referable to the sense of taste, which are among the most common. In
any collection of a hundred persons there will be found those who cannot
make use of certain articles of food generally acceptable. This may be
from the disgust they occasion or the effects they have been found to
produce. Every one knows individuals who cannot venture on honey, or
cheese, or veal, with impunity. Carlyle, for example, complains of
having veal set before him,--a meat he could not endure. There is a
whole family connection in New England, and that a very famous one, to
many of whose members, in different generations, all the products of the
dairy are the subjects of a congenital antipathy. Montaigne says there
are persons who dread the smell of apples more than they would dread
being exposed to a fire of musketry. The readers of the charming story
“A Week in a French Country-House” will remember poor Monsieur Jacque's
piteous cry in the night: “Ursula, art thou asleep? Oh, Ursula, thou
sleepest, but I cannot close my eyes. Dearest Ursula, there is such
a dreadful smell! Oh, Ursula, it is such a smell! I do so wish thou
couldst smell it! Good-night, my angel!----Dearest! I have found them!
They are apples!” The smell of roses, of peonies, of lilies, has been
known to cause faintness. The sight of various objects has had singular
effects on some persons. A boar's head was a favorite dish at the table
of great people in Marshal d'Albret's time; yet he used to faint at the
sight of one. It is not uncommon to meet with persons who faint at the
sight of blood. One of the most inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts's
college-mates confessed that he had this infirmity. Stranger and far
more awkward than this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection,
where the subject of the antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of
a red color. There are sounds, also, which have strange effects on
some individuals. Among the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk
stuffs, the sound of sweeping, the croaking of frogs. The effects
in different cases have been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse
sweating,--all showing a profound disturbance of the nervous system.
All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense,
seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres. But there is
another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part
in the phenomena. Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two
very distinguished personages.
Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge
into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy
and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a
bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in
spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story
told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter.
As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly,
his horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their
harness and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the
carriage on the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal
had the terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready
to fall over.
What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to
shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The
old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one,
that it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she
entered the holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the
presence of the sacred symbols, “cried with a loud voice, and came out
of” her. A very singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and
which the reader may accept as authentic, is the following: At the head
of the doctor's front stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of
early date and stately presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it
as he entered the front door, remarked that he should feel a great
unwillingness to pass that clock. He could not go near one of those tall
timepieces without a profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo.
This very singular idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an
infant in the arms of his nurse.
She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which
supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came
crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been
produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered.
Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock
may be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of “The
Ancient Mariner:”
“I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy hermit raised his eyes
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars; the pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.”
This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description
from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases
where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.
More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some
person, a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to death,
literally. Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise
being intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which
life depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects
like these, such an impression might of course be followed by
consequences less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature.
If here and there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden
startling sight or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which
a terrible shock is produced by similar apparently insignificant
causes,--a shock which falls short of overthrowing the reason and does
not destroy life, yet leaves a lasting effect upon the subject of it.
This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that,
as a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human
being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change
of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause
may not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to
himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced
by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some
spring in this young man's nature, or so changed its mode of action as
to account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life. But how
could any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young
man aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him? He did not
hate the human race; that was clear enough. He treated Paolo with great
kindness, and the Italian was evidently much attached to him. He had
talked naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of
his dangerous situation when his boat was upset. Dr. Butts heard that
he had once made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the
University. It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary.
What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case? Nothing that
the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of which
acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who could not
look at anything red without fainting. Suppose this were a case of the
same antipathy. How very careful it would make the subject of it as to
where he went and with whom he consorted! Time and patience would be
pretty sure to bring out new developments, and physicians, of all men in
the world, know how to wait as well as how to labor.
Such were some of the crude facts as Dr. Butts found them in books or
gathered them from his own experience. He soon discovered that the story
had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim of an
“antipathy,” whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of the
people of the place. If he suspected the channel through which it had
reached the little community, and, spreading from that centre, the
country round, he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a
domestic casus belli. Paolo might have mentioned it to others as well
as to himself. Maurice might have told some friend, who had divulged it.
But to accuse Mrs. Butts, good Mrs. Butts, of petit treason in telling
one of her husband's professional secrets was too serious a matter to be
thought of. He would be a little more careful, he promised himself, the
next time, at any rate; for he had to concede, in spite of every wish to
be charitable in his judgment, that it was among the possibilities that
the worthy lady had forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put
their tongues out, and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.
VIII. THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
The Secretary of this association was getting somewhat tired of the
office, and the office was getting somewhat tired of him. It occurred
to the members of the Society that a little fresh blood infused into
it might stir up the general vitality of the organization. The woman
suffragists saw no reason why the place of Secretary need as a matter of
course be filled by a person of the male sex. They agitated, they
made domiciliary visits, they wrote notes to influential citizens, and
finally announced as their candidate the young lady who had won and
worn the school name of “The Terror,” who was elected. She was just the
person for the place: wide awake, with all her wits about her, full of
every kind of knowledge, and, above all, strong on points of order and
details of management, so that she could prompt the presiding officer,
to do which is often the most essential duty of a Secretary. The
President, the worthy rector, was good at plain sailing in the track of
the common moralities and proprieties, but was liable to get muddled
if anything came up requiring swift decision and off-hand speech. The
Terror had schooled herself in the debating societies of the Institute,
and would set up the President, when he was floored by an awkward
question, as easily as if he were a ninepin which had been bowled over.
