Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860




A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. How can you mind
diet, bed, dress, or salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in
company, or wealth, or even the bringing things to pass, when you think
how paltry are the machinery and the workers? Wordsworth was praised to
me, in Westmoreland, for having afforded to his country neighbors an
example of a modest household, where comfort and culture were secured
without display. And a tender boy who wears his rusty cap and outgrown
coat, that he may secure the coveted place in college and the right
in the library, is educated to some purpose. There is a great deal of
self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and
country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that
keeps the earth sweet,--that saves on superfluities, and spends on
essentials,--that goes rusty, and educates the boy,--that sells the
horse, but builds the school,--works early and late, takes two looms in
the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the
paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be
used,--yet cautiously, and haughtily,--and will yield their best values
to him who best can do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but
the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of
mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter
where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He
who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling
with the souls of other men,--from living, breathing, reading, and
writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning,
solitude," said Pythagoras,--that Nature may speak to the imagination,
as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make
acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to
serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus,
Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth did not live in a crowd,
but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise
instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul, in the
disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits
of solitude. The high advantage of university-life is often the mere
mechanical one, I may call it, of a separate chamber and fire,--which
parents will allow the boy without hesitation at Cambridge, but do not
think needful at home. We say solitude, to mark the character of the
tone of thought; but if it can be shared between two, or more than two,
it is happier, and not less noble. "We four," wrote Neander to his
sacred friends, "will enjoy at Halle the inward blessedness of a
_civitas Dei_, whose foundations are forever friendship. The more I know
you, the more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted companions.
Their very presence stupefies me. The common understanding withdraws
itself from the one centre of all existence."

Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities, that more
catholic and humane relations may appear. The saint and poet seek
privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of
culture, to interest the man more in his public than in his private
quality. Here is a new poem, which elicits a good many comments in
the journals and in conversation. From these it is easy, at last, to
eliminate the verdict which readers passed upon it; and that is, in the
main, unfavorable. The poet, as a craftsman, is interested only in the
praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be just; and
the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure, as
proving incapacity in the critic. But the poet _cultivated_ becomes a
stockholder in both companies,--say Mr. Curfew,--in the Curfew stock,
and in the _humanity_ stock; and, in the last, exults as much in the
demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew as his interest in the former
gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew. For the depreciation of
his Curfew stock only shows the immense values of the humanity stock.
As soon as he sides with his critic against himself, with joy, he is a
cultivated man.

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action,
or they are nought. I must have children, I must have events, I must
have a social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body
or basis. But to give these accessories any value, I must know them as
contingent and rather showy possessions, which pass for more to the
people than to me. We see this abstraction in scholars, as a matter
of course: but what a charm it adds when observed in practical men!
Bonaparte, like Caesar, was intellectual, and could look at every object
for itself, without affection. Though an egotist _a l'outrance_, he
could criticize a play, a building, a character, on universal grounds,
and give a just opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in
politics or in trade gains largely in our esteem, if we discover that he
has some intellectual taste or skill: as when we learn of Lord Fairfax,
the Long Parliament's general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or
of the French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of
a living banker, his success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist,
his devotion to ornithology. So, if, in travelling in the dreary
wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat a
man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to hug him.
In callings that require roughest energy, soldiers, sea-captains, and
civil engineers sometimes betray a fine insight, if only through a
certain gentleness when off duty: a good-natured admission that there
are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We only
vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we say that culture opens the
sense of beauty. A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and,
however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be
said to have arrived at self-possession. I suffer, every day, from the
want of perception of beauty in people. They do not know the charm with
which all moments and objects can be embellished,--the charm of manners,
of self-command, of benevolence. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge
of the gentleman,--repose in energy. The Greek battle-pieces are calm;
the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene
aspect: as we say of Niagara, that it falls without speed. A cheerful,
intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough; for it
indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.

When our higher faculties are in activity, we are domesticated,
and awkwardness and discomfort give place to natural and agreeable
movements. It is noticed that the consideration of the great periods and
spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind and an indifference
to death. The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains,
appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a high dome,
and the expansive interior of a cathedral, have a sensible effect
on manners. I have heard that stiff people lose something of their
awkwardness under high ceilings and in spacious halls. I think sculpture
and painting have an effect to teach us manners and abolish hurry.

