Autocrat of the Breakfast Table Part 21

-The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was "rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang line," when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.

-I replied with my usual forbearance.-Certainly, to give up the algebraic symbol, because _a_ or _b_ is often a cover for ideal nihility, would be unwise. I have heard a child laboring to express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed sensation (as it supposed,) all of which could have been sufficiently explained by the participle-_bored_. I have seen a country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely, in developing an opinion of a brother-minister's discourse which would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped soph.o.m.ore in the one word-_slow_. Let us discriminate, and be shy of absolute proscription.

I am omniverbivorous by nature and training. Pa.s.sing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.

Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something. They invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank checks or counters just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists may sometimes find it worth their while to borrow of them. They are useful, too, in keeping up the standard of dress, which, but for them, would deteriorate, and become, what some old fools would have it, a matter of convenience, and not of taste and art. Yes, I like dandies well enough,-on one condition.

-What is that, Sir?-said the divinity-student.

-That they have pluck. I find that lies at the bottom of all true dandyism. A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys make fun of him, looks very silly. But if he turns red in the face and knotty in the fists, and makes an example of the biggest of his a.s.sailants, throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-b.u.t.toned jacket, if necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened Astyanax. You remember that the Duke said his dandy officers were his best officers. The "Sunday blood," the super-superb sartorial equestrian of our annual Fast-day, is not imposing or dangerous. But such fellows as Brummel and D'Orsay and Byron are not to be snubbed quite so easily. Look out for "la main de fer sous le gant de velours," (which I printed in English the other day without quotation-marks, thinking whether any _scarabaeus criticus_ would add this to his globe and roll in glory with it into the newspapers,-which he didn't do it, in the charming pleonasm of the London language, and therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing the same.) A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a decided dash of dandyism about them. There was Alcibiades, the "curled son of Clinias," an accomplished young man, but what would be called a "swell" in these days. There was Aristoteles, a very distinguished writer, of whom you have heard,-a philosopher, in short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, and is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again. Regular dandy, he was. So was Marcus Antonius; and though he lost his game, he played for big stakes, and it wasn't his dandyism that spoiled his chance. Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar or a poet, but he was one of the same sort. So was Sir Humphrey Davy; so was Lord Palmerston, formerly, if I am not forgetful. Yes,-a dandy is good for something as such; and dandies such as I was just speaking of have rocked this planet like a cradle,-aye, and left it swinging to this day.-Still, if I were you, I wouldn't go to the tailor's, on the strength of these remarks, and run up a long bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your next suit. _Elegans_ "_nascitur_, _non fit_." A man is born a dandy, as he is born a poet. There are heads that can't wear hats; there are necks that can't fit cravats; there are jaws that can't fill out collars-(Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes, if I remember rightly); there are _tournures_ nothing can humanize, and movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity or elegant languor or stately serenity which belong to different styles of dandyism.

We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,-not a _gratia-Dei_, nor a _juredivino_ one,-but a _de-facto_ upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves,-very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe this. Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race,-I don't mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air and suns.h.i.+ne, in which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton. When the spring-chickens come to market-I beg your pardon,-that is not what I was going to speak of. As the young females of each successive season come on, the finest specimens among them, other things being equal, are apt to attract those who can afford the expensive luxury of beauty. The physical character of the next generation rises in consequence. It is plain that certain families have in this way acquired an elevated type of face and figure, and that in a small circle of city-connections one may sometimes find models of both s.e.xes which one of the rural counties would find it hard to match from all its towns.h.i.+ps put together. Because there is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and waste of life, among the richer cla.s.ses, you must not overlook the equally obvious fact I have just spoken of,-which in one or two generations more will be, I think, much more patent than just now.

The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded to in connection with cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-gla.s.s of its windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its coach-panels. It is very curious to observe of how small account military folks are held among our Northern people. Our young men must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above the necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element of refinement, and the moneyed upper cla.s.s forgets what it is to count heroism among its virtues. Still I don't believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when the time comes, if it ever does come.

-These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual _green fruit_ of all the places in the world. I think so, at any rate. The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like unripe gooseberries,-get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a country which buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial Philosophy," while the author's admiring countrymen have been buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?

Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among its fruits.

There are literary green-groceries at every corner, which will buy anything, from a b.u.t.ton-pear to a pine-apple. It takes a long apprentices.h.i.+p to train a whole people to reading and writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr.-we won't say who,-editor of the-we won't say what, offered me the sum of fifty cents _per_ double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap ap.r.o.n? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the _fifty cents_ was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.

-Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.

-I don't believe one word of what you are saying,-spoke up the angular female in black bombazine.

I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,-I said, and added softly to my next neighbor,-but you prove it.

The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student said, in an undertone,-_Optime dictum_.

Your talking Latin,-said I,-reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals.

Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by subscription. I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear them.-You, Sir, (addressing myself to the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to _hibernation_. Intramural aestivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem:-

aeSTIVATION.

_An Unpublished Poem_, _by my late Latin Tutor_

IN candent ire the solar splendor flames; The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames; His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes, And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.

How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes, Dorm on the herb with none to supervise, Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine, And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!

To me, alas! no verdurous visions come, Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-sc.u.m,- No concave vast repeats the tender hue That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!

Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!

Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,- Depart,-be off,-excede,-evade,-erump!

-I have lived by the sea-sh.o.r.e and by the mountains.-No, I am not going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the best for you.

But this difference there is: you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is _ferae naturae_. You may have a hut, or know the owner of one, on the mountain-side; you see a light half-way up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home, and you might share it. You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in October, when the maples and beeches have faded. All its reliefs and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that hang round the walls of your memory's chamber.-The sea remembers nothing.

