Autocrat of the Breakfast Table Part 7

[Picture: The Poor Relation]

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 "s.h.i.+pwreck," 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.

-So you would abuse other people's beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell us your own creed!-said the divinity-student, coloring up with a spirit for which I liked him all the better.

-I have a creed,-I replied;-none better, and none shorter. It is told in two words,-the two first of the Paternoster. And when I say these words I mean them. And when I compared the human will to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to _define_ moral obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization, education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change places!

Condition does less, but "Give me neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good reason. If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these every-day working forces into account. The great theological question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is this:-

No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what personal incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto "Concilium Tridentinum." He has also heard many thousand theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this time to express an opinion on theological matters.

I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of thought. Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two letters a week, requesting him to. . . . ,-on the strength of some youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the intelligent const.i.tuency of autograph-hunters to address him as a harlequin?

-Well, I can't be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like to make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this: if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all.

I have often heard the Professor talk about hysterics as being Nature's cleverest ill.u.s.tration of the reciprocal convertibility of the two states of which these acts are the manifestations; But you may see it every day in children; and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake play _Jesse Rural_.

It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love for the ridiculous. People laugh _with_ him just so long as he amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have their laugh, and so they laugh _at_ him. There is in addition, however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear. Do you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you laugh, whether by making faces or verses? Are you aware that you have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your royal delight? Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a das, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right!-first-rate performance!-and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and, stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him,-ah, that wasn't in the programme!

I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith-who, as everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman, every inch of him-ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of Royalty. The "Quarterly," "so savage and tartarly," came down upon him in the most contemptuous style, as "a joker of jokes," a "diner-out of the first water," in one of his own phrases; sneering at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even.-If I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more solid qualities. And so to an actor: _Hamlet_ first, and _Bob Logic_ afterwards, if you like; but don't think, as they say poor Liston used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do anything great with _Macbeth's_ dagger after flouris.h.i.+ng about with _Paul Pry's_ umbrella. Do you know, too, that the majority of men look upon all who challenge their attention,-for a while, at least,-as beggars, and nuisances? They always try to get off as cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a literary man-pardon the forlorn pleasantry!-is the _funny_-bone. That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.

-Oh, indeed, no!-I am not ashamed to make you laugh, occasionally. I think I could read you something I have in my desk which would probably make you smile. Perhaps I will read it one of these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and reflective; not just now. The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas, ill.u.s.trated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call _blessed_! There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look forward, by banis.h.i.+ng all gayety from their hearts and all joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who gives me (and all that he pa.s.ses) such a rayless and chilling look of recognition,-something as if he were one of Heaven's a.s.sessors, come down to "doom" every acquaintance he met,-that I have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a violent cold, dating from that instant. I don't doubt he would cut his kitten's tail off, if he caught her playing with it. Please tell me, who taught her to play with it?

No, no!-give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies. I know nothing in English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne "EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIMSELF."

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,-but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one very sad thing in old friends.h.i.+ps, to every mind that is really moving onward. It is this: that one cannot help using his early friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress. Every now and then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a string of thought tied to him, and look-I am afraid with a kind of luxurious and sanctimonious compa.s.sion-to see the rate at which the string reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and down, poor fellow! and we are das.h.i.+ng along with the white foam and bright sparkle at our bows;-the ruffled bosom of prosperity and progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck in it! But this is only the sentimental side of the matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow all that we love.

Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you. It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary, we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy. We see just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the balance between that and whatever we may feel ourselves to be now. No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken. If we change our last simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet leaving the harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can get what we want out of it. There is one of our companions;-her streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea, then by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another, the waves swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a seeming wreck, as we flew under our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at dawn she is still in sight,-it may be in advance of us. Some deep ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent,-yes, stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim. And when at last the black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the mist sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes off panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our pride, may never come.

So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friends.h.i.+ps, because we cannot help inst.i.tuting comparisons between our present and former selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but are not what we are. Nothing strikes one more, in the race of life, than to see how many give out in the first half of the course. "Commencement day" always reminds me of the start for the "Derby," when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the season are brought up for trial. That day is the start, and life is the race. Here we are at Cambridge, and a cla.s.s is just "graduating." Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit; step out here into the gra.s.s back of the church; ah! there it is:-

"HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT SOCII MRENTES."

