the favored few who have mastered it. It may commence with the
weather, which you discover is not threadbare, for it is the weather
which breaks the ice for you, and it runs from the weather to the
opera, from opera to music in general, from music to art, art to
books, and from books to men and women. Neat little criticisms;
characteristic observations; flashes of wit; pleasant satire which
never wounds--fragmentary yet always polished--superficial, perhaps,
yet here and there giving you indications of lower depths which
would be worth exploring at the proper time. These are the main
characteristics of accomplished small talk.
This species of small talk can only exist between the opposite sexes.
Between women, small talk becomes silly or it runs to confidences.
In the one case it is soon exhausted, in the other it is vulgarly
supposed to be eternal; and the amount of smothered grief, of
heart-rending woe, of poignant anguish, of amorous doubts, of
Sphynx-like mysteries, of secret grief which cannot be whispered even
to her pillow, which one young woman will confide to four hundred
other young women, is only equalled by the rapidity with which the
latter will dispossess themselves of _les confidences_ and the
fertile imagination which will clothe them entirely new even before
they are divulged for the second time.
Between men, small talk is simply idiotic.
You pass an evening with Serafina, and you get only simpers and
syllabubs. She will not give you the ghost of a thought, although her
tongue has been running like a mill-clapper for two mortal hours.
She will run the whole gamut of talk, and you shall never once get a
taste of the amber wine beneath the foam.
_Per contra_, in an evening with Blanche, she will dive like a
humming bird into every flower, sweet or bitter, beautiful or ugly,
and extract honey from each. She does not linger long on anything.
She does not go too deep to be tiresome, and yet you are aware
that she would lead you a terrible chase into the real if you gave
the word. With that infinite tact which no one but a clever woman
possesses, she will draw you out and give you cues for conversation
without your ever dreaming of it. If you have a hobby, she will
quietly saddle it and help you to mount, and spur it up to a rattling
pace with little ingenuous confessions of ignorance, and implied
flatteries which show you at once your superiority over the rest of
mankind; and she will take you off your hobby and turn him out to
grass so gracefully that you will be thoroughly satisfied with your
ride. She will read you a charming little homily on her gold cross,
which "Jews might kiss or infidels adore," and she will lead you
with that narrow edge of lace around her pretty throat, which a rude
breath might dissipate, through meadows of talk, where every flower
is "a thing of beauty" and "a joy forever."
But to effectually do this, she must have no hobbies, and she must
assume an ignorance if she have it not. Ignorance is one of the
strongest weapons in the female armory, and if the small talk assumes
the form of an argument, a graceful yielding, especially if one is
obstinate, is also politic.
January 18, 1868.
_FLAT ON THE BACK._
I write to you to-day with a sugar-coated pill and a small bottle of
suspicious-looking fluid, which Æsculapius has designated with the
cabalistic abbreviations "_Aq. Cret. Rhu. Pulv. 2 jiii_," between
myself and the delirious chaos of fever.
My surroundings are not of a character to induce extravagant
cheerfulness, or to resolve a very decided precipitate out of the
mixture of virtue and necessity--a severely chemico-moral test I have
been working at for the past three days.
I think a man might dig into a cucumber for sunbeams or a mushroom
for moonlight, with better chances of success, than I shall have in
attempting to extract humor from the scanty material at hand, viz:
Several wet towels, ice water, a mustard plaster, sundry hot bricks,
pills, potions and lotions _ad libitum_, and a small piece of toasted
cracker.
The last item is the connecting link between myself and the good
goddess Hygeia, and I regard it with an interest I never knew before,
considering the clutch with which Febris has seized me.
Thus, skirting along the shore of Febris, sufficiently near to catch
with full force the burning simooms which blow across its miasmatic
lands--near enough to burn from its equator and to freeze from its
poles, to feel its clamps and hooks, with which it is tugging at
bone and muscle, while the soul has gone visiting, and not even left
the Will at home to resist disease--near enough all night long, as
I sail in the darkness, to see the will-o'-the-wisps, and goblins,
and chimeras, the skeletons of dead fancies, the ghosts of dreams
and the realities of horror which are the only inhabitants of this
land over which Febris reigns--behind me the very bright light of
day, and before, only a very uncertain star--under a red-hot bed
quilt, flanked with a small drug store--the great world outside only
recognizable by a confused hum--isolated from complete sights and
sounds--I vegetate and moralize.