It is feline. It licks your feet,-its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver scales until you cannot see their joints,-but their s.h.i.+ning is that of a snake's belly, after all.-In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

Yet I should love to have a little box by the seash.o.r.e. I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it, stretch its s.h.i.+ning length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury.-And then,-to look at it with that inward eye,-who does not love to shuffle off time and its concerns, at intervals,-to forget who is President and who is Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its sh.o.r.es?

-What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence?-Const.i.tution, first of all. How much snow could you melt in an hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it? Comfort is essential to enjoyment. All sensitive people should remember that persons in easy circ.u.mstances suffer much more cold in summer-that is, the warm half of the year-than in winter, or the other half. You must cut your climate to your const.i.tution, as much as your clothing to your shape. After this, consult your taste and convenient. But if you would be happy in Berks.h.i.+re, you must carry mountains in your brain; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must have an ocean in your soul. Nature plays at dominos with you; you must match her piece, or she will never give it up to you.

-The schoolmistress said, in a rather mischievous way, that she was afraid some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they took in the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic.

Have you ever read the little book called "The Stars and the Earth?"-said I.-Have you seen the Declaration of Independence photographed in a surface that a fly's foot would cover? The forms or conditions of Time and s.p.a.ce, as Kant will tell you, are nothing in themselves,-only our way of looking at things. You are right, I think, however, in recognizing the category of s.p.a.ce as being quite as applicable to minds as to the outer world. Every man of reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly-defined circle which is drawn about his intellect. He has a perfectly clear sense that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of many other minds of which he is cognizant. He often recognizes these as manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius. On the other hand, when we find a portion of an are on the outside of our own, we say it _intersects_ ours, but are very slow to confess or to see that it _circ.u.mscribes_ it. Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of s.p.a.ce that I had to spread these to fit it.

-If I thought I should ever see the Alps!-said the schoolmistress.

Perhaps you will, some time or other,-I said.

It is not very likely,-she answered.-I have had one or two opportunities, but I had rather be anything than governess in a rich family.

[Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman! Well, I can't say I like you any the worse for it. How long will school-keeping take to kill you? Is it possible the poor thing works with her needle, too? I don't like those marks on the side of her forefinger.

_Tableau_. Chamouni. Mont Blanc in full view. Figures in the foreground; two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman of-oh,-ah,-yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on his shoulder.-The ingenuous reader will understand that this was an internal, private, personal, subjective diorama, seen for one instant on the background of my own consciousness, and abolished into black nonent.i.ty by the first question which recalled me to actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-blinds (which I always pa.s.s at dusk with a s.h.i.+ver, expecting to stumble over some poor but honest shop-boy's head, just taken off by its sudden and unexpected descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) had come down in front of it "by the run."]

-Should you like to hear what moderate wishes life brings one to at last?

I used to be very ambitious,-wasteful, extravagant, and luxurious in all my fancies. Read too much in the "Arabian Nights." Must have the lamp,-couldn't do without the ring. Exercise every morning on the brazen horse. Plump down into castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of young sparrows. All love me dearly at once.-Charming idea of life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive,-almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires of my maturity.

CONTENTMENT.

"Man wants but little here below."

LITTLE I ask, my wants are few; I only wish a hut of stone, (A _very plain_ brown stone will do,) That I may call my own;- And close at hand is such a one, In yonder street that fronts the sun.

Plain food is quite enough for me; Three courses are as good as ten;- If Nature can subsist on three, Thank heaven for three. Amen!

I always thought cold victual nice;- My _choice_ would be vanilla-ice.

I care not much for gold or land;- Give me a mortgage here and there,- Some good bank-stock,-some note of hand, Or trifling railroad share;- I only ask that Fortune send A _little_ more than I shall spend.

Honors are silly toys, I know, And t.i.tles are but empty names;- I would, _perhaps_, be Plenipo,- But only near St. James;- I'm very sure I should not care To fill our Gubernator's chair.

Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin To care for such unfruitful things;- One good-sized diamond in a pin,- Some, _not so large_, in rings,- A ruby and a pearl, or so, Will do for me;-I laugh at show.

My dame should dress in cheap attire; (Good, heavy silks are never dear;)- I own perhaps I _might_ desire Some shawls of true cashmere,- Some marrowy c.r.a.pes of China silk, Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.

I would not have the horse I drive So fast that folks must stop and stare An easy gait-two, forty-five- Suits me; I do not care;- Perhaps, for just a _single spurt_, Some seconds less would do no hurt.

Of pictures, I should like to own t.i.tians and Raphaels three or four,- I love so much their style and tone,- One Turner, and no more,- (A landscape,-foreground golden dirt The suns.h.i.+ne painted with a squirt.)

Of books but few,-some fifty score For daily use, and bound for wear; The rest upon an upper floor;- Some _little_ luxury _there_ Of red morocco's gilded gleam, And vellum rich as country cream.

Busts, cameos, gems,-such things as these, Which others often show for pride, _I_ value for their power to please, And selfish churls deride;- _One_ Stradivarius, I confess, _Two_ Meerschaums, I would fain possess.

Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn, Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;- Shall not carved tables serve my turn, But _all_ must be of buhl?

Give grasping pomp its double share,- I ask but _one_ rec.u.mbent chair.

Thus humble let me live and die, Nor long for Midas' golden touch, If Heaven more generous gifts deny, I shall not miss them _much_,- Too grateful for the blessing lent Of simple tastes and mind content!