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical
skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts.
There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and
adjust particulars, which can come only from an insight of their whole
connection. The orator who has once seen things in their divine order
will never quite lose sight of this, and will come to affairs as from a
higher ground, and, though he will say nothing of philosophy, he will
have a certain mastery in dealing with them, and an incapableness of
being dazzled or frighted, which will distinguish his handling from that
of attorneys and factors. A man who stands on a good footing with the
heads of parties at Washington reads the rumors of the newspapers and
the guesses of provincial politicians with a key to the right and
wrong in each statement, and sees well enough where all this will end.
Archimedes will look through your Connecticut machine at a glance, and
judge of its fitness. And much more, a wise man who knows not only what
Plato, but what Saint John can show him, can easily raise the affair
he deals with to a certain majesty. Plato says, Pericles owed this
elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras. Burke descended from a higher
sphere when he would influence human affairs. Franklin, Adams,
Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which the brawls
of modern senates are but pot-house politics.

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the
apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave.
We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our
friends. Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse:--

"Get him the time's long grudge, the court's ill-will,
And, reconciled, keep him suspected still,
Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse,
Almost all ways to any better course;
With me thou leav'st a better Muse than thee,
And which thou brought'st me, blessed Poverty."

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism. But the wiser
God says, Take the shame, the poverty, and the penal solitude that
belong to truth-speaking. Try the rough water, as well as the smooth.
Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. When the state is unquiet,
personal qualities are more than ever decisive. Fear not a revolution
which will constrain you to live five years in one. Don't be so tender
at making an enemy now and then. Be willing to go to Coventry sometimes,
and let the populace bestow on you their coldest contempts. The finished
man of the world must eat of every apple once. He must hold his hatreds
also at arm's length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor
enemies, but values men only as channels of power.

He who aims high must dread an easy home and popular manners. Heaven
sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as
the burr that protects the fruit. If there is any great and good thing
in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, nor
in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for
dolls. "Steep and craggy," said Porphyry, "is the path of the gods."
Open your Marcus Antoninus. In the opinion of the ancients, he was the
great man who scorned to shine, and who contested the frowns of Fortune.
They preferred the noble vessel too late for the tide, contending with
winds and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to her companion borne into
harbor with colors flying and guns firing. There is none of the social
goods that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness must not
take rank with high aims and self-subsistency.

Bettine replies to Goethe's mother, who chides her disregard of
dress,--"If I cannot do as I have a mind, in our poor Frankfort, I shall
not carry things far." And the youth must rate at its true mark the
inconceivable levity of local opinion. The longer we live, the more we
must endure the elementary existence of men and women: and every brave
heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.

"All that class of the severe and restrictive virtues," said Burke, "are
almost too costly for humanity." Who wishes to be severe? Who wishes
to resist the eminent and polite, in behalf of the poor and low and
impolite? and who that dares do it can keep his temper sweet, his frolic
spirits? The high virtues are not debonair, but have their redress in
being illustrious at last. What forests of laurel we bring, and the
tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their
contemporaries! The measure of a master is his success in bringing all
men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too early. In talking with
scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of
boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and
infinite quality in their esteem. I find, too, that the chance for
appreciation is much increased by being the son of an appreciator, and
that these boys who now grow up are caught not only years too late, but
two or three births too late, to make the best scholars of. And I think
it a presentable motive to a scholar, that, as, in an old community, a
well-born proprietor is usually found, after the first heats of youth,
to be a careful husband, and to feel an habitual desire that the estate
shall suffer no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered
down to the next heir in as good condition as he received it,--so,
a considerate man will reckon himself a subject of that secular
melioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, and refined, and will
shun every expenditure of his forces on pleasure or gain, which will
jeopardize this social and secular accumulation.

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental forms,
and rose to the more complex as fast as the earth was fit for their
dwelling-place,--and that the lower perish, as the higher appear. Very
few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry
sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped
organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men.
Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music
that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with tears
and joy,--if Want with his scourge,--if War with his cannonade,--if
Christianity with its charity,--if Trade with its money,--if Art with
its portfolios,--if Science with her telegraphs through the deeps of
space and time, can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps on
the tough chrysalis can break its walls and let the new creature emerge
erect and free,--make way, and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is
to go out,--the age of the brain and of the heart is to come in.
The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be
organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He
is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.
The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one
shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature
to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in
the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not
overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and
gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into
benefit.




THE CHILDREN'S HOUR.


Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations
That is known as the Children's Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall-stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret
O'er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old moustache as I am
Is not a match for you all?

I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeons
In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!




THREE-MILE CROSS.


