V
What am I but the creature Thou hast made?
What have I save the blessings Thou hast lent?
What hope I but Thy mercy and Thy love?
Who but myself shall cloud my soul with fear?
Whose hand protect me from myself but Thine?
I claim the rights of weakness, I, the babe,
Call on my sire to shield me from the ills
That still beset my path, not trying me
With snares beyond my wisdom or my strength,
He knowing I shall use them to my harm,
And find a tenfold misery in the sense
That in my childlike folly I have sprung
The trap upon myself as vermin use
Drawn by the cunning bait to certain doom.
Who wrought the wondrous charm that leads us on
To sweet perdition, but the self-same power
That set the fearful engine to destroy
His wretched offspring (as the Rabbis tell),
And hid its yawning jaws and treacherous springs
In such a show of innocent sweet flowers
It lured the sinless angels and they fell?
Ah! He who prayed the prayer of all mankind
Summed in those few brief words the mightiest plea
For erring souls before the courts of heaven,
Save us from being tempted,--lest we fall!
If we are only as the potter's clay
Made to be fashioned as the artist wills,
And broken into shards if we offend
The eye of Him who made us, it is well;
Such love as the insensate lump of clay
That spins upon the swift-revolving wheel
Bears to the hand that shapes its growing form,
--Such love, no more, will be our hearts' return
To the great Master-workman for his care,
Or would be, save that this, our breathing clay,
Is intertwined with fine innumerous threads
That make it conscious in its framer's hand;
And this He must remember who has filled
These vessels with the deadly draught of life,
Life, that means death to all it claims. Our love
Must kindle in the ray that streams from heaven,
A faint reflection of the light divine;
The sun must warm the earth before the rose
Can show her inmost heart-leaves to the sun.
He yields some fraction of the Maker's right
Who gives the quivering nerve its sense of pain;
Is there not something in the pleading eye
Of the poor brute that suffers, which arraigns
The law that bids it suffer? Has it not
A claim for some remembrance in the book
That fills its pages with the idle words
Spoken of men? Or is it only clay,
Bleeding and aching in the potter's hand,
Yet all his own to treat it as he will
And when he will to cast it at his feet,
Shattered, dishonored, lost forevermore?
My dog loves me, but could he look beyond
His earthly master, would his love extend
To Him who--Hush! I will not doubt that He
Is better than our fears, and will not wrong
The least, the meanest of created things!
He would not trust me with the smallest orb
That circles through the sky; he would not give
A meteor to my guidance; would not leave
The coloring of a cloudlet to my hand;
He locks my beating heart beneath its bars
And keeps the key himself; he measures out
The draughts of vital breath that warm my blood,
Winds up the springs of instinct which uncoil,
Each in its season; ties me to my home,
My race, my time, my nation, and my creed
So closely that if I but slip my wrist
Out of the band that cuts it to the bone,
Men say, “He hath a devil”; he has lent
All that I hold in trust, as unto one
By reason of his weakness and his years
Not fit to hold the smallest shred in fee
Of those most common things he calls his own
And yet--my Rabbi tells me--he has left
The care of that to which a million worlds.
Filled with unconscious life were less than naught,
Has left that mighty universe, the Soul,
To the weak guidance of our baby hands,
Turned us adrift with our immortal charge,
Let the foul fiends have access at their will,
Taking the shape of angels, to our hearts,
Our hearts already poisoned through and through
With the fierce virus of ancestral sin.
If what my Rabbi tells me is the truth,
Why did the choir of angels sing for joy?
Heaven must be compassed in a narrow space,
And offer more than room enough for all
That pass its portals; but the underworld,
The godless realm, the place where demons forge
Their fiery darts and adamantine chains,
Must swarm with ghosts that for a little while
Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs
Of all the dulness of their stolid sires,
And all the erring instincts of their tribe,
Nature's own teaching, rudiments of “sin,”
Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail
To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay
And cursed with sense enough to lose their souls!
Brother, thy heart is troubled at my word;
Sister, I see the cloud is on thy brow.
He will not blame me, He who sends not peace,
But sends a sword, and bids us strike amain
At Error's gilded crest, where in the van
Of earth's great army, mingling with the best
And bravest of its leaders, shouting loud
The battle-cries that yesterday have led
The host of Truth to victory, but to-day
Are watchwords of the laggard and the slave,
He leads his dazzled cohorts. God has made
This world a strife of atoms and of spheres;
With every breath I sigh myself away
And take my tribute from the wandering wind
To fan the flame of life's consuming fire;
So, while my thought has life, it needs must burn,
And burning, set the stubble-fields ablaze,
Where all the harvest long ago was reaped
And safely garnered in the ancient barns,
But still the gleaners, groping for their food,
Go blindly feeling through the close-shorn straw,
While the young reapers flash their glittering steel
Where later suns have ripened nobler grain!
