It was a noble eulogy, and I felt before he finished, though I had misgivings at the beginning, that I deserved it all. The effect on the audience was a little different. They said it was a "strong" oration, and I think Timmins got more credit by it than I did. After the performance they stood about the chapel, talking in a subdued tone, and seemed to be a good deal impressed by what they had heard, or perhaps by thoughts of the departed. At least they all soon went over to Austin's and called for beer. My particular friends called for it twice. Then they all lit pipes. The old grocery keeper was good enough to say that I was no fool, if I did go off owing him four dollars. To the credit of human nature, let me here record that the fellows were touched by this remark reflecting upon my memory, and immediately made up a purse and paid the bill,—that is, they told the old man to charge it over to them. College boys are rich in credit and the possibilities of life.
It is needless to dwell upon the days I passed at college during this probation. So far as I could see, everything went on as if I were there, or had never been there. I could not even see the place where I had dropped out of the ranks. Occasionally I heard my name, but I must say that four weeks was quite long enough to stay in a world that had pretty much forgotten me. There is no great satisfaction in being dragged up to light now and then, like an old letter. The case was somewhat different with the people with whom I had boarded. They were relations of mine, and I often saw them weep, and they talked of me a good deal at twilight and Sunday nights, especially the youngest one, Carrie, who was handsomer than any one I knew, and not much older than I. I never used to imagine that she cared particularly for me, nor would she have done so, if I had lived, but death brought with it a sort of sentimental regret, which, with the help of a daguerreotype, she nursed into quite a little passion. I spent most of my time there, for it was more congenial than the college.
But time hastened. The last sand of probation leaked out of the glass. One day, while Carrie played (for me, though she knew it not) one of Mendelssohn's "songs without words," I suddenly, yet gently, without self-effort or volition, moved from the house, floated in the air, rose higher, higher, by an easy, delicious, exultant, yet inconceivably rapid motion. The ecstasy of that triumphant flight! Groves, trees, houses, the landscape, dimmed, faded, fled away beneath me. Upward mounting, as on angels' wings, with no effort, till the earth hung beneath me a round black ball swinging, remote, in the universal ether. Upward mounting, till the earth, no longer bathed in the sun's rays, went out to my sight, disappeared in the blank. Constellations, before seen from afar, I sailed among. Stars, too remote for shining on earth, I neared, and found to be round globes flying through space with a velocity only equaled by my own. New worlds continually opened on my sight; newfields of everlasting space opened and closed behind me.
For days and days—it seemed a mortal forever—I mounted up the great heavens, whose everlasting doors swung wide. How the worlds and systems, stars, constellations, neared me, blazed and flashed in splendor, and fled away! At length,—was it not a thousand years?—I saw before me, yet afar off, a wall, the rocky bourn of that country whence travelers come not back, a battlement wider than I could guess, the height of which I could not see, the depth of which was infinite. As I approached, it shone with a splendor never yet beheld on earth. Its solid substance was built of jewels the rarest, and stones of priceless value. It seemed like one solid stone, and yet all the colors of the rainbow were contained in it. The ruby, the diamond, the emerald, the carbuncle, the topaz, the amethyst, the sapphire; of them the wall was built up in harmonious combination. So brilliant was it that all the space I floated in was full of the splendor. So mild was it and so translucent, that I could look for miles into its clear depths.
Rapidly nearing this heavenly battlement, an immense niche was disclosed in its solid face. The floor was one large ruby. Its sloping sides were of pearl. Before I was aware I stood within the brilliant recess. I say I stood there, for I was there bodily, in my habit as I lived; how, I cannot explain. Was it the resurrection of the body? Before me rose, a thousand feet in height, a wonderful gate of flashing diamond. Beside it sat a venerable man, with long white beard, a robe of light gray, ancient sandals, and a golden key hanging by a cord from his waist. In the serene beauty of his noble features I saw justice and mercy had met and were reconciled. I cannot describe the majesty of his bearing or the benignity of his appearance. It is needless to say that I stood before St. Peter, who sits at the Celestial Gate.
I humbly approached, and begged admission. St. Peter arose, and regarded me kindly, yet inquiringly.
"What is your name?" asked he, "and from what place do you come?"
I answered, and, wishing to give a name well known, said I was from Washington, United States. He looked doubtful, as if he had never heard the name before.
"Give me," said he, "a full account of your whole life."
I felt instantaneously that there was no concealment possible; all disguise fell away, and an unknown power forced me to speak absolute and exact truth. I detailed the events of my life as well as I could, and the good man was not a little affected by the recital of my early trials, poverty, and temptation. It did not seem a very good life when spread out in that presence, and I trembled as I proceeded; but I plead youth, inexperience, and bad examples.
"Have you been accustomed," he said, after a time, rather sadly, "to break the Sabbath?"
I told him frankly that I had been rather lax in that matter, especially at college. I often went to sleep in the chapel on Sunday, when I was not reading some entertaining book. He then asked who the preacher was, and when I told him, he remarked that I was not so much to blame as he had supposed.
"Have you," he went on, "ever stolen, or told any lie?"
I was able to say no, except admitting as to the first, usual college "conveyances," and as to the last, an occasional "blinder" to the professors. He was gracious enough to say that these could be overlooked as incident to the occasion.
"Have you ever been dissipated, living riotously and keeping late hours?"
"Yes."
This also could be forgiven me as an incident of youth.
"Did you ever," he went on, "commit the crime of using intoxicating drinks as a beverage?"
I answered that I had never been a habitual drinker, that I had never been what was called a "moderate drinker," that I had never gone to a bar and drank alone; but that I had been accustomed, in company with other young men, on convivial occasions to taste the pleasures of the flowing bowl, sometimes to excess, but that I had also tasted the pains of it, and for months before my demise had refrained from liquor altogether. The holy man looked grave, but, after reflection, said this might also be overlooked in a young man.
"What," continued he, in tones still more serious, "has been your conduct with regard to the other sex?"
I fell upon my knees in a tremor of fear. I pulled from my bosom a little book like the one Leperello exhibits in the opera of "Don Giovanni." There, I said, was a record of my flirtation and inconstancy. I waited long for the decision, but it came in mercy.
"Rise," he cried; "young men will be young men, I suppose. We shall forgive this also to your youth and penitence."