It has been already mentioned that the Pansophian Society received
communications from time to time from writers outside of its own
organization. Of late these had been becoming more frequent. Many of
them were sent in anonymously, and as there were numerous visitors to
the village, and two institutions not far removed from it, both full
of ambitious and intelligent young persons, it was often impossible
to trace the papers to their authors. The new Secretary was alive with
curiosity, and as sagacious a little body as one might find if in want
of a detective. She could make a pretty shrewd guess whether a paper was
written by a young or old person, by one of her own sex or the other, by
an experienced hand or a novice.
Among the anonymous papers she received was one which exercised her
curiosity to an extraordinary degree. She felt a strong suspicion that
“the Sachem,” as the boat-crews used to call him, “the Recluse,” “the
Night-Hawk,” “the Sphinx,” as others named him, must be the author of
it. It appeared to her the production of a young person of a reflective,
poetical turn of mind. It was not a woman's way of writing; at least,
so thought the Secretary. The writer had travelled much; had resided in
Italy, among other places. But so had many of the summer visitors and
residents of Arrowhead Village. The handwriting was not decisive; it
had some points of resemblance with the pencilled orders for books
which Maurice sent to the Library, but there were certain differences,
intentional or accidental, which weakened this evidence. There was an
undertone in the essay which was in keeping with the mode of life of the
solitary stranger. It might be disappointment, melancholy, or only the
dreamy sadness of a young person who sees the future he is to climb, not
as a smooth ascent, but as overhanging him like a cliff, ready to crush
him, with all his hopes and prospects. This interpretation may have been
too imaginative, but here is the paper, and the reader can form his own
opinion:
MY THREE COMPANIONS.
“I have been from my youth upwards a wanderer. I do not mean constantly
flitting from one place to another, for my residence has often been
fixed for considerable periods. From time to time I have put down in a
notebook the impressions made upon me by the scenes through which I
have passed. I have long hesitated whether to let any of my notes appear
before the public. My fear has been that they were too subjective, to
use the metaphysician's term,--that I have seen myself reflected in
Nature, and not the true aspects of Nature as she was meant to be
understood. One who should visit the Harz Mountains would see--might
see, rather his own colossal image shape itself on the morning mist. But
if in every mist that rises from the meadows, in every cloud that hangs
upon the mountain, he always finds his own reflection, we cannot accept
him as an interpreter of the landscape.
“There must be many persons present at the meetings of the Society to
which this paper is offered who have had experiences like that of its
author. They have visited the same localities, they have had many of
the same thoughts and feelings. Many, I have no doubt. Not all,--no, not
all. Others have sought the companionship of Nature; I have been driven
to it. Much of my life has been passed in that communion. These pages
record some of the intimacies I have formed with her under some of her
various manifestations.
“I have lived on the shore of the great ocean, where its waves broke
wildest and its voice rose loudest.
“I have passed whole seasons on the banks of mighty and famous rivers.
“I have dwelt on the margin of a tranquil lake, and floated through many
a long, long summer day on its clear waters.
“I have learned the 'various language' of Nature, of which poetry has
spoken,--at least, I have learned some words and phrases of it. I will
translate some of these as I best may into common speech.
“The OCEAN says to the dweller on its shores:--
“You are neither welcome nor unwelcome. I do not trouble myself with the
living tribes that come down to my waters. I have my own people, of
an older race than yours, that grow to mightier dimensions than your
mastodons and elephants; more numerous than all the swarms that fill
the air or move over the thin crust of the earth. Who are you that build
your palaces on my margin? I see your white faces as I saw the dark
faces of the tribes that came before you, as I shall look upon the
unknown family of mankind that will come after you. And what is your
whole human family but a parenthesis in a single page of my history? The
raindrops stereotyped themselves on my beaches before a living creature
left his footprints there. This horseshoe-crab I fling at your feet is
of older lineage than your Adam,--perhaps, indeed, you count your Adam
as one of his descendants. What feeling have I for you? Not scorn,
not hatred,--not love,--not loathing. No!---indifference,--blank
indifference to you and your affairs that is my feeling, say rather
absence of feeling, as regards you.---Oh yes, I will lap your feet, I
will cool you in the hot summer days, I will bear you up in my strong
arms, I will rock you on my rolling undulations, like a babe in his
cradle. Am I not gentle? Am I not kind? Am I not harmless? But hark! The
wind is rising, and the wind and I are rough playmates! What do you
say to my voice now? Do you see my foaming lips? Do you feel the rocks
tremble as my huge billows crash against them? Is not my anger terrible
as I dash your argosy, your thunder-bearing frigate, into fragments,
as you would crack an eggshell?--No, not anger; deaf, blind, unheeding
indifference,--that is all. Out of me all things arose; sooner or later,
into me all things subside. All changes around me; I change not. I
look not at you, vain man, and your frail transitory concerns, save in
momentary glimpses: I look on the white face of my dead mistress, whom
I follow as the bridegroom follows the bier of her who has changed her
nuptial raiment for the shroud.
