Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 by Various

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It is very easy for you, the Reader, to sit down and run over the pages
of a monthly narrative as a boy "skips" a stone,--and the flatter and
thinner your capacity, the more skips, perhaps, you will make. But I
tell you, for a man who has live people to deal with, and hearts that
are beating even while he handles them,--a man who can go into families
and pull up by the roots all the mysteries of their dead generations and
their living sons' and daughters' secret history,--_responsible_ for
what he says, here and elsewhere,--open to a libel suit, if he isn't
pretty careful in his personalities, or to a visit from a brother or
other relative, wishing to know, Sir, and so forth,--or to a paragraph
in the leading journal of that whispering-gallery of a nation's gossip,
Little Millionville, to the effect that--We understand the personages
alluded to in the tale now publishing in the Oceanic Miscellany are
the Reverend Dr. S---h and his accomplished lady, the distinguished
financier, Mr. B---n,--and so through the whole list of characters;--I
say, for a man who _writes_ the pages you skim over, it is a mighty
different piece of business. Why, if I _do_ tell all I know about some
things that have come to my cognizance, I shall make you open your eyes
and spread your pupils, as if you had been to the Eye Infirmary, and the
doctors there had anointed your lids with the extract of belladonna.
Mark what I tell you! I have happened to become intimately acquainted
with circumstances of a very extraordinary nature,--not, perhaps,
without precedent, but such as very few have been called upon to
witness. Suppose that I should see fit to tell these in connection with
the story of which they form a part? I may render myself obnoxious to
persons whom it is not safe to offend,--persons that won't come out in
the public prints, perhaps, but will poke incendiary letters under your
doors,--that won't step up to you in broad daylight, and lug a Colt out
of their pocket, or draw a bowie-knife from their back, where they had
carried it under their coat, but who will dog you about to do you a
mischief unseen,--who will carry air-guns in the shape of canes, and
hang round the place where you get your provisions, and practise with
long-range rifles out in the lonely fields,--rifles that crack no louder
than a parlor-pistol, but spit a bit of lead out of their mouths half a
mile and more, so that you wait as you do for the sound of the man's axe
who is chopping on the other side of the river, to see the fellow you
have "saved" clap his hand to his breast and stagger over. It makes me
nervous to think of such things. I don't want to be suspicious of every
queer taste in my coffee, and to shiver if I see a little powdered white
sugar on the upper crust of my pastry. I don't want, every time I hear a
door bang, to think it is a ragged slug from an unseen gun-barrel.

If Dick V---- was _not_ killed on the Pampas, as they have always said
he was, I should never sleep easy after telling my story. For such a
fellow as he was would certainly see through all the disguises I could
cover up a real-life story with, and then----. He has learned the use of
the lasso too well for me to want to trust my neck anywhere within a rod
of him, if there were light enough for him to see, and nothing between
us, and nobody near.

And besides, there were a good many opinions handled by some of these
people I should have to talk about. Now, of course, a magazine like the
Oceanic is no place for opinions. Look out for your Mormon subscribers,
if you question the propriety of Solomon's domestic arrangements! And
if you say one word that touches the Sandemanians, be sure their whole
press will be down on you; for, as Sandemanianism is the undoubted and
absolutely true religion, it follows, of course, that it is as sore as a
scalded finger, and must be handled like a broken bone.

Add to this that I have always had the greatest objection to writing
anything which those who were not acquainted with the facts might call
a _romance_ or a _tale._ We think very ill of a man who offers us as a
truth some single statement which we find he knew to be false. Now what
can we think of a man who tells three volumes, or even one, full of just
such lies? Of course the _prima-facie_ aspect of the case is, that he
is guilty of the most monstrous impertinence; and, in point of fact,
I confess the greatest disgust towards any person of whom I hear the
assertion that he has _written a story,_ unless I hear something more
than that. He is bound to show extenuating or justifying circumstances,
as much as the man who writes what he calls "poems." For, as the world
is full of real histories, and every day in every great city begins and
ends a score or half a dozen score of tragic dramas, it is a huge piece
of assumption to undertake to make one out of one's own head. A man
takes refuge under your porch in a rain-storm, and you offer him the use
of your shower-bath!

Also, I cannot help remembering, that, on the whole, I have been more
intensely bored with works of fiction,--beginning with "Gil Blas," and
ending with--on the whole, I won't even mention it,--than I ever was by
the Latin Grammar or Rollin's History. Naturally, therefore, I should
not wish to threaten my friends with the punishment I have endured from
others. But then, as I said before, if I write down the circumstances
that have come to my knowledge, with some account of persons, opinions,
and conversations, no one can accuse me of writing a _novel,_--a thing
which I never meant to do, under any circumstances.

