Produced by David Widger
A MORTAL ANTIPATHY
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
CONTENTS
PREFACE.
INTRODUCTION.
THE NEW PORTFOLIO: FIRST OPENING.
A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.
I. GETTING READY.
II. THE BOAT-RACE.
III. THE WHITE CANOE.
IV. THE YOUNG SOLITARY
V. THE ENIGMA STUDIED.
VI. STILL AT FAULT.
VII. A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES
VIII. THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
IX. THE SOCIETY AND ITS NEW SECRETARY.
X. A NEW ARRIVAL.
XI. THE INTERVIEWER ATTACKS THE SPHINX.
XII. MISS VINCENT AS A MEDICAL STUDENT.
XIII. DR. BUTTS READS A PAPER.
XIV. MISS VINCENT'S STARTLING DISCOVERY.
XV. DR. BUTTS CALLS ON EUTHYMIA.
XVI. MISS VINCENT WRITES A LETTER.
XVII. Dr. BUTTS'S PATIENT.
XVIII. MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE.
XIX. THE REPORT OF THE BIOLOGICAL COMMITTEE.
XX. DR. BUTTS REFLECTS.
XXI. AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION.
XXII. EUTHYMIA.
XXIII. THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.
XXIV. THE INEVITABLE.
POSTSCRIPT: AFTER-GLIMPSES.
MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.
DR. BUTTS TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.
DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS.
PREFACE.
“A MORTAL ANTIPATHY” was a truly hazardous experiment. A very wise and
very distinguished physician who is as much at home in literature as he
is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in referring
to this story: “I should have been afraid of my subject.” He did
not explain himself, but I can easily understand that he felt the
improbability of the physiological or pathological occurrence on which
the story is founded to be so great that the narrative could hardly be
rendered plausible. I felt the difficulty for myself as well as for my
readers, and it was only by recalling for our consideration a series of
extraordinary but well-authenticated facts of somewhat similar character
that I could hope to gain any serious attention to so strange a
narrative.
I need not recur to these wonderful stories. There is, however, one, not
to be found on record elsewhere, to which I would especially call the
reader's attention. It is that of the middle-aged man, who assured
me that he could never pass a tall hall clock without an indefinable
terror. While an infant in arms the heavy weight of one of these tall
clocks had fallen with a loud crash and produced an impression on his
nervous system which he had never got over.
The lasting effect of a shock received by the sense of sight or that of
hearing is conceivable enough.
But there is another sense, the nerves of which are in close
relation with the higher organs of consciousness. The strength of the
associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves,
the olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience and
as related by others. Now we know that every human being, as well as
every other living organism, carries its own distinguishing atmosphere.
If a man's friend does not know it, his dog does, and can track him
anywhere by it. This personal peculiarity varies with the age and
conditions of the individual. It may be agreeable or otherwise, a source
of attraction or repulsion, but its influence is not less real, though
far less obvious and less dominant, than in the lower animals. It was
an atmospheric impression of this nature which associated itself with
a terrible shock experienced by the infant which became the subject of
this story. The impression could not be outgrown, but it might possibly
be broken up by some sudden change in the nervous system effected by a
cause as potent as the one which had produced the disordered condition.
This is the best key that I can furnish to a story which must have
puzzled some, repelled others, and failed to interest many who did not
suspect the true cause of the mysterious antipathy.
BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August, 1891. O. W. H.
A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.
FIRST OPENING OF THE NEW PORTFOLIO.
INTRODUCTION.
“And why the New Portfolio, I would ask?”
Pray, do you remember, when there was an accession to the nursery in
which you have a special interest, whether the new-comer was commonly
spoken of as a baby? Was it not, on the contrary, invariably, under all
conditions, in all companies, by the whole household, spoken of as the
baby? And was the small receptacle provided for it commonly spoken of
as a cradle; or was it not always called the cradle, as if there were no
other in existence?
Now this New Portfolio is the cradle in which I am to rock my new-born
thoughts, and from which I am to lift them carefully and show them to
callers, namely, to the whole family of readers belonging to my list of
intimates, and such other friends as may drop in by accident. And so
it shall have the definite article, and not be lost in the mob of its
fellows as a portfolio.
There are a few personal and incidental matters of which I wish to say
something before reaching the contents of the Portfolio, whatever these
may be. I have had other portfolios before this,--two, more especially,
and the first thing I beg leave to introduce relates to these.
