Autocrat of the Breakfast Table Part 8

He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up beneath the thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek. As I looked round, I was reminded of a show I once saw at the Museum,-the Sleeping Beauty, I think they called it. The old man's sudden breaking out in this way turned every face towards him, and each kept his posture as if changed to stone. Our Celtic Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a sentiment. She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high-shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are known in public by their amorphous style of person, their stoop forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk,-the waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy footfall.

Bridget, const.i.tuted for action, not for emotion, was about to deposit a plate heaped with something upon the table, when I saw the coa.r.s.e arm stretched by my shoulder arrested,-motionless as the arm of a terra-cotta caryatid; she couldn't set the plate down while the old gentleman was speaking!

He was quite silent after this, still wearing the slight flush on his cheek. Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever _were_ there, they _are_ there still!

By and by we got talking again.-Does a poet love the verses written through him, do you think, Sir?-said the divinity-student.

So long as they are warm from his mind, carry any of his animal heat about them, _I know_ he loves them,-I answered. When they have had time to cool, he is more indifferent.

A good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes,-said the young fellow whom they call John.

The last words, only, reached the ear of the economically organized female in black bombazine.-Buckwheat is skerce and high,-she remarked.

[Must be a poor relation sponging on our landlady,-pays nothing,-so she must stand by the guns and be ready to repel boarders.]

I liked the turn the conversation had taken, for I had some things I wanted to say, and so, after waiting a minute, I began again.-I don't think the poems I read you sometimes can be fairly appreciated, given to you as they are in the green state.

-You don't know what I mean by the _green state_? Well, then, I will tell you. Certain things are good for nothing until they have been kept a long while; and some are good for nothing until they have been long kept and _used_. Of the first, wine is the ill.u.s.trious and immortal example. Of those which must be kept and used I will name three,-meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems. The meerschaum is but a poor affair until it has burned a thousand offerings to the cloud-compelling deities. It comes to us without complexion or flavor,-born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but colorless as _pallida Mors_ herself. The fire is lighted in its central shrine, and gradually the juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a drachm are diffused through its thirsting pores. First a discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing, umber tint spreading over the whole surface. Nature true to her old brown autumnal hue, you see,-as true in the fire of the meerschaum as in the sunshine of October! And then the c.u.mulative wealth of its fragrant reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes a thousand whiffs in a single breath; and one cannot touch it without awakening the old joys that hang around it as the smell of flowers clings to the dresses of the daughters of the house of Farina!

[Don't think I use a meerschaum myself, for _I do not_, though I have owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and beaded knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his right check.

On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver-mounted tobacco-stopper you ever saw. It is a little box-wood Triton, carved with charming liveliness and truth; I have often compared it to a figure in Raphael's "Triumph of Galatea." It came to me in an ancient s.h.a.green case,-how old it is I do not know,-but it must have been made since Sir Walter Raleigh's time. If you are curious, you shall see it any day.

Neither will I pretend that I am so unused to the more perishable smoking contrivance that a few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay in a ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous incombustibles, the _cigar_, so called, of the shops,-which to "draw"

asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even if my ill.u.s.tration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me a.s.sure you, the stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under such Nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.]

Violins, too,-the sweet old Amati!-the divine Stradivarius! Played on by ancient _maestros_ until the bow-hand lost its power and the flying fingers stiffened. Bequeathed to the pa.s.sionate, young enthusiast, who made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate longings, and scream his untold agonies, and wail his monotonous despair. Pa.s.sed from his dying hand to the cold _virtuoso_, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till, when his h.o.a.rd was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of their lord and leader. Into lonely prisons with improvident artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy hymns with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies in which it learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were shut up in it; then again to the gentle _dilettante_ who calmed it down with easy melodies until it answered him softly as in the days of the old _maestros_. And so given into our hands, its pores all full of music; stained, like the meerschaum, through and through, with the concentrated hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which have kindled and faded on its strings.