"Your examination is satisfactory, he informed me," after a pause; "you can now enter the abodes of the happy."
Joy leaped within me. We approached the gate. The key turned in the lock. The gate swung noiselessly on its hinges a little open. Out flashed upon me unknown splendors. What I saw in that momentary gleam I shall never whisper in mortal ears. I stood upon the threshold, just about to enter.
"Stop! one moment," exclaimed St. Peter, laying his hand on my shoulder; "I have one more question to ask you."
I turned toward him.
"Young man, did you ever use tobacco?"
"I both smoked and chewed in my lifetime," I faltered, "but…"
"THEN TO HELL WITH YOU!" he shouted in a voice of thunder.
Instantly the gate closed without noise, and I was flung, hurled, from the battlement, down! down! down! Faster and faster I sank in a dizzy, sickening whirl into an unfathomable space of gloom. The light faded. Dampness and darkness were round about me. As before, for days and days I rose exultant in the light, so now forever I sank into thickening darkness,—and yet not darkness, but a pale, ashy light more fearful.
In the dimness, I at length discovered a wall before me. It ran up and down and on either hand endlessly into the night. It was solid, black, terrible in its frowning massiveness.
Straightway I alighted at the gate,—a dismal crevice hewn into the dripping rock. The gate was wide open, and there sat-I knew him at once; who does not?—the Arch Enemy of mankind. He cocked his eye at me in an impudent, low, familiar manner that disgusted me. I saw that I was not to be treated like a gentleman.
"Well, young man," said he, rising, with a queer grin on his face," what are you sent here for?
"For using tobacco," I replied.
"Ho!" shouted he in a jolly manner, peculiar to devils, "that's what most of 'em are sent here for now."
Without more ado, he called four lesser imps, who ushered me within. What a dreadful plain lay before me! There was a vast city laid out in regular streets, but there were no houses. Along the streets were places of torment and torture exceedingly ingenious and disagreeable. For miles and miles, it seemed, I followed my conductors through these horrors, Here was a deep vat of burning tar. Here were rows of fiery ovens. I noticed several immense caldron kettles of boiling oil, upon the rims of which little devils sat, with pitchforks in hand, and poked down the helpless victims who floundered in the liquid. But I forbear to go into unseemly details. The whole scene is as vivid in my mind as any earthly landscape.
After an hour's walk my tormentors halted before the mouth of an oven,—a furnace heated seven times, and now roaring with flames. They grasped me, one hold of each hand and foot. Standing before the blazing mouth, they, with a swing, and a "one, two, THREE…."
I again assure the reader that in this narrative I have set down nothing that was not actually dreamed, and much, very much of this wonderful vision I have been obliged to omit.
Haec fabula docet: It is dangerous for a young man to leave off the use of tobacco.
I wish I could fitly celebrate the joyousness of the New England winter. Perhaps I could if I more thoroughly believed in it. But skepticism comes in with the south wind. When that begins to blow, one feels the foundations of his belief breaking up. This is only another way of saying that it is more difficult, if it be not impossible, to freeze out orthodoxy, or any fixed notion, than it is to thaw it out; though it is a mere fancy to suppose that this is the reason why the martyrs, of all creeds, were burned at the stake. There is said to be a great relaxation in New England of the ancient strictness in the direction of toleration of opinion, called by some a lowering of the standard, and by others a raising of the banner of liberality; it might be an interesting inquiry how much this change is due to another change,—the softening of the New England winter and the shifting of the Gulf Stream. It is the fashion nowadays to refer almost everything to physical causes, and this hint is a gratuitous contribution to the science of metaphysical physics.
The hindrance to entering fully into the joyousness of a New England winter, except far inland among the mountains, is the south wind. It is a grateful wind, and has done more, I suspect, to demoralize society than any other. It is not necessary to remember that it filled the silken sails of Cleopatra's galley. It blows over New England every few days, and is in some portions of it the prevailing wind. That it brings the soft clouds, and sometimes continues long enough to almost deceive the expectant buds of the fruit trees, and to tempt the robin from the secluded evergreen copses, may be nothing; but it takes the tone out of the mind, and engenders discontent, making one long for the tropics; it feeds the weakened imagination on palm-leaves and the lotus. Before we know it we become demoralized, and shrink from the tonic of the sudden change to sharp weather, as the steamed hydropathic patient does from the plunge. It is the insidious temptation that assails us when we are braced up to profit by the invigorating rigor of winter.
Perhaps the influence of the four great winds on character is only a fancied one; but it is evident on temperament, which is not altogether a matter of temperature, although the good old deacon used to say, in his humble, simple way, that his third wife was a very good woman, but her "temperature was very different from that of the other two." The north wind is full of courage, and puts the stamina of endurance into a man, and it probably would into a woman too if there were a series of resolutions passed to that effect. The west wind is hopeful; it has promise and adventure in it, and is, except to Atlantic voyagers America-bound, the best wind that ever blew. The east wind is peevishness; it is mental rheumatism and grumbling, and curls one up in the chimney-corner like a cat. And if the chimney ever smokes, it smokes when the wind sits in that quarter. The south wind is full of longing and unrest, of effeminate suggestions of luxurious ease, and perhaps we might say of modern poetry,—at any rate, modern poetry needs a change of air. I am not sure but the south is the most powerful of the winds, because of its sweet persuasiveness. Nothing so stirs the blood in spring, when it comes up out of the tropical latitude; it makes men "longen to gon on pilgrimages."
I did intend to insert here a little poem (as it is quite proper to do in an essay) on the south wind, composed by the Young Lady Staying With Us, beginning,—
"Out of a drifting southern cloudMy soul heard the night-bird cry,"
but it never got any farther than this. The Young Lady said it was exceedingly difficult to write the next two lines, because not only rhyme but meaning had to be procured. And this is true; anybody can write first lines, and that is probably the reason we have so many poems which seem to have been begun in just this way, that is, with a south-wind-longing without any thought in it, and it is very fortunate when there is not wind enough to finish them. This emotional poem, if I may so call it, was begun after Herbert went away. I liked it, and thought it was what is called "suggestive;" although I did not understand it, especially what the night-bird was; and I am afraid I hurt the Young Lady's feelings by asking her if she meant Herbert by the "night-bird,"—a very absurd suggestion about two unsentimental people. She said, "Nonsense;" but she afterwards told the Mistress that there were emotions that one could never put into words without the danger of being ridiculous; a profound truth. And yet I should not like to say that there is not a tender lonesomeness in love that can get comfort out of a night-bird in a cloud, if there be such a thing. Analysis is the death of sentiment.
