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

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




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A knock at the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's study-door called his eyes
from the book on which they were intent. He looked up, as if expecting a
welcome guest.

The Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D.D., entered the study of the
Reverend Chauncy Fairweather. He was not the expected guest. Mr.
Fairweather slipped the book he was reading into a half-open drawer,
and pushed in the drawer. He slid something which rattled under a paper
lying on the table. He rose with a slight change of color, and welcomed,
a little awkwardly, his unusual visitor.

"Good evening, Brother Fairweather!" said the Reverend Doctor, in a
very cordial, good-humored way. "I hope I am not spoiling one of those
eloquent sermons I never have a chance to hear."

"Not at all, not at all," the younger clergyman answered, in a languid
tone, with a kind of habitual half-querulousness which belonged to
it,--the vocal expression which we meet with now and then, and which
says as plainly as so many words could say it, "I am a suffering
individual. I am persistently undervalued, wronged, and imposed upon by
mankind and the powers of the universe generally. But I endure all. I
endure _you_. Speak. I listen. It is a burden to me, but I even approve.
I sacrifice myself. Behold this movement of my lips! It is a smile."

The Reverend Doctor knew this forlorn way of Mr. Fairweather's, and was
not troubled by it. He proceeded to relate the circumstances of his
visit from the old black woman, and the fear she was in about the young
girl, who being a parishioner of Mr. Fairweather's, he had thought it
best to come over and speak to him about old Sophy's fears and fancies.

In telling the old woman's story, he alluded only vaguely to those
peculiar circumstances to which she had attributed so much importance,
taking it for granted that the other minister must be familiar with
the whole series of incidents she had related. The old minister was
mistaken, as we have before seen. Mr. Fairweather had been settled in
the place only about ten years, and, if he had heard a strange hint now
and then about Elsie, had never considered it as anything more than
idle and ignorant, if not malicious, village-gossip. All that he fully
understood was that this had been a perverse and unmanageable child, and
that the extraordinary care which had been bestowed on her had been so
far thrown away that she was a dangerous, self-willed girl, whom all
feared and almost all shunned, as if she carried with her some malignant
influence.

He replied, therefore, after hearing the story, that Elsie had always
given trouble. There seemed to be a kind of natural obliquity about
her. Perfectly unaccountable. A very dark case. Never amenable to good
influences. Had sent her good books from the Sunday-school library.
Remembered that she tore out the frontispiece of one of them, and kept
it, and flung the book out of the window. It was a picture of Eve's
temptation; and he recollected her saying that Eve was a good
woman,--and she'd have done just so, if she'd been there. A very sad
child,--very sad; bad from infancy.--He had talked himself bold, and
said all at once,--

"Doctor, do you know I am almost ready to accept your doctrine of the
congenital sinfulness of human nature? I am afraid that is the only
thing which goes to the bottom of the difficulty."

The old minister's face did not open as approvingly as Mr. Fairweather
had expected.

"Why, yes,--well,--many find comfort in it,--I believe;--there is much
to be said,--there are many bad people,--and bad children,--I can't
be so sure about bad babies,--though they cry very malignantly at
times,--especially if they have the stomach-ache. But I really don't
know how to condemn this poor Elsie; she may have impulses that act
in her like instincts in the lower animals, and so not come under the
bearing of our ordinary rules of judgment."

"But this depraved tendency, Doctor,--this unaccountable perverseness.
My dear Sir, I am afraid your school is in the right about human nature.
Oh, those words of the Psalmist, 'shapen in iniquity,' and the rest!
What are we to do with them,--we who teach that the soul of a child is
an unstained white tablet?"

"King David was very subject to fits of humility, and much given to
self-reproaches," said the Doctor, in a rather dry way. "We owe you and
your friends a good deal for calling attention to the natural graces,
which, after all, may, perhaps, be considered as another form of
manifestation of the divine influence. Some of our writers have pressed
rather too hard on the tendencies of the human soul toward evil as such.
It may be questioned whether these views have not interfered with the
sound training of certain young persons, sons of clergymen and others.
I am nearer of your mind about the possibility of educating children so
that they shall become good Christians without any violent transition.
That is what I should hope for from bringing them up 'in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord.'"