Now I tell you a poem must be kept _and used_, like a meerschaum, or a violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;-the more porous it is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity,-its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine secondary color derived from ourselves. So you see it must take time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature, by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can penetrate.

Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from the maker's hands? Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.

Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's m.u.f.fled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin. Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its hundredth birthday,-(Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,)-the sap is pretty well out of it. And here is the song of an old poet whom Neaera cheated.-

"Nox erat, et clo fulgebat Luna sereno Inter minora sidera, c.u.m tu magnorum numen laesura deorum In verba jurabas mea."

Don't you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin phrases? Now I tell you that, every word fresh from the dictionary brings with it a certain succulence; and though I cannot expect the sheets of the "Pactolian," in which, as I told you, I sometimes print my verses, to get so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those words of Horatius Flaccus, yet you may be sure, that, while the sheets are damp, and while the lines hold their sap, you can't fairly judge of my performances, and that, if made of the true stuff, they will ring better after a while.

[There was silence for a brief s.p.a.ce, after my somewhat elaborate exposition of these self-evident a.n.a.logies. Presently _a person_ turned towards me-I do not choose to designate the individual-and said that he rather expected my pieces had given pretty good "sahtisfahction."-I had, up to this moment, considered this complimentary phrase as sacred to the use of secretaries of lyceums, and, as it has been usually accompanied by a small pecuniary testimonial, have acquired a certain relish for this moderately tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm. But as a reward for gratuitous services, I confess I thought it a little below that blood-heat standard which a man's breath ought to have, whether silent, or vocal and articulate. I waited for a favorable opportunity, however, before making the remarks which follow.]

-There are single expressions, as I have told you already, that fix a man's position for you before you have done shaking hands with him.

Allow me to expand a little. There are several things, very slight in themselves, yet implying other things not so unimportant. Thus, your French servant has _devalise_ your premises and got caught. _Excusez_, says the _sergent-de-ville_, as he politely relieves him of his upper garments and displays his bust in the full daylight. Good shoulders enough,-a little marked,-traces of smallpox, perhaps,-but white. . . . .

_Crac_! from the _sergent-de-ville's_ broad palm on the white shoulder!

Now look! _Vogue la galere_! Out comes the big red V-mark of the hot iron;-he had blistered it out pretty nearly,-hadn't he?-the old rascal VOLEUR, branded in the galleys at Ma.r.s.eilles! [Don't! What if he has got something like this?-n.o.body supposes I _invented_ such a story.]

My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females which I told you I had owned,-for, look you, my friends, simple though I stand here, I am one that has been driven in his "kerridge,"-not using that term, as liberal shepherds do, for any battered old shabby-genteel go-cart which has more than one wheel, but meaning thereby a four-wheeled vehicle _with a pole_,-my man John, I say, was a retired soldier. He retired unostentatiously, as many of Her Majesty's modest servants have done before and since. John told me, that when an officer thinks he recognizes one of these retiring heroes, and would know if he has really been in the service, that he may restore him, if possible, to a grateful country, he comes suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, "Strap!" If he has ever worn the shoulder-strap, he has learned the reprimand for its ill adjustment. The old word of command flashes through his muscles, and his hand goes up in an instant to the place where the strap used to be.

[I was all the time preparing for my grand _coup_, you understand; but I saw they were not quite ready for it, and so continued,-always in ill.u.s.tration of the general principle I had laid down.]

Yes, odd things come out in ways that n.o.body thinks of. There was a legend, that, when the Danish pirates made descents upon the English coast, they caught a few Tartars occasionally, in the shape of Saxons, who would not let them go,-on the contrary, insisted on their staying, and, to make sure of it, treated them as Apollo treated Marsyas, or an Bartholinus has treated a fellow-creature in his t.i.tle-page, and, having divested them of the one essential and perfectly fitting garment, indispensable in the mildest climates, nailed the same on the church-door as we do the banns of marriage, _in terrorem_.

[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I looked at our landlady, I saw that "the water stood in her eyes," as it did in Christiana's when the interpreter asked her about the spider, and I fancied, but wasn't quite sure that the schoolmistress blushed, as Mercy did in the same conversation, as you remember.]

