--Why, I laughed because I couldn't help saying to myself that a woman
whose mind was taken up with thinking how she looked, and how her pretty
neighbor looked, wouldn't have a great deal of thought to spare for all
your fine discourse.
--Come, now,--said I,--a man who contradicts himself in the course of
two minutes must have a screw loose in his mental machinery. I never
feel afraid that such a thing can happen to me, though it happens often
enough when I turn a thought over suddenly, as you did that five-cent
piece the other day, that it reads differently on its two sides. What I
meant to say is something like this. A woman, notwithstanding she is the
best of listeners, knows her business, and it is a woman's business to
please. I don't say that it is not her business to vote, but I do say
that a woman who does not please is a false note in the harmonies of
nature. She may not have youth, or beauty, or even manner; but she must
have something in her voice or expression, or both, which it makes you
feel better disposed towards your race to look at or listen to. She
knows that as well as we do; and her first question after you have been
talking your soul into her consciousness is, Did I please? A woman never
forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any
day.
--This frightful speech of mine reached the ear of our Scheherezade, who
said that it was perfectly shocking and that I deserved to be shown up
as the outlaw in one of her bandit stories.
Hush, my dear,--said the Lady,--you will have to bring John Milton
into your story with our friend there, if you punish everybody who
says naughty things like that. Send the little boy up to my chamber for
Paradise Lost, if you please. He will find it lying on my table. The
little old volume,--he can't mistake it.
So the girl called That Boy round and gave him the message; I don't know
why she should give it, but she did, and the Lady helped her out with a
word or two.
The little volume--its cover protected with soft white leather from a
long kid glove, evidently suggesting the brilliant assemblies of the
days when friends and fortune smiled-came presently and the Lady opened
it.--You may read that, if you like, she said,--it may show you that
our friend is to be pilloried in good company.
The Young Girl ran her eye along the passage the Lady pointed out,
blushed, laughed, and slapped the book down as though she would have
liked to box the ears of Mr. John Milton, if he had been a contemporary
and fellow-contributor to the “Weekly Bucket.”--I won't touch the
thing,--she said.--He was a horrid man to talk so: and he had as many
wives as Blue-Beard.
--Fair play,--said the Master.--Bring me the book, my little fractional
superfluity,--I mean you, my nursling,--my boy, if that suits your small
Highness better.
The Boy brought the book.
The old Master, not unfamiliar with the great epic opened pretty nearly
to the place, and very soon found the passage: He read, aloud with grand
scholastic intonation and in a deep voice that silenced the table as if
a prophet had just uttered Thus saith the Lord:--
“So spake our sire, and by his countenance seemed
Entering on studious thoughts abstruse; which Eve
Perceiving--”
went to water her geraniums, to make a short story of it, and left
the two “conversationists,” to wit, the angel Raphael and the
gentleman,--there was but one gentleman in society then, you know,--to
talk it out.
“Yet went she not, as not with such discourse
Delighted, or not capable her ear
Of what was high; such pleasure she reserved,
Adam relating, she sole auditress;
Her husband the relater she preferred
Before the angel, and of him to ask
Chose rather; he she knew would intermix
Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute
With conjugal caresses: from his lips
Not words alone pleased her.”
Everybody laughed, except the Capitalist, who was a little hard of
hearing, and the Scarabee, whose life was too earnest for demonstrations
of that kind. He had his eyes fixed on the volume, however, with eager
interest.
--The p'int 's carried,--said the Member of the Haouse.
Will you let me look at that book a single minute?--said the Scarabee.
I passed it to him, wondering what in the world he wanted of Paradise
Lost.
Dermestes lardarius,--he said, pointing to a place where the edge of one
side of the outer cover had been slightly tasted by some insect.--Very
fond of leather while they 're in the larva state.
--Damage the goods as bad as mice,--said the Salesman.
--Eat half the binding off Folio 67,--said the Register of Deeds.