The younger minister looked puzzled, but presently answered,--

"Possibly we may have called attention to some neglected truths; but,
after all, I fear we must go to the old school, if we want to get at the
root of the matter. I know there is an outward amiability about many
young persons, some young girls especially, that seems like genuine
goodness; but I have been disposed of late to lean toward your view,
that these human affections, as we see them in our children,--ours, I
say, though I have not the fearful responsibility of training any of my
own,--are only a kind of disguised and sinful selfishness."

The old minister groaned in spirit. His heart had been softened by
the sweet influences of children and grandchildren. He thought of
a half-sized grave in the burial-ground, and the fine, brave,
noble-hearted boy he laid in it thirty years before,--the sweet,
cheerful child who had made his home all sunshine until the day when he
was brought home, his long curls dripping, his fresh lips purpled in
death,--foolish dear little blessed creature to throw himself into the
deep water to save the drowning boy, who clung about him and carried him
under! Disguised selfishness! And his granddaughter too, whose disguised
selfishness was the light of his household!

"Don't call it my view!" he said, "Abstractly, perhaps, all Nature may
be considered vitiated; but practically, as I see it in life, the divine
grace keeps pace with the perverted instincts from infancy in many
natures. Besides, this perversion itself may often be disease, bad
habits transmitted, like drunkenness, or some hereditary misfortune, as
with this Elsie we were talking about."

The younger minister was completely mystified. At every step he made
towards the Doctor's recognized theological position, the Doctor took
just one step towards his. They would cross each other soon at this
rate, and might as well exchange pulpits,--as Colonel Sprowle once
wished they would, it may be remembered.

The Doctor, though a much clearer-headed man, was almost equally
puzzled. He turned the conversation again upon Elsie, and endeavored
to make her minister feel the importance of bringing every friendly
influence to bear upon her at this critical period of her life. His
sympathies did not seem so lively as the Doctor could have wished.
Perhaps he had vastly more important objects of solicitude in his own
spiritual interests.

A knock at the door interrupted them. The Reverend Mr. Fairweather rose
and went towards it. As he passed the table, his coat caught something,
which came rattling to the floor. It was a crucifix with a string of
beads attached. As he opened the door, the Milesian features of Father
McShane presented themselves, and from their centre proceeded the
clerical benediction in Irish-sounding Latin, _Pax vobiscum!_

The Reverend Doctor Honeywood rose and left the priest and his disciple
together.

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REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.


_Autobiographical Recollections_. By the late CHARLES ROBERT LESLIE,
R.A. Edited, with a Prefatory Essay on Leslie as an Artist, and
Selections from his Correspondence, by TOM TAYLOR, Esq., Editor of the
"Autobiography of Haydon." With Portrait. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
1860. pp. lviii., 363.

Those who remember the excellent judgment with which Mr. Taylor selected
his material for the Autobiography of Haydon from the papers left by
that artist need not be told that this work is executed with spirit and
discrimination. It is a delicate task to publish just so much of the
letters and reminiscences of a man lately dead as shall consist with
good taste and gentlemanly feeling, to discriminate between legitimate
anecdote and what at second-hand becomes tale-bearing gossip, and not to
break faith with the dead by indiscreet confidences about the living.
If the dead have any privilege, it ought to be that of holding their
tongues; yet an unseemly fashion has prevailed lately of making
them gabble for years in Diaries, Remains, Correspondences, and
Recollections, perpetuating in a solid telltale record all they may
have said and written thoughtlessly or in a momentary pet, giving to a
fleeting whim the printed permanence of a settled opinion, and robbing
the grave of what is sometimes its only consoling attribute, the dignity
of reserve. We know of no more unsavory calling than this, unless it be
that of the Egyptian dealers in mummy, peddling out their grandfathers
to be ground into pigment. Obsequious to the last moment, the jackal
makes haste to fill his belly from the ribs of his late lion almost
before he is cold.

