The Master and I had been thinking for some time of trying to get the
Young Astronomer round to our side of the table. There are many subjects
on which both of us like to talk with him, and it would be convenient
to have him nearer to us. How to manage it was not quite so clear as it
might have been. The Scarabee wanted to sit with his back to the light,
as it was in his present position. He used his eyes so much in studying
minute objects, that he wished to spare them all fatigue, and did not
like facing a window. Neither of us cared to ask the Man of Letters, so
called, to change his place, and of course we could not think of making
such a request of the Young Girl or the Lady. So we were at a stand with
reference to this project of ours.
But while we were proposing, Fate or Providence disposed everything
for us. The Man of Letters, so called, was missing one morning, having
folded his tent--that is, packed his carpet-bag--with the silence of the
Arabs, and encamped--that is, taken lodgings--in some locality which he
had forgotten to indicate.
The Landlady bore this sudden bereavement remarkably well. Her remarks
and reflections; though borrowing the aid of homely imagery and doing
occasional violence to the nicer usages of speech, were not without
philosophical discrimination.
--I like a gentleman that is a gentleman. But there's a difference in
what folks call gentlemen as there is in what you put on table. There is
cabbages and there is cauliflowers. There is clams and there is oysters.
There is mackerel and there is salmon. And there is some that knows
the difference and some that doos n't. I had a little account with that
boarder that he forgot to settle before he went off, so all of a suddin.
I sha'n't say anything about it. I've seen the time when I should have
felt bad about losing what he owed me, but it was no great matter; and
if he 'll only stay away now he 's gone, I can stand losing it, and not
cry my eyes out nor lay awake all night neither. I never had ought to
have took him. Where he come from and where he's gone to is unbeknown to
me. If he'd only smoked good tobacco, I wouldn't have said a word; but
it was such dreadful stuff, it 'll take a week to get his chamber sweet
enough to show them that asks for rooms. It doos smell like all possest.
--Left any goods?--asked the Salesman.
--Or dockermunts?--added the Member of the Haouse.
The Landlady answered with a faded smile, which implied that there was
no hope in that direction. Dr. Benjamin, with a sudden recurrence of
youthful feeling, made a fan with the fingers of his right hand, the
second phalanx of the thumb resting on the tip of the nose, and the
remaining digits diverging from each other, in the plane of the median
line of the face,--I suppose this is the way he would have described
the gesture, which is almost a specialty of the Parisian gamin. That Boy
immediately copied it, and added greatly to its effect by extending
the fingers of the other hand in a line with those of the first, and
vigorously agitating those of the two hands,--a gesture which acts like
a puncture on the distended self-esteem of one to whom it is addressed,
and cheapens the memory of the absent to a very low figure.
I wish the reader to observe that I treasure up with interest all the
words uttered by the Salesman. It must have been noticed that he
very rarely speaks. Perhaps he has an inner life, with its own deep
emotional, and lofty contemplative elements, but as we see him, he is
the boarder reduced to the simplest expression of that term. Yet,
like most human creatures, he has generic and specific characters not
unworthy of being studied. I notice particularly a certain electrical
briskness of movement, such as one may see in a squirrel, which clearly
belongs to his calling. The dry-goodsman's life behind his counter is a
succession of sudden, snappy perceptions and brief series of coordinate
spasms; as thus:
“Purple calico, three quarters wide, six yards.”
Up goes the arm; bang! tumbles out the flat roll and turns half a dozen
somersets, as if for the fun of the thing; the six yards of calico hurry
over the measuring nails, hunching their backs up, like six cankerworms;
out jump the scissors; snip, clip, rip; the stuff is wisped up,
brown--papered, tied, labelled, delivered, and the man is himself again,
like a child just come out of a convulsion-fit. Think of a man's having
some hundreds of these semi-epileptic seizures every day, and you need
not wonder that he does not say much; these fits take the talk all out
of him.
But because he, or any other man, does not say much, it does not follow
that he may not have, as I have said, an exalted and intense inner
life. I have known a number of cases where a man who seemed thoroughly
commonplace and unemotional has all at once surprised everybody by
telling the story of his hidden life far more pointedly and dramatically
than any playwright or novelist or poet could have told it for him. I
will not insult your intelligence, Beloved, by saying how he has told
it.
--We had been talking over the subjects touched upon in the Lady's
letter.
--I suppose one man in a dozen--said the Master--ought to be born a
skeptic. That was the proportion among the Apostles, at any rate.
--So there was one Judas among them,--I remarked.
--Well,--said the Master,--they 've been whitewashing Judas of late.
But never mind him. I did not say there was not one rogue on the
average among a dozen men. I don't see how that would interfere with my
proposition. If I say that among a dozen men you ought to find one that
weighs over a hundred and fifty pounds, and you tell me that there were
twelve men in your club, and one of 'em had red hair, I don't see that
you have materially damaged my statement.
