There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were
going on. There is no particular change that I can think of in the
aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were
quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this
smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show
themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in
catastrophes. I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have
little to tell as yet. You may laugh at me, and very likely think
me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a
middling-class household like ours. Do as you like. But here is
that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the
blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned
loose among live men.
-Terrible fact?
Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost
heaven for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair
women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was
born? If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if
pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness
or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful
possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a
lovely young woman.--I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her
father used sometimes to call her, of ours. Handsome creature that
she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of
that "golden blonde" my friend whose book you read last year fell in
love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome
as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone
that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you one of my fancies, and
then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for
me.
It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they
get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later
years. These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden
startling flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the
waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep. I have
many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood
leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes. Of
course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of
it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to
time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events,
and to their First Great Cause. This secret seems to be broken up,
as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a
syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is
written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life. I
do not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs
about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of
an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an
expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life. Persons,
however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they
could not tell in our human words.
Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women
are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great
mystery. There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which
contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our
creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite
purity and love. I remember two faces of women with wings, such as
they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I just now came across a
print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something of the same
quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above
ours. No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
Heaven! The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no
women to be worshipped.
But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great
Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces
of it. Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty
of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the
lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a
message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents. But
this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken
mystery of expression. Can she tell me anything?
Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it
which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I
have tired of, and through--Hush! Is the door fast? Talking loud
is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.
You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind
you of and to use for a special illustration. Riding along over a
rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing
gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow
under your feet,--a huge unsunned cavern. Deep, deep beneath you in
the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away
it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into
streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark
until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered
out, obsolete and useless.
So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces,
grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--
now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must
ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up
against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking
and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of
life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle. Suddenly we hear the
deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of
some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.
I wish the girl would go. I don't like to look at her so much, and
yet I cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that
I ought to know,--something that she was made to tell and I to
hear,--lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap
out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or
perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet
whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out
thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.
It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.
The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three
Words. Set your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could
give you which settle all that matter. I don't wonder, however,
that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.
I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to
tell. When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the
morning of the fifth of July. And just as that little patriotic
implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine
in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train
leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her
heart. But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean. No,
women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written
in its partial, fragmentary symbols. It lies deeper than Love,
though very probably Love is a part of it. Some, I think,--
Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.
I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which
seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies. I have
known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old
alchemists,--all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving
up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and
their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about
their floor and ceilings, and so they died. The vulgar called them
drunkards.
I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
young girl's face produces on me. It is akin to those influences a
friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from
certain voices. I cannot translate it into words,--only into
feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her
face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing,
which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world
or on the very threshold of the next.
You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful
incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young
girl's face. You forget what a miserable surface-matter this
language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of
being. Articulation is a shallow trick. From the light Poh! which
we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's
impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which
comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a
space of some three or four inches. Words, which are a set of
clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared
to tones and expression of the features. I give it up; I thought I
could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this
young girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.
No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my
description. If there is here and there one that can make anything
intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has
spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or
living, that is all I can expect. One should see the person with
whom he converses about such matters. There are dreamy-eyed people
to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being
understood;--
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me
To him my tale I teach.
--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar
for this August number, so that they will never see it.
--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious
attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money
refunded, if you will make the change.
This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
breakfast-table. The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she
again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards
him. That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity
towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they
sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed. Then
there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and I
do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they
would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the
direction in which their occupants love to look.
That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some
mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She
gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and
sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in
his button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.
Very fine performances,--very fine!--truly elegant productions,
truly elegant!--Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in
the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)-
patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant,
truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings
reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an
extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures
that he remembered seeing when he was a boy. Used to remember some
lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
"Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last."
And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The
dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used
to look at him so many, many years ago. He stood still as if in a
waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines
grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face
shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.
--What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of
a mother who died in his earlier years? Mother she remains till
manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last,
when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her
fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent,
but, as it were, his child.
If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words
with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of
thought.
--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.
--All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms
of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest
little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody
that you don't want to see.--The old gentleman put his hand to his
forehead so as to shade his eyes. I saw he was looking at the dim
photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.
How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
take lessons?--This was the first,--she answered,--since she was
here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of
large size she had covered with drawings.
