expiration of that period, when his Ed was a sight, he expressed one
evening, the last company havin been turned out, and the doors shut, a
wish to have a little music.
“Mr. Chops,” I said (I never dropped the “Mr.” with him; the world might
do it, but not me),--“Mr. Chops, are you sure as you are in a state of
mind and body to sit upon the organ?”
His answer was this: “Toby, when next met with on the tramp, I forgive
her and the Indian. And I am.”
It was with fear and tremblin that I began to turn the handle; but he
sat like a lamb. It will be my belief to my dying day, that I see his Ed
expand as he sat; you may therefore judge how great his thoughts was. He
sat out all the changes, and then he come off.
“Toby,” he says with a quiet smile, “the little man will now walk three
times round the Cairawan, and then retire behind the curtain.”
When we called him in the mornin we found he had gone into much better
society than mine or Pall Mall’s. I give Mr. Chops as comfortable a
funeral as lay in my power, followed myself as chief, and had the George
the Fourth canvas carried first, in the form of a banner. But the house
was so dismal afterwards, that I give it up, and took to the wan again.
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WAKEFIELD.
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
In some old magazine or newspaper, I recollect a story, told as truth,
of a man--let us call him Wakefield--who absented himself for a long
time from his wife. The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very
uncommon, nor--without a proper distinction of circumstances--to be
condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. Howbeit, this, though far
from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance, on record,
of marital delinquency; and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be
found in the whole list of human oddities. The wedded couple lived in
London. The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the
next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or
friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment,
dwelt upward of twenty years. During that period he beheld his home
every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield. And after so great
a gap in his matrimonial felicity,--when his death was reckoned certain,
his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory, and his wife, long,
long ago, resigned to her autumnal widowhood,--he entered the door one
evening, quietly, as from a day’s absence, and became a loving spouse
till death.
This outline is all that I remember. But the incident, though of the
purest originality, unexampled, and probably never to be repeated, is
one, I think, which appeals to the generous sympathies of mankind. We
know, each for himself, that none of us would perpetrate such a folly,
yet feel as if some other might. To my own contemplations, at least, it
has often recurred, always exciting wonder, but with a sense that the
story must be true, and a conception of its hero’s character. Whenever
any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent in thinking
of it. If the reader choose, let him do his own meditation; or if he
prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield’s vagary,
I bid him welcome; trusting that there will be a pervading spirit and a
moral, even should we fail to find them, done up neatly, and condensed
into the final sentence. Thought has always its efficacy, and every
striking incident its moral.
What sort of man was Wakefield? We are free to shape out our own idea,
and call it by his name. He was now in the meridian of life; his
matrimonial affections, never violent, were sobered into a calm,
habitual sentiment; of all husbands, he was likely to be the most
constant, because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest,
wherever it might be placed. He was intellectual, but not actively so;
his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings, that tended to no
purpose, or had not vigor to attain it; his thoughts were seldom so
energetic as to seize hold of words. Imagination, in the proper meaning
of the term, made no part of Wakefield’s gifts. With a cold but not
depraved nor wandering heart, and a mind never feverish with riotous
thoughts, nor perplexed with originality, who could have anticipated
that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place among the
doers of eccentric deeds? Had his acquaintances been asked who was the
man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which should be
remembered on the morrow, they would have thought of Wakefield. Only the
wife of his bosom might have hesitated. She, without having analyzed his
character, was partly aware of a quiet selfishness, that had rusted into
his inactive mind,--of a peculiar sort of vanity, the most uneasy
attribute about him,--of a disposition to craft, which had seldom
produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets, hardly
worth revealing,--and, lastly, of what she called a little strangeness,
sometimes, in the good man. This latter quality is indefinable, and
perhaps non-existent.
Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife. It is the dusk
of an October evening. His equipment is a drab great-coat, a hat covered
with an oil-cloth, top boots, an umbrella in one hand and a small
portmanteau in the other. He has informed Mrs. Wakefield that he is to
take the night coach into the country. She would fain inquire the length
of his journey, its object, and the probable time of his return; but,
indulgent to his harmless love of mystery, interrogates him only by a
look. He tells her not to expect him positively by the return coach, nor
to be alarmed should he tarry three or four days; but, at all events, to
look for him at supper on Friday evening. Wakefield himself, be it
considered, has no suspicion of what is before him. He holds out his
hand; she gives her own, and meets his parting kiss, in the
matter-of-course way of a ten years’ matrimony; and forth goes the
middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to perplex his good lady by a
whole week’s absence. After the door has closed behind him, she
perceives it thrust partly open, and a vision of her husband’s face,
through the aperture, smiling on her, and gone in a moment. For the
time, this little incident is dismissed without a thought. But, long
afterward, when she has been more years a widow than a wife, that smile
recurs, and flickers across all her reminiscences of Wakefield’s visage.