But this is the start, and here they are,-coats bright as silk, and manes as smooth as _eau l.u.s.trale_ can make them. Some of the best of the colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show their paces. What is that old gentleman crying about? and the old lady by him, and the three girls, what are they all covering their eyes for? Oh, that is _their_ colt which has just been trotted up on the stage. Do they really think those little thin legs can do anything in such a slas.h.i.+ng sweepstakes as is coming off in these next forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered rings of the _arcus senilis_!

_Ten years gone_. First turn in the race. A few broken down; two or three bolted. Several show in advance of the ruck. _Ca.s.sock_, a black colt, seems to be ahead of the rest; those black colts commonly get the start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first quarter. _Meteor_ has pulled up.

_Twenty years_. Second corner turned. _Ca.s.sock_ has dropped from the front, and _Judex_, an iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they have thinned out! Down flat,-five,-six,-how many? They lie still enough!

they will not get up again in this race, be very sure! And the rest of them, what a "tailing off"! Anybody can see who is going to win,-perhaps.

_Thirty years_. Third corner turned. _Dives_, bright sorrel, ridden by the fellow in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is getting to be the favourite with many. But who is that other one that has been lengthening his stride from the first, and now shows close up to the front? Don't you remember the quiet brown colt _Asteroid_, with the star in his forehead? That is he; he is one of the sort that lasts; look out for him! The black "colt," as we used to call him, is in the background, taking it easily in a gentle trot. There is one they used to call _the Filly_, on account of a certain feminine air he had; well up, you see; the Filly is not to be despised my boy!

_Forty years_. More dropping off,-but places much as before.

_Fifty years_. Race over. All that are on the course are coming in at a walk; no more running. Who is ahead? Ahead? What! and the winning-post a slab of white or gray stone standing out from that turf where there is no more jockeying or straining for victory! Well, the world marks their places in its betting-book; but be sure that these matter very little, if they have run as well as they knew how!

-Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and a.n.a.logies? I will not quote Cowley, or Burns, or Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were suggested to them by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower or a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do not object, suggested by looking at a section of one of those chambered sh.e.l.ls to which is given the name of Pearly Nautilus. We need not trouble ourselves about the distinction between this and the Paper Nautilus, the _Argonauta_ of the ancients.

The name applied to both shows that each has long been compared to a s.h.i.+p, as you may see more fully in Webster's Dictionary, or the "Encyclopedia," to which he refers. If you will look into Roget's Bridgewater Treatise, you will find a figure of one of these sh.e.l.ls, and a section of it. The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the sh.e.l.l, which is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no lesson in this?

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

This is the s.h.i.+p of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main,- The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the s.h.i.+p of pearl!

And every clambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing sh.e.l.l, Before thee lies revealed,- Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his l.u.s.trous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year's dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its s.h.i.+ning archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap forlorn!

From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!

While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:-

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, n.o.bler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown sh.e.l.l by life's unresting sea!

CHAPTER V

A lyric conception-my friend, the Poet, said-hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine,-then a gasp and a great jump of the heart,-then a sudden flush and a beating in the vessels of the head,-then a long sigh,-and the poem is written.

It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly,-I replied.

No,-said he,-far from it. I said written, but I did not say _copied_.

Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an instant in the poet's soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words,-words that have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot thought come cras.h.i.+ng into his brain, and ploughing up those parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along in their regular sequences of a.s.sociation. No wonder the ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external. ????? ae?de ?e?.

G.o.ddess,-Muse,-divine afflatus,-something outside always. _I_ never wrote any verses worth reading. I can't. I am too stupid. If I ever copied any that were worth reading, I was only a medium.

[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand,-telling them what this poet told me. The company listened rather attentively, I thought, considering the literary character of the remarks.]

The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read anything better than Pope's "Essay on Man"? Had I ever perused McFingal? He was fond of poetry when he was a boy,-his mother taught him to say many little pieces,-he remembered one beautiful hymn;-and the old gentleman began, in a clear, loud voice, for his years,-

"The s.p.a.cious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens,"-