- The opinions of relatives as to a man"s powers are very commonly of little value; not merely because they sometimes overrate their own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; on the contrary, they are quite as likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the habit of considering like themselves. The advent of genius is like what florists style the BREAKING of a seedling tulip into what we may call high-caste colors,--ten thousand dingy flowers, then one with the divine streak; or, if you prefer it, like the coming up in old Jacob"s garden of that most gentlemanly little fruit, the seckel pear, which I have sometimes seen in shop-windows. It is a surprise,--there is nothing to account for it. All at once we find that twice two make FIVE. Nature is fond of what are called "gift- enterprises." This little book of life which she has given into the hands of its joint possessors is commonly one of the old story- books bound over again. Only once in a great while there is a stately poem in it, or its leaves are illuminated with the glories of art, or they enfold a draft for untold values signed by the million-fold millionnaire old mother herself. But strangers are commonly the first to find the "gift" that came with the little book.
It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of its own flavor. Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still more eloquently silent animal that might be mentioned, is aware of any personal peculiarity, may well be doubted. No man knows his own voice; many men do not know their own profiles. Every one remembers Carlyle"s famous "Characteristics" article; allow for exaggerations, and there is a great deal in his doctrine of the self-unconsciousness of genius. It comes under the great law just stated. This incapacity of knowing its own traits is often found in the family as well as in the individual. So never mind what your cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say about that fine poem you have written, but send it (postage-paid) to the editors, if there are any, of the "Atlantic,"--which, by the way, is not so called because it is A NOTION, as some dull wits wish they had said, but are too late.
- Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind;--not of manners, perhaps; they may be soft and smooth, but the smile they carry has a quiet a.s.sertion in it, such as the Champion of the Heavy Weights, commonly the best-natured, but not the most diffident of men, wears upon what he very inelegantly calls his "mug." Take the man, for instance, who deals in the mathematical sciences. There is no elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it never yields a hair"s breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes in collision with it. What the mathematician knows being absolute, unconditional, incapable of suffering question, it should tend, in the nature of things, to breed a despotic way of thinking. So of those who deal with the palpable and often unmistakable facts of external nature; only in a less degree. Every probability--and most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities--is provided with BUFFERS at both ends, which break the force of opposite opinions clashing against it; but scientific certainty has no spring in it, no courtesy, no possibility of yielding. All this must react on the minds which handle these forms of truth.
- Oh, you need net tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most gracious, una.s.suming people in the world, and yet preeminent in the ranges of science I am referring to. I know that as well as you. But mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward. A rash man, once visiting a certain noted inst.i.tution at South Boston, ventured to express the sentiment, that man is a rational being. An old woman who was an attendant in the Idiot School contradicted the statement, and appealed to the facts before the speaker to disprove it. The rash man stuck to his hasty generalization, notwithstanding.
[--It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am a.s.sociated in my daily relations. I not unfrequently practise the divine art of music in company with our landlady"s daughter, who, as I mentioned before, is the owner of an accordion. Having myself a well-marked barytone voice of more than half an octave in compa.s.s, I sometimes add my vocal powers to her execution of "Thou, thou reign"st in this bosom."
not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is present, to prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also taken a good deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to, sometimes called B. F., or more frequently Frank, in imitation of that felicitous abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience, adopted by some of his betters. My acquaintance with the French language is very imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere but in Paris, which is awkward, as B. F. devotes himself to it with the peculiar advantage of an Alsacian teacher. The boy, I think, is doing well, between us, notwithstanding. The following is an UNCORRECTED French exercise, written by this young gentleman. His mother thinks it very creditable to his abilities; though, being unacquainted with the French language, her judgment cannot be considered final.
LE RAT DIES SALONS A LECTURE.
Ce rat ci est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes de derriere sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il fait usage pour tenir les journaux. Cet animal a la peau noire pour le plupart, et porte un cerele blanchatre autour de son cou. On le trouve tous les jours aux dits salons, on il demeure, digere, s"il y a do quoi dans son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue, dort, et renfle quelquefois, ayant toujours le semblant de lire. On ne sait pas s"il a une autre gite que cela. Il a l"air d"une bete tres stupide, mais il est d"une sagacite et d"une vitesse extraordinaire quand il s"agit de saisir un journal nouveau. On ne sait pas pourquoi il lit, parcequ"il ne parait pas avoir des idees. Il vocalise rarement, mais en revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux divers. Il porte un crayon dans une de ses poches pectorales, avec lequel il fait des marques sur les bords des journaux et des livres, semblable aux suivans: !!!--Bah! Pooh! Il ne faut pas cependant les prendre pour des signes d"intelligence. Il ne vole pas, ordinairement; il fait rarement meme des echanges de parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau a toujours un caractere specifique. On ne sait pas au juste ce dont il se nourrit. Feu Cuvier etait d"avis que c"etait de l"odeur du cuir des reliures; ce qu"on dit d"etre une nourriture animale fort saine, et peu chere. Il vit bien longtems. Enfin il meure, en laissant a ses heritiers une carte du Salon a Lecture on il avait existe pendant sa vie. On pretend qu"il revient toutes les nuits, apres la mort, visiter le Salon. On peut le voir, dit on, a minuit, dans sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir, et ayant a sa main un crayon de charbon. Le lendemain on trouve des caracteres inconnus sur les bords du journal. Ce qui prouve que le spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professeurs de Cambridge sont des imbeciles qui ne savent rien du tout, du tout.
