The old trout knows enough to keep off the fisherman's hook; the
squirrel never cracks an empty nut; the crow soon learns the
harmlessness of the scarecrow. But man, though he may have twenty times
wriggled off the hook, the patient angler catches him at last. He always
cracks the empty shell, then cries: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'
This cry he might be spared would he learn a lesson from the squirrel,
who weighs his nuts and throws away the light, hollow shell.... And
there are scarescrows, the harmlessness of which the human biped learns
not in a a lifetime. How long is it since that horned, cloven-footed
monster whom the monks made of Pan _theos_ and called him _Devil_, was
an object of fear? How 'the real, genuine, no mistake' (savin' his
presence) must have laughed at his own effigy! Then there is Grim Death,
too, a creation of the Dark Ages, for in no age of light could this
horror have been ever conceived. Unlike the _other_, against him no
exorcism avails.... As if the soul about to be launched on the dim sea
Eternity, after all lights and forms of the loved shore have become
indistinct, must be cut loose from her moorings by this phantom. The
idea that 'Death comes to set us free,' would hardly make us 'meet him
cheerily, as our true friend,' were this his real shape. But were I
disposed to enumerate our scarecrows, the list would be incomplete; as
there are doubtless many that I have not the shrewdness to recognize as
such.
The only humbugs are not those that work on our fears. There are humbugs
that work on our hopes. These have been likened to bubbles that dance on
the wave, burst, and are no more. They are too often like bomb-shells,
that in exploding scatter ruin on all around. They have also been named
air-castles, _chateaux en Espagne_, 'baseless fabrics of a vision.' The
baseless fabric of a vision is built of 'airy nothingness;' but men
found on a wish, structures that tower to heaven, put real, solid
material into them, and when they fall, as fall they must--I'll not
attempt to give an idea of the utter desolation they leave, of the
_waste place_ they make of the heart, lest you should think I have thus
humbugged myself; for _self-humbug_ it certainly is; and this is the
most intensely _human_. Not a fish, or reptile, bird, or beast; not a
thing crawling, swimming, flying, or walking, but the human creature,
humbugs himself. 'Man was made to mourn,' I would change into, Man was
made to be humbugged. It is better to be greatly gullible, than a
'cunning dog,' for gulled we will be. It is better to be caught at once,
than to have our gills torn by wriggling off the hook the twenty times,
to be caught at last. It is better to walk straight into the net than to
fatigue ourselves by coming to it in a roundabout way. A Nova-Scotian
once rallied a Down-Easter on the famous wooden hams. 'Yaas,' was the
reply, 'and they say that one of you actilly _ate_ one and didn't know
the difference.' Well, it is better to swallow our humbugs, as the
Nova-Scotian did the Connecticut-cured ham, without detecting any thing
peculiar in their flavor, than it is to find our mistake at the first
cut or _saw_. By the way, saltpeter is so needed for other purposes,
that probably the _Virginia cured_ will not now have as fine a flavor as
formerly.
But, _in the way_: You dissent from some of these remarks? You've cut
your eye-teeth, have you? Possibly you forget that trip in the cars,
when you 'cutely passed by the swell in flashy waistcoat and galvanized
jewelry, and took a seat by a 'plain blunt man' in snuff-color; and
after he had left the cars at the first station, and the conductor came
to you and demanded, 'Your ticket, sir!' you probably forgot how in
fumbling for it in your pocket, you found it, but _not_ your
porte-monnaie. You perhaps set down in your mental memorandum, under the
head of Appearances, not to be deceived by plain bluntness and
snuff-color. There you were wrong; your boasted reason is of no avail in
detecting humbugs; there is no such thing as classifying them. Then,
too, we are in greater danger of being humbugged by another class of
appearances.
In material things we are compelled to acknowledge that things the most
reliable are the most unpretending. The star, by which the mariner has
steered for ages, is not a 'bright particular star;' the needle of his
compass is shaped from one of the baser metals, (though in a figurative
sense gold is highly magnetic.) The inner bears such a relation to the
outer, that the inner senses are named from the outer; we are slow to
perceive that also all objects of the outer senses, are but types of
those of the inner. You see how I have been obliged to borrow from the
outer vocabulary. I give this idea, in a nebular state, trusting that
you will consolidate it. Were we, in a figurative sense, to choose a
guiding-star, it would be a comet, we are so taken with flash and show.
A great truth, though angels heralded its birth, and a star were drawn
from its orbit to stand over its cradle, if that cradle were a manger,
we would reject it; if it assumed not the 'pomp and circumstance' of
royalty, though it worked miracles, we would cry, _Away with it_.
Eighteen hundred years have not completely transformed or transmuted the
world; we are yet ready to reject the true, and be humbugged by the
false. More than eighteen hundred and sixty-two years may yet elapse
before the bells that 'ring out the old and ring in the new,' will 'ring
out the false and ring in the true.' Then farewell humbug.
Yes, it is altogether probable that long before humbug is no more, you
and I will--I was about to say be in the narrow house, but prefer an
expression of Carlyle's--we will have 'vanished into infinite space.' I
prefer this for the same reason that one of Hood's characters was
thankful that 'Heaven was boundless.' She it was whom the physician
pronounced 'dying by inches.' 'Only think,' exclaimed the _consternated_
husband, 'how long she will be dying!' I suppose to the poor man Grim
Death appeared to hold in his skeleton fingers, instead of an
hour-glass, a twenty-year glass.
That the sands of his glass may, for you, married or single, neither run
too fast nor too slow, is sincerely the wish of
Your well-wisher,