[I AM so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to
remain there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great
many conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of
different tone and on different subjects. The talks are like the
breakfasts, - sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must
take them as they come. How can I do what all these letters ask me
to? No. 1. want serious and earnest thought. No. 2. (letter
smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a
"good storey" which he has copied out for me. (I suppose two
letters before the word "good" refer to some Doctor of Divinity who
told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand) - more poetry. No. 4.
wants something that would be of use to a practical man.
(PRAHCTICAL MAHN he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged,
sweet-scented) - "more sentiment," - " heart's outpourings." -
My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such
remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their
character will depend on many accidents, - a good deal on the
particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed. It
so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the
divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I
need not mention, saw to interfere, with more or less propriety, in
the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of
course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don't expect
all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of
what was said. Still, I think there may be a few that will rather
like this vein, - possibly prefer it to a livelier one, - serious
young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis
from - years of age to - inclusive.
Another privilege of talking is to misquote. - Of course it wasn't
Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair, - but IRIS. (As I
have since told you) it was the former lady's regular business, but
Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood firm on
the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here - Juno, in Latin
- sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that
one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for the celebrated
"Oceanic Miscellany" misquoted Campbell's line without any excuse.
"Waft us HOME the MESSAGE" of course it ought to be. Will he be
duly grateful for the correction?]
- The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to
be governed, not by, but ACCORDING TO laws, such as we observe in
the larger universe. - You think you know all about WALKING, -
don't you, now? Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held
to your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels,
("cotyloid" - cup-like - cavities,) and held there as long as you
live, and longer. At any rate, you think you move them backward
and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don't you? - On
the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a
fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by
muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and
make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by
the same mechanism as the movements of the solar system.
[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to
certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the
facts, which, however, he said he had often verified. I
appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this,
when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering?
The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost
nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had
got it already. - Why, - said the Professor, - they might have
hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]
Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the
bodily movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its
regular cycles. Such or such a thought comes round periodically,
in its turn. Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere
with the regular cycles, that we may find them practically beyond
our power of recognition. Take all this for what it is worth, but
at any rate you will agree that there are certain particular
thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but that
a year would hardly go round without your having them pass through
your mind. Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way.
Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of
assent in the listener or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often
been struck by it.
ALL AT ONCE A CONVICTION FLASHES THROUGH US THAT WE HAVE BEEN IN
THE SAME PRECISE CIRCUMSTANCES AS AT THE PRESENT INSTANT, ONCE OR
MANY TIMES BEFORE.
O, dear, yes! - said one of the company, - everybody has had that
feeling.
The landlady didn't know anything about such notions; it was an
idee in folks' heads, she expected.
The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew
the feeling well, and didn't like to experience it; it made her
think she was a ghost, sometimes.
The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he
had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous
conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that
same thing ever so many times before. I looked severely at him,
and his countenance immediately fell - ON THE SIDE TOWARD ME; I
cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either
half of his face without the other half's knowing it.
- I have noticed - I went on to say - the following circumstances
connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition
which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very
trivial, - one that might have presented itself a hundred times.
Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is
rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after
any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to
record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce
the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the
duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it
was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I have had the
same convictions in my dreams.
How do I account for it? - Why, there are several ways that I can
mention, and you may take your choice. The first is that which the
young lady hinted at; - that these flashes are sudden recollections
of a previous existence. I don't believe that; for I remember a
poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one
day when he was blacking his boots, and I can't think he had ever
lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.
Some think that Dr. Wigan's doctrine of the brain's being a double
organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts
for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the
small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the
sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the
second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.
But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see
no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the
time, nor any analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most
likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but
that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of
circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it
as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally,
mistaking him for a friend. The apparent similarity may be owing
perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to the
outward circumstances.
- Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have
said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with
something like it in books, - somewhere in Bulwer's novels, I
think, and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know.
MEMORY, IMAGINATION, OLD SENTIMENTS AND ASSOCIATIONS, ARE MORE
READILY REACHED THROUGH THE SENSE OF SMELL THAN BY ALMOST ANY OTHER
CHANNEL.
Of course the particular odors which act upon each person's
susceptibilities differ. - O, yes! I will tell you some of mine.
