The Monument is an awful place to visit,--I said.--The waves of time
are like the waves of the ocean; the only thing they beat against
without destroying it is a rock; and they destroy that at last. But it
takes a good while. There is a stone now standing in very good order
that was as old as a monument of Louis XIV. and Queen Anne's day is
now when Joseph went down into Egypt. Think of the shaft on Bunker Hill
standing in the sunshine on the morning of January 1st in the year 5872!
It won't be standing,--the Master said.--We are poor bunglers compared
to those old Egyptians. There are no joints in one of their obelisks.
They are our masters in more ways than we know of, and in more ways than
some of us are willing to know. That old Lawgiver wasn't learned in all
the wisdom of the Egyptians for nothing. It scared people well a couple
of hundred years ago when Sir John Marsham and Dr. John Spencer ventured
to tell their stories about the sacred ceremonies of the Egyptian
priesthood. People are beginning to find out now that you can't study
any religion by itself to any good purpose. You must have comparative
theology as you have comparative anatomy. What would you make of a cat's
foolish little good-for-nothing collar-bone, if you did not know how
the same bone means a good deal in other creatures,--in yourself, for
instance, as you 'll find out if you break it? You can't know too much
of your race and its beliefs, if you want to know anything about your
Maker. I never found but one sect large enough to hold the whole of me.
--And may I ask what that was?--I said.
--The Human sect,--the Master answered. That has about room enough for
me,--at present, I mean to say.
--Including cannibals and all?--said I.
-Oh, as to that, the eating of one's kind is a matter of taste, but the
roasting of them has been rather more a specialty of our own particular
belief than of any other I am acquainted with. If you broil a saint, I
don't see why, if you have a mind, you shouldn't serve him up at your--
Pop! went the little piece of artillery. Don't tell me it was accident.
I know better. You can't suppose for one minute that a boy like that
one would time his interruptions so cleverly. Now it so happened that
at that particular moment Dr. B. Franklin was not at the table. You may
draw your own conclusions. I say nothing, but I think a good deal.
--I came back to the Bunker Hill Monument.--I often think--I said--of
the dynasty which is to reign in its shadow for some thousands of years,
it may be.
The “Man of Letters,” so called, asked me, in a tone I did not exactly
like, whether I expected to live long enough to see a monarchy take the
place of a republic in this country.
--No,--said I,--I was thinking of something very different. I was
indulging a fancy of mine about the Man who is to sit at the foot of the
monument for one, or it may be two or three thousand years. As long as
the monument stands and there is a city near it, there will always be
a man to take the names of visitors and extract some small tribute from
their pockets, I suppose. I sometimes get thinking of the long,
unbroken succession of these men, until they come to look like one Man;
continuous in being, unchanging as the stone he watches, looking upon
the successive generations of human beings as they come and go, and
outliving all the dynasties of the world in all probability. It has come
to such a pass that I never speak to the Man of the Monument without
wanting to take my hat off and feeling as if I were looking down a vista
of twenty or thirty centuries.
The “Man of Letters,” so called, said, in a rather contemptuous way,
I thought, that he had n't got so far as that. He was n't quite up to
moral reflections on toll-men and ticket-takers. Sentiment was n't his
tap.
He looked round triumphantly for a response: but the Capitalist was a
little hard of hearing just then; the Register of Deeds was browsing
on his food in the calm bovine abstraction of a quadruped, and paid no
attention; the Salesman had bolted his breakfast, and whisked himself
away with that peculiar alacrity which belongs to the retail dealer's
assistant; and the Member of the Haouse, who had sometimes seemed to be
impressed with his “tahlented mahn's” air of superiority to the rest of
us, looked as if he thought the speaker was not exactly parliamentary.
So he failed to make his point, and reddened a little, and was not in
the best humor, I thought, when he left the table. I hope he will not
let off any of his irritation on our poor little Scheherezade; but the
truth is, the first person a man of this sort (if he is what I think
him) meets, when he is out of humor, has to be made a victim of, and I
only hope our Young Girl will not have to play Jephthah's daughter.