“Ye whose thoughts are of eternity, come dwell at my side. Continents
and islands grow old, and waste and disappear. The hardest rock
crumbles; vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being, wax great,
decline, and perish, to give way to others, even as human dynasties and
nations and races come and go. Look on me! 'Time writes no wrinkle' on
my forehead. Listen to me! All tongues are spoken on my shores, but I
have only one language: the winds taught me their vowels the crags and
the sands schooled me in my rough or smooth consonants. Few words are
mine but I have whispered them and sung them and shouted them to men of
all tribes from the time when the first wild wanderer strayed into my
awful presence. Have you a grief that gnaws at your heart-strings? Come
with it to my shore, as of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried
his rage and anguish to the margin of the loud-roaring sea. There, if
anywhere you will forget your private and short-lived woe, for my voice
speaks to the infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.
“To him who loves the pages of human history, who listens to the voices
of the world about him, who frequents the market and the thoroughfare,
who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather than in the
deeper emotions, in abstract speculation and spiritual contemplation,
the RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.
“Come live with me. I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural
talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except
occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get
a fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my
changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles
that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical.
I am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely
safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches
with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and
you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the
mercies of the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will
carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of
the compass. If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave
fertility behind me when I withdraw to my natural channel. Walk by my
side toward the place of my destination. I will keep pace with you, and
you shall feel my presence with you as that of a self-conscious being
like yourself. You will find it hard to be miserable in my company; I
drain you of ill-conditioned thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your
dwelling and its grounds.”
But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen
indifference, and the river disturbs with its never-pausing and
never-ending story, the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of
rest for his soul.
“'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited faculties,'
it says; 'yield not yourself to the babble of the running stream. Leave
the ocean, which cares nothing for you or any living thing that walks
the solid earth; leave the river, too busy with its own errand, too
talkative about its own affairs, and find peace with me, whose smile
will cheer you, whose whisper will soothe you. Come to me when the
morning sun blazes across my bosom like a golden baldric; come to me
in the still midnight, when I hold the inverted firmament like a cup
brimming with jewels, nor spill one star of all the constellations that
float in my ebon goblet. Do you know the charm of melancholy? Where will
you find a sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness? Does the ocean
share your grief? Does the river listen to your sighs? The salt wave,
that called to you from under last month's full moon, to-day is
dashing on the rocks of Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and
sparkling, has swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is
creeping to its grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its
tomb of liquid crystal. It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed
from one season to another; but are your features the same, absolutely
the same, from year to year? We both change, but we know each other
through all changes. Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours? And
does not Nature plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is
dressed in the glories of leaf and flower, and draw the icy lid over
my shining surface when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of
winter?'
“I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life
not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could not match
in incident. Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous
urgency to try a change of existence, if such change is a part of human
destiny,--to seek rest, if that is what we gain by laying down the
burden of life. I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should
appeal for the last service I should have need of. Ocean was there,
all ready, asking no questions, answering none. What strange voyages,
downward through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and
frothing surface, wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude
agencies; one remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach,
one perhaps built into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one
settling to the floor of the vast laboratory where continents are built,
to emerge in far-off ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers!
Unwieldy sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the
spectacled collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature;
naked-eyed creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of
the ghastly-green abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous
immensity,--what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No!
No! Ocean claims great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who
would fain be rid of himself.
“Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I
have ever found when drifting idly over its surface? No, again. I do not
want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature, when
life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me. That must not
be. The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know me as an
unwelcome object.
“If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and lead
me out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not unfriendly,
pleasantly companionable river.
“But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods
of human life which they who are choosing their places of abode should
consider. Let the child play upon the seashore. The wide horizon gives
his imagination room to grow in, untrammelled. That background of
mystery, without which life is a poor mechanical arrangement, is shaped
and colored, so far as it can have outline, or any hue but shadow, on a
vast canvas, the contemplation of which enlarges and enriches the sphere
of consciousness. The mighty ocean is not too huge to symbolize the
aspirations and ambitions of the yet untried soul of the adolescent.
“The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a solid
limit, which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he would have
thought could content him in the years of undefined possibilities. Then
he will find the river a more natural intimate than the ocean. It
is individual, which the ocean, with all its gulfs and inlets and
multitudinous shores, hardly seems to be. It does not love you very
dearly, and will not miss you much when you disappear from its margin;
but it means well to you, bids you good-morning with its coming waves,
and good-evening with those which are leaving. It will lead your
thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its source, downwards to the stream
to which it is tributary, or the wide waters in which it is to lose
itself. A river, by choice, to live by in middle age.