The smell of PHOSPHORUS is one of them. During a year or two of
adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as
about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like
another, some of these things got mixed up with each other:
orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and
transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks; - EHEU!
"Soles occidere et redire possunt,"
but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of
eighteen hundred and - spare them! But, as I was saying,
phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its
luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance;
it comes to me in a double sense "trailing clouds of glory." Only
the confounded Vienna matches, OHNE PHOSPHOR-GERUCH, have worn my
sensibilities a little.
Then there is the MARIGOLD. When I was of smallest dimensions, and
wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we
would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop
opposite a low, brown, "gambrel-roofed" cottage. Out of it would
come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself,
shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would
gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies
in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-
crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage,
garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions, -
stateliest of vegetables, - all are gone, but the breath of a
marigold brings them all back to me.
Perhaps the herb EVERLASTING, the fragrant IMMORTELLE of our autumn
fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions
that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling
flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had
been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain
on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality
in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless
petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and
carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border
the River of Life.
- I should not have talked so much about these personal
susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I
believe is a new one. It is this. There may be a physical reason
for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind.
The olfactory nerve - so my friend, the Professor, tells me - is
the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain,
the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the
intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly the
olfactory "nerve" is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the
brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether
this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have
mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth
remembering. Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of
suggestive impressions, with that of smell. Now the Professor
assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate
connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of
the spinal cord.
[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to
this hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense
of smell he nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in
getting out a large red bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a
little to the other side, and after much tribulation at last
extricated an ample round snuff-box. I looked as he opened it and
felt for the wonted pugil. Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean lying
therein. I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use
the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the
long unused stimulus - O boys, - that were, - actual papas and
possible grandpapas, - some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,
- some in locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled, - do
you remember, as you doze over this, those after-dinners at the
Trois Freres when the Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the
dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our happy sensoria? Then
it was that the Chambertin or the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering
in its straw cradle. And one among you, - do you remember how he
would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it
against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he was
hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the deep-
breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture,
in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]
Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through
my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I
was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and
pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were
stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period
there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate;
there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had
lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in
their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The
odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
recesses.
- Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"? -
To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs
the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves
us. What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the
folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and
finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up
in them perhaps a hundred years ago? And, lo! as one looks on
these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in
the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and
the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine,
promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the
Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic
the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust
so long - even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry - are
alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils,
and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of
heaven! And all this for a bit of pie-crust!
- I will thank you for that pie, - said the provoking young fellow
whom I have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and
put his hands to his eyes as if moved. - I was thinking, - he said
indistinctly -
- How? What is't? - said our landlady.
- I was thinking - said he - who was king of England when this old
pie was baked, - and it made me feel bad to think how long he must
have been dead.
[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; CELA
VA SANS DIRE. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of
corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize
itself by a special narrative. There was the wooing and the
wedding, - the start in life, - the disappointments, - the children
she had buried, - the struggle against fate, - the dismantling of
life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts, - the
broken spirits, - the altered character of the one on whom she
leaned, - and at last the death that came and drew the black
curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.
I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but
I often cried, - not those pattering tears that run off the eaves
upon our neighbors' grounds, the STILLICIDIUM of self-conscious
sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits
until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those
tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features; - such I did
shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno
tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]
Young man, - I said, - the pasty you speak lightly of is not old,
but courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are
of the weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining. May
I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you
are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet - if you are
handling an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice. I take
it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain
pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand;
Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: "QUOIQU'ELLE SOIT
TRES SOLIDEMENT MONTEE, IL FAUT NE PAS BRUTALISER LA MACHINE." - I
will thank you for the pie, if you please.
[I took more of it than was good for me - as much as 85 degrees, I
should think, - and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was
suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a
theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation.
When I got better I labelled them all "Pie-crust," and laid them by
as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my
shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as
they have great names on their title-pages, - Doctors of Divinity,
some of them, - it wouldn't do.]