It seems but yesterday, although more than thirteen years have gone
by, since I first opened the little garden-gate and walked up the path
leading to Mary Russell Mitford's cottage at Three-Mile Cross. A friend
in London had given me his card to the writer of "Our Village," and I
had promised to call on my way to Oxford, and have a half-hour's chat
over her geraniums with the charming person whose sketches I had read
with so much interest in my own country. Her cheerful voice at the
head of the stairs, telling her little maid to show me the way to her
sitting-room, sounded very musically, and I often observed in later
interviews how like a melody her tones always appeared in conversation.
Once when she read a lyrical poem, not her own, to a group of friends
assembled at her later residence, in Swallowfield, of which number it
was my good-fortune to be one, the verses came from her lips like an
exquisite chant. Her laugh had a ringing sweetness in it, rippling out
sometimes like a beautiful chime of silver bells; and when she told
a comic story, which she often did with infinite tact and grace, she
joined in with the jollity at the end, her eyes twinkling with delight
at the pleasure her narrative was always sure to bring. Her enjoyment of
a joke was something delicious, and when she heard a good thing for
the first time her exultant mirth was unbounded. As she sat in her
easy-chair, listening to a Yankee story which interested her, her "Dear
me! dear me! dear me!" (three times repeated always)

"Rang like a golden jewel down a golden stair."

The sunny summer-day was falling full on her honeysuckles, lilies, and
roses, when I first saw her face in the snug cottage at Three-Mile
Cross. As we sat together at the open casement, looking down on the
flowers that sent up their perfumes to her latticed window like fragrant
tributes from a fountain of distilled sweet waters, she pointed out,
among the neighboring farm-houses and villas, the residences of her
friends, in all of whom she seemed to have the most affectionate
interest. I noticed, as the village children went by her window, they
all stopped to bow and curtsy. One curly-headed urchin made bold to take
off his well-worn cap and wait to be recognized as "little Johnny,"--"no
great scholar," said the kind-hearted old lady to me, "but a sad rogue
among our flock of geese. Only yesterday, the young marauder was
detected by my maid with a plump gosling stuffed half-way into his
pocket!" While she was thus discoursing of Johnny's peccadilloes, the
little fellow looked up with a knowing expression, and very soon caught
in his cap a gingerbread dog, which the old lady threw to him from the
window. "I wish he loved his book as well as he relishes sweet cake,"
sighed she, as the boy kicked up his heels and disappeared down the
lane.

Full of anecdote, her conversation that afternoon ran on in a perpetual
flow of good-humor, until it was time for me to be on my way toward the
University City. From that time till she died, our friendship continued,
and, during other visits to England, I saw her frequently, driving about
the country with her in her pony-chaise, and spending many happy hours
under her cottage-roof. She was always the same cheerful spirit,
enlivening our intercourse with shrewd and pertinent observations and
reminiscences, some of which it may not be out of place to reproduce
here. Country life, its scenery and manners, she was never tired of
depicting; but not infrequently she loved to talk of those celebrities
in literature and art whom she had known intimately, with a vivacity and
sweetness of temper never-failing and delightful. I well remember, one
autumn evening, when half a dozen friends were sitting in her library
after dinner, talking with her of Tom Taylor's Life of Haydon, then
lately published, how graphically she described to us the eccentric
painter, whose genius she was among the fore-most to recognize.
The flavor of her discourse I cannot reproduce; but I was too much
interested in what she was saying to forget the main incidents she drew
for our edification, during those pleasant hours now far away in the
past.

"I am a terrible forgetter of dates," she used to say, when any one
asked her of the time when; but for the _manner how_ she was never at a
loss. "Poor Haydon!" she began. "He was an old friend of mine, and I am
indebted to Sir William Elford, one of my dear father's correspondents
during my girlhood, for a suggestion which sent me to look at a picture
then on exhibition in London, and thus was brought about my knowledge of
the painter's existence. He, Sir William, had taken a fancy to me, and
I became his child-correspondent. Few things contribute more to that
indirect after-education, which is worth all the formal lessons of the
school-room a thousand times told, than such good-humored condescension
from a clever man of the world to a girl almost young enough to be his
granddaughter. I owe much to that correspondence, and, amongst other
debts, the acquaintance of Haydon. Sir William's own letters were most
charming,--full of old-fashioned courtesy, of quaint humor, and
of pleasant and genial criticism on literature and on art. An
amateur-painter himself, painting interested him particularly, and
he often spoke much and warmly of the young man from Plymouth, whose
picture of the 'Judgment of Solomon' was then on exhibition in London.
'You must see it,' said he, 'even if you come to town on purpose.'"--The
reader of Haydon's Life will remember that Sir William Elford, in
conjunction with a Plymouth banker named Tingecombe, ultimately
purchased the picture. The poor artist was overwhelmed with astonishment
and joy when he walked into the exhibition-room and read the label,
"Sold," which had been attached to his picture that morning before
he arrived. "My first impulse," he says in his Autobiography, "was
gratitude to God."

