often delighted his company by his lively conversation, should say he
was miserable. "Alas! it is all outside," replied the sage; "I may be
cracking my joke and cursing the sun: sun, how I hate thy beams!" "Are
we to think Pope was happy," said he, on another occasion, "because he
says so in his writings? We see in his writings what he wished the state
of his mind to appear. Dr. Young, who pined for preferment, talks with
contempt of it in his writings, and affects to despise everything he did
not despise." The author of John Gilpin said of himself and his humorous
poetry, "Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote
have been when in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood,
perhaps, would never have been written at all." Sir Walter Scott, in the
height of his ill-fortune, was ever giving vent in his diary or
elsewhere to some whimsical outburst or humorous sally, and after an
extra gay entry in his journal just before leaving his dingy Edinburgh
lodgings for Abbotsford, he follows it up next day with this bit of
self-portraiture: "Anybody would think from the fal-de-ral conclusion of
my journal of yesterday that I left town in a very good humor. But
nature has given me a kind of buoyancy--I know not what to call it--that
mingles with my deepest afflictions and most gloomy hours. I have a
secret pride--I fancy it will be most truly termed--which impels me to
mix with my distress strange snatches of mirth which have no mirth in
them."
The Grand Duke of Weimar, entertaining an American author at his table,
spoke of Poe, whose poem of The Raven he had never heard of until the
evening previous. "The conception is terrible," he said. "Of course the
Raven can only symbolize Despair, and he makes it perch upon the bust of
Pallas, as if Despair even broods over Wisdom."
The Chronicle of Lueneburg, says Heine, "records that during the year
1480 there were whistled and sung throughout all Germany certain songs,
which for sweetness and tenderness surpassed any previously known in
German realms. Young and old, and the women in particular, were quite
bewitched by these ballads, which might be heard the livelong day. But
these songs, so the chronicle goes on to say, were composed by a young
priest who was afflicted with leprosy and lived a forlorn, solitary
life, secluded from all the world. You are surely aware, gentle reader,
what a horrible disease was leprosy during the Middle Ages, and how the
wretched beings afflicted with this incurable malady were driven out
from all society, and from the abodes of men, and were forbidden to
approach any human being. Living corpses, they wandered to and fro,
muffled from head to foot, a hood drawn over the face, and carrying in
the hand a bell, the Lazarus-bell, as it was called, through which they
were to give timely warning of their approach, so that every one could
avoid their path. The poor priest, whose fame as a lyric poet the
chronicle praised so highly, was such a leper; and while all Germany,
shouting and jubilant, sang and whistled his songs, he, a wretched
outcast, in the desolation of his misery sat sorrowful and alone."
"There have been times in my life," said Goethe, "when I have fallen
asleep in tears; but in my dreams the most charming forms have come to
console and to cheer me."
After Scott began the Bride of Lammermoor, he had one of his terrible
seizures of cramp, yet during his torment he dictated that fine novel;
and when he rose from his bed, and the published book was placed in his
hands, "he did not," James Ballantyne explicitly assured Lockhart,
"recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it
contained."
Jean Paul wrote a great part of his comic romance (Nicholas Margraf) in
an agony of heart-break from the death of his promising son Max. He
could not, one of his biographers says, bear the sight of any book his
son had touched; and the word philology (the science in which Max
excelled) went through his heart like a bolt of ice. He had such
wonderful power over himself as to go on with his comic romance while
his eyes continually dropped tears. He wept so much in secret that his
eyes became impaired, and he trembled for the total loss of sight. Wine,
that had previously, after long sustained labor, been a cordial to him,
he could not bear to touch; and after employing the morning in writing,
he spent the whole afternoon lying on the sofa in his wife's apartment,
his head supported by her arm.
