I am going to take it for granted now and henceforth, in my report of
what was said and what was to be seen at our table, that I have secured
one good, faithful, loving reader, who never finds fault, who never gets
sleepy over my pages, whom no critic can bully out of a liking for me,
and to whom I am always safe in addressing myself. My one elect may be
man or woman, old or young, gentle or simple, living in the next block
or on a slope of Nevada, my fellow-countryman or an alien; but one such
reader I shall assume to exist and have always in my thought when I am
writing.
A writer is so like a lover! And a talk with the right listener is so
like an arm-in-arm walk in the moonlight with the soft heartbeat just
felt through the folds of muslin and broadcloth! But it takes very
little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover. There are a great
many cruel things besides poverty that freeze the genial current of the
soul, as the poet of the Elegy calls it. Fire can stand any wind, but is
easily blown out, and then come smouldering and smoke, and profitless,
slow combustion without the cheerful blaze which sheds light all
round it. The one Reader's hand may shelter the flame; the one blessed
ministering spirit with the vessel of oil may keep it bright in spite of
the stream of cold water on the other side doing its best to put it out.
I suppose, if any writer, of any distinguishable individuality, could
look into the hearts of all his readers, he might very probably find one
in his parish of a thousand or a million who honestly preferred him
to any other of his kind. I have no doubt we have each one of us,
somewhere, our exact facsimile, so like us in all things except the
accidents of condition, that we should love each other like a pair
of twins, if our natures could once fairly meet. I know I have my
counterpart in some State of this Union. I feel sure that there is an
Englishman somewhere precisely like myself. (I hope he does not drop his
h's, for it does not seem to me possible that the Royal Dane could have
remained faithful to his love for Ophelia, if she had addressed him as
'Amlet.) There is also a certain Monsieur, to me at this moment unknown,
and likewise a Herr Von Something, each of whom is essentially my
double. An Arab is at this moment eating dates, a mandarin is
just sipping his tea, and a South-Sea-Islander (with undeveloped
possibilities) drinking the milk of a cocoa-nut, each one of whom, if
he had been born in the gambrel-roofed house, and cultivated my little
sand-patch, and grown up in “the study” from the height of Walton's
Polyglot Bible to that of the shelf which held the Elzevir Tacitus and
Casaubon's Polybius, with all the complex influences about him that
surrounded me, would have been so nearly what I am that I should have
loved him like a brother,--always provided that I did not hate him for
his resemblance to me, on the same principle as that which makes bodies
in the same electric condition repel each other.
For, perhaps after all, my One Reader is quite as likely to be not
the person most resembling myself, but the one to whom my nature is
complementary. Just as a particular soil wants some one element
to fertilize it, just as the body in some conditions has a kind of
famine--for one special food, so the mind has its wants, which do not
always call for what is best, but which know themselves and are as
peremptory as the salt-sick sailor's call for a lemon or a raw potato,
or, if you will, as those capricious “longings,” which have a certain
meaning, we may suppose, and which at any rate we think it reasonable to
satisfy if we can.
I was going to say something about our boarders the other day when I got
run away with by my local reminiscences. I wish you to understand that
we have a rather select company at the table of our boarding-house.
Our Landlady is a most respectable person, who has seen better days, of
course,--all landladies have,--but has also, I feel sure, seen a good
deal worse ones. For she wears a very handsome silk dress on state
occasions, with a breastpin set, as I honestly believe, with genuine
pearls, and appears habitually with a very smart cap, from under which
her gray curls come out with an unmistakable expression, conveyed in the
hieratic language of the feminine priesthood, to the effect that while
there is life there is hope. And when I come to reflect on the many
circumstances which go to the making of matrimonial happiness, I cannot
help thinking that a personage of her present able exterior, thoroughly
experienced in all the domestic arts which render life comfortable,
might make the later years of some hitherto companionless bachelor very
endurable, not to say pleasant.
