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their
resources.
But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy.
The soul is impatient of masters, and eager for change. Housekeepers say
of a domestic who has been valuable, "She had lived with me long
enough." We are tendencies, or rather symptoms, and none of us complete.
We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Rotation is the law of
nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for
a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished
with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will
appear; not Jefferson, not Franklin, but now a great salesman; than a
road-contractor; then a student of fishes; then a buffalo-hunting
explorer, or a semi-savage Western general. Thus we make a stand against
our rougher masters; but against the best there is a finer remedy. The
power which they communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by
ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which, also,
Plato was debtor.
I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life is
a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide
intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few
persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by
the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of
leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary
nature--admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by day, on
a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns
in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a
sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, "Let there be an entrance opened
for me into realties; I have worn the fool's cap too long." We will know
the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and, if
persons and things are scores of a celestial music, let us read off the
strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet there have been sane
men who enjoyed a rich and related existence. What they know they know
for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature transpires; nor can
the Bible be closed until the last great man is born. These men correct
the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate, and engage us
to new aims and powers. The veneration of mankind selects these for the
highest place. Witness the multitude of statues, pictures, and memorials
which recall their genius in every city, village, house, and ship:
"Ever their phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o'er us,
With looks of beauty, and words of good."
How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service
rendered by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind?--I
am plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I
work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough entertained,
and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes to
mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious nothing done. I go
to Boston or New York, and run up and down on my affairs: they are sped,
but so is the day. I am vexed by the recollection of this price I have
paid for a trifling advantage. I remember the _peau d'âne_, on which
whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of the skin was gone for
every wish. I go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I
cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But if there should appear in the
company some gentle soul who knows little of persons or parties, of
Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these
particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every
false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my
independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human body, that
man liberates me; I forget the clock. I pass out of the sore relation to
persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am made immortal by apprehending my
possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition of rich and
poor. We live in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or
land; and if I have so much more, every other must have so much less. I
seem to have no good, without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in
the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious
superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be
first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the
regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields
there is room: here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.
I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts and for
thoughts; I like rough and smooth, "scourges of God" and "darlings of
the human race." I like the first Cæsar; and Charles V, of Spain; and
Charles XII, of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in France. I
applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his office; captains,
ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs of iron,
well-born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all
men by fascination into tributaries and supports of his power. Sword and
staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the
world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself, and all
heroes, by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons;
this subtilizer, and irresistible upward force, into our thought,
destroying individualism; the power so great that the potentate is
nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a constitution to his people; a
pontiff who preaches the equality of souls, and releases his servants
from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.
But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three points
of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but, wherever she
mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies
plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully through life,
ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though all the world
point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members
of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think
themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their
astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries.
Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and
archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that
lodged the due inertia in every creature, the conserving, resisting
energy, the anger at being waked or changed? Altogether independent of
the intellectual force in each is the pride of opinion, the security
that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but
uses what spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and
triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities of all the rest.
Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one has a misgiving
of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that made things cohere with
this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst of this chuckle of
self-gratulation, some figure goes by which Thersites too can love and
admire. This is he that should marshal us the way we were going. There
is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we should almost lose our faith in
the possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but we
want one. We love to associate with heroic persons, since our
receptivity is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners
easily become great. We are all wise in capacity, though so few in
energy. There needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, so
rapid is the contagion.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their
contemporaries, even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old
couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of years,
that they grow like; and if they should live long enough, we should not
be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances, which
threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such
maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on between men of one
town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the time are
in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any high point,
this city of New York, yonder city of London, the western civilization,
would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep each other in countenance,
and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of the time. The shield against
the stingings of conscience is the universal practice, or our
contemporaries. Again: it is very easy to be as wise and good as your
companions. We learn of our contemporaries what they know, without
effort, and almost through the pores of the skin. We catch it by
sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the intellectual and moral elevations
of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very hardly can we take
another step. The great, or such as hold of nature, and transcend
fashions, by their fidelity to universal ideas, are saviors from these
federal errors, and defend us from our contemporaries. They are the
exceptions which we want, where all grows alike. A foreign greatness is
the antidote for cabalism.
Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation
with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in
which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations
of pygmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest
should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence
of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become
underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our
help: other great men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each
other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero
becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he
said of the good Jesus, even, "I pray you, let me never hear that man's
name again." They cry up the virtues of George Washington--"Damn George
Washington!" is the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But it
is human nature's indispensable defense. The centripetence augments the
centrifugence. We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of
the State depends on the see-saw.
There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is
defended from approach by quantities of unavailableness. They are very
attractive, and seem at a distance our own; but we are hindered on all
sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are repelled.
There is something not solid in the good that is done for us. The best
discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has something unreal for
his companion, until he too has substantiated it. It seems as if the
Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues
and powers not communicable to other men, and, sending it to perform one
more turn through the circle of beings, wrote, "_Not transferable_," and
"_Good for this trip only_," on these garments of the soul. There is
somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. The boundaries are
invisible, but they are never crossed. There is such good will to
impart, and such good will to receive, that each threatens to become the
other; but the law of individuality collects its secret strength: you
are you, and I am I, and so we remain.
For Nature wishes everything to remain itself; and whilst every
individual strives to grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow, to the
extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every
other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against every
other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the power by
which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world where every
benefactor becomes so easily a malefactor, only by continuation of his
activity into places where it is not due; where children seem so much at
the mercy of their foolish parents, and where almost all men are too
social and interfering. We rightly speak of the guardian angels of
children. How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons,
from vulgarity and second thought! They shed their own abundant beauty
on the objects they behold. Therefore, they are not at the mercy of such
poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them, they soon come
not to mind it, and get a self-reliance; and if we indulge them to
folly, they learn the limitation elsewhere.
We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is
permitted. Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office
thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their mouth.
Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught wider and
nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may easily be
greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be
another--not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a Christian; not
a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a poet, but a Shaksperian. In vain;
the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces of
inertia, fear, or of love itself, hold thee there. On, and forever
onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect among the
infusories circulating in water. Presently a dot appears on the animal,
which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect animals. The
ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought, and in
society. Children think they cannot live without their parents. But long
before they are aware of it, the black dot has appeared, and the
detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their
independence.
But _great men_--the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate?
What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the
superfœtation of nature. "Generous and handsome," he says, "is your
hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow;
look at his whole nation of Paddies." Why are the masses, from the dawn
of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few
leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make
war and death sacred; but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill?
The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that
others should be low as that we should be low; for we must have society.
Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say society is a Pestalozzian
school; all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by
receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things are not long
the best company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent person
of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from a lake, by
cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and great
benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to
himself. We pass very fast, in our personal moods, from dignity to
dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always to
stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a
sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about.
As to what we call the masses and common men--there are no common men.
All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible on the
conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play,
and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But
heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until
he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and beheld his
talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.
The heroes of the hour are relatively great--of a faster growth; or they
are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is
then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some rays
escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great
man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not the less
great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature never sends a
great man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul.
One gracious fact emerges from these studies--that there is true
ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will
one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is the
real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We must infer
much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the universe
is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the procession of
famous men, is reason or illumination, or that essence we were looking
for, but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new possibilities. Could
we one day complete the immense figure which these flagrant points
compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an elemental region
wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits.
Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot be impounded by any
fence of personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest
men--their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by
night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin, and publishes
itself by unknown methods; the union of all minds appears intimate; what
gets admission to one cannot be kept out of any other; the smallest
acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so much good to
the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent and position
vanish when the individuals are seen in the duration which is necessary
to complete the career of each, even more swiftly the seeming injustice
disappears when we ascend to the central identity of all the
individuals, and know that they are made of the substance which
ordaineth and doeth.
The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The
qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more
familiar. Once you saw phœnixes: they are gone; the world is not
therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems
turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred,
and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world. For a
time our teachers serve us personally, as meters or milestones of
progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and
they yielded their place to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain
so high that we have not been able to read them nearer, and age and
comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we shall cease
to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves with their
social and delegated quality. All that respects the individual is
temporary and prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending
out of his limits into a catholic existence. We have never come at the
true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we believe him an
original force. In the moment when he ceases to help us as a cause, he
begins to help us more as an effect. Then he appears as an exponent of a
vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light
of the First Cause.
Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say great
men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of organized nature
is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to tame the
chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds of science
and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder, and the
germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.
BUDS AND BIRD-VOICES
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Balmy Spring--weeks later than we expected, and months later than we
longed for her--comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and walls
of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study window, inviting me
to throw it open and create a summer atmosphere by the intermixture of
her genial breath with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove. As
the casement ascends, forth into infinite space fly the innumerable
forms of thought or fancy that have kept me company in the retirement of
this little chamber during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather--visions
gay, grotesque and sad, pictures of real life tinted with nature's
homely gray and russet, scenes in dreamland bedizened with rainbow-hues
which faded before they were well laid on. All these may vanish now, and
leave me to mold a fresh existence out of sunshine. Brooding Meditation
may flap her dusky wings and take her owl-like flight, blinking amid the
cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions befit the season of frosted
window-panes and crackling fires, when the blast howls through the
black-ash trees of our avenue, and the drifting snowstorm chokes up the
wood paths and fills the highway from stone wall to stone wall. In the
spring and summer time all somber thoughts should follow the winter
northward with the somber and thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal
economy of life is again in force: we live, not to think nor to labor,
but for the simple end of being happy; nothing for the present hour is
worthy of man's infinite capacity save to imbibe the warm smile of
heaven and sympathize with the reviving earth.
The present Spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps because Winter
lingered so unconscionably long that with her best diligence she can
hardly retrieve half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a
fortnight since I stood on the brink of our swollen river and beheld the
accumulated ice of four frozen months go down the stream. Except in
streaks here and there upon the hillsides, the whole visible universe
was then covered with deep snow the nethermost layer of which had been
deposited by an early December storm. It was a sight to make the
beholder torpid, in the impossibility of imagining how this vast white
napkin was to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world in less
time than had been required to spread it there. But who can estimate the
power of gentle influences, whether amid material desolation or the
moral winter of man's heart? There have been no tempestuous rains--even
no sultry days--but a constant breath of southern winds, with now a day
of kindly sunshine, and now a no less kindly mist, or a soft descent of
showers, in which a smile and a blessing seemed to have been steeped.
The snow has vanished as if by magic; whatever heaps may be hidden in
the woods and deep gorges of the hills, only two solitary specks remain
in the landscape, and those I shall almost regret to miss when to-morrow
I look for them in vain. Never before, methinks, has spring pressed so
closely on the footsteps of retreating winter. Along the roadside the
green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge of the snowdrifts.
The pastures and mowing fields have not yet assumed a general aspect of
verdure, but neither have they the cheerless brown tint which they wear
in later autumn, when vegetation has entirely ceased; there is now a
faint shadow of life, gradually brightening into the warm reality. Some
tracts in a happy exposure--as, for instance, yonder southwestern slope
of an orchard, in front of that old red farmhouse beyond the river--such
patches of land already wear a beautiful and tender green to which no
future luxuriance can add a charm. It looks unreal--a prophecy, a hope,
a transitory effect of some peculiar light, which will vanish with the
slightest motion of the eye. But beauty is never a delusion; not these
verdant tracts but the dark and barren landscape all around them is a
shadow and a dream. Each moment wins some portion of the earth from
death to life; a sudden gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny slope
of a bank which an instant ago was brown and bare. You look again, and,
behold an apparition of green grass!
The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet naked, but already
appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if by one magic
touch they might instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the
wind which now sighs through their naked branches might make sudden
music amid innumerable leaves. The moss-grown willow tree which for
forty years past has overshadowed these western windows will be among
the first to put on its green attire. There are some objections to the
willow: it is not a dry and cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder
with an association of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly
agreeable as companions unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a
firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost
the earliest to gladden us with the promise and reality of beauty in its
graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scatter its yellow, yet
scarcely-withered, leaves upon the ground. All through the winter, too,
its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect which is not without a cheering
influence even in the grayest and gloomiest day. Beneath a clouded sky
it faithfully remembers the sunshine. Our old house would lose a charm
were the willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over the
snow-covered roof, and its heap of summer verdure.