And that leads me to say, I cannot help thinking that the kind of
criticism to which this Young Girl has been subjected from some person
or other, who is willing to be smart at her expense, is hurtful and not
wholesome. The question is a delicate one. So many foolish persons are
rushing into print, that it requires a kind of literary police to hold
them back and keep them in order. Where there are mice there must be
cats, and where there are rats we may think it worth our while to keep
a terrier, who will give them a shake and let them drop, with all the
mischief taken out of them. But the process is a rude and cruel one at
best, and it too often breeds a love of destructiveness for its own sake
in those who get their living by it. A poor poem or essay does not do
much harm after all; nobody reads it who is like to be seriously hurt
by it. But a sharp criticism with a drop of witty venom in it stings a
young author almost to death, and makes an old one uncomfortable to no
purpose. If it were my business to sit in judgment on my neighbors,
I would try to be courteous, at least, to those who had done any good
service, but, above all, I would handle tenderly those young authors
who are coming before the public in the flutter of their first or early
appearance, and are in the trembling delirium of stage-fright already.
Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative Angelina's
book of verses, I wish you would try this experiment.
Take half a sheet of paper and copy upon it any of Angelina's
stanzas,--the ones you were going to make fun of, if you will. Now go
to your window, if it is a still day, open it, and let the half-sheet
of paper drop on the outside. How gently it falls through the soft
air, always tending downwards, but sliding softly, from side to side,
wavering, hesitating, balancing, until it settles as noiselessly as a
snow-flake upon the all-receiving bosom of the earth! Just such would
have been the fate of poor Angelina's fluttering effort, if you had left
it to itself. It would have slanted downward into oblivion so sweetly
and softly that she would have never known when it reached that harmless
consummation.
Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from
its ad infinitum progeny. A man writes a book of criticisms. A Quarterly
Review criticises the critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the critic's
critic. A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the critic's
critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the
performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical
notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the
critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea “has
smaller fleas that on him prey,” even the critic himself cannot escape
the common lot of being bitten. Whether all this is a blessing or a
curse, like that one which made Pharaoh and all his household run to
their toilet-tables, is a question about which opinions might differ.
The physiologists of the time of Moses--if there were vivisectors other
than priests in those days--would probably have considered that other
plague, of the frogs, as a fortunate opportunity for science, as this
poor little beast has been the souffre-douleur of experimenters and
schoolboys from time immemorial.
But there is a form of criticism to which none will object. It is
impossible to come before a public so alive with sensibilities as this
we live in, with the smallest evidence of a sympathetic disposition,
without making friends in a very unexpected way. Everywhere there are
minds tossing on the unquiet waves of doubt. If you confess to the same
perplexities and uncertainties that torture them, they are grateful for
your companionship. If you have groped your way out of the wilderness
in which you were once wandering with them, they will follow your
footsteps, it may be, and bless you as their deliverer. So, all at once,
a writer finds he has a parish of devout listeners, scattered, it is
true, beyond the reach of any summons but that of a trumpet like the
archangel's, to whom his slight discourse may be of more value than the
exhortations they hear from the pulpit, if these last do not happen to
suit their special needs. Young men with more ambition and intelligence
than force of character, who have missed their first steps in life and
are stumbling irresolute amidst vague aims and changing purposes, hold
out their hands, imploring to be led into, or at least pointed towards,
some path where they can find a firm foothold. Young women born into a
chilling atmosphere of circumstance which keeps all the buds of their
nature unopened and always striving to get to a ray of sunshine, if
one finds its way to their neighborhood, tell their stories, sometimes
simply and touchingly, sometimes in a more or less affected and
rhetorical way, but still stories of defeated and disappointed instincts
which ought to make any moderately impressible person feel very tenderly
toward them.
In speaking privately to these young persons, many of whom have literary
aspirations, one should be very considerate of their human feelings. But
addressing them collectively a few plain truths will not give any one
of them much pain. Indeed, almost every individual among them will feel
sure that he or she is an exception to those generalities which apply so
well to the rest.
If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell these
inexperienced persons that nothing is so frequent as to mistake an
ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment. The
mechanism of breathing and that of swallowing are very wonderful, and
if one had seen and studied them in his own person only, he might
well think himself a prodigy. Everybody knows these and other
bodily faculties are common gifts; but nobody except editors and
school-teachers and here and there a literary than knows how common
is the capacity of rhyming and prattling in readable prose, especially
among young women of a certain degree of education. In my character of
Pontiff, I should tell these young persons that most of them labored
under a delusion. It is very hard to believe it; one feels so full
of intelligence and so decidedly superior to one's dull relations and
schoolmates; one writes so easily and the lines sound so prettily to
one's self; there are such felicities of expression, just like those we
hear quoted from the great poets; and besides one has been told by
so many friends that all one had to do was to print and be famous!