But to return to the winds. Certain people impress us as the winds do. Mandeville never comes in that I do not feel a north-wind vigor and healthfulness in his cordial, sincere, hearty manner, and in his wholesome way of looking at things. The Parson, you would say, was the east wind, and only his intimates know that his peevishness is only a querulous humor. In the fair west wind I know the Mistress herself, full of hope, and always the first one to discover a bit of blue in a cloudy sky. It would not be just to apply what I have said of the south wind to any of our visitors, but it did blow a little while Herbert was here.
In point of pure enjoyment, with an intellectual sparkle in it, I suppose that no luxurious lounging on tropical isles set in tropical seas compares with the positive happiness one may have before a great woodfire (not two sticks laid crossways in a grate), with a veritable New England winter raging outside. In order to get the highest enjoyment, the faculties must be alert, and not be lulled into a mere recipient dullness. There are those who prefer a warm bath to a brisk walk in the inspiring air, where ten thousand keen influences minister to the sense of beauty and run along the excited nerves. There are, for instance, a sharpness of horizon outline and a delicacy of color on distant hills which are wanting in summer, and which convey to one rightly organized the keenest delight, and a refinement of enjoyment that is scarcely sensuous, not at all sentimental, and almost passing the intellectual line into the spiritual.
I was speaking to Mandeville about this, and he said that I was drawing it altogether too fine; that he experienced sensations of pleasure in being out in almost all weathers; that he rather liked to breast a north wind, and that there was a certain inspiration in sharp outlines and in a landscape in trim winter-quarters, with stripped trees, and, as it were, scudding through the season under bare poles; but that he must say that he preferred the weather in which he could sit on the fence by the wood-lot, with the spring sun on his back, and hear the stir of the leaves and the birds beginning their housekeeping.
A very pretty idea for Mandeville; and I fear he is getting to have private thoughts about the Young Lady. Mandeville naturally likes the robustness and sparkle of winter, and it has been a little suspicious to hear him express the hope that we shall have an early spring.
I wonder how many people there are in New England who know the glory and inspiration of a winter walk just before sunset, and that, too, not only on days of clear sky, when the west is aflame with a rosy color, which has no suggestion of languor or unsatisfied longing in it, but on dull days, when the sullen clouds hang about the horizon, full of threats of storm and the terrors of the gathering night. We are very busy with our own affairs, but there is always something going on out-doors worth looking at; and there is seldom an hour before sunset that has not some special attraction. And, besides, it puts one in the mood for the cheer and comfort of the open fire at home.
Probably if the people of New England could have a plebiscitum on their weather, they would vote against it, especially against winter. Almost no one speaks well of winter. And this suggests the idea that most people here were either born in the wrong place, or do not know what is best for them. I doubt if these grumblers would be any better satisfied, or would turn out as well, in the tropics. Everybody knows our virtues,—at least if they believe half we tell them,—and for delicate beauty, that rare plant, I should look among the girls of the New England hills as confidently as anywhere, and I have traveled as far south as New Jersey, and west of the Genesee Valley. Indeed, it would be easy to show that the parents of the pretty girls in the West emigrated from New England. And yet—such is the mystery of Providence—no one would expect that one of the sweetest and most delicate flowers that blooms, the trailing. arbutus, would blossom in this inhospitable climate, and peep forth from the edge of a snowbank at that.
It seems unaccountable to a superficial observer that the thousands of people who are dissatisfied with their climate do not seek a more congenial one—or stop grumbling. The world is so small, and all parts of it are so accessible, it has so many varieties of climate, that one could surely suit himself by searching; and, then, is it worth while to waste our one short life in the midst of unpleasant surroundings and in a constant friction with that which is disagreeable? One would suppose that people set down on this little globe would seek places on it most agreeable to themselves. It must be that they are much more content with the climate and country upon which they happen, by the accident of their birth, than they pretend to be.
Home sympathies and charities are most active in the winter. Coming in from my late walk,—in fact driven in by a hurrying north wind that would brook no delay,—a wind that brought snow that did not seem to fall out of a bounteous sky, but to be blown from polar fields,—I find the Mistress returned from town, all in a glow of philanthropic excitement.
There has been a meeting of a woman's association for Ameliorating the Condition of somebody here at home. Any one can belong to it by paying a dollar, and for twenty dollars one can become a life Ameliorator,—a sort of life assurance. The Mistress, at the meeting, I believe, "seconded the motion" several times, and is one of the Vice-Presidents; and this family honor makes me feel almost as if I were a president of something myself. These little distinctions are among the sweetest things in life, and to see one's name officially printed stimulates his charity, and is almost as satisfactory as being the chairman of a committee or the mover of a resolution. It is, I think, fortunate, and not at all discreditable, that our little vanity, which is reckoned among our weaknesses, is thus made to contribute to the activity of our nobler powers. Whatever we may say, we all of us like distinction; and probably there is no more subtle flattery than that conveyed in the whisper, "That's he," "That's she."
There used to be a society for ameliorating the condition of the Jews; but they were found to be so much more adept than other people in ameliorating their own condition that I suppose it was given up. Mandeville says that to his knowledge there are a great many people who get up ameliorating enterprises merely to be conspicuously busy in society, or to earn a little something in a good cause. They seem to think that the world owes them a living because they are philanthropists. In this Mandeville does not speak with his usual charity. It is evident that there are Jews, and some Gentiles, whose condition needs ameliorating, and if very little is really accomplished in the effort for them, it always remains true that the charitable reap a benefit to themselves. It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR. Why is it that almost all philanthropists and reformers are disagreeable?
I ought to explain who our next-door neighbor is. He is the person who comes in without knocking, drops in in the most natural way, as his wife does also, and not seldom in time to take the after-dinner cup of tea before the fire. Formal society begins as soon as you lock your doors, and only admit visitors through the media of bells and servants. It is lucky for us that our next-door neighbor is honest.
