Mr. Zebedee Marvyn, the father of James, was the sample of an individuality so purely the result of New England society and education, that he must be embodied in our story as a representative man of the times.
He owned a large farm in the immediate vicinity of Newport, which he worked with his own hands and kept under the most careful cultivation. He was a man past the middle of life, with a white head, a keen blue eye, and a face graven deeply with the lines of energy and thought. His was one of those clearly-cut minds which New England forms among her farmers, as she forms quartz crystals in her mountains, by a sort of gradual influence flowing through every pore of her soil and system.
His education, properly so called, had been merely that of those common schools and academies with which the States are thickly sown, and which are the springs of so much intellectual activity. Here he had learned to think and to inquire,–a process which had not ceased with his school-days. Though toiling daily with his sons and hired man in all the minutiae of a farmer’s life, he kept an observant eye on the field of literature, and there was not a new publication heard of that he did not immediately find means to add it to his yearly increasing stock of books. In particular was he a well-read and careful theologian, and all the controversial tracts, sermons, and books, with which then, as ever since, New England has abounded, not only lay on his shelves, but had his pencilled annotations, queries, and comments thickly scattered along their margins. There was scarce an office of public trust which had not at one time or another been filled by him. He was deacon of the church, chairman of the school-committee, justice of the peace, had been twice representative in the State legislature, and was in permanence a sort of adviser-general in all cases between neighbor and neighbor. Among other acquisitions, he had gained some knowledge of the general forms of law, and his advice was often asked in preference to that of the regular practitioners.
His dwelling was one of those large, square, white, green-blinded mansions, cool, clean, and roomy, wherein the respectability of New England in those days rejoiced. The windows were shaded by clumps of lilacs; the deep yard with its white fence inclosed a sweep of clean, short grass, and a few fruit-trees. Opposite the house was a small blacksmith’s-shed, which, of a wet day, was sparkling and lively with bellows and ringing forge, while Mr. Zebedee and his sons were hammering and pounding and putting in order anything that was out of the way in farming-tools or establishments. Not unfrequently the latest scientific work or the last tractate of theology lay open by his side, the contents of which would be discussed with a neighbor or two as they entered; for, to say the truth, many a neighbor, less forehanded and thrifty, felt the benefit of this arrangement of Mr. Zebedee, and would drop in to see if he “wouldn’t just tighten that rivet,” or “kind o’ ease out that ‘ere brace,” or “let a feller have a turn with his bellows, or a stroke or two on his anvil,”–to all which the good man consented with a grave obligingness. The fact was, that, as nothing in the establishment of Mr. Marvyn was often broken or lost or out of place, he had frequent applications to lend to those less fortunate persons, always to be found, who supply their own lack of considerateness from the abundance of their neighbors.
He who is known always to be in hand, and always obliging, in a neighborhood, stands the chance sometimes of having nothing for himself. Mr. Zebedee reflected quietly on this subject, taking it, as he did all others, into grave and orderly consideration, and finally provided a complete set of tools, which he kept for the purpose of lending; and when any of these were lent, he told the next applicant quietly, that the axe or the hoe was already out, and thus he reconciled the Scripture which commanded him to “do good and lend” with that law of order which was written in his nature.
Early in life Mr. Marvyn had married one of the handsomest girls of his acquaintance, who had brought him a thriving and healthy family of children, of whom James was the youngest. Mrs. Marvyn was, at this time, a tall, sad-eyed, gentle-mannered woman, thoughtful, earnest, deep-natured, though sparing in the matter of words. In all her household arrangements, she had the same thrift and order which characterized her husband; but hers was a mind of a finer and higher stamp than his.
In her bed-room, near by her work-basket, stood a table covered with books,–and so systematic were her household arrangements, that she never any day missed her regular hours for reading. One who should have looked over this table would have seen there how eager and hungry a mind was hid behind the silent eyes of this quiet woman. History, biography, mathematics, volumes of the encyclopaedia, poetry, novels, all alike found their time and place there,–and while she pursued her household labors, the busy, active soul within travelled cycles and cycles of thought, few of which ever found expression in words. What might be that marvellous music of the _Miserere_, of which she read, that it convulsed crowds and drew groans and tears from the most obdurate? What might be those wondrous pictures of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci? What would it be to see the Apollo, the Venus? What was the charm that enchanted the old marbles,–charm untold and inconceivable to one who had never seen even the slightest approach to a work of art? Then those glaciers of Switzerland, that grand, unapproachable mixture of beauty and sublimity in her mountains!–what would it be to one who could see it? Then what were all those harmonies of which she read,–masses, fugues, symphonies? Oh, could she once hear the Miserere of Mozart, just to know what music was like! And the cathedrals, what were they? How wonderful they must be, with their forests of arches, many-colored as autumn-woods with painted glass, and the chants and anthems rolling down their long aisles! On all these things she pondered quietly, as she sat often on Sundays in the old staring, rattle-windowed meeting-house, and looked at the uncouth old pulpit, and heard the choir faw-sol-la-ing or singing fuguing tunes; but of all this she said nothing.
Sometimes, for days, her thoughts would turn from these subjects and be absorbed in mathematical or metaphysical studies. “I have been following that treatise on Optics for a week, and never understood it till to-day,” she once said to her husband. “I have found now that there has been a mistake in drawing the diagrams. I have corrected it, and now the demonstration is complete.–Dinah, take care, that wood is hickory, and it takes only seven sticks of that size to heat the oven.”
It is not to be supposed that a woman of this sort was an inattentive listener to preaching so stimulating to the intellect as that of Dr. H. No pair of eyes followed the web of his reasonings with a keener and more anxious watchfulness than those sad, deep-set, hazel ones; and as she was drawn along the train of its inevitable logic, a close observer might have seen how the shadows deepened over them. For, while others listened for the clearness of the thought, for the acuteness of the argument, she listened as a soul wide, fine-strung, acute, repressed, whose every fibre is a nerve, listens to the problem of its own destiny,–listened as the mother of a family listens, to know what were the possibilities, the probabilities, of this mysterious existence of ours to herself and those dearer to her than herself.
The consequence of all her listening was a history of deep inward sadness. That exultant joy, or that entire submission, with which others seemed to view the scheme of the universe, as thus unfolded, did not visit her mind. Everything to her seemed shrouded in gloom and mystery; and that darkness she received as a token of unregeneracy, as a sign that she was one of those who are destined, by a mysterious decree, never to receive the light of the glorious gospel of Christ. Hence, while her husband was a deacon of the church, she, for years, had sat in her pew while the sacramental elements were distributed, a mournful spectator. Punctilious in every duty, exact, reverential, she still regarded herself as a child of wrath, an enemy to God, and an heir of perdition; nor could she see any hope of remedy, except in the sovereign, mysterious decree of an Infinite and Unknown Power, a mercy for which she waited with the sickness of hope deferred.
Her children had grown up successively around her, intelligent and exemplary. Her eldest son was mathematical professor in one of the leading colleges of New England. Her second son, who jointly with his father superintended the farm, was a man of wide literary culture and of fine mathematical genius; and not unfrequently, on winter evenings, the son, father, and mother worked together, by their kitchen fireside, over the calculations for the almanac for the ensuing year, which the son had been appointed to edit.
Everything in the family arrangements was marked by a sober precision, a grave and quiet self-possession. There was little demonstrativeness of affection between parents and children, brothers and sisters, though great mutual affection and confidence. It was not pride, nor sternness, but a sort of habitual shamefacedness, that kept far back in each soul those feelings which are the most beautiful in their outcome; but after a while, the habit became so fixed a nature, that a caressing or affectionate expression could not have passed the lips of one to another without a painful awkwardness. Love was understood, once for all, to be the basis on which their life was built. Once for all, they loved each other, and after that, the less said, the better. It had cost the woman’s heart of Mrs. Marvyn some pangs, in the earlier part of her wedlock, to accept of this _once for all_, in place of those daily outgushings which every woman desires should be like God’s loving-kindness, “new every morning”; but hers, too, was a nature strongly inclining inward, and, after a few tremulous movements, the needle of her soul settled, and her life-lot was accepted,–not as what she would like or could conceive, but as a reasonable and good one. Life was a picture painted in low, cool tones, but in perfect keeping; and though another and brighter style might have pleased better, she did not quarrel with this.
Into this steady, decorous, highly-respectable circle the youngest child, James, made a formidable irruption. One sometimes sees launched into a family-circle a child of so different a nature from all the rest, that it might seem as if, like an aerolite, he had fallen out of another sphere. All the other babies of the Marvyn family had been of that orderly, contented sort who sleep till it is convenient to take them up, and while awake suck their thumbs contentedly and look up with large, round eyes at the ceiling when it is not convenient for their elders and betters that they should do anything else. In farther advanced childhood, they had been quiet and decorous children, who could be all dressed and set up in chairs, like so many dolls, of a Sunday morning, patiently awaiting the stroke of the church-bell to be carried out and put into the wagon which took them over the two-miles’ road to church. Possessed of such tranquil, orderly, and exemplary young offshoots, Mrs. Marvyn had been considered eminent for her “faculty” in bringing up children.