The condition of the Landlady's family is, from what I learn, such as to
make the connection I have alluded to, I hope with delicacy, desirable
for incidental as well as direct reasons, provided a fitting match could
be found. I was startled at hearing her address by the familiar name
of Benjamin the young physician I have referred to, until I found on
inquiry, what I might have guessed by the size of his slices of pie and
other little marks of favoritism, that he was her son. He has recently
come back from Europe, where he has topped off his home training with
a first-class foreign finish. As the Landlady could never have educated
him in this way out of the profits of keeping boarders, I was not
surprised when I was told that she had received a pretty little property
in the form of a bequest from a former boarder, a very kind-hearted,
worthy old gentleman who had been long with her and seen how hard she
worked for food and clothes for herself and this son of hers, Benjamin
Franklin by his baptismal name. Her daughter had also married well, to
a member of what we may call the post-medical profession, that, namely,
which deals with the mortal frame after the practitioners of the healing
art have done with it and taken their leave. So thriving had this
son-in-law of hers been in his business, that his wife drove about in
her own carriage, drawn by a pair of jet-black horses of most dignified
demeanor, whose only fault was a tendency to relapse at once into a walk
after every application of a stimulus that quickened their pace to a
trot; which application always caused them to look round upon the driver
with a surprised and offended air, as if he had been guilty of a grave
indecorum.
The Landlady's daughter had been blessed with a number of children,
of great sobriety of outward aspect, but remarkably cheerful in their
inward habit of mind, more especially on the occasion of the death of
a doll, which was an almost daily occurrence, and gave them immense
delight in getting up a funeral, for which they had a complete miniature
outfit. How happy they were under their solemn aspect! For the head
mourner, a child of remarkable gifts, could actually make the tears
run down her cheeks,--as real ones as if she had been a grown person
following a rich relative, who had not forgotten his connections, to his
last unfurnished lodgings.
So this was a most desirable family connection for the right man to step
into,--a thriving, thrifty mother-in-law, who knew what was good for the
sustenance of the body, and had no doubt taught it to her daughter; a
medical artist at hand in case the luxuries of the table should happen
to disturb the physiological harmonies; and in the worst event, a
sweet consciousness that the last sad offices would be attended to with
affectionate zeal, and probably a large discount from the usual charges.
It seems as if I could hardly be at this table for a year, if I should
stay so long, without seeing some romance or other work itself out
under my eyes; and I cannot help thinking that the Landlady is to be
the heroine of the love-history like to unfold itself. I think I see the
little cloud in the horizon, with a silvery lining to it, which may end
in a rain of cards tied round with white ribbons. Extremes meet, and who
so like to be the other party as the elderly gentleman at the other end
of the table, as far from her now as the length of the board permits? I
may be mistaken, but I think this is to be the romantic episode of the
year before me. Only it seems so natural it is improbable, for you never
find your dropped money just where you look for it, and so it is with
these a priori matches.
This gentleman is a tight, tidy, wiry little man, with a small, brisk
head, close-cropped white hair, a good wholesome complexion, a quiet,
rather kindly face, quick in his movements, neat in his dress, but fond
of wearing a short jacket over his coat, which gives him the look of
a pickled or preserved schoolboy. He has retired, they say, from a
thriving business, with a snug property, suspected by some to be rather
more than snug, and entitling him to be called a capitalist, except that
this word seems to be equivalent to highway robber in the new gospel of
Saint Petroleum. That he is economical in his habits cannot be denied,
for he saws and splits his own wood, for exercise, he says,--and makes
his own fires, brushes his own shoes, and, it is whispered, darns a hole
in a stocking now and then,--all for exercise, I suppose. Every summer
he goes out of town for a few weeks. On a given day of the month a wagon
stops at the door and takes up, not his trunks, for he does not indulge
in any such extravagance, but the stout brown linen bags in which he
packs the few conveniences he carries with him.
I do not think this worthy and economical personage will have much to do
or to say, unless he marries the Landlady. If he does that, he will play
a part of some importance,--but I don't feel sure at all. His talk is
little in amount, and generally ends in some compact formula condensing
much wisdom in few words, as that a man, should not put all his eggs in
one basket; that there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of
it; and one in particular, which he surprised me by saying in pretty
good French one day, to the effect that the inheritance of the world
belongs to the phlegmatic people, which seems to me to have a good deal
of truth in it.
The other elderly personage, the old man with iron-gray hair and large
round spectacles, sits at my right at table. He is a retired college
officer, a man of books and observation, and himself an author. Magister
Artium is one of his titles on the College Catalogue, and I like best
to speak of him as the Master, because he has a certain air of authority
which none of us feel inclined to dispute. He has given me a copy of a
work of his which seems to me not wanting in suggestiveness, and which I
hope I shall be able to make some use of in my records by and by. I said
the other day that he had good solid prejudices, which is true, and I
like him none the worse for it; but he has also opinions more or
less original, valuable, probable, fanciful; fantastic, or whimsical,
perhaps, now and then; which he promulgates at table somewhat in the
tone of imperial edicts. Another thing I like about him is, that he
takes a certain intelligent interest in pretty much everything that
interests other people. I asked him the other day what he thought most
about in his wide range of studies.
