What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.
I
I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a universal
formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table. It would
have had a grand effect. For this purpose I fixed my eyes on a certain
divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few phrases, and
then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of being.--I will
thank you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a dependent creature.
It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed the
sugar to me.
--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram of
the sugar question.
You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of great
things?
The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back with a
pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great bundle of
great things,--he said.
(NOW, THEN!) The great end of being, after all, is....
Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be John,
and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold on! the
Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs about
the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the bait
and hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it
exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so
full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have
not been able to count them without quarrelling about the number, and
that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to touch
them, and especially to tread on them, unless they happen to have shoes
on, to cover the thick white soles of their broad black feet.
When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked round
the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further end of it
I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted
on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough
for him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I
felt for a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull
him down presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or
some other wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived to lose
the first of his sentence, but what I heard began so:
--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to come
down from the tents on section and Independence days with their pails to
get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; went to school in Boston
as long as the boys would let me.--The little man groaned, turned, as
if to look around, and went on.--Ran away from school one day to see
Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a logger-head. That was in flip
days, when there were always two three loggerheads in the fire. I'm a
Boston boy, I tell you,--born at North End, and mean to be buried on
Copp's Hill, with the good old underground people,--the Worthylakes,
and the rest of 'em. Yes,--up on the old hill, where they buried Captain
Daniel Malcolm in a stone grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from
the red-coats, in those old times when the world was frozen up tight
and there was n't but one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil
all,--and black enough it looked, I tell you! There 's where my bones
shall lie, Sir, and rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy
Yard opposite! You can't make me ashamed of the old place! Full crooked
little streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--
--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
“John,”--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but thinking
in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got kinked up,
turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear what was said, but
went on,--
--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened, and
kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free
speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men,--I
don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their steeples!
--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black whiskers
and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too massive, and
a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting nature might confess
an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing amounting to a suspicion. For
this is a gentleman from a great city, and sits next to the landlady's
daughter, who evidently believes in him, and is the object of his
especial attention.
How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the stairs
that lead to the New Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough?
It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be
so still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? Quis cus-(On the whole, as
this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a foreign language,
might not be familiar to all the boarders, I thought I would not finish
it.)
--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-eyed,
sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress, appearing as
if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated itself as a bit of
economy.
You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
commentary on what you say. “He who would bring back the wealth of the
Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” What you bring away
from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.--Benjamin
Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring me down the
small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will find lying under
the “Cruden's Concordance.” [The boy took a large bite, which left a
very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-butter he held, and
departed on his errand, with the portable fraction of his breakfast to
sustain him on the way.]
--Here it is. “Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J. J.
Flournoy. Athens, Georgia, 1858.”
Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously
delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the
conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived.
You shall hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back
from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if
it is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to
humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular. It is what
he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that “good
old men” may be solaced at once by the companionship of the wisdom of
maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities
which are found at an earlier period of life. He has followed your
precept, Madam; I hope you accept his conclusions.
The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, “all
abroad,” after the delivery of this “counter” of mine, that I left her
to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was
beginning to get pretty well in hand.
But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having
her argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly.--I
don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have pleased her
fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there
would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying,
“No!” is more than I, can tell you. I may as well mention that B. F.
came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for “a lady,”--one of
the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a secret he wished to be
relieved of.
--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the
faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of
all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with
its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in
favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting
it. Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a
convert to a better religion.
The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
the mind by changing the word which stands for it.
--I don't know what you mean by “depolarizing” an idea,--said the
divinity-student.
I will tell you,--I said.--When a given symbol which represents a
thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes
a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It
becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by strange forces
which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it
represents, is polarized.
The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print,
consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these from another
language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism
behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even a
priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his
ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud. What
do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his
religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words
for him. The argument for and against new translations of the Bible
really turns on this. Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in
depolarized words, and so cries out against a new translation. I think,
myself, if every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old
symbol and put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some
chance of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read
it,--which we do not and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the
“Gayatri” as a fair man and lover of truth should do. When society has
once fairly dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it
will perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
young fellow near me.
A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get
the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer and
midwinter, for instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you
must take an observation from the position of the laity as well as
of the clergy. Teachers and students of theology get a certain look,
certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional
neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their externals. They
are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well enough what the “idols
of the tribe” are. Of course they have their false gods, as all men that
follow one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have played
the part of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never
suffered it to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when
other moving powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body.
Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its
wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized error
into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But the
mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor
in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is the people that makes
the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people. Of course, the
profession reacts on its source with variable energy.--But there never
was a guild of dealers or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp
looking after.
Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in Harvard
College yard.
--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert Calef's
book was burned?