Do not throw this volume down, or turn to another page, when I tell you
that the earliest of them, that of which I now am about to speak, was
opened more than fifty years ago. This is a very dangerous confession,
for fifty years make everything hopelessly old-fashioned, without giving
it the charm of real antiquity. If I could say a hundred years, now, my
readers would accept all I had to tell them with a curious interest; but
fifty years ago,--there are too many talkative old people who know all
about that time, and at best half a century is a half-baked bit of ware.
A coin-fancier would say that your fifty-year-old facts have just enough
of antiquity to spot them with rust, and not enough to give them--the
delicate and durable patina which is time's exquisite enamel.
When the first Portfolio was opened the coin of the realm bore for its
legend,--or might have borne if the more devout hero-worshippers could
have had their way,--Andreas Jackson, Populi Gratia, Imp. Caesar. Aug.
Div., Max., etc., etc. I never happened to see any gold or silver with
that legend, but the truth is I was not very familiarly acquainted with
the precious metals at that period of my career, and, there might have
been a good deal of such coin in circulation without my handling it, or
knowing much about it.
Permit me to indulge in a few reminiscences of that far-off time.
In those days the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of
attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got
our first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the
comparatively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in
that agreeable resort of amateurs and artists.
How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in
the mind's gallery! Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in
it for one of our sunset after-glows; and Neagle's full-length portrait
of the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves; and Copley's long-waistcoated
gentlemen and satin-clad ladies,--they looked like gentlemen and
ladies, too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-waisted matrons; and
Allston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, unimpassioned women,
not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable
rocking-horse,--you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival
landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in
those days; and the Murillo,--not from Marshal Soup's collection; and
the portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athenaeum
a hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical pictures, and his immense
and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in
Joseph's coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in
for nothing; and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But
why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen
either at the Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery,
and admired or criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more
generously, than in those earlier years when we looked at them through
the japanned fish-horns?
If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the
Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in
which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous
Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary
butterflies. The father was editor of the “Boston Recorder,” a very
respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by
that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day of
the week as “the Sahbuth.” The son was the editor of several different
periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious, and of
many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society, which
he studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and color, and with
a certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but real, though somewhat
frothed over by his worldly experiences.
Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first
Portfolio. He had made himself known by his religious poetry, published
in his father's paper, I think, and signed “Roy.” He had started the
“American Magazine,” afterwards merged in the “New York Mirror.” He had
then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to lighter forms of
verse. He had just written
“I'm twenty-two, I'm twenty-two,
They idly give me joy,
As if I should be glad to know
That I was less a boy.”
He was young, therefore, and already famous. He came very near being
very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in
luxuriant abundance; his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to
show behind the footlights; he dressed with artistic elegance. He was
something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of
Oscar Wilde. There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture
of Hippolytus and Phxdra, in which the beautiful young man, who had
kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-mother, always
reminded me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of the living face
as compared with the ideal. The painted youth is still blooming on the
canvas, but the fresh-cheeked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has
long faded out of human sight. I took the leaves which lie before me
at this moment, as I write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the
door of Saint Paul's Church, on a sad, overclouded winter's day, in the
year 1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent
young American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had
all done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was
a school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his
way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was
destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories,
which have done honor to our literature, had appeared. Our school-books
depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts
from the orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant's
Thanatopsis, his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the Flowers,
Halleck's Marco Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake's American
Flag, and Percival's Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius
Waking,--and not getting very wide awake, either. These could be
depended upon. A few other copies of verses might be found, but Dwight's
“Columbia, Columbia,” and Pierpont's Airs of Palestine, were already
effaced, as many of the favorites of our own day and generation must
soon be, by the great wave which the near future will pour over the
sands in which they still are legible.
About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled
“Truth, a Gift for Scribblers,” which made some talk for a while, and
is now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be
read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones.
The “London Athenaeum” spoke of it as having been described as a
“tomahawk sort of satire.” As the author had been a trapper in Missouri,
he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its
owners. Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated
at West Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He
wrote an article on Bryant's Poems for the “North American Review,” and
another on the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk. In this last-mentioned
article he tells this story as the great warrior told it himself. It was
an incident of a fight with the Osages.
“Standing by my father's side, I saw him kill his antagonist and
tear the scalp from his head. Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed
furiously upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my
lance through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to
my father. He said nothing, but looked pleased.”
