The Atlantic Monthly Part 17

All things being at last arranged, the Rhapsodist took his leave for the present, going, as he informed me, on an errand of mercy for his stomach. The magazine aboard ship being of dubious character, he had prevailed on himself to supply his concern with a limited number of first-cla.s.s cereals with his own _imprimatur_,--copyright and profits to be in his own hands. As some consolation for his absence, I was favored with a brief oral treatise on Fats, considered both dietetically and ethically, with an appendix, somewhat _a la_ Liebig, on the nature, use, and effects of tissue-making and heat-making food, nitrogen, carbon, and the like. By way of improvement, a brilliant peroration was added, supposed to be addressed through me to the mothers of America, urging them to bring up the rising generation fatless. Thus only might war cease, justice prevail, love reign, humanity rise, and a golden age come back again to a world-wide Arcadia. Fat and Anti-Fat! Eros and Anteros, Strophe and Antistrophe. Or, better, the old primeval tale,--Jove and the t.i.tans, Theseus and the Centaurs, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, Thor and the Giants, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Good and Evil, Water and Fire, Light and Darkness. The world has told it over from the beginning.

And do you ask what manner of man was the Fatless one? You shall see him. His most striking feature was a fur cap,--weight some four pounds, I should judge. I think he was born with this cap, and will die with it, for 90 Fahrenheit seemed no temptation to uncover. Boots came second in rank, but twelfth or so in number,--weight probably on a par with the leaded brogans of the little wind-driven poetaster of old. Between these two extremes might be found about five feet ten of humanity, lank, sapless, and stooping. The seedy drapery of the figure hung in lean, reproachful wrinkles. The flabby trousers seemed to say: "Give! give!"

The hollow waistcoat murmured: "Pad, oh! pad me with hot biscuits!" The loose coat swung and sighed for forbidden fruit: "Fill me with fat!" A dry, coppery face found pointed expression in the nose, which hung like a rigid sentinel over the thin-lipped mouth,--like Victor Hugo's Javert, loyal, untiring, merciless. No traitorous comfits ever pa.s.sed that guard; no death-laden bark sailed by that sleepless quarantine. The small ferret-eyes which looked nervously out from under bushy brows, roaming, but never resting, were of the true Minerva tint,--yellow-green. The encircling rings told of unsettled weather.

While elf-locks and straggling whiskers marked the man careless of forms, the narrow, knotted brow suggested the thinker persistent in the one idea:--

"deep on his front engraven, Deliberation sat and _peptic_ care."

Not over beds of roses had he walked to ascend the heights. Those boots in which he shambled along his martyr-course were filled with peas. He had learned in suffering what he taught in sing-song. The wreath of wormwood was his, and the statue of bra.s.s. _Io triumphe!_

His gait was a swift, uncertain shuffle, a compromise between a saunter and a dog-trot. The arms hung straight and stiff from the narrow shoulders, like the radii of a governor, diverging more or less according to the rate of speed. When the scourge of his Daemon lashed him along furiously, they stood fast at forty-five degrees. His eyes peered suspiciously around, as he lumbered on, watchful for the avenger of fat, who, perhaps, was even now at his heels. A slouch-hat, crowning hollow eyes and haggard beard, filled him with joy: it marked a bran-bread man and a brother. He smiled approvingly at a shrivelled form with hobbling gait; but from the fat and the rubicund he turned with severest frown.

They were fleshly sinners, insults to himself, corrupters of youth, gorged drones, law-breakers. He was ready to say, with the statesman of old: "What use can the state turn a man's body to, when all between the throat and the groin is taken up by the belly?" He had vowed eternal hostility to all such, and from the folds of his toga was continually shaking out war. He was of the race sung by the bard, who

"Quarrel with mince-pies, and disparage Their best and dearest friend, plum-porridge, Fat pig and goose itself oppose, And blaspheme custard through the nose."