In her many musings, she surrounds the original smile with a multitude
of fantasies, which make it strange and awful; as, for instance, if she
imagines him in a coffin, that parting look is frozen on his pale
features; or, if she dreams of him in heaven, still his blessed spirit
wears a quiet and crafty smile. Yet, for its sake, when all others have
given him up for dead, she sometimes doubts whether she is a widow.
But our business is with the husband. We must hurry after him, along the
street, ere he lose his individuality, and melt into the great mass of
London life. It would be vain searching for him there. Let us follow
close at his heels, therefore, until, after several superfluous turns
and doublings, we find him comfortably established by the fireside of a
small apartment, previously bespoken. He is in the next street to his
own, and at his journey’s end. He can scarcely trust his good fortune,
in having got thither unperceived,--recollecting that, at one time, he
was delayed by the throng, in the very focus of a lighted lantern; and,
again, there were footsteps, that seemed to tread behind his own,
distinct from the multitudinous tramp around him; and, anon, he heard a
voice shouting afar, and fancied that it called his name. Doubtless a
dozen busybodies had been watching him, and told his wife the whole
affair. Poor Wakefield! Little knowest thou thine own insignificance in
this great world! No mortal eye but mine has traced thee. Go quietly to
thy bed, foolish man; and, on the morrow, if thou wilt be wise, get thee
home to good Mrs. Wakefield, and tell her the truth. Remove not thyself,
even for a little week, from thy place in her chaste bosom. Were she,
for a single moment, to deem thee dead, or lost, or lastingly divided
from her, thou wouldst be woefully conscious of a change in thy true
wife, forever after. It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections;
not that they gape so long and wide, but so quickly close again!
Almost repenting of his frolic, or whatever it may be termed, Wakefield
lies down betimes, and, starting from his first nap, spreads forth his
arms into the wide and solitary waste of the unaccustomed bed. “No,”
thinks he, gathering the bedclothes about him, “I will not sleep alone
another night.”
In the morning, he rises earlier than usual, and sets himself to
consider what he really means to do. Such are his loose and rambling
modes of thought, that he has taken this very singular step, with the
consciousness of a purpose, indeed, but without being able to define it
sufficiently for his own contemplation. The vagueness of the project,
and the convulsive effort with which he plunges into the execution of
it, are equally characteristic of a feeble-minded man. Wakefield sifts
his ideas, however, as minutely as he may, and finds himself curious to
know the progress of matters at home,--how his exemplary wife will
endure her widowhood of a week; and, briefly, how the little sphere of
creatures and circumstances, in which he was a central object, will be
affected by his removal. A morbid vanity, therefore, lies nearest the
bottom of the affair. But how is he to attain his ends? Not, certainly,
by keeping close in this comfortable lodging, where, though he slept and
awoke in the next street to his home, he is as effectually abroad as if
the stage-coach had been whirling him away all night. Yet, should he
reappear, the whole project is knocked in the head. His poor brains
being hopelessly puzzled with this dilemma, he at length ventures out,
partly resolving to cross the head of the street, and send one hasty
glance toward his forsaken domicile. Habit--for he is a man of
habits--takes him by the hand, and guides him, wholly unaware, to his
own door, where, just at the critical moment, he is aroused by the
scraping of his foot upon the step. Wakefield! whither are you going?
At that instant, his fate was turning on the pivot. Little dreaming of
the doom to which his first backward step devotes him, he hurries away,
breathless with agitation hitherto unfelt, and hardly dares turn his
head at the distant corner. Can it be that nobody caught sight of him?
Will not the whole household--the decent Mrs. Wakefield, the smart
maid-servant, and the dirty little footboy--raise a hue and cry,
through London streets, in pursuit of their fugitive lord and master?
Wonderful escape! He gathers courage to pause and look homeward, but is
perplexed with a sense of change about the familiar edifice, such as
affects us all when, after a separation of months or years, we again see
some hill or lake, or work of art, with which we were friends of old. In
ordinary cases, this indescribable impression is caused by the
comparison and contrast between our imperfect reminiscences and the
reality. In Wakefield, the magic of a single night has wrought a similar
transformation, because, in that brief period, a great moral change has
been effected. But this is a secret from himself. Before leaving the
spot, he catches a far and momentary glimpse of his wife, passing
athwart the front window, with her face turned toward the head of the
street. The crafty nincompoop takes to his heels, scared with the idea
that, among a thousand such atoms of mortality, her eye must have
detected him. Right glad is his heart, though his brain be somewhat
dizzy, when he finds himself by the coal fire of his lodgings.