But James was destined to put “faculty,” and every other talent which his mother possessed, to rout. He was an infant of moods and tenses, and those not of any regular verb. He would cry of nights, and he would be taken up of mornings, and he would not suck his thumb, nor a bundle of caraway-seed tied in a rag and dipped in sweet milk, with which the good gossips in vain endeavored to pacify him. He fought manfully with his two great fat fists the battle of babyhood, utterly reversed all nursery maxims, and reigned as baby over the whole prostrate household. When old enough to run alone, his splendid black eyes and glossy rings of hair were seen flashing and bobbing in every forbidden place and occupation. Now trailing on his mother’s gown, he assisted her in salting her butter by throwing in small contributions of snuff or sugar, as the case might be; and again, after one of those mysterious periods of silence which are of most ominous significance in nursery experience, he would rise from the demolition of her indigo-bag, showing a face ghastly with blue streaks, and looking more like a gnome than the son of a respectable mother. There was not a pitcher of any description of contents left within reach of his little tiptoes and busy fingers that was not pulled over upon his giddy head without in the least seeming to improve its steadiness. In short, his mother remarked that she was thankful every night when she had fairly gotten him into bed and asleep; James had really got through one more day and killed neither himself nor any one else. As a boy, the case was little better. He did not take to study,–yawned over books, and cut out moulds for running anchors when he should have been thinking of his columns of words in four syllables. No mortal knew how he learned to read, for he never seemed to stop running long enough to learn anything; and yet he did learn, and used the talent in conning over travels, sea-voyages, and lives of heroes and naval commanders. Spite of father, mother, and brother, he seemed to possess the most extraordinary faculty of running up unsavory acquaintances. He was hail-fellow well-met with every Tom and Jack and Jim and Ben and Dick that strolled on the wharves, and astonished his father with minutest particulars of every ship, schooner, and brig in the harbor, together with biographical notes of the different Toms, Dicks, and Harrys by whom they were worked.
There was but one member of the family that seemed to know at all what to make of James, and that was their negro servant, Candace.
In those days, when domestic slavery prevailed in New England, it was quite a different thing in its aspects from the same institution in more southern latitudes. The hard soil, unyielding to any but the most considerate culture, the thrifty, close, shrewd habits of the people, and their untiring activity and industry, prevented, among the mass of the people, any great reliance on slave labor. It was something foreign, grotesque, and picturesque in a life of the most matter-of-fact sameness; it was even as if one should see clusters of palm-trees scattered here and there among Yankee wooden meeting-houses, or open one’s eyes on clumps of yellow-striped aloes growing among hardhack and huckleberry bushes in the pastures.
Added to this, there were from the very first, in New England, serious doubts in the minds of thoughtful and conscientious people in reference to the lawfulness of slavery; and this scruple prevented many from availing themselves of it, and proved a restraint on all, so that nothing like plantation-life existed, and what servants were owned were scattered among different families, of which they came to be regarded and to regard themselves as a legitimate part and portion,–Mr. Marvyn, as a man of substance, numbering two or three in his establishment, among whom Candace reigned chief. The presence of these tropical specimens of humanity, with their wide, joyous, rich physical abundance of nature and their hearty _abandon_ of outward expression, was a relief to the still clear-cut lines in which the picture of New England life was drawn, which an artist must appreciate.
No race has ever shown such infinite and rich capabilities of adaptation to varying soil and circumstances as the negro. Alike to them the snows of Canada, the hard, rocky land of New England, with its set lines and orderly ways, or the gorgeous profusion and loose abundance of the Southern States. Sambo and Cuffy expand under them all. New England yet preserves among her hills and valleys the lingering echoes of the jokes and jollities of various sable worthies, who saw alike in orthodoxy and heterodoxy, in Dr. This-side and Dr. That-side, only food for more abundant merriment;–in fact, the minister of those days not unfrequently had his black shadow, a sort of African Boswell, who powdered his wig, brushed his boots, defended and patronized his sermons, and strutted complacently about as if through virtue of his blackness he had absorbed every ray of his master’s dignity and wisdom. In families, the presence of these exotics was a godsend to the children, supplying from the abundant outwardness and demonstrativeness of their nature that aliment of sympathy so dear to childhood, which the repressed and quiet habits of New England education denied. Many and many a New Englander counts among his pleasantest early recollections the memory of some of these genial creatures, who by their warmth of nature were the first and most potent mesmerisers of his childish mind.
Candace was a powerfully built, majestic black woman, corpulent, heavy, with a swinging majesty of motion like that of a ship in a ground-swell. Her shining black skin and glistening white teeth were indications of perfect physical vigor which had never known a day’s sickness; her turban, of broad red and yellow bandanna stripes, had even a warm tropical glow; and her ample skirts were always ready to be spread over every childish transgression of her youngest pet and favorite, James.
She used to hold him entranced long winter-evenings, while she sat knitting in the chimney-corner, and crooned to him strange, wild African legends of the things that she had seen in her childhood and early days,–for she had been stolen when about fifteen years of age; and these weird, dreamy talks increased the fervor of his roving imagination, and his desire to explore the wonders of the wide and unknown world. When rebuked or chastised, it was she who had secret bowels of mercy for him, and hid doughnuts in her ample bosom to be secretly administered to him in mitigation of the sentence that sent him supperless to bed; and many a triangle of pie, many a wedge of cake, had conveyed to him surreptitious consolations which his more conscientious mother longed, but dared not, to impart. In fact, these ministrations, if suspected, were winked at by Mrs. Marvyn, for two reasons: first, that mothers are generally glad of any loving-kindness to an erring boy, which they are not responsible for; and second, that Candace was so set in her ways and opinions that one might as well come in front of a ship under full sail as endeavor to stop her in a matter where her heart was engaged.
To be sure, she had her own private and special quarrels with “Massa James” when he disputed any of her sovereign orders in the kitchen, and would sometimes pursue him with uplifted rolling-pin and floury hands when he had snatched a gingernut or cooky without suitable deference or supplication, and would declare, roundly, that there “never was sich an aggravatin’ young un.” But if, on the strength of this, any one else ventured a reproof, Candace was immediately round on the other side:–“Dat ar’ chile gwin’ to be spiled, ’cause dey’s allers a-pickin’ on him;–he’s well enough, on’y let him alone.”
Well, under this miscellaneous assortment of influences,–through the order and gravity and solemn monotone of life at home, with the unceasing tick-tack of the clock forever resounding through clean, empty-seeming rooms,–through the sea, ever shining, ever smiling, dimpling, soliciting, like a magical charger who comes saddled and bridled and offers to take you to fairyland,–through acquaintance with all sorts of foreign, outlandish ragamuffins among the ships in the harbor,–from disgust of slow-moving oxen, and long-drawn, endless furrows round the fifteen-acre lot,–from misunderstandings with grave elder brothers, and feeling somehow as if, he knew not why, he grieved his mother all the time just by being what he was and couldn’t help being,–and, finally, by a bitter break with his father, in which came that last wrench for an individual existence which some time or other the young growing mind will give to old authority,–by all these united, was the lot at length cast; for one evening James was missing at supper, missing by the fireside, gone all night, not at home to breakfast,–till, finally, a strange, weird, most heathenish-looking cabin-boy, who had often been forbidden the premises by Mr. Marvyn, brought in a letter, half-defiant, half-penitent, which announced that James had sailed in the “Ariel” the evening before.
Mr. Zebedee Marvyn set his face as a flint, and said, “He went out from us because he was not of us,”–whereat old Candace lifted her great floury fist from the kneading-trough, and, shaking it like a large snowball, said, “Oh, you go ‘long, Massa Marvyn; ye’ll live to count dat ar’ boy for de staff o’ your old age yet, now I tell ye; got de makin’ o’ ten or’nary men in him; kittles dat’s full allers will bile over; good yeast will blow out de cork,–lucky ef it don’t bust de bottle. Tell ye, der’s angels has der hooks in sich, and when de Lord wants him dey’ll haul him in safe and sound.” And Candace concluded her speech by giving a lift to her whole batch of dough and flinging it down in the trough with an emphasis that made the pewter on the dresser rattle.
This apparently irreverent way of expressing her mind, so contrary to the deferential habits studiously inculcated in family discipline, had grown to be so much a matter of course to all the family that nobody ever thought of rebuking it. There was a sort of savage freedom about her which they excused in right of her having been born and bred a heathen, and of course not to be expected to come at once under the yoke of civilization. In fact, you must all have noticed, my dear readers, that there are some sorts of people for whom everybody turns out as they would for a railroad-car, without stopping to ask why, and Candace was one of them.
Moreover, Mr. Marvyn was not displeased with this defence of James, as might be inferred from his mentioning it four or five times in the course of the morning, to say how foolish it was,–wondering why it was that Candace and everybody else got so infatuated with that boy,–and ending, at last, after a long period of thought, with the remark, that these poor African creatures often seemed to have a great deal of shrewdness in them, and that he was often astonished at the penetration that Candace showed.
At the end of the year James came home, more quiet and manly than he had ever been known before,–so handsome with his sunburnt face, and his keen, dark eyes, and glossy curls, that half the girls in the front gallery lost their hearts the first Sunday he appeared in church. He was tender as a woman to his mother, and followed her with his eyes, like a lover, wherever she went; he made due and manly acknowledgments to his father, but declared his fixed and settled intention to abide by the profession he had chosen; and he brought home all sorts of strange foreign gifts for every member of the household. Candace was glorified with a flaming red and yellow turban of Moorish stuff, from Mogadore, together with a pair of gorgeous yellow morocco slippers with peaked toes, which, though there appeared no call to wear them in her common course of life, she would put on her fat feet and contemplate with daily satisfaction. She became increasingly strengthened thereby in the conviction that the angels who had their hooks in Massa James’s jacket were already beginning to shorten the line.
[To be continued.]
THE PALM AND THE PINE.
When Peter led the First Crusade,
A Norseman wooed an Arab maid.
He loved her lithe and palmy grace,
And the dark beauty of her face:
She loved his cheeks, so ruddy fair, His sunny eyes and yellow hair.
He called: she left her father’s tent; She followed whereso’er he went.
She left the palms of Palestine
To sit beneath the Norland pine.
She sang the musky Orient strains
Where Winter swept the snowy plains.
Their natures met like night and morn What time the morning-star is born.
The child that from their meeting grew Hung, like that star, between the two.
The glossy night his mother shed
From her long hair was on his head:
But in its shade they saw arise
The morning of his father’s eyes.
Beneath the Orient’s tawny stain
Wandered the Norseman’s crimson vein:
Beneath the Northern force was seen
The Arab sense, alert and keen.
His were the Viking’s sinewy hands,
The arching foot of Eastern lands.