--Sir,--said he,--I take stock in everything that concerns anybody.
Humani nihil,--you know the rest. But if you ask me what is my
specialty, I should say, I applied myself more particularly to the
contemplation of the Order of Things.
--A pretty wide subject,--I ventured to suggest.
--Not wide enough, sir,--not wide enough to satisfy the desire of a mind
which wants to get at absolute truth, without reference to the empirical
arrangements of our particular planet and its environments. I want to
subject the formal conditions of space and time to a new analysis, and
project a possible universe outside of the Order of Things. But I have
narrowed myself by studying the actual facts of being. By and by--by and
by--perhaps--perhaps. I hope to do some sound thinking in heaven--if
I ever get there,--he said seriously, and it seemed to me not
irreverently.
--I rather like that,--I said. I think your telescopic people are, on
the whole, more satisfactory than your microscopic ones.
--My left-hand neighbor fidgeted about a little in his chair as I said
this. But the young man sitting not far from the Landlady, to whom my
attention had been attracted by the expression of his eyes, which seemed
as if they saw nothing before him, but looked beyond everything, smiled
a sort of faint starlight smile, that touched me strangely; for until
that moment he had appeared as if his thoughts were far away, and I
had been questioning whether he had lost friends lately, or perhaps had
never had them, he seemed so remote from our boarding-house life. I
will inquire about him, for he interests me, and I thought he seemed
interested as I went on talking.
--No,--I continued,--I don't want to have the territory of a man's mind
fenced in. I don't want to shut out the mystery of the stars and
the awful hollow that holds them. We have done with those hypaethral
temples, that were open above to the heavens, but we can have attics and
skylights to them. Minds with skylights,--yes,--stop, let us see if we
can't get something out of that.
One-story intellects, two--story intellects, three story intellects with
skylights. All fact--collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts,
are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using
the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own. Three-story men
idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above,
through the skylight. There are minds with large ground floors, that can
store an infinite amount of knowledge; some librarians, for instance,
who know enough of books to help other people, without being able to
make much other use of their knowledge, have intellects of this class.
Your great working lawyer has two spacious stories; his mind is clear,
because his mental floors are large, and he has room to arrange his
thoughts so that he can get at them,--facts below, principles above, and
all in ordered series; poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear
statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of
light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture, in the attics.
--The old Master smiled. I think he suspects himself of a three-story
intellect, and I don't feel sure that he is n't right.
--Is it dark meat or white meat you will be helped to?--said the
Landlady, addressing the Master.
--Dark meat for me, always,--he answered. Then turning to me, he began
one of those monologues of his, such as that which put the Member of the
Haouse asleep the other day.
--It 's pretty much the same in men and women and in books and
everything, that it is in turkeys and chickens. Why, take your poets,
now, say Browning and Tennyson. Don't you think you can say which is
the dark-meat and which is the white-meat poet? And so of the people
you know; can't you pick out the full-flavored, coarse-fibred characters
from the delicate, fine-fibred ones? And in the same person, don't you
know the same two shades in different parts of the character that you
find in the wing and thigh of a partridge? I suppose you poets may
like white meat best, very probably; you had rather have a wing than a
drumstick, I dare say.
--Why, yes,--said I,--I suppose some of us do. Perhaps it is because a
bird flies with his white-fleshed limbs and walks with the dark-fleshed
ones. Besides, the wing-muscles are nearer the heart than the
leg-muscles.
I thought that sounded mighty pretty, and paused a moment to pat myself
on the back, as is my wont when I say something that I think of superior
quality. So I lost my innings; for the Master is apt to strike in at the
end of a bar, instead of waiting for a rest, if I may borrow a musical
phrase. No matter, just at this moment, what he said; but he talked the
Member of the Haouse asleep again.