So much for the commencement of this long whim-wham. After the initial
conception, and the stirring up of the man’s sluggish temperament to put
it in practice, the whole matter evolves itself in a natural train. We
may suppose him, as the result of deep deliberation, buying a new wig,
of reddish hair, and selecting sundry garments, in a fashion unlike his
customary suit of brown, from a Jew’s old-clothes bag. It is
accomplished. Wakefield is another man. The new system being now
established, a retrograde movement to the old would be almost as
difficult as the step that placed him in his unparalleled position.
Furthermore, he is rendered obstinate by a sulkiness, occasionally
incident to his temper, and brought on, at present, by the inadequate
sensation which he conceives to have been produced in the bosom of Mrs.
Wakefield. He will not go back until she be frightened half to death.
Well; twice or thrice has she passed before his sight, each time with a
heavier step, a paler cheek, and a more anxious brow; and in the third
week of his non-appearance, he detects a portent of evil entering the
house, in the guise of an apothecary. Next day, the knocker is muffled.
Toward nightfall comes the chariot of a physician, and deposits its
big-wigged and solemn burden at Wakefield’s door, whence, after a
quarter of an hour’s visit, he emerges, perchance the herald of a
funeral. Dear woman! Will she die? By this time, Wakefield is excited to
something like energy of feeling, but still lingers away from his wife’s
bedside, pleading with his conscience, that she must not be disturbed at
such a juncture. If aught else restrains him, he does not know it. In
the course of a few weeks, she gradually recovers; the crisis is over;
her heart is sad, perhaps, but quiet; and, let him return soon or late,
it will never be feverish for him again. Such ideas glimmer through the
mist of Wakefield’s mind, and render him indistinctly conscious that an
almost impassable gulf divides his hired apartment from his former home.
“It is but in the next street!” he sometimes says. Fool! it is in
another world. Hitherto, he has put off his return from one particular
day to another; henceforward, he leaves the precise time undetermined.
Not to-morrow,--probably next week,--pretty soon. Poor man! The dead
have nearly as much chance of revisiting their earthly homes, as the
self-banished Wakefield.
Would that I had a folio to write, instead of an article of a dozen
pages! Then might I exemplify how an influence, beyond our control, lays
its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences
into an iron tissue of necessity. Wakefield is spellbound. We must leave
him, for ten years or so, to haunt around his house, without once
crossing the threshold, and to be faithful to his wife, with all the
affection of which his heart is capable, while he is slowly fading out
of hers. Long since, it must be remarked, he has lost the perception of
singularity in his conduct.
Now for a scene! Amid the throng of a London street, we distinguish a
man, now waxing elderly, with few characteristics to attract careless
observers, yet bearing, in his whole aspect, the handwriting of no
common fate, for such as have the skill to read it. He is meagre; his
low and narrow forehead is deeply wrinkled; his eyes, small and
lustreless, sometimes wander apprehensively about him, but oftener seem
to look inward. He bends his head, and moves with an indescribable
obliquity of gait, as if unwilling to display his full front to the
world. Watch him long enough to see what we have described, and you will
allow that circumstances, which often produce remarkable men from
nature’s ordinary handiwork, have produced one such here. Next, leaving
him to sidle along the footwalk, cast your eyes in the opposite
direction, where a portly female, considerably in the wane of life, with
a prayer-book in her hand, is proceeding to yonder church. She has the
placid mien of settled widowhood. Her regrets have either died away, or
have become so essential to her heart that they would be poorly
exchanged for joy. Just as the lean man and the well-conditioned woman
are passing, a slight obstruction occurs, and brings these two figures
directly in contact. Their hands touch; the pressure of the crowd forces
her bosom against his shoulder; they stand face to face, staring into
each other’s eyes. After a ten years’ separation, thus Wakefield meets
his wife!
The throng eddies away, and carries them asunder. The sober widow,
resuming her former pace, proceeds to church, but pauses in the portal,
and throws a perplexed glance along the street. She passes in, however,
opening her prayer-book as she goes. And the man! with so wild a face
that busy and selfish London stands to gaze after him, he hurries to his
lodgings, bolts the door, and throws himself upon the bed. The latent
feelings of years break out; his feeble mind acquires a brief energy
from their strength; all the miserable strangeness of his life is
revealed to him at a glance: and he cries out passionately, “Wakefield!
Wakefield! you are mad!”
Perhaps he was so. The singularity of his situation must have so moulded
him to himself, that, considered in regard to his fellow-creatures and
the business of life, he could not be said to possess his right mind. He
had contrived, or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the
world,--to vanish,--to give up his place and privileges with living men,
without being admitted among the dead. The life of a hermit is nowise
parallel to his. He was in the bustle of the city, as of old; but the
crowd swept by, and saw him not; he was, we may figuratively say, always
beside his wife, and at his hearth, yet must never feel the warmth of
the one, nor the affection of the other. It was Wakefield’s
unprecedented fate to retain his original share of human sympathies, and
to be still involved in human interests, while he had lost his
reciprocal influence on them. It would be a most curious speculation to
trace out the effect of such circumstances on his heart and intellect,
separately, and in unison. Yet, changed as he was, he would seldom be
conscious of it, but deem himself the same man as ever; glimpses of the
truth, indeed, would come, but only for the moment; and still he would
keep saying, “I shall soon go back!”--nor reflect that he had been
saying so for twenty years.
