The Poet at the Breakfast-Table Part 17

It is very curious to see how science, that is, looking at and arranging the facts of a case with our own eyes and our own intelligence, without minding what somebody else has said, or how some old majority vote went in a pack of intriguing ecclesiastics,--I say it is very curious to see how science is catching up with one superst.i.tion after another.

There is a recognized branch of science familiar to all those who know anything of the studies relating to life, under the name of Teratology.

It deals with all sorts of monstrosities which are to be met with in living beings, and more especially in animals. It is found that what used to be called lusus naturae, or freaks of nature, are just as much subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of living creatures.

The rustic looks at the Siamese twins, and thinks he is contemplating an unheard-of anomaly; but there are plenty of cases like theirs in the books of scholars, and though they are not quite so common as double cherries, the mechanism of their formation is not a whit more mysterious than that of the twinned fruits. Such cases do not disturb the average arrangement; we have Changs and Engs at one pole, and Cains and Abels at the other. One child is born with six fingers on each hand, and another falls short by one or more fingers of his due allowance; but the glover puts his faith in the great law of averages, and makes his gloves with five fingers apiece, trusting nature for their counterparts.

Thinking people are not going to be scared out of explaining or at least trying to explain things by the shrieks of persons whose beliefs are disturbed thereby. Comets were portents to Increase Mather, President of Harvard College; "preachers of Divine wrath, heralds and messengers of evil tidings to the world." It is not so very long since Professor Winthrop was teaching at the same inst.i.tution. I can remember two of his boys very well, old boys, it is true, they were, and one of them wore a three-cornered c.o.c.ked hat; but the father of these boys, whom, as I say, I can remember, had to defend himself against the minister of the Old South Church for the impiety of trying to account for earthquakes on natural principles. And his ancestor, Governor Winthrop, would probably have shaken his head over his descendant's dangerous audacity, if one may judge by the solemn way in which he mentions poor Mrs. Hutchinson's unpleasant experience, which so grievously disappointed her maternal expectations. But people used always to be terribly frightened by those irregular vital products which we now call "interesting specimens" and carefully preserve in jars of alcohol. It took next to nothing to make a panic; a child was born a few centuries ago with six teeth in its head, and about that time the Turks began gaining great advantages over the Christians. Of course there was an intimate connection between the prodigy and the calamity. So said the wise men of that day.

--All these out-of-the-way cases are studied connectedly now, and are found to obey very exact rules. With a little management one can even manufacture living monstrosities. Malformed salmon and other fish can be supplied in quant.i.ty, if anybody happens to want them. Now, what all I have said is tending to is exactly this, namely, that just as the celestial movements are regulated by fixed laws, just as bodily monstrosities are produced according to rule, and with as good reason as normal shapes, so obliquities of character are to be accounted for on perfectly natural principles; they are just as capable of cla.s.sification as the bodily ones, and they all diverge from a certain average or middle term which is the type of its kind. If life had been a little longer I would have written a number of essays for which, as it is, I cannot expect to have time. I have set down the t.i.tles of a hundred or more, and I have often been tempted to publish these, for according to my idea, the t.i.tle of a book very often renders the rest of it unnecessary. "Moral Teratology," for instance, which is marked No. 67 on my list of "Essays Potential, not Actual," suggests sufficiently well what I should be like to say in the pages it would preface. People hold up their hands at a moral monster as if there was no reason for his existence but his own choice. That was a fine specimen we read of in the papers a few years ago, the Frenchman, it may be remembered, who used to waylay and murder young women, and after appropriating their effects, bury their bodies in a private cemetery he kept for that purpose. It is very natural, and I do not say it is not very proper, to hang such eccentric persons as this; but it is not clear whether his vagaries produce any more sensation at Headquarters than the meek enterprises of the mildest of city missionaries. For the study of Moral Teratology will teach you that you do not get such a malformed character as that without a long chain of causes to account for it; and if you only knew those causes, you would know perfectly well what to expect.