----After having carefully weighed my friends' arguments and my own
objections, I have come to the conclusion to do pretty much as I like
about it. Now the truth is, I have grown to be rather fonder of you, the
Reader, than I have ever been willing to confess. You are such a good,
kind creature,--it takes so little to please you,--you laugh and cry
so very obligingly at just the right time,--you send me such charming
notes, such dear little copies of verses,--nay, (shall I venture to say
it?) such prodigal tokens of kindness, some of you, that I----in short,
I love you very much, and cannot make up my mind to part with you.
Rather than do this, as I could not and would not write a romance, I
have made up my mind to tell you something of some persons and events of
which I have known enough,--of some of them, I might say, too much. Of
course, you must trust wholly to my discretion and sense of propriety,
in dealing with living personages, recent events, and subjects still in
dispute. Trusting that none of my friends will pay any attention to any
idle rumors tending to fix the personages or localities of which I shall
speak, and reminding my readers that the narrative will constitute only
a part of what I have to say, inasmuch as there will be no small amount
of reflections introduced, and perhaps of conversations reported, I
begin this connected statement of facts with an essay on a social
phenomenon not hitherto distinctly recognized.

CHAPTER I.

THE BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND

There is nothing in New England corresponding at all to the feudal
aristocracies of the Old World. Whether it be owing to the stock from
which we were derived, or to the practical working of our institutions,
or to the abrogation of the technical "law of honor," which draws a
sharp line between the personally responsible class of "gentlemen" and
the unnamed multitude of those who are not expected to risk their lives
for an abstraction,--whatever be the cause, we have no such aristocracy
here as that which grew up out of the military systems of the Middle
Ages.

What our people mean by "aristocracy" is merely the richer part of the
community, that live in the tallest houses, drive real carriages, (not
"kerridges,") kid-glove their hands, and French-bonnet their ladies'
heads, give parties where the persons who call them by the above title
are not invited, and have a provokingly easy way of dressing, walking,
talking, and nodding to people, as if they felt entirely at home, and
would not be embarrassed in the least, if they met the Governor, or even
the President of the United States, face to face. Some of these great
folks are really well-bred, some of them are only purse-proud and
assuming,--but they form a class, and are named as above in the common
speech.

It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when
subdivided and distributed. A million is the unit of wealth, now and
here in America. It splits into four handsome properties; each of these
into four good inheritances; these, again, into scanty competences for
four ancient maidens,--with whom it is best the family should die out,
unless it can begin again as its grandfather did. Now a million is
a kind of golden cheese, which represents in a compendious form the
summer's growth of a fat meadow of craft or commerce; and as this kind
of meadow rarely bears more than one crop, it is pretty certain that
sons and grandsons will not get another golden cheese out of it, whether
they milk the same cows or turn in new ones. In other words, the
millionocracy, considered in a large way, is not at all an affair of
persons and families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable
human element, which a philosopher might leave out of consideration
without falling into serious error. Of course, this trivial and fugitive
fact of personal wealth does not create a permanent class, unless some
special means are taken to arrest the process of disintegration in the
third generation. This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that
one need not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he
knew in childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into
the hands of the country-boys who were sweeping stores and carrying
parcels when the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating
their venison over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in
embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in
white-topped boots with silken tassels.

There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call
it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to
be a _caste_,--not in any odious sense,--but, by the repetition of the
same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct
organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is mere stupidity,
and not to be willing to describe would show a distrust of the
good-nature and intelligence of our readers, who like to have us see all
we can and tell all we see.

If you will look carefully at any class of students in one of our
colleges, you will have no difficulty in selecting specimens of two
different aspects of youthful manhood. Of course I shall choose extreme
cases to illustrate the contrast between them. In the first, the figure
is perhaps robust, but often otherwise,--inelegant, partly from careless
attitudes, partly from ill-dressing,--the face is uncouth in feature, or
at least common,--the mouth coarse and unformed,--the eye unsympathetic,
even if bright,--the movements of the face clumsy, like those of the
limbs,--the voice unmusical,--and the enunciation as if the words were
coarse castings, instead of fine carvings. The youth of the other aspect
is commonly slender,--his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid,--his
features are regular and of a certain delicacy,--his eye is bright and
quick,--his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers
dance over their music,--and his whole air, though it may be timid, and
even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher, you know what
to expect from each of these young men. With equal willingness, the
first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as a
pointer or a setter to his field-work.