THE PARSON. Why do you class reformers and philanthropists together? Those usually called reformers are not philanthropists at all. They are agitators. Finding the world disagreeable to themselves, they wish to make it as unpleasant to others as possible.
MANDEVILLE. That's a noble view of your fellow-men.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Well, granting the distinction, why are both apt to be unpleasant people to live with?
THE PARSON. As if the unpleasant people who won't mind their own business were confined to the classes you mention! Some of the best people I know are philanthropists,—I mean the genuine ones, and not the uneasy busybodies seeking notoriety as a means of living.
THE FIRE-TENDER. It is not altogether the not minding their own business. Nobody does that. The usual explanation is, that people with one idea are tedious. But that is not all of it. For few persons have more than one idea,—ministers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, manufacturers, merchants,—they all think the world they live in is the central one.
MANDEVILLE. And you might add authors. To them nearly all the life of the world is in letters, and I suppose they would be astonished if they knew how little the thoughts of the majority of people are occupied with books, and with all that vast thought circulation which is the vital current of the world to book-men. Newspapers have reached their present power by becoming unliterary, and reflecting all the interests of the world.
THE MISTRESS. I have noticed one thing, that the most popular persons in society are those who take the world as it is, find the least fault, and have no hobbies. They are always wanted to dinner.
THE YOUNG LADY. And the other kind always appear to me to want a dinner.
THE FIRE-TENDER. It seems to me that the real reason why reformers and some philanthropists are unpopular is, that they disturb our serenity and make us conscious of our own shortcomings. It is only now and then that a whole people get a spasm of reformatory fervor, of investigation and regeneration. At other times they rather hate those who disturb their quiet.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Professional reformers and philanthropists are insufferably conceited and intolerant.
THE MISTRESS. Everything depends upon the spirit in which a reform or a scheme of philanthropy is conducted.
MANDEVILLE. I attended a protracted convention of reformers of a certain evil, once, and had the pleasure of taking dinner with a tableful of them. It was one of those country dinners accompanied with green tea. Every one disagreed with every one else, and you would n't wonder at it, if you had seen them. They were people with whom good food wouldn't agree. George Thompson was expected at the convention, and I remember that there was almost a cordiality in the talk about him, until one sallow brother casually mentioned that George took snuff,—when a chorus of deprecatory groans went up from the table. One long-faced maiden in spectacles, with purple ribbons in her hair, who drank five cups of tea by my count, declared that she was perfectly disgusted, and did n't want to hear him speak. In the course of the meal the talk ran upon the discipline of children, and how to administer punishment. I was quite taken by the remark of a thin, dyspeptic man who summed up the matter by growling out in a harsh, deep bass voice, "Punish 'em in love!" It sounded as if he had said, "Shoot 'em on the spot!"
THE PARSON. I supposed you would say that he was a minister. There is another thing about those people. I think they are working against the course of nature. Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue. There's a split in my thumb-nail that has been scrupulously continued for many years, not withstanding all my efforts to make the nail resume its old regularity. You see the same thing in trees whose bark is cut, and in melons that have had only one summer's intimacy with squashes. The bad traits in character are passed down from generation to generation with as much care as the good ones. Nature, unaided, never reforms anything.
MANDEVILLE. Is that the essence of Calvinism?
THE PARSON. Calvinism has n't any essence, it's a fact.
MANDEVILLE. When I was a boy, I always associated Calvinism and calomel together. I thought that homeopathy—similia, etc.—had done away with both of them.
OUR NEXT DOOR (rising). If you are going into theology, I'm off..
I fear we are not getting on much with the joyousness of winter. In order to be exhilarating it must be real winter. I have noticed that the lower the thermometer sinks the more fiercely the north wind rages, and the deeper the snow is, the higher rise the spirits of the community. The activity of the "elements" has a great effect upon country folk especially; and it is a more wholesome excitement than that caused by a great conflagration. The abatement of a snow-storm that grows to exceptional magnitude is regretted, for there is always the half-hope that this will be, since it has gone so far, the largest fall of snow ever known in the region, burying out of sight the great fall of 1808, the account of which is circumstantially and aggravatingly thrown in our way annually upon the least provocation. We all know how it reads: "Some said it began at daylight, others that it set in after sunrise; but all agree that by eight o'clock Friday morning it was snowing in heavy masses that darkened the air."
The morning after we settled the five—or is it seven?—points of Calvinism, there began a very hopeful snow-storm, one of those wide-sweeping, careering storms that may not much affect the city, but which strongly impress the country imagination with a sense of the personal qualities of the weather,—power, persistency, fierceness, and roaring exultation. Out-doors was terrible to those who looked out of windows, and heard the raging wind, and saw the commotion in all the high tree-tops and the writhing of the low evergreens, and could not summon resolution to go forth and breast and conquer the bluster. The sky was dark with snow, which was not permitted to fall peacefully like a blessed mantle, as it sometimes does, but was blown and rent and tossed like the split canvas of a ship in a gale. The world was taken possession of by the demons of the air, who had their will of it. There is a sort of fascination in such a scene, equal to that of a tempest at sea, and without its attendant haunting sense of peril; there is no fear that the house will founder or dash against your neighbor's cottage, which is dimly seen anchored across the field; at every thundering onset there is no fear that the cook's galley will upset, or the screw break loose and smash through the side, and we are not in momently expectation of the tinkling of the little bell to "stop her." The snow rises in drifting waves, and the naked trees bend like strained masts; but so long as the window-blinds remain fast, and the chimney-tops do not go, we preserve an equal mind. Nothing more serious can happen than the failure of the butcher's and the grocer's carts, unless, indeed, the little news-carrier should fail to board us with the world's daily bulletin, or our next-door neighbor should be deterred from coming to sit by the blazing, excited fire, and interchange the trifling, harmless gossip of the day. The feeling of seclusion on such a day is sweet, but the true friend who does brave the storm and come is welcomed with a sort of enthusiasm that his arrival in pleasant weather would never excite. The snow-bound in their Arctic hulk are glad to see even a wandering Esquimau.
