There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were going
on. There is no particular change that I can think of in the aspect
of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were quietly
playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this smooth surface
of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show themselves some
fine morning or other in events, if not in catastrophes. I have been
watchful, as I said I should be, but have little to tell as yet. You
may laugh at me, and very likely think me foolishly fanciful to trouble
myself about what is going on in a middling-class household like
ours. Do as you like. But here is that terrible fact to begin with,--a
beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to
Nature's women, turned loose among live men.
-Terrible fact?
Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost heaven
for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women who
made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If
jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if pangs that
waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping
melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities,
then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.--I
love to look at this “Rainbow,” as her father used sometimes to call
her, of ours. Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,--the
very picture, as it seems to me, of that “golden blonde” my friend whose
book you read last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you
remember, no doubt,)--handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it
is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you
one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of
fascination she has for me.
It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they get
hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years.
These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling
flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the waking state,
which last is very apt to be a half-sleep. I have many times stopped
short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one
of these sudden clairvoyant flashes. Of course I cannot tell what
kind of a secret this is, but I think of it as a disclosure of
certain relations of our personal being to time and space, to other
intelligences, to the procession of events, and to their First Great
Cause. This secret seems to be broken up, as it were, into fragments,
so that we find here a word and there a syllable, and then again only a
letter of it; but it never is written out for most of us as a complete
sentence, in this life. I do not think it could be; for I am disposed to
consider our beliefs about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind
of premonition of an enlargement of our faculties in some future state
than as an expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.
Persons, however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they could
not tell in our human words.
Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are
those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great mystery.
There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something
in them that becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and
palpable a revelation is it of the infinite purity and love. I remember
two faces of women with wings, such as they call angels, of Fra
Angelico,--and I just now came across a print of Raphael's Santa
Apollina, with something of the same quality,--which I was sure had
their prototypes in the world above ours. No wonder the Catholics pay
their vows to the Queen of Heaven! The unpoetical side of Protestantism
is, that it has no women to be worshipped.
But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret
to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it.
Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain
countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman,
not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and
wait almost with awe to hear their accents. But this young girl has at
once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression. Can
she tell me anything?
Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which
I have been groping after through so many friendships that I have tired
of, and through--Hush! Is the door fast? Talking loud is a bad trick in
these curious boarding-houses.
You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of
and to use for a special illustration. Riding along over a rocky road,
suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to
a deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow under your feet,--a huge
unsunned cavern. Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living
rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding
galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been
swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk
and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.
So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding
over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--now and then
jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round
as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment,
but still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating
and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the
smoothest-rolling vehicle. Suddenly we hear the deep underground
reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of
thought or passion beneath us.
I wish the girl would go. I don't like to look at her so much, and yet I
cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that I ought to
know,--something that she was made to tell and I to hear,--lying there
ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make
a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the
truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the
dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in
an hour of passion.
It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track. The
Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words. Set
your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could give you which
settle all that matter. I don't wonder, however, that you confounded the
Great Secret with the Three Words.
I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell.
When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the morning of the
fifth of July. And just as that little patriotic implement is made with
a slender train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp
eye can almost always see the train leading from a young girl's eye or
lip to the “I love you” in her heart. But the Three Words are not the
Great Secret I mean. No, women's faces are only one of the tablets
on which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols. It lies
deeper than Love, though very probably Love is a part of it. Some, I
think,--Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others. I
can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem
to me to come near the region where I think it lies. I have known two
persons who pursued it with the passion of the old alchemists,--all
wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving up the daily search
for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to
visions of things that ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings,
and so they died. The vulgar called them drunkards.
I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
young girl's face produces on me. It is akin to those influences a
friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain
voices. I cannot translate it into words,--only into feelings; and
these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that
revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative
persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of
the next.
You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness
of my description of the expression in a young girl's face. You forget
what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to
reproduce our interior state of being. Articulation is a shallow trick.
From the light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a
nameless scribbler's impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest
utterances which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need,
is only a space of some three or four inches. Words, which are a set of
clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to
tones and expression of the features. I give it up; I thought I could
shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this young
girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use. No doubt
your head aches, trying to make something of my description. If there
is here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk
about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on
some woman's face, dead or living, that is all I can expect. One should
see the person with whom he converses about such matters. There
are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a
certainty of being understood;--
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me
To him my tale I teach.