I conceive, also, that these twenty years would appear, in the
retrospect, scarcely longer than the week to which Wakefield had at
first limited his absence. He would look on the affair as no more than
an interlude in the main business of his life. When, after a little
while more, he should deem it time to re-enter his parlor, his wife
would clap her hands for joy, on beholding the middle-aged Mr.
Wakefield. Alas, what a mistake! Would Time but await the close of our
favorite follies, we should be young men, all of us, and till Doomsday.
One evening, in the twentieth year since he vanished, Wakefield is
taking his customary walk toward the dwelling which he still calls his
own. It is a gusty night of autumn, with frequent showers, that patter
down upon the pavement, and are gone, before a man can put up his
umbrella. Pausing near the house, Wakefield discerns, through the
parlor windows of the second floor, the red glow, and the glimmer and
fitful flash, of a comfortable fire. On the ceiling appears a grotesque
shadow of good Mrs. Wakefield. The cap, the nose and chin, and the broad
waist form an admirable caricature, which dances, moreover, with the
up-flickering and down-sinking blaze, almost too merrily for the shade
of an elderly widow. At this instant, a shower chances to fall, and is
driven, by the unmannerly gust, full into Wakefield’s face and bosom. He
is quite penetrated with its autumnal chill. Shall he stand, wet and
shivering here, when his own hearth has a good fire to warm him, and his
own wife will run to fetch the gray coat and small-clothes, which,
doubtless, she has kept carefully in the closet of their bedchamber? No!
Wakefield is no such fool. He ascends the steps,--heavily!--for twenty
years have stiffened his legs, since he came down,--but he knows it not.
Stay, Wakefield! Would you go to the sole home that is left you? Then
step into your grave! The door opens. As he passes in, we have a parting
glimpse of his visage, and recognize the crafty smile which was the
precursor of the little joke that he has ever since been playing off at
his wife’s expense. How unmercifully has he quizzed the poor woman!
Well, a good night’s rest to Wakefield!
This happy event--supposing it to be such--could only have occurred at
an unpremeditated moment. We will not follow our friend across the
threshold. He has left us much food for thought, a portion of which
shall lend its wisdom to a moral, and be shaped into a figure. Amid the
seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely
adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that,
by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk
of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were,
the Outcast of the Universe.
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MURDER,
CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS.
BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
We have all heard of a Society for the Promotion of Vice, of the
Hell-Fire Club, etc. At Brighton, I think it was, that a Society was
formed for the Suppression of Virtue. That Society was itself
suppressed; but I am sorry to say that another exists in London, of a
character still more atrocious. In tendency, it may be denominated a
Society for the Encouragement of Murder; but, according to their own
delicate εἰφημισμός, it is styled, The Society of Connoisseurs in
Murder. They profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti
in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short, murder-fanciers. Every
fresh atrocity of that class, which the police annals of Europe bring
up, they meet and criticise as they would a picture, statue, or other
work of art. But I need not trouble myself with any attempt to describe
the spirit of their proceedings, as you will collect _that_ much better
from one of the monthly lectures read before the society last year. This
has fallen into my hands, accidentally, in spite of all the vigilance
exercised to keep their transactions from the public eye. The
publication of it will alarm them; and my purpose is that it should. For
I would much rather put them down quietly, by an appeal to public
opinion, than by such an exposure of names as would follow an appeal to
Bow Street; which last appeal, however, if this should fail, I must
positively resort to.
LECTURE.
GENTLEMEN,--I have had the honor to be appointed by your committee to
the trying task of reading the Williams Lecture on Murder, considered as
one of the Fine Arts; a task which might be easy enough three or four
centuries ago, when the art was little understood, and few great models
had been exhibited; but in this age, when masterpieces of excellence
have been executed by professional men, it must be evident that, in the
style of criticism applied to them, the public will look for something
of a corresponding improvement. Practice and theory must advance _pari
passu_. People begin to see that something more goes to the composition
of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed,--a knife,--a
purse,--and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade,
poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this
nature. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us; and
to me, therefore, in particular, has deepened the arduousness of my
task. Like Æschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in
painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and,
as Mr. Wordsworth observes, has in a manner “created the taste by which
he is to be enjoyed.” To sketch the history of the art, and to examine
its principles critically, now remains as a duty for the connoisseur,
and for judges of quite another stamp from his Majesty’s Judges of
Assize.