Washington Irving completed that most extravagantly humorous of all his
works--the History of New York--while he was suffering from the death of
his sweetheart, Matilda Hoffman, which nearly broke his heart. He says,
in a memorandum found amongst his private papers after his death, "She
was but about seventeen years old when she died. I cannot tell what a
horrid state of mind I was in for a long time. I seemed to care for
nothing; the world was a blank to me. I went into the country, but could
not bear solitude, yet could not enjoy society. There was a dismal
horror continually in my mind, that made me fear to be alone. I had
often to get up in the night, and seek the bedroom of my brother, as if
the having a human being by me would relieve me from the frightful gloom
of my own thoughts.... When I became more calm and collected, I applied
myself, by way of occupation, to the finishing of my work. I brought it
to a close, as well as I could, and published it; but the time and
circumstances in which it was produced rendered me almost unable to look
upon it with satisfaction. Still it took with the public, and gave me
celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in
America.... I seemed to drift about without aim or object, at the mercy
of every breeze; my heart wanted anchorage. I was naturally susceptible,
and tried to form other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it
would continually roam to what it had lost; and whenever there was a
pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement, I would sink into dismal
dejection. For years I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless
regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually
before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly."
Heine, for several years preceding his death, was a miserable paralytic.
All that time, it is stated, he lay upon a pile of mattresses, racked by
pain and exhausted by sleeplessness, till his body was reduced below all
natural dimensions, and his long beard fell over the coverlet like
swan's down or a baby's hair. The muscular debility was such that he had
to raise the eyelid with his hand when he wished to see the face of any
one about him; and thus in darkness, he thought, and listened, and
dictated, preserving to the very last his clearness of intellect, his
precision of diction, and his invincible humor.
The wretchedness of poor Scarron, at whose jests, burlesques, and
buffooneries all France was laughing, may be guessed at from his own
description. His form, to use his own words, "had become bent like a Z."
"My legs," he adds, "first made an obtuse angle with my thighs, then a
right and at last an acute angle; my thighs made another with my body.
My head is bent upon my chest; my arms are contracted as well as my
legs, and my fingers as well as my arms. I am, in truth, a pretty
complete abridgment of human misery." His head was too big for his
diminutive stature, one eye was set deeper than the other, and his teeth
were the color of wood. At the time of his marriage (to the beautiful
and gifted Mademoiselle d'Aubigne, afterward Madame de Maintenon, the
wife for thirty years of Louis XIV.!) he could only move with freedom
his hand, tongue, and eyes. His days were passed in a chair with a hood,
and so completely the abridgment of man he describes himself, that his
wife had to kneel to look in his face. He could not be moved without
screaming from pain, nor sleep without taking opium. The epitaph which
he wrote on himself is touching from its truth:--
"Tread softly--make no noise
To break his slumbers deep;
Poor Scarron here enjoys
His first calm night of sleep."
Balzac said of him, "I have often met in antiquity with pain that was
wise, and with pain that was eloquent; but I never before saw pain
joyous, nor found a soul merrily cutting capers in a paralytic frame."
He continued to jest to the last; and seeing the bystanders in tears, he
said, "I shall never, my friends, make you weep as much as I have made
you laugh."
Many of Hood's most humorous productions were dictated to his wife,
while he himself was in bed from distressing and protracted sickness.
His own family was the only one which was not delighted with the Comic
Annual, so well thumbed in every house. "We, ourselves," writes his son,
"did not enjoy it till the lapse of many years had mercifully softened
down some of the sad recollections connected with it." Fun and suffering
seemed to be natural to him, and to be constantly helping each other.
When a boy, he drew the figure of a demon with the smoke of a candle on
the staircase ceiling near his bedroom door, to frighten his brother.
Unfortunately he forgot that he had done so, and, when he went to bed,
succeeded in terrifying himself into fits almost--while his brother had
not observed the picture. Joke he would, suffering as he might be. It is
recorded of him, that upon a mustard plaster being applied to his
attenuated feet, as he lay in the direst extremity, he was heard feebly
to remark that there was "very little meat for the mustard." But if his
wit was marvelous, so was his pathos--tender beyond comparison. His
first child scarcely survived its birth. "In looking over some old
papers," says his son, "I found a few tiny curls of golden hair, as soft
as the finest silk, wrapped in a yellow and time-worn paper, inscribed
in my father's handwriting:--
'Little eyes that scarce did see,
Little lips that never smiled;
Alas! my little dear dead child,
Death is thy father, and not me;
I but embraced thee soon as he!'"