--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar for
this August number, so that they will never see it.
--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious attempt,
which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded, if you
will make the change.
This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
breakfast-table. The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again
seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him. That
slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each
other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side,
is a physical fact I have often noticed. Then there is a tendency in all
the men's eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if
all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely
placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to
look.
That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some
mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She gave a
sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another
by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in his
button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings. Very
fine performances,--very fine!--truly elegant productions, truly
elegant!--Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in the year
(eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)--patronized
by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant, truly elegant
productions, very fine performances; these drawings reminded him of
them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an extraordinary art, painting;
Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures that he remembered seeing when
he was a boy. Used to remember some lines about a portrait Written by
Mr. Cowper, beginning,
“Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.”
And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The dead
young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look
at him so many, many years ago. He stood still as if in a waking dream,
his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and
they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of
the glimmering light through which he saw them.--What is there quite
so profoundly human as an old man's memory of a mother who died in his
earlier years? Mother she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows
to be as a sister; and at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken,
he looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he
caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child.
If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words with
which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of thought.
--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.--All
gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms of her
great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest little
picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody that you
don't want to see.--The old gentleman put his hand to his forehead so as
to shade his eyes. I saw he was looking at the dim photograph of memory,
and turned from him to Iris.
How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
take lessons?--This was the first,--she answered,--since she was here;
and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of large size
she had covered with drawings.
I turned over the leaves of the book before us. Academic studies,
principally of the human figure. Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
forth. Limbs from statues. Hands and feet from Nature. What a superb
drawing of an arm! I don't remember it among the figures from Michel
Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly. From Nature, I
think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!
--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up the
drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said.--I should like to see
her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in it worth
showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock, which proved
to be fast. We are all caricatured in it, I haven't the least doubt.
I think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with us what
her fancies were about us boarders. Some of them act as if they were
bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much. Her
thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else.
The young fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces. I
think he has once or twice sent her what the landlady's daughter calls
bo-kays of flowers,--somebody has, at any rate.--I saw a book she
had, which must have come from the divinity-student. It had a dreary
title-page, which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the
author,--a face from memory, apparently,--one of those faces that small
children loathe without knowing why, and which give them that inward
disgust for heaven so many of the little wretches betray, when they
hear that these are “good men,” and that heaven is full of such.--The
gentleman with the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not
encouraged, I think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. He
pulls his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
sees him, as it should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought would
have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his
corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I
wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--which would,
perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one. But nothing
comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding
out the girl's fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.
Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber. For this
purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was just
ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk, followed
him as he toiled back to his room. He rested on the landing and faced
round toward me. There was something in his eye which said, Stop there!
So we finished our conversation on the landing. The next day, I mustered
assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.--No
answer.--Knock again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and
locked, and presently I heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled,
misshapen boots. The bolts and the lock of the inner door were
unfastened,--with unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the
passage. He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one
at which I stood. He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
“Mr. Copley” used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and
a quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short, but long
enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company
in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits. I mean to give up
such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark! What the deuse is that
odd noise in his chamber?
--I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was
a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
neighborhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of
marks called the “Devil's footsteps.” These were patches of sand in
the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush blackberry, the
“dewberry,” as our Southern neighbors call it, in prettier and more
Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers,--where even
the pale, dry, sadly-sweet “everlasting” could not grow, but all was
bare and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings
near my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor.
I do not think many persons are aware of the existence of this
mark,--little having been said about the story in print, as it was
considered very desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it
up. In the northwest corner, and on the level of the third or fourth
story, there are signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but
not to be mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been
carried away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair; and I
do not care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using
sacred things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which
was variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the
chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the
building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where the
mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible. The
queer burnt spots, called the “Devil's footsteps,” had never attracted
attention before this time, though there is no evidence that they had
not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a “Goody,” so
called, or sweeper, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange
horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know
something.--I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of
impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with
untenanted, locked upper-chambers, and a most ghostly garret,--with the
“Devil's footsteps” in the fields behind the house and in front of it
the patched dormitory where the unexplained occurrence had taken place
which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that
one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a
dreadful season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned
for his ascetic sanctity.