On such a day I recall the great snow-storms on the northern New England hills, which lasted for a week with no cessation, with no sunrise or sunset, and no observation at noon; and the sky all the while dark with the driving snow, and the whole world full of the noise of the rioting Boreal forces; until the roads were obliterated, the fences covered, and the snow was piled solidly above the first-story windows of the farmhouse on one side, and drifted before the front door so high that egress could only be had by tunneling the bank.
After such a battle and siege, when the wind fell and the sun struggled out again, the pallid world lay subdued and tranquil, and the scattered dwellings were not unlike wrecks stranded by the tempest and half buried in sand. But when the blue sky again bent over all, the wide expanse of snow sparkled like diamond-fields, and the chimney signal-smokes could be seen, how beautiful was the picture! Then began the stir abroad, and the efforts to open up communication through roads, or fields, or wherever paths could be broken, and the ways to the meeting-house first of all. Then from every house and hamlet the men turned out with shovels, with the patient, lumbering oxen yoked to the sleds, to break the roads, driving into the deepest drifts, shoveling and shouting as if the severe labor were a holiday frolic, the courage and the hilarity rising with the difficulties encountered; and relief parties, meeting at length in the midst of the wide white desolation, hailed each other as chance explorers in new lands, and made the whole country-side ring with the noise of their congratulations. There was as much excitement and healthy stirring of the blood in it as in the Fourth of July, and perhaps as much patriotism. The boy saw it in dumb show from the distant, low farmhouse window, and wished he were a man. At night there were great stories of achievement told by the cavernous fireplace; great latitude was permitted in the estimation of the size of particular drifts, but never any agreement was reached as to the "depth on a level." I have observed since that people are quite as apt to agree upon the marvelous and the exceptional as upon simple facts.
By the firelight and the twilight, the Young Lady is finishing a letter to Herbert,—writing it, literally, on her knees, transforming thus the simple deed into an act of devotion. Mandeville says that it is bad for her eyes, but the sight of it is worse for his eyes. He begins to doubt the wisdom of reliance upon that worn apothegm about absence conquering love.
Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable. Mandeville begins to wish he were in New South Wales.
I did intend to insert here a letter of Herbert's to the Young Lady, —obtained, I need not say, honorably, as private letters which get into print always are,—not to gratify a vulgar curiosity, but to show how the most unsentimental and cynical people are affected by the master passion. But I cannot bring myself to do it. Even in the interests of science one has no right to make an autopsy of two loving hearts, especially when they are suffering under a late attack of the one agreeable epidemic.
All the world loves a lover, but it laughs at him none the less in his extravagances. He loses his accustomed reticence; he has something of the martyr's willingness for publicity; he would even like to show the sincerity of his devotion by some piece of open heroism. Why should he conceal a discovery which has transformed the world to him, a secret which explains all the mysteries of nature and human-ity? He is in that ecstasy of mind which prompts those who were never orators before to rise in an experience-meeting and pour out a flood of feeling in the tritest language and the most conventional terms. I am not sure that Herbert, while in this glow, would be ashamed of his letter in print, but this is one of the cases where chancery would step in and protect one from himself by his next friend. This is really a delicate matter, and perhaps it is brutal to allude to it at all.
In truth, the letter would hardly be interesting in print. Love has a marvelous power of vivifying language and charging the simplest words with the most tender meaning, of restoring to them the power they had when first coined. They are words of fire to those two who know their secret, but not to others. It is generally admitted that the best love-letters would not make very good literature. "Dearest," begins Herbert, in a burst of originality, felicitously selecting a word whose exclusiveness shuts out all the world but one, and which is a whole letter, poem, confession, and creed in one breath. What a weight of meaning it has to carry! There may be beauty and wit and grace and naturalness and even the splendor of fortune elsewhere, but there is one woman in the world whose sweet presence would be compensation for the loss of all else. It is not to be reasoned about; he wants that one; it is her plume dancing down the sunny street that sets his heart beating; he knows her form among a thousand, and follows her; he longs to run after her carriage, which the cruel coachman whirls out of his sight. It is marvelous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is in a panic when he thinks of it. And what exquisite flattery is in that little word addressed to her, and with what sweet and meek triumph she repeats it to herself, with a feeling that is not altogether pity for those who still stand and wait. To be chosen out of all the available world—it is almost as much bliss as it is to choose. "All that long, long stage-ride from Blim's to Portage I thought of you every moment, and wondered what you were doing and how you were looking just that moment, and I found the occupation so charming that I was almost sorry when the journey was ended." Not much in that! But I have no doubt the Young Lady read it over and over, and dwelt also upon every moment, and found in it new proof of unshaken constancy, and had in that and the like things in the letter a sense of the sweetest communion. There is nothing in this letter that we need dwell on it, but I am convinced that the mail does not carry any other letters so valuable as this sort.
I suppose that the appearance of Herbert in this new light unconsciously gave tone a little to the evening's talk; not that anybody mentioned him, but Mandeville was evidently generalizing from the qualities that make one person admired by another to those that win the love of mankind.
MANDEVILLE. There seems to be something in some persons that wins them liking, special or general, independent almost of what they do or say.
THE MISTRESS. Why, everybody is liked by some one.
MANDEVILLE. I'm not sure of that. There are those who are friendless, and would be if they had endless acquaintances. But, to take the case away from ordinary examples, in which habit and a thousand circumstances influence liking, what is it that determines the world upon a personal regard for authors whom it has never seen?
THE FIRE-TENDER. Probably it is the spirit shown in their writings.
THE MISTRESS. More likely it is a sort of tradition; I don't believe that the world has a feeling of personal regard for any author who was not loved by those who knew him most intimately.
THE FIRE-TENDER. Which comes to the same thing. The qualities, the spirit, that got him the love of his acquaintances he put into his books.
MANDEVILLE. That does n't seem to me sufficient. Shakespeare has put everything into his plays and poems, swept the whole range of human sympathies and passions, and at times is inspired by the sweetest spirit that ever man had.
THE YOUNG LADY. No one has better interpreted love.
MANDEVILLE. Yet I apprehend that no person living has any personal regard for Shakespeare, or that his personality affects many,—except they stand in Stratford church and feel a sort of awe at the thought that the bones of the greatest poet are so near them.
THE PARSON. I don't think the world cares personally for any mere man or woman dead for centuries.
