The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
by Oliver Wendell Holmes · English · Gutenberg #751 · 532,439 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes
Release date: December 1, 1996 [eBook #751]
Most recently updated: January 15, 2013
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/751
Credits: Transcribed from the 1873 James R. Osgood and Company edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE ***
Transcribed from the 1873 James R. Osgood and Company edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
THE
AUTOCRAT
OF
THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
* * * * *
_EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL_.
[Picture: Decorative image]
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1873.
* * * * *
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
THE AUTOCRAT’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of these
papers was just a quarter of a century in duration.
Two articles entitled “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” will be found
in the “New England Magazine,” formerly published in Boston by J. T. and
E. Buckingham. The date of the first of these articles is November 1831,
and that of the second February 1832. When “The Atlantic Monthly” was
begun, twenty-five years afterwards, and the author was asked to write
for it, the recollection of these crude products of his uncombed literary
boyhood suggested the thought that it would be a curious experiment to
shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit were better or
worse than the early windfalls.
So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those earlier
attempts to my own notice and that of some few friends who were idle
enough to read them at the time of their publication. The man is father
to the boy that was, and I am my own son, as it seems to me, in those
papers of the New England Magazine. If I find it hard to pardon the
boy’s faults, others would find it harder. They will not, therefore, be
reprinted here, nor as I hope, anywhere.
But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing, and with
these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind being still breathes, will
be contented.
—“It is a capital plan to carry a tablet with you, and, when you find
yourself felicitous, take notes of your own conversation.”—
—“When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The
poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The
author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and luftre
have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the fineft fimile
from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will fhow you a
fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a
more eloquent analogy.”—
—“Once on a time, a notion was ftarted, that if all the people in the
world would fhout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the
projectors agreed it fhould be done in juft ten years. Some thousand
fhip-loads of chronometers were diftributed to the selectmen and
other great folks of all the different nations. For a year
beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that
was to be made on the great occafion. When the time came, everybody
had their ears so wide open, to hear the universal ejaculation of
BOO,—the word agreed upon,—that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one
of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was
never so ftill fince the creation.”—
There was nothing better than these things and there was not a little
that was much worse. A young fellow of two or three and twenty has as
good a right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in learning how to write,
as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his hat-full of eyes in learning
how to operate for cataract, or an _elegant_ like Brummel to point to an
armful of failures in the attempt to achieve a perfect tie. This son of
mine, whom I have not seen for these twenty-five years, generously
counted, was a self-willed youth, always too ready to utter his
unchastised fancies. He, like too many American young people, got the
spur when he should have had the rein. He therefore helped to fill the
market with that unripe fruit which his father says in one of these
papers abounds in the marts of his native country. All these by-gone
shortcomings he would hope are forgiven, did he not feel sure that very
few of his readers know anything about them. In taking the old name for
the new papers, he felt bound to say that he had uttered unwise things
under that title, and if it shall appear that his unwisdom has not
diminished by at least half while his years have doubled, he promises not
to repeat the experiment if he should live to double them again and
become his own grandfather.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
BOSTON _Nov._ 1_st_ 1858.
CHAPTER I
I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many
ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and
algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an
extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula: 2+2=4.
Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the
expression _a+b=c_. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists,
until we learn to think in letters instead of figures.
They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to
whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a
certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent
questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion by
presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation.—No, sir, I
replied, he has not. But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics,
that sounds something like it, and you found it, _not in the original_,
but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will tell the company what he did say,
one of these days.
—If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration?—I blush to say that I do
not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was the first
association to which I ever heard the term applied; a body of scientific
young men in a great foreign city who admired their teacher, and to some
extent each other. Many of them deserved it; they have become famous
since. It amuses me to hear the talk of one of those beings described by
Thackeray—
“Letters four do form his name”—
about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage of
civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors,
philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of Mutual
Admiration. A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred
from admiring the same quality in another, nor the other from returning
his admiration. They may even associate together and continue to think
highly of each other. And so of a dozen such men, if any one place is
fortunate enough to hold so many. The being referred to above assumes
several false premises. First, that men of talent necessarily hate each
other. Secondly, that intimate knowledge or habitual association
destroys our admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance.
Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine and
have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to glorify
themselves and to put down him and the fraction of the human race not
belonging to their number. Fourthly, that it is an outrage that he is
not asked to join them.
[Picture: The Old Gentleman Opposite]
Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who sits
opposite said, “That’s it! that’s it!”
I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever people’s hating
each other, I think a _little_ extra talent does sometimes make people
jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts and failures, and
it hurts their tempers and dispositions. Unpretending mediocrity is
good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an
essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality
of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wineglass
spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of,
who always belongs to this class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is
puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working
and playing together in harmony. He and his fellows are always fighting.
With them familiarity naturally breeds contempt. If they ever praise
each other’s bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined verses,
nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply a contract
between themselves and a publisher or dealer.
If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that alters
the question. But if they are men with noble powers and qualities, let
me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family affections, there is
no human sentiment better than that which unites the Societies of Mutual
Admiration. And what would literature or art be without such
associations? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society
of which Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were
members? Or to that of which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and
which gave us the Spectator? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith,
and Burke, and Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among
all admirers, met together? Was there any great harm in the fact that
the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable cabal in
the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and as many more as
they chose to associate with them?
The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he abuses
this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries through the
knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a medium for his
popgun. Such a society is the crown of a literary metropolis; if a town
has not material for it, and spirit and good feeling enough to organize
it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a man of genius to lodge in, but
not to live in. Foolish people hate and dread and envy such an
association of men of varied powers and influence, because it is lofty,
serene, impregnable, and, by the necessity of the case, exclusive. Wise
ones are prouder of the title M. S. M. A. than of all their other honors
put together.
—All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.”
They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know
fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which they lead
after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them
slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or
pleasant fancy? I allow no “facts” at this table. What! Because bread
is good and wholesome and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a
crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine
represent a hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract
of ten thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off
my speech?
[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar mind.
The reader will of course understand the precise amount of seasoning
which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of his
life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse in
incompetent hands.]
This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There are men
that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day’s fasting would
do. Mark this that I am going to say, for it is as good as a working
professional man’s advice, and costs you nothing: It is better to lose a
pint of blood from your veins than to have a nerve tapped. Nobody
measures your nervous force as it runs away, nor bandages your brain and
marrow after the operation.
There are men of _esprit_ who are excessively exhausting to some people.
They are the talkers who have what may be called _jerky_ minds. Their
thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence. They say bright
things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death.
After a jolting half-hour with one of these jerky companions, talking
with a dull friend affords great relief. It is like taking the cat in
your lap after holding a squirrel.
What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A
ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our
dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.
“Do not dull people bore you?” said one of the lady-boarders,—the same
that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a few
original stanzas, not remembering that “The Pactolian” pays me five
dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.
“Madam,” said I, (she and the century were in their teens together,) “all
men are bores, except when we want them. There never was but one man
whom I would trust with my latch-key.”
“Who might that favored person be?”
“Zimmermann.”
—The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the
cobra-di-capello. You remember what they tell of William Pinkney, the
great pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his neck would
swell and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he seemed on the
verge of apoplexy. The hydraulic arrangements for supplying the brain
with blood are only second in importance to its own organization. The
bulbous-headed fellows that steam well when they are at work are the men
that draw big audiences and give us marrowy books and pictures. It is a
good sign to have one’s feet grow cold when he is writing. A great
writer and speaker once told me that he often wrote with his feet in hot
water; but for this, _all_ his blood would have run into his head, as the
mercury sometimes withdraws into the ball of a thermometer.
—You don’t suppose that my remarks made at this table are like so many
postage-stamps, do you,—each to be only once uttered? If you do, you are
mistaken. He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself.
Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, “Know thyself,”
never alluding to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted
existence! Why, the truths a man carries about with him are his tools;
and do you think a carpenter is bound to use the same plane but once to
smooth a knotty board with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven
its first nail? I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often.
I shall use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same
stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a
hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express
train of associations.
Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech twice
over, and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer, after
performing in an inland city, where dwells a _Littératrice_ of note, was
invited to meet her and others over the social teacup. She pleasantly
referred to his many wanderings in his new occupation. “Yes,” he
replied, “I am like the Huma, the bird that never lights, being always in
the cars, as he is always on the wing.”—Years elapsed. The lecturer
visited the same place once more for the same purpose. Another social
cup after the lecture, and a second meeting with the distinguished lady.
“You are constantly going from place to place,” she said.—“Yes,” he
answered, “I am like the Huma,”—and finished the sentence as before.
What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine speech,
word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the lady might
perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished his conversation
with the Huma daily during that whole interval of years. On the
contrary, he had never once thought of the odious fowl until the
recurrence of precisely the same circumstances brought up precisely the
same idea. He ought to have been proud of the accuracy of his mental
adjustments. Given certain factors, and a sound brain should always
evolve the same fixed product with the certainty of Babbage’s calculating
machine.
—What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere mathematician! A
Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too
stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and
never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of
them!
I have an immense respect for a man of talents _plus_ “the mathematics.”
But the calculating power alone should seem to be the least human of
qualities, and to have the smallest amount of reason in it; since a
machine can be made to do the work of three or four calculators, and
better than any one of them. Sometimes I have been troubled that I had
not a deeper intuitive apprehension of the relations of numbers. But the
triumph of the ciphering hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I
can hear the wheels clicking in a calculator’s brain. The power of
dealing with numbers is a kind of “detached lever” arrangement, which may
be put into a mighty poor watch—I suppose it is about as common as the
power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare
endowment.
—Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized
knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about. Nature is
very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many small talents and
little accomplishments would be neglected! Talk about conceit as much as
you like, it is to human character what salt is to the ocean; it keeps it
sweet, and renders it endurable. Say rather it is like the natural
unguent of the sea-fowl’s plumage, which enables him to shed the rain
that falls on him and the wave in which he dips. When one has had _all_
his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost _all_ his illusions, his
feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.
“So you admire conceited people, do you?” said the young lady who has
come to the city to be finished off for—the duties of life.
I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. It does not
follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a salt-water
plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human
minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people’s thoughts
move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an
arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement
of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even
if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it.
The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does
not obviously imply any individual centre.
Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing. What
resplendent beauty that must have been which could have authorized Phryne
to “peel” in the way she did! What fine speeches are those two: “_Non
omnis mortar_,” and “I have taken all knowledge to be my province”! Even
in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man
who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself
severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though
liable to be tedious at times.
—What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of
words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I
don’t doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good
talks than anything else;—long arguments on special points between people
who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these points depend.
No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have
agreed on certain _ultimata_ of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary
conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary
questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In
short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best social
order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable
talk between two persons. Talking is like playing on the harp; there is
as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in
twanging them to bring out their music.
—Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your
minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and language are
alike sacred. Homicide and _verbicide_—that is, violent treatment of a
word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are
alike forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the
same as man’s laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is _primâ
facie_ an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter
indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how
serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on
the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking
with such a person. I should like to commit him, but cannot, because he
is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological convulsions, and he asks me what
was the cosine of Noah’s ark; also, whether the Deluge was not a deal
huger than any modern inundation.
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were
given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of
the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated
character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide. Thus, in a case
lately decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper,
and urged the claims of suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When
charity was like a top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved a
dignified silence. Roe then said, “When it begins to hum.” Doe then—and
not till then—struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of
the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification ensued,
with a fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of the law to his
brother justices, who unanimously replied, “Jest so.” The chief
rejoined, that no man should jest so without being punished for it, and
charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted, and the pun ordered to be
burned by the sheriff. The bound volume was forfeited as a deodand, but
not claimed.
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the
railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their
little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a
battered witticism.
I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will mark
the places on this slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may say that this
boy, our land-lady’s youngest, is called BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, after the
celebrated philosopher of that name. A highly merited compliment.)
I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to
listen. The great moralist says: “To trifle with the vocabulary which is
the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human
intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue
would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and
repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion.”
And, once more, listen to the historian. “The Puritans hated puns. The
Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried
them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its Royal
quibble. ‘Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,’ said Queen Elizabeth, ‘but
ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester.’ The
gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent their sanction to the
practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared himself a descendant of ’Og, the
King of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the
soldier who brought him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying
man. A courtier, who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre,
remarked, that the blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. ‘Thou hast
reason,’ replied a great Lord, ‘according to Plato his saying; for this
be a two-legged animal _with_ feathers.’ The fatal habit became
universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the
national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of
verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the
Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in
the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of the
Stuarts.”
Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the
Macaulay-flowers of literature?—There was a dead silence.—I said calmly,
I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change
my boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If _I_ have used any such,
it has been only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken helot. We
have done with them.
—If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic?—I should say
that its most frequent work was to build a _pons asinorum_ over chasms
which shrewd people can bestride without such a structure. You can hire
logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to
prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that
no battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought. The great minds are those with
a wide span, which couple truths related to, but far removed from, each
other. Logicians carry the surveyor’s chain over the track of which
these are the true explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary
relations with truth, as I understand truth,—not for any secondary
artifice in handling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in argument are
notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a
smart debater, any more than that of a good chess-player. Either may of
course advise wisely, but not necessarily because he wrangles or plays
well.
The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts
his forefoot, at the expression, “his relations with truth, as I
understand truth,” and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and said I
talked like a transcendentalist. For his part, common sense was good
enough for him.
Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, _as you understand
it_. We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our own minds,
either of things or persons. A man who is willing to take another’s
opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice of whom to follow,
which is often as nice a matter as to judge of things for one’s self. On
the whole, I had rather judge men’s minds by comparing their thoughts
with my own, than judge of thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must do
one or the other. It does not follow, of course, that I may not
recognize another man’s thoughts as broader and deeper than my own; but
that does not necessarily change my opinion, otherwise this would be at
the mercy of every superior mind that held a different one. How many of
our most cherished beliefs are like those drinking-glasses of the ancient
pattern, that serve us well so long as we keep them in our hand, but
spill all if we attempt to set them down! I have sometimes compared
conversation to the Italian game of _mora_, in which one player lifts his
hand with so many fingers extended, and the other gives the number if he
can. I show my thought, another his; if they agree, well; if they
differ, we find the largest common factor, if we can, but at any rate
avoid disputing about remainders and fractions, which is to real talk
what tuning an instrument is to playing on it.
—What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a copy of
verses, with critical remarks by the author? Any of the company can
retire that like.
ALBUM VERSES.
When Eve had led her lord away,
And Cain had killed his brother,
The stars and flowers, the poets say,
Agreed with one another
To cheat the cunning tempter’s art,
And teach the race its duty,
By keeping on its wicked heart
Their eyes of light and beauty.
A million sleepless lids, they say,
Will be at least a warning;
And so the flowers would watch by day,
The stars from eve to morning.