And in his soul conflicting strove
Northern indifference, Southern love;
The chastity of temperate blood,
Impetuous passion’s fiery flood;
The settled faith that nothing shakes, The jealousy a breath awakes;
The planning Reason’s sober gaze.
And Fancy’s meteoric blaze.
And stronger, as he grew to man,
The contradicting natures ran,–
As mingled streams from Etna flow,
One born of fire, and one of snow.
And one impelled, and one withheld,
And one obeyed, and one rebelled.
One gave him force, the other fire;
This self-control, and that desire.
One filled his heart with fierce unrest; With peace serene the other blessed.
He knew the depth and knew the height, The bounds of darkness and of light;
And who these far extremes has seen
Must needs know all that lies between.
So, with untaught, instinctive art,
He read the myriad-natured heart.
He met the men of many a land;
They gave their souls into his hand;
And none of them was long unknown:
The hardest lesson was his own.
But how he lived, and where, and when, It matters not to other men;
For, as a fountain disappears,
To gush again in later years,
So natures lost again may rise
After the lapse of centuries,–
May track the hidden course of blood Through many a generation’s flood,
Till, on some unsuspected field,
The latent lineage is revealed.
The hearts that met in Palestine,
And mingled ‘neath the Norland pine. Still beat with double pulse in mine.
THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
WHAT HE SAID, WHAT HE HEARD, AND WHAT HE SAW.
Back again!–A turtle–which means a tortoise–is fond of his shell; but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it. So the boys say.
It is a libel on the turtle. He grows to his shell, and his shell is in his body as much as his body is in his shell.–I don’t think there is one of our boarders quite so testudinous as I am. Nothing but a combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the turtle’s back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace; and after memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand sights, and huge influx of patriotic pride,–for every American owns all America,–
“Creation’s heir,–the world, the world is”
his, if anybody’s,–I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to resume his skeleton.
Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral of Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves! Welcome, ye triumphs of pictorial art (repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me from the walls of my sacred cell! Vesalius, as Titian drew him, high-fronted, still-eyed, thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems a gentleman, with book and carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper, commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old man of a century and seven years besides, father of twenty sons and two daughters cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on one of the Paris _quais_; and ye Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in shadow against the blaze of sunlight; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir Joshua,–thy roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely nor unrenowned, Young Bull of Paulus Potter, and Sleeping Cat of Cornelius Visscher; welcome once more to my eyes! The old books look out from the shelves, and I seem to read on their backs something besides their titles,–a kind of solemn greeting. The crimson carpet flushes warm under my feet. The arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with me, as if it were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent _fauteuil_ stretches itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine stretches in after-dinner laughter.
The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back. One of them ventured a compliment, namely,–that I talked as if I believed what I said.–This was apparently considered something unusual, by its being mentioned.
One who means to talk with entire sincerity,–I said,–always feels himself in danger of two things, namely,–an affectation of bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in “Lear,” and actual rudeness. What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him. Life is short, and conversation apt to run to mere words. Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without saying a word which has any meaning in it. Something like this is occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall. The best Chinese talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to time. Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in _eau-de-vie de Dantzic_; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,–never a wave, and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or a high-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we find faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds. There is something very odd, though, about this mechanical talk.
You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine was detached a long way from the station you were approaching? Well, you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if the locomotive were drawing them? Indeed, you would not have suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side-track. Upon my conscience, I believe some of these pretty women detach their minds entirely, sometimes, from their talk,–and, what is more, that we never know the difference. Their lips let off the fluty syllables just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just as it does that of music into notes.–Well, they govern the world, for all that,–these sweet-lipped women,–because beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
—-The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
Madam,–said I,–wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
—-All this, however, is not what I was going to say. Here am I, suppose, sealed–we will say at a dinner-table–alongside of an intelligent Englishman. We look in each other’s faces,–we exchange a dozen words. One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each other,–to be perfectly courteous,–more than courteous; for we are the entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable feelings to each other. The claret is good; and if our blood reddens a little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for it.
—-I don’t think people that talk over their victuals are like to say anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with strong drink before they begin jabberin’.
The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words had been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.–The boys of my time used to call a hit like this a “side-winder.”
—-I must finish this woman.–
Madam,–I said,–the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking as he sat at meat. Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off place, you forget what the true fact of it was,–that those were real dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a very miscellaneous company. Probably there was a great deal of loose talk among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may believe.
Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,–and I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water, and, I blush to say it, in black tea,–there is no doubt about its being the grand specific against dull dinners. A score of people come together in all moods of mind and body. The problem is, in the space of one hour, more or less, to bring them all into the same condition of slightly exalted life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,–talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now just where it was when
“The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,”
–when six great vessels containing water, which seems to have been carefully purified, so as to be ready for the marriage-feast, were changed into the best of wine. I once wrote a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that I was afraid some would think it was written _inter pocula_; whereas it was composed in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing domestic influences.
—-The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.–Can you tell me,–he said,–who wrote a song for a temperance celebration once, of which the following is a verse?–
Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair The joys of the banquet to chasten and share! Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine, And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
_I_ did,–I answered.–What are you going to do about it?–I will tell you another line I wrote long ago:–
Don’t be “consistent,”–but be simply _true_.
The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with many facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a single flat surface. It is hard work to resist this grinding-down action.–Now give me a chance. Better eternal and universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made wives and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they should have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches! Yet better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public dinner! I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.” But a great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face and its profile often do.
Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend the “Autocrat,”–which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by omitting the very word which gives it its significance,–the word _fluid_, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will,–holds it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image. Now I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend’s poems, printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman where _he_ has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the independent will of the “subcreative centre,” as my heretical friend has elsewhere called man.
–Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own He rent a pillar from the eternal throne! –Made in His image, thou must nobly dare The thorny crown of sovereignty to share. –Think not too meanly of thy low estate; Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and the full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly consistent.
Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation with the intelligent Englishman. We begin skirmishing with a few light ideas,–testing for thoughts,–as our electro-chemical friend, De Sauty, if there were such a person, would test for his current; trying a little litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-paper for alkalies, as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging the lead, and looking at the shells and sands it brings up to find out whether we are like to keep in shallow water, or shall have to drop the deep-sea line;–in short, seeing what we have to deal with. If the Englishman gets his Hs pretty well placed, he comes from one of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find him a good companion.
But, after all, here is a great fact between us. We belong to two different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe,–without any hole in the wall to talk through. Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World folks. They are children to us in certain points of view. They are playing with toys we have done with for whole generations. That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly than they do. Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh at, honestly, without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World puppet-shows. I don’t think we on our part ever understand the Englishman’s concentrated loyalty and specialized reverence. But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring some little difficulties about race and complexion which the Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever lived did think of him. Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it is less intense. We have caste among us, to some extent, it is true; but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty individuality.
This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim into each other’s laps. The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a personal character. But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians. Then you get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses. The best conversation I have had with one of them for a long time, lively, fluent, courteous, delightful, was a variation and illustrative development in elegant phrases of the following short sentences.
_Englishman_.–Sir, your New-World civilization is barbarism.
_American_.–Sir, your Old-World development is infancy.
How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
—-My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep. I follow a slow person’s talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my own beneath it. My friend the Autocrat has already made a similar remark. Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two others. I will try to write out a mental movement in three parts.
A.–First part, or Mental Soprano,–thought follows a woman talking.
B.–Second part, or Mental Barytone,–my running accompaniment.
C.–Third part, or Mental Basso,–low grumble of an importunate self-repeating idea.
A.–White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and earrings, the most delicious _berthe_ you ever saw, white satin slippers—-
B.–Deuse take her! What a fool she is! Hear her chatter! (Look out of window just here.–Two pages and a half of description, if it were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)–Go ahead, old lady! (Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There’s that infernal family nose! Came over in the “Mayflower” on the first old fool’s face. Why don’t they wear a ring in it?
C.–You’ll be late at lecture,–late at lecture,–late,–late,–late—-
I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt through the superincumbent strata, thus:–The usual single or double currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,–Oh, there! I knew there was something troubling me,–and the thought which had been working through comes up to the surface clear, definite, and articulates itself,–a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or an unpleasant recollection.
The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in this, that they are both brimful. There is no space between consecutive thoughts or between the never-ending series of actions. All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of both thoughts and actions,–just as you find that cylinders crowded all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed into regular polyhedra.
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him. So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the layers of thought, we may consider the mind, as it moves among thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great troop of horses. He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more or less completely, but he cannot stop it. So, as I said in another way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once, but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop. He can only take his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of another.
—-What is the saddle of a thought? Why, a word, of course.–Twenty years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and round all that time without a rider.
The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving thought upon that of another.
—-I should like to ask,–said the divinity-student,–since we are getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always _now_ to something.
–I will thank you for the dry toast,–was my answer.
—-I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or elsewhere. One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,–as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an Egyptian mummy. He then proceeds, with the air and method of a master, to take off the bandages. Nothing can be neater than the way in which he does it. But as he takes off layer after layer, the truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines begin to look like something we have seen before. At last, when he has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the streets all our lives. The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the truth into his study and put all those bandages on; of course it is not very hard for him to take them off. Still, a great many people like to watch the process,–he does it so neatly!
Dear! dear! I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,–perhaps by myself. How they spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
—-The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat fighting attitude.–Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!–he said,–and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.–You small boy there, hurry up that “Webster’s Unabridged!”
The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three words, of which the two last were “Webster’s Unabridged,” and the first was an emphatic monosyllable.–Beg pardon,–he added,–forgot myself. But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have any. I don’t believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir! If I put a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the wind blows up aloft,–off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow! I don’t want a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman’s study that he can take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir! Wait till we give you a dictionary, Sir! It takes Boston to do that thing, Sir!
—-Some folks think water can’t run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,–remarked the Koh-i-noor.