Mr. Taylor is too manly and well-bred to be guilty of any indiscretions,
much more of any indecencies. He let Haydon tell his own story, nor
assumed the function of a judge. And wisely, as we think; for, commonly,
when men take it upon themselves uncalled, their inability to conceive
the special weakness that is not theirs, (and which, perhaps, was but
the negative of a strength equally alien to them.) their humanly narrow
and often professionally back-attic view of character and circumstance,
their easy after-dinner superiority to what was perhaps a loathing
compromise with famine and the jail, fit them rather for the office of
_advocatus diaboli_ than of the justice which must be all-seeing that it
may be charitable. It is so hard to see that a sin is sometimes but a
thwarted and misdirected virtue! When Burns sighed that "the light that
led astray was light from Heaven," he was but unconsciously repeating
what a poet who of all men least needed the apology had said centuries
before.

We do not admit, that, because a man has published a volume or a
picture, he has published himself, excommunicated his soul from the
sanctuary of privacy, and made his life as common as a tavern-threshold
to every blockhead in the parish,--or that any Pharisee who kept
carefully to windward of his virtues, out of the way of infection, has
thereby earned the right to mismoralize his failings after he is dumbly
defenceless. The moral compasses that are too short for the aberration
may be, must be, unequal to the orbit. We would not deny that Burns was
a chamberer and a drunkard because he was a great poet; but we would not
admit that whiskey and wenches made him any the less the most richly
endowed genius of his century, with just title to the love and
admiration of men. It is not for us to decide whether he, who, by
doubling the suggestive and associative power of any thought, fancy,
feeling, or natural object, has so far added permanently to the sum of
human happiness, is not as sure of a welcome and a well-done from the
Infinite Fatherliness as he that has turned an honest penny by printing
a catechism; but we are sure that it is a shallow cant which holds up
the errors of men of genius as if they were especial warnings, and
proofs of how little the rarest gifts avail. Is it intended to put men
on their guard against being geniuses? That is scarcely called for till
those who yield to the temptation become more numerous. Do they mean,
We, too, might have been geniuses, but we chose rather to be good and
dull? Self-denial is always praiseworthy, and we reconcile ourselves to
the Ovid lost in consideration of the Deacon gained. But if it be meant
that the danger was in the genius, we deny it altogether. Burns's genius
was the one good thing he had, and it was always, as it always must be,
good, and only good, the leaven of uncontaminate heaven in him that
would not let him sink contentedly into the sty of oblivion with the
million other tipplers and loose-livers of his century. It was his
weakness of character, and not his strength or pride of intellect, that
betrayed him; and to call his faults errors of genius is a mischievous
fallacy. If they were, then they were no lesson for the rest of us; if
they were not, to call them so is to encourage certain gin-and-water
philosophers who would fain extenuate their unpleasant vices by the plea
that they are the necessary complement of unusual powers,--as if the
path to immortality were through the kennel, and fine verses were to be
written only at the painful sacrifice of bilking your washerwoman.

We are over-fond of drawing monitory morals from the lives of gifted
persons, tacking together our little ten-by-twelve pinfolds to impound
breachy human nature in, but it is only because we know more than we
have any business to know of the private concerns of such persons
that we have the opportunity. We are thankful that the character of
Shakspeare is wrapped safely away from us in un-Boswellable night.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge the man stood forever in the way of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge the poet and metaphysician, and the fault of the
poppy-juice in his nature is laid at the door of the laudanum he bought
of the apothecary. Yet all the drowsy juices of Circe's garden could not
hinder De Quincey from writing his twenty-five volumes. To us nothing is
more painful, and nothing seems more cruelly useless, than the parading
of mortal weaknesses, especially of those to whom we are indebted
for delight and teaching. For an inherent weakness has no lesson of
avoidance in it, being helpless from the first, and by the doom of its
own nature growing more and more helpless to the last, not more so in
the example than in him who is to profit by it, and who is more likely
to have his appetite flattered by good company than his fear aroused by
the evil consequence. Because the swans have a vile habit of over-eating
themselves, shall we nail them to the barn-door as a moral lesson to the
crows?

There is, doubtless, a great deal to be taught by biography; but it is
by the mistakes of men that we learn, and not by their weaknesses. To
see clearly an error of judgment and its consequences may be of positive
service to us in the conduct of life, while a vice of temperament
concerns us not at all in private men, and only so far in statesmen
and rulers as it may have been influential in history as a modifier of
action, or is essential to an understanding of it as an explainer of
motive.