Every chance-comer was instantaneously gauged as dyspeptic or eupeptic, friend or foe. On the march, Javert was on the alert, snuffing up the air, until some savory odor crossed his path, when he would shut himself up, like a snail within his sh.e.l.l. Yet he was not sleeping, for no t.i.tbit ever pa.s.sed the portals beneath. Perhaps, however, they were themselves trusty now, having made habit a second nature. I cannot imagine them watering at sight of any dainty.

I have heard it said that certain orders of beings are able to improvise or to interchange organs, just as need calls. Thus a polyp, if hard put to it, may shift what little brain and stomach happen to be in his possession. You may say that he carries his heart in his hand. He can take his stomach, and dump it down in brain-case or thorax, just as he fancies,--can organize viscera and victory anywhere, at any moment; and all works merrily. The Fatless was similar, yet different. His stomach changed not its local habitation, was never victorious; yet, from cap to boot, it was ubiquitous and despotic. Brain and heel alike felt themselves to be mere squatters on another's soil, and had a vague idea that the rightful lord might some day come to oust them, and build up a new capital in these far-away districts. Sometimes they went so far as to style themselves his proconsuls and lieutenants, but they were never suffered to do more than simply to register the decrees of the central power. Duspeptos was king only in name,--_roi faineant_. Gaster was the power behind the throne,--the Mayor of the Palace,--the great Grand-Vizier. Nought went merrily, for he ruled with a rod of iron.

Every day his strange freaks set the empire topsy-turvy. Every day there was growling and ill-feeling at his whimsical tyranny,--but nothing more. Secession was as impossible as in the day of Menenius Agrippa.

Looking at it another way, Gaster might be called the object-gla.s.s through which Duspeptos looked out upon the world,--a gla.s.s always bubbly, distorted, and cracked, generally filmy and smoky, never achromatic, and decidedly the worse for wear. I think that the world thus seen must have had a very odd look to him. His most fitting salutation to each fellow-peptic, as he crossed the field of vision, would have been the Chinese form of greeting: "How is your stomach? Have you eaten your rice?" or, perhaps, the Egyptian style: "How do you perspire?" With him, the peptic bond was the only real one; all others were shams. All sin was peptic in origin: Eve ate an apple which disagreed with her. The only satisfactory atonement, therefore, must be gastric. All reforms. .h.i.therto had profited nothing, because they had been either cerebral or cardiac. None had started squarely from Gaster, the true centre. Moral reform was better than intellectual, since the heart lay nearer than the head to the stomach. Phalansteries, Pantisocracies, Unitary Homes, Asylums, Houses of Refuge,--these were all mere makeshifts. The hope of the world lay in Hygeian Inst.i.tutes.

Heroes of heart and brain must bow before the hero of the stomach.

Judged by any right test of greatness, Graham was more a man than was Napoleon or John Howard. He that ruled his stomach was greater than he who took a city. Beranger's Roi d'Yvetot, who ate four meals a day,--the Esquimaux, with his daily twenty-pound quantum of train-oil, gravy, and tallow-candles,--the alderman puffing over callipash and callipee,--the backwoodsman hungering after fattest of pork,--such men as these were no common sinners: they were a.s.sa.s.sins who struck at the very fountain of life, and throttled a human stomach. Pancreatic meant pancreative.

Gastric juice was the long-sought elixir. The liver was the lever of the higher life. Along the biliary duct led the road to glory. All the essence of character, life, power, virtue, success, and their opposites,--all the decrees of Fate even,--were daily concocted by curious chemistry within that dark laboratory lying between the oesophagus and the portal vein. There were brewed the reeking ingredients that fertilize the fungus of Crime; there was made to bloom the bright star-flower of Innocence; there was forged the anchor of Hope; there were twisted the threads of the rotten cable of Despair; there Faith built her cross; there Love vivified the heart, and Hate dyed it; there Remorse sharpened his tooth; there Jealousy tinged his eye with emerald; there was quarried the horse-block from which dark Care leaped into the saddle behind the rider; there were puffed out the smoke-wreaths of Doubt; there were blown the bubbles of Phantasy; there sprouted the seeds of Madness; and there, down in the icy vaults, Death froze his finger for the last, cold touch.