We listened to these lines in silence. They were evidently written
honestly, and with feeling, and no doubt meant to be reverential. I
thought, however, the Lady looked rather serious as he finished reading.
The Young Girl's cheeks were flushed, but she was not in the mood for
criticism.
As we came away the Master said to me--The stubble-fields are mighty
slow to take fire. These young fellows catch up with the world's ideas
one after another,--they have been tamed a long while, but they find
them running loose in their minds, and think they are ferae naturae.
They remind me of young sportsmen who fire at the first feathers they
see, and bring down a barnyard fowl. But the chicken may be worth
bagging for all that, he said, good-humoredly.
X
Caveat Lector. Let the reader look out for himself. The old Master,
whose words I have so frequently quoted and shall quote more of, is a
dogmatist who lays down the law, ex cathedra, from the chair of his own
personality. I do not deny that he has the ambition of knowing something
about a greater number of subjects than any one man ought to meddle
with, except in a very humble and modest way. And that is not his way.
There was no doubt something of, humorous bravado in his saying that the
actual “order of things” did not offer a field sufficiently ample for
his intelligence. But if I found fault with him, which would be easy
enough, I should say that he holds and expresses definite opinions
about matters that he could afford to leave open questions, or ask the
judgment of others about. But I do not want to find fault with him. If
he does not settle all the points he speaks of so authoritatively, he
sets me thinking about them, and I like a man as a companion who is not
afraid of a half-truth. I know he says some things peremptorily that
he may inwardly debate with himself. There are two ways of dealing
with assertions of this kind. One may attack them on the false side and
perhaps gain a conversational victory. But I like better to take them
up on the true side and see how much can be made of that aspect of
the dogmatic assertion. It is the only comfortable way of dealing with
persons like the old Master.
There have been three famous talkers in Great Britain, either of whom
would illustrate what I say about dogmatists well enough for my purpose.
You cannot doubt to what three I refer: Samuel the First, Samuel the
Second, and Thomas, last of the Dynasty. (I mean the living Thomas and
not Thomas B.)
I say the last of the Dynasty, for the conversational dogmatist on the
imperial scale becomes every year more and more an impossibility. If he
is in intelligent company he will be almost sure to find some one who
knows more about some of the subjects he generalizes upon than any
wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo is like to know. I
find myself, at certain intervals, in the society of a number of experts
in science, literature, and art, who cover a pretty wide range, taking
them all together, of human knowledge. I have not the least doubt that
if the great Dr. Samuel Johnson should come in and sit with this company
at one of their Saturday dinners, he would be listened to, as he always
was, with respect and attention. But there are subjects upon which the
great talker could speak magisterially in his time and at his club, upon
which so wise a man would express himself guardedly at the meeting where
I have supposed him a guest. We have a scientific man or two among
us, for instance, who would be entitled to smile at the good Doctor's
estimate of their labors, as I give it here:
“Of those that spin out life in trifles and die without a memorial, many
flatter themselves with high opinion of their own importance and imagine
that they are every day adding some improvement to human life.”--“Some
turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone,
and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day. Some
register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind
is changeable.
“There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colorless
liquors may produce a color by union, and that two cold bodies will
grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce the effect
expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.”
I cannot transcribe this extract without an intense inward delight in
its wit and a full recognition of its thorough half-truthfulness. Yet
if while the great moralist is indulging in these vivacities, he can be
imagined as receiving a message from Mr. Boswell or Mrs. Thrale flashed
through the depths of the ocean, we can suppose he might be tempted to
indulge in another oracular utterance, something like this:---A wise
man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but he bows to
the authority of a particular fact. He who would bound the possibilities
of human knowledge by the limitations of present acquirements would take
the dimensions of the infant in ordering the habiliments of the adult.
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of
wisdom to listen. Will the Professor have the kindness to inform me by
what steps of gradual development the ring and the loadstone, which were
but yesterday the toys of children and idlers, have become the means
of approximating the intelligences of remote continents, and wafting
emotions unchilled through the abysses of the no longer unfathomable
deep?