Delusion, my poor dear, delusion at least nineteen times out of twenty,
yes, ninety-nine times in a hundred.
But as private father confessor, I always allow as much as I can for the
one chance in the hundred. I try not to take away all hope, unless the
case is clearly desperate, and then to direct the activities into some
other channel.
Using kind language, I can talk pretty freely. I have counselled more
than one aspirant after literary fame to go back to his tailor's board
or his lapstone. I have advised the dilettanti, whose foolish friends
praised their verses or their stories, to give up all their deceptive
dreams of making a name by their genius, and go to work in the study of
a profession which asked only for the diligent use of average;
ordinary talents. It is a very grave responsibility which these unknown
correspondents throw upon their chosen counsellors. One whom you have
never seen, who lives in a community of which you know nothing, sends
you specimens more or less painfully voluminous of his writings, which
he asks you to read over, think over, and pray over, and send back an
answer informing him whether fame and fortune are awaiting him as the
possessor of the wonderful gifts his writings manifest, and whether
you advise him to leave all,--the shop he sweeps out every morning, the
ledger he posts, the mortar in which he pounds, the bench at which he
urges the reluctant plane,--and follow his genius whithersoever it may
lead him. The next correspondent wants you to mark out a whole course
of life for him, and the means of judgment he gives you are about as
adequate as the brick which the simpleton of old carried round as an
advertisement of the house he had to sell. My advice to all the young
men that write to me depends somewhat on the handwriting and spelling.
If these are of a certain character, and they have reached a mature age,
I recommend some honest manual calling, such as they have very probably
been bred to, and which will, at least, give them a chance of becoming
President of the United States by and by, if that is any object to them.
What would you have done with the young person who called on me a good
many years ago, so many that he has probably forgotten his literary
effort,--and read as specimens of his literary workmanship lines like
those which I will favor you with presently? He was an able-bodied,
grown-up young person, whose ingenuousness interested me; and I am sure
if I thought he would ever be pained to see his maiden effort in print,
I would deny myself the pleasure of submitting it to the reader. The
following is an exact transcript of the lines he showed me, and which I
took down on the spot:
“Are you in the vein for cider?
Are you in the tune for pork?
Hist! for Betty's cleared the larder
And turned the pork to soap.”
Do not judge too hastily this sincere effort of a maiden muse. Here was
a sense of rhythm, and an effort in the direction of rhyme; here was an
honest transcript of an occurrence of daily life, told with a certain
idealizing expression, recognizing the existence of impulses, mysterious
instincts, impelling us even in the selection of our bodily sustenance.
But I had to tell him that it wanted dignity of incident and grace of
narrative, that there was no atmosphere to it, nothing of the light that
never was and so forth. I did not say this in these very words, but I
gave him to understand, without being too hard upon him, that he had
better not desert his honest toil in pursuit of the poet's bays. This,
it must be confessed, was a rather discouraging case. A young person
like this may pierce, as the Frenchmen say, by and by, but the chances
are all the other way.
I advise aimless young men to choose some profession without needless
delay, and so get into a good strong current of human affairs, and
find themselves bound up in interests with a compact body of their
fellow-men.
I advise young women who write to me for counsel,--perhaps I do not
advise them at all, only sympathize a little with them, and listen to
what they have to say (eight closely written pages on the average, which
I always read from beginning to end, thinking of the widow's cruse and
myself in the character of Elijah) and--and--come now, I don't believe
Methuselah would tell you what he said in his letters to young ladies,
written when he was in his nine hundred and sixty-ninth year.
But, dear me! how much work all this private criticism involves! An
editor has only to say “respectfully declined,” and there is the end of
it. But the confidential adviser is expected to give the reasons of his
likes and dislikes in detail, and sometimes to enter into an argument
for their support. That is more than any martyr can stand, but what
trials he must go through, as it is! Great bundles of manuscripts, verse
or prose, which the recipient is expected to read, perhaps to recommend
to a publisher, at any rate to express a well-digested and agreeably
flavored opinion about; which opinion, nine times out of ten, disguise
it as we may, has to be a bitter draught; every form of egotism,
conceit, false sentiment, hunger for notoriety, and eagerness for
display of anserine plumage before the admiring public;--all these come
in by mail or express, covered with postage-stamps of so much more cost
than the value of the waste words they overlie, that one comes at last
to groan and change color at the very sight of a package, and to dread
the postman's knock as if it were that of the other visitor whose naked
knuckles rap at every door.