--I thought it best to let the old Master have his easy victory, which
was more apparent than real, very evidently, and he went on.
--When the Lord sends out a batch of human beings, say a hundred--Did
you ever read my book, the new edition of it, I mean?
It is rather awkward to answer such a question in the negative, but I
said, with the best grace I could, “No, not the last edition.”
--Well, I must give you a copy of it. My book and I are pretty much the
same thing. Sometimes I steal from my book in my talk without mentioning
it, and then I say to myself, “Oh, that won't do; everybody has read my
book and knows it by heart.” And then the other I says,--you know there
are two of us, right and left, like a pair of shoes,--the other I says,
“You're a--something or other--fool. They have n't read your confounded
old book; besides, if they have, they have forgotten all about it.”
Another time, I say, thinking I will be very honest, “I have said
something about that in my book”; and then the other I says, “What a
Balaam's quadruped you are to tell 'em it's in your book; they don't
care whether it is or not, if it's anything worth saying; and if it
isn't worth saying, what are you braying for?” That is a rather sensible
fellow, that other chap we talk with, but an impudent whelp. I never got
such abuse from any blackguard in my life as I have from that No. 2 of
me, the one that answers the other's questions and makes the comments,
and does what in demotic phrase is called the “sarsing.”
--I laughed at that. I have just such a fellow always with me, as
wise as Solomon, if I would only heed him; but as insolent as Shimei,
cursing, and throwing stones and dirt, and behaving as if he had the
traditions of the “ape-like human being” born with him rather than
civilized instincts. One does not have to be a king to know what it is
to keep a king's jester.
--I mentioned my book,--the Master said, because I have something in
it on the subject we were talking about. I should like to read you a
passage here and there out of it, where I have expressed myself a little
more freely on some of those matters we handle in conversation. If you
don't quarrel with it, I must give you a copy of the book. It's a rather
serious thing to get a copy of a book from the writer of it. It has
made my adjectives sweat pretty hard, I know, to put together an answer
returning thanks and not lying beyond the twilight of veracity, if one
may use a figure. Let me try a little of my book on you, in divided
doses, as my friends the doctors say.
-Fiat experimentum in corpore vili,--I said, laughing at my own expense.
I don't doubt the medicament is quite as good as the patient deserves,
and probably a great deal better,--I added, reinforcing my feeble
compliment.
[When you pay a compliment to an author, don't qualify it in the next
sentence so as to take all the goodness out of it. Now I am thinking of
it, I will give you one or two pieces of advice. Be careful to assure
yourself that the person you are talking with wrote the article or book
you praise. It is not very pleasant to be told, “Well, there, now! I
always liked your writings, but you never did anything half so good as
this last piece,” and then to have to tell the blunderer that this last
piece is n't yours, but t' other man's. Take care that the phrase or
sentence you commend is not one that is in quotation-marks. “The best
thing in your piece, I think, is a line I do not remember meeting
before; it struck me as very true and well expressed:
“'An honest man's the noblest work of God.'
“But, my dear lady, that line is one which is to be found in a writer
of the last century, and not original with me.” One ought not to have
undeceived her, perhaps, but one is naturally honest, and cannot bear to
be credited with what is not his own. The lady blushes, of course, and
says she has not read much ancient literature, or some such thing. The
pearl upon the Ethiop's arm is very pretty in verse, but one does not
care to furnish the dark background for other persons' jewelry.]
I adjourned from the table in company with the old Master to his
apartments. He was evidently in easy circumstances, for he had the best
accommodations the house afforded. We passed through a reception room
to his library, where everything showed that he had ample means for
indulging the modest tastes of a scholar.
--The first thing, naturally, when one enters a scholar's study or
library, is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his
tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his bookshelves.
Of course, you know there are many fine houses where the library is
a part of the upholstery, so to speak. Books in handsome binding kept
locked under plate-glass in showy dwarf bookcases are as important to
stylish establishments as servants in livery; who sit with folded arms,
are to stylish equipages. I suppose those wonderful statues with the
folded arms do sometimes change their attitude, and I suppose those
books with the gilded backs do sometimes get opened, but it is nobody's
business whether they do or not, and it is not best to ask too many
questions.
This sort of thing is common enough, but there is another case that may
prove deceptive if you undertake to judge from appearances. Once in a
while you will come on a house where you will find a family of readers
and almost no library. Some of the most indefatigable devourers of
literature have very few books. They belong to book clubs, they haunt
the public libraries, they borrow of friends, and somehow or other get
hold of everything they want, scoop out all it holds for them, and have
done with it. When I want a book, it is as a tiger wants a sheep. I must
have it with one spring, and, if I miss it, go away defeated and hungry.