On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
Their dewy eyes upturning,
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn
Till western skies are burning.
Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.
But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor’s smile, the murderer’s frown,
The lips of lying lovers,
They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavour
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink forever.
What do _you_ think of these verses my friends?—Is that piece an
impromptu? said my landlady’s daughter. (Aet. 19 +. Tender-eyed blonde.
Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold pencil-case on a chain. Locket.
Bracelet. Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and
Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Says “Yes?”
when you tell her anything.)—_Oui et non_, _ma petite_,—Yes and no, my
child. Five of the seven verses were written off-hand; the other two
took a week,—that is, were hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn,
unrhymed condition as long as that. All poets will tell you just such
stories. _C’est le_ DERNIER _pas qui coute_. Don’t you know how hard it
is for some people to get out of a room after their visit is really over?
They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don’t know
how to manage it. One would think they had been built in your parlour or
study, and were waiting to be launched. I have contrived a sort of
ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which being lubricated with
certain smooth phrases, I back them down, metaphorically speaking,
stern-foremost, into their “native element,” the great ocean of
out-doors. Well, now, there are poems as hard to get rid of as these
rural visitors. They come in glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes,
_day_, _ray_, _beauty_, _duty_, _skies_, _eyes_, _other_, _brother_,
_mountain_, _fountain_, and the like; and so they go on until you think
it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won’t come on any terms. So
they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by
thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them
out of doors. I suspect a good many “impromptus” could tell just such a
story as the above.—Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration
which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly
commanded. “Madam,” I said, “you can pour three gills and three quarters
of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less than one minute; but,
Madam, you could not empty that last quarter of a gill, though you were
turned into a marble Hebe, and held the vessel upside down for a thousand
years.”
[Picture: The Landlady’s Daughter]
One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that
copy of verses,—which I don’t mean to abuse, or to praise either. I
always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an old
pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these
venerable jingles.
. . . . youth
. . . . . morning
. . . . . truth
. . . . . warning
Nine tenths of the “Juvenile Poems” written spring out of the above
musical and suggestive coincidences.
“Yes?” said our landlady’s daughter.
I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her
limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my
next neighbour.
When a young female wears a flat circular side—curl, gummed on each
temple,—when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against
the back of hers,—and when she says “Yes?” with the note of
interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what wages she gets,
and who the “feller” was you saw her with.
“What were you whispering?” said the daughter of the house, moistening
her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.
“I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis.”
“Yes?”
—It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same
implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The young
ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook’s Voyages, had a sort of
crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest spread of our
own lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am
only taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before
me. A _blanket_-shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like
the aborigines, and not like the Highlanders.
—We are the Romans of the modern world,—the great assimilating people.
Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as
with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army
sword is the short, stiff, pointed _gladius_ of the Romans; and the
American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants
of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in
Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:—
The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.
_Corollary_. It was the Polish _lance_ that left Poland at last with
nothing of her own to bound.
“Dropped from her nerveless grasp the _shattered spear_!”
What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot
pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but clutched
the old Roman and young American weapon, and come to close quarters,
there might have been a chance for her; but it would have spoiled the
best passage in “The Pleasures of Hope.”
—Self-made men?—Well, yes. Of course everybody likes and respects
self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not
to be made at all. Are any of you younger people old enough to remember
that Irishman’s house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built
from drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many
years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb,
and a little wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general
aspect. A regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it
was a very good house for a “self-made” carpenter’s house, and people
praised it, and said how remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded.
They never thought of praising the fine blocks of houses a little farther
on.
Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife, deserves
more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-turned article,
shaped by the most approved pattern, and French-polished by society and
travel. But as to saying that one is every way the equal of the other,
that is another matter. The right of strict social discrimination of all
things and persons, according to their merits, native or acquired, is one
of the most precious republican privileges. I take the liberty to
exercise it, when I say, that, _other things being equal_, in most
relations of life I prefer a man of family.
What do I mean by a man of family?—O, I’ll give you a general idea of
what I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us nothing.
Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a
member of his Majesty’s Council for the Province, a Governor or so, one
or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time
of top-boots with tassels.
Family portraits. The member of the Council, by Smibert. The great
merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in a
velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the range of
his commercial transactions, and letters with large red seals lying
round, one directed conspicuously to The Honourable etc. etc.
Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands
superlative; grand old lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her mother, artist
unknown; flat, angular, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of
Stuarts, viz., 1. A superb full-blown, mediaeval gentleman, with a fiery
dash of Tory blood in his veins, tempered down with that of a fine old
rebel grandmother, and warmed up with the best of old India Madeira; his
face is one flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled shirt rushes out of his
bosom with an impetuous generosity, as if it would drag his heart after
it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand dollars to the Hospital,
besides ample bequests to all relatives and dependants. 2. Lady of the
same; remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of Empire; bust _à la
Josephine_; wisps of curls, like celery-tips, at sides of forehead;
complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial. As for the miniatures by
Malbone, we don’t count them in the gallery.
Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them,—family
names;—you will find them at the head of their respective classes in the
days when students took rank on the catalogue from their parents’
condition. Elzevirs, with the Latinized appellations of youthful
progenitors, and _Hic liber est meus_ on the title-page. A set of
Hogarth’s original plates. Pope, original edition, 15 volumes, London,
1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio. Tillotson on the upper, in
a little dark platoon of octo-decimos.
Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms of
the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden aunt.
If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in, furnished
with claw-footed chairs and black mahogany tables, and tall bevel-edged
mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit is complete.
No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who
inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four
or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have
tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books, who have not
handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear _didascalos_ over
there ever read _Poli Synopsis_, or consulted _Castelli Lexicon_, while
he was growing up to their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through
the hem of their parchment and leather garments whenever he touched them,
as the precious drugs sweated through the bat’s handle in the Arabian
story. I tell you he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating
fragrance of Russia leather. No self-made man feels so. One may, it is
true, have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a
shabby fellow. One may have none of them, and yet be fit for councils
and courts. Then let them change places. Our social arrangement has
this great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change
specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I
still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go for the man
with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the
twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the
better of the two.
—I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought
the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and
besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring
myself to think was made for nothing. If certain things, which seem to
me essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should have been
frightened; but they haven’t. Perhaps you would like to hear my
LATTER-DAY WARNINGS.
When legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle—rasp—and straw—
Grow bigger _downwards_ through the box,—
When he that selleth house or land
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right,—
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light,—
When preachers tell us all they think,
And party leaders all they mean,—
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean,—
When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take,—
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience’ sake,—
When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof,—
When in the usual place for rips
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair,—
When Cuba’s weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harber not
Such dimples as would hold your fist,—
When publishers no longer steal,
And pay for what they stole before,—
When the first locomotive’s wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel’s bore;—
_Till_ then let Cumming a blaze away,
And Miller’s saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
_Then_ order your ascension robe!
The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read others
occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course they would not
expect it every morning. Neither must the reader suppose that all these
things I have reported were said at any one breakfast-time. I have not
taken the trouble to date them, as Raspail, _père_, used to date every
proof he sent to the printer; but they were scattered over several
breakfasts; and I have said a good many more things since, which I shall
very possibly print some time or other, if I am urged to do it by
judicious friends.
I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the Professor, of
whom you may perhaps hear more by and by. The Professor read them, he
told me, at a farewell meeting, where the youngest of our great
Historians met a few of his many friends at their invitation.
Yes, we knew we must lose him,—though friendship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
’Tis the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.
As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,—
As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,—
As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.
What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!
In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,
There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,
There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!
Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed
From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!
Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,
Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!
* * * * *
The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
On pampas, on prairie, o’er mountain and lake,
To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,
With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.
So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
When the dead summer’s jewels were trampled and crushed:
THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING,—the world holds him dear,—
Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career!
CHAPTER II
I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too
precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the
other day to one that was talking good things,—good enough to print?
“Why,” said he, “you are wasting mechantable literature, a cash article,
at the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour.” The
talker took him to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he
saw.
“Nothing but a very dusty street,” he said, “and a man driving a
sprinkling-machine through it.”
“Why don’t you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the
state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our
_thought-sprinklers_ through them with the valves open, sometimes?
“Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget.
It shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the
surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little.
I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken
language is so plastic,—you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and
rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily when you work that soft
material, that there is nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come
the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books,
if you happen to write such. Or, to use another illustration, writing or
printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader’s mind,
or miss it;—but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an
engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can’t help
hitting it.”
The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior
excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, “Fust-rate.” I acknowledged
the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression. “Fust-rate,” “prime,”
“a prime article,” “a superior piece of goods,” “a handsome garment,” “a
gent in a flowered vest,”—all such expressions are final. They blast the
lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down.
There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man’s
social _status_, if it is not already: “That tells the whole story.” It
is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect,
and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from them. It is
intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General
Court. Only it doesn’t; simply because “that” does not usually tell the
whole, nor one half of the whole story.
—It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a professional
education. To become a doctor a man must study some three years and hear
a thousand lectures, more or less. Just how much study it takes to make
a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not more than this. Now most decent
people hear one hundred lectures or sermons (discourses) on theology
every year,—and this, twenty, thirty, fifty years together. They read a
great many religious books besides. The clergy, however, rarely hear any
sermons except what they preach themselves. A dull preacher might be
conceived, therefore, to lapse into a state of _quasi_ heathenism, simply
for want of religious instruction. And on the other hand, an attentive
and intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers, might
become actually better educated in theology than any one of them. We are
all theological students, and more of us qualified as doctors of divinity
than have received degrees at any of the universities.
It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often find it
difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed upon a sermon
treating feebly a subject which they have thought vigorously about for
years, and heard able men discuss scores of times. I have often noticed,
however, that a hopelessly dull discourse acts _inductively_, as
electricians would say, in developing strong mental currents. I am
ashamed to think with what accompaniments and variations and _fioriture_
I have sometimes followed the droning of a heavy speaker,—not
willingly,—for my habit is reverential,—but as a necessary result of a
slight continuous impression on the senses and the mind, which kept both
in action without furnishing the food they required to work upon. If you
ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a
dull speaker and a lively listener. The bird in sable plumage flaps
heavily along his straight-forward course, while the other sails round
him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks out a
black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of him, and
finally reaches the crow’s perch at the same time the crow does, having
cut a perfect labyrinth of loops and knots and spirals while the slow
fowl was painfully working from one end of his straight line to the
other.
[I think these remarks were received rather coolly. A temporary boarder
from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than middle-aged female,
with a parchment forehead and a dry little “frisette” shingling it, a
sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, a black dress too rusty for
recent grief and contours in basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely,
and was reported to have been very virulent about what I said. So I went
to my good old minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could
remember them, to him. He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was
considerable truth in them. He thought he could tell when people’s minds
were wandering, by their looks. In the earlier years of his ministry he
had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching;—very little of late
years. Sometimes, when his colleague was preaching, he observed this
kind of inattention; but after all, it was not so very unnatural. I will
say, by the way, that it is a rule I have long followed, to tell my worst
thoughts to my minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk
with.]
—I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody has
made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes,
because I have read some of them at this table. (The company
assented,—two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought,
as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going to read
half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)—I continued. Of course I
write some lines or passages which are better than others; some which,
compared with the others, might be called relatively excellent. It is in
the nature of things that I should consider these relatively excellent
lines or passages as absolutely good. So much must be pardoned to
humanity. Now I never wrote a “good” line in my life, but the moment
after it was written it seemed a hundred years old. Very commonly I had
a sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly I may have
sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but I do not remember that I ever once
detected any historical truth in these sudden convictions of the
antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I have learned utterly to
distrust them, and never allow them to bully me out of a thought or line.
This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the company was
diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula which suddenly emerges
in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is
virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized
growths of our intellect. Any crystalline group of musical words has had
a long and still period to form in. Here is one theory.
[Picture: The schoolmistress]
But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts. It is
this. The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories is in a
direct ratio to the squares of their importance. Their apparent age runs
up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as they increase in
magnitude. A great calamity, for instance, is as old as the trilobites
an hour after it has happened. It stains backward through all the leaves
we have turned over in the book of life, before its blot of tears or of
blood is dry on the page we are turning. For this we seem to have lived;
it was foreshadowed in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of
terror; in the “dissolving views” of dark day-visions; all omens pointed
to it; all paths led to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the
first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as a
surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again,—old as eternity.
[I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known
better. The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was looking at
me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression. All at once the blood
dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops from a broken
barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat like an image of snow;
a slung-shot could not have brought her down better. God forgive me!
After this little episode, I continued, to some few that remained
balancing teaspoons on the edges of cups, twirling knives, or tilting
upon the hind legs of their chairs until their heads reached the wall,
where they left gratuitous advertisements of various popular cosmetics.]
When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new position of trial,
he finds the place fits him as if he had been measured for it. He has
committed a great crime, for instance, and is sent to the State Prison.
The traditions, prescriptions, limitations, privileges, all the sharp
conditions of his new life, stamp themselves upon his consciousness as
the signet on soft wax;—a single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen
the image a little. Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and
velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides
backward and forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out
of a ring. The engine lays one of _its_ fingers calmly, but firmly, upon
a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and tell
a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over with twenty
centuries. So it is that a great silent-moving misery puts a new stamp
on us in an hour or a moment,—as sharp an impression as if it had taken
half a lifetime to engrave it.
It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional dealers in
misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a moment, and you
pass out of the individual life you were living into the rhythmical
movements of their horrible machinery. Do the worst thing you can, or
suffer the worst that can be thought of, you find yourself in a category
of humanity that stretches back as far as Cain, and with an expert at
your elbow who has studied your case all out beforehand, and is waiting
for you with his implements of hemp or mahogany. I believe, if a man
were to be burned in any of our cities tomorrow for heresy, there would
be found a master of ceremonies that knew just how many fagots were
necessary, and the best way of arranging the whole matter.
—So we have not won the Goodwood cup; _au contraire_, we were a “bad
fifth,” if not worse than that; and trying it again, and the third time,
has not yet bettered the matter. Now I am as patriotic as any of my
fellow-citizens,—too patriotic in fact, for I have got into hot water by
loving too much of my country; in short, if any man, whose fighting
weight is not more than eight stone four pounds, disputes it, I am ready
to discuss the point with him. I should have gloried to see the stars
and stripes in front at the finish. I love my country, and I love
horses. Stubbs’s old mezzotint of Eclipse hangs over my desk, and
Herring’s portrait of Plenipotentiary,—whom I saw run at Epsom,—over my
fireplace. Did I not elope from school to see Revenge, and Prospect, and
Little John, and Peacemaker run over the race-course where now yon
suburban village flourishes, in the year eighteen hundred and
ever-so-few? Though I never owned a horse, have I not been the
proprietor of six equine females, of which one was the prettiest little
“Morgin” that ever stepped? Listen, then, to an opinion I have often
expressed long before this venture of ours in England. Horse-_racing_ is
not a republican institution; horse-_trotting_ is. Only very rich
persons can keep race-horses, and everybody knows they are kept mainly as
gambling implements. All that matter about blood and speed we won’t
discuss; we understand all that; useful, very,—_of_ course,—great
obligations to the Godolphin “Arabian,” and the rest. I say racing
horses are essentially gambling implements, as much as roulette tables.
