[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!