IV.--HARMONICS.

Ah! but the card? you ask. Yes, here it is.

-------------------------------- | | | NAPHTALI RINK, | | 51 Early Avenue. | | (At the Hygienic Inst.i.tute.) | | | --------------------------------

Of course, this is only in miniature, and represents every way but a very small part of the doc.u.ment, the address being but a drop in the superscriptive surge,--a rivulet of text meandering through a meadow of marginalia. Inasmuch as Duspeptos courted the widest publicity for these stomachic sc.r.a.ps, no scruples of delicacy forbid me to jot down here some few of them. He thought them fitted for the race,--the more readers the better: perhaps it may be, the more the merrier. If called upon to cla.s.sify them, I should put them all under the genus Gastric Scholia. The different species and varieties it is hardly worth while to enter upon here. There were intuitions, recollections, and glosses, apparently set down in a fragmentary way from time to time, in a most minute and distinct text. Very probably they were hints of thoughts designed to be worked up in a more formal way. Whether the quotations were taken at first or second hand I cannot say; but internal evidence would seem to indicate that many of them might have been clippings from the columns of "The Old Lancaster Day-Book." It is, perhaps, worthy of note that Mr. Rink was, in fact, a man of rather more thought and general information than one might suppose, if judging him merely by his uncouth grammar, and the clipped coin of his jangling speech:--

"His voice was nasal with the tw.a.n.g That spoiled the hymns when Cromwell's army sang."

Now, then, O reader, returning from this feast of fat things, I lay before you the sc.r.a.ps.

"Character is Digestion."

"There's been a good deal of high-fangled nonsense written about genius.

One man says it's in the head; another, that it comes from the heart, etc., etc. The fact is, they're all wrong. Genius lies in the stomach.

Who ever knew a fat genius? Now there's De Quincey,--he says, in his outlandish way, that genius is the synthesis of the intellect with the moral nature. No such thing; and a man who sinned day and night against his stomach, and swilled opium as he did, couldn't be expected to know.

If there's any synthesis at all about it, it's the synthesis of the stomach with the liver."

"What a complete knowledge of human nature Sam Slick shows, when he says, 'A bilious cheek and a sour temper are like the Siamese twins: there's a nateral cord of union atween them. The one is a sign with the name of the firm written on it in long letters.'"

"The French are a mighty cute people. They know a thing or two about as well as the next man. There's a heap of truth and poetry in these maxims of one of their writers: 'Indigestion is the remorse of a guilty stomach'; 'Happiness consists in a hard heart and a good digestion.'"

"The old tempter--the original Jacobs--was called in Hebrew a _nachash_, so I'm told. But folks don't seem to understand exactly what this _nachash_ was. Some say it was a rattlesnake, some a straddle-bug. Old Dr. Adam Clarke, I've heard, vowed it was a monkey. They're all out of their reckoning. It's as plain as a pikestaff that it was nothing but Fried Fat cooked up to order, and it's been a-tempting weak sisters ever since. That's what's the matter."

"Let me make the bran-bread of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

"It makes me master-sick to hear all these fellows who've just made out to sc.r.a.pe together a few postage-stamps laying down their three-cent notions about the way to get on in the world, the rules for success, and all that. Just as if a couple of greenbacks could make a blind man see clean through a millstone! They're like these old nursing grannies: No.

1 thinks catnip is the only thing; No. 2 believes there's nothing like sage-tea and mustard-poultice; No. 3 swears by burdock. The truth is,--and men might as well own up to it first as last,--success depends on bile."

"Shakspeare was a man who was pretty well posted in human nature all round,--knew the kitchen about as well as the parlor. He knocks on the head the sin of stuffing, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' where he speaks of the man that 'dies with feeding his own stomach.' In 'Timon of Athens' there's a chap who 'greases his pure mind,' probably with fried sausages, gravy, and such like trash. The fellow in 'Macbeth' who has 'eaten of the insane root' was meant, I calculate, as a hard rap on tobacco-chewers (and smokers too); he called it _root_, instead of _leaf_, just to cover up his tracks. What a splendid thought that is in 'Love's Labor's Lost': 'Fat paunches have lean pates'! Everybody knows how Julius Caesar turned up his nose at fat men. The poet never could stand frying; he calls it, in 'Macbeth,' 'the young fry of treachery.'