Now I am not preaching at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons
some other morning; but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is
not republican. It belongs to two phases of society,—a cankered
over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the reckless
life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a
civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real Republicanism is
stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of government, but in the
omnipotence of public opinion which grows out of it. This public opinion
cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, but it can and does compel
it to keep comparatively quiet. But horse-racing is the most public way
of gambling, and with all its immense attractions to the sense and the
feelings,—to which I plead very susceptible,—the disguise is too thin
that covers it, and everybody knows what it means. Its supporters are
the Southern gentry,—fine fellows, no doubt, but not republicans exactly,
as we understand the term,—a few Northern millionnaires more or less
thoroughly millioned, who do not represent the real people, and the mob
of sporting men, the best of whom are commonly idlers, and the worst very
bad neighbors to have near one in a crowd, or to meet in a dark alley.
In England, on the other hand, with its aristocratic institutions, racing
is a natural growth enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through
all classes, from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a
shelled corn-cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could
raise the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit
down on his office-stool the next day without wincing.
Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment. The racer is
incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet upon, as much as
the thimble-rigger’s “little joker.” The trotter is essentially and
daily useful, and only incidentally a tool for sporting men.
What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is most
cultivated and reaches his greatest perfection in England, and that the
trotting horses of America beat the world? And why should we have
expected that the pick—if it was the pick—of our few and far-between
racing stables should beat the pick of England and France? Throw over
the fallacious time-test, and there was nothing to show for it but a
natural kind of patriotic feeling, which we all have, with a thoroughly
provincial conceit, which some of us must plead guilty to.
We may beat yet. As an American, I hope we shall. As a moralist and
occasional sermonizer, I am not so anxious about it. Wherever the
trotting horse goes, he carries in his train brisk omnibuses, lively
bakers’ carts, and therefore hot rolls, the jolly butcher’s wagon, the
cheerful gig, the wholesome afternoon drive with wife and child,—all the
forms of moral excellence, except truth, which does not agree with any
kind of horse-flesh. The racer brings with him gambling, cursing,
swearing, drinking, the eating of oysters, and a distaste for mob-caps
and the middle-aged virtues.
And by the way, let me beg you not to call a _trotting match_ a _race_,
and not to speak of a “thoroughbred” as a “_blooded_” horse, unless he
has been recently phlebotomized. I consent to your saying “blood horse,”
if you like. Also, if, next year, we send out Posterior and
Posterioress, the winners of the great national four-mile race in 7 18.5,
and they happen to get beaten, pay your bets, and behave like men and
gentlemen about it, if you know how.
[I felt a great deal better after blowing off the ill-temper condensed in
the above paragraph. To brag little,—to show well,—to crow gently, if in
luck,—to pay up, to own up, and to shut up, if beaten, are the virtues of
a sporting man, and I can’t say that I think we have shown them in any
great perfection of late.]
—Apropos of horses. Do you know how important good jockeying is to
authors? Judicious management; letting the public see your animal just
enough, and not too much; holding him up hard when the market is too full
of him; letting him out at just the right buying intervals; always gently
feeling his mouth; never slacking and never jerking the rein;—this is
what I mean by jockeying.
—When an author has a number of books out a cunning hand will keep them
all spinning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; fetching each one
up, as it begins to “wabble,” by an advertisement, a puff, or a
quotation.
—Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast in the
papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new edition
coming. The extracts are _ground-bait_.
—Literary life is fun of curious phenomena. I don’t know that there is
anything more noticeable than what we may call _conventional
reputations_. There is a tacit understanding in every community of men
of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this
or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various reasons for this
forbearance: one is old; one is rich; one is good-natured; one is such a
favorite with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss him from the
manager’s box. The venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple
may smile faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in
general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating and
imploring a man to stay with you with the implied compact between you
that he shall by no means think of doing it. A poor wretch he must be
who would wantonly sit down on one of these bandbox reputations. A
Prince-Rupert’s-drop, which is a tear of unannealed glass, lasts
indefinitely, if you keep it from meddling hands; but break its tail off,
and it explodes and resolves itself into powder. These celebrities I
speak of are the Prince-Rupert’s-drops of the learned and polite world.
See how the papers treat them! What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic
phrases, which can be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at
their service! How kind the “Critical Notices”—where small authorship
comes to pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy—always are
to them! Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and other
fictions; so let them pass current. Don’t steal their chips; don’t
puncture their swimming-bladders; don’t come down on their pasteboard
boxes; don’t break the ends of their brittle and unstable reputations,
you fellows who all feel sure that your names will be household words a
thousand years from now.
“A thousand years is a good while,” said the old gentleman who sits
opposite, thoughtfully.
—Where have I been for the last three or four days? Down at the Island,
deer-shooting.—How many did I bag? I brought home one buck shot.—The
Island is where? No matter. It is the most splendid domain that any man
looks upon in these latitudes. Blue sea around it, and running up into
its heart, so that the little boat slumbers like a baby in lap, while the
tall ships are stripping naked to fight the hurricane outside, and
storm-stay-sails banging and flying in ribbons. Trees, in stretches of
miles; beeches, oaks, most numerous;—many of them hung with moss, looking
like bearded Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge, dark-stemmed
grape-vines. Open patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep, and
the winds come so finely sifted that they are as soft as swan’s down.
Rocks scattered about,—Stonehenge-like monoliths. Fresh-water lakes; one
of them, Mary’s lake, crystal-clear, full of flashing pickerel lying
under the lily-pads like tigers in the jungle. Six pounds of ditto
killed one morning for breakfast. EGO _fecit._
The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question my Latin.
No, sir, I said,—you need not trouble yourself. There is a higher law in
grammar, not to be put down by Andrews and Stoddard. Then I went on.
Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the like of
in these our New England sovereignties. There is nothing in the shape of
kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful, which has not found
its home in that ocean-principality. It has welcomed all who were worthy
of welcome, from the pale clergyman who came to breathe the sea-air with
its medicinal salt and iodine, to the great statesman who turned his back
on the affairs of empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, and flashed
his white teeth in merriment over the long table, where his wit was the
keenest and his story the best.
[I don’t believe any man ever talked like that in this world. I don’t
believe _I_ talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting one’s
conversation, one cannot help _Blair_-ing it up more or less, ironing out
crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping and plaiting a
little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at the looking-glass.]
—How can a man help writing poetry in such a place? Everybody does write
poetry that goes there. In the state archives, kept in the library of
the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of unpublished verse,—some by
well-known hands, and others quite as good, by the last people you would
think of as versifiers,—men who could pension off all the genuine poets
in the country, and buy ten acres of Boston common, if it was for sale,
with what they had left. Of course I had to write my little copy of
verses with the rest; here it is, if you will hear me read it. When the
sun is in the west, vessels sailing in an easterly direction look bright
or dark to one who observes them from the north or south, according to
the tack they are sailing upon. Watching them from one of the windows of
the great mansion, I saw these perpetual changes, and moralized thus:—
SUN AND SHADOW.
As I look from the isle, o’er its billows of green,
To the billows of foam-crested blue,
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
The sun gleaming bright on her sail.
Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun,—
Of breakers that whiten and roar;
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
They see him that gaze from the shore!
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
To the rock that is under his lee,
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O’er the gulfs of the desolate sea.
Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade;
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark,
We’ll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore!
—Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental
machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust
among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A
weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity
often saves a man from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane
hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called _religious_
mental disturbances. I confess that I think better of them than of many
who hold the same notions, and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life
very well, outside of the asylums. Any decent person ought to go mad, if
he really holds such or such opinions. It is very much to his discredit
in every point of view, if he does not. What is the use of my saying
what some of these opinions are? Perhaps more than one of you hold such
as I should think ought to send you straight over to Somerville, if you
have any logic in your heads or any human feeling in your hearts.
Anything that is brutal, cruel, heathenish, that makes life hopeless for
the most of mankind and perhaps for entire races,—anything that assumes
the necessity of the extermination of instincts which were given to be
regulated,—no matter by what name you call it,—no matter whether a fakir,
or a monk, or a deacon believes it,—if received, ought to produce
insanity in every well-regulated mind. That condition becomes a normal
one, under the circumstances. I am very much ashamed of some people for
retaining their reason, when they know perfectly well that if they were
not the most stupid or the most selfish of human beings, they would
become _non-compotes_ at once.
[Nobody understood this but the theological student and the
schoolmistress. They looked intelligently at each other; but whether
they were thinking about my paradox or not, I am not clear.—It would be
natural enough. Stranger things have happened. Love and Death enter
boarding-houses without asking the price of board, or whether there is
room for them. Alas, these young people are poor and pallid! Love
_should_ be both rich and rosy, but _must_ be either rich or rosy. Talk
about military duty! What is that to the warfare of a married
maid-of-all-work, with the title of mistress, and an American female
constitution, which collapses just in the middle third of life, and comes
out vulcanized India-rubber, if it happen to live through the period when
health and strength are most wanted?]
—Have I ever acted in private theatricals? Often. I have played the
part of the “Poor Gentleman,” before a great many audiences,—more, I
trust, than I shall ever face again. I did not wear a stage-costume, nor
a wig, nor moustaches of burnt cork; but I was placarded and announced as
a public performer, and at the proper hour I came forward with the
ballet-dancer’s smile upon my countenance, and made my bow and acted my
part. I have seen my name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed
to show myself in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a
sober literary essay in my pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced
as the most desperate of _buffos_,—one who was obliged to restrain
himself in the full exercise of his powers, from prudential
considerations. I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses, in the
pursuit of my histrionic vocation. I have travelled in cars until the
conductors all knew me like a brother. I have run off the rails, and
stuck all night in snow-drifts, and sat behind females that would have
the window open when one could not wink without his eyelids freezing
together. Perhaps I shall give you some of my experiences one of these
days;—I will not now, for I have something else for you.
Private theatricals, as I have figured in them in country lyceum-halls,
are one thing,—and private theatricals, as they may be seen in certain
gilded and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are another. Yes, it is
pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies, who do not think it necessary
to mouth, and rant, and stride, like most of our stage heroes and
heroines, in the characters which show off their graces and talents; most
of all to see a fresh, unrouged, unspoiled, high bred young maiden, with
a lithe figure, and a pleasant voice, acting in those love-dramas which
make us young again to look upon, when real youth and beauty will play
them for us.
—Of course I wrote the prologue I was asked to write. I did not see the
play, though. I knew there was a young lady in it, and that somebody was
in love with her, and she was in love with him, and somebody (an old
tutor, I believe) wanted to interfere, and, very naturally, the young
lady was too sharp for him. The play of course ends charmingly; there is
a general reconciliation, and all concerned form a line and take each
others’ hands, as people always do after they have made up their
quarrels,—and then the curtain falls,—if it does not stick, as it
commonly does at private theatrical exhibitions, in which case a boy is
detailed to pull it down, which he does, blushing violently.
Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going to change my cæsuras and
cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or iambic
trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear it
THIS IS IT.
A Prologue? Well, of course the ladies know;—
I have my doubts. No matter,—here we go!
What is a Prologue? Let our Tutor teach:
_Pro_ means beforehand; _logos_ stands for speech.
’Tis like the harper’s prelude on the strings,
The prima donna’s courtesy ere she sings;—
Prologues in metre are to other _pros_
As worsted stockings are to engine-hose.
“The world’s a stage,” as Shakspeare said, one day;
The stage a world—was what he meant to say.
The outside world’s a blunder, that is clear;
The real world that Nature meant is here.
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma;
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa;
Misers relent, the spendthrift’s debts are paid,
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid;
One after one the troubles all are past
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last,
When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all,
Join hands, _so_ happy at the curtain’s fall.
—Here suffering virtue ever finds relief,
And black-browed ruffians always come to grief,
—When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech,
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach,
Cries, “Help, kyind Heaven!” and drops upon her knees
On the green—baize,—beneath the (canvas) trees,—
See to her side avenging Valor fly:—
“Ha! Villain! Draw! Now, Terraitorr, yield or die!”
—When the poor hero flounders in despair,
Some dear lost uncle turns up millionnaire,—
Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy,
Sobs on his neck, “_My boy_! MY BOY!! MY BOY!!!”
Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night.
Of love that conquers in disaster’s spite.
Ladies, attend! While woful cares and doubt
Wrong the soft passion in the world without,
Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
One thing is certain: Love will triumph here!
Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule,—
The world’s great masters, when you’re out of school,—
Learn the brief moral of our evening’s play:
Man has his will,—but woman has her way!
While man’s dull spirit toils in smoke and fire,
Woman’s swift instinct threads the electric wire,—
The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves
Beats the black giant with his score of slaves.
All earthly powers confess your sovereign art
But that one rebel,—woman’s wilful heart.
All foes you master; but a woman’s wit
Lets daylight through you ere you know you’re hit.
So, just to picture what her art can do,
Hear an old story made as good as new.
Rudolph, professor of the headsman’s trade,
Alike was famous for his arm and blade.
One day a prisoner Justice had to kill
Knelt at the block to test the artist’s skill.
Bare-armed, swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy-browed,
Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd.
His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam,
As the pike’s armor flashes in the stream.
He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go;
The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow.
“Why strikest not? Perform thy murderous act,”
The prisoner said. (Hs voice was slightly cracked.)
“Friend I _have_ struck,” the artist straight replied;
“Wait but one moment, and yourself decide.”
He held his snuff-box,—“Now then, if you please!”
The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing sneeze,
Off his head tumbled,—bowled along the floor,—
Bounced down the steps;—the prisoner said no more!
Woman! thy falchion is a glittering eye;
If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die!
Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head;
We die with love, and never dream we’re dead!
The prologue went off very well, as I hear. No alterations were
suggested by the lady to whom it was sent, so far as I know. Sometimes
people criticize the poems one sends them, and suggest all sorts of
improvements. Who was that silly body that wanted Burns to alter “Scots
wha hae,” so as to lengthen the last line, thus
“_Edward_!” Chains and slavery!
Here is a little poem I sent a short time since to a committee for a
certain celebration. I understood that it was to be a festive and
convivial occasion, and ordered myself accordingly. It seems the
president of the day was what is called a “teetotaller.” I received a
note from him in the following words, containing the copy subjoined, with
the emendations annexed to it.
“Dear Sir,—your poem gives good satisfaction to the committee. The
sentiments expressed with reference to liquor are not, however, those
generally entertained by this community. I have therefore consulted the
clergyman of this place, who has made come slight changes, which he
thinks will remove all objections, and keep the valuable portions of the
poem. Please to inform me of your charge for said poem. Our means are
limited, etc., etc., etc.