I turned over the leaves of the book before us. Academic studies,
principally of the human figure. Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
forth. Limbs from statues. Hands and feet from Nature. What a
superb drawing of an arm! I don't remember it among the figures
from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.
From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!
--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up
the drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said.--I should like
to see her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in
it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock,
which proved to be fast. We are all caricatured in it, I haven't
the least doubt. I think, though, I could tell by her way of
dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders. Some of
them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem
to notice it much. Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor
more than on anybody else. The young fellow John appears to stand
second in her good graces. I think he has once or twice sent her
what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,--somebody
has, at any rate.--I saw a book she had, which must have come from
the divinity-student. It had a dreary title-page, which she had
enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory,
apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without
knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so
many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are
"good men," and that heaven is full of such.--The gentleman with
the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, I
think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. He pulls
his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
sees him, as it should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought
would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks
from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to
say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--
which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present
one. But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my
sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her
locked drawing-book.
Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber. For
this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was
just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk,
followed him as he toiled back to his room. He rested on the
landing and faced round toward me. There was something in his eye
which said, Stop there! So we finished our conversation on the
landing. The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his
door, having a pretext ready.--No answer.--Knock again. A door,
as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I
heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots.
The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,--with
unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the passage. He
pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I
stood. He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
"Mr. Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in;
and a quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short,
but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not
want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits. I mean to give
up such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark! What the deuse
is that odd noise in his chamber?
--I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when
I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a
distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled
round the neighborhood where I was born and bred. The first was a
series of marks called the "Devil's footsteps." These were patches
of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush
blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in
prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging
creepers,--where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could
not grow, but all was bare and blasted. The second was a mark in
one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory
named after a Colonial Governor. I do not think many persons are
aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about
the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the
sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the northwest corner,
and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are signs of a
breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken. A
considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away,
from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care
to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the
chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to
the building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where
the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly
visible. The queer burnt spots, called the "Devil's footsteps," had
never attracted attention before this time, though there is no
evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the
late Miss M., a "Goody," so called, or sweeper, who was positive on
the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of
which she was thought to know something.--I tell you it was not so
pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in
an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers,
and a most ghostly garret,--with the "Devil's footsteps" in the
fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory
where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled
those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them
was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful
season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for
his ascetic sanctity.
There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
by these two singular facts I have just mentioned. There was a dark
storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly
see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which
seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their
fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's
backs,--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were
killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty. Then the Lady's
portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,--marks of
the British officers' rapiers,--and the tall mirror in which they
used to look at their red coats,--confound them for smashing its
mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy
used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a gentleman, and
always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk
covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room
downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on
the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the
study" in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of
armed men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will
show you the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the
floor. With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the
wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our
service brought with them;--of contracts written in blood and left
out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the
Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed
away for future use,)--of dreams coming true,--of death-signs,--of
apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was
liable to superstitious fancies.
Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly
see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the
world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just
such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head.
That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of
curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy
with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his
chamber after midnight.
But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred
for the present. You will see in what way it happened that my
thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how
I got my fancy full of material images,--faces, heads, figures,
muscles, and so forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance
in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the
means of so doing.
Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this
time. It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it
that I should sit to him for my portrait. When a soul draws a body
in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize,
such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same
curious interest with which one who has ventured into a "gift
enterprise" examines the "massive silver pencil-case" with the
coppery smell and impressible tube, or the "splendid gold ring" with
the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to
obtain in addition to his purchase.
The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well. But
there is this difference between its view and that of a person
looking at us:--we look from within, and see nothing but the mould
formed by the elements in which we are incased; other observers look
from without, and see us as living statues. To be sure, by the aid
of mirrors, we get a few glimpses of our outside aspect; but this
occasional impression is always modified by that look of the soul
from within outward which none but ourselves can take. A portrait
is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us. The artist looks only
from without. He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our faces
we are never likely to see. No genuine expression can be studied by
the subject of it in the looking-glass.
More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
acquaintances never see us. Without wearing any mask we are
conscious of, we have a special face for each friend. For, in the
first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on
the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last
record, if you happened to read that document. And secondly, each
of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther,
into our face, and each sees in it the particular thing that he
looks for. Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does not take
any one of these special views. Suppose he should copy you as you
appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you
could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the
likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board.
Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which the
rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation. The
artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the
two, or something different from either. What the daguerreotype and
photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness.
