I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a
universal formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table.
It would have had a grand effect. For this purpose I fixed my eyes
on a certain divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few
phrases, and then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of
being.--I will thank you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a
dependent creature.
It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed
the sugar to me.
--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram
of the sugar question.
You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of
great things?
The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back
with a pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great
bundle of great things,--he said.
(NOW, THEN!) The great end of being, after all, is....
Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be
John, and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold
on! the Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs
about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing
the bait and hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the
water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a
surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the
naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling
about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil,
do not like to touch them, and especially to tread on them, unless
they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick white soles of their
broad black feet.
When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked
round the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further
end of it I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed
body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a
fair level enough for him to get at his food. His whole appearance
was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman
behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the
hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous
spectacle. I contrived to lose the first of his sentence, but what I
heard began so:
--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to
come down from the tents on section and Independence days with their
pails to get water to make egg-pop with. Born in Boston; went to
school in Boston as long as the boys would let me.--The little man
groaned, turned, as if to look around, and went on.--Ran away from
school one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a
logger-head. That was in flip days, when there were always two three
loggerheads in the fire. I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,--born at
North End, and mean to be buried on Copp's Hill, with the good old
underground people,--the Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em. Yes,--up
on the old hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a stone
grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the red-coats, in those
old times when the world was frozen up tight and there was n't but
one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil all,--and black enough
it looked, I tell you! There 's where my bones shall lie, Sir, and
rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite! You
can't make me ashamed of the old place! Full crooked little
streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--
--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but
thinking in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got
kinked up, turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear
what was said, but went on,--
--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and
free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead
men,--I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their
steeples!
--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black
whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too
massive, and a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting
nature might confess an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing
amounting to a suspicion. For this is a gentleman from a great city,
and sits next to the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in
him, and is the object of his especial attention.
How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the
stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough?
It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may
be so still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? Quis cus-(On the
whole, as this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a
foreign language, might not be familiar to all the boarders, I
thought I would not finish it.)
--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-
eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated
itself as a bit of economy.
You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
commentary on what you say. "He who would bring back the wealth of
the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies." What you bring
away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.-
Benjamin Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring
me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will
find lying under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large
bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-
butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable
fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]
--Here it is. "Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J.
J. Flournoy. Athens, Georgia, 1858."
Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have
judiciously delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what
are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia,
has arrived. You shall hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and
he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing
social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to
be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of
humanity in particular. It is what he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the
marrying of three wives, so that "good old men" may be solaced at
once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those
less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at
an earlier period of life. He has followed your precept, Madam; I
hope you accept his conclusions.
The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact,
"all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I
left her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation,
which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.
But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having her
argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly.
--I don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have
pleased her fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into
fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the
luxury of saying, "No!" is more than I, can tell you. I may as well
mention that B. F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet
for "a lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a
secret he wished to be relieved of.
--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in
the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
end of all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for
truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no
presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of
our inheriting it. Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair
chance to become a convert to a better religion.
The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
the mind by changing the word which stands for it.
--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
divinity-student.
I will tell you,--I said.---When a given symbol which represents a
thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it
undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives
to iron. It becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by
strange forces which did not belong to it. The word, and
consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.
The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in
print, consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these
from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all
its magnetism behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo
mythology. Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy
Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you
should say it aloud. What do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get
the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize
this and all similar words for him. The argument for and against new
translations of the Bible really turns on this. Skepticism is afraid
to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a
new translation. I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains
could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean,
unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as
philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we do not
and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
fair man and lover of truth should do. When society has once fairly
dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will
perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
young fellow near me.
A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get
the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
and midwinter, for instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths,
you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well
as of the clergy. Teachers and students of theology get a certain
look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a
professional neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their
externals. They are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well
enough what the "idols of the tribe" are. Of course they have their
false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling are prone to
do.--The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in our modern
civilization. They have never suffered it to stop. They have often
carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the
momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes, too, they have kept
it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the
bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that
yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the world's onward
religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me
tell you. It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy
that makes the people. Of course, the profession reacts on its
source with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers
or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.
Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
Harvard College yard.
--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert
Calef's book was burned?
The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember
the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef,
trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what
a set of fools and worse than fools they were-
Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it,
as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what
it wears. There was a ring on it.
May I look at it?--I said.
Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the
table, and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being
only a little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain
and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his
sticks, he took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the
deadbeat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and
ear the malformation which is called in learned language talipes
varus, or inverted club-foot.
Stop! stop!--I said,--let me come to you.
The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his
right hand, with the ring upon it. The ring had been put on long
ago, and could not pass the misshapen joint. It was one of those
funeral rings which used to be given to relatives and friends after
the decease of persons of any note or importance. Beneath a round
fit of glass was a death's head. Engraved on one side of this, "L.