MANDEVILLE. But there is a difference. I think there is still rather a warm feeling for Socrates the man, independent of what he said, which is little known. Homer's works are certainly better known, but no one cares personally for Homer any more than for any other shade.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Why not go back to Moses? We've got the evening before us for digging up people.
MANDEVILLE. Moses is a very good illustration. No name of antiquity is better known, and yet I fancy he does not awaken the same kind of popular liking that Socrates does.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Fudge! You just get up in any lecture assembly andpropose three cheers for Socrates, and see where you'll be.Mandeville ought to be a missionary, and read Robert Browning to theFijis.
THE FIRE-TENDER. How do you account for the alleged personal regard for Socrates?
THE PARSON. Because the world called Christian is still more than half heathen.
MANDEVILLE. He was a plain man; his sympathies were with the people; he had what is roughly known as "horse-sense," and he was homely. Franklin and Abraham Lincoln belong to his class. They were all philosophers of the shrewd sort, and they all had humor. It was fortunate for Lincoln that, with his other qualities, he was homely. That was the last touching recommendation to the popular heart.
THE MISTRESS. Do you remember that ugly brown-stone statue of St. Antonio by the bridge in Sorrento? He must have been a coarse saint, patron of pigs as he was, but I don't know any one anywhere, or the homely stone image of one, so loved by the people.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Ugliness being trump, I wonder more people don't win. Mandeville, why don't you get up a "centenary" of Socrates, and put up his statue in the Central Park? It would make that one of Lincoln in Union Square look beautiful.
THE PARSON. Oh, you'll see that some day, when they have a museum there illustrating the "Science of Religion."
THE FIRE-TENDER. Doubtless, to go back to what we were talking of, the world has a fondness for some authors, and thinks of them with an affectionate and half-pitying familiarity; and it may be that this grows out of something in their lives quite as much as anything in their writings. There seems to be more disposition of personal liking to Thackeray than to Dickens, now both are dead,—a result that would hardly have been predicted when the world was crying over Little Nell, or agreeing to hate Becky Sharp.
THE YOUNG LADY. What was that you were telling about Charles Lamb, the other day, Mandeville? Is not the popular liking for him somewhat independent of his writings?
MANDEVILLE. He is a striking example of an author who is loved. Very likely the remembrance of his tribulations has still something to do with the tenderness felt for him. He supported no dignity and permitted a familiarity which indicated no self-appreciation of his real rank in the world of letters. I have heard that his acquaintances familiarly called him "Charley."
OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a relief to know that! Do you happen to know what Socrates was called?
MANDEVILLE. I have seen people who knew Lamb very well. One of them told me, as illustrating his want of dignity, that as he was going home late one night through the nearly empty streets, he was met by a roystering party who were making a night of it from tavern to tavern. They fell upon Lamb, attracted by his odd figure and hesitating manner, and, hoisting him on their shoulders, carried him off, singing as they went. Lamb enjoyed the lark, and did not tell them who he was. When they were tired of lugging him, they lifted him, with much effort and difficulty, to the top of a high wall, and left him there amid the broken bottles, utterly unable to get down. Lamb remained there philosophically in the enjoyment of his novel adventure, until a passing watchman rescued him from his ridiculous situation.
THE FIRE-TENDER. How did the story get out?
MANDEVILLE. Oh, Lamb told all about it next morning; and when asked afterwards why he did so, he replied that there was no fun in it unless he told it.
The King sat in the winter-house in the ninth month, and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him . . . . When Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife.
That seems to be a pleasant and home-like picture from a not very remote period,—less than twenty-five hundred years ago, and many centuries after the fall of Troy. And that was not so very long ago, for Thebes, in the splendid streets of which Homer wandered and sang to the kings when Memphis, whose ruins are older than history, was its younger rival, was twelve centuries old when Paris ran away with Helen.
I am sorry that the original—and you can usually do anything with the "original"—does not bear me out in saying that it was a pleasant picture. I should like to believe that Jehoiakiin—for that was the singular name of the gentleman who sat by his hearthstone—had just received the Memphis "Palimpsest," fifteen days in advance of the date of its publication, and that his secretary was reading to him that monthly, and cutting its leaves as he read. I should like to have seen it in that year when Thales was learning astronomy in Memphis, and Necho was organizing his campaign against Carchemish. If Jehoiakim took the "Attic Quarterly," he might have read its comments on the banishment of the Alcmaeonida, and its gibes at Solon for his prohibitory laws, forbidding the sale of unguents, limiting the luxury of dress, and interfering with the sacred rights of mourners to passionately bewail the dead in the Asiatic manner; the same number being enriched with contributions from two rising poets,—a lyric of love by Sappho, and an ode sent by Anacreon from Teos, with an editorial note explaining that the Maces was not responsible for the sentiments of the poem.
But, in fact, the gentleman who sat before the backlog in his winter-house had other things to think of. For Nebuchadnezzar was coming that way with the chariots and horses of Babylon and a great crowd of marauders; and the king had not even the poor choice whether he would be the vassal of the Chaldean or of the Egyptian. To us, this is only a ghostly show of monarchs and conquerors stalking across vast historic spaces. It was no doubt a vulgar enough scene of war and plunder. The great captains of that age went about to harry each other's territories and spoil each other's cities very much as we do nowadays, and for similar reasons;—Napoleon the Great in Moscow, Napoleon the Small in Italy, Kaiser William in Paris, Great Scott in Mexico! Men have not changed much.
—The Fire-Tender sat in his winter-garden in the third month; there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. He cut the leaves of "Scribner's Monthly" with his penknife, and thought of Jehoiakim.
That seems as real as the other. In the garden, which is a room of the house, the tall callas, rooted in the ground, stand about the fountain; the sun, streaming through the glass, illumines the many-hued flowers. I wonder what Jehoiakim did with the mealy-bug on his passion-vine, and if he had any way of removing the scale-bug from his African acacia? One would like to know, too, how he treated the red spider on the Le Marque rose. The record is silent. I do not doubt he had all these insects in his winter-garden, and the aphidae besides; and he could not smoke them out with tobacco, for the world had not yet fallen into its second stage of the knowledge of good and evil by eating the forbidden tobacco-plant.