They have a new term nowadays (I am speaking to you, the Reader)
for people that do a good deal of talking; they call them
“conversationists,” or “conversationalists “; talkists, I suppose, would
do just as well. It is rather dangerous to get the name of being one
of these phenomenal manifestations, as one is expected to say something
remarkable every time one opens one's mouth in company. It seems hard
not to be able to ask for a piece of bread or a tumbler of water,
without a sensation running round the table, as if one were an electric
eel or a torpedo, and couldn't be touched without giving a shock. A
fellow is n't all battery, is he? The idea that a Gymnotus can't swallow
his worm without a coruscation of animal lightning is hard on that
brilliant but sensational being. Good talk is not a matter of will at
all; it depends--you know we are all half-materialists nowadays--on a
certain amount of active congestion of the brain, and that comes when it
is ready, and not before. I saw a man get up the other day in a pleasant
company, and talk away for about five minutes, evidently by a pure
effort of will. His person was good, his voice was pleasant, but anybody
could see that it was all mechanical labor; he was sparring for wind, as
the Hon. John Morrissey, M. C., would express himself. Presently,--
Do you,--Beloved, I am afraid you are not old enough,--but do you
remember the days of the tin tinder-box, the flint, and steel? Click!
click! click!--Al-h-h! knuckles that time! click! click! CLICK! a spark
has taken, and is eating into the black tinder, as a six-year-old eats
into a sheet of gingerbread.
Presently, after hammering away for his five minutes with mere words,
the spark of a happy expression took somewhere among the mental
combustibles, and then for ten minutes we had a pretty, wandering,
scintillating play of eloquent thought, that enlivened, if it did not
kindle, all around it. If you want the real philosophy of it, I will
give it to you. The chance thought or expression struck the nervous
centre of consciousness, as the rowel of a spur stings the flank of a
racer. Away through all the telegraphic radiations of the nervous cords
flashed the intelligence that the brain was kindling, and must be fed
with something or other, or it would burn itself to ashes.
And all the great hydraulic engines poured in their scarlet blood, and
the fire kindled, and the flame rose; for the blood is a stream that,
like burning rock-oil, at once kindles, and is itself the fuel. You
can't order these organic processes, any more than a milliner can make
a rose. She can make something that looks like a rose, more or less,
but it takes all the forces of the universe to finish and sweeten that
blossom in your button-hole; and you may be sure that when the orator's
brain is in a flame, when the poet's heart is in a tumult, it is
something mightier than he and his will that is dealing with him! As
I have looked from one of the northern windows of the street which
commands our noble estuary,--the view through which is a picture on an
illimitable canvas and a poem in innumerable cantos,--I have sometimes
seen a pleasure-boat drifting along, her sail flapping, and she seeming
as if she had neither will nor aim. At her stern a man was laboring to
bring her head round with an oar, to little purpose, as it seemed to
those who watched him pulling and tugging. But all at once the wind of
heaven, which had wandered all the way from Florida or from Labrador,
it may be, struck full upon the sail, and it swelled and rounded itself,
like a white bosom that had burst its bodice, and--
--You are right; it is too true! but how I love these pretty phrases! I
am afraid I am becoming an epicure in words, which is a bad thing to be,
unless it is dominated by something infinitely better than itself.
But there is a fascination in the mere sound of articulated breath; of
consonants that resist with the firmness of a maid of honor, or half or
wholly yield to the wooing lips; of vowels that flow and murmur, each
after its kind; the peremptory b and p, the brittle k, the vibrating r,
the insinuating s, the feathery f, the velvety v, the bell-voiced m, the
tranquil broad a, the penetrating e, the cooing u, the emotional o, and
the beautiful combinations of alternate rock and stream, as it were,
that they give to the rippling flow of speech,--there is a fascination
in the skilful handling of these, which the great poets and even
prose-writers have not disdained to acknowledge and use to recommend
their thought. What do you say to this line of Homer as a piece of
poetical full-band music? I know you read the Greek characters with
perfect ease, but permit me, just for my own satisfaction, to put it
into English letters:--
Aigle pamphanoosa di' aitheros ouranon ike!
as if he should have spoken in our poorer phrase of
Splendor far shining through ether to heaven ascending.
That Greek line, which I do not remember having heard mention of
as remarkable, has nearly every consonantal and vowel sound in the
language. Try it by the Greek and by the English alphabet; it is a
curiosity. Tell me that old Homer did not roll his sightless eyeballs
about with delight, as he thundered out these ringing syllables! It
seems hard to think of his going round like a hand-organ man, with such
music and such thought as his to earn his bread with. One can't help
wishing that Mr. Pugh could have got at him for a single lecture, at
least, of the “Star Course,” or that he could have appeared in the Music
Hall, “for this night only.”
--I know I have rambled, but I hope you see that this is a delicate way
of letting you into the nature of the individual who is, officially,
the principal personage at our table. It would hardly do to describe
him directly, you know. But you must not think, because the lightning
zigzags, it does not know where to strike.