B. AEt. 22,"--on the other, "Ob. 1692"
My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a
witch. It does n't seem a great while ago. I knew my grandmother,
and loved her. Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief
Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.-
-That was Salem, though, and not Boston. No, not Boston. Robert
Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to-
Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of
talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are
plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above
all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life,
that all of the Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of
any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of
the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite,
instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's being consists,--an
incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a
past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come,-
-that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this
larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films
in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some
things into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of
Divinity."
I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the
bottom of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street
Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch
another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea,
I say, is pretty nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a
civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a
judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,--
as fires come, from a spark.
Here, look at medicine. Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine,--
and that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak
of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded! I
did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the
old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
proprietor, of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
reprints by Philadelphia Editors. Besides, many of the profession
and I know a little something of each other, and you don't think I am
such a simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the
better heads among them would condemn as unfair and untrue? Now mark
how the great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and
in what form it fell.
A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous
fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy. I am very
fair, you see,---you can help yourself to either of these sets of
phrases.
All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general
an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug
is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing,
as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan
(theorist). Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to
teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general
practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their
drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get
well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle would not learn it of
themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.
--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
theology? I will tell you, then. It is Spiritualism. While some
are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are
laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with
it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism
is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state
which have been and are still accepted,--not merely in those who
believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a
larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of. It need n't
be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work.
The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over,
which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at different
times. And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little
thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with
such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the
ministers' studies of Christendom? Sir, you cannot have people of
cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of
science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world
and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
reacting on the whole conception of that other life. It is the folly
of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom. Not only out
of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools
and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons. For the fool's
judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat
watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one
shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call
the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.
--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the
watch. Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
their left foot!
I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty
seconds. His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant.
I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a
youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak. I have often
noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when
their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give
little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the
subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,--by no means
intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the
driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky. This, I
think, is the physiological condition of the young person, John. I
noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting the
eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the
facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition
to be satirical on his part.
--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
Professor, a conservative. For I don't know any fruit that clings to
its tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as
a Professor to the bough of which his chair is made. You can't shake
him off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off. Hence, by
a chain of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism
generally.
But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you
are in it.
You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight
in a profession. Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in,
through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and
general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with
twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.
By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-
hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with
a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on
the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
them--like Aaron's calf
[See Holmes poem: "When doctor's take what they would give and
lawyers give what they would take and strawberries grow larger down
through the box." D.W.]
If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up
and keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the
east and the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the
cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus
is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave
in its delirium,--I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the
barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.
--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager
and excited.
I was not,--I replied.
It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to
be born in. But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can
come and live here. Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science
and the American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here. Jim Otis,
the father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod
marshes awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough.
Joe Warren, the first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as
good as born here. Parson Charming strolled along this way from
Newport, and stayed here. Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--
we'd have made a man of him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen!
There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-
ground! I've stood on the slab many a time. Meant well,--meant
well. Juggernaut. Parson Charming put a little oil on one linchpin,
and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was
the wheel of that side was down. T' other fellow's at work now, but
he makes more noise about it. When the linchpin comes out on his
side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the
old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in
it which may get hurt. Hope not,--hope not. But this is the great
Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.
Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's
Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if
it went by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and
foreign vermin included,--said the little man.
This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed. The little man uttered it with
the distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to
exclaim, E-chec! so that it must have been heard. The party supposed
to be interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-
bladeful of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt,
interfered with the reply he would have made.
--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders. I think
our small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I
undertake to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too
magisterially. I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when
I have been in company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have
been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly
justified. But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good
listener. If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable
angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the
contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren. If, when I
am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story,
I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the
fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
of the "Old Sailor" says. I had rather hear one of those grand
elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names,
Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our College
days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old
Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any
chance find myself capable of saying. Of course, if I come across a
real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I
enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.
Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
sometimes. Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
thought. I can't answer for what will turn up. If I could, it would
n't be talking, but "speaking my piece." Better, I think, the hearty
abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the
risk of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it
escapes, but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of
never saying a foolish thing.
--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
do,--and that is to let him talk when he will. The day of the
"Autocrat's" monologues is over.
--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
person who sits at the other end of the table?
What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,-
-and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.
Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you
may have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge,
when they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves
protected by this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime,
thumb-supported, fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you
know anything about this deformed person?
About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would
not hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by
Nature to be spared by his fellows. Even in speaking of him to
others, I could wish that you might not employ a term which implies
contempt for what should inspire only pity.
A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
John.
Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak. It's all
right. The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I
understand the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,-
-it is a conservative principle in creation.
The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was
speaking, until it became as blank of vivid significance as the
countenance of a gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of
eyes. He had not taken my meaning.
Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink,
as he answered,--Jest so. All right. A 1. Put her through. That's
the way to talk. Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man
struck up that well-known song which I think they used to sing at
Masonic festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left
you Chrononhotonthologos?"
I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved
or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a
natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as
well as of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon
the abode spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future
generations. This is the final cause of the underlying brute
instinct which we have in common with the herds.
--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
thought I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up,
where there are such hereditary infirmities. Still, let us treat
this poor man fairly, and not call him names. Do you know what his
name is?
