itself together for the duly meditative reader. In indirect touches of
his own work, scraps of faded old letters, what others remembered of his
talk, the man's likeness emerges; what he laughed and wept at, his
sudden elevations, and longings after absent friends, his fine
casuistries of affection and devices to jog sometimes, as he says, the
lazy happiness of perfect love, his solemn moments of higher discourse
with the young, as they came across him on occasion, and went along a
little way with him, the sudden surprised apprehension of beauties in
old literature, revealing anew the deep soul of poetry in things, and
withal the pure spirit of fun, having its way again; laughter, that most
short-lived of all things (some of Shakespeare's even being grown
hollow) wearing well with him. Much of all this comes out through his
letters, which may be regarded as a department of his essays. He is an
old-fashioned letter-writer, the essence of the old fashion of
letter-writing lying, as with true essay-writing, in the dexterous
availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in the prosecution of
deeper lines of observation; although, just as with the record of his
conversation, one loses something, in losing the actual tones of the
stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he halted also in
composition, composing slowly and by fits, "like a Flemish painter," as
he tells us, so "it is to be regretted," says the editor of his letters,
"that in the printed letters the reader will lose the curious varieties
of writing with which the originals abound, and which are scrupulously
adapted to the subject."
Also, he was a true "collector," delighting in the personal finding of a
thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by the little
accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's _Emblems_, "that old
book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it at last, he values none
the less because a child had coloured the plates with his paints. A
lover of household warmth everywhere, of that tempered atmosphere which
our various habitations get by men's living within them, he "sticks to
his favourite books as he did to his friends," and loved the "town,"
with a jealous eye for all its characteristics, "old houses" coming to
have souls for him. The yearning for mere warmth against him in another,
makes him content, all through life, with pure brotherliness, "the most
kindly and natural species of love," as he says, in place of the
_passion_ of love. Brother and sister, sitting thus side by side, have,
of course, their anticipations how one of them must sit at last in the
faint sun alone, and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely
what amount of melancholy really accompanied for him the approach of old
age, so steadily foreseen; make us note also with pleasure, his
successive wakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious musing
over what is gone and what remains, of life. In his subtle capacity for
enjoying the more refined points of earth, of human relationship, he
could throw the gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or
threadbare; has a care for the sighs, and the weary, humdrum
preoccupations of very weak people, down to their little pathetic
"gentilities," even; while, in the purely human temper, he can write of
death, almost like Shakespeare.
And that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what is
accustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging to
home and the earth, was congruous also with that love for the accustomed
in religion, which we may notice in him. He is one of the last votaries
of that old-world sentiment, based on the feelings of hope and awe,
which may be described as the religion of men of letters (as Sir Thomas
Browne has his _Religion of the Physician_), religion as understood by
the soberer men of letters in the last century, Addison, Gray, and
Johnson; by Jane Austen and Thackeray, later. A high way of feeling
developed largely by constant intercourse with the great things of
literature, and extended in its turn to those matters greater still,
this religion lives, in the main retrospectively, in a system of
received sentiments and beliefs; received, like those great things of
literature and art, in the first instance, on the authority of a long
tradition, in the course of which they have linked themselves in a
thousand complex ways to the conditions of human life, and no more
questioned now than the feeling one keeps by one of the greatness--say!
of Shakespeare. For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes the
solemn background on which the nearer and more exciting objects of his
immediate experience relieve themselves, borrowing from it an expression
of calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a profound quiet, that
quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy, working, we might
say, on the principle of the _opus operatum,_[88] almost without any
co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of the higher self.
And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attuned temperament mere
physical stillness has its full value; such natures seeming to long for
it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, with a sort of mystical
sensuality.