The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in
repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its
transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression. Out of
all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your
exact look at any one time or to any particular person. Such a
portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call "as nat'ral
as life." Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting
in resemblance by many persons.
There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist
shapes your features from his outline. It is that you resemble so
many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular
likeness in your countenance.
He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances,
thus:
There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I
never thought I had a sign of it. The mother's eyebrow and grayish-
blue eye, those I knew I had. But there is a something which
recalls a smile that faded away from my sister's lips--how many
years ago! I thought it so pleasant in her, that I love myself
better for having a trace of it.
Are we not young? Are we not fresh and blooming? Wait, a bit. The
artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines,
diverging outwards from the eye over the temple. Five years.--The
artist draws one tolerably distinct and two faint lines,
perpendicularly between the eyebrows. Ten years.--The artist
breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little
as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as
one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling
or other change of feature.--Hold on! Stop that! Give a young
fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of that interesting
period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc., etc.?
There now! That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek. Is he not a POET
that painted us?
"Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
COWPER.
--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school
with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive
appellation, and in his features as special and definite an
expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created
of his race: As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three
or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family
histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we
know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from
this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face into its ancestral
elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest
infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings
with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when
Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after
feature, from the slight outline to the finished portrait.
--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
identified with ourselves. In early years, while the child "feels
its life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a
very great extent. It ought to be so. There have been many very
interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the
things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual
nature. There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all
alike in their essentials; the same "disinclination to the usual
amusements of childhood "; the same remarkable sensibility; the same
docility; the same conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform
character, marked by beautiful traits, which we look at with a
painful admiration. It will be found that most of these children
are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the
most frequent of which I need not mention. They are like the
beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time
because its core is gnawed out. They have their meaning,--they do
not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls. I am convinced that many
healthy children are injured morally by being forced to read too
much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
exercises. Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football,
turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast,
skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut his name on fences,
read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-
angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with
his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names,
throw stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut
behind" anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth,
"holler" Fire! on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an
engine-company, or, in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or
whatever it may be;--isn't that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though
he has not got anything the matter with him that takes the taste of
this world out? Now, when you put into such a hot-blooded, hard-
fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking volume or
pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose life
is really as much a training for death as the last month of a
condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between
his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents? The time
comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the
beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the
pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.
But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of
honest hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make
the most of,--not until he has learned the use of his various
faculties, which is his first duty,--that a boy of courage and
animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of
premature decay. I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the
minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological
piety. I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms
and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just
as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues. I
know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this
country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
fools to pick a quarrel with me. In the sensibility and the
sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
Divine benevolence. But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust
natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply
what we Professors call "bad practice"; and I know by experience
that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own
children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.
--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed,
or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized. A polite
note from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at
their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted. We
repaired to that scientific Golgotha.
Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden
arm suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the
other retires backwards, and vice versa. The more particular
speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of
the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the
establishment. Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and
pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles. I wonder
if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted
Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio
plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim. An extra convolution, No.
9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to
be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally
supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of
"organs." Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,--
horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or
Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them
on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a
stripped twig of willow.
The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
antechamber.
Tape round the head,--22 inches. (Come on, old 23 inches, if you
think you are the better man!)
Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those
horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the
provision-stalls at the Quincy Market. Vitality, No. 5 or 6, or
something or other. Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some
other number equally significant.
Mild champooing of head now commences. 'Extraordinary revelations!
Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6 +! Paediphilous, 5!
Deipniphilous, 6! Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5!
Uraniphilous, 5! Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on. Meant for a
linguist.--Invaluable information. Will invest in grammars and
dictionaries immediately.--I have nothing against the grand total
of my phrenological endowments.
I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs.
Bumpus and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did,
especially considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion.
Much obliged to them for their politeness. They have been useful in
their way by calling attention to important physiological facts.
(This concession is due to our immense bump of Candor.)
A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
Breakfast-Table.
I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
against it, is excluded. It is invariably connected with some
lucrative practical application. Its professors and practitioners
are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public,
but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves. The believing
multitude consists of women of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers,
poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses,
philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others
of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a
lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or
a member of the detective police.--I do not say that Phrenology was
one of the Pseudo-sciences.
A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies. It
may contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rottenest bank
starts with a little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay
on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly
a good one. The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that
common minds, after they have been baited with a real fact or two,
will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook.