The lilac shrubs under my study windows are likewise almost in leaf; in
two or three days more I may put forth my hand and pluck the topmost
bough in its freshest green. These lilacs are very aged, and have lost
the luxuriant foliage of their prime. The heart or the judgment or the
moral sense or the taste is dissatisfied with their present aspect. Old
age is not venerable when it embodies itself in lilacs, rose-bushes, or
any other ornamental shrubs; it seems as if such plants, as they grow
only for beauty, ought to flourish only in immortal youth--or, at least,
to die before their sad decrepitude. Trees of beauty are trees of
paradise, and therefore not subject to decay by their original nature,
though they have lost that precious birthright by being transplanted to
an earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a
time-stricken and grandfatherly lilac-bush. The analogy holds good in
human life. Persons who can only be graceful and ornamental--who can
give the world nothing but flowers--should die young, and never be seen
with gray hair and wrinkles, any more than the flower-shrubs with mossy
bark and blighted foliage, like the lilacs under my window. Not that
beauty is worthy of less than immortality. No; the beautiful should live
forever, and thence, perhaps, the sense of impropriety when we see it
triumphed over by time. Apple trees, on the other hand, grow old without
reproach. Let them live as long as they may, and contort themselves into
whatever perversity of shape they please, and deck their withered limbs
with a springtime gaudiness of pink-blossoms, still they are
respectable, even if they afford us only an apple or two in a season.
Those few apples--or, at all events, the remembrance of apples in
bygone years--are the atonement which utilitarianism inexorably demands
for the privilege of lengthened life. Human flower shrubs, if they will
grow old on earth, should, besides their lovely blossoms, bear some kind
of fruit that will satisfy earthly appetites, else neither man nor the
decorum of nature will deem it fit that the moss should gather on them.
One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white sheet
of winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden
beneath it. Nature is not cleanly, according to our prejudices. The
beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown and blighted
deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness of the present hour. Our
avenue is strewn with the whole crop of autumn's withered leaves. There
are quantities of decayed branches which one tempest after another has
flung down, black and rotten, and one or two with the ruin of a bird's
nest clinging to them. In the garden are the dried bean-vines, the brown
stalks of the asparagus-bed, and melancholy old cabbages which were
frozen into the soil before their unthrifty cultivator could find time
to gather them. How invariable throughout all the forms of life do we
find these intermingled memorials of death! On the soil of thought and
in the garden of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, lie
withered leaves--the ideas and feelings that we have done with. There is
no wind strong enough to sweep them away; infinite space will not garner
them from our sight. What mean they? Why may we not be permitted to live
and enjoy as if this were the first life and our own the primal
enjoyment, instead of treading always on these dry bones and mouldering
relics from the aged accumulation of which springs all that now appears
so young and new? Sweet must have been the spring-time of Eden, when no
earlier year had strewn its decay upon the virgin turf, and no former
experience had ripened into summer and faded into autumn in the hearts
of its inhabitants! That was a world worth living in.--Oh, thou
murmurer, it is out of the very wantonness of such a life that thou
feignest these idle lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul is
the first created inhabitant of its own Eden.--We dwell in an old
moss-covered mansion and tread in the worn footprints of the past and
have a gray clergyman's ghost for our daily and nightly inmate, yet all
these outward circumstances are made less than visionary by the renewing
power of the spirit. Should the spirit ever lose this power--should the
withered leaves and the rotten branches and the moss-covered house and
the ghost of the gray past ever become its realities, and the verdure
and the freshness merely its faint dream--then let it pray to be
released from earth. It will need the air of heaven to revive its
pristine energies.
What an unlooked for flight was this from our shadowy avenue of
black-ash and balm-of-gilead trees into the infinite! Now we have our
feet again upon the turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so
industriously as in this homely yard, along the base of the stone wall
and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings, and especially around the
southern door-step--a locality which seems particularly favorable to its
growth, for it is already tall enough to bend over and wave in the wind.