Here are a few sentences from the long letters which the author of the
Bridge of Sighs wrote to the children of his friend, Dr. Elliot, then
residing at Sandgate, almost from his death-bed: "My dear Jeanie,--So
you are at Sandgate! Of course, wishing for your old play fellow to help
you to make little puddles in the sand, and swing on the gate. But
perhaps there are no sand and gate at Sandgate, which, in that case,
nominally tells us a fib.... I have heard that you bathe in the sea,
which is very refreshing, but it requires care; for if you stay under
water too long, you may come up a mermaid, who is only half a lady, with
a fish's tail--which she can boil if she likes. You had better try this
with your doll, whether it turns her into half a 'doll-fin.'... I hope
you like the sea. I always did when I was a child, which was about two
years ago. Sometimes it makes such a fizzing and foaming, I wonder some
of our London cheats do not bottle it up and sell it for ginger-pop.
When the sea is too rough, if you pour the sweet oil out of the cruet
all over it, and wait for a calm, it will be quite smooth--much smoother
than a dressed salad.... Do you ever see any boats or vessels? And don't
you wish, when you see a ship, that somebody was a sea-captain instead
of a doctor, that he might bring you home a pet lion, or calf-elephant,
ever so many parrots, or a monkey from foreign parts? I knew a little
girl who was promised a baby-whale by her sailor-brother, and who
blubbered because he did not bring it. I suppose there are no whales at
Sandgate, but you might find a seal about the beach; or at least a stone
for one. The sea-stones are not pretty when they are dry, but look
beautiful when they are wet--and we can always keep sucking them!" To
Jeanie's brother, among other things he writes, "I used to catch
flat-fish with a very long string line. It was like swimming a kite.
Once I caught a plaice, and seeing it all over red spots, thought I had
caught the measles." To Mary Elliot, a still more youthful
correspondent, he says, "I remember that when I saw the sea, it used
sometimes to be very fussy and fidgety, and did not always wash itself
quite clean; but it was very fond of fun. Have the waves ever run after
you yet, and turned your little two shoes into pumps, full of water?
Have you been bathed yet in the sea, and were you afraid? I was the
first time, and the time before that; and, dear me, how I kicked and
screamed--or, at least, meant to scream; but the sea, ships and all,
began to run into my mouth, and so I shut it up. I think I see you being
dipped into the sea, screwing your eyes up, and putting your nose, like
a button, into your mouth, like a button-hole, for fear of getting
another smell and taste. Did you ever try, like a little crab, to run
two ways at once? See if you can do it, for it is good fun; never mind
tumbling over yourself a little at first.... And now good-by; Fanny has
made my tea, and I must drink it before it gets too hot, as we all were
last Sunday week. They say the glass was eighty-eight in the shade,
which is a great age. The last fair breeze I blew dozens of kisses for
you, but the wind changed, and, I am afraid, took them all to Miss
H----, or somebody that it shouldn't."
You remember the anecdote Southey repeats in his Doctor, of a physician
who, being called in to an unknown patient, found him suffering under
the deepest depression of mind, without any discoverable disease, or
other assignable cause. The physician advised him to seek for cheerful
objects, and recommended him especially to go to the theatre and see a
famous actor then in the meridian of his powers, whose comic talents
were unrivaled. Alas! the comedian who kept crowded theatres in a roar
was this poor hypochondriac himself!
XII.
CONDUCT.