There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
by these two singular facts I have just mentioned. There was a dark
storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly see a
heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which seemed
to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their fright to have
huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs,--as the people
did in that awful crush where so many were killed, at the execution of
Holloway and Haggerty. Then the Lady's portrait, up-stairs, with the
sword-thrusts through it,--marks of the British officers' rapiers,--and
the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats,--confound
them for smashing its mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair
in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a
gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save
the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room
downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the
hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--“the study”
in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed
men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will show you
the “dents” left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With
all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories
those awful country-boys that came to live in our service brought with
them;--of contracts written in blood and left out over night, not to be
found the next morning, (removed by the Evil One, who takes his nightly
round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use,)--of dreams
coming true,--of death-signs,--of apparitions, no wonder that my
imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies.
Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly see
a ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the world
will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such
circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head. That is the
only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of curiosity with which
I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy with which I lie awake
whenever I hear anything going on in his chamber after midnight.
But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred for
the present. You will see in what way it happened that my thoughts were
turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how I got my fancy
full of material images,--faces, heads, figures, muscles, and so
forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance in this number to
gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the means of so doing.
Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this time.
It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it that I
should sit to him for my portrait. When a soul draws a body in the great
lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize, such as it is, the
said soul inspects the said body with the same curious interest with
which one who has ventured into a “gift enterprise” examines the
“massive silver pencil-case” with the coppery smell and impressible
tube, or the “splendid gold ring” with the questionable specific
gravity, which it has been his fortune to obtain in addition to his
purchase.
The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well. But there is
this difference between its view and that of a person looking at us:--we
look from within, and see nothing but the mould formed by the elements
in which we are incased; other observers look from without, and see
us as living statues. To be sure, by the aid of mirrors, we get a few
glimpses of our outside aspect; but this occasional impression is always
modified by that look of the soul from within outward which none but
ourselves can take. A portrait is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to
us. The artist looks only from without. He sees us, too, with a hundred
aspects on our faces we are never likely to see. No genuine expression
can be studied by the subject of it in the looking-glass.
More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
acquaintances never see us. Without wearing any mask we are conscious
of, we have a special face for each friend. For, in the first place,
each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on the principle of
assimilation you found referred to in my last record, if you happened
to read that document. And secondly, each of our friends is capable of
seeing just so far, and no farther, into our face, and each sees in it
the particular thing that he looks for. Now the artist, if he is truly
an artist, does not take any one of these special views. Suppose he
should copy you as you appear to the man who wants your name to a
subscription-list, you could hardly expect a friend who entertains you
to recognize the likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance
at his board. Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a
face which the rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor
relation. The artist must take one or the other, or something compounded
of the two, or something different from either. What the daguerreotype
and photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness. The
artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in repose,
puts your face through its exercises, observes its transitions, and
so gets the whole range of its expression. Out of all this he forms an
ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your exact look at any one time
or to any particular person. Such a portrait cannot be to everybody what
the ungloved call “as nat'ral as life.” Every good picture, therefore,
must be considered wanting in resemblance by many persons.
There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist shapes
your features from his outline. It is that you resemble so many
relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular likeness
in your countenance.
He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances, thus:
There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I never
thought I had a sign of it. The mother's eyebrow and grayish-blue eye,
those I knew I had. But there is a something which recalls a smile that
faded away from my sister's lips--how many years ago! I thought it so
pleasant in her, that I love myself better for having a trace of it.
Are we not young? Are we not fresh and blooming? Wait, a bit. The artist
takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines, diverging
outwards from the eye over the temple. Five years.--The artist draws
one tolerably distinct and two faint lines, perpendicularly between the
eyebrows. Ten years.--The artist breaks up the contours round the mouth,
so that they look a little as a hat does that has been sat upon and
recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the
same creases, on smiling or other change of feature.--Hold on! Stop
that! Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of that
interesting period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc.,
etc.?
There now! That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek. Is he not a POET that
painted us?
“Blest be the art that can immortalize!”
COWPER.
--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with
any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation,
and in his features as special and definite an expression of his sole
individuality as if he were the first created of his race: As soon as
we are old enough to get the range of three or four generations well in
hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an individual
in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with
fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face
into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the
very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look
it brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief
space when Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his
silent servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he
has wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after feature,
from the slight outline to the finished portrait.