The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred to
bodily labor. Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind of
life it has lived. The hands and feet by constant use have got more than
their share of development,--the organs of thought and expression less
than their share. The finer instincts are latent and must be developed.
A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of elaboration.
You must not expect too much of any such. Many of them have force of
will and character, and become distinguished in practical life; but very
few of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is almost always the
son of scholars or scholarly persons.

That is exactly what the other young man is. He comes of the _Brahmin
caste of New England_. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled
aristocracy to which I have referred, and which I am sure you will
at once acknowledge. There are races of scholars among us, in which
aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of,
are congenital and hereditary. Their names are always on some college
catalogue or other. They break out every generation or two in some
learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At
last some newer name takes their place, it may be,--but you inquire a
little and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or
the Ellerys or some of the old historic scholars, disguised under the
altered name of a female descendant.

I suppose there is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our
Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general
distinction. But the reader who has never been a teacher will very
probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come
direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,--and he may, perhaps,
even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the
English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude
of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual
classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training
are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as
well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more
or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that
sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands
and sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into
intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for
intellectual acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an
improved strain of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in
the large uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary
class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism;
thank God for it, but do not let it make you illogical. The race of the
hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor
for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal of
animal vigor. The scholar who comes by Nature's special grace from an
unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always
overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality.
A man's breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add
_muscular_) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as
his thinking organs. You broke down in your great speech, did you? Yes,
your grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too
hard on his famous Election Sermon. All this does not touch the main
fact: our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our
best fruits come from well-known grafts,--though now and then a seedling
apple, like the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel,
springs from a nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the
gardens in the land.

Let me introduce you to a young man who belongs to the Brahmin caste of
New England.

CHAPTER II.

THE STUDENT AND HIS CERTIFICATE.

Bernard C. Langdon, a young man attending Medical Lectures at the school
connected with one of our principal colleges, remained after the Lecture
one day and wished to speak with the Professor. He was a student of
mark,--first favorite of his year, as they say of the Derby colts.
There are in every class half a dozen bright faces to which the teacher
naturally directs his discourse, and by the intermediation of whose
attention he seems to hold that of the mass of listeners. Among these
some one is pretty sure to take the lead, by virtue of a personal
magnetism, or some peculiarity of expression, which places the face in
quick sympathetic relations with the lecturer. This was a young man
with such a face; and I found,--for you have guessed that I was the
"Professor" above-mentioned,--that, when there was anything difficult to
be explained, or when I was bringing out some favorite illustration of a
nice point, (as, for instance, when I compared the cell-growth, by which
Nature builds up a plant or an animal, to the glass-blower's similar
mode of beginning,--always with a hollow sphere, or vesicle, whatever he
is going to make,) I naturally looked in his face and gauged my success
by its expression.

It was a handsome face,--a little too pale, perhaps, and would have
borne something more of fulness without becoming heavy. I put the
organization to which it belongs in Section C of Class 1 of my
Anglo-American Anthropology (unpublished). The jaw in this class is but
_slightly_ narrowed,--just enough to make the width of the forehead tell
more decidedly. The moustache often grows vigorously, but the whiskers
are thin. The skin is like that of Jacob, rather than like Esau's. One
string of the animal nature has been taken away, but this gives only a
greater predominance to the intellectual chords. To see just how the
vital energy has been toned down, you must contrast one of this section
with a specimen of Section A of the same class,--say, for instance, one
of the old-fashioned, full-whiskered, red-faced, roaring-big Commodores
of the last generation, whom you remember, at least by their portraits,
in ruffled shirts, looking as hearty as butchers and as plucky as
bull-terriers, with their hair combed straight up from their foreheads,
which were not commonly very high or broad. The special form of physical
life I have been describing gives you a right to expect more delicate
perceptions and a more reflective nature than you commonly find in
shaggy-throated men, clad in heavy suits of muscles.

The student lingered in the lecture-room, looking all the time as if he
wanted to say something in private, and waiting for two or three others,
who were still hanging about, to be gone.

Something is wrong!--I said to myself, when I noticed his
expression.--Well, Mr. Langdon,--I said to him, when we were alone,--can
I do anything for you to-day?

You can, Sir,--he said.--I am going to leave the class, for the present,
and keep school.

Why, that's a pity, and you so near graduating! You'd better stay and
finish this course, and take your degree in the spring, rather than
break up your whole plan of study.

