THE BLUE CHAMBER.
In the morning he found the front yard had a wild and tangled, and
the garden a neglected look, and busied himself, with the boys, in
improving their appearance.
In the afternoon he overhauled a small desk, the contents of which
soon lay about on the floor. There were papers of all colors and
sizes--scraps, single sheets, and collections of several pages--all
covered with verses in many hands, from that of the young boy to
elegant clerkly manuscript. They seemed to represent every style of
poetic composition. It would have been amusing to watch the manner
and expression with which the youth dealt with these children of his
fancy, and to listen to his exclamations of condensed criticism. He
evidently found little to commend. As he opened or unrolled one after
another, and caught the heading, or a line of the text, he dashed it
to the floor, with a single word of contempt, disgust, or derision.
"Faugh!" "Oh!" "Pshaw!" "Blank verse? Blank enough!" Some he lingered
over for a moment, but his brow never cleared or relented, and each
and all were condemned with equal justice and impartiality. When the
last was thrown down, and he was certain that none remained, he rose
and contemplated their crumpled and creased forms with calm disdain.
"Oh, dear! you thought, some of you, that you might possibly be
poetry, you miserable weaklings and beguilers! You are not even
verses--are hardly rhymes. You are, one and all, without sense or
sound." His brow grew severe in its condemnation. "There! take
that! and that! and that!"--stamping them with his foot; "poor
broken-backed, halting, limping, club-footed, no-going, unbodied,
unsouled, nameless things. How do you like it? What business had you
to be? You had no right to be born--never were born; had no capacity
for birth; you don't even amount to failures! Words are wasted on you:
let me see if you'll burn." Lighting one, he threw it upon the hearth.
"It does! I am surprised at that. I rather like it. How blue and faint
the flame is--it hardly produces smoke, and"--watching until it was
consumed--"no ashes. Too ethereal for smoke and ashes. Let me try the
rest;" and he did.
He then opened a small drawer and took out a portfolio, in which were
various bits of bristol-board and paper, covered with crayon and pen
sketches, and some things in water-colors--all giving evidence of a
ready hand which showed some untaught practice. Whether his sense of
justice was somewhat appeased, or because he regarded them with more
favor, or reserved them for another occasion, was, perhaps, uncertain.
Singularly enough, on each of them, no matter what was the subject,
appeared one or more young girl's heads--some full-faced, some
three-fourths, and more in profile--all spirited, all looking alike,
and each having a strong resemblance to Julia Markham. Two or three
were studied and deliberate attempts. He contemplated these long and
earnestly, and laid them away with a sigh. They undoubtedly saved the
collection.
That night he wrote to Henry:
"DEAR BROTHER,--I am back, of course. It is an unpleasant way of
mine--this coming back. It was visionary for me to try a fall with the
sciences at Hudson. You would have been too many for them; I ran
away. I found Colton sick at Cincinnati. The Texan Rangers had left.
I looked into the waters of the Ohio, running and hurrying away
returnlessly to the south-west. Lord, how they called to me in their
liquid offers to carry me away! They seemed to draw me to linger, and
gurgle, and murmur in little staying, coaxing eddies at my feet, to
persuade me to go.
"How near one seems to that far-off region of fever and swamp, of sun
and sea, of adventure and blood, and old buccaneering, standing by
those swift waters, already on their way thither! Should I go? Was
I not too good to go, and be lost? Think of the high moral
considerations involved? No matter, I didn't go--I came! Well!
"On reflection--and I thus assume that I do reflect--I think men don't
find opportunities, or, if they do, they don't know them. One must
make an opportunity for himself, and then he will know what to do with
it. The other day I stood on the other side of the Chagrin waiting for
an opportunity, and it didn't come, and I made one. I waded through,
and liked it, and that was not the only lesson I learned at the same
time. But that other was for my personal improvement. A man can as
well find the material for his opportunity in one place as another.
See how I excuse myself!
"Just now, I am a reformed young Blue Beard. Fatima and her sister may
go--have gone. I have just overhauled my 'Blue Chamber,' taken down
all my suspended wives, and burned them. They ended in smoke. Lord!
there wasn't flesh and blood enough in them all to decompose, and they
gave out no odor even while burning. I burned them all, cleaned off
all the blood-spots, ventilated the room, opened the windows, and will
turn it to a workshop. No more sighing for the unattainable, no more
grasping at the intangible, no more clutching at the impalpable. I am
no poet, and we don't want poetry. Our civilization isn't old enough.