I don’t know what _some folks think_ so well as I know what _some fools say_,–rejoined Little Boston.–If importing most dry goods made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for ’em.–Mr. Webster couldn’t spell, Sir, or wouldn’t spell, Sir,–at any rate, he didn’t spell; and the end of it was a fight between the owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language which we have inherited from our English fathers,–language!–the blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which they grow! We know what a word is worth here in Boston. Young Sam Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there, with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that wasn’t in the Colonial dictionaries! _R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e, tance, Resistance!_ That was in ’43, and it was a good many years before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;–but when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden women in the English almshouses heard every syllable! Yes, yes, yes,–it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the class so far along that it could spell those two hard words, _Independence_ and _Union!_ I tell you what, there are a thousand lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language that is worth speaking. We know what language means too well here in Boston to play tricks with it. We never make a new word till we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! When we shaped the new mould of this continent, we had to make a few. When, by God’s permission, we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,–this thirty-masted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,–must throw a little spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new world’s destiny!
He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair human proportions. His feet must have been on the upper round of his high chair;–that was the only way I could account for it.
Puts her through fust-rate,–said the young fellow whom the boarders call John.
The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said he remembered Sam Adams as Governor. An old man in a brown coat. Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common. Was a boy then, and remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house. Recollects he had a glazed ‘lection-bun, and sat eating it and looking down on to the Common. Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.
Them ‘lection buns are no go,–said the young man John, so called.–I know the trick. Give a fellah a fo’penny bun in the mornin’, an’ he downs the whole of it. In about an hour it swells up in his stomach as big as a football, and his feedin’s sp’ilt for _that_ day. That’s the way to stop off a young one from eatin’ up all the ‘lection dinner.
Salem! Salem! not Boston,–shouted the little man.
But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.
Little Boston was holding a fork in his left hand. He stabbed a boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it as if it ought to shriek. It did not,–but he sat as if watching it.
—-Language is a solemn thing,–I said.–It grows out of life,–out of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness. Every language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined. Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time? Let me tell you what comes of meddling with things that can take care of themselves.–A friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was a boy,–a “bull’s eye,” with a loose silver case that came off like an oyster-shell from its contents; you know them,–the cases that you hang on your thumb, while the _core_ or the real watch lies in your hand as naked as a peeled apple. Well, he began with taking off the case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he got it fairly open, and there were the works, as good as if they were alive,–crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest. All right except one thing,–there was a confounded little _hair_ had got tangled round the balance-wheel. So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and caught hold of the _hair_ very nicely, and pulled it right out, without touching any of the wheels,–when,–buzzzZZZ! and the watch had done up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time!–The English language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a _hair_, our grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-_spring_, and the old Anglo-Norman soul’s-timekeeper will run down, as so many other dialects have done before it. I can’t stand this meddling any better than you, Sir. But we have a great deal to be proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we mustn’t be ungrateful. Besides, don’t let us deceive ourselves, the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of publishers. After all, the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making. You may spade up the ocean as much as you like, and harrow it afterwards, if you can,–but the moon will still lead the tides, and the winds will form their surface.
—-Do you know Richardson’s Dictionary?–I said to my neighbor the divinity-student.
Haoew?–said the divinity-student.–He colored, as he noticed on my face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the mouth, (_zygomaticus major_,) and which I could not hold back from making a little movement on its own account.
It was too late.–A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown colt. Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps, better,–but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his earlier ways of life. Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours. Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,–but it lay there under all their culture. That is one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled them with.
—-Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English dictionary,–said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as sitting at the right upper corner of the table.
I turned and looked him full in the face,–for the pure, manly intonations arrested me. The voice was youthful, but full of character.–I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in the matter of voice.–Hear this.
Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in her father’s chaise in a street of this town of Boston. She overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken with the tones of her voice. Nothing would satisfy her but she must have that little girl come and live in her father’s house. So the child came, being then nine years old. Until her marriage she remained under the same roof with the young lady. Her children became successively inmates of the lady’s dwelling; and now, _seventy_ years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing, one of that child’s children and one of her grandchildren are with her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes her peaceful days.–Three generations linked together by so light a breath of accident!
I liked the sound of this youth’s voice, I said, and his look when I came to observe him a little more closely. His complexion had something better than the bloom and freshness which had first attracted me;–it had that diffused _tone_ which is a sure index of wholesome lusty life. A fine liberal style of nature it seemed to be: hair crisped, moustache springing thick and dark, head firmly planted, lips finished, as one commonly sees them in gentlemen’s families, a pupil well contracted, and a mouth that opened frankly with a white flash of teeth that looked as if they could serve him as they say Ethan Allen’s used to serve their owner,–to draw nails with. This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate’s deck and bowl his broadsides into the “Gallant Thunderbomb,” or any forty-portholed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron compliments.–I don’t know what put this into my head, for it was not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in the naval school at Annapolis. Something had happened to change his plan of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in Boston.
When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him, the little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at him.
Good for the Boston boy!–he said.
I am not a Boston boy,–said the youth, smiling,–I am a Marylander.
I don’t care where you come from,–we’ll make a Boston man of you,–said the little gentleman.–Pray, what part of Maryland did you come from, and how shall I call you?
The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper corner of the table, and Little Boston next the lower left-hand corner. His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly,–telling who he was, as if the little man’s infirmity gave him a right to ask any questions he wanted to.
Here is the place for you to sit,–said the little gentleman, pointing to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.
You’re go’n’ to have a young lady next you, if you wait till to-morrow,–said the landlady to Little Boston.
He did not reply, but I had a fancy, that he changed color. It can’t be that _he_ has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young lady! It can’t be that he has had experiences which make him sensitive! Nature could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart throbbing in that poor little cage of ribs! There is no use in wasting notes of admiration. I must ask the landlady about him.
These are some of the facts she furnished.–Has not been long with her. Brought a sight of furniture,–couldn’t hardly get some of it up-stairs. Hasn’t seemed particularly attentive to the ladies. The Bombazine (whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to enter into conversation with him, but retired with the impression that he was indifferent to ladies’ society. Paid his bill the other day without saying a word about it. Paid it in gold,–had a great heap of twenty-dollar pieces. Hires her best room. Thinks he is a very nice little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber. Wants the care of some capable nuss. Never pitied anybody more in her life,–never see a more interestin’ person.
—-My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them consist principally of conversations between myself and the other boarders. So they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited about this little boarder of ours, and my reader must not be disappointed, if I sometimes interrupt a discussion to give an account of whatever fact or traits I may discover about him. It so happens that his room is next to mine, and I have the opportunity of observing many of his ways without any active movements of curiosity. That his room contains heavy furniture, that he is a restless little body and is apt to be up late, that he talks to himself, and keeps mainly to himself, is nearly all I have found out.
One curious circumstance happened lately, which I mention without drawing an absolute inference.–Being at the studio of a sculptor with whom I am acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of a _left arm_. On my asking where the model came from, he said it was taken direct from the arm of a _deformed person_, who had employed one of the Italian moulders to make the cast. It was a curious case, it should seem, of one beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly imperfect.–I have repeatedly noticed this little gentleman’s use of his left arm. Can he have furnished the model I saw at the sculptor’s?
—-So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow. I hope there will be something pretty and pleasant about her. A woman with a creamy voice, and finished in _alto rilievo_, would be a variety in the boarding-house,–a little more marrow and a little less sinew than our landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of whom are of the turkey-drumstick style of organization. I don’t mean that these are our only female companions; but the rest being conversational non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in their food as locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither away from the table like blossoms that never come to fruit, I have not yet referred to them as individuals.
I wonder what kind of a young person we shall see in that empty chair to-morrow!
—-I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning. It was written for our fellows;–you know who they are, of course.
THE BOYS.
Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys? If there has, take him out, without making a noise! Hang the Almanac’s cheat and the Catalogue’s spite! Old Time is a liar! We’re twenty to-night!
We’re twenty! We’re twenty! Who says we are more? He’s tipsy,–young jackanapes!–show him the door!– “Gray temples at twenty?”–Yes! _white_, if we please; Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there’s nothing can freeze!
Was it snowing I spoke of? Excuse the mistake! Look close,–you will see not a sign of a flake; We want some new garlands for those we have shed,– And these are white roses in place of the red!
We’ve a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told, Of talking (in public) as if we were old;– That boy we call “Doctor,” and this we call “Judge”;– It’s a neat little fiction,–of course it’s all fudge.
That fellow’s the “Speaker,”–the one on the right; “Mr. Mayor,” my young one, how are you to-night? That’s our “Member of Congress,” we say when we chaff; There’s the “Reverend” What’s his name?–don’t make me laugh!
That boy with the grave mathematical look Made believe he had written a wonderful book, And the ROYAL ACADEMY thought it was _true!_ So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too!
There’s a boy,–we pretend,–with a three-decker-brain, That could harness a team with a logical chain; When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire, We called him “The Justice,” but now he’s “The Squire.”
And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith,– Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,– But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,– –Just read on his medal,–“My country,”–“of thee!”
You hear that boy laughing?–You think he’s all fun,– But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done The children laugh loud as they troop to his call, And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!
Yes, we’re boys,–always playing with tongue or with pen,– And I sometimes have asked,–Shall we ever be men? Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay, Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
Then here’s to our boyhood, its gold and its gray! The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May! And when we have done with our life-lasting toys Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!
* * * * *
WHITE’S SHAKSPEARE.[A]
[Footnote A: _The Works of William Shakespeare_. Edited, etc., by RICHARD GRANT WHITE. Vols. II., III., IV., and V. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1858]
(SECOND NOTICE.)
