[I did not think it probable that I should have a great many more talks
with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could
into every conversation. That is the reason why you will find some odd,
miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I
should not have a chance to tell them habitually, at our
breakfast-table.--We're very free and easy, you know; we don't read
what we don't like. Our parish is so large, one can't pretend to preach
to all the pews at once. Besides, one can't be all the time trying to
do the best of one's best; if a company works a steam fire-engine, the
firemen needn't be straining themselves all day to squirt over the top
of the flagstaff. Let them wash some of those lower-story windows a
little. Besides, there is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will
find out when you get through this paper.]
----Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to
the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of
travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy.
Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the
brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are
certain principles to be assumed,--such as these:--He who is carried by
horses must deal with rogues.--To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual
angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me
than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.--Every traveller is a
self-taught entomologist.--Old jokes are dynamometers of mental
tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at
home,--which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished,
rather than increased vitality. There was a story about "strahps to
your pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows--on the road from
Milan to Venice.--_Coelum, non animum_,--travellers change their
guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating dates
under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon
Street.--Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for "establishing
raws" upon each other.--A man shall sit down with his friend at the
foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had
been talking about under "the great elm," and forget all about Egypt.
When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of
one fellow's telling another that his argument was _absurd_; one
maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by
the phrase, "reductio ad absurdum"; the rest badgering him as a
conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for _Padus_,
the Po, "a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times
when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants
thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum
ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!
----Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or
annexed, or implied.
Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in _undress_ often affects
more than one in full costume.
"Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?"
says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul
in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about
the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the
World's Mistress in her stone girdle--_alta maenia Romae_--rose before
me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of
the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of
St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning
candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus
Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved
figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping
Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These
things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me
so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the
walls. It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and
beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its
reopening, two girls of the parish (_filles de la paroisse_) fell from
the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the
pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls,
nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they
came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the
sharpest treble in the Te Deum! (Look at Carlyle's article on Boswell,
and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in
the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two "filles de
la paroisse,"--gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes
that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market
on that day.
Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call
up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle,
reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the
parapet of which Theobald Weinzäpfli's restive horse sprung with him
and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not
dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant
from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all
else.--I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at
Alnwick,--the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a
pump-handle,--and why? Because of the story of the village boy who must
fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water,--which
breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an
idiot for the rest of his life.
Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe
must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and
definite pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than
huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies
hatchet and hammer. "The Royal George" went down with all her crew, and
Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf that
holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother's
portrait is blistered with tears.
My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same
kind that strike the imagination, especially when one is still young.
You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead
with a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the books. Here
is one I never heard mentioned;--if any of the "Note and Query" tribe
can tell the story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was
riding on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble
column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.--What
is that?--I said.--That,--answered the coachman,--is _the hangman's
pillar_. Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago,
to steal sheep. He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope
over his head, and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope
slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was
found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the other;
in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument to be
erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than virtue. I will
send a copy of this record to him or her who shall first set me right
about this column and its locality.
And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something
that may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once
ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I
think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully
open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from
falling. To climb it is a noon-day nightmare, and to think of having
climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits.
While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane," a strong wind
was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back
and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a
bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire
did really swing back and forward,--I think he said some feet.
Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect
it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old
journal,--the "Magazin Encyclopédique" for _l'an troisième_, (1795,)
when I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of
Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so that the movement shall be
shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and
higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one
of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some
of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven
cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it) swinging like a reed,
in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a
stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like a
blade of grass? I suppose.
You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;--perhaps we will
have some philosophy by and by;--let me work out this thin mechanical
vein.--I have something more to say about trees, I have brought down
this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that
were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth;--nine feet,
where I got my section, higher up. This is a wedge, going to the
centre, of the general shape of a slice of apple-pie in a large and not
opulent family. Length, about eighteen inches. I have studied the
growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and
forty-two rings. Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the
rings tells the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate
was slow,--then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550
it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years.
In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714; then for the most
part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and
uniformly until within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got
on sluggishly.
Look here. Here are some human lies laid down against the periods of
its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare's. The tree
was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died.
A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he
died. Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson's
life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine
inches in diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon's career;--the tree
doesn't seem to have minded it.