This little red story describes very well Spelling's style of literary
warfare. His handling of his most conspicuous victim, Willis, was very
much like Black Hawk's way of dealing with the Osage. He tomahawked
him in heroics, ran him through in prose, and scalped him in barbarous
epigrams. Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised; hardly any one
else escaped.
If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were
floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago,
he will find in the pages of “Truth” a long catalogue of celebrities he
never heard of. I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned
in the little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have
not read the obituaries of all the others, some of them may be still
flourishing in spite of Mr. Spelling's exterminating onslaught. Time
dealt as hardly with poor Spelling, who was not without talent and
instruction, as he had dealt with our authors. I think he found shelter
at last under a roof which held numerous inmates, some of whom had seen
better and many of whom had known worse days than those which they were
passing within its friendly and not exclusive precincts. Such, at least,
was the story I heard after he disappeared from general observation.
That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and
all that class of showy annuals. Short stories, slender poems, steel
engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising
establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,--to manifestations of
this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years.
The “Scarlet Letter” was an unhinted possibility. The “Voices of the
Night” had not stirred the brooding silence; the Concord seer was still
in the lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes,
which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have
shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature
by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.
What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations,
floating in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring
each other in reciprocal reflections! Violent, abusive as he was, unjust
to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of
the small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use.
His attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little
discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came
with it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble
writer Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental
pique, or equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three
survivors before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest
son of the Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment. Bailey,
an American writer, “who made long since a happy snatch at fame,” which
must have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot
identify him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last
Request, not wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright
and agreeable writer of light verse,--all these are commended to the
keeping of that venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and
hour-glass such a load that he generally drops the burdens committed to
his charge, after making a show of paying every possible attention to
them so long as he is kept in sight.
It was a good time to open a portfolio. But my old one had boyhood
written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old warship
I had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen
literature, and in the “Naval Monument,” was threatened with demolition;
a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville in his cocked
hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of that first
Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere with the
duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and thought
which would have been otherwise expended in filling it.
During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for
the greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up
and opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more
particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a
member.
In the year 1857, towards its close, the “Atlantic Monthly,” which I had
the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips
& Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He thought
that I might bring something out of my old Portfolio which would be not
unacceptable in the new magazine. I looked at the poor old receptacle,
which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had lost its freshness,
and seemed hardly presentable to the new company expected to welcome
the new-comer in the literary world of Boston, the least provincial of
American centres of learning and letters. The gilded covering where
the emblems of hope and aspiration had looked so bright had faded; not
wholly, perhaps, but how was the gold become dim!---how was the most
fine gold changed! Long devotion to other pursuits had left little time
for literature, and the waifs and strays gathered from the old Portfolio
had done little more than keep alive the memory that such a source of
supply was still in existence. I looked at the old Portfolio, and said
to myself, “Too late! too late. This tarnished gold will never brighten,
these battered covers will stand no more wear and tear; close them, and
leave them to the spider and the book-worm.”
In the mean time the nebula of the first quarter of the century had
condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period.
When, a little while after the establishment of the new magazine, the
“Saturday Club” gathered about the long table at “Parker's,” such a
representation of all that was best in American literature had never
been collected within so small a compass. Most of the Americans whom
educated foreigners cared to see-leaving out of consideration
official dignitaries, whose temporary importance makes them objects of
curiosity--were seated at that board. But the club did not yet exist,
and the “Atlantic Monthly” was an experiment. There had already been
several monthly periodicals, more or less successful and permanent,
among which “Putnam's Magazine” was conspicuous, owing its success
largely to the contributions of that very accomplished and delightful
writer, Mr. George William Curtis. That magazine, after a somewhat
prolonged and very honorable existence, had gone where all periodicals
go when they die, into the archives of the deaf, dumb, and blind
recording angel whose name is Oblivion. It had so well deserved to live
that its death was a surprise and a source of regret. Could another
monthly take its place and keep it when that, with all its attractions
and excellences, had died out, and left a blank in our periodical
literature which it would be very hard to fill as well as that had
filled it?
This was the experiment which the enterprising publishers ventured upon,
and I, who felt myself outside of the charmed circle drawn around the
scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given myself to
other studies and duties, wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted
upon my becoming a contributor. And so, yielding to a pressure which I
could not understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised
to take a part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the
columns of the new magazine.