When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next
out of our own imagination. (How many persons can read Judges xv.
16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take advantage of
this.--I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.
I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
something in Phrenology. A broad, high forehead, it is commonly
agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a
huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature. I have
as rarely met an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in
the bumps. It is observed, however, that persons with what the
Phrenologists call "good heads" are more prone than others toward
plenary belief in the doctrine.
It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that
the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable
substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary,
I might be puzzled. But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar
cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of
our satellite, before I purchase.
It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological
statement. It is only necessary to show that its truth is not
proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument. The walls
of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over
the smallest and most closely crowded "organs." Can you tell how
much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by
kneading its knobs with your fingers? So when a man fumbles about
my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size,
etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of
my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-
dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet. Perhaps there is;
only he does n't know anything about at. But this is a point that
I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly,
better than you do. The next argument you will all appreciate.
I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences.
An example will show it most conveniently.
A. is a notorious thief. Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and
find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness. Positive fact for
Phrenology. Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump
does not lose in the act of copying.--I did not say it gained.--
What do you look so for? (to the boarders.)
Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A. But B. has no bump at
all over Acquisitiveness. Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.
--Not a bit of it. Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is?
That's the reason B. stole.
And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--
used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own
pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other
way of committing petty larceny. Unfortunately, C. has a hollow,
instead of a bump, over Acquisitiveness. Ah, but just look and see
what a bump of Alimentiveness! Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread,
when a boy, with the money he stole? Of course you see why he is a
thief, and how his example confirms our noble science.
At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there
is a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of
Byron, for instance. Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which
covers everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
Phrenologist. "It is not the size alone, but the quality of an
organ, which determines its degree of power."
Oh! oh! I see.--The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
Phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose." Well, that's
convenient.
It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to
the Pseudo-sciences. I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and
amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of
Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls. Of
course the Professor acquires his information solely through his
cranial inspections and manipulations.--What are you laughing at?
(to the boarders.)--But let us just suppose, for a moment, that a
tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about
Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people's
characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece. Let us see how well
he could get along without the "organs."
I will suppose myself to set up such a shop. I would invest one
hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts,
and other matters that would make the most show for the money. That
would do to begin with. I would then advertise myself as the
celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and
wait for my first customer. My first customer is a middle-aged man.
I look at him,--ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk.
When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed
to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:
SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
LIST OF FACULTIES FOR PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
CUSTOMER.
Each to be accompanied with a wink.
Amativeness, 7. Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
men love to be told they do.
Alimentiveness, 8. Don't you see that he has burst off his
lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey
Acquisitiveness, 8. Of course. A middle-aged Yankee.
Approbativeness 7+. Hat well brushed. Hair ditto. Mark the
effect of that plus sign.
Self-Esteem 6. His face shows that.
Benevolence 9. That'll please him.
Conscientiousness 8 1/2 That fraction looks first-rate.
Mirthfulness 7 Has laughed twice since he came in.
Ideality 9 That sounds well.
Form, Size, Weight, 4 to 6. Average everything that
Color, Locality, cannot be guessed.
Eventuality, etc. etc.
And so of the other faculties.
Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do. They
go only by the bumps.--What do you keep laughing so for? (to the
boarders.) I only said that is the way I should practise
"Phrenology" for a living.
End of my Lecture.
--The Reformers have good heads, generally. Their faces are
commonly serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse,
even though their voices may be like
The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
when heard from the platform. Their greatest spiritual danger is
from the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed.
These lines are meant to caution them.
SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
HIS TEMPTATION.
No fear lest praise should make us proud!
We know how cheaply that is won;
The idle homage of the crowd
Is proof of tasks as idly done.
A surface-smile may pay the toil
That follows still the conquering Right,
With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
Sing the sweet song of other days,
Serenely placid, safely true,
And o'er the present's parching ways
Thy verse distils like evening dew.
But speak in words of living power,--
They fall like drops of scalding rain
That plashed before the burning shower
Swept o'er the cities of the plain!
Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,--
Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
And, smitten through their leprous mail,
Strike right and left in hope to sting.
If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--
Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
Too firm for clamor to dismay,
When Faith forbids thee to believe,
And Meekness calls to disobey,--
Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
The smiling pride that calmly scorns
Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
In laboring on thy crown of thorns! |