I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed to be touched in any way, is not discreditable to B. F. You observe that he is acquiring a knowledge of zoology at the same time that he is learning French. Fathers of families in moderate circ.u.mstances will find it profitable to their children, and an economical mode of instruction, to set them to revising and amending this boy"s exercise. The pa.s.sage was originally taken from the "Histoire Naturelle des Betes Ruminans et Rongeurs, Bipedes et Autres," lately published in Paris. This was translated into English and published in London. It was republished at Great Pedlington, with notes and additions by the American editor. The notes consist of an interrogation-mark on page 53d, and a reference (p. 127th) to another book "edited" by the same hand. The additions consist of the editor"s name on the t.i.tle-page and back, with a complete and authentic list of said editor"s honorary t.i.tles in the first of these localities. Our boy translated the translation back into French. This may be compared with the original, to be found on Shelf 13, Division X, of the Public Library of this metropolis.]
- Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don"t write a story, or a novel, or something of that kind. Instead of answering each one of you separately, I will thank you to step up into the wholesale department for a few moments, where I deal in answers by the piece and by the bale.
That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for ONE novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a cherished belief. It has been maintained, on the other hand, that many persons cannot write more than one novel,--that all after that are likely to be failures.--Life is so much more tremendous a thing in its heights and depths than any transcript of it can be, that all records of human experience are as so many bound herbaria to the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing, fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies. All we can do with books of human experience is to make them alive again with something borrowed from our own lives. We can make a book alive for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form to our own experience. Now an author"s first novel is naturally drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is, is a literal copy of nature under various slight disguises. But the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must have the creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in order to tell a living story; and this is rare.
Besides, there is great danger that a man"s first life-story shall clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts. Most lives, though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along. Oftentimes a single CRADLING gets them all, and after that the poor man"s labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles. All which proves that I, as an individual of the human family, could write one novel or story at any rate, if I would.
- Why don"t I, then?--Well, there are several reasons against it. In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that verse is the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the fire of imagination, the flashes of pa.s.sion, so hide the nakedness of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A beauty shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by the glitter of her diamonds, with such a broad snowdrift of white arms and shoulders laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in plain calico, she would be unendurable--in the opinion of the ladies.
Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends. I should like to know if all story-tellers do not do this? Now I am afraid all my friends would not bear showing up very well; for they have an average share of the common weakness of humanity, which I am pretty certain would come out. Of all that have told stories among us there is hardly one I can recall who has not drawn too faithfully some living portrait that might better have been spared.
Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be too dull to write such a story as I should wish to write.
And finally, I think it very likely I SHALL write a story one of these days. Don"t be surprised at any time, if you see me coming out with "The Schoolmistress," or "The Old Gentleman Opposite." [OUR schoolmistress and OUR old gentleman that sits opposite had left the table before I said this.] I want my glory for writing the same discounted now, on the spot, if you please. I will write when I get ready. How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
- I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my being too dull to write a good story. I don"t pretend to know what you meant by it, but I take occasion to make a remark which may hereafter prove of value to some among you.--When one of us who has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery to think himself or herself possessed of talent arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a mortal"s mind. All our failures, our shortcomings, our strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian"s pack, at the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gift of high intelligence,--with which one look may overflow us in some wider sphere of being.
- How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, "I hate books!" A gentleman,--singularly free from affectations,--not learned, of course, but of perfect breeding, which is often so much better than learning,--by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge of the world and society, but certainly not clever either in the arts or sciences,--his company is pleasing to all who know him. I did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless acknowledgment of his inapt.i.tude for scholarship. In fact, I think there are a great many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark to keep their place, that really "hate books," but never had the wit to find it out, or the manliness to own it. [Entre nous, I always read with a mark.]
We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an "intellectual man" was, as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or thereabouts, of book-learning, and one-tenth himself. But even if he is actually so compounded, he need not read much. Society is a strong solution of books. It draws the virtue out of what is best worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves. If I were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well. The infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I would have a person whose sole business should be to read day and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for n.o.body except for the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as tender and reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,--that is, of a new influx of truth or beauty,--as a nun over her missal. In short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life"s chessboard. To him I would push up another p.a.w.n, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take--to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, b.u.t.ton-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,--with the privilege of shutting it off at will.