I shall try to go through the rest of my description of our boarders
with as little of digression as is consistent with my nature. I think
we have a somewhat exceptional company. Since our Landlady has got up in
the world, her board has been decidedly a favorite with persons a little
above the average in point of intelligence and education. In fact,
ever since a boarder of hers, not wholly unknown to the reading public,
brought her establishment into notice, it has attracted a considerable
number of literary and scientific people, and now and then a politician,
like the Member of the House of Representatives, otherwise called the
Great and General Court of the State of Massachusetts. The consequence
is, that there is more individuality of character than in a good many
similar boardinghouses, where all are business-men, engrossed in the
same pursuit of money-making, or all are engaged in politics, and so
deeply occupied with the welfare of the community that they can think
and talk of little else.
At my left hand sits as singular-looking a human being as I remember
seeing outside of a regular museum or tent-show. His black coat shines
as if it had been polished; and it has been polished on the wearer's
back, no doubt, for the arms and other points of maximum attrition are
particularly smooth and bright. Round shoulders,--stooping over
some minute labor, I suppose. Very slender limbs, with bends like
a grasshopper's; sits a great deal, I presume; looks as if he might
straighten them out all of a sudden, and jump instead of walking. Wears
goggles very commonly; says it rests his eyes, which he strains in
looking at very small objects. Voice has a dry creak, as if made by
some small piece of mechanism that wanted oiling. I don't think he is
a botanist, for he does not smell of dried herbs, but carries a
camphorated atmosphere about with him, as if to keep the moths from
attacking him. I must find out what is his particular interest. One
ought to know something about his immediate neighbors at the table.
This is what I said to myself, before opening a conversation with him.
Everybody in our ward of the city was in a great stir about a certain
election, and I thought I might as well begin with that as anything.
--How do you think the vote is likely to go tomorrow?--I said.
--It isn't to-morrow,--he answered,--it 's next month.
--Next month!--said I.--Why, what election do you mean?
--I mean the election to the Presidency of the Entomological Society,
sir,--he creaked, with an air of surprise, as if nobody could by any
possibility have been thinking of any other. Great competition, sir,
between the dipterists and the lepidopterists as to which shall get
in their candidate. Several close ballotings already; adjourned for a
fortnight. Poor concerns, both of 'em. Wait till our turn comes.
--I suppose you are an entomologist?--I said with a note of
interrogation.
-Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes
on the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an
Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as
that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir,
a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist,
sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.
--May I venture to ask,--I said, a little awed by his statement and
manner,--what is your special province of study?
I am often spoken of as a Coleopterist,--he said,--but I have no right
to so comprehensive a name. The genus Scarabaeus is what I have chiefly
confined myself to, and ought to have studied exclusively. The beetles
proper are quite enough for the labor of one man's life. Call me a
Scarabaeist if you will; if I can prove myself worthy of that name, my
highest ambition will be more than satisfied.
I think, by way of compromise and convenience, I shall call him the
Scarabee. He has come to look wonderfully like those creatures,--the
beetles, I mean,--by being so much among them. His room is hung round
with cases of them, each impaled on a pin driven through him, something
as they used to bury suicides. These cases take the place for him
of pictures and all other ornaments. That Boy steals into his room
sometimes, and stares at them with great admiration, and has himself
undertaken to form a rival cabinet, chiefly consisting of flies, so far,
arranged in ranks superintended by an occasional spider.
The old Master, who is a bachelor, has a kindly feeling for this little
monkey, and those of his kind.
--I like children,--he said to me one day at table,--I like 'em, and I
respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the
world is done by them. Do you know they play the part in the household
which the king's jester, who very often had a mighty long head under his
cap and bells, used to play for a monarch? There 's no radical club
like a nest of little folks in a nursery. Did you ever watch a baby's
fingers? I have, often enough, though I never knew what it was to own
one.--The Master paused half a minute or so,--sighed,--perhaps at
thinking what he had missed in life,--looked up at me a little vacantly.
I saw what was the matter; he had lost the thread of his talk.
--Baby's fingers,--I intercalated.
-Yes, yes; did you ever see how they will poke those wonderful little
fingers of theirs into every fold and crack and crevice they can get at?
That is their first education, feeling their way into the solid facts
of the material world. When they begin to talk it is the same thing over
again in another shape. If there is a crack or a flaw in your answer
to their confounded shoulder-hitting questions, they will poke and poke
until they have got it gaping just as the baby's fingers have made a
rent out of that atom of a hole in his pinafore that your old eyes never
took notice of. Then they make such fools of us by copying on a small
scale what we do in the grand manner. I wonder if it ever occurs to our
dried-up neighbor there to ask himself whether That Boy's collection
of flies is n't about as significant in the Order of Things as his own
Museum of Beetles?