I observe that several weeds--and, most frequently, a plant that stains
the fingers with its yellow juice--have survived and retained their
freshness and sap throughout the winter. One knows not how they have
deserved such an exception from the common lot of their race. They are
now the patriarchs of the departed year, and may preach mortality to the
present generation of flowers and weeds.
Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to forget the birds?
Even the crows were welcome, as the sable harbingers of a brighter and
livelier race. They visited us before the snow was off, but seem mostly
to have betaken themselves to remote depths of the woods, which they
haunt all summer long. Many a time shall I disturb them there, and feel
as if I had intruded among a company of silent worshipers as they sit in
Sabbath stillness among the treetops. Their voices, when they speak, are
in admirable accordance with the tranquil solitude of a summer
afternoon, and, resounding so far above the head, their loud clamor
increases the religious quiet of the scene instead of breaking it. A
crow, however, has no real pretensions to religion, in spite of his
gravity of mien and black attire; he is certainly a thief, and probably
an infidel. The gulls are far more respectable, in a moral point of
view. These denizens of sea-beaten rocks and haunters of the lonely
beach come up our inland river at this season, and soar high overhead,
flapping their broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are among the
most picturesque of birds, because they so float and rest upon the air
as to become almost stationary parts of the landscape. The imagination
has time to grow acquainted with them; they have not flitted away in a
moment. You go up among the clouds and greet these lofty-flighted gulls,
and repose confidently with them upon the sustaining atmosphere. Ducks
have their haunts along the solitary places of the river, and alight in
flocks upon the broad bosom of the overflowed meadows. Their flight is
too rapid and determined for the eye to catch enjoyment from it,
although it never fails to stir up the heart with the sportsman's
ineradicable instinct. They have now gone farther northward, but will
visit us again in autumn.
The smaller birds--the little songsters of the woods, and those that
haunt man's dwellings and claim human friendship by building their nests
under the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees--these require a
touch more delicate and a gentler heart than mine to do them justice.
Their outburst of melody is like a brook let loose from wintry chains.
We need not deem it a too high and solemn word to call it a hymn of
praise to the Creator, since Nature, who pictures the reviving year in
so many sights of beauty, has expressed the sentiment of renewed life in
no other sound save the notes of these blessed birds. Their music,
however, just now seems to be incidental, and not the result of a set
purpose. They are discussing the economy of life and love and the site
and architecture of their summer residences, and have no time to sit on
a twig and pour forth solemn hymns or overtures, operas, symphonies and
waltzes. Anxious questions are asked, grave subjects are settled in
quick and animated debate, and only by occasional accident, as from pure
ecstasy, does a rich warble roll its tiny waves of golden sound through
the atmosphere. Their little bodies are as busy as their voices; they
are in a constant flutter and restlessness. Even when two or three
retreat to a tree-top to hold council, they wag their tails and heads
all the time with the irrepressible activity of their nature, which
perhaps renders their brief span of life in reality as long as the
patriarchal age of sluggish man. The blackbirds--three species of which
consort together--are the noisiest of all our feathered citizens. Great
companies of them--more than the famous "four-and-twenty" whom Mother
Goose has immortalized--congregate in contiguous tree-tops and
vociferate with all the clamor and confusion of a turbulent political
meeting. Politics, certainly, must be the occasion of such tumultuous
debates, but still, unlike all other politicians, they instill melody
into their individual utterances and produce harmony as a general
effect. Of all bird-voices, none are more sweet and cheerful to my ear
than those of swallows in the dim, sun-streaked interior of a lofty
barn; they address the heart with even a closer sympathy than Robin
Redbreast. But, indeed, all these winged people that dwell in the
vicinity of homesteads seem to partake of human nature and possess the
germ, if not the development, of immortal souls. We hear them saying
their melodious prayers at morning's blush and eventide. A little while
ago, in the deep of night, there came the lively thrill of a bird's note
from a neighboring tree--a real song such as greets the purple dawn or
mingles with the yellow sunshine. What could the little bird mean by
pouring it forth at midnight? Probably the music gushed out of the midst
of a dream in which he fancied himself in paradise with his mate, but
suddenly awoke on a cold, leafless bough with a New England mist
penetrating through his feathers. That was a sad exchange of imagination
for reality.
