Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 by Various

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Recette pour le Depilatoire Physiophilosophique.
Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj.
Depilez avec. Polissez ensuite.

----I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to
him; and some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the piece
that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as well as I
could, on the spot.

The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that,
a depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific
accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she might
send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't think he'd
have to do anything to the outside of his head to get into any of
the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he played a part in a
tabullo.

No,--said I,--I shouldn't think of printing that in English. I'll tell
you why. As soon as you get a few thousand people together in a town,
there is somebody that every sharp thing you say is sure to hit. What
if a thing was written in Paris or in Pekin?--that makes no difference.
Everybody in those cities, or almost everybody, has his counterpart
here, and in all large places.--You never studied averages, as I have
had occasion to.

I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages. There was
one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the week,
through most of the lecturing period. I soon found, as most speakers do,
that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to keep several in hand.

----Don't you get sick to death of one lecture?--said the landlady's
daughter,--who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for
conversation.

I was going to talk about averages,--I said,--but I have no objection to
telling you about lectures, to begin with.

A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its
delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his mind.
After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then disgusted with
its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the disgust passes off, until,
after one has repeated it a hundred or a hundred and fifty times, he
rather enjoys the hundred and first or hundred and fifty-first time,
before a new audience. But this is on one condition,--that he never lays
the lecture down and lets it cool. If he does, there comes on a
loathing for it which is intense, so that the sight of the old battered
manuscript is as bad as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a while
with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it.
By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no longer any
sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the calluses disappear;
and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the
blisters.--The story is often quoted of Whitefield, that he said a
sermon was good for nothing until it had been preached forty times.
A lecture doesn't begin to be old until it has passed its hundredth
delivery; and some, I think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, that
number. These old lectures are a man's best, commonly; they improve by
age, also,--like the pipes, fiddles, and poems I told you of the other
day. One learns to make the most of their strong points and to carry off
their weak ones, to take out the really good things which don't tell on
the audience, and put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades
him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery. A
thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five
hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

----No, indeed,--I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful
of audiences. I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may
occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell you the _average_ intellect
of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very high. It may be
sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not very rapid or profound.
A lecture ought to be something which all can understand, about
something which interests everybody. I think, that, if any experienced
lecturer gives you a different account from this, it will probably be
one of those eloquent or forcible speakers who hold an audience by the
charm of their manner, whatever they talk about,--even when they don't
talk very well.

But an _average_, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of the
most extraordinary subjects of observation and study. It is awful in its
uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action. Two communities of
ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions, so far as we can
see. Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike,
that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite
mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell
the "remarkably intelligent audience" of a town in New York or Ohio from
one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle
of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young
men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the
assemblage. But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one
knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes
in. Front seats: a few old folks,--shiny-headed,--slant up best ear
towards the speaker,--drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins
to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young
and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front--(pick out
the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance
sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about.
An indefinite number of pairs of young people,--happy, but not always
very attentive. Boys in the back-ground, more or less quiet. Dull faces
here, there,--in how many places! I don't say dull _people_, but faces
without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what
kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and
stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;--that is the
chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They
render _latent_ any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as
those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on our hearts.

Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,--a great
compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two
mammals of the same species are like each other. Each audience laughs,
and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you
make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even those little indescribable
movements which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices
his horse's cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place
of your lecture, always. I declare to you, that, as the monk said about
the picture in the convent,--that he sometimes thought the living
tenants were the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,--I
have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and
coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the same sleepless
eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation!

----Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,--a thousand faces
that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts,
but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are
memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not ungrateful, nor
unconscious of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be
met with through the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers. But
when I set forth, leading a string of my mind's daughters to market, as
the country-folk fetch in their strings of horses----Pardon me, that
was a coarse fellow who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy
lecturer, as if, because he was decently paid for his services, he had
therefore sold his sensibilities.--Family men get dreadfully homesick.
In the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
the logs in one's fireplace at home.

"There are his young barbarians all at play,"--

if he owns any youthful savages.--No, the world has a million roosts for
a man, but only one nest.