--I couldn't help thinking that perhaps That Boy's questions about the
simpler mysteries of life might have a good deal of the same kind of
significance as the Master's inquiries into the Order of Things.
--On my left, beyond my next neighbor the Scarabee, at the end of the
table, sits a person of whom we know little, except that he carries
about him more palpable reminiscences of tobacco and the allied sources
of comfort than a very sensitive organization might find acceptable.
The Master does not seem to like him much, for some reason or
other,--perhaps he has a special aversion to the odor of tobacco. As
his forefinger shows a little too distinctly that he uses a pen, I shall
compliment him by calling him the Man of Letters, until I find out more
about him.
--The Young Girl who sits on my right, next beyond the Master, can
hardly be more than nineteen or twenty years old. I wish I could paint
her so as to interest others as much as she does me. But she has not a
profusion of sunny tresses wreathing a neck of alabaster, and a cheek
where the rose and the lily are trying to settle their old quarrel with
alternating victory. Her hair is brown, her cheek is delicately pallid,
her forehead is too ample for a ball-room beauty's. A single faint line
between the eyebrows is the record of long--continued anxious efforts to
please in the task she has chosen, or rather which has been forced upon
her. It is the same line of anxious and conscientious effort which I saw
not long since on the forehead of one of the sweetest and truest singers
who has visited us; the same which is so striking on the masks of
singing women painted upon the facade of our Great Organ,--that
Himalayan home of harmony which you are to see and then die, if you
don't live where you can see and hear it often. Many deaths have
happened in a neighboring large city from that well-known complaint,
Icterus Invidiosorum, after returning from a visit to the Music Hall.
The invariable symptom of a fatal attack is the Risus Sardonicus.--But
the Young Girl. She gets her living by writing stories for a newspaper.
Every week she furnishes a new story. If her head aches or her heart
is heavy, so that she does not come to time with her story, she falls
behindhand and has to live on credit. It sounds well enough to say
that “she supports herself by her pen,” but her lot is a trying one; it
repeats the doom of the Danaides. The “Weekly Bucket” has no bottom, and
it is her business to help fill it. Imagine for one moment what it is
to tell a tale that must flow on, flow ever, without pausing; the lover
miserable and happy this week, to begin miserable again next week and
end as before; the villain scowling, plotting, punished; to scowl,
plot, and get punished again in our next; an endless series of woes and
busses, into each paragraph of which the forlorn artist has to throw all
the liveliness, all the emotion, all the graces of style she is mistress
of, for the wages of a maid of all work, and no more recognition or
thanks from anybody than the apprentice who sets the types for the paper
that prints her ever-ending and ever-beginning stories. And yet she has
a pretty talent, sensibility, a natural way of writing, an ear for
the music of verse, in which she sometimes indulges to vary the dead
monotony of everlasting narrative, and a sufficient amount of invention
to make her stories readable. I have found my eyes dimmed over them
oftener than once, more with thinking about her, perhaps, than about
her heroes and heroines. Poor little body! Poor little mind! Poor
little soul! She is one of that great company of delicate, intelligent,
emotional young creatures, who are waiting, like that sail I spoke of,
for some breath of heaven to fill their white bosoms,--love, the
right of every woman; religious emotion, sister of love, with the same
passionate eyes, but cold, thin, bloodless hands,--some enthusiasm of
humanity or divinity; and find that life offers them, instead, a seat
on a wooden bench, a chain to fasten them to it, and a heavy oar to pull
day and night. We read the Arabian tales and pity the doomed lady who
must amuse her lord and master from day to day or have her head cut off;
how much better is a mouth without bread to fill it than no mouth at all
to fill, because no head? We have all round us a weary-eyed company of
Scheherezades! This is one of them, and I may call her by that name when
it pleases me to do so.
The next boarder I have to mention is the one who sits between the Young
Girl and the Landlady. In a little chamber into which a small thread of
sunshine finds its way for half an hour or so every day during a month
or six weeks of the spring or autumn, at all other times obliged to
content itself with ungilded daylight, lives this boarder, whom, without
wronging any others of our company, I may call, as she is very generally
called in the household, The Lady. In giving her this name it is not
meant that there are no other ladies at our table, or that the handmaids
who serve us are not ladies, or to deny the general proposition that
everybody who wears the unbifurcated garment is entitled to that
appellation. Only this lady has a look and manner which there is no
mistaking as belonging to a person always accustomed to refined and
elegant society. Her style is perhaps a little more courtly and gracious
than some would like. The language and manner which betray the habitual
desire of pleasing, and which add a charm to intercourse in the higher
social circles, are liable to be construed by sensitive beings unused to
such amenities as an odious condescension when addressed to persons of
less consideration than the accused, and as a still more odious--you
know the word--when directed to those who are esteemed by the world as
considerable person ages. But of all this the accused are fortunately
wholly unconscious, for there is nothing so entirely natural and
unaffected as the highest breeding.