That was the way in which the second Portfolio found its way to my
table, and was there opened in the autumn of the year 1857. I was
already at least
'Nel mezzo del cammin di mia, vita,'
when I risked myself, with many misgivings, in little-tried paths of
what looked at first like a wilderness, a selva oscura, where, if I did
not meet the lion or the wolf, I should be sure to find the critic, the
most dangerous of the carnivores, waiting to welcome me after his own
fashion.
The second Portfolio is closed and laid away. Perhaps it was hardly
worth while to provide and open a new one; but here it lies before me,
and I hope I may find something between its covers which will justify me
in coming once more before my old friends. But before I open it I want
to claim a little further indulgence.
There is a subject of profound interest to almost every writer, I
might say to almost every human being. No matter what his culture or
ignorance, no matter what his pursuit, no matter what his character, the
subject I refer to is one of which he rarely ceases to think, and, if
opportunity is offered, to talk. On this he is eloquent, if on nothing
else. The slow of speech becomes fluent; the torpid listener becomes
electric with vivacity, and alive all over with interest.
The sagacious reader knows well what is coming after this prelude. He
is accustomed to the phrases with which the plausible visitor, who has a
subscription book in his pocket, prepares his victim for the depressing
disclosure of his real errand. He is not unacquainted with the
conversational amenities of the cordial and interesting stranger, who,
having had the misfortune of leaving his carpet-bag in the cars, or of
having his pocket picked at the station, finds himself without the means
of reaching that distant home where affluence waits for him with its
luxurious welcome, but to whom for the moment the loan of some five and
twenty dollars would be a convenience and a favor for which his heart
would ache with gratitude during the brief interval between the loan and
its repayment.
I wish to say a few words in my own person relating to some passages in
my own history, and more especially to some of the recent experiences
through which I have been passing.
What can justify one in addressing himself to the general public as if
it were his private correspondent? There are at least three sufficient
reasons: first, if he has a story to tell that everybody wants to
hear,--if he has been shipwrecked, or has been in a battle, or has
witnessed any interesting event, and can tell anything new about it;
secondly, if he can put in fitting words any common experiences not
already well told, so that readers will say, “Why, yes! I have had
that sensation, thought, emotion, a hundred times, but I never heard
it spoken of before, and I never saw any mention of it in print;” and
thirdly, anything one likes, provided he can so tell it as to make it
interesting.
I have no story to tell in this Introduction which can of itself claim
any general attention. My first pages relate the effect of a certain
literary experience upon myself,--a series of partial metempsychoses
of which I have been the subject. Next follows a brief tribute to the
memory of a very dear and renowned friend from whom I have recently been
parted. The rest of the Introduction will be consecrated to the memory
of my birthplace.
I have just finished a Memoir, which will appear soon after this page is
written, and will have been the subject of criticism long before it is
in the reader's hands. The experience of thinking another man's thoughts
continuously for a long time; of living one's self into another man's
life for a month, or a year, or more, is a very curious one. No matter
how much superior to the biographer his subject may be, the man who
writes the life feels himself, in a certain sense, on the level of the
person whose life he is writing. One cannot fight over the battles of
Marengo or Austerlitz with Napoleon without feeling as if he himself
had a fractional claim to the victory, so real seems the transfer of his
personality into that of the conqueror while he reads. Still more must
this identification of “subject” and “object” take place when one is
writing of a person whose studies or occupations are not unlike his own.
Here are some of my metempsychoses: Ten years ago I wrote what I called
A Memorial Outline of a remarkable student of nature. He was a born
observer, and such are far from common. He was also a man of great
enthusiasm and unwearying industry. His quick eye detected what others
passed by without notice: the Indian relic, where another would see only
pebbles and fragments; the rare mollusk, or reptile, which his companion
would poke with his cane, never suspecting that there was a prize at the
end of it. Getting his single facts together with marvellous sagacity
and long-breathed patience, he arranged them, classified them, described
them, studied them in their relations, and before those around him were
aware of it the collector was an accomplished naturalist. When--he died
his collections remained, and they still remain, as his record in the
hieratic language of science. In writing this memoir the spirit of his
quiet pursuits, the even temper they bred in him, gained possession of
my own mind, so that I seemed to look at nature through his gold-bowed
spectacles, and to move about his beautifully ordered museum as if I had
myself prepared and arranged its specimens. I felt wise with his wisdom,
fair-minded with his calm impartiality; it seemed as if for the time his
placid, observant, inquiring, keen-sighted nature “slid into my soul,”
and if I had looked at myself in the glass I should almost have expected
to see the image of the Hersey professor whose life and character I was
sketching.