----It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always made
in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence,
with that slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness
of earning a "settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the
individual thus armed. When a person is really full of information, and
does not abuse it to crush conversation, his part is to that of the real
talkers what the instrumental accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of
vocalists.

----What do I mean by the real talkers?--Why, the people with fresh
ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in. Facts
always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts about
facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger on the key
and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I have known three of
these men of facts, at least, who were always formidable,--and one of
them was tyrannical.

----Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular
occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and
never made mistakes.--He? _Veneers_ in first-rate style. The mahogany
scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the cheap light
stuff.--I found ---- very fine in conversational information, the other
day, when we were in company. The talk ran upon mountains. He was
wonderfully well acquainted with the leading facts about the Andes, the
Apennines, and the Appalachians; he had nothing in particular to
say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and various other mountains that were
mentioned. By and by some Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed
singular familiarity with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many
details relating to Major Andre. A point of Natural History being
suggested, he gave an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes.
He was very full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the
conversation when horticulture was introduced in the discussion. So
he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, but did not
pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal. There was something so
odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge, that I suspected
all at once what might be the meaning of it, and waited till I got an
opportunity.--Have you seen the "New American Cyclopaedia?" said I.--I
have, he replied; I received an early copy.--How far does it go?--He
turned red, and answered,--To Araguay.--Oh, said I to myself,--not quite
so far as Ararat;--that is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he
must have read all the rest straight through, and, if he can remember
what is in this volume until he has read all those that are to come, he
will know more than I ever thought he would.

Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related a
similar story. I didn't borrow it, for all that.--I made a comparison
at table some time since, which has often been quoted and received many
compliments. It was that of the mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye;
the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts. The simile is a
very obvious, and, I suppose I may now say, a happy one; for it has just
been shown me that it occurs in a Preface to certain Political Poems of
Thomas Moore's, published long before my remark was repeated. When a
person of fair character for literary honesty uses an image such as
another has employed before him, the presumption is, that he has struck
upon it independently, or unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his
own.

It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a comparison
which suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a recollection. I
told you the other day that I never wrote a line of verse that seemed to
me comparatively good, but it appeared old at once, and often as if it
had been borrowed. But I confess I never suspected the above comparison
of being old, except from the fact of its obviousness. It is proper,
however, that I proceed by a formal instrument to relinquish all claim
to any property in an idea given to the world at about the time when
I had just joined the class in which Waster Thomas Moore was then a
somewhat advanced scholar.

I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing the
liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for that reason
feeling uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing it, do hereby
renounce all claim to being considered the _first_ person who gave
utterance to a certain simile or comparison referred to in the
accompanying documents, and relating to the pupil of the eye on the one
part and the mind of the bigot on the other. I hereby relinquish all
glory and profit, and especially all claims to letters from
autograph collectors, founded upon my supposed property in the above
comparison,--knowing well, that, according to the laws of literature,
they who speak first hold the fee of the thing said. I do also agree
that all Editors of Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all
Publishers of Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein,
shall be at liberty to retract or qualify any opinion predicated on
the supposition that I was the sole and undisputed author of the above
comparison. But, inasmuch as I do affirm that the comparison aforesaid
was uttered by me in the firm belief that it was new and wholly my own,
and as I have good reason to think that I had never seen or heard it
when first expressed by me, and as it is well known that different
persons may independently utter the same idea,--as is evinced by that
familiar line from Donatus,--

"Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixcrunt,"--

now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all well-disposed
persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I am open to any
accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison, and, if they have
so asserted or implied, that they will have the manliness forthwith to
retract the same assertion or insinuation.

I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than myself.
If I had even suspected that the idea in question was borrowed,--I
should have disclaimed originality, or mentioned the coincidence, as
I once did in a case where I had happened to hit on an idea of
Swift's.--But what shall I do about these verses I was going to read
you? I am afraid that half mankind would accuse me of stealing their
thoughts, if I printed them. I am convinced that several of you,
especially if you are getting a little on in life, will recognize some
of these sentiments as having passed through your consciousness at some
time. I can't help it,--it is too late now. The verses are written, and
you must have them. Listen, then, and you shall hear

WHAT WE ALL THINK.