"It so happened," continued Miss Mitford, "that I merely passed through
London that season, and, being detained by some of the thousand and one
nothings which are so apt to detain women in the great city, I arrived
at the exhibition, in company with a still younger friend, so near the
period of closing, that more punctual visitors were moving out, and the
doorkeeper actually turned us and our money back. I persisted, however,
assuring him that I only wished to look at one picture, and promising
not to detain him long. Whether my entreaties would have carried
the point or not, I cannot tell; but half a crown did; so we stood
admiringly before the 'Judgment of Solomon.' I am no great judge of
painting; but that picture impressed me then, as it does now, as
excellent in composition, in color, and in that great quality of telling
a story which appeals at once to every mind. Our delight was sincerely
felt, and most enthusiastically expressed, as we kept gazing at the
picture, and seemed, unaccountably to us at first, to give much pleasure
to the only gentleman who had remained in the room,--a young and very
distinguished-looking person, who had watched with evident amusement our
negotiation with the doorkeeper. Beyond indicating the best position to
look at the picture, he had no conversation with us; but I soon surmised
that we were seeing the painter, as well as his painting; and when, two
or three years afterwards, a friend took me by appointment to view the
'Entry into Jerusalem,' Haydon's next great picture, then near its
completion, I found I had not been mistaken.

"Haydon was, at that period, a remarkable person to look at and listen
to. Perhaps your American word _bright_ expresses better than any other
his appearance and manner. His figure, short, slight, elastic, and
vigorous, looked still more light and youthful from the little
sailor's-jacket and snowy trousers which formed his painting costume.
His complexion was clear and healthful. His forehead, broad and
high, out of all proportion to the lower part of his face, gave an
unmistakable character of intellect to the finely placed head. Indeed,
he liked to observe that the gods of the Greek sculptors owed much of
their elevation to being similarly out of drawing! The lower features
were terse, succinct, and powerful,--from the bold, decided jaw, to the
large, firm, ugly, good-humored mouth. His very spectacles aided the
general expression; they had a look of the man. But how shall I attempt
to tell you of his brilliant conversation, of his rapid, energetic
manner, of his quick turns of thought, as he flew on from topic to
topic, dashing his brush here and there upon the canvas? Slow and quiet
persons were a good deal startled by this suddenness and mobility. He
left such people far behind, mentally and bodily. But his talk was so
rich and varied, so earnest and glowing, his anecdotes so racy, his
perception of character so shrewd, and the whole tone so spontaneous and
natural, that the want of repose was rather recalled afterwards than
felt at the time. The alloy to this charm was a slight coarseness of
voice and accent, which contrasted somewhat strangely with his constant
courtesy and high breeding. Perhaps this was characteristic. A defect
of some sort pervades his pictures. Their great want is equality and
congruity,--that perfect union of qualities which we call _taste_. His
apartment, especially at that period when he lived in his painting-room,
was in itself a study of the most picturesque kind. Besides the great
picture itself, for which there seemed hardly space between the walls,
it was crowded with casts, lay figures, arms, tripods, vases, draperies,
and costumes of all ages, weapons of all nations, books in all tongues.
These cumbered the floor; whilst around hung smaller pictures, sketches,
and drawings, replete with originality and force. With chalk he could do
what he chose. I remember he once drew for me a head of hair with nine
of his sweeping, vigorous strokes! Among the studies I remarked that
day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just lost her only
child,--a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief. A sonnet,
which I could not help writing on this sketch, gave rise to our long
correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged. Everybody feels
that his life, as told by Mr. Taylor, with its terrible catastrophe, is
a stern lesson to young artists, an awful warning that cannot be set
aside. Let us not forget that amongst his many faults are qualities
which hold out a bright example. His devotion to his noble art, his
conscientious pursuit of every study connected with it, his unwearied
industry, his love of beauty and of excellence, his warm family
affection, his patriotism, his courage, and his piety, will not easily
be surpassed. Thinking of them, let us speak tenderly of the ardent
spirit whose violence would have been softened by better fortune, and
who, if more successful, would have been more gentle and more humble."

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