The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the
old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader
of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of
fools and worse than fools they were--
Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it,
as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what it
wears. There was a ring on it.
May I look at it?--I said.
Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the table,
and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being only a
little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor,
lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he
took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the deadbeat of the
misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation
which is called in learned language talipes varus, or inverted
club-foot.
Stop! stop!--I said,--let me come to you.
The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his right
hand, with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long ago, and
could not pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those funeral rings
which used to be given to relatives and friends after the decease of
persons of any note or importance. Beneath a round fit of glass was a
death's head. Engraved on one side of this, “L. B. AEt. 22,”--on the
other, “Ob. 1692”
My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a witch.
It does n't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother, and loved
her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief Justice Sewall
hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.--That was Salem,
though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert Calef, the Boston
merchant, it was that blew them all to--
Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of talking
over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are plenty of
praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above all, who has
found out, by living into the pith and core of life, that all of the
Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of any human book is to
the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of the hot aortic flood of
throbbing human life, of this infinite, instantaneous consciousness in
which the soul's being consists,--an incandescent point in the filament
connecting the negative pole of a past eternity with the positive pole
of an eternity that is to come,--that all of the Deity which any human
book can hold is to this larger Deity of the working battery of the
universe only as the films in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad
seams and curdled lumps of ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin
placers,--Oh!--I was saying that a man who lives out-of-doors, among
live people, gets some things into his head he might not find in the
index of his “Body of Divinity.”
I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the bottom
of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and
look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire
across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea, I say, is pretty
nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls
into senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it
comes as plagues come, from a breath,--as fires come, from a spark.
Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long, “curing”
patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling, selling lies
at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving unfortunate sick
people a mess of things either too odious to swallow or too acrid to
hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--and
that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of
eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I did not
bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the old folios
in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the proprietor,
of a “Wood and Bache,” and a shelf of peppered sheepskin reprints by
Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession and I know
a little something of each other, and you don't think I am such a
simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the better heads
among them would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark how the great
plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and in what form it
fell.
A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy and
incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow dabbler
in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous fiction
(founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very fair, you
see,--you can help yourself to either of these sets of phrases.
All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general an
effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug is a
good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing, as was
produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan (theorist). Not
that the wiser part of the profession needed him to teach them; but the
routinists and their employers, the “general practitioners,” who lived
by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had
to recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle
would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell
on them.
--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
theology? I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some are
crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are laughing
at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with it as a
mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly
undermining the traditional ideas of the future state which have been
and are still accepted,--not merely in those who believe in it, but in
the general sentiment of the community, to a larger extent than most
good people seem to be aware of. It need n't be true, to do this, any
more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work. The Spiritualists have some
pretty strong instincts to pry over, which no doubt have been roughly
handled by theologians at different times. And the Nemesis of the pulpit
comes, in a shape it little thought of, beginning with the snap of a
toe-joint, and ending with such a crack of old beliefs that the roar
of it is heard in all the ministers' studies of Christendom? Sir, you
cannot have people of cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in
common things, large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men,
men of science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual
world and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
reacting on the whole conception of that other life. It is the folly of
the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom. Not only out of
the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools and
cheats, we may often get our truest lessons. For the fool's judgment is
a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat watches the clouds
and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one shall often see by
their pointing which way the winds of heaven are blowing, when the
slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call the Temples of Wisdom
are turning to all points of the compass.
--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the watch.
Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up their left
foot!
I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty seconds.
His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it was
simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness,
that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet
horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to
get the winter roughness, will give little sportive demi-kicks, with
slight sudden elevation of the subsequent region of the body, and a
sharp short whinny,--by no means intending to put their heels through
the dasher, or to address the driver rudely, but feeling, to use a
familiar word, frisky. This, I think, is the physiological condition
of the young person, John. I noticed, however, what I should call a
palpebral spasm, affecting the eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if
it were intended for the facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to
suspect a disposition to be satirical on his part.
--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
Professor, a conservative. For I don't know any fruit that clings to
its tree so faithfully, not even a “froze-'n'-thaw” winter-apple, as a
Professor to the bough of which his chair is made. You can't shake him
off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off. Hence, by a chain
of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism generally.
But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you are
in it.
You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight in
a profession. Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in, through
India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and general knowledge
will leak in, though a profession were covered with twenty thicknesses
of sheepskin diplomas.
By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with
trip-hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming
with a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down
on the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
them--like Aaron's calf.
If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up and
keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the east and
the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the cellar, and the
moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders weave their lace
before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus is bred out of our neglect,
and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its delirium,--I, Sir, am
a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the barricades, my friends, rather than a
conservative.
--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager and
excited.