Still there are experiences which go far towards repaying all these
inflictions. My last young man's case looked desperate enough; some of
his sails had blown from the rigging, some were backing in the wind, and
some were flapping and shivering, but I told him which way to head, and
to my surprise he promised to do just as I directed, and I do not doubt
is under full sail at this moment.
What if I should tell my last, my very recent experience with the other
sex? I received a paper containing the inner history of a young woman's
life, the evolution of her consciousness from its earliest record of
itself, written so thoughtfully, so sincerely, with so much firmness and
yet so much delicacy, with such truth of detail and such grace in the
manner of telling, that I finished the long manuscript almost at a
sitting, with a pleasure rarely, almost never experienced in voluminous
communications which one has to spell out of handwriting. This was from
a correspondent who made my acquaintance by letter when she was little
more than a child, some years ago. How easy at that early period to have
silenced her by indifference, to have wounded her by a careless epithet,
perhaps even to have crushed her as one puts his heel on a weed! A very
little encouragement kept her from despondency, and brought back one of
those overflows of gratitude which make one more ashamed of himself
for being so overpaid than he would be for having committed any of the
lesser sins. But what pleased me most in the paper lately received was
to see how far the writer had outgrown the need of any encouragement of
mine; that she had strengthened out of her tremulous questionings into a
self-reliance and self-poise which I had hardly dared to anticipate for
her. Some of my readers who are also writers have very probably had
more numerous experiences of this kind than I can lay claim to;
self-revelations from unknown and sometimes nameless friends, who write
from strange corners where the winds have wafted some stray words of
theirs which have lighted in the minds and reached the hearts of those
to whom they were as the angel that stirred the pool of Bethesda.
Perhaps this is the best reward authorship brings; it may not imply much
talent or literary excellence, but it means that your way of thinking
and feeling is just what some one of your fellow-creatures needed.
--I have been putting into shape, according to his request, some further
passages from the Young Astronomer's manuscript, some of which the
reader will have a chance to read if he is so disposed. The conflict in
the young man's mind between the desire for fame and the sense of its
emptiness as compared with nobler aims has set me thinking about the
subject from a somewhat humbler point of view. As I am in the habit of
telling you, Beloved, many of my thoughts, as well as of repeating what
was said at our table, you may read what follows as if it were addressed
to you in the course of an ordinary conversation, where I claimed rather
more than my share, as I am afraid I am a little in the habit of doing.
I suppose we all, those of us who write in verse or prose, have the
habitual feeling that we should like to be remembered. It is to be awake
when all of those who were round us have been long wrapped in slumber.
It is a pleasant thought enough that the name by which we have been
called shall be familiar on the lips of those who come after us, and the
thoughts that wrought themselves out in our intelligence, the emotions
that trembled through our frames, shall live themselves over again in
the minds and hearts of others.
But is there not something of rest, of calm, in the thought of gently
and gradually fading away out of human remembrance? What line have we
written that was on a level with our conceptions? What page of ours that
does not betray some weakness we would fain have left unrecorded? To
become a classic and share the life of a language is to be ever open to
criticisms, to comparisons, to the caprices of successive generations,
to be called into court and stand a trial before a new jury, once or
more than once in every century. To be forgotten is to sleep in peace
with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats,
the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that
shadow of a man which we call his reputation. The line which dying we
could wish to blot has been blotted out for us by a hand so tender, so
patient, so used to its kindly task, that the page looks as fair as if
it had never borne the record of our infirmity or our transgression.
And then so few would be wholly content with their legacy of fame. You
remember poor Monsieur Jacques's complaint of the favoritism shown
to Monsieur Berthier,--it is in that exquisite “Week in a French
Country-House.” “Have you seen his room? Have you seen how large it is?
Twice as large as mine! He has two jugs, a large one and a little one.