Yours with respect.”
HERE IT IS—WITH THE _SLIGHT ALTERATIONS_!
Come! fill a fresh bumper,—for why should we go
While the [nectar → logwood] still reddens our cups as they flow?
Pour out the [rich juices → decoction] still bright with the sun,
Till o’er the brimmed crystal the [rubies → dye-stuff] shall run.
The [purple glebed clusters → half-ripened apples] their life-dews
have bled;
How sweet is the [breath → taste] of the [fragrance they shed → sugar
of lead]!
For summer’s [last roses → rank poisons] lie hid in the [wines →
_wines_!!!]
That were garnered by [maidens who laughed through the vines. →
stable-boys smoking long-nines.]
Then a [smile → scowl], and a [glass → howl], and a [toast → scoff],
and a [cheer → sneer],
For all [the good wine, and we’ve some of it here → strychnine and
whiskey, and ratsbane and beer]
In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
[Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all! → Down, down, with
the tyrant that masters us all!]
The company said I had been shabbily treated, and advised me to charge
the committee double,—which I did. But as I never got my pay, I don’t
know that it made much difference. I am a very particular person about
having all I write printed as I write it. I require to see a proof, a
revise, a re-revise, and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified
impression of all my productions, especially verse. A misprint kills a
sensitive author. An intentional change of his text murders him. No
wonder so many poets die young!
I have nothing more to report at this time, except two pieces of advice I
gave to the young women at table. One relates to a vulgarism of
language, which I grieve to say is sometimes heard even from female lips.
The other is of more serious purport, and applies to such as contemplate
a change of condition,—matrimony, in fact.
—The woman who “calculates” is lost.
—Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
CHAPTER III
[The “Atlantic” obeys the moon, and its LUNIVERSARY has come round again.
I have gathered up some hasty notes of my remarks made since the last
high tides, which I respectfully submit. Please to remember this is
_talk_; just as easy and just as formal as I choose to make it.]
—I never saw an author in my life—saving, perhaps, one—that did not purr
as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat, (_Felis Catus_, LINN.,) on
having his fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful hand.
But let me give you a caution. Be very careful how you tell an author he
is _droll_. Ten to one he will hate you; and if he does, be sure he can
do you a mischief, and very probably will. Say you _cried_ over his
romance or his verses, and he will love you and send you a copy. You can
laugh over that as much as you like—in private.
—Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny?—Why, there are
obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown knows very well
that the women are not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the fellow in
the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs. The wit knows
that his place is at the tail of a procession.
If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more time to tell it.
There is a perfect consciousness in every form of wit—using that term in
its general sense—that its essence consists in a partial and incomplete
view of whatever it touches. It throws a single ray, separated from the
rest,—red, yellow, blue, or any intermediate shade,—upon an object; never
white light; that is the province of wisdom. We get beautiful effects
from wit,—all the prismatic colors,—but never the object as it is in fair
daylight. A pun, which is a kind if wit, is a different and much
shallower trick in mental optics throwing the _shadows_ of two objects so
that one overlies the other. Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special
effects, but always keeps its essential object in the purest white light
of truth.—Will you allow me to pursue this subject a little further?
[They didn’t allow me at that time, for somebody happened to scrape the
floor with his chair just then; which accidental sound, as all must have
noticed, has the instantaneous effect that the cutting of the yellow hair
by Iris had upon infelix Dido. It broke the charm, and that breakfast
was over.]
—Don’t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say
disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you
come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy
become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend
to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they are ready enough to
tell them. Good-breeding _never_ forgets that _amour-propre_ is
universal. When you read the story of the Archbishop and Gil Blas, you
may laugh, if you will, at the poor old man’s delusion; but don’t forget
that the youth was the greater fool of the two, and that his master
served such a booby rightly in turning him out of doors.
—You need not get up a rebellion against what I say, if you find
everything in my sayings is not exactly new. You can’t possibly mistake
a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I once read an
introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for its latitude. On
examination, I found all its erudition was taken ready-made from
D’Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown up the little
great man, who had once belabored me in his feeble way. But one can
generally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough, and they are not
worth the trouble of putting them in the pillory. I doubt the entire
novelty of my remarks just made on telling unpleasant truths, yet I am
not conscious of any larceny.
Neither make too much of flaws and occasional overstatements. Some
persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly stated
propositions, is all that conversation admits. This is precisely as if a
musician should insist on having nothing but perfect chords and simple
melodies,—no diminished fifths, no flat sevenths, no flourishes, on any
account. Now it is fair to say, that, just as music must have all these,
so conversation must have its partial truths, its embellished truths, its
exaggerated truths. It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and
admits the ideal element as much as pictures or statues. One man who is
a little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of
_esprit_.—“Yes,” you say, “but who wants to hear fanciful people’s
nonsense? Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!”—Certainly, if
a man is too fond of paradox,—if he is flighty and empty,—if, instead of
striking those fifths and sevenths, those harmonious discords, often so
much better than the twinned octaves, in the music of thought,—if,
instead of striking these, he jangles the chords, stick a fact into him
like a stiletto. But remember that talking is one of the fine arts,—the
noblest, the most important, and the most difficult,—and that its fluent
harmonies may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single harsh note.
Therefore conversation which is suggestive rather than argumentative,
which lets out the most of each talker’s results of thought, is commonly
the pleasantest and the most profitable. It is not easy, at the best,
for two persons talking together to make the most of each other’s
thoughts, there are so many of them.
[The company looked as if they wanted an explanation.]
When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it is natural
enough that among the six there should be more or less confusion and
misapprehension.
[Our landlady turned pale;—no doubt she thought there was a screw loose
in my intellects,—and that involved the probable loss of a boarder. A
severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted
by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the
professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain
lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and
somewhat rasping _voce di petto_, to Falstaff’s nine men in buckram.
Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman opposite was afraid I
should seize the carving-knife; at any rate, he slid it to one side, as
it were carelessly.]
I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here, that
there are at least six personalities distinctly to be recognized as
taking part in that dialogue between John and Thomas.
Three Johns.
1. The real John; known only to his Maker.
2. John’s ideal John; never the real one, and often very unlike him.
3. Thomas’s ideal John; never the real John, nor John’s John, but often
very unlike either.
Three Thomas.
1. The real Thomas.
2. Thomas’s ideal Thomas.
3. John’s ideal Thomas.
* * * * *
Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a
platform-balance; but the other two are just as important in the
conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and
ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the gift
of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly conceives
himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point
of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes him to be an artful
rogue, we will say; therefore he is, so far as Thomas’s attitude in the
conversation is concerned, an artful rogue, though really simple and
stupid. The same conditions apply to the three Thomases. It follows,
that, until a man can be found who knows himself as his Maker knows him,
or who sees himself as others see him, there must be at least six persons
engaged in every dialogue between two. Of these, the least important,
philosophically speaking, is the one that we have called the real person.
No wonder two disputants often get angry, when there are six of them
talking and listening all at the same time.
[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made by a
young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at table.
A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known to
boarding-houses, was on its way to me _viâ_ this unlettered Johannes. He
appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there
was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical
inference was hasty and illogical, but in the mean time he had eaten the
peaches.]
[Picture: The Young Fellow called John]
—The opinions of relatives as to a man’s powers are very commonly of
little value; not merely because they sometimes overrate their own flesh
and blood, as some may suppose; on the contrary, they are quite as likely
to underrate those whom they have grown into the habit of considering
like themselves. The advent of genius is like what florists style the
_breaking_ of a seedling tulip into what we may call high-caste
colors,—ten thousand dingy flowers, then one with the divine streak; or,
if you prefer it, like the coming up in old Jacob’s garden of that most
gentlemanly little fruit, the seckel pear, which I have sometimes seen in
shop-windows. It is a surprise,—there is nothing to account for it. All
at once we find that twice two make _five_. Nature is fond of what are
called “gift-enterprises.” This little book of life which she has given
into the hands of its joint possessors is commonly one of the old
story-books bound over again. Only once in a great while there is a
stately poem in it, or its leaves are illuminated with the glories of
art, or they enfold a draft for untold values signed by the million-fold
millionnaire old mother herself. But strangers are commonly the first to
find the “gift” that came with the little book.
It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of its own flavor.
Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still more eloquently
silent animal that might be mentioned, is aware of any personal
peculiarity, may well be doubted. No man knows his own voice; many men
do not know their own profiles. Every one remembers Carlyle’s famous
“Characteristics” article; allow for exaggerations, and there is a great
deal in his doctrine of the self-unconsciousness of genius. It comes
under the great law just stated. This incapacity of knowing its own
traits is often found in the family as well as in the individual. So
never mind what your cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and the
rest, say about that fine poem you have written, but send it
(postage-paid) to the editors, if there are any, of the
“Atlantic,”—which, by the way, is not so called because it is _a notion_,
as some dull wits wish they had said, but are too late.
—Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with
it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts
are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a
bullying habit of mind;—not of manners, perhaps; they may be soft and
smooth, but the smile they carry has a quiet assertion in it, such as the
Champion of the Heavy Weights, commonly the best-natured, but not the
most diffident of men, wears upon what he very inelegantly calls his
“mug.” Take the man, for instance, who deals in the mathematical
sciences. There is no elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up
against it, it never yields a hair’s breadth; everything must go to
pieces that comes in collision with it. What the mathematician knows
being absolute, unconditional, incapable of suffering question, it should
tend, in the nature of things, to breed a despotic way of thinking. So
of those who deal with the palpable and often unmistakable facts of
external nature; only in a less degree. Every probability—and most of
our common, working beliefs are probabilities—is provided with _buffers_
at both ends, which break the force of opposite opinions clashing against
it; but scientific certainty has no spring in it, no courtesy, no
possibility of yielding. All this must react on the minds which handle
these forms of truth.
—Oh, you need net tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most gracious,
unassuming people in the world, and yet preëminent in the ranges of
science I am referring to. I know that as well as you. But mark this
which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to
project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts
which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single file from this
day forward. A rash man, once visiting a certain noted institution at
South Boston, ventured to express the sentiment, that man is a rational
being. An old woman who was an attendant in the Idiot School
contradicted the statement, and appealed to the facts before the speaker
to disprove it. The rash man stuck to his hasty generalization,
notwithstanding.
[—It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am associated in my
daily relations. I not unfrequently practise the divine art of music in
company with our landlady’s daughter, who, as I mentioned before, is the
owner of an accordion. Having myself a well-marked barytone voice of
more than half an octave in compass, I sometimes add my vocal powers to
her execution of
“Thou, thou reign’st in this bosom.”
not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is present,
to prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also taken a good deal of
interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to, sometimes called B.
F., or more frequently Frank, in imitation of that felicitous
abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience, adopted by some of his
betters. My acquaintance with the French language is very imperfect, I
having never studied it anywhere but in Paris, which is awkward, as B. F.
devotes himself to it with the peculiar advantage of an Alsacian teacher.
The boy, I think, is doing well, between us, notwithstanding. The
following is an _uncorrected_ French exercise, written by this young
gentleman. His mother thinks it very creditable to his abilities;
though, being unacquainted with the French language, her judgment cannot
be considered final.
LE RAT DES SALONS À LECTURE.
CE rat çi est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes de derrière
sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il fait usage
pour tenir les journaux. Cet animal a la peau noire pour le plupart,
et porte un cerele blanchâtre autour de son cou. On le trouve tous
les jours aux dits salons, on il demeure, digere, s’il y a do quoi
dans son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue, dort, et renfle
quelquefois, ayant toujours le semblant de lire. On ne sait pas s’il
a une autre gite que çelà. Il a l’air d’une bête très stupide, mais
il est d’une sagacité et d’une vitesse extraordinaire quand il s’agit
de saisir un journal nouveau. On ne sait pas pourquoi il lit,
parcequ’il ne parait pas avoir des idées. Il vocalise rarement, mais
en revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux divers. Il porte un crayon
dans une de ses poches pectorales, avec lequel il fait des marques
sur les bords des journaux et des livres, semblable aux suivans:
!!!—Bah! Pooh! Il ne faut pas cependant les prendre pour des signes
d’intelligence. Il ne vole pas, ordinairement; il fait rarement même
des echanges de parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau
a toujours un caractère specifique. On ne sait pas au juste ce dont
il se nourrit. Feu Cuvier était d’avis que c’etait de l’odeur du
cuir des reliures; ce qu’on dit d’être une nourriture animale fort
saine, et peu chère. Il vit bien longtems. Enfin il meure, en
laissant à ses héritiers une carte du Salon à Lecture on il avait
existé pendant sa vie. On pretend qu’il revient toutes les nuits,
après la mort, visiter le Salon. On peut le voir, dit on, à minuit,
dans sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir, et ayant à sa
main un crayon de charbon. Le lendemain on trouve des caractères
inconnus sur les bords du journal. Ce qui prouve que le
spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professeurs de Cambridge
sont des imbeçiles qui ne savent rien du tout, du tout.
I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed to be
touched in any way, is not discreditable to B. F. You observe that he is
acquiring a knowledge of zoölogy at the same time that he is learning
French. Fathers of families in moderate circumstances will find it
profitable to their children, and an economical mode of instruction, to
set them to revising and amending this boy’s exercise. The passage was
originally taken from the “Histoire Naturelle des Bêtes Ruminans et
Rongeurs, Bipèdes et Autres,” lately published in Paris. This was
translated into English and published in London. It was republished at
Great Pedlington, with notes and additions by the American editor. The
notes consist of an interrogation-mark on page 53d, and a reference (p.
127th) to another book “edited” by the same hand. The additions consist
of the editor’s name on the title-page and back, with a complete and
authentic list of said editor’s honorary titles in the first of these
localities. Our boy translated the translation back into French. This
may be compared with the original, to be found on Shelf 13, Division X,
of the Public Library of this metropolis.]
—Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don’t write a story,
or a novel, or something of that kind. Instead of answering each one of
you separately, I will thank you to step up into the wholesale department
for a few moments, where I deal in answers by the piece and by the bale.
That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for _one_
novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a cherished
belief. It has been maintained, on the other hand, that many persons
cannot write more than one novel,—that all after that are likely to be
failures.—Life is so much more tremendous a thing in its heights and
depths than any transcript of it can be, that all records of human
experience are as so many bound _herbaria_ to the innumerable glowing,
glistening, rustling, breathing, fragrance-laden, poison-sucking,
life-giving, death-distilling leaves and flowers of the forest and the
prairies. All we can do with books of human experience is to make them
alive again with something borrowed from our own lives. We can make a
book alive for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in
form to our own experience. Now an author’s first novel is naturally
drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is, is a
literal copy of nature under various slight disguises. But the moment
the author gets out of his personality, he must have the creative power,
as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in order to tell a living
story; and this is rare.