From an aspect of dignified but undisguised economy which showed itself
in her dress as well as in her limited quarters, I suspected a story
of shipwrecked fortune, and determined to question our Landlady. That
worthy woman was delighted to tell the history of her most distinguished
boarder. She was, as I had supposed, a gentlewoman whom a change of
circumstances had brought down from her high estate.
--Did I know the Goldenrod family?--Of course I did.--Well, the Lady,
was first cousin to Mrs. Midas Goldenrod. She had been here in her
carriage to call upon her,--not very often.--Were her rich relations
kind and helpful to her?--Well, yes; at least they made her presents
now and then. Three or four years ago they sent her a silver waiter, and
every Christmas they sent her a boquet,--it must cost as much as five
dollars, the Landlady thought.
--And how did the Lady receive these valuable and useful gifts?
--Every Christmas she got out the silver waiter and borrowed a glass
tumbler and filled it with water, and put the boquet in it and set it
on the waiter. It smelt sweet enough and looked pretty for a day or
two, but the Landlady thought it wouldn't have hurt 'em if they'd sent a
piece of goods for a dress, or at least a pocket-handkercher or two,
or something or other that she could 'a' made some kind of use of;
but beggars must n't be choosers; not that she was a beggar, for she'd
sooner die than do that if she was in want of a meal of victuals. There
was a lady I remember, and she had a little boy and she was a widow,
and after she'd buried her husband she was dreadful poor, and she was
ashamed to let her little boy go out in his old shoes, and copper-toed
shoes they was too, because his poor little ten--toes--was a coming out
of 'em; and what do you think my husband's rich uncle,--well, there
now, it was me and my little Benjamin, as he was then, there's no use
in hiding of it,--and what do you think my husband's uncle sent me but a
plaster of Paris image of a young woman, that was,--well, her appearance
wasn't respectable, and I had to take and wrap her up in a towel and
poke her right into my closet, and there she stayed till she got her
head broke and served her right, for she was n't fit to show folks.
You need n't say anything about what I told you, but the fact is I was
desperate poor before I began to support myself taking boarders, and a
lone woman without her--her--
The sentence plunged into the gulf of her great remembered sorrow, and
was lost to the records of humanity.
--Presently she continued in answer to my questions: The Lady was not
very sociable; kept mostly to herself. The Young Girl (our Scheherezade)
used to visit her sometimes, and they seemed to like each other, but the
Young Girl had not many spare hours for visiting. The Lady never found
fault, but she was very nice in her tastes, and kept everything about
her looking as neat and pleasant as she could.
--What did she do?--Why, she read, and she drew pictures, and she did
needlework patterns, and played on an old harp she had; the gilt was
mostly off, but it sounded very sweet, and she sung to it sometimes,
those old songs that used to be in fashion twenty or thirty years ago,
with words to 'em that folks could understand.
Did she do anything to help support herself?--The Landlady couldn't say
she did, but she thought there was rich people enough that ought to buy
the flowers and things she worked and painted.
All this points to the fact that she was bred to be an ornamental rather
than what is called a useful member of society. This is all very well
so long as fortune favors those who are chosen to be the ornamental
personages; but if the golden tide recedes and leaves them stranded,
they are more to be pitied than almost any other class. “I cannot dig,
to beg I am ashamed.”
I think it is unpopular in this country to talk much about gentlemen and
gentlewomen. People are touchy about social distinctions, which no doubt
are often invidious and quite arbitrary and accidental, but which it
is impossible to avoid recognizing as facts of natural history. Society
stratifies itself everywhere, and the stratum which is generally
recognized as the uppermost will be apt to have the advantage in easy
grace of manner and in unassuming confidence, and consequently be
more agreeable in the superficial relations of life. To compare these
advantages with the virtues and utilities would be foolish. Much of the
noblest work in life is done by ill-dressed, awkward, ungainly persons;
but that is no more reason for undervaluing good manners and what we
call high-breeding, than the fact that the best part of the sturdy labor
of the world is done by men with exceptionable hands is to be urged
against the use of Brown Windsor as a preliminary to appearance in
cultivated society.