--This, you understand, Beloved, is only a conventional imitation of the
Doctor's style of talking. He wrote in grand balanced phrases, but his
conversation was good, lusty, off-hand familiar talk. He used very often
to have it all his own way. If he came back to us we must remember that
to treat him fairly we must suppose him on a level with the knowledge of
our own time. But that knowledge is more specialized, a great deal, than
knowledge was in his day. Men cannot talk about things they have seen
from the outside with the same magisterial authority the talking dynasty
pretended to. The sturdy old moralist felt grand enough, no doubt, when
he said, “He that is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle
wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war or
peace.” Benjamin Franklin was one of these idlers who were electrifying
bottles, but he also found time to engage in the trifling prattle about
war and peace going on in those times. The talking Doctor hits him very
hard in “Taxation no Tyranny”: “Those who wrote the Address (of the
American Congress in 1775), though they have shown no great extent or
profundity of mind, are yet probably wiser than to believe it: but they
have been taught by some master of mischief how to put in motion the
engine of political electricity; to attract by the sounds of Liberty and
Property, to repel by those of Popery and Slavery; and to give the great
stroke by the name of Boston.” The talking dynasty has always been
hard upon us Americans. King Samuel II. says: “It is, I believe, a fact
verified beyond doubt, that some years ago it was impossible to obtain
a copy of the Newgate Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the
Americans, whether to suppress the blazon of their forefathers or
to assist in their genealogical researches I could never learn
satisfactorily.” As for King Thomas, the last of the monological
succession, he made such a piece of work with his prophecies and his
sarcasms about our little trouble with some of the Southern States, that
we came rather to pity him for his whims and crotchets than to get angry
with him for calling us bores and other unamiable names.
I do not think we believe things because considerable people say them,
on personal authority, that is, as intelligent listeners very commonly
did a century ago. The newspapers have lied that belief out of us. Any
man who has a pretty gift of talk may hold his company a little while
when there is nothing better stirring. Every now and then a man who may
be dull enough prevailingly has a passion of talk come over him which
makes him eloquent and silences the rest. I have a great respect for
these divine paroxysms, these half-inspired moments of influx when they
seize one whom we had not counted among the luminaries of the social
sphere. But the man who can--give us a fresh experience on anything that
interests us overrides everybody else. A great peril escaped makes a
great story-teller of a common person enough. I remember when a certain
vessel was wrecked long ago, that one of the survivors told the story as
well as Defoe could have told it. Never a word from him before; never
a word from him since. But when it comes to talking one's common
thoughts,--those that come and go as the breath does; those that
tread the mental areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall, an
interminable procession of every hue and garb,--there are few, indeed,
that can dare to lift the curtain which hangs before the window in the
breast and throw open the window, and let us look and listen. We are all
loyal enough to our sovereign when he shows himself, but sovereigns are
scarce. I never saw the absolute homage of listeners but once, that I
remember, to a man's common talk, and that was to the conversation of an
old man, illustrious by his lineage and the exalted honors he had won,
whose experience had lessons for the wisest, and whose eloquence had
made the boldest tremble.
All this because I told you to look out for yourselves and not take for
absolute truth everything the old Master of our table, or anybody else
at it sees fit to utter. At the same time I do not think that he, or any
of us whose conversation I think worth reporting, says anything for the
mere sake of saying it and without thinking that it holds some truth,
even if it is not unqualifiedly true.
I suppose a certain number of my readers wish very heartily that the
Young Astronomer whose poetical speculations I am recording would stop
trying by searching to find out the Almighty, and sign the thirty-nine
articles, or the Westminster Confession of Faith, at any rate slip his
neck into some collar or other, and pull quietly in the harness, whether
it galled him or not. I say, rather, let him have his talk out; if
nobody else asks the questions he asks, some will be glad to hear them,
but if you, the reader, find the same questions in your own mind,
you need not be afraid to see how they shape themselves in another's
intelligence. Do you recognize the fact that we are living in a new
time? Knowledge--it excites prejudices to call it science--is advancing
as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in
upon the shore. The courtiers of King Canute (I am not afraid of the old
comparison), represented by the adherents of the traditional beliefs
of the period, move his chair back an inch at a time, but not until his
feet are pretty damp, not to say wet. The rock on which he sat securely
awhile ago is completely under water. And now people are walking up and
down the beach and judging for themselves how far inland the chair
of King Canute is like to be moved while they and their children are
looking on, at the rate in which it is edging backward. And it is quite
too late to go into hysterics about it.
The shore, solid, substantial, a great deal more than eighteen
hundred years old, is natural humanity. The beach which the ocean of
knowledge--you may call it science if you like--is flowing over, is
theological humanity. Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and the
teachings of Saint Augustine sin was made a transferable chattel. (I
leave the interval wide for others to make narrow.)