We doubt if posterity owe a greater debt to any two men living in 1623 than to the two obscure actors who in that year published the first folio edition of Shakspeare’s plays. But for them, it is more than likely that such of his works as had remained to that time imprinted would have been irrecoverably lost, and among them were “Julius Caesar,” “The Tempest,” and “Macbeth.” But are we to believe them when they assert that they present to us the plays which they reprinted from stolen and surreptitious copies “cured and perfect of their limbs,” and those which are original in their edition “absolute in their numbers as he [Shakspeare] conceived them”? Alas, we have read too many theatrical announcements, have been taught too often that the value of the promise was in an inverse ratio to the generosity of the exclamation-marks, too easily to believe that! Nay, we have seen numberless processions of healthy kine enter our native village unheralded save by the lusty shouts of drovers, while a wretched calf, cursed by stepdame Nature with two heads, was brought to us in a triumphal car, avant-couriered by a band of music as abnormal as itself, and announced as the greatest wonder of the age. If a double allowance of vituline brains deserve such honor, there are few commentators on Shakspeare that would have gone afoot, and the trumpets of Messieurs Heminge and Condell call up in our minds too many monstrous and deformed associations.
What, then, is the value of the first folio as an authority? We are inclined to think that Mr. Collier (for obvious reasons) underrates it, and that Mr. White sometimes errs in the opposite direction. For eighteen of the plays it is the only authority we have, and the only one also for four others in their complete form. It is admitted that in several instances Heminge and Condell reprinted the earlier quarto impressions with a few changes, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse; and it is most probable that copies of those editions (whether surreptitious or not) had taken the place of the original prompter’s books, as being more convenient and legible. Even in these cases it is not safe to conclude that all or even any of the variations were made by the hand of Shakspeare himself. And where the players printed from manuscript, is it likely to have been that of the author? The probability is small that a writer so busy as Shakspeare must have been during his productive period should have copied out their parts for the actors, himself, or that one so indifferent as he seems to have been to the mere literary fortunes of his works should have given any great care to the correction of such copies, if made by others. The copies exclusively in the hands of Heminge and Condell were, it is manifest, in some cases, very imperfect, whether we account for the fact by the burning of the Globe Theatre or by the necessary wear and tear of years, and (what is worthy of notice) they are plainly more defective in some parts than in others. “Measure for Measure” is an example of this, and we are not satisfied with being told that its ruggedness of verse is intentional, or that its obscurity is due to the fact that Shakspeare grew more elliptical in his style as he grew older. Profounder in thought he doubtless became; though, in a mind like his, we believe that this would imply only a more absolute supremacy in expression. But, from whatever original we suppose either the quartos or the first folio to have been printed, it is more than questionable whether the proof-sheets had the advantage of any revision other than that of the printing-office. Steevens was of opinion that authors in the time of Shakspeare never read their own proof-sheets; and Mr. Spedding, in his recent edition of Bacon, comes independently to the same conclusion.[B] We may be very sure that Heminge and Condell did not, as vicars, take upon themselves a disagreeable task which the author would have been too careless to assume.
[Footnote B: Vol. III. p. 348, _note_. He grounds his belief, not on the misprinting of words, but on the misplacing of whole paragraphs. We were struck with the same thing in the original edition of Chapman’s _Biron’s Conspiracy and Tragedy_. One of the misprints which Mr. Spedding notices affords both a hint and a warning to the conjectural emendator. In the edition of _The Advancement of Learning_ printed in 1605 occurs the word _dusinesse_. In a later edition this was conjecturally changed to _business_; but the occurrence of _vertigine_ in the Latin translation enables Mr. Spedding to print rightly, _dizziness_.]
Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out against the Folio of 1623, whatever sins of omission we may lay to the charge of Heminge and Condell, or of commission to that of the printers, it remains the only text we have with any claims whatever to authenticity. It should be deferred to as authority in all cases where it does not make Shakspeare write bad sense, uncouth metre, or false grammar, of all which we believe him to have been more supremely incapable than any other man who ever wrote English. Yet we would not speak unkindly even of the blunders of the Folio. They have put bread into the mouth of many an honest editor, publisher, and printer, for the last century and a half; and he who loves the comic side of human nature will find the serious notes of a _variorum_ edition of Shakspeare as funny reading as the funny ones are serious. Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, if he had only been at Shakspeare’s elbow, he could have given valuable advice; scarce one who did not know off-hand that there was never a seaport in Bohemia,–as if Shakspeare’s world were one which Mercator could have projected; scarce one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a sufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, of planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say Shakspearian of any other. And yet, in the midst of our impatience, we cannot help thinking also of how much healthy mental activity this one man has been the occasion, how much good he has indirectly done to society by withdrawing men to investigations and habits of thought that secluded them from baser attractions, for how many he has enlarged the circle of study and reflection; since there is nothing in history or politics, nothing in art or science, nothing in physics or metaphysics, that is not sooner or later taxed for his illustration. This is partially true of all great minds, open and sensitive to truth and beauty through any large arc of their circumference; but it is true in an unexampled sense of Shakspeare, the vast round of whose balanced nature seems to have been equatorial, and to have had a southward exposure and a summer sympathy at every point, so that life, society, statecraft serve us at last but as commentaries on him, and whatever we have gathered of thought, of knowledge, and of experience, confronted with his marvellous page, shrinks to a mere footnote, the stepping-stone to some hitherto inaccessible verse. We admire in Homer the blind placid mirror of the world’s young manhood, the bard who escapes from his misfortune in poems all memory, all life and bustle, adventure and picture; we revere in Dante that compressed force of lifelong passion which could make a private experience cosmopolitan in its reach and everlasting in its significance; we respect in Goethe the Aristotelian poet, wise by weariless observation, witty with intention, the stately _Geheimerrath_ of a provincial court in the empire of Nature. As we study these, we seem in our limited way to penetrate into their consciousness and to measure and master their methods;–but with Shakspeare it is just the other way; the more we have familiarized ourselves with the operations of our own consciousness, the more do we find, in reading him, that he has been beforehand with us, and that, while we have been vainly endeavoring to find the door of his being, he has searched every nook and cranny of our own. While other poets and dramatists embody isolated phases of character and work inward from the phenomenon to the special law which it illustrates, he seems in some strange way unitary with human nature itself, and his own soul to have been the law- and life-giving power of which his creations are only the phenomena. We justify or criticize the characters of other writers by our memory and experience, and pronounce them natural or unnatural; but he seems to have worked in the very stuff of which memory and experience are made, and we recognize his truth to Nature by an innate and unacquired sympathy, as if he alone possessed the secret of the “ideal form and universal mould,” and embodied generic types rather than individuals. In this Cervantes alone has approached him; and Don Quixote and Sancho, like the men and women of Shakspeare, are the contemporaries of every generation, because they are not products of an artificial and transitory society, but because they are animated by the primeval and unchanging forces of that humanity which underlies and survives the forever-fickle creeds and ceremonials of the parochial corners which we who dwell in them sublimely call The World.
But the dropping of our _variorum_ volume upon the floor recalls us from our reverie, and, as we pick it up, we ask ourselves sadly, Is it fitting that we should have a Shakspeare according to plodding Malone or coarse-minded Steevens, both of whom would have had the headache all their lives after, could one of the Warwickshire plebeian’s conceptions have got into their brains and stretched them, and who would have hidden under their bedclothes in a cold-sweat of terror, could they have seen the awful vision of Macbeth as he saw it? No! and to every other commentator who has wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it with his inky cloud of paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the quadrisyllable name of the brother of Agis, king of Sparta. Clearly, we should be grateful to an editor who feels it his chief duty to scrape away these barnacles from the brave old hull, to replace with the original heart-of-oak the planks where these small but patient terebrators have bored away the tough fibre to fill the gap with sawdust!
This task Mr. White has undertaken, and, after such conscientious examination of his work as the importance of it demands, after a painful comparison, note by note, and reading by reading, of his edition with those of Messrs. Knight, Collier, and Dyce, our opinion of his ability and fitness for his task has been heightened and confirmed. Not that we always agree with him,–not that we do not think that in respect of the Folio text he has sometimes erred on the side of superstitious reverence for it, and sometimes in too rashly abandoning it,–but, making all due exceptions, we think that his edition is, in the phrase of our New England fathers in Israel, for substance, scope, and aim, the best hitherto published. The chief matter must in all cases be the text, and the faults we find in him do not, as a general rule, affect that. Some of them are faults which his own better judgment, we think, will lead him to avoid in his forthcoming volumes; and in regard to some, he will probably honestly disagree with us as to their being faults at all. No conceivable edition of Shakspeare would satisfy all tastes;–sometimes we have attached associations to received readings which make impartial perception impossible; sometimes we have imparted our own meaning to a passage by too steady pondering over it, just as in twilight an inanimate thing will seem to move, if we look at it long, though the wavering be truly in our own overstrained vision; sometimes our personal temperament will insensibly warp our judgment;–but Mr. White has generally shown so just a discrimination, that there are few instances where we dissent, and in these a pencil will enable every one to edit for himself. Any criticism of an edition of Shakspeare must necessarily concern itself with seemingly insignificant matters, often with a comma or a syllable,–and the danger is always of degenerating into a captiousness and word-catching unworthy the lover of truth for its own sake. We shall endeavor to be minute without being small.