That age was older once than now,
In spite of locks untimely shed,
Or silvered on the youthful brow;
That babes make love and children wed.

That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
Which faded with those "good old days,"
When winters came with deeper snow,
And autumns with a softer haze.

That--mother, sister, wife, or child--
The "best of women" each has known.
Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
How young the grandpapas have grown!

That _but for this_ our souls were free,
And _but for that_ our lives were blest;
That in some season yet to be
Our cares will leave us time to rest.

Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,
Some common ailment of the race,--
Though doctors think the matter plain,--
That ours is "a peculiar case."

That when like babes with fingers burned
We count one bitter maxim more,
Our lesson all the world has learned,
And men are wiser than before.

That when we sob o'er fancied woes,
The angels hovering overhead
Count every pitying drop that flows
And love us for the tears we shed.

That when we stand with tearless eye
And turn the beggar from our door,
They still approve us when we sigh,
"Ah, had I but _one thousand more_!"

That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
In half the slips our youth has known;
And whatsoe'er its blame has been,
That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.

Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
O'erhanging truth's eternal flow,
Their tablets bold with _what we think_,
Their echoes dumb to _what we know_;

That one unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above,
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it: GOD is LOVE!

* * * * *

SANDALPHON.

Have you read in the Talmud of old,
In the legends the Rabbins have told
Of the limitless realms of the air,
Have you read it,--the marvellous story
Of Sandalphon, the Angel of Glory,
Sandalphon, the Angel of Prayer?

How, erect, at the outermost gate
Of the City Celestial he waits,
With his feet on the ladder of light,
That, crowded with angels unnumbered,
By Jacob was seen, as he slumbered
Alone in the desert at night?

The Angels of Wind and of Fire
Chant only one hymn, and expire
With the song's irresistible stress,--
Expire in their rapture and wonder,
As harp-strings are broken asunder
By the music they throb to express.

But serene in the rapturous throng,
Unmoved by the rush of the song,
With eyes unimpassioned and slow,
Among the dead angels, the deathless
Sandalphon stands listening, breathless,
To sounds that ascend from below,--

From the spirits on earth that adore,
From the souls that entreat and implore
In the frenzy and passion of prayer,--
From the hearts that are broken with losses,
And weary with dragging the crosses
Too heavy for mortals to bear.

And he gathers the prayers as he stands,
And they change into flowers in his hands,
Into garlands of purple and red;
And beneath the great arch of the portal,
Through the streets of the City Immortal,
Is wafted the fragrance they shed.

It is but a legend, I know,--
A fable, a phantom, a show
Of the ancient Rabbinical lore;
Yet the old mediaeval tradition,
The beautiful, strange superstition,
But haunts me and holds me the more.

When I look from my window at night,
And the welkin above is all white,
All throbbing and panting with stars,
Among them majestic is standing
Sandalphon the angel, expanding
His pinions in nebulous bars.

And the legend, I feel, is a part
Of the hunger and thirst of the heart,
The frenzy and fire of the brain,
That grasps at the fruitage forbidden,
The golden pomegranates of Eden,
To quiet its fever and pain.

* * * * *

MR. BUCHANAN'S ADMINISTRATION.

Mr. Buchanan came into power with the prestige of experience; he was
known to have been long in public life; he had been a senator, a
secretary, a diplomatist, and almost everything else which is supposed
to fit a man for the practical conduct of affairs.

This presumed fitness for office greatly assisted his chances in the
Presidential campaign; and it assisted him especially with those timid
and conservative minds, of which there are many, apt to conceive that a
familiarity with the business and details of government is the same as
statesmanship, and to confound the skill and facility acquired by mere
routine with a genuine ability in execution. Had these men, however,
looked more closely into Mr. Buchanan's official career, they would have
found causes for suspecting the validity of their judgment, in the very
length and variety of his services. They would have discovered, that,
long as these had been and various as they had been, they were quite
undistinguished by any peculiar evidences of capacity or aptitude.