- My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or
twice, told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some
of the journals of his calling. I told him that I didn't doubt he
deserved it; that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse
occasionally, and would for a number of years to come; that nobody
could do anything to make his neighbors wiser or better without
being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to have
their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing
something of the kind. - The Professor smiled. - Now, said I, hear
what I am going to say. It will not take many years to bring you
to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing
and talking men, do nothing but praise. Men, like peaches and
pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay. I
don't know what it is, - whether a spontaneous change, mental or
bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness
of critical honesty, - but it is a fact, that most writers, except
sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the
time when they are beginning to grow old. As a general thing, I
would not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he
is himself an author, over fifty years of age. At thirty we are
all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this
tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up
our jack-knives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less
to hinder any, because nobody's elbows are in our way. So I am
glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in
a few years.
- Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me
very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just
now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you
know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the
harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are
gentle and placid as young children? I have heard it said, but I
cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain,
Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age. An
old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind,
used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to
him. One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years
describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I
remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became
remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of
his life.
And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their
way of coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human
Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon
over. Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn
kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit. And some, that,
like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the
rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after
the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards. Beware
of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may
be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath
the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate
Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old
Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were
swelling when he ripened.
- There is no power I envy so much - said the divinity-student - as
that of seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don't
understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling
thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each
other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you
wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair
of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.
[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of
the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and
training. I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs, -
give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to
speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only
contains lifeless albumen.]
You call it MIRACULOUS, - I replied, - tossing the expression with
my facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear. - Two men are walking
by the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup
with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and
the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at
all, - and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the
ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer
than that all things are in all things, and that just according to
the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the
many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what
he was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean, - the child
and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a
pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its
compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had
grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all
the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by
invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A
body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the
entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne
of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the
rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!
So, - to return to OUR walk by the ocean, - if all that poetry has
dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics
have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed
in the fancies of women, - if the dreams of colleges and convents
and boarding-schools, - if every human feeling that sighs, or
smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their
innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat, -
the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac,
would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and
analogies that rolls through the universe.
[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he
received this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he
reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried
it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at
his leisure.]
- Here is another remark made for his especial benefit. - There is
a natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together
in TRIADS, as I have heard them called, - thus: He was honorable,
courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous.
Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you
could separate a paper in the "Rambler" into three distinct essays.
Many of our writers show the same tendency, - my friend, the
Professor, especially. Some think it is in humble imitation of
Johnson, - some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only.
I don't think they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an
instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought
or image with the THREE DIMENSIONS that belong to every solid, - an
unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth, and
thickness. It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it,
and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it. But
mind this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the
range of the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind,
and morals, and the narrower the limits of the self-determining
conscious movement.
- I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such
strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted
to laugh at them. "Where did our friends pick up all these fine
ecstatic airs?" I would say to myself. Then I would remember My
Lady in "Marriage a la Mode," and amuse myself with thinking how
affectation was the same thing in Hogarth's time and in our own.
But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at
my window. By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe
his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and
waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing
side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I should
like to ask, WHO taught him all this? - and me, through him, that
the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side
and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was
passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made
of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its
shoulders?
- Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable
restrictions? A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may
see such a one in any mineralogical collection. One little fluid
particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!
- Weaken moral obligations? - No, not weaken, but define them.
When I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to
lay down some principles not fully recognized in some of your text-
books.
I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary. You
saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in
which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very
apt to be fools and cowards. But a great many of the clergyman's
patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.
[Immense sensation at the table. - Sudden retirement of the angular
female in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion - as they say
in the Chamber of Deputies - on the part of the young fellow they
call John. Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite's lower jaw -
(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him.) Our landlady
to Benjamin Franklin, briskly, - Go to school right off, there's a
good boy! Schoolmistress curious, - takes a quick glance at
divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly flushed draws his
shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood - or truth - had hit
him in the forehead. Myself calm.]
- I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having
pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit
should be disputed. Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin,
(for B. F. had NOT gone right off, of course,) and bring down a
small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?
[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed,
vellum-papered 32mo. "DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA. Amstelodami.
Typis Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650." Various names written on title-
page. Most conspicuous this: Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn. Anim.
1725. Oxon.
- O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford, - then writing
as I now write, - now in the dust, where I shall lie, - is this
line all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is
at least once more spoken by living men; - is it a pleasure to
thee? Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality, -
its week, its month, its year, - whatever it may be, - and then we
will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion's
Uncatalogued Library!]