A few years hater I lived over the life of another friend in writing
a Memoir of which he was the subject. I saw him, the beautiful,
bright-eyed boy, with dark, waving hair; the youthful scholar, first
at Harvard, then at Gottingen and Berlin, the friend and companion of
Bismarck; the young author, making a dash for renown as a novelist, and
showing the elements which made his failures the promise of success in a
larger field of literary labor; the delving historian, burying his fresh
young manhood in the dusty alcoves of silent libraries, to come forth in
the face of Europe and America as one of the leading historians of
the time; the diplomatist, accomplished, of captivating presence and
manners, an ardent American, and in the time of trial an impassioned and
eloquent advocate of the cause of freedom; reaching at last the summit
of his ambition as minister at the Court of Saint James. All this I
seemed to share with him as I tracked his career from his birthplace in
Dorchester, and the house in Walnut Street where he passed his boyhood,
to the palaces of Vienna and London. And then the cruel blow which
struck him from the place he adorned; the great sorrow that darkened his
later years; the invasion of illness, a threat that warned of danger,
and after a period of invalidism, during a part of which I shared his
most intimate daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons.
Did not my own consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer
itself into this brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing record?
I, too, seemed to feel the delight of carrying with me, as if they were
my own, the charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere.
I shared his heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social
triumphs, I was honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about
him, I was wronged by the indignity from which he suffered, mourned with
him in his sorrow, and thus, after I had been living for months with his
memory, I felt as if I should carry a part of his being with me so
long as my self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable
elements.
The years passed away, and the influences derived from the
companionships I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own
current of being. Then there came to me a new experience in my relations
with an eminent member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually
for a long period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a
prelude to a work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances.
He was the subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost
necessarily fatal disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon
itself if it were not supplied with food from without, he determined
to write a treatise on a subject which had greatly interested him, and
which would oblige him to bestow much of his time and thought upon it,
if indeed he could hold out to finish the work. During the period
while he was engaged in writing it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect
health, died suddenly of pneumonia. Physical suffering, mental distress,
the prospect of death at a near, if uncertain, time always before him,
it was hard to conceive a more terrible strain than that which he had to
endure. When, in the hour of his greatest need, his faithful companion,
the wife of many years of happy union, whose hand had smoothed his
pillow, whose voice had consoled and cheered him, was torn from him
after a few days of illness, I felt that my friend's trial was such that
the cry of the man of many afflictions and temptations might well have
escaped from his lips: “I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder; he
hath also taken me by my neck and shaken me to pieces, and set me up
for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins
asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground.”
I had dreaded meeting him for the first time after this crushing blow.
What a lesson he gave me of patience under sufferings which the fearful
description of the Eastern poet does not picture too vividly! We have
been taught to admire the calm philosophy of Haller, watching his
faltering pulse as he lay dying; we have heard the words of pious
resignation said to have been uttered with his last breath by Addison:
but here was a trial, not of hours, or days, or weeks, but of months,
even years, of cruel pain, and in the midst of its thick darkness the
light of love, which had burned steadily at his bedside, was suddenly
extinguished.
There were times in which the thought would force itself upon my
consciousness, How long is the universe to look upon this dreadful
experiment of a malarious planet, with its unmeasurable freight of
suffering, its poisonous atmosphere, so sweet to breathe, so sure to
kill in a few scores of years at farthest, and its heart-breaking woes
which make even that brief space of time an eternity? There can be but
one answer that will meet this terrible question, which must arise in
every thinking nature that would fain “justify the ways of God to men.”
So must it be until that
“one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves”
has become a reality, and the anthem in which there is no discordant
note shall be joined by a voice from every life made “perfect through
sufferings.”
Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years of
companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend, in retracing which
I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.