I mean to stand up for this poor lady, whose usefulness in the world
is apparently problematical. She seems to me like a picture which has
fallen from its gilded frame and lies, face downward, on the dusty
floor. The picture never was as needful as a window or a door, but it
was pleasant to see it in its place, and it would be pleasant to see
it there again, and I, for one, should be thankful to have the Lady
restored by some turn of fortune to the position from which she has been
so cruelly cast down.
--I have asked the Landlady about the young man sitting near her, the
same who attracted my attention the other day while I was talking, as
I mentioned. He passes most of his time in a private observatory, it
appears; a watcher of the stars. That I suppose gives the peculiar look
to his lustrous eyes. The Master knows him and was pleased to tell me
something about him.
You call yourself a Poet,--he said,--and we call you so, too, and so
you are; I read your verses and like 'em. But that young man lives in a
world beyond the imagination of poets, let me tell you. The daily
home of his thought is in illimitable space, hovering between the two
eternities. In his contemplations the divisions of time run together,
as in the thought of his Maker. With him also,--I say it not
profanely,--one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one
day.
This account of his occupation increased the interest his look had
excited in me, and I have observed him more particularly and found out
more about him. Sometimes, after a long night's watching, he looks so
pale and worn, that one would think the cold moonlight had stricken him
with some malign effluence such as it is fabled to send upon those who
sleep in it. At such times he seems more like one who has come from a
planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of
us terrestrial creatures. His home is truly in the heavens, and he
practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to
that of Saint Simeon Stylites. Yet they tell me he might live in luxury
if he spent on himself what he spends on science. His knowledge is
of that strange, remote character, that it seems sometimes almost
superhuman. He knows the ridges and chasms of the moon as a surveyor
knows a garden-plot he has measured. He watches the snows that gather
around the poles of Mars; he is on the lookout for the expected comet at
the moment when its faint stain of diffused light first shows itself; he
analyzes the ray that comes from the sun's photosphere; he measures the
rings of Saturn; he counts his asteroids to see that none are missing,
as the shepherd counts the sheep in his flock. A strange unearthly
being; lonely, dwelling far apart from the thoughts and cares of
the planet on which he lives,--an enthusiast who gives his life to
knowledge; a student of antiquity, to whom the records of the geologist
are modern pages in the great volume of being, and the pyramids a
memorandum of yesterday, as the eclipse or occultation that is to take
place thousands of years hence is an event of to-morrow in the diary
without beginning and without end where he enters the aspect of the
passing moment as it is read on the celestial dial.
In very marked contrast with this young man is the something more than
middle-aged Register of Deeds, a rusty, sallow, smoke-dried looking
personage, who belongs to this earth as exclusively as the other
belongs to the firmament. His movements are as mechanical as those of
a pendulum,--to the office, where he changes his coat and plunges into
messuages and building-lots; then, after changing his coat again, back
to our table, and so, day by day, the dust of years gradually gathering
around him as it does on the old folios that fill the shelves all round
the great cemetery of past transactions of which he is the sexton.
Of the Salesman who sits next him, nothing need be said except that he
is good-looking, rosy, well-dressed, and of very polite manners, only a
little more brisk than the approved style of carriage permits, as one
in the habit of springing with a certain alacrity at the call of a
customer.
You would like to see, I don't doubt, how we sit at the table, and I
will help you by means of a diagram which shows the present arrangement
of our seats.
4 3 2 1 14 13
---------------------------------
| O O O O O O |
| |
5 | O Breakfast-Table O |12
| |
| O O O O O O |
---------------------------------
6 7 8 9 10 11
1. The Poet.
2. The Master Of Arts.
3. The Young Girl (Scheherezade).
4. The Lady.
5. The Landlady.
6. Dr. B. Franklin.
7. That Boy.
8. The Astronomer.
9. The Member of the Haouse.
10. The Register of Deeds.
11. The Salesman.
12. The Capitalist.
13. The Man of Letters(?).
14. The Scarabee.
Our young Scheherezade varies her prose stories now and then, as I told
you, with compositions in verse, one or two of which she has let me look
over. Here is one of them, which she allowed me to copy. It is from a
story of hers, “The Sun-Worshipper's Daughter,” which you may find in
the periodical before mentioned, to which she is a contributor, if your
can lay your hand upon a file of it. I think our Scheherezade has never
had a lover in human shape, or she would not play so lightly with the
firebrands of the great passion.