He had been, senator, secretary, and diplomatist, it is true; but in no
one of these positions had he achieved any remarkable successes. The
occasion could not be indicated on which he had risen above the average
level of respectability as a public man. There were no salient points in
his course,--no splendid developments of mastery,--no great reports, or
speeches, or measures, to cause him to be remembered,--and no leading
thoughts or acts, to awaken a high and general feeling of admiration on
the part of his countrymen. He was never such a senator as Webster
was, nor such a secretary as Clay, nor such a diplomatist as Marey.
Throughout his protracted official existence, he followed in the wake
of his party submissively, doing its appointed work with patience, and
vindicating its declared policy with skill, but never emerging as a
distinct and prominent figure. He never exhibited any peculiar largeness
of mind or loftiness of character; and though he spoke well and wrote
well, and played the part of a cool and wary manager, he was scarcely
considered a commanding spirit among his fellows. Amid that array of
luminaries, indeed, which adorned the Senate, where his chief reputation
was made,--among such men as Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Benton, and
Wright,--he shone with a diminished lustre.

Now, forty years of action, in the most conspicuous spheres,
unillustrated by a single incident which mankind has, or will have,
reason to cite and applaud, were not astonishing evidence of fitness for
the chief magistracy; and the event has shown, that Mr. Buchanan was to
be regarded as an old politician rather than a practised statesman, that
the most serviceable soldier in the ranks may prove to be an indifferent
general in command,--and that the experience, for which he was vaunted
and trusted, was not that ripening discipline of the mind and heart,

-------"which doth attain
To something of prophetic strain,"--

but that other unlearning use and wont, which

----"chews on wisdom past,
And totters on in blunders to the last."

His administration has been a series of blunders, and worse; it
has evinced no mastery; on the other hand, it may be arraigned for
inconsistencies the most palpable, for proceedings the most awkward, for
a general impotence which places it on a level with that of Tyler or
Pierce, and for signal offences against the national sense of decorum
and duty.

It is scarcely a year since Mr. Buchanan assumed the reins at
Washington. He assumed them under circumstances by which he and his
party and the whole country had been taught a great lesson of
political duty. The infamous mismanagement of Kansas, by his immediate
predecessor, had just shattered the most powerful of our party
organizations, and caused a mighty uprising of the masses of the North
in defence of menaced freedom. His election was carried amid the
extremest hazards, and with the utmost difficulty. Two months more of
such ardent debate and such popular enlightenment as were then going
forward would have resulted in his defeat. As it was, nearly every
Northern State--no matter how firm its previous adherence to the
Democratic party--was aroused to a strenuous opposition. Nearly every
Northern State pronounced by a stupendous majority against him and
against his cause. Nothing but a systematic disguise of the true
questions at issue by his own party, and a gratuitous complication of
the canvass by means of a foolish third party, saved his followers from
the most complete and shameful rout that had been given for many years
to any political array. Men of every class, of every shade of faith,
joined in that hearty protest against the spirit which animated the
Democratic administration, and joined in it, that they might utter the
severest rebuke in their power, of its meanness and perfidy.

Mr. Buchanan ought to have read the warning which was thus blazed across
the political skies, like the hand-writing upon the wall. He ought to
have discerned in this general movement the signs of a deep, earnest,
and irrepressible conviction on the part of the North. It is no slight
cause which can start such general and enthusiastic expressions of
popular feeling; they cannot be manufactured; they are not the work of
mere party excitement; there is nothing spurious and nothing hollow in
them; but they well up from the deep heart of nations, showing that a
chord of sympathy has been touched, with which it is fatal to tamper or
to sport. Call it fanaticism, if you will; call it delusion; call it
anything; but recollect also that it is out of such feelings that
revolutions are born, and by them that awful national crises are
determined.

But Mr. Buchanan has not profited, as we shall see, by the monition. His
initial act, the choice of a cabinet, in which the only man of national
reputation was superannuated, and the others were of little note, gave
small hope that he would do so; and his subsequent mistakes might have
been augured from the calibre of the counsellors by whom he chose to
be surrounded.--But let the men pass, since our object is to discuss
measures.

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