I have only one small one. And a tea-service and a gilt Cupid on the
top of his looking-glass.” The famous survivor of himself has had his
features preserved in a medallion, and the slice of his countenance
seems clouded with the thought that it does not belong to a bust; the
bust ought to look happy in its niche, but the statue opposite makes
it feel as if it had been cheated out of half its personality, and the
statue looks uneasy because another stands on a loftier pedestal.
But “Ignotus” and “Miserrimus” are of the great majority in that vast
assembly, that House of Commons whose members are all peers, where to be
forgotten is the standing rule. The dignity of a silent memory is not
to be undervalued. Fame is after all a kind of rude handling, and a
name that is often on vulgar lips seems to borrow something not to be
desired, as the paper money that passes from hand to hand gains somewhat
which is a loss thereby. O sweet, tranquil refuge of oblivion, so far
as earth is concerned, for us poor blundering, stammering, misbehaving
creatures who cannot turn over a leaf of our life's diary without
feeling thankful that its failure can no longer stare us in the face!
Not unwelcome shall be the baptism of dust which hides forever the name
that was given in the baptism of water! We shall have good company whose
names are left unspoken by posterity. “Who knows whether the best of men
be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than
any that stand remembered in the known account of time? The greater part
must be content to be as though they had not been; to be found in the
register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up
the first story before the flood, and the recorded names ever since
contain not one living century.”
I have my moods about such things as the Young Astronomer has, as we all
have. There are times when the thought of becoming utterly nothing to
the world we knew so well and loved so much is painful and oppressive;
we gasp as if in a vacuum, missing the atmosphere of life we have so
long been in the habit of breathing. Not the less are there moments
when the aching need of repose comes over us and the requiescat in pace,
heathen benediction as it is, sounds more sweetly in our ears than all
the promises that Fame can hold out to us.
I wonder whether it ever occurred to you to reflect upon another horror
there must be in leaving a name behind you. Think what a horrid piece of
work the biographers make of a man's private history! Just imagine the
subject of one of those extraordinary fictions called biographies coming
back and reading the life of himself, written very probably by somebody
or other who thought he could turn a penny by doing it, and having the
pleasure of seeing
“His little bark attendant sail,
Pursue the triumph and partake the gale.”
The ghost of the person condemned to walk the earth in a biography
glides into a public library, and goes to the shelf where his mummied
life lies in its paper cerements. I can see the pale shadow glancing
through the pages and hear the comments that shape themselves in the
bodiless intelligence as if they were made vocal by living lips.
“Born in July, 1776!” And my honored father killed at the battle of
Bunker Hill! Atrocious libeller! to slander one's family at the start
after such a fashion!
“The death of his parents left him in charge of his Aunt Nancy, whose
tender care took the place of those parental attentions which should
have guided and protected his infant years, and consoled him for the
severity of another relative.”
--Aunt Nancy! It was Aunt Betsey, you fool! Aunt Nancy used to--she has
been dead these eighty years, so there is no use in mincing matters--she
used to keep a bottle and a stick, and when she had been tasting a drop
out of the bottle the stick used to come off the shelf and I had to
taste that. And here she is made a saint of, and poor Aunt Betsey, that
did everything for me, is slandered by implication as a horrid tyrant.
“The subject of this commemorative history was remarkable for a
precocious development of intelligence. An old nurse who saw him at the
very earliest period of his existence is said to have spoken of him as
one of the most promising infants she had seen in her long experience.
At school he was equally remarkable, and at a tender age he received a
paper adorned with a cut, inscribed REWARD OF MERIT.”
--I don't doubt the nurse said that,--there were several promising
children born about that time. As for cuts, I got more from the
schoolmaster's rattan than in any other shape. Didn't one of my teachers
split a Gunter's scale into three pieces over the palm of my hand?
And didn't I grin when I saw the pieces fly? No humbug, now, about my
boyhood!
“His personal appearance was not singularly prepossessing. Inconspicuous
in stature and unattractive in features.”