The doctrine of heritable guilt, with its mechanical consequences, has
done for our moral nature what the doctrine of demoniac possession
has done in barbarous times and still does among barbarous tribes for
disease. Out of that black cloud came the lightning which struck the
compass of humanity. Conscience, which from the dawn of moral being had
pointed to the poles of right and wrong only as the great current of
will flowed through the soul, was demagnetized, paralyzed, and knew
henceforth no fixed meridian, but stayed where the priest or the council
placed it. There is nothing to be done but to polarize the needle over
again. And for this purpose we must study the lines of direction of all
the forces which traverse our human nature.
We must study man as we have studied stars and rocks. We need not go,
we are told, to our sacred books for astronomy or geology or other
scientific knowledge. Do not stop there! Pull Canute's chair back fifty
rods at once, and do not wait until he is wet to the knees! Say now,
bravely, as you will sooner or later have to say, that we need not go to
any ancient records for our anthropology. Do we not all hold, at least,
that the doctrine of man's being a blighted abortion, a miserable
disappointment to his Creator, and hostile and hateful to him from his
birth, may give way to the belief that he is the latest terrestrial
manifestation of an ever upward-striving movement of divine power? If
there lives a man who does not want to disbelieve the popular notions
about the condition and destiny of the bulk of his race, I should like
to have him look me in the face and tell me so.
I am not writing for the basement story or the nursery, and I do not
pretend to be, but I say nothing in these pages which would not be said
without fear of offence in any intelligent circle, such as clergymen of
the higher castes are in the habit of frequenting. There are teachers
in type for our grandmothers and our grandchildren who vaccinate the
two childhoods with wholesome doctrine, transmitted harmlessly from one
infant to another. But we three men at our table have taken the disease
of thinking in the natural way. It is an epidemic in these times, and
those who are afraid of it must shut themselves up close or they will
catch it.
I hope none of us are wanting in reverence. One at least of us is a
regular church-goer, and believes a man may be devout and yet very free
in the expression of his opinions on the gravest subjects. There may be
some good people who think that our young friend who puts his thoughts
in verse is going sounding over perilous depths, and are frightened
every time he throws the lead. There is nothing to be frightened at.
This is a manly world we live in. Our reverence is good for nothing if
it does not begin with self-respect. Occidental manhood springs from
that as its basis; Oriental manhood finds the greatest satisfaction in
self-abasement. There is no use in trying to graft the tropical palm
upon the Northern pine. The same divine forces underlie the growth of
both, but leaf and flower and fruit must follow the law of race, of
soil, of climate. Whether the questions which assail my young friend
have risen in my reader's mind or not, he knows perfectly well that
nobody can keep such questions from springing up in every young mind of
any force or honesty. As for the excellent little wretches who grow up
in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, Protestant or
Catholic, Jew or Mormon, Mahometan or Buddhist, they signify nothing in
the intellectual life of the race. If the world had been wholly peopled
with such half-vitalized mental negatives, there never would have been a
creed like that of Christendom.
I entirely agree with the spirit of the verses I have looked over, in
this point at least, that a true man's allegiance is given to that which
is highest in his own nature. He reverences truth, he loves kindness,
he respects justice. The two first qualities he understands well enough.
But the last, justice, at least as between the Infinite and the
finite, has been so utterly dehumanized, disintegrated, decomposed, and
diabolized in passing through the minds of the half-civilized banditti
who have peopled and unpeopled the world for some scores of generations,
that it has become a mere algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever
as a human conception.
As for power, we are outgrowing all superstition about that. We have not
the slightest respect for it as such, and it is just as well to remember
this in all our spiritual adjustments. We fear power when we cannot
master it; but just as far as we can master it, we make a slave and a
beast of burden of it without hesitation. We cannot change the ebb and
flow of the tides, or the course of the seasons, but we come as near it
as we can. We dam out the ocean, we make roses bloom in winter and water
freeze in summer. We have no more reverence for the sun than we have for
a fish-tail gas-burner; we stare into his face with telescopes as at a
ballet-dancer with opera-glasses; we pick his rays to pieces with prisms
as if they were so many skeins of colored yarn; we tell him we do not
want his company and shut him out like a troublesome vagrant. The gods
of the old heathen are the servants of to-day. Neptune, Vulcan, Aolus,
and the bearer of the thunderbolt himself have stepped down from their
pedestals and put on our livery. We cannot always master them, neither
can we always master our servant, the horse, but we have put a bridle
on the wildest natural agencies. The mob of elemental forces is as noisy
and turbulent as ever, but the standing army of civilization keeps it
well under, except for an occasional outbreak.
When I read the Lady's letter printed some time since, I could not
help honoring the feeling which prompted her in writing it. But while I
respect the innocent incapacity of tender age and the limitations of the
comparatively uninstructed classes, it is quite out of the question to
act as if matters of common intelligence and universal interest were the
private property of a secret society, only to be meddled with by those
who know the grip and the password.