The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value
of reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour,
and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental character
of his work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in his life, a
genuinely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at its darkest in those
hard shadows of _Rosamund Grey_, is always there, though not always
realised either for himself or his readers, and restrained always in
utterance. It gives to those lighter matters on the surface of life and
literature among which he for the most part moved, a wonderful force of
expression, as if at any moment these slight words and fancies might
pierce very far into the deeper soul of things. In his writing, as in
his life, that quiet is not the low-flying of one from the first drowsy
by choice, and needing the prick of some strong passion or worldly
ambition, to stimulate him into all the energy of which he is capable;
but rather the reaction of nature, after an escape from fate, dark and
insane as in old Greek tragedy, following upon which the sense of mere
relief becomes a kind of passion, as with one who, having narrowly
escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing for grateful tears in
just sitting quiet at home, under the wall, till the end of days.
He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the
places he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell--London,
sixty-five years ago, with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and the
Temple gardens still unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to north
and south the fields at Enfield or Hampton, to which, "with their living
trees," the thoughts wander "from the hard wood of the desk"--fields
fresher, and coming nearer to town then, but in one of which the present
writer remembers, on a brooding early summer's day, to have heard the
cuckoo for the first time. Here, the surface of things is certainly
humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where the child goes
a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things more apt to respond to the
brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference between rain and
sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll together more grandly; those quaint
suburban pastorals gather a certain quality of grandeur from the
background of the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent
of storm in the rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 86: From "Appreciations," 1889.]
[Footnote 87: Macabre: very grim.]
[Footnote 88: Opus operatum (a phrase from Catholic theology): the work
performed through the sacraments--baptism, confirmation, etc.--the
efficacy of which is not dependent on the participants.]
DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT[89]
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
That very singular man, old Dr. Heidegger, once invited four venerable
friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded
gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, and a
withered gentlewoman, whose name was the Widow Wycherly. They were all
melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose
greatest misfortune it was, that they were not long ago in their graves.
Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant,
but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now little better
than a mendicant. Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years, and his
health and substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had
given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other
torments of soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man
of evil fame, or at least had been so, till time had buried him from the
knowledge of the present generation, and made him obscure instead of
infamous. As for the Widow Wycherly, tradition tells us that she was a
great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in
deep seclusion, on account of certain scandalous stories, which had
prejudiced the gentry of the town against her. It is a circumstance
worth mentioning, that each of these three old gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne,
Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, were early lovers of the Widow
Wycherly, and had once been on the point of cutting each others' throats
for her sake. And, before proceeding further, I will merely hint, that
Dr. Heidegger and all his four guests were sometimes thought to be a
little beside themselves; as is not unfrequently the case with old
people, when worried either by present troubles or woeful recollections.
"My dear old friends," said Dr. Heidegger, motioning them to be seated,
"I am desirous of your assistance in one of those little experiments
with which I amuse myself here in my study."
If all stories were true, Dr. Heidegger's study must have been a very
curious place. It was a dim, old-fashioned chamber festooned with
cobwebs, and besprinkled with antique dust. Around the walls stood
several oaken bookcases, the lower shelves of which were filled with
rows of gigantic folios, and black-letter quartos, and the upper with
little parchment-covered duodecimos. Over the central bookcase was a
bronze bust of Hippocrates, with which, according to some authorities,
Dr. Heidegger was accustomed to hold consultations, in all difficult
cases of his practice. In the obscurest corner of the room stood a tall
and narrow oaken closet, with its door ajar, within which doubtfully
appeared a skeleton. Between two of the bookcases hung a looking-glass,
presenting its high and dusty plate within a tarnished gilt frame. Among
many wonderful stories related of this mirror, it was fabled that the
spirits of all the doctor's deceased patients dwelt within its verge,
and would stare him in the face whenever he looked thitherward. The
opposite side of the chamber was ornamented with the full-length
portrait of a young lady, arrayed in the faded magnificence of silk,
satin, and brocade, and with a visage as faded as her dress. Above half
a century ago Dr. Heidegger had been on the point of marriage with this
young lady; but, being affected with some slight disorder, she had
swallowed one of her lover's prescriptions, and died on the bridal
evening. The greatest curiosity of the study remains to be mentioned; it
was a ponderous folio volume, bound in black leather, with massive
silver clasps. There were no letters on the back, and nobody could tell
the title of the book. But it was well known to be a book of magic; and
once, when a chambermaid had lifted it, merely to brush away the dust,
the skeleton had rattled in its closet, the picture of the young lady
had stepped one foot upon the floor, and several ghastly faces had
peeped forth from the mirror; while the brazen head of Hippocrates
frowned, and said--"Forbear!"