Mr. White reserves for a first volume (not yet published) his notices of Shakspeare’s life, his remarks upon the text, and other general introductory topics. In the second volume, he gives us an excellent copy of the Droeshout portrait, the preliminary matter of the Folio of 1628, with notices of the writers of commendatory verses thereto prefixed, and of the principal actors who performed parts in Shakspeare’s plays. We notice particularly his discussion of the authorship of the verses signed J.M.S. as a good example of the delicacy and acuteness of his criticism. Though he has the great authority of Coleridge against him, we think that he has constructed a very ingenious, strong, and even convincing argument against the Milton theory. Each play is preceded by an Introduction, remarkably well digested and condensed, giving an account of the text, and of the sources from which Shakspeare helped himself to plots or incidents. We cannot but commend highly the self-restraint which marks these brief and pithy prefaces, and the pertinency of every sentence to the matter in hand. The Germans, (to whom we are undeniably indebted for the first philosophic appreciation of the poet,) being debarred by their alienage from the tempting parliament of verbal commentary and conflict, have made themselves such ample amends by expatiations in the unfenced field of aesthetics and of that constructive criticism which is too often confined to the architecture of Castles in Spain, that we feel as if Dogberry had charged us in relation to them with that hopelessly bewildering commission to “_comprehend_ all vagrom men” which we have hitherto considered applicable only to peripatetic lecturers. Mr. White wisely and kindly leaves us to Shakspeare and our own imaginations,–two very potent spells to conjure with,–and seems to be aware of the fact, that, in its application to a creative mind like that of the great Poet, the science of teleology may sometimes find itself as much at fault as it so often is in attempting to fathom the designs of the Infinite Creator. Rabelais solves the grave problem of the goodliness of Friar John’s nose by the comprehensive formula, “Because God willed it so”; and it is well for us in most cases to enjoy Shakspeare in the same pious way,–to smell a rose without bothering ourselves about its having been made expressly to serve the turn of the essence-peddlers of Shiraz. We yield the more credit to Mr. White’s self-denial in this respect, because his notes prove him to be capable of profound as well as delicate and sympathetic exegesis. Shakspeare himself has left us a pregnant satire on dogmatical and categorical esthetics (which commonly in discussion soon lose their ceremonious tails and are reduced to the internecine dog and cat of their bald first syllables) in the cloud-scene between Hamlet and Polonius, suggesting exquisitely how futile is any attempt at a cast-iron definition of those perpetually metamorphic impressions of the beautiful, whose source is as much in the man who looks as in the thing he sees. And elsewhere more directly,–Mr. White must allow us the old reading for the sake of our illustration,–he has told us how
“Affection,
Master of passion, sways it to the mood Of what it likes or loathes.”
We are glad to see, likewise, with what becoming indifference the matter of Shakspeare’s indebtedness to others is treated by Mr. White in his Introductions. There are many commentators who seem to think they have wormed themselves into the secret of the Master’s inspiration when they have discovered the sources of his plots. But what he took was by right of eminent domain; and was he not to resuscitate a theme and make it immortal, because some botcher had tried his hand upon it before, and left it for stone-dead? Because he could not help throwing sizes, was he to avoid the dice which for others would only come up ames-ace?
Up to the middle of 1854,[C] there had been published in England and on the Continent eighty-eight complete editions of Shakspeare in English, thirty-two in German, six in French, and five, more or less complete, in Italian. Beside these, his works had been translated into Dutch, (1778-82,) into Danish, (1807-28,) into Hungarian, (1824,) into Polish, (1842,) and into Swedish (1847-51). The numerous American editions are not reckoned in this statement; and, to give an adequate notion of the extent of the Shakspeare-literature, we should add that the number of separately-printed comments and other illustrative publications already exceeds five hundred. No other poet except Dante has received such appreciation,–and not even he, if we consider in Shakspeare’s case the greater bulk of the works and the difficulty of the language. After so many people had used their best wit and had their say, could there be any unconsidered trifle left for a new editor? Could the sharpest eyes find more needles in this enormous haystack? We do not pretend to have examined the whole of this polyglot library, nay, but for Herr Sillig, we had never heard of most of the books in it, but we are tolerably familiar with the more important English editions, and with some of the German comments,[D] and we must say that the freshness of many of Mr. White’s observations struck us with very agreeable surprise. We are not fond of off-hand opinions on any subject, much more on one so multifarious and complex as this,–we are a great deal too ready with them in America, and pronounce upon pictures and poems with a _b’hoyish_ nonchalance that would be amusing, were it not for its ill consequence to Art,–but we love the expression of honest praise, of sifted and considerate judgment, and we think that a laborious collation justifies us in saying that in acute discrimination of aesthetic shades of expression, and often of textual niceties, Mr. White is superior to any previous editor.
[Footnote C: _Die Shakspere-Literatur bis Mitte_ 1854. Zusammengestellt und herausgegeben von P.H. SILLIG. Leipzig. 1854.]
[Footnote D: Among which (setting aside a few remarks of Goethe) we are inclined to value as highly us anything Tieck’s _Essay on the Element of the Wonderful in Shakspeare_.]
In proof of what we have said, we will refer to a few of the notes which have particularly pleased us, and which show originality of view.
(_Tempest_, Act ii. Sc. 2.)
“‘_Nor scrape_ trenchering, _nor wash, dish_.’
“Dryden, Theobald, Dyce, Halliwell, and Hudson would have ‘trenchering’ a typographical error for ‘trencher,’ which they introduce into the text. Surely they must all have forgotten that _Caliban_ was drunk, and, after singing ‘firing’ and ‘requiring,’ would naturally sing ‘trenchering.’ There is a drunken swing in the original line which is entirely lost in the precise, curtailed rhythm of–
‘_Nor scrape_ trencher, _nor wash dish_.'”
Other editors had retained “trenchering,” but none, that we know, ever gave so good a reason for it. Equally good is his justification of himself for omitting Theobald’s interpolation of “Did she nod?” in “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Act i. Sc. 1. Other examples may be found in the readings, “There is a lady of Verona here,” (same play, Act iii. Sc. 1); “Yet reason dares her _on_,” (_Measure for Measure_, Act iv. Sc. 4); “Hark, how the villain would _glose_ now,” (same play, Act v. Sc. 1); “The forced fallacy,” (_Comedy of Errors_, Act ii. Sc. 1); in the note on “Cupid is a good hare-finder,” (_Much Ado_, Act i. Sc. 3); the admirable note on “Examine those men,” (same play, Act iii. Sc. 1); the readings, “Out on thee! Seeming!” (same play, Act iv. Sc. 1); “For I have only silent been,” (ibid.); “Goodly Count-Confect,” and note, (same play, Act iv. Sc. 2); the note on “I do beseech thee, remember thy courtesy,” (_Love’s Labor’s Lost_, Act v. Sc. 1); on “Mounsieur Cobweb,” and “Help Cavalery Cobweb to scratch,” (_Mid. Night’s D_., Act iv. Sc. 1); on “Or in the night,” etc. (same play, Act v. Sc. 1); on “Is sum of nothing,” (_Merchant of Venice_, Act iii. Sc. 2); on “Stays me here at home unkept,” (_As you like it_, Act i. Sc. 1); on “Unquestionable spirit,” (same play, Act iii. Sc. 2); on “Move the still-piecing air,” (_All’s Well_, etc., Act ii. Sc. 2); and on “What is not holy,” (same play, Act iv. Sc. 2). We have referred to a few only out of the many instances that have attracted our notice, and these chiefly for their bearing on what we have said of the editor’s refinement of appreciation and originality of view. The merely illustrative and explanatory notes are also full and judicious, containing all that it is important the reader should know, and a great deal which it will entertain him to learn. In the Introductions to the several plays, too, we find many _obiter dicta_ of Mr. White which are excellent in their clearness of critical perception and conciseness of phrase. From that to the “Comedy of Errors” we quote the following sentence:–
“Concerning the place and the period of the action of this play, it seems that Shakspeare did not trouble himself to form a very accurate idea. The Ephesus of “The Comedy of Errors” is much like the Bohemia of “The Winter’s Tale,”–a remote, unknown place, yet with a familiar and imposing name, and therefore well suited to the purposes of one who, as poet and dramatist, cared much for men and little for things, and to whose perception the accidental was entirely eclipsed by the essential. Anachronisms are scattered through it with a profusion which could only be the result of entire indifference,–in fact, of an absolute want of thought on the subject.”–Vol. III. 189.
We think this could not be better said, if only we might supplant “things” with the more precise word “facts”; for about _things_ Shakspeare was never careless. It is only that deciduous foliage of facts which every generation leaves heaps of behind it dry, and dead, that he rustles through with eyes so royally unconcerned. As a good example of Mr. White’s style, we should be inclined to cite the Introduction to “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” from which we detach this single crystal:–
“It is ever the ambitious way of youthful genius to aim at novelty of form in its first essays, while yet in treatment it falls unconsciously into a vein of reminiscence; afterward it is apt to return to established forms, and to show originality of treatment.”
The temptation which too easily besets an editor of Shakspeare is to differ, if possible, from everybody who has gone before him, though but as between the N.E. and N.N.E. points in the circumference of a hair. We do not find Mr. White guilty in this respect for what he has done, but sometimes for what he has left undone in allowing the Folio text to remain. The instance that has surprised us most is his not admitting (_As You Like it_, Act iv. Sc. 1) the reading,–“The foolish _coroners_ of that age found it was Hero of Sestos,” instead of the unmeaning one, “_chroniclers_.” He has been forced, for the sake of sense, to make some changes in the Folio text which seem to us quite as violent, and we cannot help thinking that the gain in aptness of phrase and coherence of meaning would have justified him in doing as much here. He admits, in his note on the passage, that the change is “very plausible”; but adds, “If we can at will reduce a perfectly appropriate and uncorrupted word of ten letters to one of eight, and strike out such marked letters as _h_, _l_, and _e_, we may re-write Shakspeare at our pleasure.” Mr. White has already admitted that “_chroniclers_” is not _perfectly_ appropriate in admitting that the change is “very plausible”; and he has no right to assume that the word is uncorrupted,–for that is the very point in question. As to the disparity in the number of letters, no one familiar with misprints will be surprised at it; and Mr. Spedding, in the edition of Bacon already referred to, furnishes us with an example of blunder[E] precisely the reverse, in which one word of eight letters is given for two of ten, (_sciences_ for _six princess_,)–the printer in both cases having set up his first impression of what the word was for the word itself. Had this occurred in Shakspeare, instead of Bacon, we should have had a series of _variorum_ notes like this:–
[Footnote E: Bacon’s Works, by Ellis, Spedding, & Heath. Vol. III. p. 303, _note_.]
“That _sixpence_ was the word used by our author scarcely admits of doubt. From a number of parallel passages we select the following:–
‘Live on _sixpence_ a day, and earn it.’–_Abernethy_.