- If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to
read something to you out of the book of this keen and witty
scholar, - the great Erasmus, - who "laid the egg of the
Reformation which Luther hatched." Oh, you never read his
NAUFRAGIUM, or "Shipwreck," did you? Of course not; for, if you
had, I don't think you would have given me credit - or discredit -
for entire originality in that speech of mine. That men are
cowards in the contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the
extraordinary antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they
are fools, by their praying to the sea, and making promises to bits
of wood from the true cross, and all manner of similar nonsense;
that they are fools, cowards, and liars all at once, by this story:
I will put it into rough English for you. - "I couldn't help
laughing to hear one fellow bawling out, so that he might be sure
to be heard, a promise to Saint Christopher of Paris - the
monstrous statue in the great church there - that he would give him
a wax taper as big as himself. 'Mind what you promise!' said an
acquaintance that stood near him, poking him with his elbow; 'you
couldn't pay for it, if you sold all your things at auction.'
'Hold your tongue, you donkey!' said the fellow, - but softly, so
that Saint Christopher should not hear him, - 'do you think I'm in
earnest? If I once get my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him
so much as a tallow candle!'"
Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in
their talk about the great subject of which we were speaking have
not necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the
contrary, have very often been wanting in one or two or all of the
qualities these words imply, I should expect to find a good many
doctrines current in the schools which I should be obliged to call
foolish, cowardly, and false.
- So you would abuse other people's beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell
us your own creed! - said the divinity-student, coloring up with a
spirit for which I liked him all the better.
- I have a creed, - I replied; - none better, and none shorter. It
is told in two words, - the two first of the Paternoster. And when
I say these words I mean them. And when I compared the human will
to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to DEFINE moral
obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to
express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings
is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief
planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization,
education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the
will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale
mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to
nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but "Give me
neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good
reason. If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in
getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these
every-day working forces into account. The great theological
question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is
this:-
No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be
repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what
personal incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business
has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-
table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the
Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto
"Concilium Tridentinum." He has also heard many thousand
theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not
at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this
time to express an opinion on theological matters.
I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal
rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of
thought. Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two
letters a week, requesting him to. . . . , - on the strength of
some youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the
intelligent constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a
harlequin?
- Well, I can't be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like
to make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this:
if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible
nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he
had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head
of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels
of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the
other water-power; that is all. I have often heard the Professor
talk about hysterics as being Nature's cleverest illustration of
the reciprocal convertibility of the two states of which these acts
are the manifestations; But you may see it every day in children;
and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the
transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake
play JESSE RURAL.
It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love
for the ridiculous. People laugh WITH him just so long as he
amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have
their laugh, and so they laugh AT him. There is in addition,
however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear. Do
you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you
laugh, whether by making faces or verses? Are you aware that you
have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so
far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your
royal delight? Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a
dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is
exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right! - first-rate
performance! - and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at
once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and,
stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him, - ah, that
wasn't in the programme!
I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith - who, as
everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman,
every inch of him - ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of
Royalty. The "Quarterly," "so savage and tartarly," came down upon
him in the most contemptuous style, as "a joker of jokes," a
"diner-out of the first water," in one of his own phrases; sneering
at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking
behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a
man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even. - If
I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three
facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit
in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more
solid qualities. And so to an actor: HAMLET first, and BOB LOGIC
afterwards, if you like; but don't think, as they say poor Liston
used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do
anything great with MACBETH'S dagger after flourishing about with
PAUL PRY'S umbrella. Do you know, too, that the majority of men
look upon all who challenge their attention, - for a while, at
least, - as beggars, and nuisances? They always try to get off as
cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a
literary man - pardon the forlorn pleasantry! - is the FUNNY-bone.
That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and
makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.
- Oh, indeed, no! - I am not ashamed to make you laugh,
occasionally. I think I could read you something I have in my desk
which would probably make you smile. Perhaps I will read it one of
these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and
reflective; not just now. The ludicrous has its place in the
universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas,
illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long
before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we
always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and
encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of
those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call
BLESSED! There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be
preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look
forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all
joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street
not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who
gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look
of recognition, - something as if he were one of Heaven's
assessors, come down to "doom" every acquaintance he met, - that I
have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a
violent cold, dating from that instant. I don't doubt he would cut
his kitten's tail off, if he caught her playing with it. Please
tell me, who taught her to play with it?