Probably he'd had more taste of the traitor than was good for him. Has a good slap somewhere on the critter that 'devours up all the fry it finds.' I reckon that Shakspeare always set a proper valuation on human digestion; 'cause when he speaks of a man with a good stomach,--an excellent stomach,--he always has a good word for him, and kind of strokes down his fur the right way of the grain; but he comes down dreadful strong on the lout that has no stomach, as he calls it. In 'Henry IV.,' he says, 'the cook helps to make the gluttony.' I estimate that that one sentence alone, if he'd never writ another word, would have made him immortal. If I had my way, I'd have it printed in gold letters a foot long, and sot up before every cook-stove in the land. But just see what a man he was! This very same play that tells the disease prescribes the cure, that is, 'the remainder-biscuit,'--a knock-down proof to any man with a knowledge-box that Graham-bread was known and appreciated in those days, and that Shakspeare himself had cut his own eye-teeth on it."

"A broken heart is only another name for an everlasting indigestion."

"History is merely a record of indigestions,--a calendar of the foremost stomachs of the age. The destinies of nations hang on the bowels of princes. Internal wars come from intestine rebellion. The rising within is father to the insurrection without. The fountain of a national crisis is always found under the waistcoat of one man. There's Napoleon I.,--what settled him for good was just that greasy mutton-chop stewed up in onions, which he took for his grub at Leipsic. If he'd only ordered a couple of slices of dry Graham-toast, with a cup of weak black tea, he'd have saved his stomach, and whipped 'em, sure; and matters and things in Europe would have had a different look all round ever since."

"Emerson is a man who once in a while gets a little inkling of the truth. I see he says that the creed lies in the biliary duct. That's good orthodox doctrine, I don't care who says it."

"Buckwheat-cakes are now leading us back to barbarism faster than the printing-press ever carried us forward towards civilization."

"Temperament means nothing more nor less than just quant.i.ty and quality of bile. That old sawbones, Hippocrates, came mighty near hitting the nail square on the head more 'n two thousand year ago, but he felt kind of uncertain, and didn't exactly know what he was driving at. The old heathen made out just four humors, as he called 'em,--the sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. If he'd only made one step more on to the other side of the fence, he'd have cracked the nut, and picked the kernel, certain. Those four different humors are only four different ways of modifying bile with fat."

"Every man is dyspeptic. Tell me his dyspepsy, and I'll tell you what he is."

"In sick-headache, a heaping tablespoonful each of salt and common mustard, stirred into a pint of hot water, and drank without breathing, will generally produce an immediate effect. (_Mem._ But Graham-biscuit is better in the long run.)"

"Society is the meeting of a gang of incurables, who come together to talk over their dyspepsies. And everybody takes his turn in furnishing fodder to keep the thing going hot-foot."

"Professor Bache says sea-sickness comes from the head, 'cause a man gets dizzy in trying to get used to the teetering of the ship. All nonsense. The Professor may be posted in the survey of the coast, but he don't know the lay of the land in the interior. Sea-sickness comes from the stomach: just offer a man a mouthful of fried salt pork."

"It's stated that some old bookworm of a Dutchman, with a jaw-breaking name that I can't recollect, has an idea, that, 'if we could penetrate into the secret foundations of human events, we should frequently find the misfortunes of one man caused by the intestines of another.' There's not the least doubt of it,--true of one man or a million."

"Fate is Fat: Fat is Fate."

V.--NOCTURNE.

Romanza (_affettuoso_).

The Choral Gamut (_con espressione_).