Besides, there is great danger that a man’s first life-story shall clean
him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts. Most lives, though their
stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial waste, drop a few
golden grains of wisdom as they flow along. Oftentimes a single
_cradling_ gets them all, and after that the poor man’s labor is only
rewarded by mud and worn pebbles. All which proves that I, as an
individual of the human family, could write one novel or story at any
rate, if I would.
—Why don’t I, then?—Well, there are several reasons against it. In the
first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that verse is
the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and rhyme and the
harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the fire of
imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness of a heart
laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in the luminous halo
of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A beauty shows herself under
the chandeliers, protected by the glitter of her diamonds, with such a
broad snowdrift of white arms and shoulders laid bare, that, were she
unadorned and in plain calico, she would be unendurable—in the opinion of
the ladies.
Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends. I should
like to know if all story-tellers do not do this? Now I am afraid all my
friends would not bear showing up very well; for they have an average
share of the common weakness of humanity, which I am pretty certain would
come out. Of all that have told stories among us there is hardly one I
can recall who has not drawn too faithfully some living portrait that
might better have been spared.
Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be too dull to
write such a story as I should wish to write.
And finally, I think it very likely I _shall_ write a story one of these
days. Don’t be surprised at any time, if you see me coming out with “The
Schoolmistress,” or “The Old Gentleman Opposite.” [_Our_ schoolmistress
and _our_ old gentleman that sits opposite had left the table before I
said this.] I want my glory for writing the same discounted now, on the
spot, if you please. I will write when I get ready. How many people
live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
—I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my being too dull
to write a good story. I don’t pretend to know what you meant by it, but
I take occasion to make a remark which may hereafter prove of value to
some among you.—When one of us who has been led by native vanity or
senseless flattery to think himself or herself possessed of talent
arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull,
it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can
enter a mortal’s mind. All our failures, our shortcomings, our strange
disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted from our bruised
shoulders, and fall, like Christian’s pack, at the feet of that
Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gift of high
intelligence,—with which one look may overflow us in some wider sphere of
being.
—How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, “I hate books!”
A gentleman,—singularly free from affectations,—not learned, of course,
but of perfect breeding, which is often so much better than learning,—by
no means dull, in the sense of knowledge of the world and society, but
certainly not clever either in the arts or sciences,—his company is
pleasing to all who know him. I did not recognize in him inferiority of
literary taste half so distinctly as I did simplicity of character and
fearless acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship. In fact, I
think there are a great many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark
to keep their place, that really “hate books,” but never had the wit to
find it out, or the manliness to own it. [_Entre nous_, I always read
with a mark.]
We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an “intellectual man”
was, as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or thereabouts, of
book-learning, and one-tenth himself. But even if he is actually so
compounded, he need not read much. Society is a strong solution of
books. It draws the virtue out of what is best worth reading, as hot
water draws the strength of tea-leaves. If _I_ were a prince, I would
hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in which I would steep all the
leaves of new books that promised well. The infusion would do for me
without the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I would have a person
whose sole business should be to read day and night, and talk to me
whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would have: a quick-witted,
out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf
full of books about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all
useful arts and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels,
and the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in new
costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet and a wink,
and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for the virtue there is
in what he says; delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns,
and in the disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he
is as tender and reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,—that
is, of a new influx of truth or beauty,—as a nun over her missal. In
short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a
living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on
life’s chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of
a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take—to wife. For
all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the
plebeian, but expressive phrase, “put him through” all the material part
of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that,
just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—with the privilege of
shutting it off at will.
A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with about a
dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord of the
macrocosm. They do well to dine together once in a while. A
dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of civilization
over barbarism. Nature and art combine to charm the senses; the
equatorial zone of the system is soothed by well-studied artifices; the
faculties are off duty, and fall into their natural attitudes; you see
wisdom in slippers and science in a short jacket.
The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take for
granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out; nothing short
of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies their dull
apprehensions. But look at two masters of that noble game! White stands
well enough, so far as you can see; but Red says, Mate in six
moves;—White looks,—nods;—the game is over. Just so in talking with
first-rate men; especially when they are good-natured and expansive, as
they are apt to be at table. That blessed clairvoyance which sees into
things without opening them,—that glorious license, which, having shut
the door and driven the reporter from its key-hole, calls upon Truth,
majestic virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic
poses, and take a festive garland and the vacant place on the _medius
lectus_,—that carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments,
large axioms bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from professional
mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored fire, and
the mischief-making rain of _bon-bons_ pelting everybody that shows
himself,—the picture of a truly intellectual banquet is one which the old
Divinities might well have attempted to reproduce in their—
—“Oh, oh, oh!” cried the young fellow whom they call John,—“that is from
one of your lectures!”
I know it, I replied,—I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.
“The trail of the serpent is over them all!”
All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and grooves
in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually sliding. Did
you never, in riding through the woods of a still June evening, suddenly
feel that you had passed into a warm stratum of air, and in a minute or
two strike the chill layer of atmosphere beyond? Did you never, in
cleaving the green waters of the Back Bay,—where the Provincial
blue-noses are in the habit of beating the “Metropolitan”
boat-clubs,—find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local gulf-stream,
a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone, through which your glistening
shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back to the cold realities of
full-sea temperature? Just so, in talking with any of the characters
above referred to, one not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the
style of the conversation. The lack-lustre eye rayless as a
Beacon-Street door-plate in August, all at once fills with light; the
face flings itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and
bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes, like
the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early
childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile,—you have a
giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you!—Nothing but a streak out of
a fifty-dollar lecture.—As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty
fountain-column springs into the air before the astonished
passer-by,—silver-footed, diamond-crowned, rainbow-scarfed,—from the
bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at
home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less elevated order of
_reptilia_ in other latitudes.
—Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that
in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher?
No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in India,—a white,
superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still
“Caucasian” race,—and where are English and American sympathies? We
can’t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the
brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it
is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the
brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals,—tame it
or crush it. The India mail brings stories of women and children
outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the
babe-killers. England takes down the Map of the World, which she has
girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus: [DELPHI] _Dele_. The
civilized world says, Amen.
—Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly, that I
should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them and dilute
it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college themes and water my
remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric heroes did with their _melas
oinos_,—that black sweet, syrupy wine (?) which they used to alloy with
three parts or more of the flowing stream. [Could it have been
_melasses_, as Webster and his provincials spell it,—or _Molossa’s_, as
dear old smattering, chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton
Mather, has it in the “Magnalia”? Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries
who make barn-door-fowl flights of learning in “Notes and Queries!”—ye
Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend
the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars!—ye Amines of
parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of native-grown food with
a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the great
minds Goethe speaks of, you have “made a Golgotha” of your pages!—ponder
thereon!]
—Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses. You
will understand by the title that they are written in an imaginary
character. I don’t doubt they will fit some family-man well enough. I
send it forth as “Oak Hall” projects a coat, on _a priori_ grounds of
conviction that it will suit somebody. There is no loftier illustration
of faith than this. It believes that a soul has been clad in flesh; that
tender parents have fed and nurtured it; that its mysterious _compages_
or frame-work has survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature
of maturity; that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his
adhesion to the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial
clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select the
very locality where this audacious generalization has been acted upon.
It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and trusts that Nature
will model a material shape to fit it. There is a prophecy in every
seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.—Now hear the verses.
THE OLD MAN DREAMS.
O for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I’d rather laugh a bright-haired boy
Than reign a gray-beard king!
Off with the wrinkled spoils of age!
Away with learning’s crown!
Tear out life’s wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!
One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood’s fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!
—My listening angel heard the prayer,
And calmly smiling, said,
“If I but touch thy silvered hair,
Thy hasty wish hath sped.
“But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?”
—Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee, what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I’ll take—my—precious wife!
—The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
“The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!”
—“And is there nothing yet unsaid
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years!”
Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
I could not bear to leave them all;
I’ll take—my—girl—and—boys!
The smiling angel dropped his pen,—
“Why this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!”
And so I laughed,—my laughter woke
The household with its noise,—
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the gray-haired boys.
CHAPTER IV
[I am so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to remain
there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great many
conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of different tone
and on different subjects. The talks are like the breakfasts,—sometimes
dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must take them as they come. How
can I do what all these letters ask me to? No. 1. want serious and
earnest thought. No. 2. (letter smells of bad cigars) must have more
jokes; wants me to tell a “good storey” which he has copied out for me.
(I suppose two letters before the word “good” refer to some Doctor of
Divinity who told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand)—more poetry. No.
4. wants something that would be of use to a practical man. (_Prahctical
mahn_ he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged,
sweet-scented)—“more sentiment,”—“heart’s outpourings.”—
My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks as
I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character will
depend on many accidents,—a good deal on the particular persons in the
company to whom they were addressed. It so happens that those which
follow were mainly intended for the divinity-student and the
school-mistress; though others, whom I need not mention, saw to
interfere, with more or less propriety, in the conversation. This is one
of my privileges as a talker; and of course, if I was not talking for our
whole company, I don’t expect all the readers of this periodical to be
interested in my notes of what was said. Still, I think there may be a
few that will rather like this vein,—possibly prefer it to a livelier
one,—serious young men, and young women generally, in life’s roseate
parenthesis from—years of age to—inclusive.
Another privilege of talking is to misquote.—Of course it wasn’t
Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair,—but _Iris_. (As I have
since told you) it was the former lady’s regular business, but Dido had
used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d’Enfer stood firm on the point of
etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here—Juno, in Latin—sent down Iris
instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one of the gentlemen
that do the heavy articles for the celebrated “Oceanic Miscellany”
misquoted Campbell’s line without any excuse. “Waft us _home_ the
_message_” of course it ought to be. Will he be duly grateful for the
correction?]
—The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be
governed, not by, but _according to_ laws, such as we observe in the
larger universe.—You think you know all about _walking_,—don’t you, now?
Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to your body? They
are sucked up by two cupping vessels, (“cotyloid”—cup-like—cavities,) and
held there as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you
move them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines,
don’t you?—On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing,
at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by
muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make
it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same
mechanism as the movements of the solar system.
[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to certain
German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, which,
however, he said he had often verified. I appropriated it to my own use;
what can one do better than this, when one has a friend that tells him
anything worth remembering?
The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost nearly
half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had got it
already.—Why,—said the Professor,—they might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for
less money!]
Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the bodily
movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its regular cycles.
Such or such a thought comes round periodically, in its turn. Accidental
suggestions, however, so far interfere with the regular cycles, that we
may find them practically beyond our power of recognition. Take all this
for what it is worth, but at any rate you will agree that there are
certain particular thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a
week, but that a year would hardly go round without your having them pass
through your mind. Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way.
Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of assent
in the listener or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often been struck
by it.
_All at once a conviction flashes through us that we have been in the
same precise circumstances as at the present instant_, _once or many
times before_.
O, dear, yes!—said one of the company,—everybody has had that feeling.
The landlady didn’t know anything about such notions; it was an idee in
folks’ heads, she expected.
The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew the
feeling well, and didn’t like to experience it; it made her think she was
a ghost, sometimes.
The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he had
just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous conviction all at
once came over him that he had done just that same thing ever so many
times before. I looked severely at him, and his countenance immediately
fell—_on the side toward me_; I cannot answer for the other, for he can
wink and laugh with either half of his face without the other half’s
knowing it.
—I have noticed—I went on to say—the following circumstances connected
with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which seems to
be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,—one that might
have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is
very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any
voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that
there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of
incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have
often felt that the duplicate condition had not only occurred once
before, but that it was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I
have had the same convictions in my dreams.
How do I account for it?—Why, there are several ways that I can mention,
and you may take your choice. The first is that which the young lady
hinted at;—that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous
existence. I don’t believe that; for I remember a poor student I used to
know told me he had such a conviction one day when he was blacking his
boots, and I can’t think he had ever lived in another world where they
use Day and Martin.
Some think that Dr. Wigan’s doctrine of the brain’s being a double organ,
its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts for it. One
of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the small interval
between the perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an
indefinitely long period, and therefore the second perception appears to
be the copy of another, ever so old. But even allowing the centre of
perception to be double, I can see no good reason for supposing this
indefinite lengthening of the time, nor any analogy that bears it out.
It seems to me most likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very
partial, but that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of
circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it as
exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally, mistaking
him for a friend. The apparent similarity may be owing perhaps, quite as
much to the mental state at the time, as to the outward circumstances.
—Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have said it,
and heard it many times, and occasionally met with something like it in
books,—somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, I think, and in one of the works of
Mr. Olmsted, I know.
_Memory_, _imagination_, _old sentiments and associations_, _are more
readily reached through the sense of_ SMELL _than by almost any other
channel_.
Of course the particular odors which act upon each person’s
susceptibilities differ.—O, yes! I will tell you some of mine. The
smell of _phosphorus_ is one of them. During a year or two of
adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as about
that time I had my little aspirations and passions like another, some of
these things got mixed up with each other: orange-colored fumes of
nitrous acid, and visions as bright and transient; reddening
litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks;—_eheu_!
“Soles occidere et redire possunt,”
but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of eighteen
hundred and—spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires this
train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapors with their
penetrating odor throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense
“trailing clouds of glory.” Only the confounded Vienna matches, _ohne
phosphor-geruch_, have worn my sensibilities a little.
Then there is the _marigold_. When I was of smallest dimensions, and
wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would
sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop opposite a
low, brown, “gambrel-roofed” cottage. Out of it would come one Sally,
sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced,
and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a “posy,” as she called
it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue
slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last
few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling
onions,—stateliest of vegetables,—all are gone, but the breath of a
marigold brings them all back to me.
Perhaps the herb _everlasting_, the fragrant _immortelle_ of our autumn
fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that
come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A
something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from
the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a
mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint
sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not
tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought
to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.
—I should not have talked so much about these personal susceptibilities,
if I had not a remark to make about them which I believe is a new one.
It is this. There may be a physical reason for the strange connection
between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve—so my
friend, the Professor, tells me—is the only one directly connected with
the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason
to believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more
truly the olfactory “nerve” is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of
the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether this
anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have mentioned, I
will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth remembering.
Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of suggestive impressions, with
that of smell. Now the Professor assures me that you will find the nerve
of taste has no immediate connection with the brain proper, but only with
the prolongation of the spinal cord.
[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to this
hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense of smell he
nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in getting out a large
red bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a little to the other side,
and after much tribulation at last extricated an ample round snuff-box.
I looked as he opened it and felt for the wonted pugil. Moist rappee,
and a Tonka-bean lying therein. I made the manual sign understood of all
mankind that use the precious dust, and presently my brain, too,
responded to the long unused stimulus—O boys,—that were,—actual papas and
possible grandpapas,—some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,—some in
locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled,—do you remember, as
you doze over this, those after-dinners at the Trois Frères when the
Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the dry Lundy-Foot tickled its
way along into our happy sensoria? Then it was that the Chambertin or
the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering in its straw cradle. And one among
you,—do you remember how he would have a bit of ice always in his
Burgundy, and sit tinkling it against the sides of the bubble-like glass,
saying that he was hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when
the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry
pasture, in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]
Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my
soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born!