And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of
intimacy with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than while
he was here in living form and feature. I did not know how difficult a
task I had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man whom all, or
almost all, agree upon as one of the great lights of the New World, and
whom very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah. Never before was I so
forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of the work of a newspaper
editor,--that threshing of straw already thrice beaten by the flails of
other laborers in the same field. What could be said that had not been
said of “transcendentalism” and of him who was regarded as its prophet;
of the poet whom some admired without understanding, a few understood,
or thought they did, without admiring, and many both understood and
admired,--among these there being not a small number who went far beyond
admiration, and lost themselves in devout worship? While one exalted him
as “the greatest man that ever lived,” another, a friend, famous in the
world of letters, wrote expressly to caution me against the danger
of overrating a writer whom he is content to recognize as an American
Montaigne, and nothing more.
After finishing this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would
gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought
which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism
and the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the
sparkle of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union
of prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest
audacity of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and
was not ashamed, the feeling that I was in the company of a sibylline
intelligence which was discounting the promises of the remote future
long before they were due,--all this made the task a grave one. But when
I found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering
judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from
under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill;
the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical,
estimate of hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they
whirled, each around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very
difficult to keep the faculties clear and the judgment unbiassed.
It is a great privilege to have lived so long in the society of such a
man. “He nothing common” said, “or mean.” He was always the same pure
and high-souled companion. After being with him virtue seemed as natural
to man as its opposite did according to the old theologies. But how to
let one's self down from the high level of such a character to one's own
poor standard? I trust that the influence of this long intellectual and
spiritual companionship never absolutely leaves one who has lived in
it. It may come to him in the form of self-reproach that he falls so
far short of the superior being who has been so long the object of
his contemplation. But it also carries him at times into the other's
personality, so that he finds himself thinking thoughts that are not his
own, using phrases which he has unconsciously borrowed, writing, it may
be, as nearly like his long-studied original as Julio Romano's painting
was like Raphael's; and all this with the unquestioning conviction that
he is talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way. So far
as tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy
of the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a
misfortune for the borrower. But to share the inmost consciousness of
a noble thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure
and radiant soul,--this is indeed the highest form of teaching and
discipline.
I have written these few memoirs, and I am grateful for all that they
have taught me. But let me write no more. There are but two biographers
who can tell the story of a man's or a woman's life. One is the person
himself or herself; the other is the Recording Angel. The autobiographer
cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, though he may tell nothing
but the truth, and the Recording Angel never lets his book go out of
his own hands. As for myself, I would say to my friends, in the Oriental
phrase, “Live forever!” Yes, live forever, and I, at least, shall not
have to wrong your memories by my imperfect record and unsatisfying
commentary.
In connection with these biographies, or memoirs, more properly, in
which I have written of my departed friends, I hope my readers will
indulge me in another personal reminiscence. I have just lost my dear
and honored contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this
day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered
Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious
in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of
protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just
ending when those four letters, “son b.” were written under the date
of my birth, August 29th. Autumn had just begun when my great
pre-contemporary entered this un-Christian universe and was made a
member of the Christian church on the same day, for he was born and
baptized on the 18th of September.
Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the
great English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost
month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in
the last century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew
just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking
and doing; what were his feelings about life; what changes the years
had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his
reputation. It was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both
playing that old familiar air, “Life,”--one a bassoon, if you will, and
the other an oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still
keeping pace with each other until the players both grew old and gray.
At last the thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep
accompaniment rolls out its thunder no more.
I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years
has left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with
many of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know
him. I can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend
Dr. Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted
him,--he hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample
coat, too, I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous
cuffs, and beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat,
arching in front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian
prominence, involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned
buttons, and the strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns
of support to the massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over
it. I can hear him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and
a gap is widened to make room for his portly figure. “A fine day,” says
Sir Joshua. “Sir,” he answers, “it seems propitious, but the atmosphere
is humid and the skies are nebulous,” at which the great painter smiles,
shifts his trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.
Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the
eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,
between you and the bony, “mighty-mouthed,” harsh-toned termagant and
dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the
snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the
shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our “spiritualist's” paper in the
Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what
I shall find when it is opened.
Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear
old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next
Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,--I seem to find
myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.
Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me
has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old
dwelling-house, precious for its intimate association with the earliest
stages of the war of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace
and the home of my boyhood.
The “Old Gambrel-roofed House” exists no longer. I remember saying
something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the
experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever, as the
soul dies out of the body. We may die out of many houses, but the house
itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to one who
has dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which held him
in dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate youth,--so real,
I say, is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it must
outlast its perishing frame.