Hazlitt, in one of his discursive essays, says, "I stopped these two
days at Bridgewater, and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of
its muddy river, returned to the inn and read Camilla. So have I
loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to
plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted
only one thing to make me happy; but wanting that have wanted
everything." Alas! who has not wanted one thing? Fortunatus had a cap,
which when he put on, and wished himself anywhere, behold he was there.
Aladdin had a lamp, which if he rubbed, and desired anything,
immediately it was his. If we each had both, there would still be
something wanting--one thing more. Donatello's matchless statue of St.
George "wanted one thing," in the opinion of Michel Angelo; it wanted
"the gift of speech." The poor widow in Holland that Pepys tells us
about in his Diary, who survived twenty-five husbands, wanted one thing
more, no doubt--perhaps one more husband. "Hadst thou Samson's hair,
Milo's strength, Scanderbeg's arm, Solomon's wisdom, Absalom's beauty,
Croesus's wealth, Caesar's valor, Alexander's spirit, Tully's or
Demosthenes's eloquence, Gyges's ring, Perseus's Pegasus, and Gorgon's
head, Nestor's years to come, all this," saith Burton, "would not make
thee absolute, give thee content and true happiness in this life, or so
continue it." Proverbially, we never are, but always to be, blest. "A
child," said the good Sachs, "thinks the stars blossom on the trees;
when he climbs to the tree-tops, he fancies they cluster on the spire;
when he climbs the spire, he finds, to reach them, he must leave the
earth and go to heaven." There is an old German engraving, in the manner
of Holbein, which represents an aged man near a grave, wringing his
hands. Death, behind, directs his attention to heaven. In the palace
Sciarra is a very expressive picture by Schedone. On the ruins of an old
tomb stands a skull, beneath which is written--"I, too, was of Arcadia;"
and, at a little distance, gazing at it in attitudes of earnest
reflection, stand two shepherds, struck simultaneously with the moral.
What we have is nothing, what we want, everything. "All worldly things,"
says Baxter, "appear most vain and unsatisfactory, when we have tried
them most." The prize we struggled for, which filled our imagination,
when attained was not much; worthless in grasp, priceless in
expectation. The one thing we want is one thing we have not--that we
have not had.
"I saw the little boy,
In thought how oft that he
Did wish of God, to scape the rod,
A tall young man to be.
"The young man eke that feels
His bones with pain opprest,
How he would be a rich old man,
To live and lie at rest:
"The rich old man that sees
His end draw on so sore,
How he would be a boy again,
To live so much the more."
This hunger, this hope, this longing, is our best possession at last,
and fades not away, unsubstantial as it may seem. It builds for each one
of us magnificent castles. "All the years of our youth and the hopes of
our manhood are stored away, like precious stones, in the vaults; and we
know that we shall find everything convenient, elegant, and splendid,
when we come into possession." Curtis, in one of his exquisite sketches,
treats this element of us as no other author has. He calls it his
Spanish property. "I am the owner," he says, "of great estates; but the
greater part are in Spain. It is a country famously romantic, and my
castles are all of perfect proportions, and appropriately set in the
most picturesque situations. I have never been to Spain myself, but I
have, naturally, conversed much with travelers to that country,
although, I must allow, without deriving from them much substantial
information about my property there. The wisest of them told me that
there were more holders of real estate in Spain than in any other region
he had ever heard of, and they are all great proprietors. Every one of
them possesses a multitude of the stateliest castles. From conversation
with them you easily gather that each one considers his own castles much
the largest and in the loveliest positions.... It is remarkable that
none of the proprietors have ever been to Spain to take possession and
report to the rest of us the state of our property there. I, of course,
cannot go, I am too much engaged. So is Titbottom. And I find that it is
the case with all the proprietors. We have so much to detain us at home
that we cannot get away. It is always so with rich men.... It is not
easy for me to say how I know so much as I certainly do about my castles
in Spain. The sun always shines upon them. They stand large and fair in
a luminous, golden atmosphere, a little hazy and dreamy, perhaps, like
the Indian summer, but in which no gales blow and there are no tempests.