And my experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the
book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that
is out.
--I was pretty well prepared to understand the Master's library and his
account of it. We seated ourselves in two very comfortable chairs, and I
began the conversation.
-I see you have a large and rather miscellaneous collection of books.
Did you get them together by accident or according to some preconceived
plan?
--Both, sir, both,--the Master answered. When Providence throws a good
book in my way, I bow to its decree and purchase it as an act of piety,
if it is reasonably or unreasonably cheap. I adopt a certain number of
books every year, out of a love for the foundlings and stray children of
other people's brains that nobody seems to care for. Look here.
He took down a Greek Lexicon finely bound in calf, and spread it open.
Do you see that Hedericus? I had Greek dictionaries enough and to spare,
but I saw that noble quarto lying in the midst of an ignoble crowd of
cheap books, and marked with a price which I felt to be an insult
to scholarship, to the memory of Homer, sir, and the awful shade of
AEschylus. I paid the mean price asked for it, and I wanted to double
it, but I suppose it would have been a foolish sacrifice of coin to
sentiment: I love that book for its looks and behavior. None of your
“half-calf” economies in that volume, sir! And see how it lies open
anywhere! There is n't a book in my library that has such a generous way
of laying its treasures before you. From Alpha to Omega, calm, assured
rest at any page that your choice or accident may light on. No lifting
of a rebellious leaf like an upstart servant that does not know his
place and can never be taught manners, but tranquil, well-bred repose.
A book may be a perfect gentleman in its aspect and demeanor, and this
book would be good company for personages like Roger Ascham and his
pupils the Lady Elizabeth and the Lady Jane Grey.
The Master was evidently riding a hobby, and what I wanted to know was
the plan on which he had formed his library. So I brought him back to
the point by asking him the question in so many words.
Yes,--he said,--I have a kind of notion of the way in which a library
ought to be put together--no, I don't mean that, I mean ought to grow.
I don't pretend to say that mine is a model, but it serves my turn well
enough, and it represents me pretty accurately. A scholar must shape
his own shell, secrete it one might almost say, for secretion is only
separation, you know, of certain elements derived from the materials
of the world about us. And a scholar's study, with the books lining
its walls, is his shell. It is n't a mollusk's shell, either; it 's a
caddice-worm's shell. You know about the caddice-worm?
--More or less; less rather than more,--was my humble reply.
Well, sir, the caddice-worm is the larva of a fly, and he makes a case
for himself out of all sorts of bits of everything that happen to suit
his particular fancy, dead or alive, sticks and stones and small shells
with their owners in 'em, living as comfortable as ever. Every one of
these caddice-worms has his special fancy as to what he will pick up
and glue together, with a kind of natural cement he provides himself,
to make his case out of. In it he lives, sticking his head and shoulders
out once in a while, that is all. Don't you see that a student in his
library is a caddice-worm in his case? I've told you that I take an
interest in pretty much everything, and don't mean to fence out any
human interests from the private grounds of my intelligence. Then,
again, there is a subject, perhaps I may say there is more than one,
that I want to exhaust, to know to the very bottom. And besides, of
course I must have my literary harem, my pare aux cerfs, where my
favorites await my moments of leisure and pleasure,--my scarce and
precious editions, my luxurious typographical masterpieces; my Delilahs,
that take my head in their lap: the pleasant story-tellers and the
like; the books I love because they are fair to look upon, prized by
collectors, endeared by old associations, secret treasures that nobody
else knows anything about; books, in short, that I like for insufficient
reasons it may be, but peremptorily, and mean to like and to love and to
cherish till death us do part.
Don't you see I have given you a key to the way my library is made up,
so that you can apriorize the plan according to which I have filled my
bookcases? I will tell you how it is carried out.
In the first place, you see, I have four extensive cyclopaedias. Out
of these I can get information enough to serve my immediate purpose on
almost any subject. These, of course, are supplemented by geographical,
biographical, bibliographical, and other dictionaries, including of
course lexicons to all the languages I ever meddle with. Next to
these come the works relating to my one or two specialties, and these
collections I make as perfect as I can. Every library should try to be
complete on something, if it were only on the history of pin-heads.
I don't mean that I buy all the trashy compilations on my special
subjects, but I try to have all the works of any real importance
relating to them, old as well as new. In the following compartment you
will find the great authors in all the languages I have mastered, from
Homer and Hesiod downward to the last great English name.
This division, you see, you can make almost as extensive or as limited
as you choose. You can crowd the great representative writers into
a small compass; or you can make a library consisting only of the
different editions of Horace, if you have space and money enough. Then
comes the Harem, the shelf or the bookcase of Delilahs, that you
have paid wicked prices for, that you love without pretending to be
reasonable about it, and would bag in case of fire before all the
rest, just as Mr. Townley took the Clytie to his carriage when the
anti-Catholic mob threatened his house in 1780. As for the foundlings
like my Hedericus, they go among their peers; it is a pleasure to
take them, from the dusty stall where they were elbowed by plebeian
school-books and battered odd volumes, and give them Alduses and
Elzevirs for companions.