I can't help myself, Sir,--the young man answered.--There's trouble at
home, and they cannot keep me here as they have done. So I must look out
for myself for a while. It's what I've done before, and am ready to do
again. I came to ask you for a certificate of my fitness to teach a
common school, or a high school, if you think I am up to that. Are you
willing to give it to me?

Willing? Yes, to be sure,--but I don't want you to go. Stay; we'll make
it easy for you. There's a fund will do something for you, perhaps. Then
you can take both the annual prizes, if you like,--and claim them in
money, if you want that more than medals.

I have thought it all over,--he answered,--and have pretty much made up
my mind to go.

A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous address and mild
utterance, but means at least as much as he says. There are some people
whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual understatement. I often
tell Mrs. Professor that one of her "I think it's sos" is worth the
Bible-oath of all the rest of the household that they "know it's so."
When you find a person a little better than his word, a little more
liberal than his promise, a little more than borne out in his statement
by his facts, a little larger in deed than in speech, you recognize a
kind of eloquence in that person's utterance not laid down in Blair or
Campbell.

This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive, with
family-recollections that made him unwilling to accept the kind of aid
which many students--would have thankfully welcomed. I knew him too well
to urge him, after the few words which implied that he was determined
to go. Besides, I have great confidence in young men who believe in
themselves, and are accustomed to rely on their own resources from an
early period. When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully,
the World, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to
find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away
timid adventurers. I have seen young men more than once, who came to a
great city without a single friend, support themselves and pay for their
education, lay up money in a few years, grow rich enough to travel, and
establish themselves in life, without ever asking a dollar of any person
which they had not earned. But these are exceptional cases. There are
horse-tamers, born so, as we all know; there are woman-tamers who
bewitch the sex as the pied piper bedeviled the children of Hamelin; and
there are world-tamers, who can make any community, even a Yankee one,
get down and let them jump on its back as easily as Mr. Rarey saddled
Cruiser.

Whether Langdon was of this sort or not I could not say positively; but
he had spirit, and, as I have said, a family-pride which would not let
him be dependent. The New England Brahmin caste often gets blended with
connections of political influence or commercial distinction. It is a
charming thing for the scholar, when his fortune carries him in this way
into some of the "old families" who have fine old houses, and city-lots
that have risen in the market, and names written in all the stock-books
of all the dividend-paying companies. His narrow study expands into a
stately library, his books are counted by thousands instead of hundreds,
and his favorites are dressed in gilded calf in place of plebeian
sheepskin or its pauper substitutes of cloth and paper.

The Reverend Jedediah Langdon, grandfather of our young gentleman, had
made an advantageous alliance of this kind. Miss Dorothea Wentworth had
read one of his sermons which had been printed "by request," and became
deeply interested in the young author, whom she had never seen. Out of
this circumstance grew a correspondence, an interview, a declaration, a
matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a dozen children. Wentworth
Langdon, Esquire, was the oldest of these, and lived in the old
family-mansion. Unfortunately, that principle of the diminution of
estates by division, to which I have referred, rendered it somewhat
difficult to maintain the establishment upon the fractional income
which the proprietor received from his share of the property. Wentworth
Langdon, Esq., represented a certain intermediate condition of life
not at all infrequent in our old families. He was the connecting link
between the generation which lived in ease, and even a kind of state,
upon its own resources, and the new brood, which must live mainly by its
wits or industry, and make itself rich, or shabbily subside into that
lower stratum known to social geologists by a deposit of Kidderminster
carpets and the peculiar aspect of the fossils constituting the family
furniture and wardrobe. This _slack-water_ period of a race, which comes
before the rapid ebb of its prosperity, is familiar to all who live in
cities. There are no more quiet, inoffensive people than these children
of rich families, just above the necessity of active employment, yet
not in a condition to place their own children advantageously, if they
happen to have families. Many of them are content to live unmarried.
Some mend their broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a
numerous progeny to pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors
emerged; so that you may see on hand-carts and cobblers' stalls names
which, a few generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals,
and tombstones with armorial bearings.

In a large city, this class of citizens are familiar to us in the
streets. They are very courteous in their salutations; they have
time enough to bow and take their hats off,--which, of course, no
business-man can afford to do. Their beavers are smoothly brushed, and
their boots well polished; all their appointments are tidy; they look
the respectable walking gentleman to perfection. They are prone to
habits,--to frequent reading-rooms, insurance-offices,--to walk the same
streets at the same hours,--so that one becomes familiar with their
faces and persons, as a part of the street-furniture.

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