Something did, anyhow, and it was n't mice. Found the shelf covered with
little hairy cases belonging to something or other that had no business
there.
Skins of the Dermestes lardaraus,--said the Scarabee,--you can always
tell them by those brown hairy coats. That 's the name to give them.
--What good does it do to give 'em a name after they 've eat the binding
off my folios?--asked the Register of Deeds.
The Scarabee had too much respect for science to answer such a question
as that; and the book, having served its purposes, was passed back to
the Lady.
I return to the previous question,--said I,--if our friend the Member of
the House of Representatives will allow me to borrow the phrase. Womanly
women are very kindly critics, except to themselves and now and then to
their own sex. The less there is of sex about a woman, the more she is
to be dreaded. But take a real woman at her best moment,--well dressed
enough to be pleased with herself, not so resplendent as to be a
show and a sensation, with those varied outside influences which set
vibrating the harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about
her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital
interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour
memorable? What can equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of
apprehension, her quickness to feel the changes of temperature as the
warm and cool currents of talk blow by turns? At one moment she is
microscopically intellectual, critical, scrupulous in judgment as an
analyst's balance, and the next as sympathetic as the open rose that
sweetens the wind from whatever quarter it finds its way to her bosom.
It is in the hospitable soul of a woman that a man forgets he is a
stranger, and so becomes natural and truthful, at the same time that he
is mesmerized by all those divine differences which make her a mystery
and a bewilderment to--
If you fire your popgun at me, you little chimpanzee, I will stick a pin
right through the middle of you and put you into one of this gentleman's
beetle-cases!
I caught the imp that time, but what started him was more than I could
guess. It is rather hard that this spoiled child should spoil such a
sentence as that was going to be; but the wind shifted all at once, and
the talk had to come round on another tack, or at least fall off a point
or two from its course.
--I'll tell you who I think are the best talkers in all probability,
--said I to the Master, who, as I mentioned, was developing interesting
talent as a listener,--poets who never write verses. And there are a
good many more of these than it would seem at first sight. I think you
may say every young lover is a poet, to begin with. I don't mean either
that all young lovers are good talkers,--they have an eloquence all
their own when they are with the beloved object, no doubt, emphasized
after the fashion the solemn bard of Paradise refers to with such
delicious humor in the passage we just heard,--but a little talk goes a
good way in most of these cooing matches, and it wouldn't do to report
them too literally. What I mean is, that a man with the gift of musical
and impassioned phrase (and love often deeds that to a young person for
a while), who “wreaks” it, to borrow Byron's word, on conversation as
the natural outlet of his sensibilities and spiritual activities, is
likely to talk better than the poet, who plays on the instrument of
verse. A great pianist or violinist is rarely a great singer. To write
a poem is to expend the vital force which would have made one brilliant
for an hour or two, and to expend it on an instrument with more pipes,
reeds, keys, stops, and pedals than the Great Organ that shakes New
England every time it is played in full blast.
Do you mean that it is hard work to write a poem?--said the old
Master.--I had an idea that a poem wrote itself, as it were, very
often; that it came by influx, without voluntary effort; indeed, you
have spoken of it as an inspiration rather than a result of volition.
--Did you ever see a great ballet-dancer?--I asked him.
--I have seen Taglioni,--he answered.--She used to take her steps
rather prettily. I have seen the woman that danced the capstone on to
Bunker Hill Monument, as Orpheus moved the rocks by music, the Elssler
woman,--Fanny Elssler. She would dance you a rigadoon or cut a pigeon's
wing for you very respectably.
(Confound this old college book-worm,---he has seen everything!)
Well, did these two ladies dance as if it was hard work to them?
--Why no, I should say they danced as if they liked it and couldn't help
dancing; they looked as if they felt so “corky” it was hard to keep them
down.
--And yet they had been through such work to get their limbs strong and
flexible and obedient, that a cart-horse lives an easy life compared to
theirs while they were in training.
--The Master cut in just here--I had sprung the trap of a reminiscence.