The Autobiography of Leslie seems to us in some sort the complement
of Haydon's, and throws the defiant struggle of that remarkable
self-portraiture into stronger relief by the contrast of its equable
good-fortune and fireside tranquillity. The causes of the wide
difference in the course and the result of these two lives are on the
surface and are instructive. Comparing the two men at the outset, we
should have said that all the chances were on Haydon's side. If he had
not genius, he had at least the temperament and external characteristics
that go along with it. He had what is sometimes wanting to it in its
more purely aesthetic manifestation, the ambition that spurs and the
unflagging energy that seemed a guerdon of unlimited achievement.
Yet the ambition fermented into love of notoriety and soured into a
fraudulent self-assertion, that grew boastful as it grew distrustful of
its claims and could bring less proof in support of them; the energy
degenerated into impudence, evading the shame of spendthrift bankruptcy
to-day by shifts that were sure to bring a more degrading exposure
tomorrow; and the whole ended at last in a suicide whose tragic pang
is deadened to us by the feeling that so much of the mixed motive that
drove him to it as was not cowardice was a hankering after melodramatic
effect, the last throb of a passion for making his name the theme of
public talk, and his fate the centre of a London day's sensation.
Chatterton makes us lenient to a life of fraud by the dogged and cynical
uncomplainingness of the despair that drove him to cut it short; but
Haydon continues his self-autopsy to the last moment, and in pulling the
trigger seems to be only firing the train for an explosion that shall
give him a week longer of posthumous notoriety. The egotism of Pepys was
but a suppressed garrulity, which habitual caution, fostered by a period
of political confusion and the mystery of office, drove inward to a kind
of soliloquy in cipher; that of Montaigne was metaphysical,--in studying
his own nature and noting his observations he was studying man, and that
with a singular insouciance of public opinion; but Haydon appears to
have written his journals with a deliberate intention of their some day
advertising himself, and his most private aspirations are uttered with
an eye to the world. Yet it was a genuine instinct that led him to the
pen, and his lifelong succession of half-successes that are worse than
defeats was due to the initial error of mistaking a passion for a power.
A fine critic, a vivid sketcher of character, and a writer of singular
clearness, point, and eloquence was spoiled to make an artist, sometimes
noble in conception, but without sense of color, and utterly inadequate
to any but the most confused expression of himself by the pencil. His
very sense of the power which he was conscious of somewhere in himself
harassed and hampered him, as time after time he refused to see that his
failure was due, not to injustice or insensibility on the part of the
world, but to his having chosen the wrong means of making his ability
felt and acknowledged. His true place would have been that of Professor
and Lecturer in the Royal Academy. The world is not insensible or
unjust, but it knows what it wants, and will not long be put off with
less. There is always a public for success; there never is, and never
ought to be, for inadequacy. Haydon was in some respects a first-rate
man, but the result of his anxious, restless, and laborious life was
almost zero, as far as concerned its definite aims. It does not convey
the moral of neglected genius, or of loose notions of money-obligations,
ending in suicide, but simply of a mischosen vocation, leading sooner or
later to utter and undeniable failure. _Pas meme academicien_! Plenty of
neglected geniuses have found it good to be neglected, plenty of Jeremy
Diddlers (in letters and statesmanship as often as in money-matters)
have lived to a serene old age, but the man who in any of the unuseful
arts insists on doing what Nature never asked him to do has no place in
the world. Leslie, a second-rate man in all respects, but with a genuine
talent rightly directed, an obscure American, with few friends, no
influential patrons, and a modesty that would never let him obtrude his
claims, worked steadily forward to competence, to reputation, and the
Council of the Academy. The only blunder of his life was his accepting
the Professorship of Drawing at West Point, a place for which he was
unsuited. But this blunder he had the good sense and courage to correct
by the frank acknowledgment of resignation. Altogether his is a career
as pleasant as Haydon's is painful to contemplate, the more so as we
feel that his success was fairly won by honest effort directed by
a contented consciousness of the conditions and limitations of his
faculty.