Nothing remains but the Infirmary. The most painful subjects are the
unfortunates that have lost a cover. Bound a hundred years ago, perhaps,
and one of the rich old browned covers gone--what a pity! Do you know
what to do about it? I 'll tell you,--no, I 'll show you. Look at this
volume. M. T. Ciceronis Opera,--a dozen of 'em,--one of 'em minus half
his cover, a poor one-legged cripple, six months ago,--now see him.
--He looked very respectably indeed, both covers dark, ancient, very
decently matched; one would hardly notice the fact that they were not
twins.
-I 'll tell you what I did. You poor devil, said I, you are a disgrace
to your family. We must send you to a surgeon and have some kind of a
Taliacotian operation performed on you. (You remember the operation as
described in Hudibras, of course.) The first thing was to find a subject
of similar age and aspect ready to part with one of his members. So I
went to Quidlibet's,--you know Quidlibet and that hieroglyphic sign of
his with the omniscient-looking eye as its most prominent feature,--and
laid my case before him. I want you, said I, to look up an old book of
mighty little value,--one of your ten-cent vagabonds would be the sort
of thing,--but an old beggar, with a cover like this, and lay it by for
me.
And Quidlibet, who is a pleasant body to deal with,--only he has
insulted one or two gentlemanly books by selling them to me at very
low-bred and shamefully insufficient prices,--Quidlibet, I say, laid by
three old books for me to help myself from, and did n't take the trouble
even to make me pay the thirty cents for 'em. Well, said I to myself,
let us look at our three books that have undergone the last insult short
of the trunkmaker's or the paper-mills, and see what they are. There may
be something worth looking at in one or the other of 'em.
Now do you know it was with a kind of a tremor that I untied the package
and looked at these three unfortunates, too humble for the companionable
dime to recognize as its equal in value. The same sort of feeling you
know if you ever tried the Bible-and-key, or the Sortes Virgiliance.
I think you will like to know what the three books were which had been
bestowed upon me gratis, that I might tear away one of the covers of the
one that best matched my Cicero, and give it to the binder to cobble my
crippled volume with.
The Master took the three books from a cupboard and continued.
No. I. An odd volume of The Adventurer. It has many interesting things
enough, but is made precious by containing Simon Browne's famous
Dedication to the Queen of his Answer to Tindal's “Christianity as old
as the Creation.” Simon Browne was the Man without a Soul. An excellent
person, a most worthy dissenting minister, but lying under a strange
delusion.
Here is a paragraph from his Dedication:
“He was once a man; and of some little name; but of no worth, as his
present unparalleled case makes but too manifest; for by the immediate
hand of an avenging GOD, his very thinking substance has, for more than
seven years, been continually wasting away, till it is wholly perished
out of him, if it be not utterly come to nothing. None, no, not the
least remembrance of its very ruins, remains, not the shadow of an
idea is left, nor any sense that so much as one single one, perfect or
imperfect, whole or diminished, ever did appear to a mind within him, or
was perceived by it.”
Think of this as the Dedication of a book “universally allowed to be
the best which that controversy produced,” and what a flood of light it
pours on the insanities of those self-analyzing diarists whose morbid
reveries have been so often mistaken for piety! No. I. had something
for me, then, besides the cover, which was all it claimed to have worth
offering.
No. II. was “A View of Society and Manners in Italy.” Vol. III. By
John Moore, M. D. (Zeluco Moore.) You know his pleasant book. In
this particular volume what interested me most, perhaps, was the very
spirited and intelligent account of the miracle of the liquefaction of
the blood of Saint Januarius, but it gave me an hour's mighty agreeable
reading. So much for Number Two.
No. III. was “An ESSAY On the Great EFFECTS of Even Languid and Unheeded
LOCAL MOTION.” By the Hon. Robert Boyle. Published in 1685, and, as
appears from other sources, “received with great and general applause.”
I confess I was a little startled to find how near this earlier
philosopher had come to the modern doctrines, such as are illustrated in
Tyndall's “Heat considered as a Mode of Motion.” He speaks of “Us,
who endeavor to resolve the Phenomena of Nature into Matter and Local
motion.” That sounds like the nineteenth century, but what shall we say
to this? “As when a bar of iron or silver, having been well hammered,
is newly taken off of the anvil; though the eye can discern no motion
in it, yet the touch will readily perceive it to be very hot, and if you
spit upon it, the brisk agitation of the insensible parts will become
visible in that which they will produce in the liquor.” He takes a bar
of tin, and tries whether by bending it to and fro two or three times he
cannot “procure a considerable internal commotion among the parts “; and
having by this means broken or cracked it in the middle, finds, as he
expected, that the middle parts had considerably heated each other.