--When I was a boy,--he said,--some of the mothers in our small town,
who meant that their children should know what was what as well as other
people's children, laid their heads together and got a dancing-master to
come out from the city and give instruction at a few dollars a quarter
to the young folks of condition in the village. Some of their husbands
were ministers and some were deacons, but the mothers knew what they
were about, and they did n't see any reason why ministers' and deacons'
wives' children shouldn't have as easy manners as the sons and daughters
of Belial. So, as I tell you, they got a dancing-master to come out to
our place,--a man of good repute, a most respectable man,--madam (to
the Landlady), you must remember the worthy old citizen, in his
advanced age, going about the streets, a most gentlemanly bundle of
infirmities,--only he always cocked his hat a little too much on
one side, as they do here and there along the Connecticut River, and
sometimes on our city sidewalks, when they've got a new beaver; they got
him, I say, to give us boys and girls lessons in dancing and deportment.
He was as gray and as lively as a squirrel, as I remember him, and used
to spring up in the air and “cross his feet,” as we called it, three
times before he came down. Well, at the end of each term there was what
they called an “exhibition ball,” in which the scholars danced cotillons
and country-dances; also something called a “gavotte,” and I think one
or more walked a minuet. But all this is not what--I wanted to say. At
this exhibition ball he used to bring out a number of hoops wreathed
with roses, of the perennial kind, by the aid of which a number of
amazingly complicated and startling evolutions were exhibited; and also
his two daughters, who figured largely in these evolutions, and whose
wonderful performances to us, who had not seen Miss Taglioni or Miss
Elssler, were something quite bewildering, in fact, surpassing the
natural possibilities of human beings. Their extraordinary powers were,
however, accounted for by the following explanation, which was accepted
in the school as entirely satisfactory. A certain little bone in the
ankles of each of these young girls had been broken intentionally,
secundum artem, at a very early age, and thus they had been fitted to
accomplish these surprising feats which threw the achievements of
the children who were left in the condition of the natural man into
ignominious shadow.
--Thank you,--said I,--you have helped out my illustration so as to make
it better than I expected. Let me begin again. Every poem that is worthy
of the name, no matter how easily it seems to be written, represents
a great amount of vital force expended at some time or other. When you
find a beach strewed with the shells and other spoils that belonged once
to the deep sea, you know the tide has been there, and that the winds
and waves have wrestled over its naked sands. And so, if I find a poem
stranded in my soul and have nothing to do but seize it as a wrecker
carries off the treasure he finds cast ashore, I know I have paid at
some time for that poem with some inward commotion, were it only an
excess of enjoyment, which has used up just so much of my vital capital.
But besides all the impressions that furnished the stuff of the poem,
there has been hard work to get the management of that wonderful
instrument I spoke of,--the great organ, language. An artist who works
in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man
who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized
by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling. I don't know that
you must break any bones in a poet's mechanism before his thought
can dance in rhythm, but read your Milton and see what training, what
patient labor, it took before he could shape our common speech into his
majestic harmonies.
It is rather singular, but the same kind of thing has happened to me not
very rarely before, as I suppose it has to most persons, that just when
I happened to be thinking about poets and their conditions, this very
morning, I saw a paragraph or two from a foreign paper which is apt to
be sharp, if not cynical, relating to the same matter. I can't help
it; I want to have my talk about it, and if I say the same things that
writer did, somebody else can have the satisfaction of saying I stole
them all.
[I thought the person whom I have called hypothetically the Man
of Letters changed color a little and betrayed a certain awkward
consciousness that some of us were looking at him or thinking of him;
but I am a little suspicious about him and may do him wrong.]