I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this
section. I have seen many wooden preachers,--never one like this. How
much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of
those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and
where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of
vegetable being, which remembers all human history as a thing of
yesterday in its own dateless existence!
I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is
one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections
of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary
clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he
first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people's ages, as they
do in the country. He swore--(ministers' sons get so familiar with good
words that they are apt to handle them carelessly)--that the children
were dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off
next day in recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught
before the clock got through striking.] At the foot of "the hill," down
in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped
with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (_Credat Hahnemannus_,)
and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood. Of
course, this is not the tree my relative means.
Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling
me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and
twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that?
And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises!
And that in a town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as
Norwich!--Only the dear people there must learn to call it Norridge,
and not be misled by the mere accident of spelling.
Nor_wich_.
Por_ch_mouth.
Cincinnat_ah_.
What a sad picture of our civilization!
I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the Colman
farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for many years,
and did not like to trust my recollection. But I had it in memory, and
even noted down, as one of the finest trees in symmetry and beauty I
had ever seen. I have received a document, signed by two citizens of a
neighboring town, certified by the postmaster and a selectman, and
these again corroborated, reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that
extraordinary college-class to which it is the good fortune of my
friend the Professor to belong, who, though he has _formerly_ been a
member of Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy of confidence. The tree
"girts" eighteen and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a
real beauty. I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we
don't have "youth at the prow," we will have "pleasure at the 'elm."
And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows in
Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for anything
but thanks.
[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many
communications, in prose and verse, since I began printing these notes.
The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and brief poem,
from New Orleans. I could not make any of them public, though sometimes
requested to do so. Some of them have given me great pleasure, and
encouraged me to believe I had friends whose faces I had never seen. If
you are pleased with anything a writer says, and doubt whether to tell
him of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a cordial to one, who
perhaps thinks he is tiring you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr
very loud over a good, honest letter that says pretty things to me.]
----Sometimes very young persons send communications, which they want
forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to
have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of
themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but,
on the whole, thought it best not to send. It is not fair to single out
one for such sharp advice, where there are hundreds that are in need of
it.
Dear Sir,--You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser than I
was at your age. I don't wish to be understood as saying too much, for
I think, without committing myself to any opinion on my present state,
that I was not a Solomon at that stage of development.
You long to "leap at a single bound into celebrity." Nothing is so
common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to those
who are thinking about something else,--very rarely to those who say to
themselves, "Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!" The
struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in notoriety;--that ladder is
easy to climb, but it leads to pillory which is crowded with fools who
could not hold their tongues and rogues who could not hide their
tricks.
If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it. The
world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true
originality; if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and
newspapers will find you out, as the school-boys find out where the
ripe apples and pears are. Produce anything really good, and an
intelligent editor will jump at it. Don't flatter yourself that any
article of yours is rejected because you are unknown to fame. Nothing
pleases an editor more than to get anything worth having from a new
hand. There is always a dearth of really fine articles for a first-rate
journal; for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety are at or below the
sea-level; some have water enough, but no head; some head enough, but
no water; only two or three are from full reservoirs, high up that hill
which is so hard to climb.
You may have genius. The contrary is of course probable, but it is not
demonstrated. If you have, the world wants you more than you want it.
It not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark of genius that
shows itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in our national pasture
that can bleat a rhyme but it is ten to one, among his friends and no
takers, that he is the real, genuine, no-mistake Osiris.
_Qu'est ce qu'il a fait?_ What has he done? That was Napoleon's test.
What have you done? Turn up the faces of your picture-cards, my boy!
You need not make mouths at the public because it has not accepted you
at your own fancy-valuation. Do the prettiest thing you can and wait
your time.
For the verses you send me, I will not say they are hopeless, and I
dare not affirm that they show promise. I am not an editor, but I know
the standard of a some editors. You must not expect to "leap with a
single bound" into the society of those whom it is not flattery to call
your betters. When "The Paetolian" has paid you for a copy of
verses,--(I can furnish you a list of alliterative signatures,
beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoë Zenith,)--when "The
Ragbag" has stolen your piece, after carefully scratching your name
out,--when "The Nut-cracker" has thought you worth shelling, and strung
the kernel of your cleverest poem,--then, and not till then, you may
consider the presumption against you, from the fact of your rhyming
tendency, as called in question, and let our friends hear from you, if
you think it worth while. You may possibly think me too candid, and
even accuse me of incivility; but let me assure you that I am not half
so plain-spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time. If you prefer the
long jolting of public opinion to the gentle touch of friendship, try
it like a man. Only remember this,--that, if a bushel of potatoes is
shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes
always get to the bottom.