‘I give thee sixpence? I will see thee and-so-forthed first!’–_Canning_.
‘Be shot for _sixpence_ on a battlefield.’–_Tennyson_.
‘Half a crown, two shillings and _sixpence_.’–_Niemand’s Dictionary_.
Moreover, we find our author using precisely the same word in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’:–
‘Thus hath he lost sixpence a day during his life.'” JONES.
“Had the passage read ‘_two_ princes,’ we might have thought it genuine; since ‘the two kings of Brentford’ must have been familiar to our great poet, and he was also likely to have that number deeply impressed on his mind by the awful tragedy in the tower, (see _Richard the Third_,) where, it is remarkable, precisely that number of royal offspring suffered at the hands of the crook-backed tyrant. The citation from Niemand’s Dictionary, by the Rev. Mr. Jones, tells as much in favor of _two princes_ as of _sixpence_; for how could the miseries of a divided empire be more emphatically portrayed than in the striking, and, as it seems to me, touching phrase, HALF _a crown?_ Could we in any way read ‘_three_ princes,’ we should find strong support in the tradition of ‘the three kings of Cologne,’ and in the Arabian story of the ‘Three Calenders.’ The line quoted by Thomson, (Shakspeare, by Thomson, Vol. X. p. 701.) ‘Under which King Bezonian, speak or die!’ (though we agree with him in preferring his pointing to the ordinary and meaningless ‘Under which King, Bezonian,’ etc.) unhappily can throw no light on the present passage till we know how many King Bezonians are intended, and who they were. Perhaps we should read _Belzonian_, and suppose a reference to the Egyptian monarchs whose tombs were first explored by the intrepid Belzoni. The epithet would certainly be appropriate and in Shakspeare’s best manner; but among so many monarchs, a choice of two, or even three, would be embarrassing and invidious.” BROWN.
“As for the ‘Three Calenders,’ there can be no reasonable question that Shakspeare was well acquainted with the story; for that he had travelled extensively in the East I have proved in my ‘Essay to show that Sir Thomas Roe and William Shakspeare were identical’; and that he was familiar with the Oriental languages must be apparent to any one who has read my note on ‘_Concolinel_’ (_Love’s Labor’s Lost_, Act iii. Sc. 1). But that ‘six princes’ is the true reading is clear from the parallel passage in “Richard the Third,” which I am surprised that the usually accurate Mr. Brown should have overlooked,–‘Methinks there be Six Richmonds in the field.'” ROBINSON.
“I was at first inclined to the opinion of the late Mr. Robinson, but maturer consideration has caused me to agree with the eloquent and erudite Jones. There is a definite meaning in the word _sixpence_; and a similar error of the press in Lord Bacon’s ‘Advancement of Learning,’ where the context shows that _sixpences_ and not _sciences_ was the word intended, leads me to suspect that the title of his _opus magnum_ should be _De Augmentis Sixpenciarum_. Viewing the matter as a political economist, such a topic would have been more worthy of the Lord Chancellor of England; it would have been more in accordance with what we know of the character of ‘the meanest of mankind’; and the exquisite humor of the title would tally precisely with what Ben Jonson tells us in his ‘Discoveries,’ under the head _Dominus Verulamius_, that ‘his language _(where he could spare or pass by a jest)_ was nobly censorious.’ Sir Thomas More had the same proneness to merriment, a coincidence the more striking as both these great men were Lord Chancellors. A comic stroke of this description would have been highly attractive to a mind so constituted, and might easily escape the notice of a printer, who was more likely to be intent upon the literal accuracy of the Latin than on the watch for extraordinary flights of humor.” SMITH.
But we must return from our excursion into an imaginary _variorum_, delightful because it requires no eyesight and no thought, to the more serious duty of examining the notes of Mr. White. We have mentioned a single instance in which we differ with him as to the propriety of a fanatical adherence to the text of the Folio of 1623. We differ, because we think that sense is not all that we have a right to expect from Shakspeare,–that it is, indeed, merely the body in which his genius creates a soul of meaning, nay, oftentimes a double one, exoteric and esoteric, the _spiritus astralis_ and the _anima caelestis_. Had the passage been in verse, where the change might have damaged the rhythm, –had it been one of those ecstasies of Shakspearian imagination, to tamper with which because _we_ could not understand it would be Bottom-like presumption,–one of those tempests of passion where every word reeks hot and sulphurous, like a thunderstone new-fallen,–in any of these cases we should have agreed with Mr. White that to abstain was a duty. But in a sentence of lightsome and careless prose, and where the chances are great that the word to be changed is the accident of the printer and not the choice of the author, we say, give us a text that is true to the context and the aesthetic instinct rather than to the Folio, even were that Pandora-box only half as full of manifest corruptions as it is.
In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” (Act iii. Sc. 1,) Mr. White prefers, “She is not to be fasting in respect of her breath,” to “She is not to be _kissed_ fasting in respect of her breath,”–an emendation made by Rowe,[F] and found also in Mr. Collier’s Corrected Folio of 1632. We cannot agree with him in a reading which seems to us to destroy all the point of the passage.
[Footnote F: Mr. Dyce says the word supplied by Rowe was “fasting,” a manifest slip of the pen, and worth notice only as showing how easily errors may be committed.]
In Dumain’s ode, (_Love’s Labor’s Lost_, Act iv. Sc. 3,) beginning,
“On a day, (alack the day!)
Love, whose month is ever May,”
Mr. White chooses to read
“Thou, for whom Jove would swear
Juno but an Ethiop were,”
rather than accept Pope’s suggestion of “ev’n Jove,” or the far better “great Jove” of Mr. Collier’s Corrected Folio,–affirming that “the quantity and accent proper to ‘thou’ make any addition to the line superfluous.” We should like to hear Mr. White read the verse as he prints it. The result would be something of this kind:–
Thou-ou for whom Jove would swear,–
which would be like the ‘bow-wow-wow before the Lord’ of the old country-choirs. To our ear it is quite out of the question; and, moreover, we affirm that in dissyllabic (which we, for want of a better name, call iambic and trochaic) measures the omission of a half-foot is an impossibility, and all the more so when, as in this case, the preceding syllable is strongly accented. Even had the poem been meant for singing, which it was not, for Dumain reads it, the quantity would be false, though the ear might more easily excuse it. Such an omission would be not only possible, but sometimes very effective, in trisyllabic measures,–as, for instance, in anapests like these,–
“‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock,”–
where iambs or spondees may take the place of the first or second foot with no shock to the ear, though the change of rhythm be sensible enough,–as
‘Tis th[)e] d[=e][=e]p midnight by the castle clock, And [)o]wls have awakened the crowing cock.
We quite agree with Mr. White and Mr. Knight in their hearty dislike of the Steevens-system of versification, but we think that Coleridge (who, although the best English metrist since Milton, often thought lazily and talked loosely) has misled both of them in what he has said about the pauses and retardations of verse. In that noblest of our verses, the unrhymed iambic pentameter, two short or lightly-accented syllables may often gracefully and effectively take the place of a long or heavily-accented one; but great metrists contrive their pauses by the artistic choice and position of their syllables, and not by leaving them out. Metre is the solvent in which alone thought and emotion can perfectly coalesce,–the thought confining the emotion within decorous limitations of law, the emotion beguiling the thought into somewhat of its own fluent grace and rebellious animation. That is ill metre which does not read itself in the mouth of a man thoroughly penetrated with the meaning of what he reads; and only a man as thoroughly possessed of the meaning of what he writes can produce any metre that is not sing-song. Not that we would have Shakspeare’s metre tinkered where it seems defective, but that we would not have palpable gaps defended as intentional by the utterly unsatisfactory assumption of pauses and retardations. Mr. White has in many cases wisely and properly made halting verses perfect in their limbs by easy transpositions, and we think he is perfectly right in refusing to interpolate a syllable, but wrong in assuming that we have Shakspeare’s metre where we have no metre at all. We are not speaking of seeming irregularities, of lines broken up by rapid dialogue or cut short by the gulp of voiceless passion, nor do we forget that Shakspeare wrote for the tongue and not the eye, but we do not believe he ever left an unmusical period. Especially is this true of passages where the lyrical sentiment predominates, and we beg Mr. White to reconsider whether we owe the reading
“All overcanopied with luscious woodbine” (instead of _lush_)
to the printers of the Folio or to Shakspeare. Even if we accept Steevens’s “whereon” instead of “where” in the first verse of this exquisite piece of melody, and read (as Mr. White does not)
“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows,”
it leaves the peculiar _lilt_ of the metre unchanged. The varied accentuation of the verses is striking; and would any one convince himself of the variety of which this measure is capable, let him try to read this passage, and the speech of Prospero, beginning “Ye elves of hills,” to the same tune. In the verses,
“And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, | and do fly him When he comes back,”
observe how the pauses are contrived to echo the sense and give the effect of flux and reflux. Versification was understood in that day as never since, and no treatise on English verse so good, in all respects, as that of Campion (1602) has ever been written. Coleridge learned from him how to write his “Catullian hendeca-syllables,” and did not better his instruction.[G]
[Footnote G: For the comprehension of the laws of some of the lighter measures, no book is so instructive as Mother Goose’s Melodies. That excellent lady was one of the best metrists the language has produced.]
In “Measure for Measure,” (Act i. Sc. 1,) in this passage,–
“what’s open made
To justice, that justice seizes: what knows the law That thieves do pass on thieves?”
does Mr. White believe the “that” and “what” are Shakspeare’s? Does he consider
“To justice, that justice seizes: what knows the law”
an alexandrine,–and an alexandrine worthy of a student and admirer of Spenser? Should we read it thus, we should dread Martial’s sarcasm of, _Sed male cum recitas_. We believe that Shakspeare wrote
“What’s open made
To Justice, Justice seizes; knows the Law That thieve do pass on thieves?”