You may feel pretty sure that our friend of the private cemetery was not the child of pious and intelligent parents; that he was not nurtured by the best of mothers, and educated by the most judicious teachers; and that he did not come of a lineage long known and honored for its intellectual and moral qualities. Suppose that one should go to the worst quarter of the city and pick out the worst-looking child of the worst couple he could find, and then train him up successively at the School for Infant Rogues, the Academy for Young Scamps, and the College for Complete Criminal Education, would it be reasonable to expect a Francois Xavier or a Henry Martyn to be the result of such a training?

The traditionists, in whose presumptuous hands the science of anthropology has been trusted from time immemorial, have insisted on eliminating cause and effect from the domain of morals. When they have come across a moral monster they have seemed to think that he put himself together, having a free choice of all the const.i.tuents which make up manhood, and that consequently no punishment could be too bad for him.

I say, hang him and welcome, if that is the best thing for society; hate him, in a certain sense, as you hate a rattlesnake, but, if you pretend to be a philosopher, recognize the fact that what you hate in him is chiefly misfortune, and that if you had been born with his villanous low forehead and poisoned instincts, and bred among creatures of the Races Maudites whose natural history has to be studied like that of beasts of prey and vermin, you would not have been sitting there in your gold-bowed spectacles and pa.s.sing judgment on the peccadilloes of your fellow-creatures.

I have seen men and women so disinterested and n.o.ble, and devoted to the best works, that it appeared to me if any good and faithful servant was ent.i.tled to enter into the joys of his Lord, such as these might be.

But I do not know that I ever met with a human being who seemed to me to have a stronger claim on the pitying consideration and kindness of his Maker than a wretched, puny, crippled, stunted child that I saw in Newgate, who was pointed out as one of the most notorious and inveterate little thieves in London. I have no doubt that some of those who were looking at this pitiable morbid secretion of the diseased social organism thought they were very virtuous for hating him so heartily.

It is natural, and in one sense is all right enough. I want to catch a thief and put the extinguisher on an incendiary as much as my neighbors do; but I have two sides to my consciousness as I have two sides to my heart, one carrying dark, impure blood, and the other the bright stream which has been purified and vivified by the great source of life and death,--the oxygen of the air which gives all things their vital heat, and burns all things at last to ashes.

One side of me loves and hates; the other side of me judges, say rather pleads and suspends judgment. I think, if I were left to myself, I should hang a rogue and then write his apology and subscribe to a neat monument, commemorating, not his virtues, but his misfortunes. I should, perhaps, adorn the marble with emblems, as is the custom with regard to the more regular and normally const.i.tuted members of society. It would not be proper to put the image of a lamb upon the stone which marked the resting-place of him of the private cemetery. But I would not hesitate to place the effigy of a wolf or a hyena upon the monument. I do not judge these animals, I only kill them or shut them up. I presume they stand just as well with their Maker as lambs and kids, and the existence of such beings is a perpetual plea for G.o.d Almighty's poor, yelling, scalping Indians, his weasand-stopping Thugs, his despised felons, his murdering miscreants, and all the unfortunates whom we, picked individuals of a picked cla.s.s of a picked race, scrubbed, combed, and catechized from our cradles upward, undertake to find accommodations for in another state of being where it is to be hoped they will have a better chance than they had in this.

The Master paused, and took off his great round spectacles. I could not help thinking that he looked benevolent enough to pardon Judas Iscariot just at that moment, though his features can knot themselves up pretty, formidably on occasion.

--You are somewhat of a phrenologist, I judge, by the way you talk of instinctive and inherited tendencies--I said.

--They tell me I ought to be,--he answered, parrying my question, as I thought.--I have had a famous chart made out of my cerebral organs, according to which I ought to have been--something more than a poor Magister Artaum.

--I thought a shade of regret deepened the lines on his broad, antique-looking forehead, and I began talking about all the sights I had seen in the way of monstrosities, of which I had a considerable list, as you will see when I tell you my weakness in that direction. This, you understand, Beloved, is private and confidential.

I pay my quarter of a dollar and go into all the side-shows that follow the caravans and circuses round the country. I have made friends of all the giants and all the dwarfs. I became acquainted with Monsieur Bihin, le plus bel homme du monde, and one of the biggest, a great many years ago, and have kept up my agreeable relations with him ever since. He is a most interesting giant, with a softness of voice and tenderness of feeling which I find very engaging. I was on friendly terms with Mr.