There are many other curious and interesting observations in the volume
which I should like to tell you of, but these will serve my purpose.
--Which book furnished you the old cover you wanted?--said I.
--Did he kill the owl?--said the Master, laughing. [I suppose you, the
reader, know the owl story.]--It was Number Two that lent me one of his
covers. Poor wretch! He was one of three, and had lost his two brothers.
From him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath. The
Scripture had to be fulfilled in his case. But I couldn't help saying to
myself, What do you keep writing books for, when the stalls are covered
all over with 'em, good books, too, that nobody will give ten cents
apiece for, lying there like so many dead beasts of burden, of no
account except to strip off their hides? What is the use, I say? I have
made a book or two in my time, and I am making another that perhaps
will see the light one of these days. But if I had my life to live over
again, I think I should go in for silence, and get as near to Nirvana as
I could. This language is such a paltry tool! The handle of it cuts and
the blade doesn't. You muddle yourself by not knowing what you mean by a
word, and send out your unanswered riddles and rebuses to clear up other
people's difficulties. It always seems to me that talk is a ripple and
thought is a ground swell. A string of words, that mean pretty much
anything, helps you in a certain sense to get hold of a thought, just as
a string of syllables that mean nothing helps you to a word; but it's a
poor business, it's a poor business, and the more you study definition
the more you find out how poor it is. Do you know I sometimes think our
little entomological neighbor is doing a sounder business than we people
that make books about ourselves and our slippery abstractions? A man can
see the spots on a bug and count 'em, and tell what their color is, and
put another bug alongside of him and see whether the two are alike or
different. And when he uses a word he knows just what he means. There
is no mistake as to the meaning and identity of pulex irritans, confound
him!
--What if we should look in, some day, on the Scarabeeist, as he calls
himself?--said I.--The fact is the Master had got agoing at such a rate
that I was willing to give a little turn to the conversation.
--Oh, very well,--said the Master,--I had some more things to say, but I
don't doubt they'll keep. And besides, I take an interest in entomology,
and have my own opinion on the meloe question.
--You don't mean to say you have studied insects as well as solar
systems and the order of things generally?
--He looked pleased. All philosophers look pleased when people say
to them virtually, “Ye are gods.” The Master says he is vain
constitutionally, and thanks God that he is. I don't think he has enough
vanity to make a fool of himself with it, but the simple truth is he
cannot help knowing that he has a wide and lively intelligence, and
it pleases him to know it, and to be reminded of it, especially in an
oblique and tangential sort of way, so as not to look like downright
flattery.
Yes, yes, I have amused a summer or two with insects, among other
things. I described a new tabanus,--horsefly, you know,--which, I think,
had escaped notice. I felt as grand when I showed up my new discovery
as if I had created the beast. I don't doubt Herschel felt as if he had
made a planet when he first showed the astronomers Georgium Sidus, as he
called it. And that reminds me of something. I was riding on the outside
of a stagecoach from London to Windsor in the year--never mind the
year, but it must have been in June, I suppose, for I bought some
strawberries. England owes me a sixpence with interest from date, for I
gave the woman a shilling, and the coach contrived to start or the woman
timed it so that I just missed getting my change. What an odd thing
memory is, to be sure, to have kept such a triviality, and have lost
so much that was invaluable! She is a crazy wench, that Mnemosyne; she
throws her jewels out of the window and locks up straws and old rags in
her strong box.
[De profundis! said I to myself, the bottom of the bushel has dropped
out! Sancta--Maria, ora pro nobis!]
--But as I was saying, I was riding on the outside of a stage-coach from
London to Windsor, when all at once a picture familiar to me from my New
England village childhood came upon me like a reminiscence rather than a
revelation. It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts and spars and
ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if
it might be a piece of ordnance such as the revolted angels battered the
walls of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its muzzle defiantly
towards the sky. Why, you blessed old rattletrap, said I to myself, I
know you as well as I know my father's spectacles and snuff-box! And
that same crazy witch of a Memory, so divinely wise and foolish, travels
thirty-five hundred miles or so in a single pulse-beat, makes straight
for an old house and an old library and an old corner of it, and whisks
out a volume of an old cyclopaedia, and there is the picture of which
this is the original. Sir William Herschel's great telescope! It was
just about as big, as it stood there by the roadside, as it was in the
picture, not much different any way. Why should it be? The pupil of your
eye is only a gimlet-hole, not so very much bigger than the eye of a
sail-needle, and a camel has to go through it before you can see him.