That poets are treated as privileged persons by their admirers and the
educated public can hardly be disputed. That they consider themselves so
there is no doubt whatever. On the whole, I do not know so easy a way of
shirking all the civic and social and domestic duties, as to settle it
in one's mind that one is a poet. I have, therefore, taken great pains
to advise other persons laboring under the impression that they were
gifted beings, destined to soar in the atmosphere of song above the
vulgar realities of earth, not to neglect any homely duty under the
influence of that impression. The number of these persons is so great
that if they were suffered to indulge their prejudice against every-day
duties and labors, it would be a serious loss to the productive
industry of the country. My skirts are clear (so far as other people are
concerned) of countenancing that form of intellectual opium-eating in
which rhyme takes the place of the narcotic. But what are you going to
do when you find John Keats an apprentice to a surgeon or apothecary? Is
n't it rather better to get another boy to sweep out the shop and shake
out the powders and stir up the mixtures, and leave him undisturbed to
write his Ode on a Grecian Urn or to a Nightingale? Oh yes, the critic
I have referred to would say, if he is John Keats; but not if he is of
a much lower grade, even though he be genuine, what there is of him. But
the trouble is, the sensitive persons who belong to the lower grades
of the poetical hierarchy do not--know their own poetical limitations,
while they do feel a natural unfitness and disinclination for many
pursuits which young persons of the average balance of faculties take to
pleasantly enough. What is forgotten is this, that every real poet,
even of the humblest grade, is an artist. Now I venture to say that any
painter or sculptor of real genius, though he may do nothing more than
paint flowers and fruit, or carve cameos, is considered a privileged
person. It is recognized perfectly that to get his best work he must
be insured the freedom from disturbances which the creative power
absolutely demands, more absolutely perhaps in these slighter artists
than in the great masters. His nerves must be steady for him to finish a
rose-leaf or the fold of a nymph's drapery in his best manner; and
they will be unsteadied if he has to perform the honest drudgery which
another can do for him quite as well. And it is just so with the poet,
though he were only finishing an epigram; you must no more meddle
roughly with him than you would shake a bottle of Chambertin and expect
the “sunset glow” to redden your glass unclouded. On the other hand,
it may be said that poetry is not an article of prime necessity, and
potatoes are. There is a disposition in many persons just now to deny
the poet his benefit of clergy, and to hold him no better than other
people. Perhaps he is not, perhaps he is not so good, half the time; but
he is a luxury, and if you want him you must pay for him, by not trying
to make a drudge of him while he is all his lifetime struggling with the
chills and heats of his artistic intermittent fever.
There may have been some lesser interruptions during the talk I have
reported as if it was a set speech, but this was the drift of what I
said and should have said if the other man, in the Review I referred to,
had not seen fit to meddle with the subject, as some fellow always does,
just about the time when I am going to say something about it. The old
Master listened beautifully, except for cutting in once, as I told
you he did. But now he had held in as long as it was in his nature to
contain himself, and must have his say or go off in an apoplexy,
or explode in some way.--I think you're right about the poets,--he
said.--They are to common folks what repeaters are to ordinary watches.
They carry music in their inside arrangements, but they want to be
handled carefully or you put them out of order. And perhaps you must
n't expect them to be quite as good timekeepers as the professional
chronometer watches that make a specialty of being exact within a few
seconds a month. They think too much of themselves. So does everybody
that considers himself as having a right to fall back on what he calls
his idiosyncrasy. Yet a man has such a right, and it is no easy thing to
adjust the private claim to the fair public demand on him. Suppose you
are subject to tic douloureux, for instance. Every now and then a tiger
that nobody can see catches one side of your face between his jaws and
holds on till he is tired and lets go. Some concession must be made to
you on that score, as everybody can see. It is fair to give you a seat
that is not in the draught, and your friends ought not to find
fault with you if you do not care to join a party that is going on a
sleigh-ride. Now take a poet like Cowper. He had a mental neuralgia, a
great deal worse in many respects than tic douloureux confined to the
face. It was well that he was sheltered and relieved, by the cares of
kind friends, especially those good women, from as many of the burdens
of life as they could lift off from him. I am fair to the poets,--don't
you agree that I am?