If one should feed luxuriously on almond paste and comfits all his
life, he would never appreciate the products of sour apple trees and
the extracts of much-maligned herbs. So also if one should forever
pursue the beaten track of good health, which is only the case in
perfection among buffaloes and Digger Indians, one would never know
the luxury and the blessing of being sick. We must have, now and
then, a cessation of the good to appreciate the bad.
I can conceive that it would be the height of wretchedness to be
compelled to live with a saint on earth. This world was not made for
saints, and those who have made the foolish attempt to be saints,
have wisely climbed pillars, gone into caves or wandered in deserts,
getting as far out of the world as possible. Those who have persisted
in being saints and remaining in the world, have usually been hanged
or burned by other saints.
Equally, the man who is always well, becomes a nuisance after a
time. His ruddy face hangs out a constant banner of presumptuous
defiance, and the only person who can conscientiously love him is a
life insurance agent. He never knows the soft ministrations of small
female hands, or the hygienic virtue in the hem of an old lady's
robe. Consequently his milk of human kindness is very apt to freeze
up. He can have but small sympathy, for no one can sympathize, who
has not learned sympathy by experience. At this present moment I
fairly burn with pity, and extend a red right hand of sympathy to
every man, woman and child, who has ever had a fever, who has a fever
now, or who is going to have a fever. In his great, strong animal
existence he goes crashing and smashing about like a whale among
minnows, with this difference--that the whale is bent upon legitimate
prey, while your healthy man is simply trying to show that he _is_ a
whale.
As who should say, "Here am I, Mr. Merryman, the great American
Healthist. Any lady or gentleman in the audience, wishing to show
liver, lights or lungs, will please step forward into the arena."
But, of course, there are compensations for all this. In the next
world our healthy friend will probably take twice as much punishment
as some of the poor devils who took half of theirs before they went
there.
A person whose wings have sprouted and grown, and who has become a
precocious angel in the prescribed three score and ten, is certainly
leaving a very narrow margin for angelic growth hereafter, and,
equally, a man who goes through his three score and ten without any
terrene ails, I fancy will need Hippocrates and Galen when he gets to
the other shore.
At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back.
* * * * * * * * *
Which stars are to be considered equivalent to the time consumed in
taking the sugar-coated pill before referred to, reminding one, in
its passage down the æsophagus, of the cathartic literature which St.
John swallowed, sweet above and bitter below.
Which recalls to me that the most of us are more or less
sugar-coated--sweet outside, but quite bitter, or quite sad, or quite
bad inside.
The partition between body and soul with some of us is so thin that
the light shines through easily.
Some of us, again, cover up our little sepulchres so thickly with
vines and roses, and fix such a laughing mask on the door, that we
pass for very Ariels, God help us!
While others of us still, living in ourselves, isolated from all
intimate relations, carry in our faces no sign of the toil and the
weariness and the struggle. It is all blank on the outside; on the
inside, it is isolation, death and expiation.
But, then, there are some of us who get our pills coated so badly
that a child wouldn't touch them. For instance, good Deacon Jones,
who slept all through Parson Primrose's sermon, and told Deacon
Brown, who didn't sleep, that the Parson's doctrine was correct;
Prof. Blather, who hitches himself to the tail of every high-flying
kite, hoping thereby to be brought before the popular eyes; old Mrs.
Peacock, who still persists in being young, making admirers, mincing
through her spavined paces, leering with her faded eyes out of that
painted face, when all Japonicadom knows there is not a genuine
feather about her. And so one might go on for hours, for the number
of these badly coated pills is legion.
At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back.
* * * * * * * * *
More stars for the Doctor who has been to see me. He is a jolly,
sanguine dog, and assures me I shall be up in time for the opera--if
not for the whole season, at least that I shall have two days
off--one for Bellini's _Englishman_ and one for Hermanns' _Mephisto_.