I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They
call him Little Boston. There's no harm in that, is there?
It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little Boston, in a
place where most are Bostonians?
Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
young fellow.
"L. B. Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him.
The ring he wears labels him well enough. There is stuff in the
little man, or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked,
crotchety old town. Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin,
won't you?--I said to the young fellow.
Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term. Don't call him so any more,
if you please. Call him Little Boston, if you like.
All right,--said the young fellow.--I would n't be hard on the poor
little-
The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
grammar. It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among
the Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or
given to rural pursuits. It is classed by custom among the profane
words; why, it is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street
by those who speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
fish to the little man from that day forward.
--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house. First, myself, the
Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
looking down, where the "Autocrat" used to sit. At the further end
sits the Landlady. At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-
noor, or the gentleman with the diamond. Opposite me is a Venerable
Gentleman with a bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little.
The Divinity Student is my neighbor on the right,--and further down,
that Young Fellow of whom I have repeatedly spoken. The Landlady's
Daughter sits near the Koh-i-noor, as I said. The Poor Relation near
the Landlady. At the right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of
whose name and history I have as yet learned nothing. Next the
further left-hand corner, near the lower end of the table, sits the
deformed person. The chair at his side, occupying that corner, is
empty. I need not specially mention the other boarders, with the
exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near his
mother. We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference enough and
likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something wanting.
The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of feminine
attractions. I am not quite satisfied with this young lady. She
wears more "jewelry," as certain young ladies call their trinkets,
than I care to see on a person in her position. Her voice is
strident, her laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish
way of dancing and bobbing like a quill-float with a "minnum" biting
the hook below it, which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons
of more pretensions. I can't help hoping we shall put something into
that empty chair yet which will add the missing string to our social
harp. I hear talk of a rare Miss who is expected. Something in the
schoolgirl way, I believe. We shall see.
--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution
which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit
of all concerned.
Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run
dry before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow?
Let me tell you what happened to me once. I put a little money into
a bank, and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted,
in sums to suit. Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a
pen was as easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book
seemed to be a dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all
the synonymes of happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot.
A check came back to me at last with these two words on it,--NO
FUNDS. My check-book was a volume of waste-paper.
Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's
currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO
FUNDS,--and then where will you be, my boy? These little bits of
paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and
you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to
your metallic basis.
There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can
coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words. What
if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that
falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be
no more dew on those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,--many drops,
large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have
absterged!
Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they
are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particuly
awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward
agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in
which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding
with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth
of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well;
finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of
the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement
of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for
me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend
has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!
A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.
As to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,-
-the gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a
favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting
receptacle.--I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel
over the desert-sand along which my lonely consciousness paces day
and night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a
year. All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us
and the due projection of our thought. The pulse-like "fits of easy
and difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium
through which our souls are seen. We know our humanity by its often
intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor
by its constantly recurring obscuration.
An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he
ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if
he had told all he knew. Braham came forward once to sing one of his
most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the
first line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they
screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could
not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal
equinox. One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to
suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible
temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without
fitting him with a new garment. "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine,
who was standing by, "if it hadn't been for that confounded headache
of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of
himself, before he left-the store." A passing throb, only,--but it
deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human
being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.
We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
transmission of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's
mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the
universe for which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I
look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with
the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of
individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.
When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
is an end of his genius as a real solvent. No more effervescence and
hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
alkaline unbeliefs! No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
covered with lies! No more taking up of dull earths, and turning
them, first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out
when I have used up my affinities. What a blessed thing it is, that
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left! Painful
as the task is, they never fail to warn the author, in the most
impressive manner, of the probabilities of failure in what he has
undertaken. Sad as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities,
they never hesitate to advertise him of the decline of his powers,
and to press upon him the propriety of retiring before he sinks into
imbecility. Trusting to their kind offices, I shall endeavor to
fulfil-
--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
great department of Ocean-Cable literature. As all the poets of this
country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns
Centenary, (so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because
there will be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce
and dear. Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present
article, which, by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of
Chemistry, will be found intelligible to the educated classes.
DE SAUTY
AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
Professor. Blue-Nose.
PROFESSOR.
Tell me, O Provincial! speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
Lives there one De Sauty extant now among yon,
Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
Holding talk with nations?
Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
Three times daily patent?
Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for "humbug,"--
Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
Romulus and Remus?
Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
Or a living product of galvanic action,
Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
BLUE-NOSE.
Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
Thou shalt hear them answered.
When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
At the polar focus of the wire electric
Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
Called himself "DE SAUTY."
As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
Sucking in the current.
When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
Said, "All right! DE SAUTY."
From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
Of "All right! DE SAUTY."
When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
Of disintegration.
Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
There was no De Sauty.
Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor. Flu. Sil. Potassa,
Calc. Sod. Phosph. Mag. Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
Such as man is made of.
Born of stream galvanic, with it be had perished!
There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
Cry, "All right! DE SAUTY."