You look into a stereoscope and think you see a miniature of a
building or a mountain; you don't, you 're made a fool of by your lying
intelligence, as you call it; you see the building and the mountain just
as large as with your naked eye looking straight at the real objects.
Doubt it, do you? Perhaps you'd like to doubt it to the music of a
couple of gold five-dollar pieces. If you would, say the word, and
man and money, as Messrs. Heenan and Morrissey have it, shall be
forthcoming; for I will make you look at a real landscape with your
right eye, and a stereoscopic view of it with your left eye, both at
once, and you can slide one over the other by a little management and
see how exactly the picture overlies the true landscape. We won't try it
now, because I want to read you something out of my book.
--I have noticed that the Master very rarely fails to come back to his
original proposition, though he, like myself, is fond of zigzagging in
order to reach it. Men's minds are like the pieces on a chess-board in
their way of moving. One mind creeps from the square it is on to the
next, straight forward, like the pawns. Another sticks close to its
own line of thought and follows it as far as it goes, with no heed for
others' opinions, as the bishop sweeps the board in the line of his own
color. And another class of minds break through everything that lies
before them, ride over argument and opposition, and go to the end of
the board, like the castle. But there is still another sort of intellect
which is very apt to jump over the thought that stands next and come
down in the unexpected way of the knight. But that same knight, as the
chess manuals will show you, will contrive to get on to every square
of the board in a pretty series of moves that looks like a pattern
of embroidery, and so these zigzagging minds like the Master's, and I
suppose my own is something like it, will sooner or later get back to
the square next the one they started from.
The Master took down a volume from one of the shelves. I could not
help noticing that it was a shelf near his hand as he sat, and that the
volume looked as if he had made frequent use of it. I saw, too, that
he handled it in a loving sort of way; the tenderness he would have
bestowed on a wife and children had to find a channel somewhere, and
what more natural than that he should look fondly on the volume which
held the thoughts that had rolled themselves smooth and round in his
mind like pebbles on a beach, the dreams which, under cover of the
simple artifices such as all writers use, told the little world of
readers his secret hopes and aspirations, the fancies which had pleased
him and which he could not bear to let die without trying to please
others with them? I have a great sympathy with authors, most of all with
unsuccessful ones. If one had a dozen lives or so, it would all be very
well, but to have only a single ticket in the great lottery, and have
that drawn a blank, is a rather sad sort of thing. So I was pleased to
see the affectionate kind of pride with which the Master handled his
book; it was a success, in its way, and he looked on it with a cheerful
sense that he had a right to be proud of it. The Master opened the
volume, and, putting on his large round glasses, began reading, as
authors love to read that love their books.
--The only good reason for believing in the stability of the moral order
of things is to be found in the tolerable steadiness of human averages.
Out of a hundred human beings fifty-one will be found in the long run
on the side of the right, so far as they know it, and against the wrong.
They will be organizers rather than disorganizers, helpers and not
hinderers in the upward movement of the race. This is the main fact
we have to depend on. The right hand of the great organism is a little
stronger than the left, that is all.
Now and then we come across a left-handed man. So now and then we find
a tribe or a generation, the subject of what we may call moral
left-handedness, but that need not trouble us about our formula. All we
have to do is to spread the average over a wider territory or a longer
period of time. Any race or period that insists on being left-handed
must go under if it comes in contact with a right-handed one. If there
were, as a general rule, fifty-one rogues in the hundred instead
of forty-nine, all other qualities of mind and body being equally
distributed between the two sections, the order of things would sooner
or later end in universal disorder. It is the question between the leak
and the pumps.
It does not seem very likely that the Creator of all things is taken by
surprise at witnessing anything any of his creatures do or think. Men
have sought out many inventions, but they can have contrived nothing
which did not exist as an idea in the omniscient consciousness to which
past, present, and future are alike Now.
We read what travellers tell us about the King of Dahomey, or the
Fejee Island people, or the short and simple annals of the celebrities
recorded in the Newgate Calendar, and do not know just what to make
of these brothers and sisters of the race; but I do not suppose an
intelligence even as high as the angelic beings, to stop short there,
would see anything very peculiar or wonderful about them, except as
everything is wonderful and unlike everything else.
It is very curious to see how science, that is, looking at and arranging
the facts of a case with our own eyes and our own intelligence, without
minding what somebody else has said, or how some old majority vote went
in a pack of intriguing ecclesiastics,--I say it is very curious to see
how science is catching up with one superstition after another.
There is a recognized branch of science familiar to all those who know
anything of the studies relating to life, under the name of Teratology.
It deals with all sorts of monstrosities which are to be met with in
living beings, and more especially in animals. It is found that what
used to be called lusus naturae, or freaks of nature, are just as much
subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of living creatures.