We must get over the habit of transferring the limitations of the
nervous temperament and of hectic constitutions to the great Source
of all the mighty forces of nature, animate and inanimate. We may
confidently trust that we have over us a Being thoroughly robust and
grandly magnanimous, in distinction from the Infinite Invalid bred in
the studies of sickly monomaniacs, who corresponds to a very common
human type, but makes us blush for him when we contrast him with a truly
noble man, such as most of us have had the privilege of knowing both in
public and in private life.
I was not a little pleased to find that the Lady, in spite of her
letter, sat through the young man's reading of portions of his poem with
a good deal of complacency. I think I can guess what is in her mind. She
believes, as so many women do, in that great remedy for discontent, and
doubts about humanity, and questionings of Providence, and all sorts of
youthful vagaries,--I mean the love-cure. And she thinks, not without
some reason, that these astronomical lessons, and these readings of
poetry and daily proximity at the table, and the need of two young
hearts that have been long feeling lonely, and youth and nature and “all
impulses of soul and sense,” as Coleridge has it, will bring these two
young people into closer relations than they perhaps have yet thought
of; and so that sweet lesson of loving the neighbor whom he has seen
may lead him into deeper and more trusting communion with the Friend and
Father whom he has not seen.
The Young Girl evidently did not intend that her accomplice should be a
loser by the summary act of the Member of the Haouse: I took occasion
to ask That Boy what had become of all the popguns. He gave me to
understand that popguns were played out, but that he had got a squirt
and a whip, and considered himself better off than before.
This great world is full of mysteries. I can comprehend the pleasure to
be got out of the hydraulic engine; but what can be the fascination of a
whip, when one has nothing to flagellate but the calves of his own legs,
I could never understand. Yet a small riding-whip is the most
popular article with the miscellaneous New-Englander at all great
gatherings,--cattle-shows and Fourth-of-July celebrations. If Democritus
and Heraclitus could walk arm in arm through one of these crowds, the
first would be in a broad laugh to see the multitude of young persons
who were rejoicing in the possession of one of these useless and
worthless little commodities; happy himself to see how easily others
could purchase happiness. But the second would weep bitter tears to
think what a rayless and barren life that must be which could extract
enjoyment from the miserable flimsy wand that has such magic attraction
for sauntering youths and simpering maidens. What a dynamometer of
happiness are these paltry toys, and what a rudimentary vertebrate must
be the freckled adolescent whose yearning for the infinite can be stayed
even for a single hour by so trifling a boon from the venal hands of the
finite!
Pardon these polysyllabic reflections, Beloved, but I never contemplate
these dear fellow-creatures of ours without a delicious sense of
superiority to them and to all arrested embryos of intelligence, in
which I have no doubt you heartily sympathize with me. It is not
merely when I look at the vacuous countenances of the mastigophori, the
whip-holders, that I enjoy this luxury (though I would not miss that
holiday spectacle for a pretty sum of money, and advise you by all means
to make sure of it next Fourth of July, if you missed it this), but I
get the same pleasure from many similar manifestations.
I delight in Regalia, so called, of the kind not worn by kings, nor
obtaining their diamonds from the mines of Golconda. I have a passion
for those resplendent titles which are not conferred by a sovereign and
would not be the open sesame to the courts of royalty, yet which are as
opulent in impressive adjectives as any Knight of the Garter's list
of dignities. When I have recognized in the every-day name of His Very
Worthy High Eminence of some cabalistic association, the inconspicuous
individual whose trifling indebtedness to me for value received remains
in a quiescent state and is likely long to continue so, I confess to
having experienced a thrill of pleasure. I have smiled to think how
grand his magnificent titular appendages sounded in his own ears and
what a feeble tintinnabulation they made in mine. The crimson sash, the
broad diagonal belt of the mounted marshal of a great procession, so
cheap in themselves, yet so entirely satisfactory to the wearer, tickle
my heart's root.
Perhaps I should have enjoyed all these weaknesses of my infantile
fellow-creatures without an afterthought, except that on a certain
literary anniversary when I tie the narrow blue and pink ribbons in my
button-hole and show my decorated bosom to the admiring public, I am
conscious of a certain sense of distinction and superiority in virtue of
that trifling addition to my personal adornments which reminds me that I
too have some embryonic fibres in my tolerably well-matured organism.