On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and
lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds
should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk-teeth
always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of
the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream
of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels.
The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
recesses.
—Do I remember Byron’s line about “striking the electric chain”?—To be
sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the automatic
machinery of association, the more easily this moves us. What can be
more trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare that
used to lie in some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of
Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up in them perhaps a hundred
years ago? And, lo! as one looks on these poor relics of a bygone
generation, the universe changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George
the Second is back again, and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and
General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, and over the Channel they
are pulling the Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the
Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust so
long—even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry—are alive again;
the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of
the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all this for a bit
of pie-crust!
—I will thank you for that pie,—said the provoking young fellow whom I
have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands
to his eyes as if moved.—I was thinking,—he said indistinctly—
—How? What is’t?—said our landlady.
—I was thinking—said he—who was king of England when this old pie was
baked,—and it made me feel bad to think how long he must have been dead.
[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; _celà va
sans dire_. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn
that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize itself by a
special narrative. There was the wooing and the wedding,—the start in
life,—the disappointments,—the children she had buried,—the struggle
against fate,—the dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, and
then of its comforts,—the broken spirits,—the altered character of the
one on whom she leaned,—and at last the death that came and drew the
black curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.
I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but I
often cried,—not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our
neighbors’ grounds, the _stillicidium_ of self-conscious sentiment, but
those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the
cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly
with unchanging features;—such I did shed for her often when the imps of
the boarding-house Inferno tugged at her soul with their red-hot
pincers.]
Young man,—I said,—the pasty you speak lightly of is not old, but
courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are of the
weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining. May I recommend
to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you are dealing with a
woman, or an artist, or a poet—if you are handling an editor or
politician, it is superfluous advice. I take it from the back of one of
those little French toys which contain pasteboard figures moved by a
small running stream of fine sand; Benjamin Franklin will translate it
for you: “_Quoiqu’elle soit très solidement montée_, _il faut ne pas_
BRUTALISER _la machine_.”—I will thank you for the pie, if you please.
[I took more of it than was good for me—as much as 85°, I should
think,—and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was suffering from
it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a theological essay which
took a very melancholy view of creation. When I got better I labelled
them all “Pie-crust,” and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings.
I have a number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with
some such title; but, as they have great names on their
title-pages,—Doctors of Divinity, some of them,—it wouldn’t do.]
—My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or twice,
told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some of the
journals of his calling. I told him that I didn’t doubt he deserved it;
that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse occasionally, and would for a
number of years to come; that nobody could do anything to make his
neighbors wiser or better without being liable to abuse for it;
especially that people hated to have their little mistakes made fun of,
and perhaps he had been doing something of the kind.—The Professor
smiled.—Now, said I, hear what I am going to say. It will not take many
years to bring you to the period of life when men, at least the majority
of writing and talking men, do nothing but praise. Men, like peaches and
pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay. I don’t
know what it is,—whether a spontaneous change, mental or bodily, or
whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness of critical
honesty,—but it is a fact, that most writers, except sour and
unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the time when they
are beginning to grow old. As a general thing, I would not give a great
deal for the fair words of a critic, if he is himself an author, over
fifty years of age. At thirty we are all trying to cut our names in big
letters upon the walls of this tenement of life; twenty years later we
have carved it, or shut up our jack-knives. Then we are ready to help
others, and care less to hinder any, because nobody’s elbows are in our
way. So I am glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine
enough in a few years.
—Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me very much
in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just now spoke of the
sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you know that in the gradual
passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters sometimes
have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young children? I
have heard it said, but I cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the
famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old
age. An old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind,
used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to him.
One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years describes him as
very gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I remember a person of
singularly stern and lofty bearing who became remarkably gracious and
easy in all his ways in the later period of his life.
And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their way
of coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human Jargonelles,
and must be made the most of, for their day is soon over. Some come into
their perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last better
than the summer fruit. And some, that, like the Winter-Nelis, have been
hard and uninviting until all the rest have had their season, get their
glow and perfume long after the frost and snow have done their worst with
the orchards. Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit
you condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked
up beneath the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate
Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old
Chaucer was an Easter-Beurré; the buds of a new summer were swelling when
he ripened.
—There is no power I envy so much—said the divinity-student—as that of
seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don’t understand how it is
that some minds are continually coupling thoughts or objects that seem
not in the least related to each other, until all at once they are put in
a certain light, and you wonder that you did not always see that they
were as like as a pair of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous
gift.
[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of the
higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and training. I
try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,—give it an intellectual
shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in
it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen.]
You call it _miraculous_,—I replied,—tossing the expression with my
facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear.—Two men are walking by the
polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he
can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but
his hands, which will hardly hold water at all,—and you call the tin cup
a miraculous possession! It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant
apostle! Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and
that just according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we
shall see the many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac
think what he was saying when he made _his_ speech about the ocean,—the
child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a
pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment
of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and
has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force
that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of
Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an
archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of
corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its
every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!
So,—to return to _our_ walk by the ocean,—if all that poetry has dreamed,
all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics have driven
through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed in the fancies of
women,—if the dreams of colleges and convents and boarding-schools,—if
every human feeling that sighs, or smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or
groans, should bring all their innumerable images, such as come with
every hurried heart-beat,—the epic which held them all, though its
letters filled the zodiac, would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean
of similitudes and analogies that rolls through the universe.
[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he received
this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he reject it; but he
took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried it off with him to his
hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at his leisure.]
—Here is another remark made for his especial benefit.—There is a natural
tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together in _triads_, as
I have heard them called,—thus: He was honorable, courteous, and brave;
she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous. Dr. Johnson is famous for
this; I think it was Bulwer who said you could separate a paper in the
“Rambler” into three distinct essays. Many of our writers show the same
tendency,—my friend, the Professor, especially. Some think it is in
humble imitation of Johnson,—some that it is for the sake of the stately
sound only. I don’t think they get to the bottom of it. It is, I
suspect, an instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a
thought or image with the _three dimensions_ that belong to every
solid,—an unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth,
and thickness. It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it,
and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it. But mind
this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the range of the
automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind, and morals, and the
narrower the limits of the self-determining conscious movement.
—I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such strange
motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted to laugh at
them. “Where did our friends pick up all these fine ecstatic airs?” I
would say to myself. Then I would remember My Lady in “Marriage à la
Mode,” and amuse myself with thinking how affectation was the same thing
in Hogarth’s time and in our own. But one day I bought me a Canary-bird
and hung him up in a cage at my window. By-and-by he found himself at
home, and began to pipe his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough,
swimming and waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and
languishing side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I
should like to ask, WHO taught him all this?—and me, through him, that
the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side and
bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was passing its
shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made of finer clay than
the frame which carried that same head upon its shoulders?
—Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable restrictions?
A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may see such a one in any
mineralogical collection. One little fluid particle in the crystalline
prism of the solid universe!
—Weaken moral obligations?—No, not weaken, but define them. When I
preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to lay down
some principles not fully recognized in some of your text-books.
[Picture: The Poor Relation]
I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary. You saw an
article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in which some old
Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very apt to be fools and
cowards. But a great many of the clergyman’s patients are not only fools
and cowards, but also liars.
[Immense sensation at the table.—Sudden retirement of the angular female
in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion—as they say in the Chamber
of Deputies—on the part of the young fellow they call John. Falling of
the old-gentleman-opposite’s lower jaw—(gravitation is beginning to get
the better of him.) Our landlady to Benjamin Franklin, briskly,—Go to
school right off, there’s a good boy! Schoolmistress curious,—takes a
quick glance at divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly flushed
draws his shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood—or truth—had hit
him in the forehead. Myself calm.]
—I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having pretty
substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit should be
disputed. Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin, (for B. F. had
_not_ gone right off, of course,) and bring down a small volume from the
left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?
[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed,
vellum-papered 32mo. “DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA. Amstelodami. Typis
Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650.” Various names written on title-page. Most
conspicuous this: Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn. Anim. 1725. Oxon.
—O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford,—then writing as I now
write,—now in the dust, where I shall lie,—is this line all that remains
to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is at least once more spoken by
living men;—is it a pleasure to thee? Thou shalt share with me my little
draught of immortality,—its week, its month, its year,—whatever it may
be,—and then we will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion’s
Uncatalogued Library!]
—If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to read
something to you out of the book of this keen and witty scholar,—the
great Erasmus,—who “laid the egg of the Reformation which Luther
hatched.” Oh, you never read his _Naufragium_, or “Shipwreck,” did you?
Of course not; for, if you had, I don’t think you would have given me
credit—or discredit—for entire originality in that speech of mine. That
men are cowards in the contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the
extraordinary antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they are
fools, by their praying to the sea, and making promises to bits of wood
from the true cross, and all manner of similar nonsense; that they are
fools, cowards, and liars all at once, by this story: I will put it into
rough English for you.—“I couldn’t help laughing to hear one fellow
bawling out, so that he might be sure to be heard, a promise to Saint
Christopher of Paris—the monstrous statue in the great church there—that
he would give him a wax taper as big as himself. ‘Mind what you
promise!’ said an acquaintance that stood near him, poking him with his
elbow; ‘you couldn’t pay for it, if you sold all your things at auction.’
‘Hold your tongue, you donkey!’ said the fellow,—but softly, so that
Saint Christopher should not hear him,—‘do you think I’m in earnest? If
I once get my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him so much as a tallow
candle!’”
Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in their
talk about the great subject of which we were speaking have not
necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the contrary, have
very often been wanting in one or two or all of the qualities these words
imply, I should expect to find a good many doctrines current in the
schools which I should be obliged to call foolish, cowardly, and false.
—So you would abuse other people’s beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell us your
own creed!—said the divinity-student, coloring up with a spirit for which
I liked him all the better.
—I have a creed,—I replied;—none better, and none shorter. It is told in
two words,—the two first of the Paternoster. And when I say these words
I mean them. And when I compared the human will to a drop in a crystal,
and said I meant to _define_ moral obligations, and not weaken them, this
was what I intended to express: that the fluent, self-determining power
of human beings is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The
chief planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization,
education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the will to
nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale mounts upwards
by slight gradations. Education is only second to nature. Imagine all
the infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change places!
Condition does less, but “Give me neither poverty nor riches” was the
prayer of Agur, and with good reason. If there is any improvement in
modern theology, it is in getting out of the region of pure abstractions
and taking these every-day working forces into account. The great
theological question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian
men is this:—
No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be repeated,
and it would give my friends pain to see with what personal incivilities
I should be visited. Besides, what business has a mere boarder to be
talking about such things at a breakfast-table? Let him make puns. To
be sure, he was brought up among the Christian fathers, and learned his
alphabet out of a quarto “Concilium Tridentinum.” He has also heard many
thousand theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is
not at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this time
to express an opinion on theological matters.
I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal rather
see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of thought. Does not
my friend, the Professor, receive at least two letters a week, requesting
him to. . . . ,—on the strength of some youthful antic of his, which, no
doubt, authorizes the intelligent constituency of autograph-hunters to
address him as a harlequin?
—Well, I can’t be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like to
make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this: if the
sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very
well; but if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been an
ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter
and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of
sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.
I have often heard the Professor talk about hysterics as being Nature’s
cleverest illustration of the reciprocal convertibility of the two states
of which these acts are the manifestations; But you may see it every day
in children; and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the
transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake play
_Jesse Rural_.
It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love for
the ridiculous. People laugh _with_ him just so long as he amuses them;
but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have their laugh, and
so they laugh _at_ him. There is in addition, however, a deeper reason
for this than would at first appear. Do you know that you feel a little
superior to every man who makes you laugh, whether by making faces or
verses? Are you aware that you have a pleasant sense of patronizing him,
when you condescend so far as to let him turn somersets, literal or
literary, for your royal delight? Now if a man can only be allowed to
stand on a daïs, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is
exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right!—first-rate
performance!—and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at once
the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and, stepping
upon the platform, begins to talk down at him,—ah, that wasn’t in the
programme!
I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith—who, as everybody
knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman, every inch of
him—ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of Royalty. The
“Quarterly,” “so savage and tartarly,” came down upon him in the most
contemptuous style, as “a joker of jokes,” a “diner-out of the first
water,” in one of his own phrases; sneering at him, insulting him, as
nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever
have been mean enough to do to a man of his position and genius, or to
any decent person even.—If I were giving advice to a young fellow of
talent, with two or three facets to his mind, I would tell him by all
means to keep his wit in the background until after he had made a
reputation by his more solid qualities. And so to an actor: _Hamlet_
first, and _Bob Logic_ afterwards, if you like; but don’t think, as they
say poor Liston used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can
do anything great with _Macbeth’s_ dagger after flourishing about with
_Paul Pry’s_ umbrella. Do you know, too, that the majority of men look
upon all who challenge their attention,—for a while, at least,—as
beggars, and nuisances? They always try to get off as cheaply as they
can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a literary man—pardon
the forlorn pleasantry!—is the _funny_-bone. That is all very well so
far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and makes a good many angry, as I
told you on a former occasion.
—Oh, indeed, no!—I am not ashamed to make you laugh, occasionally. I
think I could read you something I have in my desk which would probably
make you smile. Perhaps I will read it one of these days, if you are
patient with me when I am sentimental and reflective; not just now. The
ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but
one of the Divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens
and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is
that we always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises
and encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of
those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call
_blessed_! There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be
preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look
forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all joyousness
from their countenances. I meet one such in the street not unfrequently,
a person of intelligence and education, but who gives me (and all that he
passes) such a rayless and chilling look of recognition,—something as if
he were one of Heaven’s assessors, come down to “doom” every acquaintance
he met,—that I have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home
with a violent cold, dating from that instant. I don’t doubt he would
cut his kitten’s tail off, if he caught her playing with it. Please tell
me, who taught her to play with it?
No, no!—give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and you need
not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about entertaining you, if I
can do it, as well as giving you some of my serious thoughts, and perhaps
my sadder fancies. I know nothing in English or any other literature
more admirable than that sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne “EVERY MAN TRULY
LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE
FACULTIES OF HIMSELF.”
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in
what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail
sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—but we must sail, and
not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one very sad thing in old
friendships, to every mind that is really moving onward. It is this:
that one cannot help using his early friends as the seaman uses the log,
to mark his progress. Every now and then we throw an old schoolmate over
the stern with a string of thought tied to him, and look—I am afraid with
a kind of luxurious and sanctimonious compassion—to see the rate at which
the string reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and down, poor
fellow! and we are dashing along with the white foam and bright sparkle
at our bows;—the ruffled bosom of prosperity and progress, with a sprig
of diamonds stuck in it! But this is only the sentimental side of the
matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow all that we love.