That sounds like a c.o.c.k-and-bull-story,-said the young fellow whom they call John. I abstained from making Hamlet's remark to Horatio, and continued.

Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying an old Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other things thought the doors should be attended to. One of them particularly, the front-door, looked very badly, crusted, as it were, and as if it would be all the better for sc.r.a.ping. There happened to be a microscopist in the village who had heard the old pirate story, and he took it into his head to examine the crust on this door. There was no mistake about it; it was a genuine historical doc.u.ment, of the Ziska drum-head pattern,-a real _cutis humana_, stripped from some old Scandinavian filibuster, and the legend was true.

My friend, the Professor, settled an important historical and financial question once by the aid of an exceedingly minute fragment of a similar doc.u.ment. Behind the pane of plate-gla.s.s which bore his name and t.i.tle burned a modest lamp, signifying to the pa.s.sers-by that at all hours of the night the slightest favors (or fevers) were welcome. A youth who had freely partaken of the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, following a moth-like impulse very natural under the circ.u.mstances, dashed his fist at the light and quenched the meek luminary,-breaking through the plate-gla.s.s, of course, to reach it. Now I don't want to go into _minutiae_ at table, you know, but a naked hand can no more go through a pane of thick gla.s.s without leaving some of its cuticle, to say the least, behind it, than a b.u.t.terfly can go through a sausage-machine without looking the worse for it. The Professor gathered up the fragments of gla.s.s, and with them certain very minute but entirely satisfactory doc.u.ments which would have identified and hanged any rogue in Christendom who had parted with them.-The historical question, _Who did it_? and the financial question, _Who paid for it_? were both settled before the new lamp was lighted the next evening.

You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very insignificant premises. This is eminently true of manners and forms of speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you want to know about a person. Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly p.r.o.nounced _haalth_)-instead of, How do you do? or, How are you? Or calling your little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety one-horse wagon a "kerridge." Or telling a person who has been trying to please you that he has given you pretty good "sahtisfahction." Or saying that you "remember of" such a thing, or that you have been "stoppin"' at Deacon Somebody's,-and other such expressions. One of my friends had a little marble statuette of Cupid in the parlor of his country-house,-bow, arrows, wings, and all complete. A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a statoo of her deceased infant?" What a delicious, though somewhat voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that brief question!

[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual at whose door it lay.]

That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, _Ex pede Herculem_. He might as well have said, "From a peck of apples you may judge of the barrel." _Ex_ PEDE, to be sure! Read, instead, _Ex ungue minimi digiti pedis_, _Herculem_, _ejusque patrem_, _matrem_, _avos et proavos_, _filios_, _nepotes et p.r.o.nepotes_! Talk to me about your d??

p?? st?! Tell me about Cuvier's getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Aga.s.siz's drawing a portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the "O" revealed Giotto,-as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford atte-Bowe-taught Anglais,-so all a man's antecedents and possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at once the gauge of his education and his mental organization.

Possibilities, Sir?-said the divinity-student; can't a man who says _Haow_? arrive at distinction?

Sir,-I replied,-in a republic all things are possible. But the man _with a future_ has almost of necessity sense enough to see that any odious trick of speech or manners must be got rid of. Doesn't Sydney Smith say that a public man in England never gets over a false quant.i.ty uttered in early life? _Our_ public men are in little danger of this fatal misstep, as few of them are in the habit of introducing Latin into their speeches,-for good and sufficient reasons. But they are bound to speak decent English,-unless, indeed, they are rough old campaigners, like General Jackson or General Taylor; in which case, a few scars on Priscian's head are pardoned to old fellows who have quite as many on their own, and a const.i.tuency of thirty empires is not at all particular, provided they do not swear in their Presidential Messages.