A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with about a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord of the macrocosm. They do well to dine together once in a while. A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of civilization over barbarism. Nature and art combine to charm the senses; the equatorial zone of the system is soothed by well- studied artifices; the faculties are off duty, and fall into their natural att.i.tudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science in a short jacket.
The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take for granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out; nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies their dull apprehensions. But look at two masters of that n.o.ble game! White stands well enough, so far as you can see; but Red says, Mate in six moves;--White looks,--nods;--the game is over. Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they are good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table. That blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them,-- that glorious license, which, having shut the door and driven the reporter from its key-hole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a festive garland and the vacant place on the medius lectus,--that carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms bowled over the mahogany like bomb-sh.e.l.ls from professional mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored fire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons pelting everybody that shows himself,--the picture of a truly intellectual banquet is one which the old Divinities might well have attempted to reproduce in their - - "Oh, oh, oh!" cried the young fellow whom they call John,--"that is from one of your lectures!"
I know it, I replied,--I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.
"The trail of the serpent is over them all!"
All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually sliding. Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still June evening, suddenly feel that you had pa.s.sed into a warm stratum of air, and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere beyond? Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back Bay,--where the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating the "Metropolitan" boat-clubs,--find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone, through which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back to the cold realities of full-sea temperature? Just so, in talking with any of the characters above referred to, one not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the style of the conversation. The lack-l.u.s.tre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street door- plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile,-- you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you!--Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture.--As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the air before the astonished pa.s.ser-by,--silver-footed, diamond- crowned, rainbow-scarfed,--from the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less elevated order of reptilia in other lat.i.tudes.
- Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in India,--a white, superior "Caucasian" race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still "Caucasian" race,--and where are English and American sympathies? We can"t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals,--tame it or crush it. The India mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus: [DELPHI] Dele. The civilized world says, Amen.
- Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly, that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them and dilute it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college themes and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric heroes did with their melas oinos,--that black sweet, syrupy wine (?) which they used to alloy with three parts or more of the flowing stream. [Could it have been mela.s.ses, as Webster and his provincials spell it,--or Molossa"s, as dear old smattering, chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the "Magnalia"? Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make barn-door-fowl flights of learning in "Notes and Queries!"--ye Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars!--ye Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have "made a Golgotha" of your pages!--ponder thereon!]
- Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses. You will understand by the t.i.tle that they are written in an imaginary character. I don"t doubt they will fit some family-man well enough. I send it forth as "Oak Hall" projects a coat, on a priori grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody. There is no loftier ill.u.s.tration of faith than this. It believes that a soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and nurtured it; that its mysterious compages or frame-work has survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity; that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select the very locality where this audacious generalization has been acted upon. It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and trusts that Nature will model a material shape to fit it. There is a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.- -Now hear the verses.
THE OLD MAN DREAMS.
O for one hour of youthful joy! Give back my twentieth spring! I"d rather laugh a bright-haired boy Than reign a gray-beard king!
Off with the wrinkled spoils of age! Away with learning"s crown! Tear out life"s wisdom-written page, And dash its trophies down!
One moment let my life-blood stream From boyhood"s fount of flame! Give me one giddy, reeling dream Of life all love and fame!
- My listening angel heard the prayer, And calmly smiling, said, "If I but touch thy silvered hair, Thy hasty wish hath sped.
"But is there nothing in thy track To bid thee fondly stay, While the swift seasons hurry back To find the wished-for day?"
- Ah, truest soul of womankind! Without thee, what were life? One bliss I cannot leave behind: I"ll take--my--precious wife!
- The angel took a sapphire pen And wrote in rainbow dew, "The man would be a boy again, And be a husband too!"
- "And is there nothing yet unsaid Before the change appears? Remember, all their gifts have fled With those dissolving years!"
Why, yes; for memory would recall My fond paternal joys; I could not bear to leave them all; I"ll take--my--girl--and--boys!
The smiling angel dropped his pen, - "Why this will never do; The man would be a boy again, And be a father too!"
And so I laughed,--my laughter woke The household with its noise, - And wrote my dream, when morning broke, To please the gray-haired boys.
CHAPTER IV.
[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 p.r.o.nounces 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sent 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 CIRc.u.mSTANCES 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 circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 a.n.a.logy that bears it out. It seems to me most likely that the coincidence of circ.u.mstances is very partial, but that we take this partial resemblance for ident.i.ty, as we occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances.
- 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 a.s.sOCIATIONS, 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 pa.s.sions 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 a.s.sociations 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 a.s.sures 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-b.a.l.l.s,- -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 gla.s.s, 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 antic.i.p.ate; 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 a.s.sociation, 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 s.e.x, 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 t.i.tle; but, as they have great names on their t.i.tle-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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body"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 pa.s.sage 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 a.n.a.logies 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 alb.u.men.]
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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.n.a.logies 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 pa.s.sing 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 impa.s.sable 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 t.i.tle- 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 ill.u.s.trates 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.