Such was Dr. Heidegger's study. On the summer afternoon of our tale, a
small round table, as black as ebony, stood in the center of the room
sustaining a cut-glass vase of beautiful form and elaborate workmanship.
The sunshine came through the window, between the heavy festoons of two
faded damask curtains, and fell directly across this vase, so that a
mild splendor was reflected from it on the ashen visages of the five old
people who sat around. Four champagne glasses were also on the table.
"My dear old friends," repeated Dr. Heidegger, "may I reckon on your aid
in performing an exceedingly curious experiment?"
Now Dr. Heidegger was a very strange old gentleman, whose eccentricity
had become the nucleus for a thousand fantastic stories. Some of these
fables, to my shame be it spoken, might possibly be traced back to mine
own veracious self; and if any passage of the present tale should
startle the reader's faith, I must be content to bear the stigma of a
fiction monger.
When the doctor's four guests heard him talk of his proposed experiment,
they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of a mouse in an
air pump, or the examination of a cobweb by the microscope, or some
similar nonsense, with which he was constantly in the habit of pestering
his intimates. But without waiting for a reply, Dr. Heidegger hobbled
across the chamber, and returned with the same ponderous folio, bound in
black leather, which common report affirmed to be a book of magic.
Undoing the silver clasps, he opened the volume, and took from among its
black-letter pages a rose, or what was once a rose, though now the
green leaves and crimson petals had assumed one brownish hue, and the
ancient flower seemed ready to crumble to dust in the doctor's hands.
"This rose," said Dr. Heidegger, with a sigh, "this same withered and
crumbling flower, blossomed five and fifty years ago. It was given me by
Sylvia Ward, whose portrait hangs yonder; and I meant to wear it in my
bosom at our wedding. Five and fifty years it has been treasured between
the leaves of this old volume. Now, would you deem it possible that this
rose of half a century could ever bloom again?"
"Nonsense!" said the Widow Wycherly, with a peevish toss of her head.
"You might as well ask whether an old woman's wrinkled face could ever
bloom again."
"See!" answered Dr. Heidegger.
He uncovered the vase, and threw the faded rose into the water which it
contained. At first, it lay lightly on the surface of the fluid,
appearing to imbibe none of its moisture. Soon, however, a singular
change began to be visible. The crushed and dried petals stirred, and
assumed a deepening tinge of crimson, as if the flower were reviving
from a death-like slumber; the slender stalk and twigs of foliage became
green; and there was the rose of half a century, looking as fresh as
when Sylvia Ward had first given it to her lover. It was scarcely full
blown; for some of its delicate red leaves curled modestly around its
moist bosom, within which two or three dewdrops were sparkling.
"That is certainly a very pretty deception," said the doctor's friends;
carelessly, however, for they had witnessed greater miracles at a
conjurer's show; "pray how was it effected?"
"Did you never hear of the 'Fountain of Youth'?" asked Dr. Heidegger,
"which Ponce De Leon, the Spanish adventurer, went in search of two or
three centuries ago?"
"But did Ponce De Leon ever find it?" said the Widow Wycherly.
"No," answered Dr. Heidegger, "for he never sought it in the right
place. The famous Fountain of Youth, if I am rightly informed, is
situated in the southern part of the Floridian peninsula, not far from
Lake Macaco. Its source is overshadowed by several gigantic magnolias,
which, though numberless centuries old, have been kept as fresh as
violets, by the virtues of this wonderful water. An acquaintance of
mine, knowing my curiosity in such matters, has sent me what you see in
the vase."
"Ahem!" said Colonel Killigrew, who believed not a word of the doctor's
story; "and what may be the effect of this fluid on the human frame?"