I confess that this little picture of a fire on the hearth so many centuries ago helps to make real and interesting to me that somewhat misty past. No doubt the lotus and the acanthus from the Nile grew in that winter-house, and perhaps Jehoiakim attempted—the most difficult thing in the world the cultivation of the wild flowers from Lebanon. Perhaps Jehoiakim was interested also, as I am through this ancient fireplace,—which is a sort of domestic window into the ancient world,—in the loves of Bernice and Abaces at the court of the Pharaohs. I see that it is the same thing as the sentiment —perhaps it is the shrinking which every soul that is a soul has, sooner or later, from isolation—which grew up between Herbert and the Young Lady Staying With Us. Jeremiah used to come in to that fireside very much as the Parson does to ours. The Parson, to be sure, never prophesies, but he grumbles, and is the chorus in the play that sings the everlasting ai ai of "I told you so!" Yet we like the Parson. He is the sprig of bitter herb that makes the pottage wholesome. I should rather, ten times over, dispense with the flatterers and the smooth-sayers than the grumblers. But the grumblers are of two sorts,—the healthful-toned and the whiners. There are makers of beer who substitute for the clean bitter of the hops some deleterious drug, and then seek to hide the fraud by some cloying sweet. There is nothing of this sickish drug in the Parson's talk, nor was there in that of Jeremiah, I sometimes think there is scarcely enough of this wholesome tonic in modern society. The Parson says he never would give a child sugar-coated pills. Mandeville says he never would give them any. After all, you cannot help liking Mandeville.
We were talking of this late news from Jerusalem. The Fire-Tender was saying that it is astonishing how much is telegraphed us from the East that is not half so interesting. He was at a loss philosophically to account for the fact that the world is so eager to know the news of yesterday which is unimportant, and so indifferent to that of the day before which is of some moment.
MANDEVILLE. I suspect that it arises from the want of imagination. People need to touch the facts, and nearness in time is contiguity. It would excite no interest to bulletin the last siege of Jerusalem in a village where the event was unknown, if the date was appended; and yet the account of it is incomparably more exciting than that of the siege of Metz.
OUR NEXT DOOR. The daily news is a necessity. I cannot get along without my morning paper. The other morning I took it up, and was absorbed in the telegraphic columns for an hour nearly. I thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of immediate contact with all the world of yesterday, until I read among the minor items that Patrick Donahue, of the city of New York, died of a sunstroke. If he had frozen to death, I should have enjoyed that; but to die of sunstroke in February seemed inappropriate, and I turned to the date of the paper. When I found it was printed in July, I need not say that I lost all interest in it, though why the trivialities and crimes and accidents, relating to people I never knew, were not as good six months after date as twelve hours, I cannot say.
THE FIRE-TENDER. You know that in Concord the latest news, except a remark or two by Thoreau or Emerson, is the Vedas. I believe the Rig-Veda is read at the breakfast-table instead of the Boston journals.
THE PARSON. I know it is read afterward instead of the Bible.
MANDEVILLE. That is only because it is supposed to be older. I have understood that the Bible is very well spoken of there, but it is not antiquated enough to be an authority.
OUR NEXT DOOR. There was a project on foot to put it into the circulating library, but the title New in the second part was considered objectionable.
HERBERT. Well, I have a good deal of sympathy with Concord as to the news. We are fed on a daily diet of trivial events and gossip, of the unfruitful sayings of thoughtless men and women, until our mental digestion is seriously impaired; the day will come when no one will be able to sit down to a thoughtful, well-wrought book and assimilate its contents.
THE MISTRESS. I doubt if a daily newspaper is a necessity, in the higher sense of the word.
THE PARSON. Nobody supposes it is to women,—that is, if they can see each other.
THE MISTRESS. Don't interrupt, unless you have something to say; though I should like to know how much gossip there is afloat that the minister does not know. The newspaper may be needed in society, but how quickly it drops out of mind when one goes beyond the bounds of what is called civilization. You remember when we were in the depths of the woods last summer how difficult it was to get up any interest in the files of late papers that reached us, and how unreal all the struggle and turmoil of the world seemed. We stood apart, and could estimate things at their true value.
THE YOUNG LADY. Yes, that was real life. I never tired of the guide's stories; there was some interest in the intelligence that a deer had been down to eat the lily-pads at the foot of the lake the night before; that a bear's track was seen on the trail we crossed that day; even Mandeville's fish-stories had a certain air of probability; and how to roast a trout in the ashes and serve him hot and juicy and clean, and how to cook soup and prepare coffee and heat dish-water in one tin-pail, were vital problems.
THE PARSON. You would have had no such problems at home. Why will people go so far to put themselves to such inconvenience? I hate the woods. Isolation breeds conceit; there are no people so conceited as those who dwell in remote wildernesses and live mostly alone.
THE YOUNG LADY. For my part, I feel humble in the presence of mountains, and in the vast stretches of the wilderness.
THE PARSON. I'll be bound a woman would feel just as nobody would expect her to feel, under given circumstances.
MANDEVILLE. I think the reason why the newspaper and the world it carries take no hold of us in the wilderness is that we become a kind of vegetable ourselves when we go there. I have often attempted to improve my mind in the woods with good solid books. You might as well offer a bunch of celery to an oyster. The mind goes to sleep: the senses and the instincts wake up. The best I can do when it rains, or the trout won't bite, is to read Dumas's novels. Their ingenuity will almost keep a man awake after supper, by the camp-fire. And there is a kind of unity about them that I like; the history is as good as the morality.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I always wondered where Mandeville got his historical facts.
THE MISTRESS. Mandeville misrepresents himself in the woods. I heard him one night repeat "The Vision of Sir Launfal"—(THE FIRE-TENDER. Which comes very near being our best poem.)—as we were crossing the lake, and the guides became so absorbed in it that they forgot to paddle, and sat listening with open mouths, as if it had been a panther story.
THE PARSON. Mandeville likes to show off well enough. I heard that he related to a woods' boy up there the whole of the Siege of Troy. The boy was very much interested, and said "there'd been a man up there that spring from Troy, looking up timber." Mandeville always carries the news when he goes into the country.