Was that seething sun never again to plunge his lurid face beneath the waves of old Ocean? Had some latter-day Joshua arisen, and with stern fiat nailed him in mid-heavens, blazing forever? To me as slowly rolled the westering orb down that final slope as ever turned the wheel of Fortune to Murad the Unlucky. Perchance the sun-G.o.d had turned cook, and now, burning with 'prentice zeal, and scoffing at Duspeptos and all sound hygiene, was aiming to make of this terrestrial ball one illimitable fry turned over and well done,--a fry ever doing and never done, which should simmer and fizzle on eternally down the ages. An abstract fry--let me here record it--suits me pa.s.sing well; yet I like not the concrete and personal broil. I trip gayly to a feast, prepared to eat, but not, as in the supper of Polonius, to be eaten. I have very little of the martyr-stuff about me. It is well, it is glorious, to read of those fine things; but does any man relish the application of the _Hoc age_? To beatified Lawrence I gladly pay meet tribute of tears and praise. Let the luckless one ask of me no more; let him call only upon the succulent; let him recruit among the full ranks of the adipose. Be it mine to lay these spare-ribs athwart no gridiron more fervid than the pavement of his own monumental Escurial. _Suum cuique._

So, albeit in a melting mood, I gazed listlessly upon the brazen firmament, with no fellow-feeling for those hot culinary bars. The broiling glow was not at all tempting: I think it would have staggered even the gay salamander that is said to accept so thoroughly the gospel of caloric. And what was the Markerstown without the Great Captain? What was the Victory with no Nelson? Hence, like the patriarch, I went out to meditate at the eventide. But, alack! there were no camels, no Rebekah, no comfort. Even in subterranean grots there was nothing drawn but Tropic's x.x.x. Every water-c.o.c.k let on a geyser. But by-and-by Apollo Archimagirus, wearying of gastronomy, stayed his hand, moistened the fierce flames, jerked the half-fried earth out into free s.p.a.ce, pocketed his stew-pan, and flung himself supperless to bed. No more, for the nonce at least, should that new Lycidas--the cosmical gridiron--flame in the forehead of the evening sky. Anon came twilight, dusk, darkness, and all the pleasant charities of deep night. Behind the veil of night are sometimes done evil deeds. The snail has been known to start before his time. Laying down these general postulates, I drew therefrom, late in the sultry gloom, this particular inference: Caesar's shallop might possibly breast the deep before dawn; and if Caesar was not on hand, she would carry his fortunes, but not him. Forthwith, groping through the obscurity, I found my fears without foundation. The shallop was quiescent in a remarkable degree, and thoroughly tethered.

Deep darkness reigned throughout the little kingdom. Silence brooded over all, save now and then when some vocal nose, informed by murky visions of the night, brayed out its stertorous tale to the unheeding air. At times a shrill, sharp pipe, screaming with gusts of horror, split my unexpectant ear. With this wrangled fitfully the cracked clarionet of some peevish brother. Ever and anon some vast nostril, punctually thundering, hurled forth the relentless growl of the ba.s.soon,--a very mountain of sound, which crushed all before it, and made the shuddering timbers crack and reel. A pensive flute vainly poured, in swift recurring gushes, its rhythmic oil upon the roaring billows. From some melodious swain came a freakish fiddling, which leaped and danced like mad, now here, now there, like an audible will-o'-the-wisp. A dolorous whistle chimed harmonies, and with regular sibilation came to time, quavering out the chromatic moments of this nasal hour. High over all floated a faint whisper,--a song-cloud rising from the dream-mist of a peaceful breast,--a revelation timidly exhaled to the disembodied spirits of the air. Its hazy lullaby breathed down as from distant heights, and murmured of celestial rest. Its soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.

Save this feeling symphony, all was still. No light shone upon the tuneful beaks. Like Theseus, I picked my way along, guided by an Ariadne's thread. My Ariadne was a slumbering orchestra deftly spinning out a thick proboscis-chord of such stuff as dreams are made of. Taking this web in my ear, I safely traversed the labyrinth, and meandered at last into pen No. 1. In placing my foot on the edge of the under-world crib, I unwittingly pressed some secret spring which straight swung wide the portals of a precipitate dawn.

VI.--THE PEPTIC SYMPHONY.