"You shall judge for yourself, my dear Colonel," replied Dr. Heidegger;
"and all of you, my respected friends, are welcome to so much of this
admirable fluid, as may restore to you the bloom of youth. For my own
part, having had much trouble in growing old, I am in no hurry to grow
young again. With your permission, therefore, I will merely watch the
progress of the experiment.".
While he spoke, Dr. Heidegger had been filling the four champagne
glasses with the water of the Fountain of Youth. It was apparently
impregnated with an effervescent gas, for little bubbles were
continually ascending from the depths of the glasses, and bursting in
silvery spray at the surface. As the liquor diffused a pleasant perfume,
the old people doubted not that it possessed cordial and comfortable
properties; and, though utter sceptics as to its rejuvenescent power,
they were inclined to swallow it at once. But Dr. Heidegger besought
them to stay a moment.
"Before you drink, my respectable old friends," said he, "it would be
well that, with the experience of a lifetime to direct you, you should
draw up a few general rules for your guidance, in passing a second time
through the perils of youth. Think what a sin and shame it would be, if,
with your peculiar advantages, you should not become patterns of virtue
and wisdom to all the young people of the age!"
The doctor's four venerable friends made him no answer, except by a
feeble and tremulous laugh; so very ridiculous was the idea, that,
knowing how closely repentance treads behind the steps of error, they
should ever go astray again.
"Drink, then," said the doctor, bowing; "I rejoice that I have so well
selected the subjects of my experiment."
With palsied hands, they raised the glasses to their lips. The liquor,
if it really possessed such virtues as Dr. Heidegger imputed to it,
could not have been bestowed on four human beings who needed it more
wofully. They looked as if they had never known what youth or pleasure
was, but had been the offspring of Nature's dotage, and always the gray,
decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures, who now sat stooping round the
doctor's table, without life enough in their souls or bodies to be
animated even by the prospect of growing young again. They drank off the
water, and replaced their glasses on the table.
Assuredly there was an almost immediate improvement in the aspect of the
party, not unlike what might have been produced by a glass of generous
wine, together with a sudden glow of cheerful sunshine, brightening over
all their visages at once. There was a healthful suffusion on their
cheeks, instead of the ashen hue that had made them look so corpse-like.
They gazed at one another, and fancied that some magic power had really
begun to smooth away the deep and sad inscriptions which Father Time had
been so long engraving on their brows. The Widow Wycherly adjusted her
cap, for she felt almost like a woman again.
"Give us more of this wondrous water!" cried they, eagerly. "We are
younger--but we are still too old! Quick--give us more!"
"Patience, patience!" quoth Dr. Heidegger, who sat watching the
experiment, with philosophic coolness. "You have been a long time
growing old. Surely, you might be content to grow young in half an hour!
But the water is at your service."
Again he filled their glasses with the liquor of youth, enough of which
still remained in the vase to turn half the old people in the city to
the age of their own grandchildren. While the bubbles were yet sparkling
on the brim, the doctor's four guests snatched their glasses from the
table, and swallowed the contents at a single gulp. Was it delusion?
Even while the draught was passing down their throats, it seemed to have
wrought a change on their whole systems. Their eyes grew clear and
bright; a dark shade deepened among their silvery locks; they sat around
the table, three gentlemen, of middle age, and a woman, hardly beyond
her buxom prime.
"My dear widow, you are charming!" cried Colonel Killigrew, whose eyes
had been fixed upon her face, while the shadows of age were flitting
from it like darkness from the crimson daybreak.