Poets, like other maggots, will be produced when fermentation comes.
I am going about the humdrum and the useful. I am about as low in
the public estimation as I can well go; at any rate I am down on hard
land, which will be a good starting-point. Now don't go off and become
sanguine over me, nor trouble yourself much about me.
"'The world will find me after many a day,' as Southey says of one of
his books. I doubt if it ever did. The Doctor contends that Southey
was a poet; but then he thinks I am, also!
"What a deuce of a clamor is made about this new comet or planet! What
a useful thing to us poor, mud-stranded mortals to find out that there
is another little fragment of a world, away some hundreds of
millions of miles, outside of no particular where--for I believe
this astronomical detective is only on its track! The Doctor is in
ecstacies over it, takes it as a special personal favor, and declaims
luminously and constellationally about writing one's name among the
stars, like that frisky cow who, in jumping over the moon, upon a
time, made the milky way. I've always had some doubts about that
exploit; but then there is the mark she left. Your friend Roberts
is uneasy about this new star business; he is afraid that it will
unsettle the cheese market, and he don't know about it, nor do I.
"There! I got home only last night, and haven't heard any news to
write you. Some time I will tell of two or three things I saw and
heard, and about some of our cousins, who regard us as belonging to
the outer and lower skirts of the race. If I am to be one end of a
family, let it be the beginning.
"Mother sends love. Edward and George speak of you constantly. I've
not seen our Major since my return.
"Write me a good, sharp, cutting, criticising, deuced brotherly letter
soon. As ever,
"BART.
"P.S. Have you read Pickwick?
"B."
It was full of badinage, with only a dip or two into an absorbing
purpose that he had fully formed, and which he evidenced to himself by
the summary expulsion of the muses.
In the world of nature and humanity, is there such an embodiment of
contradictions and absurdities as a youth in his transit from the
dreamland of boyhood to the battle-field of manhood, through a region
partaking of both, and abounding with strange products of its own? I
am not speaking of the average boy, such boys as make up the male mass
of the world--the undreaming, unthinking, plodding, drudging, sweating
herd, whose few old commonplace, well-worn ideas don't possess the
power of reproduction, and whose thoughts are thirteenth or thirteen
hundredth-handed, and transmitted unimpregnated to other dullards, and
whose life and spirit is that of the young animal merely--but a real
young man, one of possibilities, intended for a man, and not merely
for a male, one in whom the primitive forces of nature are planted,
and who may develop into a new driving or forming power. What a mad,
impulsive, freaky thing it is! You may see him bruising his still
soft head a score of times against the impossible, and he will still
contend that he can do it. He will spring frantically up the face of
an unclimbable precipice, as the young salmon leaps up a cataract, and
die in the faith that he can go up it.
Oh, sublime faith! Oh, sublime folly! What strides he is constantly
taking to the ridiculous, and not always from the sublime! How strong!
how weak! How wise! how foolish! Consistent only in folly, and steady
in the purpose of being foolish. How beautiful, and how ugly! What a
lovable, detestable, desirable, proud, wilful, arrogant, supercilious,
laughing, passionate, tender, cruel, loving, hating, good sort of a
good-for-nothing he is! He believes everything--he believes nothing;
and, like Mary's Son, questions and mocks the doctors to their beards
in the very temple. Patience! he must have his time, and room to grow
in, develop, and shape out. Let him have coral for his teeth, and
climbing, and running, and jumping for his muscle. No man may love
him, and no woman but his mother, and she is to be tried to the extent
of endurance. Wait for him; he will, with or without your help, turn
out good or bad, and in either event people will say: "I always told
you so," "I always knew it was in him"; and cite a score of unhappened
things in proof of their sagacity.
Barton was one of these; neither better nor worse, full of
possibilities and capabilities, impulsive, rash, and unreasoning. He
has just made a resolve, and will act upon it; proud and sensitive
to a degree, he had heard a word of fault once at the store, which
another word would have explained. He would not say it, and went. It
was discovered that the fault was not his, in time for him to remain;
but he left without that word. He is willing to take his chances, and
must speak and act for himself.
He sealed and directed his letter, walked about with the plaintive
airs of old melodies running and running through his head, and sang
snatches and verses of sad old ballads, going over and over with some
touching line, or complaining strain, till he was saturated with its
tender melancholy, and so he came back to ordinary life.