We have pointed out a passage or two where we think Mr. White follows the Folio text too literally. Two instances we have noted where he has altered, as we think, for the worse. The first is (_Tempest_, Act in. Sc. 3) where Mr. White reads,
“You are three men of sin whom Destiny (That hath to instrument this lower world And what is in’t) the never-surfeited sea Hath caused to belch you up,–and on this island Where man doth not inhabit; you ‘mongst men Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad.”
The Folio reads, “Hath caused to belch up you”; and Mr. White says in his note, “The tautological repetition of the pronoun was a habit, almost a custom, with the Elizabethan dramatists.” This may be true, (though we think the assertion rash,) but certainly never as in this case. We think the Folio right, except in its punctuation. The repetition of the “you” is emphatic, not tautological, and is demanded by the whole meaning of the passage. Ariel is taunting the persons she addresses, with the intention of angering them; and the “you” is repeated, because those highly respectable men cannot at first bring their minds to believe that such unsavory epithets are addressed to them. We should punctuate thus, following the order of the words in the Folio,–
“Hath caused to belch up,–you! and on this island, Where man doth not inhabit;–you ‘mongst men Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad.”
In the “Comedy of Errors,” (Act ii. Sc. 2,) Adriana, suspecting her husband of unfaithfulness, says to him,–
“For, if we two be one, and thou play false, I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by thy contagion. Keep, then, fair league and truce with thy true bed;
I live distained, thou undishonored.”
Such is the reading of the Folio. Mr. White reads,
“I live distained, thou one dishonored.”
But we cannot help thinking that the true reading should be,
“I live distained, though undishonored,”
which is a less forced construction, and coincides with the rest of the passage,–“I am contaminate through thee, though in myself immaculate.”
In “As You Like it,” (Act ii. Sc. 3,) Mr. White (with the Folio and some recent editors) calls the Duke’s wrestler, “the _bonny_ priser of the Duke.” The common reading is “bony,” which seems to us better, though we believe _brawny_ to be the word intended. We likewise question Mr. White’s explanation of the word _priser_, which, he says, “is prize-fighter, one who wins prizes.” One who “fights for prizes” would have been better; but we suspect that the word is more nearly akin with the French _prise_ (in the sense of _venir aux prises_) than with _prix_. We should prefer also “Aristotle’s ethicks” (_Taming of the Shrew_, Act i. Sc. 1) to the ordinary “Aristotle’s checks,” which is retained by Mr. White. In “Much Ado about Nothing,” (Act ii. Sc. 1,) we have no doubt that Mr. Collier’s corrector is right in reading “_sink_ apace,” though Mr. White states authoritatively that Shakspeare would not have so written. It is only fair to Mr. White, however, to say that he is generally open-minded toward readings suggested by others, and that he accepts nearly all those of Mr. Collier’s Corrected Folio on which honest lovers of Shakspeare would be likely to agree. In comparing his notes with the text, our eye was caught by a verse in which there seems so manifest a corruption that we shall venture to throw down the discord-apple of a conjectural emendation. In the “Merchant of Venice,” (Act iii. Sc. 2,) where Bassanio is making his choice among the caskets, after a long speech about “outward shows” and “ornament,” he is made to say that ornament is,
“in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning _times_ put on To entrap the wisest.”
We find it hard to believe that _times_ is the right word here, and strongly suspect that it has stolen the place of _tires_. The whole previous tenor of the speech, and especially of the images immediately preceding that in question, appears to demand such a word.
We have said, that we considered the style and matter of Mr. White’s notes excellent. Indeed, to the purely illustrative notes we should hardly make an exception. There are two or three which we think in questionable taste, and one where the temptation to say a sharp thing has led the editor to vulgarize the admirable Benedick, and to misinterpret the text in a way so unusual for him that it is worth a comment. When Benedick’s friends are discussing the symptoms which show him to be in love, Claudio asks,
“When was he wont to wash his face?”
Mr. White annotates thus:–
“That the benign effect of the tender passion upon _Benedick_ in this regard should be so particularly noticed, requires, perhaps, the remark, that in Shakspeare’s time our race had not abandoned itself to that reckless use of water, whether for ablution or potation, which has more recently become one of its characteristic traits.”
Now, if there could be any doubt that “wash” means _cosmetic_ here, the next speech of Don Pedro (“Yea, or to _paint_ himself?”) would remove it. The gentlemen of all periods in history have been so near at least to godliness as is implied in cleanliness. The very first direction in the old German poem of “Tisch-zucht” is to wash before coming to table; and in “Parzival,” Gurnamanz specially inculcates on his catechumen the social duty of always thoroughly cleansing himself on laying aside his armor. Such instances could be multiplied without end.
In annotating Shakspeare, it would, perhaps, be asking too much of an editor to give credit to its first finder for every scrap of illustration. The immense mass of notes already existing may, perhaps, be fairly looked upon as a kind of dictionary, open to every one, and the use of which implies no indebtedness. Mr. White, in general, indicates the source whence he has drawn, though we have sometimes found him negligent in this respect. He says, in the Advertisement prefixed to his second volume, “that in every case, where no such credit is given for a restoration, a conjecture, or a quotation, the editor is responsible for it; and as he is disinclined to the giving of much prominence to claims of this sort, he has, in those cases, merely remarked, that ‘hitherto’ the text has stood thus or so.” We have not been at the trouble of verifying every one of Mr. White’s “hithertos,” but we did so in two plays, and found in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” four, and in “Much Ado” two cases, where the reading claimed as a restoration occurred also in Mr. Knight’s excellent edition of 1842. These oversights do not affect the correctness of Mr. White’s text, but they diminish our confidence in the accuracy of the collation to which he lays claim.
The chief objection which we have to make against Mr. White’s text is, that he has perversely allowed it to continue disfigured by vulgarisms of grammar and spelling. For example, he gives us _misconster_, and says, “This is not a mis-spelling or loose spelling of ‘misconstrue,’ but the old form of the word.” Mr. Dyce insisted on the same cacographical nicety in his “Remarks” on the editions of Mr. Collier and Mr. Knight, but abandons it in his own with the artless admission that _misconstrue_ also occurs in the Folio. In one of the Camden Society’s publications is a letter from Friar John Hylsey to Thomas Cromwell, in which we find “As God is my jugge”;[H] but we do not believe that _jug_ was an old form of _judge_, though a philological convict might fancy that the former word was a derivative of the latter. Had the phrase occurred in Shakspeare, we should have had somebody defending it as tenderly poetical. We cannot but think it a sacrifice in Mr. White that he has given up the _whatsomeres_ of the Folio. He does retain _puisny_ as the old form, but why not spell it _puisne_ and so indicate its meaning? Mr. White informs us that “the grammatical form in use in Shakspeare’s day” was to have the verb govern a nominative case! Accordingly, he perpetuates the following oversight of the poet or blunder of the printer:–
[Footnote H: _Suppression of the Monasteries_, p. 13.]
“What he is, indeed,
More suits you to conceive, than _I_ to speak of.”
Again, he says that _who_, as an objective case, “is in accordance with the grammatical usage of Shakspeare’s day,” (Vol. II. p. 86,) and that, “considering the unsettled state of minor grammatical relations in Shakspeare’s time,” it is possible that he wrote _whom_ as a nominative (Vol. V. p. 393). But the most extraordinary instance is where he makes a nominative plural agree with a verb in the second person singular, (Vol. III. p. 121,) and justifies it by saying that “such disagreements … are not uncommon in Shakspeare’s writings, and those of his contemporaries.” The passage reads as follows in Mr. White’s edition:–
“A breath thou art,
Servile to all the skiey influences That dost this habitation where thou keep’st Hourly afflict.”
Hanmer (mistaking the meaning) read _do_. Porson objected, on the ground that it was _thou_ and not _influences_ which governed _dost_. Porson was certainly right, and we wonder how any one could ever have understood the passage in any other way. The mediaevals had as much trouble in reconciling free-will with judicial astrology as we with the divine foreknowledge. A passage in Dante, it appears to us, throws light on the meaning of the Duke’s speech:–
“Lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia; Non dico tutti; ma posto ch’ io ‘l dica Lume v’ e dato a bene ed a malizia,
E libero voler che, se fatica
Nelle prime battaglie col ciel dura, Poi vince tutto se ben si notrica.”
_Purg._, Cant. xvi.
_Cielo_ is here used for the influence of the stars, as is clear from a parallel passage in the “Convito.” Accordingly, “Though servile to all the skyey influences, it is thou, breath as thou art, that dost hourly afflict thy body with the results of sin.” But even if this be not the meaning, is Mr. White correct in saying that _influence_ had no plural at that time?[I] Had he forgotten “the sweet _influences_ of Pleiades”? The word occurs in this form not only in our version of the Bible, but in that of Cranmer, and in the “Breeches” Bible. So in Chapman’s “Byron’s Conspiracy,” (Ed. 1608, B. 3,)
“Where the beames of starres have carv’d Their powerful _influences_.”
[Footnote I: Mr. White cites Dr. Richardson, but the Doctor is not always a safe guide.]
Mr. White repeatedly couples together the translators of the Bible and Shakspeare, but he seems to have studied their grammar but carelessly. “_Whom_ therefore ye ignorantly worship, _him_ declare I unto you,” is a case in point, and we ought never to forget our danger from that dusky personage who goes about “seeking _whom_ he may devour.” At a time when correction of the press was so imperfect, one instance of true construction should outweigh twenty false, and nothing could be easier than the mistake of _who_ for _whom_, when the latter was written _wh[=o]_. A glance at Ben Jonson’s English Grammar is worth more than all theorizing. Mr. White thinks it probable that Shakspeare understood French, Latin, and Italian, but not–English!
The truth is, that, however forms of spelling varied, (as they must where both writers and printers spelt phonographically,) the forms of grammatical construction were as strict then as now. There were some differences of usage, as where two nominatives coupled by a conjunction severally governed the verb, and where certain nouns in the plural were