Charles Freeman, a very superior giant of American birth, seven feet four, I think, in height, "double-jointed," of mylodon muscularity, the same who in a British prize-ring tossed the Tipton Slasher from one side of the rope to the other, and now lies stretched, poor fellow! in a mighty grave in the same soil which holds the sacred ashes of Cribb, and the honored dust of Burke,--not the one "commonly called the sublime,"

but that other Burke to whom Nature had denied the sense of hearing lest he should be spoiled by listening to the praises of the admiring circles which looked on his dear-bought triumphs. Nor have I despised those little ones whom that devout worshipper of Nature in her exceptional forms, the distinguished Barnum, has introduced to the notice of mankind. The General touches his chapeau to me, and the Commodore gives me a sailor's greeting. I have had confidential interviews with the double-headed daughter of Africa,--so far, at least, as her twofold personality admitted of private confidences. I have listened to the touching experiences of the Bearded Lady, whose rough cheeks belie her susceptible heart. Miss Jane Campbell has allowed me to question her on the delicate subject of avoirdupois equivalents; and the armless fair one, whose embrace no monarch could hope to win, has wrought me a watch-paper with those despised digits which have been degraded from gloves to boots in our evolution from the condition of quadrumana.

I hope you have read my experiences as good-naturedly as the old Master listened to them. He seemed to be pleased with my whim, and promised to go with me to see all the side-shows of the next caravan. Before I left him he wrote my name in a copy of the new edition of his book, telling me that it would not all be new to me by a great deal, for he often talked what he had printed to make up for having printed a good deal of what he had talked.

Here is the pa.s.sage of his Poem the Young Astronomer read to us.

WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

IV

From my lone turret as I look around O'er the green meadows to the ring of blue, From slope, from summit, and from half-hid vale The sky is stabbed with dagger-pointed spires, Their gilded symbols whirling in the wind, Their brazen tongues proclaiming to the world, Here truth is sold, the only genuine ware; See that it has our trade-mark!

You will buy Poison instead of food across the way, The lies of--this or that, each several name The standard's blazon and the battle-cry Of some true-gospel faction, and again The token of the Beast to all beside.

And grouped round each I see a huddling crowd Alike in all things save the words they use; In love, in longing, hate and fear the same.

Whom do we trust and serve? We speak of one And bow to many; Athens still would find The shrines of all she worshipped safe within Our tall barbarian temples, and the thrones That crowned Olympus mighty as of old.

The G.o.d of music rules the Sabbath choir; The lyric muse must leave the sacred nine To help us please the dilettante's ear; Plutus limps homeward with us, as we leave The portals of the temple where we knelt And listened while the G.o.d of eloquence (Hermes of ancient days, but now disguised In sable vestments) with that other G.o.d Somnus, the son of Erebus and Nog, Fights in unequal contest for our souls; The dreadful sovereign of the under world Still shakes his sceptre at us, and we hear The baying of the triple-throated hound; Eros-is young as ever, and as fair The lovely G.o.ddess born of ocean's foam.

These be thy G.o.ds, O Israel! Who is he, The one ye name and tell us that ye serve, Whom ye would call me from my lonely tower To worship with the many-headed throng?

Is it the G.o.d that walked in Eden's grove In the cool hour to seek our guilty sire?

The G.o.d who dealt with Abraham as the sons Of that old patriarch deal with other men?

The jealous G.o.d of Moses, one who feels An image as an insult, and is wroth With him who made it and his child unborn?

The G.o.d who plagued his people for the sin Of their adulterous king, beloved of him, The same who offers to a chosen few The right to praise him in eternal song While a vast shrieking world of endless woe Blends its dread chorus with their rapturous hymn?

Is this the G.o.d ye mean, or is it he Who heeds the sparrow's fall, whose loving heart Is as the pitying father's to his child, Whose lesson to his children is, "Forgive,"

Whose plea for all, "They know not what they do"

I claim the right of knowing whom I serve, Else is my service idle; He that asks My homage asks it from a reasoning soul.

To crawl is not to worship; we have learned A drill of eyelids, bended neck and knee, Hanging our prayers on binges, till we ape The flexures of the many-jointed worm.