What a blessing these jolly doctors are. They give one an invoice of
moral courage, wherewith to make a stout fight against disease. They
light up your room as beautifully as the sun this morning kindled my
frosty window-panes with burning gold. And my jolly doctor will not
take it unkindly of me if I say that I have more confidence in his
jolliness than in his cabalistic abbreviations.
On the other hand, I can conceive that if I were compelled to receive
the attentions of one of those solemn, owl-like doctors--those
funereal-looking personages in deep black, whose noses and chins
meet--who wear heavy canes, the knobs of which do heavy thinking for
the wearers--whose only remark is an ominous shake of the head, and
the preparation of a bill at the neighboring drug store--who have
made the very sunlight look mercurial, and who cut off the supply of
that delicious Muscat which Blanche sent in--I think, after one visit
from such a walking Bolus, I should say, with Elijah of old: "It
is enough; now let me die. You may call in your friend Sir." For I
should know that as soon as he came into the house Death would sneak
after him, and wait outside the door.
At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back.
* * * * * * * * *
Another night in the darkness, sailing along these shores of Febris,
and this crystal Saturday morning, it seems all bright and clear
ahead. I feel no more the breath of the burning gales, but in its
place an ecstasy of pain. My hand wearies and the head tires with
this trifling work which has run through three days of nullity.
At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back.
January 31, 1868.
_GETTING OUT OF BED._
Getting out of bed is one of the little circumstances which shows
man in his abstract essence. He is then a pure animal with all
his instincts on the surface. There is no dignity in him then, no
majesty, no true religion, no concealment of his nature. In fact he
is worse off than the lower orders of the brute creation, as they
awake in the full plenitude of their life. A butterfly, which has
slept all night in a tulip, rises from his gorgeously curtained
couch just as beautiful as he is under the noonday sun, when he
lazily flutters among the languid roses. Man, when he rises, is a
fragmentary being and has to be set up piece by piece and arrayed in
his conventional garments before he can say good morning to the world.
There are various methods of getting out of bed. One man in a
thousand wakes up all over at once, kicks off his bedclothes and
bounds out of bed as Minerva bounded out of Jupiter's brain, armed
and equipped as the law directs. He never tasted lotus in his life.
He owns no real estate in Spain, but a good deal of outside city
property. He never saw the point of a joke in his life. He never
dreams. He is fiendishly healthy, and will, therefore, have much
to answer for in the next world. He has no idea of the _dolce far
niente_. If he has imagination, he clipped its wings long ago. A
_post mortem_ examination of his internal economy would reveal
nothing to speak of but columns of logarithms, interest tables and
bills of lading in his skull, a complete set of office furniture in
his stomach, and his abdominal canal crowded with cargoes of lumber
and perches of stone. And he is apt to forget to say his prayers.
There are men who get out of bed a little at a time. The first
symptoms of life are uneasy movements and a gentle rustling of the
bedclothes. Slowly one arm appears from under the coverlid, and
is thrown over the head. Then out comes another arm, disposed of
in a similar manner. His legs are uneasy. One eye opens in a very
uncertain manner and blinks, and the other opens and winks, and then
both blink and wink for some minutes. He then commences to uncoil
himself and straighten himself out. This is the stretching process.
He mutters to himself incoherent nothings. He tries to go to sleep
again, but the charm is broken. He yawns, and the process fairly
opens his eyes. He sneezes, and the grand currents of life are once
more in motion. One more stretch all over, and he accepts the hard
necessity of nature which condemns him to quit his lotus to feed on
hash, and he slowly gets out of bed as one utterly disgusted.