Don’t misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you. It is
merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring our rate of
movement by those with whom we have long been in the habit of comparing
ourselves; and when they once become stationary, we can get our reckoning
from them with painful accuracy. We see just what we were when they were
our peers, and can strike the balance between that and whatever we may
feel ourselves to be now. No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken. If we
change our last simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet
leaving the harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can
get what we want out of it. There is one of our companions;—her
streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea, then
by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another, the waves
swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a seeming wreck, as we
flew under our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at dawn she is still in
sight,—it may be in advance of us. Some deep ocean-current has been
moving her on, strong, but silent,—yes, stronger than these noisy winds
that puff our sails until they are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant
cherubim. And when at last the black steam-tug with the skeleton arms,
which comes out of the mist sooner or later and takes us all in tow,
grapples her and goes off panting and groaning with her, it is to that
harbor where all wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in
our pride, may never come.
So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships, because
we cannot help instituting comparisons between our present and former
selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but are not what we
are. Nothing strikes one more, in the race of life, than to see how many
give out in the first half of the course. “Commencement day” always
reminds me of the start for the “Derby,” when the beautiful high-bred
three-year olds of the season are brought up for trial. That day is the
start, and life is the race. Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is
just “graduating.” Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has
paid forfeit; step out here into the grass back of the church; ah! there
it is:—
“HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT
SOCII MŒRENTES.”
But this is the start, and here they are,—coats bright as silk, and manes
as smooth as _eau lustrale_ can make them. Some of the best of the colts
are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show their paces. What is that
old gentleman crying about? and the old lady by him, and the three girls,
what are they all covering their eyes for? Oh, that is _their_ colt
which has just been trotted up on the stage. Do they really think those
little thin legs can do anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is
coming off in these next forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of
second-sight that comes to some of us when we begin to look through the
silvered rings of the _arcus senilis_!
_Ten years gone_. First turn in the race. A few broken down; two or
three bolted. Several show in advance of the ruck. _Cassock_, a black
colt, seems to be ahead of the rest; those black colts commonly get the
start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first quarter. _Meteor_ has
pulled up.
_Twenty years_. Second corner turned. _Cassock_ has dropped from the
front, and _Judex_, an iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they have
thinned out! Down flat,—five,—six,—how many? They lie still enough!
they will not get up again in this race, be very sure! And the rest of
them, what a “tailing off”! Anybody can see who is going to
win,—perhaps.
_Thirty years_. Third corner turned. _Dives_, bright sorrel, ridden by
the fellow in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is getting to be
the favourite with many. But who is that other one that has been
lengthening his stride from the first, and now shows close up to the
front? Don’t you remember the quiet brown colt _Asteroid_, with the star
in his forehead? That is he; he is one of the sort that lasts; look out
for him! The black “colt,” as we used to call him, is in the background,
taking it easily in a gentle trot. There is one they used to call _the
Filly_, on account of a certain feminine air he had; well up, you see;
the Filly is not to be despised my boy!
_Forty years_. More dropping off,—but places much as before.
_Fifty years_. Race over. All that are on the course are coming in at a
walk; no more running. Who is ahead? Ahead? What! and the winning-post
a slab of white or gray stone standing out from that turf where there is
no more jockeying or straining for victory! Well, the world marks their
places in its betting-book; but be sure that these matter very little, if
they have run as well as they knew how!
—Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an
ocean of similitudes and analogies? I will not quote Cowley, or Burns,
or Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were suggested to them
by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower or a leaf; but I will
read you a few lines, if you do not object, suggested by looking at a
section of one of those chambered shells to which is given the name of
Pearly Nautilus. We need not trouble ourselves about the distinction
between this and the Paper Nautilus, the _Argonauta_ of the ancients.
The name applied to both shows that each has long been compared to a
ship, as you may see more fully in Webster’s Dictionary, or the
“Encyclopedia,” to which he refers. If you will look into Roget’s
Bridgewater Treatise, you will find a figure of one of these shells, and
a section of it. The last will show you the series of enlarging
compartments successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell,
which is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no lesson in this?
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every clambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
CHAPTER V
A lyric conception—my friend, the Poet, said—hits me like a bullet in the
forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck,
and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of
centipedes running down the spine,—then a gasp and a great jump of the
heart,—then a sudden flush and a beating in the vessels of the head,—then
a long sigh,—and the poem is written.
It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly,—I
replied.
No,—said he,—far from it. I said written, but I did not say _copied_.
Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the
copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an
instant in the poet’s soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in the
meshes of a few sweet words,—words that have loved each other from the
cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it
will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not
is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet
turns pale with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a
hot thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those parallel
ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along in their
regular sequences of association. No wonder the ancients made the
poetical impulse wholly external. Μηνιν αειδε θεά.
Goddess,—Muse,—divine afflatus,—something outside always. _I_ never
wrote any verses worth reading. I can’t. I am too stupid. If I ever
copied any that were worth reading, I was only a medium.
[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand,—telling
them what this poet told me. The company listened rather attentively, I
thought, considering the literary character of the remarks.]
The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read anything
better than Pope’s “Essay on Man”? Had I ever perused McFingal? He was
fond of poetry when he was a boy,—his mother taught him to say many
little pieces,—he remembered one beautiful hymn;—and the old gentleman
began, in a clear, loud voice, for his years,—
“The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens,”—
He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up
beneath the thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek. As I looked
round, I was reminded of a show I once saw at the Museum,—the Sleeping
Beauty, I think they called it. The old man’s sudden breaking out in
this way turned every face towards him, and each kept his posture as if
changed to stone. Our Celtic Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish fat
scullion to burst out crying for a sentiment. She is of the serviceable,
red-handed, broad-and-high-shouldered type; one of those imported female
servants who are known in public by their amorphous style of person,
their stoop forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk,—the
waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy footfall.
Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, was about to deposit a
plate heaped with something upon the table, when I saw the coarse arm
stretched by my shoulder arrested,—motionless as the arm of a terra-cotta
caryatid; she couldn’t set the plate down while the old gentleman was
speaking!
He was quite silent after this, still wearing the slight flush on his
cheek. Don’t ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his
forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand
trembles! If they ever _were_ there, they _are_ there still!
By and by we got talking again.—Does a poet love the verses written
through him, do you think, Sir?—said the divinity-student.
So long as they are warm from his mind, carry any of his animal heat
about them, _I know_ he loves them,—I answered. When they have had time
to cool, he is more indifferent.
A good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes,—said the young fellow whom
they call John.
The last words, only, reached the ear of the economically organized
female in black bombazine.—Buckwheat is skerce and high,—she remarked.
[Must be a poor relation sponging on our landlady,—pays nothing,—so she
must stand by the guns and be ready to repel boarders.]
I liked the turn the conversation had taken, for I had some things I
wanted to say, and so, after waiting a minute, I began again.—I don’t
think the poems I read you sometimes can be fairly appreciated, given to
you as they are in the green state.
—You don’t know what I mean by the _green state_? Well, then, I will
tell you. Certain things are good for nothing until they have been kept
a long while; and some are good for nothing until they have been long
kept and _used_. Of the first, wine is the illustrious and immortal
example. Of those which must be kept and used I will name
three,—meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems. The meerschaum is but a
poor affair until it has burned a thousand offerings to the
cloud-compelling deities. It comes to us without complexion or
flavor,—born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but colorless as _pallida
Mors_ herself. The fire is lighted in its central shrine, and gradually
the juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable had sucked up
from an acre and curdled into a drachm are diffused through its thirsting
pores. First a discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing,
umber tint spreading over the whole surface. Nature true to her old
brown autumnal hue, you see,—as true in the fire of the meerschaum as in
the sunshine of October! And then the cumulative wealth of its fragrant
reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes a thousand whiffs in a
single breath; and one cannot touch it without awakening the old joys
that hang around it as the smell of flowers clings to the dresses of the
daughters of the house of Farina!
[Don’t think I use a meerschaum myself, for _I do not_, though I have
owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the
Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and beaded
knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his right check.
On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver-mounted
tobacco-stopper you ever saw. It is a little box-wood Triton, carved
with charming liveliness and truth; I have often compared it to a figure
in Raphael’s “Triumph of Galatea.” It came to me in an ancient shagreen
case,—how old it is I do not know,—but it must have been made since Sir
Walter Raleigh’s time. If you are curious, you shall see it any day.
Neither will I pretend that I am so unused to the more perishable smoking
contrivance that a few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay in a
ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not unacquainted with that
fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous
incombustibles, the _cigar_, so called, of the shops,—which to “draw”
asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the
leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even
if my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your
life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain of
a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I have
seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under
such Nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly
bought at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.]
Violins, too,—the sweet old Amati!—the divine Stradivarius! Played on by
ancient _maestros_ until the bow-hand lost its power and the flying
fingers stiffened. Bequeathed to the passionate, young enthusiast, who
made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate longings, and
scream his untold agonies, and wail his monotonous despair. Passed from
his dying hand to the cold _virtuoso_, who let it slumber in its case for
a generation, till, when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more
and rode the stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing
bow of their lord and leader. Into lonely prisons with improvident
artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy hymns
with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies in which it
learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were shut up in it;
then again to the gentle _dilettante_ who calmed it down with easy
melodies until it answered him softly as in the days of the old
_maestros_. And so given into our hands, its pores all full of music;
stained, like the meerschaum, through and through, with the concentrated
hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which have kindled and faded on
its strings.
Now I tell you a poem must be kept _and used_, like a meerschaum, or a
violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;—the more porous it
is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of
absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity,—its
tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be
gradually stained through with a divine secondary color derived from
ourselves. So you see it must take time to bring the sentiment of a poem
into harmony with our nature, by staining ourselves through every thought
and image our being can penetrate.
Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect
anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from the
maker’s hands? Now you know very well that there are no less than
fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to
each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly
acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument
becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had
grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is
juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or a
hundred more gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.
Don’t you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each
word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than
in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened
them, and they don’t understand it at first. But let the poem be
repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind’s muffled whisper often
enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute
solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world’s
crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe,
too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in
that of a violin. Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its
hundredth birthday,—(Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,)—the sap is
pretty well out of it. And here is the song of an old poet whom Neæra
cheated.—
“Nox erat, et cœlo fulgebat Luna sereno
Inter minora sidera,
Cum tu magnorum numen læsura deorum
In verba jurabas mea.”
Don’t you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin phrases? Now
I tell you that, every word fresh from the dictionary brings with it a
certain succulence; and though I cannot expect the sheets of the
“Pactolian,” in which, as I told you, I sometimes print my verses, to get
so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those words of Horatius Flaccus,
yet you may be sure, that, while the sheets are damp, and while the lines
hold their sap, you can’t fairly judge of my performances, and that, if
made of the true stuff, they will ring better after a while.
[There was silence for a brief space, after my somewhat elaborate
exposition of these self-evident analogies. Presently _a person_ turned
towards me—I do not choose to designate the individual—and said that he
rather expected my pieces had given pretty good “sahtisfahction.”—I had,
up to this moment, considered this complimentary phrase as sacred to the
use of secretaries of lyceums, and, as it has been usually accompanied by
a small pecuniary testimonial, have acquired a certain relish for this
moderately tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm. But as a
reward for gratuitous services, I confess I thought it a little below
that blood-heat standard which a man’s breath ought to have, whether
silent, or vocal and articulate. I waited for a favorable opportunity,
however, before making the remarks which follow.]
—There are single expressions, as I have told you already, that fix a
man’s position for you before you have done shaking hands with him.
Allow me to expand a little. There are several things, very slight in
themselves, yet implying other things not so unimportant. Thus, your
French servant has _dévalisé_ your premises and got caught. _Excusez_,
says the _sergent-de-ville_, as he politely relieves him of his upper
garments and displays his bust in the full daylight. Good shoulders
enough,—a little marked,—traces of smallpox, perhaps,—but white. . . . .
_Crac_! from the _sergent-de-ville’s_ broad palm on the white shoulder!
Now look! _Vogue la galère_! Out comes the big red V—mark of the hot
iron;—he had blistered it out pretty nearly,—hadn’t he?—the old rascal
VOLEUR, branded in the galleys at Marseilles! [Don’t! What if he has
got something like this?—nobody supposes I _invented_ such a story.]
My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females which I
told you I had owned,—for, look you, my friends, simple though I stand
here, I am one that has been driven in his “kerridge,”—not using that
term, as liberal shepherds do, for any battered old shabby-genteel
go-cart which has more than one wheel, but meaning thereby a four-wheeled
vehicle _with a pole_,—my man John, I say, was a retired soldier. He
retired unostentatiously, as many of Her Majesty’s modest servants have
done before and since. John told me, that when an officer thinks he
recognizes one of these retiring heroes, and would know if he has really
been in the service, that he may restore him, if possible, to a grateful
country, he comes suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, “Strap!” If he
has ever worn the shoulder-strap, he has learned the reprimand for its
ill adjustment. The old word of command flashes through his muscles, and
his hand goes up in an instant to the place where the strap used to be.
[I was all the time preparing for my grand _coup_, you understand; but I
saw they were not quite ready for it, and so continued,—always in
illustration of the general principle I had laid down.]
Yes, odd things come out in ways that nobody thinks of. There was a
legend, that, when the Danish pirates made descents upon the English
coast, they caught a few Tartars occasionally, in the shape of Saxons,
who would not let them go,—on the contrary, insisted on their staying,
and, to make sure of it, treated them as Apollo treated Marsyas, or an
Bartholinus has treated a fellow-creature in his title-page, and, having
divested them of the one essential and perfectly fitting garment,
indispensable in the mildest climates, nailed the same on the church-door
as we do the banns of marriage, _in terrorem_.
[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I looked
at our landlady, I saw that “the water stood in her eyes,” as it did in
Christiana’s when the interpreter asked her about the spider, and I
fancied, but wasn’t quite sure that the schoolmistress blushed, as Mercy
did in the same conversation, as you remember.]
That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story,—said the young fellow whom they
call John. I abstained from making Hamlet’s remark to Horatio, and
continued.
Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying an old
Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other things thought
the doors should be attended to. One of them particularly, the
front-door, looked very badly, crusted, as it were, and as if it would be
all the better for scraping. There happened to be a microscopist in the
village who had heard the old pirate story, and he took it into his head
to examine the crust on this door. There was no mistake about it; it was
a genuine historical document, of the Ziska drum-head pattern,—a real
_cutis humana_, stripped from some old Scandinavian filibuster, and the
legend was true.
