Back again!--A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it. So the boys
say.
It is a libel on the turtle. He grows to his shell, and his shell is in
his body as much as his body is in his shell.--I don't think there
is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am. Nothing but a
combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the turtle's
back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace; and after
memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand sights, and
huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns all America,--
“Creation's heir,--the world, the world is”
his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
resume his skeleton.
Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral of
Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves! Welcome, ye triumphs of pictorial art
(repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me from the walls of
my sacred cell! Vesalius, as Titian drew him, high-fronted, still-eyed,
thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems a gentleman, with book and
carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper,
commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old man of a century and seven years
besides, father of twenty sons and two daughters, cut in copper by
Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on one of the Paris quais; and ye
Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in shadow against the blaze of light;
and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin
of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for
unrenowned, Young Bull of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius
Visscher; welcome once more to my eyes! The old books look out from
the shelves, and I seem to read on their backs something asides their
titles,--a kind of solemn greeting. The crimson carpet flushes warm
under my feet. The arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round
with me, as if it were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil
stretches itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
stretches in after-dinner laughter.
The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back. One
of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I believed
what I said.--This was apparently considered something unusual, by its
being mentioned.
One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of bluntness,
like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in “Lear,” and actual rudeness.
What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to
give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two
talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt
to run to mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very good
stories about the way in which two Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up
a long talk without saying a word which has any meaning in it. Something
like this is occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall. The best
Chinese talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time
to time. Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so gracefully,
that we find meaning for the music they make as we find faces in the
coals and fairy palaces in the clouds. There is something very odd,
though, about this mechanical talk.
You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine was
detached a long way from the station you were approaching? Well, you
have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if the
locomotive were drawing them? Indeed, you would not have suspected that
you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if you had not seen
the engine running away from you on a side-track. Upon my conscience,
I believe some of these pretty women detach their minds entirely,
sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that we never know the
difference. Their lips let off the fluty syllables just as their fingers
would sprinkle the music-drops from their pianos; unconscious habit
turns the phrase of thought into words just as it does that of
music into notes.--Well, they govern the world for all that, these
sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index of a larger fact than
wisdom.
--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the
promise of the future.
--All this, however, is not what I was going to say. Here am I, suppose,
seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an intelligent
Englishman. We look in each other's faces,--we exchange a dozen words.
One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each other,--to be perfectly
courteous,--more than courteous; for we are the entertainer and the
entertained, and cherish particularly amiable feelings, to each other.
The claret is good; and if our blood reddens a little with its warm
crimson, we are none the less kind for it.
I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
strong drink before they begin jabberin'.
The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words had
been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.--The boys of my time used
to call a hit like this a “side-winder.”
--I must finish this woman.--
Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking as
he sat at meat. Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off place,
you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a very
miscellaneous company. Probably there was a great deal of loose talk
among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may believe.
Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--and
I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water, and,
I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its being the
grand specific against dull dinners. A score of people come together in
all moods of mind and body. The problem is, in the space of one hour,
more or less, to bring them all into the same condition of slightly
exalted life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,--talk,
alone, for another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works
up the radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their
maximum receptivity, is now just where it was when
The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,
--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to more
than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine. I once wrote
a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that I was afraid
some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it was composed
in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing domestic
influences.
--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.--Can you
tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration once,
of which the following is a verse?
Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
I did,--I answered.--What are you going to do about it?--I will tell you
another line I wrote long ago:--
Don't be “consistent,”--but be simply true.
The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with many
facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about them;
secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind
us down to a single flat surface. It is hard work to resist this
grinding-down action.--Now give me a chance. Better eternal and
universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made wives
and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they should
have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches! Yet
better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon all
our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and social
tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the closet and
pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public dinner! I think
you will find that people who honestly mean to be true really contradict
themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.” But
a great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply
because they are partial views of a truth, and may often look unlike at
first, as a front view of a face and its profile often do.
Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend the
“Autocrat,”--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by omitting the
very word which gives it its significance,--the word fluid, intended to
typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds it up, I say, as if
it attacked the reality of the self-determining principle, instead of
illustrating its limitations by an image. Now I will not explain any
farther, still less defend, and least of all attack, but simply quote
a few lines from one of my friend's poems, printed more than ten years
ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman where he has ever asserted more
strongly or absolutely the independent will of the “subcreative centre,”
as my heretical friend has elsewhere called man.
--Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
--Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
--Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and the
full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly consistent!
Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
with the intelligent Englishman. We begin skirmishing with a few light
ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend, De Sauty,
if there were such a person, would test for his current; trying a little
litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-paper for alkalies,
as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging the lead, and looking
at the shells and sands it brings up to find out whether we are like
to keep in shallow water, or shall have to drop the deep-sea line;--in
short, seeing what we have to deal with. If the Englishman gets his
H's pretty well placed, he comes from one of the higher grades of the
British social order, and we shall find him a good companion.
But, after all, here is a great fact between us. We belong to two
different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we
are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall to
talk through. Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior fellow,
incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I would let out
the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World folks. They are
children to us in certain points of view. They are playing with toys we
have done with for whole-generations.
--------FOOTNOTE: The more I have observed and reflected, the more
limited seems to me the field of action of the human will. Every act of
choice involves a special relation between the ego and the conditions
before it. But no man knows what forces are at work in the determination
of his ego. The bias which decides his choice between two or more
motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he
knows nothing at all. He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring
of reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is
self-determining. The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this
book was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
moving. 'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
*****
That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and
the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have
not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly
than they do. Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and
lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh
at honestly, without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World
puppet-shows. I don't think we on our part ever understand the
Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized reverence. But then we
do think more of a man, as such, (barring some little difficulties about
race and complexion which the Englishman will touch us on presently,)
than any people that ever lived did think of him. Our reverence is a
great deal wider, if it is less intense. We have caste among us, to some
extent; it is true; but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog
such as you often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his
robust, hearty individuality.
This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me;
it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim
into each other's laps. The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out
the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a
personal character. But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he
talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians. Then you
get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses.
How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent
as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
--My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep. I follow
a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my
own beneath it. Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a
third train of reflections, independent of the two others. I will try to
write out a Mental movement in three parts.
A.--First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman talking.
B.--Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.
C.--Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate
self-repeating idea.
A.--White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of
apple-blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers--
B.--Deuse take her! What a fool she is! Hear her chatter! (Look out of
window just here.--Two pages and a half of description, if it were
all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady! (Eye
catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family nose! Came
over in the “Mayflower” on the first old fool's face. Why don't they
wear a ring in it?