MANDEVILLE. I'm going to take the Parson's sermon on Jonah next summer; it's the nearest to anything like news we've had from his pulpit in ten years. But, seriously, the boy was very well informed. He'd heard of Albany; his father took in the "Weekly Tribune," and he had a partial conception of Horace Greeley.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I never went so far out of the world in America yet that the name of Horace Greeley did n't rise up before me. One of the first questions asked by any camp-fire is, "Did ye ever see Horace?"
HERBERT. Which shows the power of the press again. But I have often remarked how little real conception of the moving world, as it is, people in remote regions get from the newspaper. It needs to be read in the midst of events. A chip cast ashore in a refluent eddy tells no tale of the force and swiftness of the current.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I don't exactly get the drift of that last remark; but I rather like a remark that I can't understand; like the landlady's indigestible bread, it stays by you.
HERBERT. I see that I must talk in words of one syllable. The newspaper has little effect upon the remote country mind, because the remote country mind is interested in a very limited number of things. Besides, as the Parson says, it is conceited. The most accomplished scholar will be the butt of all the guides in the woods, because he cannot follow a trail that would puzzle a sable (saple the trappers call it).
THE PARSON. It's enough to read the summer letters that people write to the newspapers from the country and the woods. Isolated from the activity of the world, they come to think that the little adventures of their stupid days and nights are important. Talk about that being real life! Compare the letters such people write with the other contents of the newspaper, and you will see which life is real. That's one reason I hate to have summer come, the country letters set in.
THE MISTRESS. I should like to see something the Parson does n't hate to have come.
MANDEVILLE. Except his quarter's salary; and the meeting of theAmerican Board.
THE FIRE-TENDER. I don't see that we are getting any nearer the solution of the original question. The world is evidently interested in events simply because they are recent.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I have a theory that a newspaper might be published at little cost, merely by reprinting the numbers of years before, only altering the dates; just as the Parson preaches over his sermons.
THE FIRE-TENDER. It's evident we must have a higher order of news-gatherers. It has come to this, that the newspaper furnishes thought-material for all the world, actually prescribes from day to day the themes the world shall think on and talk about. The occupation of news-gathering becomes, therefore, the most important. When you think of it, it is astonishing that this department should not be in the hands of the ablest men, accomplished scholars, philosophical observers, discriminating selectors of the news of the world that is worth thinking over and talking about. The editorial comments frequently are able enough, but is it worth while keeping an expensive mill going to grind chaff? I sometimes wonder, as I open my morning paper, if nothing did happen in the twenty-four hours except crimes, accidents, defalcations, deaths of unknown loafers, robberies, monstrous births,—say about the level of police-court news.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I have even noticed that murders have deteriorated; they are not so high-toned and mysterious as they used to be.
THE FIRE-TENDER. It is true that the newspapers have improved vastly within the last decade.
HERBERT. I think, for one, that they are very much above the level of the ordinary gossip of the country.
THE FIRE-TENDER. But I am tired of having the under-world still occupy so much room in the newspapers. The reporters are rather more alert for a dog-fight than a philological convention. It must be that the good deeds of the world outnumber the bad in any given day; and what a good reflex action it would have on society if they could be more fully reported than the bad! I suppose the Parson would call this the Enthusiasm of Humanity.
THE PARSON. You'll see how far you can lift yourself up by your boot-straps.
HERBERT. I wonder what influence on the quality (I say nothing of quantity) of news the coming of women into the reporter's and editor's work will have.
OUR NEXT DOOR. There are the baby-shows; they make cheerful reading.
THE MISTRESS. All of them got up by speculating men, who impose upon the vanity of weak women.
HERBERT. I think women reporters are more given to personal details and gossip than the men. When I read the Washington correspondence I am proud of my country, to see how many Apollo Belvederes, Adonises, how much marble brow and piercing eye and hyacinthine locks, we have in the two houses of Congress.
THE YOUNG LADY. That's simply because women understand the personal weakness of men; they have a long score of personal flattery to pay off too.
MANDEVILLE. I think women will bring in elements of brightness, picturesqueness, and purity very much needed. Women have a power of investing simple ordinary things with a charm; men are bungling narrators compared with them.
THE PARSON. The mistake they make is in trying to write, and especially to "stump-speak," like men; next to an effeminate man there is nothing so disagreeable as a mannish woman.
HERBERT. I heard one once address a legislative committee. The knowing air, the familiar, jocular, smart manner, the nodding and winking innuendoes, supposed to be those of a man "up to snuff," and au fait in political wiles, were inexpressibly comical. And yet the exhibition was pathetic, for it had the suggestive vulgarity of a woman in man's clothes. The imitation is always a dreary failure.
THE MISTRESS. Such women are the rare exceptions. I am ready to defend my sex; but I won't attempt to defend both sexes in one.
THE FIRE-TENDER. I have great hope that women will bring into the newspaper an elevating influence; the common and sweet life of society is much better fitted to entertain and instruct us than the exceptional and extravagant. I confess (saving the Mistress's presence) that the evening talk over the dessert at dinner is much more entertaining and piquant than the morning paper, and often as important.
THE MISTRESS. I think the subject had better be changed.
MANDEVILLE. The person, not the subject. There is no entertainment so full of quiet pleasure as the hearing a lady of cultivation and refinement relate her day's experience in her daily rounds of calls, charitable visits, shopping, errands of relief and condolence. The evening budget is better than the finance minister's.
OUR NEXT DOOR. That's even so. My wife will pick up more news in six hours than I can get in a week, and I'm fond of news.
MANDEVILLE. I don't mean gossip, by any means, or scandal. A woman of culture skims over that like a bird, never touching it with the tip of a wing. What she brings home is the freshness and brightness of life. She touches everything so daintily, she hits off a character in a sentence, she gives the pith of a dialogue without tediousness, she mimics without vulgarity; her narration sparkles, but it does n't sting. The picture of her day is full of vivacity, and it gives new value and freshness to common things. If we could only have on the stage such actresses as we have in the drawing-room!
THE FIRE-TENDER. We want something more of this grace, sprightliness, and harmless play of the finer life of society in the newspaper.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder Mandeville does n't marry, and become a permanent subscriber to his embodied idea of a newspaper.
THE YOUNG LADY. Perhaps he does not relish the idea of being unable to stop his subscription.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Parson, won't you please punch that fire, and give us more blaze? we are getting into the darkness of socialism.