Why, yes,--I said,--you have stated the case fairly enough, a good deal
as I should have put it myself.
Now, then,--the Master continued,--I 'll tell you what is necessary to
all these artistic idiosyncrasies to bring them into good square human
relations outside of the special province where their ways differ
from those of other people. I am going to illustrate what I mean by a
comparison. I don't know, by the way, but you would be disposed to think
and perhaps call me a wine-bibber on the strength of the freedom with
which I deal with that fluid for the purposes of illustration. But I
make mighty little use of it, except as it furnishes me an image now and
then, as it did, for that matter, to the Disciples and their Master.
In my younger days they used to bring up the famous old wines, the
White-top, the Juno, the Eclipse, the Essex Junior, and the rest, in
their old cobwebbed, dusty bottles. The resurrection of one of these old
sepulchred dignitaries had something of solemnity about it; it was like
the disinterment of a king; the bringing to light of the Royal Martyr
King Charles I., for instance, that Sir Henry Halford gave such an
interesting account of. And the bottle seemed to inspire a personal
respect; it was wrapped in a napkin and borne tenderly and reverently
round to the guests, and sometimes a dead silence went before the first
gush of its amber flood, and
“The boldest held his breath
For a time.”
But nowadays the precious juice of a long-dead vintage is transferred
carefully into a cut-glass decanter, and stands side by side with the
sherry from a corner grocery, which looks just as bright and apparently
thinks just as well of itself. The old historic Madeiras, which have
warmed the periods of our famous rhetoricians of the past and burned
in the impassioned eloquence of our earlier political demigods, have
nothing to mark them externally but a bit of thread, it may be, round
the neck of the decanter, or a slip of ribbon, pink on one of them and
blue on another.
Go to a London club,--perhaps I might find something nearer home that
would serve my turn,--but go to a London club, and there you will see
the celebrities all looking alike modern, all decanted off from
their historic antecedents and their costume of circumstance into the
every-day aspect of the gentleman of common cultivated society. That is
Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain
gray suit; there is the Laureate in a frockcoat like your own, and the
leader of the House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy. That is the
kind of thing you want to take the nonsense out of you. If you are not
decanted off from yourself every few days or weeks, you will think it
sacrilege to brush a cobweb from your cork by and by. O little
fool, that has published a little book full of little poems or other
sputtering tokens of an uneasy condition, how I love you for the one
soft nerve of special sensibility that runs through your exiguous
organism, and the one phosphorescent particle in your unilluminated
intelligence! But if you don't leave your spun-sugar confectionery
business once in a while, and come out among lusty men,--the bristly,
pachydermatous fellows that hew out the highways for the material
progress of society, and the broad-shouldered, out-of-door men that
fight for the great prizes of life,--you will come to think that the
spun-sugar business is the chief end of man, and begin to feel and
look as if you believed yourself as much above common people as that
personage of whom Tourgueneff says that “he had the air of his own
statue erected by national subscription.”
--The Master paused and fell into a deep thinking fit, as he does
sometimes. He had had his own say, it is true, but he had established
his character as a listener to my own perfect satisfaction, for I, too,
was conscious of having preached with a certain prolixity.
--I am always troubled when I think of my very limited mathematical
capacities. It seems as if every well-organized mind should be able to
handle numbers and quantities through their symbols to an indefinite
extent; and yet, I am puzzled by what seems to a clever boy with a turn
for calculation as plain as counting his fingers. I don't think any
man feels well grounded in knowledge unless he has a good basis of
mathematical certainties, and knows how to deal with them and apply them
to every branch of knowledge where they can come in to advantage.
Our Young Astronomer is known for his mathematical ability, and I asked
him what he thought was the difficulty in the minds that are weak in
that particular direction, while they may be of remarkable force in
other provinces of thought, as is notoriously the case with some men of
great distinction in science.
The young man smiled and wrote a few letters and symbols on a piece of
paper.--Can you see through that at once?--he said.