No, no! - give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and
you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about
entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my
serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies. I know nothing in
English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment
of Sir Thomas Browne "EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS
NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIMSELF."
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,
as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven,
we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, -
but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one
very sad thing in old friendships, to every mind that is really
moving onward. It is this: that one cannot help using his early
friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress. Every
now and then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a
string of thought tied to him, and look - I am afraid with a kind
of luxurious and sanctimonious compassion - to see the rate at
which the string reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and
down, poor fellow! and we are dashing along with the white foam and
bright sparkle at our bows; - the ruffled bosom of prosperity and
progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck in it! But this is only
the sentimental side of the matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow
all that we love.
Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you.
It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring
our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the
habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary,
we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy. We see
just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the
balance between that and whatever we may feel ourselves to be now.
No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken. If we change our last
simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet leaving the
harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can get
what we want out of it. There is one of our companions; - her
streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea,
then by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another,
the waves swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a
seeming wreck, as we flew under our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at
dawn she is still in sight, - it may be in advance of us. Some
deep ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent, -
yes, stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they
are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim. And when at last
the black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the
mist sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes
off panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all
wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our pride,
may never come.
So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships,
because we cannot help instituting comparisons between our present
and former selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but
are not what we are. Nothing strikes one more, in the race of
life, than to see how many give out in the first half of the
course. "Commencement day" always reminds me of the start for the
"Derby," when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the season
are brought up for trial. That day is the start, and life is the
race. Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is just "graduating."
Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit;
step out here into the grass back of the church; ah! there it is:-
"HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT
SOCII MOERENTES."
But this is the start, and here they are, - coats bright as silk,
and manes as smooth as EAU LUSTRALE can make them. Some of the
best of the colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show
their paces. What is that old gentleman crying about? and the old
lady by him, and the three girls, what are they all covering their
eyes for? Oh, that is THEIR colt which has just been trotted up on
the stage. Do they really think those little thin legs can do
anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these
next forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that
comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered
rings of the ARCUS SENILIS!
TEN YEARS GONE. First turn in the race. A few broken down; two or
three bolted. Several show in advance of the ruck. CASSOCK, a
black colt, seems to be ahead of the rest; those black colts
commonly get the start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first
quarter. METEOR has pulled up.
TWENTY YEARS. Second corner turned. CASSOCK has dropped from the
front, and JUDEX, an iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they
have thinned out! Down flat, - five, - six, - how many? They lie
still enough! they will not get up again in this race, be very
sure! And the rest of them, what a "tailing off"! Anybody can see
who is going to win, - perhaps.
THIRTY YEARS. Third corner turned. DIVES, bright sorrel, ridden
by the fellow in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is
getting to be the favourite with many. But who is that other one
that has been lengthening his stride from the first, and now shows
close up to the front? Don't you remember the quiet brown colt
ASTEROID, with the star in his forehead? That is he; he is one of
the sort that lasts; look out for him! The black "colt," as we
used to call him, is in the background, taking it easily in a
gentle trot. There is one they used to call THE FILLY, on account
of a certain feminine air he had; well up, you see; the Filly is
not to be despised my boy!
FORTY YEARS. More dropping off, - but places much as before.
FIFTY YEARS. Race over. All that are on the course are coming in
at a walk; no more running. Who is ahead? Ahead? What! and the
winning-post a slab of white or gray stone standing out from that
turf where there is no more jockeying or straining for victory!
Well, the world marks their places in its betting-book; but be sure
that these matter very little, if they have run as well as they
knew how!
- Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in
an ocean of similitudes and analogies? I will not quote Cowley, or
Burns, or Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were
suggested to them by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower
or a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do not object,
suggested by looking at a section of one of those chambered shells
to which is given the name of Pearly Nautilus. We need not trouble
ourselves about the distinction between this and the Paper
Nautilus, the ARGONAUTA of the ancients. The name applied to both
shows that each has long been compared to a ship, as you may see
more fully in Webster's Dictionary, or the "Encyclopedia," to which
he refers. If you will look into Roget's Bridgewater Treatise, you
will find a figure of one of these shells, and a section of it.
The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments
successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell, which
is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no lesson in this?
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main, -
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every clambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed, -
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:-
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! |