My friend, the Professor, settled an important historical and financial
question once by the aid of an exceedingly minute fragment of a similar
document. Behind the pane of plate-glass which bore his name and title
burned a modest lamp, signifying to the passers-by that at all hours of
the night the slightest favors (or fevers) were welcome. A youth who had
freely partaken of the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates,
following a moth-like impulse very natural under the circumstances,
dashed his fist at the light and quenched the meek luminary,—breaking
through the plate-glass, of course, to reach it. Now I don’t want to go
into _minutiæ_ at table, you know, but a naked hand can no more go
through a pane of thick glass without leaving some of its cuticle, to say
the least, behind it, than a butterfly can go through a sausage-machine
without looking the worse for it. The Professor gathered up the
fragments of glass, and with them certain very minute but entirely
satisfactory documents which would have identified and hanged any rogue
in Christendom who had parted with them.—The historical question, _Who
did it_? and the financial question, _Who paid for it_? were both settled
before the new lamp was lighted the next evening.
You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very
insignificant premises. This is eminently true of manners and forms of
speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you want to know about
a person. Thus, “How’s your health?” (commonly pronounced
_haälth_)—instead of, How do you do? or, How are you? Or calling your
little dark entry a “hall,” and your old rickety one-horse wagon a
“kerridge.” Or telling a person who has been trying to please you that
he has given you pretty good “sahtisfahction.” Or saying that you
“remember of” such a thing, or that you have been “stoppin”’ at Deacon
Somebody’s,—and other such expressions. One of my friends had a little
marble statuette of Cupid in the parlor of his country-house,—bow,
arrows, wings, and all complete. A visitor, indigenous to the region,
looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house “if that was
a statoo of her deceased infant?” What a delicious, though somewhat
voluminous biography, social, educational, and æsthetic in that brief
question!
[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in the
particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my
fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual at
whose door it lay.]
That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, _Ex pede
Herculem_. He might as well have said, “From a peck of apples you may
judge of the barrel.” _Ex_ PEDE, to be sure! Read, instead, _Ex ungue
minimi digiti pedis_, _Herculem_, _ejusque patrem_, _matrem_, _avos et
proavos_, _filios_, _nepotes et pronepotes_! Talk to me about your δὸς
ποῠ στῶ! Tell me about Cuvier’s getting up a megatherium from a tooth,
or Agassiz’s drawing a portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single
scale! As the “O” revealed Giotto,—as the one word “moi” betrayed the
Stratford atte-Bowe-taught Anglais,—so all a man’s antecedents and
possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at once the
gauge of his education and his mental organization.
Possibilities, Sir?—said the divinity-student; can’t a man who says
_Haöw_? arrive at distinction?
Sir,—I replied,—in a republic all things are possible. But the man _with
a future_ has almost of necessity sense enough to see that any odious
trick of speech or manners must be got rid of. Doesn’t Sydney Smith say
that a public man in England never gets over a false quantity uttered in
early life? _Our_ public men are in little danger of this fatal misstep,
as few of them are in the habit of introducing Latin into their
speeches,—for good and sufficient reasons. But they are bound to speak
decent English,—unless, indeed, they are rough old campaigners, like
General Jackson or General Taylor; in which case, a few scars on
Priscian’s head are pardoned to old fellows who have quite as many on
their own, and a constituency of thirty empires is not at all particular,
provided they do not swear in their Presidential Messages.
However, it is not for me to talk. I have made mistakes enough in
conversation and print. I never find them out until they are
stereotyped, and then I think they rarely escape me. I have no doubt I
shall make half a dozen slips before this breakfast is over, and remember
them all before another. How one does tremble with rage at his own
intense momentary stupidity about things he knows perfectly well, and to
think how he lays himself open to the impertinences of the _captatores
verborum_, those useful but humble scavengers of the language, whose
business it is to pick up what might offend or injure, and remove it,
hugging and feeding on it as they go! I don’t want to speak too
slightingly of these verbal critics;—how can I, who am so fond of talking
about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference
between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing
better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is
unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears silk or
broadcloth.
[I write down the above remarks this morning, January 26th, making this
record of the date that nobody may think it was written in wrath, on
account of any particular grievance suffered from the invasion of any
individual _scarabæus grammaticus_.]
—I wonder if anybody ever finds fault with anything I say at this table
when it is repeated? I hope they do, I am sure. I should be very
certain that I had said nothing of much significance, if they did not.
Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone,
which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the
grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its
edges,—and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you
it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot
or your fingers under its edge and turned it over as a housewife turns a
cake, when she says to herself, “It’s done brown enough by this time”?
What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to
a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected,
until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your
turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless,
matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous
crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or
horny-shelled,—turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer,
but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature
never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern
bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-pattern five timekeepers to
slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments
sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless,
slug-like creatures, young larvæ, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy
stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner
is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this
compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them
which enjoy the luxury of legs—and some of them have a good many—rush
round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in
a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by
sunshine. _Next year_ you will find the grass growing tall and green
where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had
his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the
broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the
rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified
being.
—The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very
familiar way,—at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I
sometimes think it necessary to repress,—that I was coming it rather
strong on the butterflies.
No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images,—the butterfly as
well as the others. The stone is ancient error. The grass is human
nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by it. The shapes which
are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the
weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is
whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter
whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year
stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain
blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native hues in the
sunshine. Then shall God’s minstrels build their nests in the hearts of
a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty—Divinity taking outlines and
color—light upon the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the
beatified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a
poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been
lifted.
You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a
terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that
dwells under it.
—Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody
or other. As soon as his breath comes back, he very probably begins to
expend it in hard words. These are the best evidence a man can have that
he has said something it was time to say. Dr. Johnson was disappointed
in the effect of one of his pamphlets. “I think I have not been attacked
enough for it,” he said;—“attack is the reaction; I never think I have
hit hard unless it rebounds.”
—If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I. Do you
think I don’t understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called
_the hydrostatic paradox of controversy_?
Don’t know what that means?—Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if
you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and
the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same
height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men
in the same way,—_and the fools know it_.
—No, but I often read what they say about other people. There are about
a dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like the tongs,
and the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the bellows, in one of
those domestic avalanches that everybody knows. If you get one, you get
the whole lot.
What are they?—Oh, that depends a good deal on latitude and longitude.
Epithets follow the isothermal lines pretty accurately. Grouping them in
two families, one finds himself a clever, genial, witty, wise, brilliant,
sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished, celebrated, illustrious scholar and
perfect gentleman, and first writer of the age; or a dull, foolish,
wicked, pert, shallow, ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted
outcast, and disgrace to civilization.
What do I think determines the set of phrases a man gets?—Well, I should
say a set of influences something like these:—1st. Relationships,
political, religious, social, domestic. 2d. Oyster, in the form of
suppers given to gentlemen connected with criticism. I believe in the
school, the college, and the clergy; but my sovereign logic, for
regulating public opinion—which means commonly the opinion of half a
dozen of the critical gentry—is the following _Major proposition_.
Oysters _au naturel_. _Minor proposition_. The same “scalloped.”
_Conclusion_. That—(here insert entertainer’s name) is clever, witty,
wise, brilliant,—and the rest.
—No, it isn’t exactly bribery. One man has oysters, and another
epithets. It is an exchange of hospitalities; one gives a “spread” on
linen, and the other on paper,—that is all. Don’t you think you and I
should be apt to do just so, if we were in the critical line? I am sure
I couldn’t resist the softening influences of hospitality. I don’t like
to dine out, you know,—I dine so well at our own table, [our landlady
looked radiant,] and the company is so pleasant [a rustling movement of
satisfaction among the boarders]; but if I did partake of a man’s salt,
with such additions as that article of food requires to make it
palatable, I could never abuse him, and if I had to speak of him, I
suppose I should hang my set of jingling epithets round him like a string
of sleigh-bells. Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of
us,—not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that its
sharp corners get terribly rounded. I love truth as chiefest among the
virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I would never be a critic,
because I know I could not always tell it. I might write a criticism of
a book that happened to please me; that is another matter.
—Listen, Benjamin Franklin! This is for you, and such others of tender
age as you may tell it to.
When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those two
grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to us a
youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and in his
left spheres like marbles. The cubes are of stainless ivory, and on each
is written in letters of gold—TRUTH. The spheres are veined and streaked
and spotted beneath, with a dark crimson flush above, where the light
falls on them, and in a certain aspect you can make out upon every one of
them the three letters L, I, E. The child to whom they are offered very
probably clutches at both. The spheres are the most convenient things in
the world; they roll with the least possible impulse just where the child
would have them. The cubes will not roll at all; they have a great
talent for standing still, and always keep right side up. But very soon
the young philosopher finds that things which roll so easily are very apt
to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out of his way when he most
wants them, while he always knows where to find the others, which stay
where they are left. Thus he learns—thus we learn—to drop the streaked
and speckled globes of falsehood and to hold fast the white angular
blocks of truth. But then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and
last of all Polite-behavior, all insisting that truth must _roll_, or
nobody can do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse rasp,
and the second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve,
do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of truth,
that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes hard to tell
them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.
The schoolmistress was polite enough to say that she was pleased with
this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next day. But
she should tell the children, she said, that there were better reasons
for truth than could be found in mere experience of its convenience and
the inconvenience of lying.
Yes,—I said,—but education always begins through the senses, and works up
to the idea of absolute right and wrong. The first thing the child has
to learn about this matter is, that lying is unprofitable,—afterwards,
that it is against the peace and dignity of the universe.
—Do I think that the particular form of lying often seen in newspapers,
under the title, “From our Foreign Correspondent,” does any harm?—Why,
no,—I don’t know that it does. I suppose it doesn’t really deceive
people any more than the “Arabian Nights” or “Gulliver’s Travels” do.
Sometimes the writers compile _too_ carelessly, though, and mix up facts
out of geographies, and stories out of the penny papers, so as to mislead
those who are desirous of information. I cut a piece out of one of the
papers, the other day, which contains a number of improbabilities, and, I
suspect, misstatements. I will send up and get it for you, if you would
like to hear it.—Ah, this is it; it is headed
“OUR SUMATRA CORRESPONDENCE.
“This island is now the property of the Stamford family,—having been won,
it is said, in a raffle, by Sir — Stamford, during the stock-gambling
mania of the South-Sea Scheme. The history of this gentleman may be
found in an interesting series of questions (unfortunately not yet
answered) contained in the ‘Notes and Queries.’ This island is entirely
surrounded by the ocean, which here contains a large amount of saline
substance, crystallizing in cubes remarkable for their symmetry, and
frequently displays on its surface, during calm weather, the rainbow
tints of the celebrated South-Sea bubbles. The summers are oppressively
hot, and the winters very probably cold; but this fact cannot be
ascertained precisely, as, for some peculiar reason, the mercury in these
latitudes never shrinks, as in more northern regions, and thus the
thermometer is rendered useless in winter.
“The principal vegetable productions of the island are the pepper tree
and the bread-fruit tree. Pepper being very abundantly produced, a
benevolent society was organized in London during the last century for
supplying the natives with vinegar and oysters, as an addition to that
delightful condiment. [Note received from Dr. D. P.] It is said,
however, that, as the oysters were of the kind called _natives_ in
England, the natives of Sumatra, in obedience to a natural instinct,
refused to touch them, and confined themselves entirely to the crew of
the vessel in which they were brought over. This information was
received from one of the oldest inhabitants, a native himself, and
exceedingly fond of missionaries. He is said also to be very skilful in
the _cuisine_ peculiar to the island.
“During the season of gathering the pepper, the persons employed are
subject to various incommodities, the chief of which is violent and
long-continued sternutation, or sneezing. Such is the vehemence of these
attacks, that the unfortunate subjects of them are often driven backwards
for great distances at immense speed, on the well-known principle of the
aeolipile. Not being able to see where they are going, these poor
creatures dash themselves to pieces against the rocks or are precipitated
over the cliffs and thus many valuable lives are lost annually. As,
during the whole pepper-harvest, they feed exclusively on this stimulant,
they become exceedingly irritable. The smallest injury is resented with
ungovernable rage. A young man suffering from the _pepper-fever_ as it
is called, cudgelled another most severely for appropriating a
superannuated relative of trifling value, and was only pacified by having
a present made him of a pig of that peculiar species of swine called the
_Peccavi_ by the Catholic Jews, who, it is well known, abstain from
swine’s flesh in imitation of the Mahometan Buddhists.
“The bread-tree grows abundantly. Its branches are well known to Europe
and America under the familiar name of _maccaroni_. The smaller twigs
are called _vermicelli_. They have a decided animal flavor, as may be
observed in the soups containing them. Maccaroni, being tubular, is the
favorite habitat of a very dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly
ferocious by being boiled. The government of the island, therefore,
never allows a stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a
piston with which its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out.
These are commonly lost or stolen before the maccaroni arrives among us.
It therefore always contains many of these insects, which, however,
generally die of old age in the shops, so that accidents from this source
are comparatively rare.
“The fruit of the bread-tree consists principally of hot rolls. The
buttered-muffin variety is supposed to be a hybrid with the cocoa-nut
palm, the cream found on the milk of the cocoa-nut exuding from the
hybrid in the shape of butter, just as the ripe fruit is splitting, so as
to fit it for the tea-table, where it is commonly served up with cold”—
—There,—I don’t want to read any more of it. You see that many of these
statements are highly improbable.—No, I shall not mention the paper.—No,
neither of them wrote it, though it reminds me of the style of these
popular writers. I think the fellow who wrote it must have been reading
some of their stories, and got them mixed up with his history and
geography. I don’t suppose _he_ lies;—he sells it to the editor, who
knows how many squares off “Sumatra” is. The editor, who sells it to the
public—By the way, the papers have been very civil haven’t they?—to
the—the what d’ye call it?—“Northern Magazine,”—isn’t it?—got up by some
of those Come-outers, down East, as an organ for their local
peculiarities.
—The Professor has been to see me. Came in, glorious, at about twelve
o’clock, last night. Said he had been with “the boys.” On inquiry,
found that “the boys,” were certain baldish and grayish old gentlemen
that one sees or hears of in various important stations of society. The
Professor is one of the same set, but he always talks as if he had been
out of college about ten years, whereas. . . [Each of these dots was a
little nod, which the company understood, as the reader will, no doubt.]
He calls them sometimes “the boys,” and sometimes “the old fellows.”
Call him by the latter title, and see how he likes it.—Well, he came in
last night glorious, as I was saying. Of course I don’t mean vinously
exalted; he drinks little wine on such occasions, and is well known to
all the Peters and Patricks as the gentleman who always has indefinite
quantities of black tea to kill any extra glass of red claret he may have
swallowed. But the Professor says he always gets tipsy on old memories
at these gatherings. He was, I forget how many years old when he went to
the meeting; just turned of twenty now,—he said. He made various
youthful proposals to me, including a duet under the landlady’s
daughter’s window. He had just learned a trick, he said, of one of “the
boys,” of getting a splendid bass out of a door-panel by rubbing it with
the palm of his hand. Offered to sing “The sky is bright,” accompanying
himself on the front-doo
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