Insects are among the earliest births of spring. Multitudes, of I know
not what species, appeared long ago on the surface of the snow. Clouds
of them almost too minute for sight hover in a beam of sunshine, and
vanish as if annihilated when they pass into the shade. A mosquito has
already been heard to sound the small horror of his bugle-horn. Wasps
infest the sunny windows of the house. A bee entered one of the chambers
with a prophecy of flowers. Rare butterflies came before the snow was
off, flaunting in the chill breeze, and looking forlorn and all astray
in spite of the magnificence of their dark velvet cloaks with golden
borders.
The fields and wood-paths have as yet few charms to entice the wanderer.
In a walk the other day I found no violets nor anemones, nor anything in
the likeness of a flower. It was worth while, however, to ascend our
opposite hill for the sake of gaining a general idea of the advance of
spring, which I had hitherto been studying in its minute developments.
The river lay round me in a semi-circle, overflowing all the meadows
which give it its Indian name, and offering a noble breadth to sparkle
in the sunbeams. Along the hither shore a row of trees stood up to their
knees in water, and afar off, on the surface of the stream, tufts of
bushes thrust up their heads, as it were, to breathe. The most striking
objects were great solitary trees here and there with a mile-wide waste
of water all around them. The curtailment of the trunk by its immersion
in the river quite destroys the fair proportions of the tree, and thus
makes us sensible of a regularity and propriety in the usual forms of
nature. The flood of the present season, though it never amounts to a
freshet on our quiet stream, has encroached farther upon the land than
any previous one for at least a score of years. It has overflowed stone
fences, and even rendered a portion of the highway navigable for boats.
The waters, however, are now gradually subsiding; islands become annexed
to the mainland, and other islands emerge like new creations from the
watery waste. The scene supplies an admirable image of the receding of
the Nile--except that there is no deposit of black slime--or of Noah's
flood, only that there is a freshness and novelty in these recovered
portions of the continent which give the impression of a world just made
rather than of one so polluted that a deluge had been requisite to
purify it. These upspringing islands are the greenest spots in the
landscape; the first gleam of sunlight suffices to cover them with
verdure.
Thank Providence for spring! The earth--and man himself, by sympathy
with his birthplace--would be far other than we find them if life toiled
wearily onward without this periodical infusion of the primal spirit.
Will the world ever be so decayed that spring may not renew its
greenness? Can man be so dismally age-stricken that no faintest
sunshine of his youth may revisit him once a year? It is impossible. The
moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty, the good old pastor
who once dwelt here renewed his prime, regained his boyhood, in the
genial breezes of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy soul
if, whether in youth or age, it have outlived its privilege of
springtime sprightliness! From such a soul the world must hope no
reformation of its evil--no sympathy with the lofty faith and gallant
struggles of those who contend in its behalf. Summer works in the
present and thinks not of the future; autumn is a rich conservative;
winter has utterly lost its faith, and clings tremulously to the
remembrance of what has been; but spring, with its outgushing life, is
the true type of the movement.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION
EDGAR ALLAN POE
CHARLES DICKENS, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an
examination I once made of the mechanism of _Barnaby Rudge_, says--"By
the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his _Caleb Williams_ backwards?
He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second
volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of
accounting for what had been done."
I cannot think this the _precise_ mode of procedure on the part of
Godwin--and indeed what he himself acknowledges, is not altogether in
accordance with Mr. Dickens' idea--but the author of _Caleb Williams_
was too good an artist not to perceive the advantage derivable from at
least a somewhat similar process. Nothing is more clear than that every
plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its _dénouement_ before
anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the _dénouement_
constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of
consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the
tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.
There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a
story. Either history affords a thesis--or one is suggested by an
incident of the day--or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the
combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his
narrative--designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue,
or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from
page to page, render themselves apparent.
I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping
originality _always_ in view--for he is false to himself who ventures to
dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of
interest--I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable
effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more
generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present
occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid
effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or
tone--whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse,
or by peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterward looking about me
(or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall
best aid me in the construction of the effect.