There is another class of men who always get out of bed over the
footboard, and are uncomfortable all day after it. Their idea of
happiness is realized in making somebody wretched, and they are
singularly fortunate in the realization of that idea. They are sour
in aspect and in disposition. No one has any rights they are bound
to respect. Mrs. Gilliflower and her daughter, who always come late
and go away early from the concerts, get out over the footboard. The
man who mistakes a horse car for a hog pen and acts accordingly,
although in some respects he is not much mistaken, gets out over
the footboard. The man who worries his butcher or his baker over an
insignificant trifle, and is too mean to have the snow shoveled off
his sidewalk; the man who makes his lady clerks stand on their feet
all day whether engaged or not; the woman who has a keen scent for
ferreting out other persons' foibles and attending to other persons'
business; the woman who is constantly lamenting over the wickedness
and follies of the times; the man whose clumsiness trips him over
and who then anathematizes an innocent curbstone; the man who raises
a domestic war every morning over a lost button which he ripped off
the night before, over an open window which he left open himself,
over the discovery of his boots under the bed, where he placed them
himself, over a dried up beefsteak which has been waiting an hour
for him; the man whose pious nose goes heavenward at the sight of
innocent pleasure, and who doesn't give his clerks time enough
for dinner; the man who is sour himself and sours everything he
touches--all these people get up over the footboard, and they won't
get up any other way. If the footboard was forty feet high they would
go over it with a step ladder, and curse every rung of it all the way
up.
Then, there are men who get up only half awake, and don't fairly wake
up until it is time to go to bed again. These are the unlucky ones,
against whom fate and nature have a grudge. In the grand lottery of
life they draw all the blanks. They usually receive all the broken
limbs and fractured legs. They have come within a hair's breadth of
making a fortune a number of times, but the hair was always too
much. Such a man is always the one killed on a railway train. If he
hears of a case of small-pox in West Wheeling, he will catch it. He
is always the man in the great crowd who loses his pocket-book, and
although he is one of the best of fellows, it will be just his luck
to be overlooked by St. Peter at the gate of Heaven.
My favorite way of getting out of bed is to wake up, bid good morning
to the newly created day, quietly turn over and go to sleep again
without disturbing any one, and sleep the sleep of the just. In that
second nap, I visit my Spanish castles. Their architecture is more
elaborate and ethereal than ever Wren dreamed of, and they float
always in an amber haze just over the Pyrenees. I have leased them
all to a goodly company of ladies and gentlemen, and they are the
best of pay. Among them are the fair Rosamund; poor Beatrice Cenci;
that other Beatrice, who has come down from her shining beatitudes
and occupies one of the best of them with Dante; the yellow-haired
Gretchen and Faust; the rare and radiant Countess Irma; Spenser's
Fairy Queen and Titania; Aspasia, still reclining on beds of roses;
Dame Durden, whose house is no longer bleak; Cinderella, with her
tiny slipper; Joan of Domremy, still talking with the angels; Undine,
bathing in eternal streams; Colonel Newcome, and that prince of good
fellows, George Warrington; Wilkins Micawber and Samuel Weller, who
are living together--(Uriah Heep and Mr. Chadband made application
for one castle, but their references were not good)--Wilhelm Meister
and Nathan the Wise; the Lady of Shallott and Hiawatha, who have
become firm friends; the fair Florinda and the Princess Scherezade,
who amuse each other with rare stories; Sinbad and Aladdin and
Rasselas; and Donatello, who never can agree with Werter. When I
arrive, they hang out the banners, and such music as Malibran and
Sontag sing, which Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert have been
writing for them, you don't hear in our concert halls. All the
charming women and good fellows, of all times, come in to breakfast
and we drink ambrosial wines, sweeter than the honey of Hymettus,
and breakfast on fruits which have mellowed in the hanging gardens.
There is no such lotus, by the bye, on the Nile banks as grows
in those gardens. Time would fail me to narrate the sonnets that
Dante is writing; the good jokes that George Warrington and Sam
Weller have with each other over Wilkins, who is still waiting for
something to turn up; the philosophical speculations of Rasselas, and
the Munchausenisms of Sinbad; to tell you of a magnificent Spanish
symphony that Beethoven has just finished, and the delight with which
he listens to a new Ave Maria by Schubert, for the grand old master's
hearing has been restored; the songs of Irma, as she looks down upon
the mountains of her transfiguration; and the great joy of Faust
and Gretchen, who have deciphered the vital problem they could not
solve in the baneful shadow of Mephisto. The most beautiful castle is
reserved for the friend who died years ago and passed away from me,
but who is now like the living, because he greets me every morning in
my castle with the warm grip of the hand and the cheery voice and the
pleasant face of old times. He has not grown old since then, and I....
February 15, 1868.