I hope I have not hurt your feelings, if you happen to be a High and
Mighty Grand Functionary in any illustrious Fraternity. When I tell you
that a bit of ribbon in my button-hole sets my vanity prancing, I think
you cannot be grievously offended that I smile at the resonant titles
which make you something more than human in your own eyes. I would not
for the world be mistaken for one of those literary roughs whose brass
knuckles leave their mark on the foreheads of so many inoffensive
people.
There is a human sub-species characterized by the coarseness of its
fibre and the acrid nature of its intellectual secretions. It is to a
certain extent penetrative, as all creatures are which are provided with
stings. It has an instinct which guides it to the vulnerable parts of
the victim on which it fastens. These two qualities give it a certain
degree of power which is not to be despised. It might perhaps be less
mischievous, but for the fact that the wound where it leaves its poison
opens the fountain from which it draws its nourishment.
Beings of this kind can be useful if they will only find their
appropriate sphere, which is not literature, but that circle of
rough-and-tumble political life where the fine-fibred men are at a
discount, where epithets find their subjects poison-proof, and the sting
which would be fatal to a literary debutant only wakes the eloquence
of the pachydermatous ward-room politician to a fiercer shriek of
declamation.
The Master got talking the other day about the difference between races
and families. I am reminded of what he said by what I have just been
saying myself about coarse-fibred and fine-fibred people.
--We talk about a Yankee, a New-Englander,--he said,-as if all of 'em
were just the same kind of animal. “There is knowledge and knowledge,”
said John Bunyan. There are Yankees and Yankees. Do you know two native
trees called pitch pine and white pine respectively? Of course you know
'em. Well, there are pitch-pine Yankees and white-pine Yankees. We don't
talk about the inherited differences of men quite as freely, perhaps,
as they do in the Old World, but republicanism doesn't alter the laws
of physiology. We have a native aristocracy, a superior race, just as
plainly marked by nature as of a higher and finer grade than the common
run of people as the white pine is marked in its form, its stature, its
bark, its delicate foliage, as belonging to the nobility of the forest;
and the pitch pine, stubbed, rough, coarse-haired, as of the plebeian
order. Only the strange thing is to see in what a capricious way our
natural nobility is distributed. The last born nobleman I have seen,
I saw this morning; he was pulling a rope that was fastened to a Maine
schooner loaded with lumber. I should say he was about twenty years
old, as fine a figure of a young man as you would ask to see, and with
a regular Greek outline of countenance, waving hair, that fell as if
a sculptor had massed it to copy, and a complexion as rich as a red
sunset. I have a notion that the State of Maine breeds the natural
nobility in a larger proportion than some other States, but they spring
up in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. The young fellow I saw this
morning had on an old flannel shirt, a pair of trowsers that meant hard
work, and a cheap cloth cap pushed back on his head so as to let the
large waves of hair straggle out over his forehead; he was tugging at
his rope with the other sailors, but upon my word I don't think I have
seen a young English nobleman of all those whom I have looked upon that
answered to the notion of “blood” so well as this young fellow did. I
suppose if I made such a levelling confession as this in public, people
would think I was looking towards being the labor-reform candidate for
President. But I should go on and spoil my prospects by saying that
I don't think the white-pine Yankee is the more generally prevailing
growth, but rather the pitch-pine Yankee.
--The Member of the Haouse seemed to have been getting a dim idea that
all this was not exactly flattering to the huckleberry districts. His
features betrayed the growth of this suspicion so clearly that the
Master replied to his look as if it had been a remark. [I need hardly
say that this particular member of the General Court was a pitch-pine
Yankee of the most thoroughly characterized aspect and flavor.]
--Yes, Sir,--the Master continued,--Sir being anybody that listened,
--there is neither flattery nor offence in the views which a
physiological observer takes of the forms of life around him. It won't
do to draw individual portraits, but the differences of natural groups
of human beings are as proper subjects of remark as those of different
breeds of horses, and if horses were Houyhnhnms I don't think they would
quarrel with us because we made a distinction between a “Morgan” and a
“Messenger.” The truth is, Sir, the lean sandy soil and the droughts and
the long winters and the east-winds and the cold storms, and all sorts
of unknown local influences that we can't make out quite so plainly as
these, have a tendency to roughen the human organization and make it
coarse, something as it is with the tree I mentioned. Some spots and
some strains of blood fight against these influences, but if I should
say right out what I think, it would be that the finest human fruit, on
the whole; and especially the finest women that we get in New England
are raised under glass.
--Good gracious!--exclaimed the Landlady, under glass!
--Give me cowcumbers raised in the open air, said the Capitalist, who
was a little hard of hearing.
--Perhaps,--I remarked,--it might be as well if you would explain this
last expression of yours. Raising human beings under glass I take to be
a metaphorical rather than a literal statement of your meaning.