--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
identified with ourselves. In early years, while the child “feels its
life in every limb,” it lives in the body and for the body to a very
great extent. It ought to be so. There have been many very interesting
children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the things of earth
and an extraordinary development of the spiritual nature. There is a
perfect literature of their biographies, all alike in their essentials;
the same “disinclination to the usual amusements of childhood “;
the same remarkable sensibility; the same docility; the same
conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform character, marked by
beautiful traits, which we look at with a painful admiration. It will
be found that most of these children are the subjects of some
constitutional unfitness for living, the most frequent of which I need
not mention. They are like the beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit
that falls before its time because its core is gnawed out. They have
their meaning,--they do not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls. I am
convinced that many healthy children are injured morally by being forced
to read too much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
exercises. Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football, turn
somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast, skate,
fire crackers, blow squash “tooters,” cut his name on fences, read about
Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-angled slices of
pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with his back teeth and
bite out the better part of another boy's apple with his front ones,
turn up coppers, “stick” knives, call names, throw stones, knock off
hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, “cut behind” anything on
wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth, “holler” Fire! on slight
evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an engine-company, or, in his
own words, “blow for tub No. 11,” or whatever it may be;--isn't that
a pretty nice sort of a boy, though he has not got anything the matter
with him that takes the taste of this world out? Now, when you put into
such a hot-blooded, hard-fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a
sad-looking volume or pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced
child, whose life is really as much a training for death as the last
month of a condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common
between his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time comes
when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the beauty of
resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the pillow of those
who die before their time, in humble hope and trust. But it is not
until he has worked his way through the period of honest hearty animal
existence, which every robust child should make the most of,--not until
he has learned the use of his various faculties, which is his first
duty,--that a boy of courage and animal vigor is in a proper state to
read these tearful records of premature decay. I have no doubt that
disgust is implanted in the minds of many healthy children by early
surfeits of pathological piety. I do verily believe that He who took
children in His arms and blessed them loved the healthiest and
most playful of them just as well as those who were richest in the
tuberculous virtues. I know what I am talking about, and there are more
parents in this country who will be willing to listen to what I say than
there are fools to pick a quarrel with me. In the sensibility and the
sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
Divine benevolence. But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust natures
out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply what we
Professors call “bad practice”; and I know by experience that there are
worthy people who not only try it on their own children, but actually
force it on those of their neighbors.
--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed, or
done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized. A polite note
from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at their
Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted. We repaired to
that scientific Golgotha.
Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
woman in the toy called a “weather-house,” both on the same wooden arm
suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the other
retires backwards, and vice versa. The more particular speciality of one
is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of the other to polish
you off phrenologically in the recesses of the establishment. Suppose
yourself in a room full of casts and pictures, before a counterful of
books with taking titles. I wonder if the picture of the brain is
there, “approved” by a noted Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the
Professor's, folio plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim. An extra
convolution, No. 9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath,
which was not to be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very
liberally supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue
of “organs.” Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,
--horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or Joe
Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them on his
cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen “shiners” on a stripped twig of
willow.
The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let
the horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
antechamber.
Tape round the head,--22 inches. (Come on, old 23 inches, if you think
you are the better man!)
Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those horrid
old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the provision-stalls
at the Quincy Market. Vitality, No. 5 or 6, or something or other.
Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some other number equally
significant.
Mild champooing of head now commences. 'Extraordinary revelations!
Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6 +! Paediphilous, 5! Deipniphilous, 6!
Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphilous, 5! Glossiphilous, 8!!
and so on. Meant for a linguist.--Invaluable information. Will invest in
grammars and dictionaries immediately.--I have nothing against the grand
total of my phrenological endowments.
I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs. Bumpus
and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did, especially
considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion. Much obliged to
them for their politeness. They have been useful in their way by calling
attention to important physiological facts. (This concession is due to
our immense bump of Candor.)
A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
Breakfast-Table.
I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
against it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some lucrative
practical application. Its professors and practitioners are usually
shrewd people; they are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh
a good deal among themselves. The believing multitude consists of women
of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers, poetical optimists, people
who always get cheated in buying horses, philanthropists who insist
on hurrying up the millennium, and others of this class, with here and
there a clergyman, less frequently a lawyer, very rarely a physician,
and almost never a horse-jockey or a member of the detective police.--I
do not say that Phrenology was one of the Pseudo-sciences.