All the sublime mountains, and beautiful valleys, and soft landscapes,
that I have not yet seen, are to be found in the grounds. They command a
noble view of the Alps; so fine, indeed, that I should be quite content
with the prospect of them from the highest tower of my castle, and not
care to go to Switzerland. The neighboring ruins, too, are as
picturesque as those of Italy, and my desire of standing in the
Coliseum and of seeing the shattered arches of the aqueducts, stretching
along the Campagna, and melting into the Alban Mount, is entirely
quenched. The rich gloom of my orange groves is gilded by fruit as
brilliant of complexion and exquisite of flavor as any that ever
dark-eyed Sorrento girls, looking over the high plastered walls of
Southern Italy, hand to the youthful travelers, climbing on donkeys up
the narrow lane beneath. The Nile flows through my grounds. The Desert
lies upon their edge, and Damascus stands in my garden. I am given to
understand, also, that the Parthenon has been removed to my Spanish
possessions. The Golden Horn is my fish preserve; my flocks of golden
fleece are pastured on the plain of Marathon, and the honey of Hymettus
is distilled from the flowers that grow in the vale of Enna--all in my
Spanish domains. From the windows of these castles look the beautiful
women whom I have never seen, whose portraits the poets have painted.
They wait for me there, and chiefly the fair-haired child, lost to my
eye so long ago, now bloomed into an impossible beauty. The lights that
never shone glance at evening in the vaulted halls, upon banquets that
were never spread. The bands I have never collected play all night long,
and enchant the brilliant company, that was never assembled, into
silence. In the long summer mornings the children that I never had, play
in the gardens that I never planted.... I have often wondered how I
shall ever reach my castles. The desire of going comes over me very
strongly sometimes, and I endeavor to see how I can arrange my affairs
so as to get away. To tell the truth, I am not quite sure of the
route,--I mean, to that particular part of Spain in which my estates
lie. I have inquired very particularly, but nobody seems to know
precisely.... Will you tell me what you consider the shortest and safest
route thither, Mr. Bourne? for, of course, a man who drives such an
immense trade with all parts of the world will know all that I have come
to inquire.' 'My dear sir,' answered he, wearily, 'I have been trying
all my life to discover it; but none of my ships have ever been
there--none of my captains have any report to make. They bring me, as
they brought my father, gold-dust from Guinea; ivory, pearls, and
precious stones from every part of the earth; but not a fruit, not a
solitary flower, from one of my castles in Spain. I have sent clerks,
agents, and travelers of all kinds; philosophers, pleasure-hunters, and
invalids, in all sorts of ships, to all sorts of places, but none of
them ever saw or heard of my castles, except one young poet, and he died
in a mad-house.'... At length I resolved to ask Titbottom if he had ever
heard of the best route to our estates. He said that he owned castles,
and sometimes there was an expression in his face as if he saw them....
'I have never known but two men who reached their estates in Spain.'
'Indeed,' said I, 'how did they go?' 'One went over the side of a ship,
and the other out of a third story window,' answered Titbottom. 'And I
know one man that resides upon his estates constantly,' continued he.
'Who is that?' 'Our old friend Slug, whom you may see any day at the
asylum, just coming in from the hunt, or going to call upon his friend
the Grand Lama, or dressing for the wedding of the Man in the Moon, or
receiving an embassador from Timbuctoo. Whenever I go to see him, Slug
insists that I am the pope, disguised as a journeyman carpenter, and he
entertains me in the most distinguished manner. He always insists upon
kissing my foot, and I bestow upon him, kneeling, the apostolic
benediction. This is the only Spanish proprietor in possession, with
whom I am acquainted.'... Ah! if the true history of Spain could be
written, what a book were there!"
"Gayly bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
"But he grew old,
This knight so bold,
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
"And as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow:
'Shadow,' said he,
'Where can it be--
This land of Eldorado?'
"'Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,'
The shade replied,
'If you seek for Eldorado!'"