--No, Sir!--replied the Master, with energy,--I mean just what I say,
Sir. Under glass, and with a south exposure. During the hard season, of
course,--for in the heats of summer the tenderest hot-house plants are
not afraid of the open air. Protection is what the transplanted Aryan
requires in this New England climate. Keep him, and especially keep her,
in a wide street of a well-built city eight months of the year; good
solid brick walls behind her, good sheets of plate-glass, with the sun
shining warm through them, in front of her, and you have put her in the
condition of the pine-apple, from the land of which, and not from that
of the other kind of pine, her race started on its travels. People don't
know what a gain there is to health by living in cities, the best parts
of them of course, for we know too well what the worst parts are. In the
first place you get rid of the noxious emanations which poison so many
country localities with typhoid fever and dysentery, not wholly rid of
them, of course, but to a surprising degree. Let me tell you a doctor's
story. I was visiting a Western city a good many years ago; it was in
the autumn, the time when all sorts of malarious diseases are about. The
doctor I was speaking of took me to see the cemetery just outside the
town, I don't know how much he had done to fill it, for he didn't tell
me, but I'll tell you what he did say.
“Look round,” said the doctor. “There isn't a house in all the ten-mile
circuit of country you can see over, where there isn't one person, at
least, shaking with fever and ague. And yet you need n't be afraid of
carrying it away with you, for as long as your home is on a paved street
you are safe.”
--I think it likely--the Master went on to say--that my friend the
doctor put it pretty strongly, but there is no doubt at all that while
all the country round was suffering from intermittent fever, the paved
part of the city was comparatively exempted. What do you do when you
build a house on a damp soil, and there are damp soils pretty much
everywhere? Why you floor the cellar with cement, don't you? Well,
the soil of a city is cemented all over, one may say, with certain
qualifications of course. A first-rate city house is a regular
sanatorium. The only trouble is, that the little good-for-nothings that
come of utterly used-up and worn-out stock, and ought to die, can't die,
to save their lives. So they grow up to dilute the vigor of the race
with skim-milk vitality. They would have died, like good children, in
most average country places; but eight months of shelter in a regulated
temperature, in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good
sidewalks to go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream
of summer and the fresh milk of Jersey cows, make the little sham
organizations--the worm-eaten wind-falls, for that 's what they look
like--hang on to the boughs of life like “froze-n-thaws”; regular
struldbrugs they come to be, a good many of 'em.
--The Scarabee's ear was caught by that queer word of Swift's, and he
asked very innocently what kind of bugs he was speaking of, whereupon
That Boy shouted out, Straddlebugs! to his own immense amusement and the
great bewilderment of the Scarabee, who only saw that there was one of
those unintelligible breaks in the conversation which made other people
laugh, and drew back his antennae as usual, perplexed, but not amused.
I do not believe the Master had said all he was going to say on this
subject, and of course all these statements of his are more or less
one-sided. But that some invalids do much better in cities than in the
country is indisputable, and that the frightful dysenteries and fevers
which have raged like pestilences in many of our country towns are
almost unknown in the better built sections of some of our large cities
is getting to be more generally understood since our well-to-do people
have annually emigrated in such numbers from the cemented surface of the
city to the steaming soil of some of the dangerous rural districts. If
one should contrast the healthiest country residences with the worst
city ones the result would be all the other way, of course, so that
there are two sides to the question, which we must let the doctors pound
in their great mortar, infuse and strain, hoping that they will present
us with the clear solution when they have got through these processes.
One of our chief wants is a complete sanitary map of every State in the
Union.
The balance of our table, as the reader has no doubt observed, has been
deranged by the withdrawal of the Man of Letters, so called, and
only the side of the deficiency changed by the removal of the Young
Astronomer into our neighborhood. The fact that there was a vacant chair
on the side opposite us had by no means escaped the notice of That Boy.
He had taken advantage of his opportunity and invited in a schoolmate
whom he evidently looked upon as a great personage. This boy or youth
was a good deal older than himself and stood to him apparently in the
light of a patron and instructor in the ways of life. A very jaunty,
knowing young gentleman he was, good-looking, smartly dressed,
smooth-checked as yet, curly-haired, with a roguish eye, a sagacious
wink, a ready tongue, as I soon found out; and as I learned could catch
a ball on the fly with any boy of his age; not quarrelsome, but, if he
had to strike, hit from the shoulder; the pride of his father (who was
a man of property and a civic dignitary), and answering to the name of
Johnny.