I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written
by any author who would--that is to say, who could--detail, step by
step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its
ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to
the world, I am much at a loss to say--but, perhaps, the autorial vanity
has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most
writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they
compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would
positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes,
at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought--at the true
purposes seized only at the last moment--at the innumerable glimpses of
idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view--at the fully matured
fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable--at the cautious selections
and rejections--at the painful erasures and interpolations--in a word,
at the wheels and pinions--the tackle for scene-shifting--the
step-ladders and demon-traps--the cock's feathers, the red paint and the
black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred,
constitute the properties of the literary _histrio_.
I am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no means common, in
which an author is at all in condition to retrace the steps by which his
conclusions have been attained. In general, suggestions, having arisen
pell-mell, are pursued and forgotten in a similar manner.
For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded to,
nor, at any time, the least difficulty in recalling to mind the
progressive steps of any of my compositions; and, since the interest of
an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I have considered a
_desideratum_, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in
the thing analyzed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my
part to show the _modus operandi_ by which some one of my own works was
put together. I select "The Raven," as the most generally known. It is
my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is
referable either to accident or intuition--that the work proceeded, step
by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a
mathematical problem.
Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, _per se_, the
circumstance--or say the necessity--which, in the first place, gave rise
to the intention of composing _a_ poem that should suit at once the
popular and the critical taste.
We commence, then, with this intention.
The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is
too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with
the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression--for,
if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and
everything like totality is at once destroyed. But since, _ceteris
paribus_, no poet can afford to dispense with _anything_ that may
advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in
extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which attends
it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely
a succession of brief ones--that is to say, of brief poetical effects.
It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it
intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements
are, through a psychal necessity, brief. For this reason, at least
one-half of the _Paradise Lost_ is essentially prose--a succession of
poetical excitements interspersed, _inevitably_, with corresponding
depressions--the whole being deprived, through the extremeness of its
length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of
effect.
It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards
length, to all works of literary art--the limit of a single sitting--and
that, although in certain classes of prose composition, such as
_Robinson Crusoe_, (demanding no unity,) this limit may be
advantageously overpassed, it can never properly be overpassed in a
poem. Within this limit, the extent of a poem may be made to bear
mathematical relation to its merit--in other words, to the excitement or
elevation--again in other words, to the degree of the true poetical
effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is clear that the brevity
must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect:--this,
with one proviso--that a certain degree of duration is absolutely
requisite for the production of any effect at all.
Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of
excitement which I deemed not above the popular, while not below the
critical, taste, I reached at once what I conceived the proper _length_
for my intended poem--a length of about one hundred lines. It is, in
fact, a hundred and eight.
My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be
conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the
construction, I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work
_universally_ appreciable. I should be carried too far out of my
immediate topic were I to demonstrate a point upon which I have
repeatedly insisted, and which, with the poetical, stands not in the
slightest need of demonstration--the point, I mean, that Beauty is the
sole legitimate province of the poem. A few words, however, in
elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a
disposition to misrepresent. That pleasure which is at once the most
intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in
the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty,
they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect--they
refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of
_soul_--_not_ of intellect, or of heart--upon which I have commented,
and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating "the
beautiful." Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely
because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to
spring from direct causes--that objects should be attained through means
best adapted for their attainment--no one as yet having been weak enough
to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to is _most readily_
attained in the poem. Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the
intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are,
although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily
attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a
_homeliness_ (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are
absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the
excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul. It by no means
follows from anything here said, that passion, or even truth, may not
be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem--for they may
serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in
music, by contrast--but the true artist will always contrive, first, to
tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and,
secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is
the atmosphere and the essence of the poem.
Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the
_tone_ of its highest manifestation--and all experience has shown that
this tone is one of _sadness_. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme
development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy
is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.
The length, the province, and the tone, being thus determined, I betook
myself to ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining some artistic
piquancy which might serve me as a key-note in the construction of the
poem--some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn. In carefully
thinking over all the usual artistic effects--or more properly _points_,
in the theatrical sense--I did not fail to perceive immediately that no
one had been so universally employed as that of the _refrain_. The
universality of its employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic
value, and spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis. I
considered it, however, with regard to its susceptibility of
improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. As commonly
use
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40196