The fair widow knew, of old, that Colonel Killigrew's compliments were
not always measured by sober truth; so she started up and ran to the
mirror, still dreading that the ugly visage of an old woman would meet
her gaze. Meanwhile, the three gentlemen behaved in such a manner as
proved that the water of the Fountain of Youth possessed some
intoxicating qualities; unless, indeed, their exhilaration of spirits
were merely a lightsome dizziness, caused by the sudden removal of the
weight of years. Mr. Gascoigne's mind seemed to run on political topics,
but whether relating to the past, present, or future, could not easily
be determined, since the same ideas and phrases have been in vogue these
fifty years. Now he rattled forth full-throated sentences about
patriotism, national glory, and the people's right; now he muttered some
perilous stuff or other, in a sly and doubtful whisper, so cautiously
that even his own conscience could scarcely catch the secret; and now,
again, he spoke in measured accents, and a deeply deferential tone, as
if a royal ear were listening to his well-turned periods. Colonel
Killigrew all this time had been trolling forth a jolly bottle song, and
ringing his glass in symphony with the chorus, while his eyes wandered
toward the buxom figure of the Widow Wycherly. On the other side of the
table, Mr. Medbourne was involved in a calculation of dollars and cents,
with which was strangely intermingled a project for supplying the East
Indies with ice, by harnessing a team of whales to the polar icebergs.
As for the Widow Wycherly, she stood before the mirror courtesying and
simpering to her own image, and greeting it as the friend whom she loved
better than all the world beside. She thrust her face close to the
glass, to see whether some long-remembered wrinkle or crow's-foot had
indeed vanished. She examined whether the snow had so entirely melted
from her hair, that the venerable cap could be safely thrown aside. At
last, turning briskly away, she came with a sort of dancing step to the
table.
"My dear old doctor," cried she, "pray favor me with another glass!"
"Certainly, my dear madam, certainly!" replied the complaisant doctor;
"see! I have already filled the glasses."
There, in fact, stood the four glasses, brimful of this wonderful water,
the delicate spray of which, as it effervesced from the surface,
resembled the tremulous glitter of diamonds. It was now so nearly
sunset, that the chamber had grown duskier than ever; but a mild and
moonlight splendor gleamed from within the vase, and rested alike on the
four guests and on the doctor's venerable figure. He sat in a
high-backed, elaborately-carved, oaken arm-chair, with a gray dignity of
aspect that might have well befitted that very Father Time, whose power
had never been disputed, save by this fortunate company. Even while
quaffing the third draught of the Fountain of Youth, they were almost
awed by the expression of his mysterious visage.
But, the next moment, the exhilarating gush of young life shot through
their veins. They were now in the happy prime of youth. Age, with its
miserable train of cares, and sorrows, and diseases, was remembered only
as the trouble of a dream, from which they had joyously awoke. The
fresh gloss of the soul, so early lost, and without which the world's
successive scenes had been but a gallery of faded pictures, again threw
its enchantment over all their prospects. They felt like new-created
beings, in a new-created universe.
"We are young! We are young!" they cried exultingly.
Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly-marked
characteristics of middle life, and mutually assimilated them all. They
were a group of merry youngsters, almost maddened with the exuberant
frolicsomeness of their years. The most singular effect of their gayety
was an impulse to mock the infirmity and decrepitude of which they had
so lately been the victims. They laughed loudly at their old-fashioned
attire, the wide-skirted coats and flapped waistcoats of the young men,
and the ancient cap and gown of the blooming girl. One limped across the
floor, like a gouty grandfather; one set a pair of spectacles astride of
his nose, and pretended to pore over the black-letter pages of the book
of magic; a third seated himself in an arm-chair, and strove to imitate
the venerable dignity of Dr. Heidegger. Then all shouted mirthfully, and
leaped about the room. The Widow Wycherly--if so fresh a damsel could be
called a widow--tripped up to the doctor's chair, with a mischievous
merriment in her rosy face.
"Doctor, you dear old soul," cried she, "get up and dance with me!" And
then the four young people laughed louder than ever to think what a
queer figure the poor old doctor would cut.
"Pray excuse me," answered the doctor, quietly. "I am old and rheumatic,
and my dancing days were over long ago. But either of these gay young
gentlemen will be glad of so pretty a partner."
"Dance with me, Clara!" cried Colonel Killigrew.
"No, no, I will be her partner!" shouted Mr. Gascoigne.
"She promised me her hand fifty years ago!" exclaimed Mr. Medbourne.