--You misbegotten son of an ourang and grandson of an ascidian (ghosts
keep up with science, you observe), what business have you to be holding
up my person to the contempt of my posterity? Haven't I been sleeping
for this many a year in quiet, and don't the dandelions and buttercups
look as yellow over me as over the best-looking neighbor I have in the
dormitory? Why do you want to people the minds of everybody that reads
your good-for-nothing libel which you call a “biography” with your
impudent caricatures of a man who was a better-looking fellow than
yourself, I 'll bet you ten to one, a man whom his Latin tutor called
fommosus puer when he was only a freshman? If that's what it means to
make a reputation,--to leave your character and your person, and the
good name of your sainted relatives, and all you were, and all you had
and thought and felt, so far as can be gathered by digging you out
of your most private records, to be manipulated and bandied about and
cheapened in the literary market as a chicken or a turkey or a goose is
handled and bargained over at a provision stall, is n't it better to be
content with the honest blue slate-stone and its inscription informing
posterity that you were a worthy citizen and a respected father of a
family?
--I should like to see any man's biography with corrections and
emendations by his ghost. We don't know each other's secrets quite so
well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don't always know our own secrets
as well as we might. You have seen a tree with different grafts upon it,
an apple or a pear tree we will say. In the late summer months the fruit
on one bough will ripen; I remember just such a tree, and the early
ripening fruit was the Jargonelle. By and by the fruit of another
bough will begin to come into condition; the lovely Saint Michael, as
I remember, grew on the same stock as the Jargonelle in the tree I am
thinking of; and then, when these have all fallen or been gathered,
another, we will say the Winter Nelis, has its turn, and so out of the
same juices have come in succession fruits of the most varied aspects
and flavors. It is the same thing with ourselves, but it takes us a
long while to find it out. The various inherited instincts ripen in
succession. You may be nine tenths paternal at one period of your life,
and nine tenths maternal at another. All at once the traits of some
immediate ancestor may come to maturity unexpectedly on one of the
branches of your character, just as your features at different periods
of your life betray different resemblances to your nearer or more remote
relatives.
But I want you to let me go back to the Bunker Hill Monument and the
dynasty of twenty or thirty centuries whose successive representatives
are to sit in the gate, like the Jewish monarchs, while the people shall
come by hundreds and by thousands to visit the memorial shaft until the
story of Bunker's Hill is as old as that of Marathon.
Would not one like to attend twenty consecutive soirees, at each one of
which the lion of the party should be the Man of the Monument, at the
beginning of each century, all the way, we will say, from Anno Domini
2000 to Ann. Dom. 4000,--or, if you think the style of dating will be
changed, say to Ann. Darwinii (we can keep A. D. you see) 1872? Will the
Man be of the Indian type, as President Samuel Stanhope Smith and others
have supposed the transplanted European will become by and by? Will he
have shortened down to four feet and a little more, like the Esquimaux,
or will he have been bred up to seven feet by the use of new chemical
diets, ozonized and otherwise improved atmospheres, and animal
fertilizers? Let us summon him in imagination and ask him a few
questions.
Is n't it like splitting a toad out of a rock to think of this man
of nineteen or twenty centuries hence coming out from his stony
dwelling-place and speaking with us? What are the questions we should
ask him? He has but a few minutes to stay. Make out your own list; I
will set down a few that come up to me as I write.
--What is the prevalent religious creed of civilization?
--Has the planet met with any accident of importance?
--How general is the republican form of government?
--Do men fly yet?
--Has the universal language come into use?
--Is there a new fuel since the English coal-mines have given out?
--Is the euthanasia a recognized branch of medical science?
--Is the oldest inhabitant still living?
--Is the Daily Advertiser still published?
--And the Evening Transcript?
--Is there much inquiry for the works of a writer of the nineteenth
century (Old Style) by--the name of--of--
My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. I cannot imagine the putting
of that question without feeling the tremors which shake a wooer as
he falters out the words the answer to which will make him happy or
wretched.
Whose works was I going to question him about, do you ask me? Oh, the
writings of a friend of mine, much esteemed by his relatives and others.
But it's of no consequence, after all; I think he says he does not care
much for posthumous reputation.
I find something of the same interest in thinking about one of the
boarders at our table that I find in my waking dreams concerning the
Man of the Monument. This personage is the Register of Deeds. He is an
unemotional character, living in his business almost as exclusively as
the Scarabee, but without any of that eagerness and enthusiasm which
belong to our scientific specialist. His work is largely, principally,
I may say, mechanical. He has developed, however, a certain amount of
taste for the antiquities of his department, and once in a while brings
out some curious result of his investigations into ancient documents.