The rustic looks at the Siamese twins, and thinks he is contemplating
an unheard-of anomaly; but there are plenty of cases like theirs in the
books of scholars, and though they are not quite so common as double
cherries, the mechanism of their formation is not a whit more mysterious
than that of the twinned fruits. Such cases do not disturb the average
arrangement; we have Changs and Engs at one pole, and Cains and Abels at
the other. One child is born with six fingers on each hand, and another
falls short by one or more fingers of his due allowance; but the glover
puts his faith in the great law of averages, and makes his gloves with
five fingers apiece, trusting nature for their counterparts.
Thinking people are not going to be scared out of explaining or at least
trying to explain things by the shrieks of persons whose beliefs are
disturbed thereby. Comets were portents to Increase Mather, President of
Harvard College; “preachers of Divine wrath, heralds and messengers
of evil tidings to the world.” It is not so very long since Professor
Winthrop was teaching at the same institution. I can remember two of his
boys very well, old boys, it is true, they were, and one of them wore a
three-cornered cocked hat; but the father of these boys, whom, as I say,
I can remember, had to defend himself against the minister of the Old
South Church for the impiety of trying to account for earthquakes on
natural principles. And his ancestor, Governor Winthrop, would probably
have shaken his head over his descendant's dangerous audacity, if one
may judge by the solemn way in which he mentions poor Mrs. Hutchinson's
unpleasant experience, which so grievously disappointed her maternal
expectations. But people used always to be terribly frightened by those
irregular vital products which we now call “interesting specimens” and
carefully preserve in jars of alcohol. It took next to nothing to make a
panic; a child was born a few centuries ago with six teeth in its head,
and about that time the Turks began gaining great advantages over the
Christians. Of course there was an intimate connection between the
prodigy and the calamity. So said the wise men of that day.
--All these out-of-the-way cases are studied connectedly now, and are
found to obey very exact rules. With a little management one can even
manufacture living monstrosities. Malformed salmon and other fish can be
supplied in quantity, if anybody happens to want them. Now, what all
I have said is tending to is exactly this, namely, that just as
the celestial movements are regulated by fixed laws, just as bodily
monstrosities are produced according to rule, and with as good reason
as normal shapes, so obliquities of character are to be accounted for on
perfectly natural principles; they are just as capable of classification
as the bodily ones, and they all diverge from a certain average or
middle term which is the type of its kind. If life had been a little
longer I would have written a number of essays for which, as it is, I
cannot expect to have time. I have set down the titles of a hundred or
more, and I have often been tempted to publish these, for according
to my idea, the title of a book very often renders the rest of it
unnecessary. “Moral Teratology,” for instance, which is marked No. 67
on my list of “Essays Potential, not Actual,” suggests sufficiently well
what I should be like to say in the pages it would preface. People hold
up their hands at a moral monster as if there was no reason for his
existence but his own choice. That was a fine specimen we read of in the
papers a few years ago, the Frenchman, it may be remembered, who used
to waylay and murder young women, and after appropriating their effects,
bury their bodies in a private cemetery he kept for that purpose. It
is very natural, and I do not say it is not very proper, to hang such
eccentric persons as this; but it is not clear whether his vagaries
produce any more sensation at Headquarters than the meek enterprises of
the mildest of city missionaries. For the study of Moral Teratology will
teach you that you do not get such a malformed character as that without
a long chain of causes to account for it; and if you only knew those
causes, you would know perfectly well what to expect.
You may feel pretty sure that our friend of the private cemetery was not
the child of pious and intelligent parents; that he was not nurtured by
the best of mothers, and educated by the most judicious teachers;
and that he did not come of a lineage long known and honored for its
intellectual and moral qualities. Suppose that one should go to the
worst quarter of the city and pick out the worst-looking child of the
worst couple he could find, and then train him up successively at the
School for Infant Rogues, the Academy for Young Scamps, and the College
for Complete Criminal Education, would it be reasonable to expect a
Francois Xavier or a Henry Martyn to be the result of such a training?
The traditionists, in whose presumptuous hands the science of
anthropology has been trusted from time immemorial, have insisted on
eliminating cause and effect from the domain of morals. When they
have come across a moral monster they have seemed to think that he put
himself together, having a free choice of all the constituents which
make up manhood, and that consequently no punishment could be too bad
for him.
I say, hang him and welcome, if that is the best thing for society; hate
him, in a certain sense, as you hate a rattlesnake, but, if you pretend
to be a philosopher, recognize the fact that what you hate in him is
chiefly misfortune, and that if you had been born with his villanous low
forehead and poisoned instincts, and bred among creatures of the Races
Maudites whose natural history has to be studied like that of beasts
of prey and vermin, you would not have been sitting there in your
gold-bowed spectacles and passing judgment on the peccadilloes of your
fellow-creatures.