A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It may
contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank starts
with a little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay on the
strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly a good one.
The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that common minds, after
they have been baited with a real fact or two, will jump at the merest
rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook. When we have one fact found us,
we are very apt to supply the next out of our own imagination. (How
many persons can read Judges xv. 16 correctly the first time?) The
Pseudo-sciences take advantage of this.--I did not say that it was so
with Phrenology.
I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
something in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly agreed,
promises intellect; one that is “villanous low” and has a huge hind-head
back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. I have as rarely met
an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in the bumps. It is
observed, however, that persons with what the Phrenologists call “good
heads” are more prone than others toward plenary belief in the doctrine.
It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that the
moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable substance
of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary, I might be
puzzled. But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar cheese, I call
on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of our satellite, before
I purchase.
It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological statement.
It is only necessary to show that its truth is not proved, and cannot
be, by the common course of argument. The walls of the head are double,
with a great air-chamber between them, over the smallest and most
closely crowded “organs.” Can you tell how much money there is in a
safe, which also has thick double walls, by kneading its knobs with your
fingers? So when a man fumbles about my forehead, and talks about the
organs of Individuality, Size, etc., I trust him as much as I should
if he felt of the outside of my strong-box and told me that there was
a five-dollar or a ten-dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.
Perhaps there is; only he does n't know anything about at. But this is
a point that I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought
to, certainly, better than you do. The next argument you will all
appreciate.
I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences. An
example will show it most conveniently.
A. is a notorious thief. Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and find a
good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness. Positive fact for Phrenology. Casts
and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump does not lose in the act
of copying.--I did not say it gained.--What do you look so for? (to the
boarders.)
Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A. But B. has no bump at all
over Acquisitiveness. Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.--Not a bit
of it. Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is? That's the reason
B. stole.
And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--used
to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own pockets and
put its contents in another, if he could find no other way of committing
petty larceny. Unfortunately, C. has a hollow, instead of a bump,
over Acquisitiveness. Ah, but just look and see what a bump of
Alimentiveness! Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread, when a boy, with
the money he stole? Of course you see why he is a thief, and how his
example confirms our noble science.
At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there is
a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of Byron,
for instance. Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which covers
everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
Phrenologist. “It is not the size alone, but the quality of an organ,
which determines its degree of power.”
Oh! oh! I see.--The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
Phrenologist: “Heads I win, tails you lose.” Well, that's convenient.
It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to the
Pseudo-sciences. I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and amazed
at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of Phrenology had
read their characters written upon their skulls. Of course the Professor
acquires his information solely through his cranial inspections and
manipulations.--What are you laughing at? (to the boarders.)--But let us
just suppose, for a moment, that a tolerably cunning fellow, who did not
know or care anything about Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake
to read off people's characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece. Let
us see how well he could get along without the “organs.”
I will suppose myself to set up such a shop. I would invest one hundred
dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts, and other
matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to
begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor
Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first
customer. My first customer is a middle-aged man. I look at him,--ask
him a question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the
hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble his skull,
dictating as follows: SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
LIST OF FACULTIES FOR PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
CUSTOMER.
Each to be accompanied with a wink.
Amativeness, 7. Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
men love to be told they do.
Alimentiveness, 8. Don't you see that he has burst off his
lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey
Acquisitiveness, 8. Of course. A middle-aged Yankee.
Approbativeness 7+. Hat well brushed. Hair ditto. Mark the
effect of that plus sign.
Self-Esteem 6. His face shows that.
Benevolence 9. That'll please him.
Conscientiousness 8 1/2 That fraction looks first-rate.
Mirthfulness 7 Has laughed twice since he came in.
Ideality 9 That sounds well.
Form, Size, Weight, 4 to 6. Average everything that Color, Locality,
cannot be guessed. Eventuality, etc. etc.
And so of the other faculties.
Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do. They go
only by the bumps.--What do you keep laughing so for? (to the boarders.)
I only said that is the way I should practise “Phrenology” for a living.
End of my Lecture.
--The Reformers have good heads, generally. Their faces are commonly
serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse, even though
their voices may be like
The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
when heard from the platform. Their greatest spiritual danger is from
the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed. These lines
are meant to caution them.