I was a little surprised at the liberty That Boy had taken in
introducing an extra peptic element at our table, reflecting as I did
that a certain number of avoirdupois ounces of nutriment which the
visitor would dispose of corresponded to a very appreciable pecuniary
amount, so that he was levying a contribution upon our Landlady
which she might be inclined to complain of. For the Caput mortuum (or
deadhead, in vulgar phrase) is apt to be furnished with a Venter vivus,
or, as we may say, a lively appetite. But the Landlady welcomed the
new-comer very heartily.
--Why! how--do--you--do Johnny?! with the notes of interrogation and of
admiration both together, as here represented.
Johnny signified that he was doing about as well as could be expected
under the circumstances, having just had a little difference with a
young person whom he spoke of as “Pewter-jaw” (I suppose he had worn a
dentist's tooth-straightening contrivance during his second dentition),
which youth he had finished off, as he said, in good shape, but at
the expense of a slight epistaxis, we will translate his vernacular
expression.
--The three ladies all looked sympathetic, but there did not seem to be
any great occasion for it, as the boy had come out all right, and seemed
to be in the best of spirits.
--And how is your father and your mother? asked the Landlady.
--Oh, the Governor and the Head Centre? A 1, both of 'em. Prime order
for shipping,--warranted to stand any climate. The Governor says he
weighs a hunderd and seventy-five pounds. Got a chin-tuft just like
Ed'in Forrest. D'd y' ever see Ed'in Forrest play Metamora? Bully, I
tell you! My old gentleman means to be Mayor or Governor or President or
something or other before he goes off the handle, you'd better b'lieve.
He's smart,--and I've heard folks say I take after him.
--Somehow or other I felt as if I had seen this boy before, or known
something about him. Where did he get those expressions “A 1” and
“prime” and so on? They must have come from somebody who has been in the
retail dry-goods business, or something of that nature. I have certain
vague reminiscences that carry me back to the early times of this
boardinghouse.--Johnny.--Landlady knows his father well.
--Boarded with her, no doubt.--There was somebody by the name of John,
I remember perfectly well, lived with her. I remember both my friends
mentioned him, one of them very often. I wonder if this boy isn't a son
of his! I asked the Landlady after breakfast whether this was not, as I
had suspected, the son of that former boarder.
--To be sure he is,--she answered,--and jest such a good-natur'd sort of
creatur' as his father was. I always liked John, as we used to call his
father. He did love fun, but he was a good soul, and stood by me when I
was in trouble, always. He went into business on his own account after a
while, and got merried, and settled down into a family man. They tell
me he is an amazing smart business man,--grown wealthy, and his wife's
father left her money. But I can't help calling him John,--law, we never
thought of calling him anything else, and he always laughs and says,
“That's right.” This is his oldest son, and everybody calls him Johnny.
That Boy of ours goes to the same school with his boy, and thinks there
never was anybody like him,--you see there was a boy undertook to impose
on our boy, and Johnny gave the other boy a good licking, and ever since
that he is always wanting to have Johnny round with him and bring him
here with him,--and when those two boys get together, there never was
boys that was so chock full of fun and sometimes mischief, but not very
bad mischief, as those two boys be. But I like to have him come once in
a while when there is room at the table, as there is now, for it puts me
in mind of the old times, when my old boarders was all round me, that
I used to think so much of,--not that my boarders that I have now a'nt
very nice people, but I did think a dreadful sight of the gentleman that
made that first book; it helped me on in the world more than ever
he knew of,--for it was as good as one of them Brandreth's pills
advertisements, and did n't cost me a cent, and that young lady he
merried too, she was nothing but a poor young schoolma'am when she come
to my house, and now--and she deserved it all too; for she was always
just the same, rich or poor, and she is n't a bit prouder now she wears
a camel's-hair shawl, than she was when I used to lend her a woollen one
to keep her poor dear little shoulders warm when she had to go out and
it was storming,--and then there was that old gentleman,--I can't speak
about him, for I never knew how good he was till his will was opened,
and then it was too late to thank him....
I respected the feeling which caused the interval of silence, and found
my own eyes moistened as I remembered how long it was since that friend
of ours was sitting in the chair where I now sit, and what a tidal wave
of change has swept over the world and more especially over this great
land of ours, since he opened his lips and found so many kind listeners.
The Young Astronomer has read us another extract from his manuscript. I
ran my eye over it, and so far as I have noticed it is correct enough
in its versification. I suppose we are getting gradually over our
hemispherical provincialism, which allowed a set of monks to pull their
hoods over our eyes and tell us there was no meaning in any religious
symbolism but our own. If I am mistaken about this advance I am very
glad to print the young man's somewhat outspoken lines to help us in
that direction.