I have seen men and women so disinterested and noble, and devoted to the
best works, that it appeared to me if any good and faithful servant was
entitled to enter into the joys of his Lord, such as these might be.
But I do not know that I ever met with a human being who seemed to me to
have a stronger claim on the pitying consideration and kindness of
his Maker than a wretched, puny, crippled, stunted child that I saw in
Newgate, who was pointed out as one of the most notorious and inveterate
little thieves in London. I have no doubt that some of those who
were looking at this pitiable morbid secretion of the diseased social
organism thought they were very virtuous for hating him so heartily.
It is natural, and in one sense is all right enough. I want to catch a
thief and put the extinguisher on an incendiary as much as my neighbors
do; but I have two sides to my consciousness as I have two sides to my
heart, one carrying dark, impure blood, and the other the bright stream
which has been purified and vivified by the great source of life and
death,--the oxygen of the air which gives all things their vital heat,
and burns all things at last to ashes.
One side of me loves and hates; the other side of me judges, say rather
pleads and suspends judgment. I think, if I were left to myself, I
should hang a rogue and then write his apology and subscribe to a neat
monument, commemorating, not his virtues, but his misfortunes. I should,
perhaps, adorn the marble with emblems, as is the custom with regard to
the more regular and normally constituted members of society. It would
not be proper to put the image of a lamb upon the stone which marked the
resting-place of him of the private cemetery. But I would not hesitate
to place the effigy of a wolf or a hyena upon the monument. I do not
judge these animals, I only kill them or shut them up. I presume they
stand just as well with their Maker as lambs and kids, and the existence
of such beings is a perpetual plea for God Almighty's poor, yelling,
scalping Indians, his weasand-stopping Thugs, his despised felons,
his murdering miscreants, and all the unfortunates whom we, picked
individuals of a picked class of a picked race, scrubbed, combed, and
catechized from our cradles upward, undertake to find accommodations
for in another state of being where it is to be hoped they will have a
better chance than they had in this.
The Master paused, and took off his great round spectacles. I could not
help thinking that he looked benevolent enough to pardon Judas Iscariot
just at that moment, though his features can knot themselves up pretty,
formidably on occasion.
--You are somewhat of a phrenologist, I judge, by the way you talk of
instinctive and inherited tendencies--I said.
--They tell me I ought to be,--he answered, parrying my question, as
I thought.--I have had a famous chart made out of my cerebral organs,
according to which I ought to have been--something more than a poor
Magister Artaum.
--I thought a shade of regret deepened the lines on his broad,
antique-looking forehead, and I began talking about all the sights I had
seen in the way of monstrosities, of which I had a considerable list,
as you will see when I tell you my weakness in that direction. This, you
understand, Beloved, is private and confidential.
I pay my quarter of a dollar and go into all the side-shows that follow
the caravans and circuses round the country. I have made friends of all
the giants and all the dwarfs. I became acquainted with Monsieur Bihin,
le plus bel homme du monde, and one of the biggest, a great many years
ago, and have kept up my agreeable relations with him ever since. He
is a most interesting giant, with a softness of voice and tenderness
of feeling which I find very engaging. I was on friendly terms with Mr.
Charles Freeman, a very superior giant of American birth, seven feet
four, I think, in height, “double-jointed,” of mylodon muscularity, the
same who in a British prize-ring tossed the Tipton Slasher from one
side of the rope to the other, and now lies stretched, poor fellow! in a
mighty grave in the same soil which holds the sacred ashes of Cribb, and
the honored dust of Burke,--not the one “commonly called the sublime,”
but that other Burke to whom Nature had denied the sense of hearing lest
he should be spoiled by listening to the praises of the admiring circles
which looked on his dear-bought triumphs. Nor have I despised those
little ones whom that devout worshipper of Nature in her exceptional
forms, the distinguished Barnum, has introduced to the notice of
mankind. The General touches his chapeau to me, and the Commodore gives
me a sailor's greeting. I have had confidential interviews with the
double-headed daughter of Africa,--so far, at least, as her twofold
personality admitted of private confidences. I have listened to the
touching experiences of the Bearded Lady, whose rough cheeks belie her
susceptible heart. Miss Jane Campbell has allowed me to question her on
the delicate subject of avoirdupois equivalents; and the armless fair
one, whose embrace no monarch could hope to win, has wrought me a
watch-paper with those despised digits which have been degraded from
gloves to boots in our evolution from the condition of quadrumana.
I hope you have read my experiences as good-naturedly as the old Master
listened to them. He seemed to be pleased with my whim, and promised to
go with me to see all the side-shows of the next caravan. Before I left
him he wrote my name in a copy of the new edition of his book, telling
me that it would not all be new to me by a great deal, for he often
talked what he had printed to make up for having printed a good deal of
what he had talked.
Here is the passage of his Poem the Young Astronomer read to us.