Asia has taught her Aliabs and salaams To the world's children,--we have grown to men!

We who have rolled the sphere beneath our feet To find a virgin forest, as we lay The beams of our rude temple, first of all Must frame its doorway high enough for man To pa.s.s unstooping; knowing as we do That He who shaped us last of living forms Has long enough been served by creeping things, Reptiles that left their foot-prints in the sand Of old sea-margins that have turned to stone, And men who learned their ritual; we demand To know him first, then trust him and then love When we have found him worthy of our love, Tried by our own poor hearts and not before; He must be truer than the truest friend, He must be tenderer than a woman's love, A father better than the best of sires; Kinder than she who bore us, though we sin Oftener than did the brother we are told, We-poor ill-tempered mortals-must forgive, Though seven times sinning threescore times and ten.

This is the new world's gospel: Be ye men!

Try well the legends of the children's time; Ye are the chosen people, G.o.d has led Your steps across the desert of the deep As now across the desert of the sh.o.r.e; Mountains are cleft before you as the sea Before the wandering tribe of Israel's sons; Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan, Its coming printed on the western sky, A cloud by day, by night a pillared flame; Your prophets are a hundred unto one Of them of old who cried, "Thus saith the Lord"; They told of cities that should fall in heaps, But yours of mightier cities that shall rise Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets, Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl; The tree of knowledge in your garden grows Not single, but at every humble door; Its branches lend you their immortal food, That fills you with the sense of what ye are, No servants of an altar hewed and carved From senseless stone by craft of human hands, Rabbi, or dervish, Brahmin, bishop, bonze, But masters of the charm with which they work To keep your hands from that forbidden tree!

Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit, Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!

Ye are as G.o.ds! Nay, makers of your G.o.ds, Each day ye break an image in your shrine And plant a fairer image where it stood Where is the Moloch of your fathers' creed, Whose fires of torment burned for span-long babes?

Fit object for a tender mother's love!

Why not? It was a bargain duly made For these same infants through the surety's act Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven, By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well His fitness for the task,--this, even this, Was the true doctrine only yesterday As thoughts are reckoned,--and to-day you hear In words that sound as if from human tongues Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth As would the saurians of the age of slime, Awaking from their stony sepulchres And wallowing hateful in the eye of day!

Four of us listened to these lines as the young man read them,--the Master and myself and our two ladies. This was the little party we got up to hear him read. I do not think much of it was very new to the Master or myself. At any rate, he said to me when we were alone, That is the kind of talk the "natural man," as the theologians call him, is apt to fall into.

--I thought it was the Apostle Paul, and not the theologians, that used the term "natural man", I ventured to suggest.

--I should like to know where the Apostle Paul learned English?--said the Master, with the look of one who does not mean to be tripped up if he can help himself.--But at any rate,--he continued,--the "natural man," so called, is worth listening to now and then, for he didn't make his nature, and the Devil did n't make it; and if the Almighty made it, I never saw or heard of anything he made that wasn't worth attending to.

The young man begged the Lady to pardon anything that might sound harshly in these crude thoughts of his. He had been taught strange things, he said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had thought his way out of many of his early superst.i.tions. As for the Young Girl, our Scheherezade, he said to her that she must have got dreadfully tired (at which she colored up and said it was no such thing), and he promised that, to pay for her goodness in listening, he would give her a lesson in astronomy the next fair evening, if she would be his scholar, at which she blushed deeper than before, and said something which certainly was not No.

IX

There was no sooner a vacancy on our side of the table, than the Master proposed a change of seats which would bring the Young Astronomer into our immediate neighborhood. The Scarabee was to move into the place of our late unlamented a.s.sociate, the Man of Letters, so called. I was to take his place, the Master to take mine, and the young man that which had been occupied by the Master. The advantages of this change were obvious. The old Master likes an audience, plainly enough; and with myself on one side of him, and the young student of science, whose speculative turn is sufficiently shown in the pa.s.sages from his poem, on the other side, he may feel quite sure of being listened to. There is only one trouble in the arrangement, and that is that it brings this young man not only close to us, but also next to our Scheherezade.