He too belongs to a dynasty which will last as long as there is such a
thing as property in land and dwellings. When that is done away with,
and we return to the state of villanage, holding our tenement-houses,
all to be of the same pattern, of the State, that is to say, of the
Tammany Ring which is to take the place of the feudal lord,--the office
of Register of Deeds will, I presume, become useless, and the dynasty
will be deposed.
As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things
and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much
they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone
twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of
his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we
had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden
candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber. So it was the other day after
my reminiscences of the old gambrel-roofed house and its visitors. They
found an echo in the recollections of one of the brightest and liveliest
of my suburban friends, whose memory is exact about everything except
her own age, which, there can be no doubt, she makes out a score or two
of years more than it really is. Still she was old enough to touch some
lights--and a shadow or two--into the portraits I had drawn, which
made me wish that she and not I had been the artist who sketched the
pictures. Among the lesser regrets that mingle with graver sorrows for
the friends of an earlier generation we have lost, are our omissions to
ask them so many questions they could have answered easily enough, and
would have been pleased to be asked. There! I say to myself sometimes,
in an absent mood, I must ask her about that. But she of whom I am now
thinking has long been beyond the reach of any earthly questioning, and
I sigh to think how easily I could have learned some fact which I should
have been happy to have transmitted with pious care to those who are
to come after me. How many times I have heard her quote the line about
blessings brightening as they take their flight, and how true it proves
in many little ways that one never thinks of until it is too late.
The Register of Deeds is not himself advanced in years. But he borrows
an air of antiquity from the ancient records which are stored in his
sepulchral archives. I love to go to his ossuary of dead transactions,
as I would visit the catacombs of Rome or Paris. It is like wandering
up the Nile to stray among the shelves of his monumental folios. Here
stands a series of volumes, extending over a considerable number of
years, all of which volumes are in his handwriting. But as you go
backward there is a break, and you come upon the writing of another
person, who was getting old apparently, for it is beginning to be a
little shaky, and then you know that you have gone back as far as the
last days of his predecessor. Thirty or forty years more carry you to
the time when this incumbent began the duties of his office; his hand
was steady then; and the next volume beyond it in date betrays the work
of a still different writer. All this interests me, but I do not see how
it is going to interest my reader. I do not feel very happy about the
Register of Deeds. What can I do with him? Of what use is he going to be
in my record of what I have seen and heard at the breakfast-table? The
fact of his being one of the boarders was not so important that I was
obliged to speak of him, and I might just as well have drawn on my
imagination and not allowed this dummy to take up the room which another
guest might have profitably filled at our breakfast-table.
I suppose he will prove a superfluity, but I have got him on my hands,
and I mean that he shall be as little in the way as possible. One always
comes across people in actual life who have no particular business to
be where we find them, and whose right to be at all is somewhat
questionable.
I am not going to get rid of the Register of Deeds by putting him out of
the way; but I confess I do not see of what service he is going to be to
me in my record. I have often found, however, that the Disposer of men
and things understands much better than we do how to place his pawns
and other pieces on the chess-board of life. A fish more or less in the
ocean does not seem to amount to much. It is not extravagant to say that
any one fish may be considered a supernumerary. But when Captain
Coram's ship sprung a leak and the carpenter could not stop it, and the
passengers had made up their minds that it was all over with them, all
at once, without any apparent reason, the pumps began gaining on the
leak, and the sinking ship to lift herself out of the abyss which was
swallowing her up. And what do you think it was that saved the ship, and
Captain Coram, and so in due time gave to London that Foundling Hospital
which he endowed, and under the floor of which he lies buried? Why, it
was that very supernumerary fish, which we held of so little account,
but which had wedged itself into the rent of the yawning planks, and
served to keep out the water until the leak was finally stopped.
I am very sure it was Captain Coram, but I almost hope it was somebody
else, in order to give some poor fellow who is lying in wait for the
periodicals a chance to correct me. That will make him happy for a
month, and besides, he will not want to pick a quarrel about anything
else if he has that splendid triumph. You remember Alcibiades and his
dog's tail.
Here you have the extracts I spoke of from the manuscript placed in my
hands for revision and emendation. I can understand these alternations
of feeling in a young person who has been long absorbed in a single
pursuit, and in whom the human instincts which have been long silent
are now beginning to find expression. I know well what he wants; a great
deal better, I think, than he knows himself.