_THE TEAPOT._
We were all sitting at the table together. All told, we were ten,
viz: Celeste and her maiden aunt, who had a sorrow when she was
young, a blighted affection, or something of that sort; Aurelia, now
Mrs. Peplum; Mr. Peplum, who has become much more sedate since his
family affair with Aurelia; Aurelia's mother, who is getting old and
rather fussy; Blanche, and young Boosey, who is sweet on Blanche; Old
Blobbs, the Water street indigo merchant, and Mrs. Blobbs; and myself.
"As I was about to say when I was interrupted, the teapot...."
Here I was again interrupted by young Boosey, who was filling himself
to repletion with brandied peaches, and who rather scornfully
remarked to Old Blobbs that tea might do well enough for old women,
but that, for a steady diet, he preferred champagne punches. Old
Blobbs silenced him by telling him that if he spent less for
champagne punches, it would be for the interest of his landlady.
The rebuke was severe, but just.
As I was about to say when I was interrupted the second time, the
teapot is one of the strongest links in the chain of society. If
my friend Blobbs, across the way, will recall his youthful days, he
will confess that all his subsequent prosperity and happiness are due
to the teapot. He will remember that in those days, when, strange
as it may seem, he was addicted to Byronic collars and bad rhymes,
he accompanied the future Mrs. Blobbs home from singing-school one
June night, and that, as they went across the fields instead of by
the straight road, he felt excessively foolish at the manner in
which the stars winked and blinked at each other. You see, my friend
Blobbs thought that he was the first man in the world who had ever
done that sort of thing; and my dear Mrs. Blobbs will pardon me if I
say that she was excessively sheepish also over the fancy that, for
the first time in the world, she was receiving the attentions of a
young man. But the stars were used to it, and knew what would come
of it. Ever since they peeped through the branches of the Tree of
Knowledge and saw Adam sitting up with Eve, they had been looking at
a young man and a young woman rehearsing this same old story, and, my
dear Blobbs, long after you and I are under the daisies, they will
shine down upon young men and young women, going across the fields
and telling the same old story. It is the only story which can't be
printed fast enough to supply the demand.
And my friend Blobbs will also remember that when they reached
the gate, the air was full of the perfume of apple-blossoms and
roses; that the bell of the village church over on the hill was
striking eleven, and that its tones were borne on the night air,
across the meadows, as softly and soothingly as if they were the
audible pulsations of the moonlight; that an officious little
insect, shrouded in the gloom of the fir tree in the front yard,
was continually informing him that Katy-did; that, before they
parted, they chose a mutual star which should ever be their symbol
and souvenir; and that when at last he took her little white hand
in his--it _was_ a pretty hand in those days, you know, Blobbs--she
said: "Won't you come over to tea to-morrow night, Mr. Blobbs?" Did
you refuse, Mr. Blobbs?
He will furthermore be so good as to remember that he walked on air
as he went home; that he whistled as he went; that all the stars in
Heaven, except that particular one, were laughing at him, and that he
wouldn't have taken a thousand dollars for himself.
Now I put it to you, Mr. Blobbs, as a man of honor, if that teapot,
the next evening, did not do the business and make a man of you all
the rest of your life.
Blobbs looked rather uncomfortable, but I thought I detected
some of the brilliancy of those days shining through all the
conventionalities and financial callouses of his life, as he
assented; and if a tear stood in the corner of Mrs. B.'s eye, as she
looked at her consort in the indigo trade, it dropped immediately
into the quince sauce and dissolved into sweetness.
And as I passed my cup to Aurelia's mother the second time, with a
deprecating look at Boosey, I continued: I know of no pleasanter
sight in the world than a steaming teapot upon the tray and five
or six old ladies gathered about it, who have just dropped over
and brought their knitting. They have all made the voyage of life,
weathered the storms and gone into old age's winter quarters. Life's
spring will never come for them again. The roses will not bloom
for them, and the birds will miss them, but the frosts and the keen
winter winds touch them kindly; and if they sometimes regard the
blue, lichen-covered slate stones with the unutterable thoughts of
old age, it is only because they feel the first breath of the gales
blowing from the eternal springs, inhale the faint perfumes of the
asphodels and the lilies on the banks of the River of Life, and hear,
as in a dream, the sounds of music from the golden harps over the
battlements of Heaven.