I am obliged to confess that he has shown occasional marks of inattention even while the Master was discoursing in a way that I found agreeable enough. I am quite sure it is no intentional disrespect to the old Master. It seems to me rather that he has become interested in the astronomical lessons he has been giving the Young Girl. He has studied so much alone, that it is naturally a pleasure to him to impart some of his knowledge. As for his young pupil, she has often thought of being a teacher herself, so that she is of course very glad to acquire any accomplishment that may be useful to her in that capacity. I do not see any reason why some of the boarders should have made such remarks as they have done. One cannot teach astronomy to advantage, without going out of doors, though I confess that when two young people go out by daylight to study the stars, as these young folks have done once or twice, I do not so much wonder at a remark or suggestion from those who have nothing better to do than study their neighbors.

I ought to have told the reader before this that I found, as I suspected, that our innocent-looking Scheherezade was at the bottom of the popgun business. I watched her very closely, and one day, when the little monkey made us all laugh by stopping the Member of the Haouse in the middle of a speech he was repeating to us,--it was his great effort of the season on a bill for the protection of horn-pout in Little Muddy River,--I caught her making the signs that set him going. At a slight tap of her knife against her plate, he got all ready, and presently I saw her cross her knife and fork upon her plate, and as she did so, pop!

went the small piece of artillery. The Member of the Haouse was just saying that this bill hit his const.i.tooents in their most vital--when a pellet hit him in the feature of his countenance most exposed to aggressions and least tolerant of liberties. The Member resented this unparliamentary treatment by jumping up from his chair and giving the small aggressor a good shaking, at the same time seizing the implement which had caused his wrath and breaking it into splinters. The Boy blubbered, the Young Girl changed color, and looked as if she would cry, and that was the last of these interruptions.

I must own that I have sometimes wished we had the popgun back, for it answered all the purpose of "the previous question" in a deliberative a.s.sembly. No doubt the Young Girl was capricious in setting the little engine at work, but she cut short a good many disquisitions that threatened to be tedious. I find myself often wishing for her and her small fellow-conspirator's intervention, in company where I am supposed to be enjoying myself. When my friend the politician gets too far into the personal details of the quorum pars magna fui, I find myself all at once exclaiming in mental articulation, Popgun! When my friend the story-teller begins that protracted narrative which has often emptied me of all my voluntary laughter for the evening, he has got but a very little way when I say to myself, What wouldn't I give for a pellet from that popgun! In short, so useful has that trivial implement proved as a jaw-stopper and a boricide, that I never go to a club or a dinner-party, without wishing the company included our Scheherezade and That Boy with his popgun.

How clearly I see now into the mechanism of the Young Girl's audacious contrivance for regulating our table-talk! Her brain is tired half the time, and she is too nervous to listen patiently to what a quieter person would like well enough, or at least would not be annoyed by. It amused her to invent a scheme for managing the headstrong talkers, and also let off a certain spirit of mischief which in some of these nervous girls shows itself in much more questionable forms. How cunning these half-hysteric young persons are, to be sure! I had to watch a long time before I detected the telegraphic communication between the two conspirators. I have no doubt she had sedulously schooled the little monkey to his business, and found great delight in the task of instruction.

But now that our Scheherezade has become a scholar instead of a teacher, she seems to be undergoing a remarkable transformation. Astronomy is indeed a n.o.ble science. It may well kindle the enthusiasm of a youthful nature. I fancy at times that I see something of that starry light which I noticed in the young man's eyes gradually kindling in hers. But can it be astronomy alone that does it? Her color comes and goes more readily than when the old Master sat next her on the left. It is having this young man at her side, I suppose. Of course it is. I watch her with great, I may say tender interest. If he would only fall in love with her, seize upon her wandering affections and fancies as the Romans seized the Sabine virgins, lift her out of herself and her listless and weary drudgeries, stop the outflow of this young life which is draining itself away in forced literary labor--dear me, dear me--if, if, if--

"If I were G.o.d An' ye were Martin Elginbrod!"

I am afraid all this may never be. I fear that he is too much given to lonely study, to self-companionship, to all sorts of questionings, to looking at life as at a solemn show where he is only a spectator. I dare not build up a romance on what I have yet seen. My reader may, but I will answer for nothing. I shall wait and see.