The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to admit,
a case of justifiable domicide. Not the less was it to be deplored
by all who love the memories of the past. With its destruction are
obliterated some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took
the first steps in the long and bloody march which led us through the
wilderness to the promised land of independent nationality. Personally,
I have a right to mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me. My
private grief for its loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion,
were it not that the experience through which I have just passed is one
so familiar to my fellow-countrymen that, in telling my own reflections
and feelings, I am repeating those of great numbers of men and women who
have had the misfortune to outlive their birthplace.
It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon. The
Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural
objects encircling it. Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and
some unpretending two-story houses which had been its neighbors for a
century and more. To the south of it the square brick dormitories and
the bellfried hall of the university helped to shut out the distant
view. But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common,
beyond which the historical “Washington elm” and two companions in line
with it, spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter. And
far away rose the hills that bounded the view, with the glimmer here and
there of the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered,
half-hidden villa. Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier
remembrance, widely open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails
gliding along as if through the level fields, for no water was visible.
So there were broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination
to wander over.
I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us
all our days. Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built their
fairy palaces, and even now, as I look at them from my library window,
across the estuary of the Charles, I find myself in the familiar home of
my early visions. The “clouds of glory” which we trail with us in after
life need not be traced to a pre-natal state. There is enough to account
for them in that unconsciously remembered period of existence before we
have learned the hard limitations of real life. Those earliest months
in which we lived in sensations without words, and ideas not fettered in
sentences, have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving “before
the letter.” I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not
passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and
unsympathetic pavement.
Our university town was very much like the real country, in those
days of which I am thinking. There were plenty of huckleberries and
blueberries within half a mile of the house. Blackberries ripened in the
fields, acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees, squirrels ran among
the branches, and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen circling over
the barnyard. Still another rural element was not wanting, in the form
of that far-diffused, infragrant effluvium, which, diluted by a good
half mile of pure atmosphere, is no longer odious, nay is positively
agreeable, to many who have long known it, though its source and centre
has an unenviable reputation. I need not name the animal whose Parthian
warfare terrifies and puts to flight the mightiest hunter that ever
roused the tiger from his jungle or faced the lion of the desert.
Strange as it may seem, an aerial hint of his personality in the far
distance always awakens in my mind pleasant remembrances and tender
reflections. A whole neighborhood rises up before me: the barn, with
its haymow, where the hens laid their eggs to hatch, and we boys hid our
apples to ripen, both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis;
the shed, where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism
that made Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old
outhouse, with the “corn-chamber” which the mice knew so well; the paved
yard, with its open gutter,--these and how much else come up at the
hint of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy. Nothing is more
familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories. There was
that quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh
sawdust. It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the
tumble of the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put
asunder; the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,--the
straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as
if it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it
that mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it
listen to reason,--there are just such straight-grained and just such
knotty men and women. All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose
parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming “egh!*******!”
How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking!
From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where the head of
the family preached and the limbs of the family listened, was not much
more than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue. But of
a hot summer's afternoon, after having already heard one sermon,
which could not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of
presentation to the members of the home circle, and the theology of
which was not too clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more
or less lugubrious, rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many
preliminary snuffles and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by
the snort of a huge bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a
hippopotamus, with other exercises of the customary character,--after
all this in the forenoon, the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the
hot sun counted for as much, in my childish dead-reckoning, as from old
Israel Porter's in Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston
did in after years. It takes a good while to measure the radius of the
circle that is about us, for the moon seems at first as near as the
watchface. Who knows but that, after a certain number of ages, the
planet we live on may seem to us no bigger than our neighbor Venus
appeared when she passed before the sun a few months ago, looking as
if we could take her between our thumb and finger, like a bullet or a
marble? And time, too; how long was it from the serious sunrise to the
joyous “sun-down” of an old-fashioned, puritanical, judaical first day
of the week, which a pious fraud christened “the Sabbath”? Was it a
fortnight, as we now reckon duration, or only a week? Curious entities,
or non-entities, space and tithe? When you see a metaphysician trying to
wash his hands of them and get rid of these accidents, so as to lay his
dry, clean palm on the absolute, does it not remind you of the hopeless
task of changing the color of the blackamoor by a similar proceeding?
For space is the fluid in which he is washing, and time is the soap
which he is using up in the process, and he cannot get free from them
until he can wash himself in a mental vacuum.
In my reference to the old house in a former paper, published years ago,
I said,
“By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself
on this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung so
tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with those
who cherished them.”