Backlog Studies Part 7

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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sions, 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 ill.u.s.tration. 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 a.s.sembly and propose three cheers for Socrates, and see where you'll be. Mandeville ought to be a missionary, and read Robert Browning to the Fijis.

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 cla.s.s. 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 coa.r.s.e 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 d.i.c.kens, 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 pa.s.sing 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.

SIXTH STUDY

I

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 Jehoiakim--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 pa.s.sionately 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 va.s.sal of the Chaldean or of the Egyptian. To us, this is only a ghostly show of monarchs and conquerors stalking across vast historic s.p.a.ces. 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 gla.s.s, illumines the many-hued flowers. I wonder what Jehoiakim did with the mealy-bug on his pa.s.sion-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 subst.i.tute 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.

II

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 Th.o.r.eau or Emerson, is the Vedas. I believe the Rig-Veda is read at the breakfast-table instead of the Boston journals.