Believe me, etc., etc.
* * * * *
I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these are
by far the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless, querulous,
unreasonable literary persons one is like to meet with. Is a young man
in the habit of writing verses? Then the presumption is that he is an
inferior person. For, look you, there are at least nine chances in ten
that he writes _poor_ verses. Now the habit of chewing on rhymes
without sense and soul to match them is, like that of using any other
narcotic, at once a proof of feebleness and a debilitating agent. A
young man can get rid of the presumption against him afforded by his
writing verses only by convincing us that they are verses worth
writing.
All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, it is not addressed to
any individual, and of course does not refer to any reader of these
pages. I would always treat any given young person passing through the
meteoric showers which rain down on the brief period of adolescence
with great tenderness. God forgive us, if we ever speak harshly to
young creatures on the strength of these ugly truths, and so, sooner or
later, smite some tender-souled poet or poetess on the lips who might
have sung the world into sweet trances, had we not silenced the
matin-song in its first low breathings! Just as my heart yearns over
the unloved, just so it sorrows for the ungifted who are doomed to the
pangs of an undeceived self-estimate. I have always tried to be gentle
with the most hopeless cases. My experience, however, has not been
encouraging.
----X. Y., aet. 18, a cheaply-got-up youth, with narrow jaws, and
broad, bony, cold, red hands, having been laughed at by the girls in
his village, and "got the mitten" (pronounced mittin) two or three
times, falls to souling and controlling, and youthing and training, in
the newspapers. Sends me some strings of verses, candidates for the
Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in which I learn for the millionth
time one of the following facts: either that something about a chime is
sublime, or that something about time is sublime, or that something
about a chime is concerned with time, or that something about a rhyme
is sublime or concerned with time or with a chime. Wishes my opinion of
the same, with advice as to his future course.
What shall I do about it? Tell him the whole truth, and send him a
ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded
Youth? One doesn't like to be cruel,--and yet one hates to lie.
Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism,
--recommends study of good models,--that writing verse should
be an incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the
needle, the lapstone, or the ledger,--and, above all, that there should
be no hurry in printing what is written. Not the least use in all this.
The poetaster who has tasted type is done for. He is like the man who
has once been a candidate for the Presidency. He feeds on the madder of
his delusion all his days, and his very bones grow red with the glow of
his foolish fancy. One of these young brains is like a bunch of India
crackers; once touch fire to it and it is best to keep hands off until
it has done popping,--if it ever stops. I have two letters on file; one
is a pattern of adulation, the other of impertinence. My reply to the
first, containing the best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous
language, had brought out the second. There was some sport in this, but
Dulness is not commonly a game fish, and only sulks after he is struck.
You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that
those who ask your _opinion_ really want your _praise_, and will be
contented with nothing less.
There is another kind of application to which editors, or those
supposed to have access to them, are liable, and which often proves
trying and painful. One is appealed to in behalf of some person in
needy circumstances who wishes to make a living by the pen. A
manuscript accompanying the letter is offered for publication. It is
not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably deficient. If Rachel's
saying is true, that "fortune is the measure of intelligence," then
poverty is evidence of limited capacity, which it too frequently proves
to be, notwithstanding a noble exception here and there. Now an editor
is a person under a contract with the public to furnish them with the
best things he can afford for his money. Charity shown by the
publication of an inferior article would be like the generosity of
Claude Duval and the other gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so
much they robbed the rich to have the means of relieving them.
Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the trials
to which they are submitted. They have nothing to do but to develope
enormous calluses at every point of contact with authorship. Their
business is not a matter of sympathy, but of intellect. They must
reject the unfit productions of those whom they long to befriend,
because it would be a profligate charity to accept them. One cannot
burn his house down to warm the hands even of the fatherless and the
widow.