However, it is not for me to talk. I have made mistakes enough in conversation and print. I never find them out until they are stereotyped, and then I think they rarely escape me. I have no doubt I shall make half a dozen slips before this breakfast is over, and remember them all before another. How one does tremble with rage at his own intense momentary stupidity about things he knows perfectly well, and to think how he lays himself open to the impertinences of the _captatores verborum_, those useful but humble scavengers of the language, whose business it is to pick up what might offend or injure, and remove it, hugging and feeding on it as they go! I don't want to speak too slightingly of these verbal critics;-how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears silk or broadcloth.

[I write down the above remarks this morning, January 26th, making this record of the date that n.o.body may think it was written in wrath, on account of any particular grievance suffered from the invasion of any individual _scarabaeus grammaticus_.]

-I wonder if anybody ever finds fault with anything I say at this table when it is repeated? I hope they do, I am sure. I should be very certain that I had said nothing of much significance, if they did not.

Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone, which had lain, n.o.body knows how long, just where you found it, with the gra.s.s forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its edges,-and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to herself, "It's done brown enough by this time"?

What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of gra.s.s flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or h.o.r.n.y-sh.e.l.led,-turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs-and some of them have a good many-rush round wildly, b.u.t.ting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. _Next year_ you will find the gra.s.s growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the b.u.t.tercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.

-The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very familiar way,-at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I sometimes think it necessary to repress,-that I was coming it rather strong on the b.u.t.terflies.

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images,-the b.u.t.terfly as well as the others. The stone is ancient error. The gra.s.s is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native hues in the sunshine. Then shall G.o.d's minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty-Divinity taking outlines and color-light upon the souls of men as the b.u.t.terfly, image of the beatified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the sh.e.l.l that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.

You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.

-Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other. As soon as his breath comes back, he very probably begins to expend it in hard words. These are the best evidence a man can have that he has said something it was time to say. Dr. Johnson was disappointed in the effect of one of his pamphlets. "I think I have not been attacked enough for it," he said;-"attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds."

-If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I. Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called _the hydrostatic paradox of controversy_?

Don't know what that means?-Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way,-_and the fools know it_.

-No, but I often read what they say about other people. There are about a dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like the tongs, and the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the bellows, in one of those domestic avalanches that everybody knows. If you get one, you get the whole lot.

What are they?-Oh, that depends a good deal on lat.i.tude and longitude.

Epithets follow the isothermal lines pretty accurately. Grouping them in two families, one finds himself a clever, genial, witty, wise, brilliant, sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished, celebrated, ill.u.s.trious scholar and perfect gentleman, and first writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked, pert, shallow, ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted outcast, and disgrace to civilization.

What do I think determines the set of phrases a man gets?-Well, I should say a set of influences something like these:-1st. Relationships, political, religious, social, domestic. 2d. Oyster, in the form of suppers given to gentlemen connected with criticism. I believe in the school, the college, and the clergy; but my sovereign logic, for regulating public opinion-which means commonly the opinion of half a dozen of the critical gentry-is the following _Major proposition_.

Oysters _au naturel_. _Minor proposition_. The same "scalloped."

_Conclusion_. That-(here insert entertainer's name) is clever, witty, wise, brilliant,-and the rest.

-No, it isn't exactly bribery. One man has oysters, and another epithets. It is an exchange of hospitalities; one gives a "spread" on linen, and the other on paper,-that is all. Don't you think you and I should be apt to do just so, if we were in the critical line? I am sure I couldn't resist the softening influences of hospitality. I don't like to dine out, you know,-I dine so well at our own table, [our landlady looked radiant,] and the company is so pleasant [a rustling movement of satisfaction among the boarders]; but if I did partake of a man's salt, with such additions as that article of food requires to make it palatable, I could never abuse him, and if I had to speak of him, I suppose I should hang my set of jingling epithets round him like a string of sleigh-bells. Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of us,-not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that its sharp corners get terribly rounded. I love truth as chiefest among the virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I would never be a critic, because I know I could not always tell it. I might write a criticism of a book that happened to please me; that is another matter.

-Listen, Benjamin Franklin! This is for you, and such others of tender age as you may tell it to.