Nothing can be more agreeable than the career of a successful artist.
His employment does not force upon him the solitude of an author; it
is eminently companionable; from its first design, through all the
processes that bring his work to perfection, he is not shut out from the
encouragement of sympathy; his success is definite and immediate; he
can see it in the crowd around his work at the exhibition; and his very
calling brings him into pleasant contact with beauty, taste, and (if a
portrait-painter) with eminence in every department of human activity.

Leslie's passage through the world was of that equal temper which is
happiest for the man and unhappiest for the biographer. With no dramatic
surprises of fortune, and no great sorrows, his life had scarce any
other alternation than that it went round with the earth through night
and day, and would have been tame but for his necessary labor in an
art which he loved wisely and with the untumultuous sentiment of
an after-honey-moon constancy. We should say that his leading
characteristic was Taste, an external quality, it is true, but one which
is often the indication of more valuable ones lying deeper. In the
conduct of life it insures tact, and in Art a certain gentlemanlike
equipoise, incapable of what is deepest and highest, but secure also
from the vulgar, the grotesque, and the extravagant. Leslie, we think,
was more at home with Addison than with Cervantes.

His autobiographical reminiscences are very entertaining, especially
that part of them which describes a voyage home to America, varied by
a winter in Portugal, during the early part of his life. The Scotch
captain, who, with his scanty merchant-crew, beats off a Bordeaux
privateer, and then, crippled and half-sinking, clears for action with
what he supposes to be a French frigate, but which turns out to be
English, is a personage whose acquaintance it is pleasant to make. The
sketches of life in Lisbon, too, are very lively, and the picture of
the decayed Portuguese nobleman's family, for whose pride of birth an
imaginary dinner-table was set every day in the parlor with the remains
of the hereditary napery and plate, the numerous covers hiding nothing
but the naked truth, while their common humanity, squatting on the floor
in the kitchen, fished its scanty meal from an earthen pot with pewter
spoons, is pathetically humorous and would have delighted Caleb
Balderstone. In after-life, Leslie's profession made him acquainted with
some of the best London life of his time, and the volume is full of
agreeable anecdotes of Scott, Irving, Turner, Rogers, Wilkie, and
many more. It contains also several letters of Irving, of no special
interest, and some from a sort of Lesmahago of a room-mate of Leslie's,
named Peter Powell, so queer, individual, and shrewd, that we are sorry
not to have more of them and their writer. Altogether the book is one of
the pleasantest we have lately met with.


_The Old Battle-Ground_. By J.T. TROWBRIDGE, Author of "Father
Brighthopes," "Neighbor Jackwood," etc. New York: Sheldon & Company.
1860. pp. 276.

Mr. Trowbridge's previous works have made him known to a large circle of
appreciating readers as a writer of originality and promise. His "Father
Brighthopes" we have never read, but we have heard it spoken of as one
of the most wholesome children's books ever published in America, and
our knowledge of the author makes us ready to believe the favorable
opinion a just one. Parts of "Neighbor Jackwood" we read with sincere
relish and admiration; they showed so true an eye for Nature and so
thorough an appreciation of the truly humorous elements of New England
character, as distinguished from the vulgar and laughable ones. The
domestic interior of the Jackwood family was drawn with remarkable truth
and spirit, and all the working characters of the book on a certain
average level of well-to-do rusticity were made to think and talk
naturally, and were as full of honest human nature as those of the
conventional modern novel are empty of it. An author who puts us in the
way to form some just notion of the style of thought proper to so large
a class as our New England country-people, and of the motives likely to
influence their social and political conduct, does us a greater service
than we are apt to admit. And the power to conceive the leading
qualities that make up an average representative and to keep them
always clearly in view, so as to swerve neither toward tameness nor
exaggeration, is by no means common. This power, it seems to us, Mr.
Trowbridge possesses in an unusual degree. The late Mr. Judd, in his
remarkable romance of "Margaret," gave such a picture as has never been
equalled for truth of color and poetry of conception, of certain phases
of life among a half-gypsy family in the outskirts of a remote village,
and growing up in the cold penumbra of our civilization and material
prosperity. But his scene and characters were exceptional, or, if
typical, only so of a very limited class, and his book, full of fine
imagination as it is, is truly a romance, an ideal and artistic
representation, rather a poem than a story of manners general and
familiar enough to be called real.

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