I
The King sat in the winter-house in the ninth month, and there was a
fire on the hearth burning before him.... When Jehudi had read three or
four leaves he cut it with the penknife.
That seems to be a pleasant and home-like picture from a not very remote
period,--less than twenty-five hundred years ago, and many centuries
after the fall of Troy. And that was not so very long ago, for Thebes,
in the splendid streets of which Homer wandered and sang to the kings
when Memphis, whose ruins are older than history, was its younger rival,
was twelve centuries old when Paris ran away with Helen.
I am sorry that the original--and you can usually do anything with
the "original"--does not bear me out in saying that it was a pleasant
picture. I should like to believe that Jehoiakim--for that was the
singular name of the gentleman who sat by his hearthstone--had just
received the Memphis "Palimpsest," fifteen days in advance of the date
of its publication, and that his secretary was reading to him that
monthly, and cutting its leaves as he read. I should like to have seen
it in that year when Thales was learning astronomy in Memphis, and Necho
was organizing his campaign against Carchemish. If Jehoiakim took the
"Attic Quarterly," he might have read its comments on the banishment
of the Alcmaeonida, and its gibes at Solon for his prohibitory laws,
forbidding the sale of unguents, limiting the luxury of dress, and
interfering with the sacred rights of mourners to passionately bewail
the dead in the Asiatic manner; the same number being enriched with
contributions from two rising poets,--a lyric of love by Sappho, and an
ode sent by Anacreon from Teos, with an editorial note explaining that
the Maces was not responsible for the sentiments of the poem.
But, in fact, the gentleman who sat before the backlog in his
winter-house had other things to think of. For Nebuchadnezzar was coming
that way with the chariots and horses of Babylon and a great crowd of
marauders; and the king had not even the poor choice whether he would
be the vassal of the Chaldean or of the Egyptian. To us, this is only
a ghostly show of monarchs and conquerors stalking across vast historic
spaces. It was no doubt a vulgar enough scene of war and plunder. The
great captains of that age went about to harry each other's territories
and spoil each other's cities very much as we do nowadays, and for
similar reasons;--Napoleon the Great in Moscow, Napoleon the Small in
Italy, Kaiser William in Paris, Great Scott in Mexico! Men have not
changed much;--The Fire-Tender sat in his winter-garden in the third
month; there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. He cut
the leaves of "Scribner's Monthly" with his penknife, and thought of
Jehoiakim.
That seems as real as the other. In the garden, which is a room of the
house, the tall callas, rooted in the ground, stand about the fountain;
the sun, streaming through the glass, illumines the many-hued flowers. I
wonder what Jehoiakim did with the mealy-bug on his passion-vine, and
if he had any way of removing the scale-bug from his African acacia? One
would like to know, too, how he treated the red spider on the Le Marque
rose. The record is silent. I do not doubt he had all these insects in
his winter-garden, and the aphidae besides; and he could not smoke them
out with tobacco, for the world had not yet fallen into its second stage
of the knowledge of good and evil by eating the forbidden tobacco-plant.
I confess that this little picture of a fire on the hearth so many
centuries ago helps to make real and interesting to me that somewhat
misty past. No doubt the lotus and the acanthus from the Nile grew in
that winter-house, and perhaps Jehoiakim attempted--the most difficult
thing in the world the cultivation of the wild flowers from Lebanon.
Perhaps Jehoiakim was interested also, as I am through this ancient
fireplace,--which is a sort of domestic window into the ancient
world,--in the loves of Bernice and Abaces at the court of the Pharaohs.
I see that it is the same thing as the sentiment--perhaps it is the
shrinking which every soul that is a soul has, sooner or later, from
isolation--which grew up between Herbert and the Young Lady Staying With
Us. Jeremiah used to come in to that fireside very much as the Parson
does to ours. The Parson, to be sure, never prophesies, but he grumbles,
and is the chorus in the play that sings the everlasting ai ai of "I
told you so!" Yet we like the Parson. He is the sprig of bitter herb
that makes the pottage wholesome. I should rather, ten times over,
dispense with the flatterers and the smooth-sayers than the grumblers.
But the grumblers are of two sorts,--the healthful-toned and the
whiners. There are makers of beer who substitute for the clean bitter of
the hops some deleterious drug, and then seek to hide the fraud by some
cloying sweet. There is nothing of this sickish drug in the Parson's
talk, nor was there in that of Jeremiah, I sometimes think there is
scarcely enough of this wholesome tonic in modern society. The Parson
says he never would give a child sugar-coated pills. Mandeville says he
never would give them any. After all, you cannot help liking Mandeville.