Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862

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Yet do not be made conceited by obscurity, any more than by notoriety.
Many fine geniuses have been long neglected; but what would become
of us, if all the neglected were to turn out geniuses? It is unsafe
reasoning from either extreme. You are not necessarily writing like
Holmes because your reputation for talent began in college, nor like
Hawthorne because you have been before the public ten years without an
admirer. Above all, do not seek to encourage yourself by dwelling on
the defects of your rivals: strength comes only from what is above you.
Northcote, the painter, said, that, in observing an inferior picture,
he always felt his spirits droop, with the suspicion that perhaps he
deceived himself and his own paintings were no better; but the works of
the mighty masters always gave him renewed strength, in the hope that
perhaps his own had in their smaller way something of the same divine
quality.

Do not complacently imagine, because your first literary attempt proved
good and successful, that your second will doubtless improve upon it.
The very contrary sometimes happens. A man dreams for years over
one projected composition, all his reading converges to it, all his
experience stands related to it, it is the net result of his existence
up to a certain time, it is the cistern into which he pours his
accumulated life. Emboldened by success, he mistakes the cistern for a
fountain, and instantly taps his brain again. The second production,
as compared with the first, costs but half the pains and attains but
a quarter part of the merit; a little more of fluency and facility
perhaps,--but the vigor, the wealth, the originality, the head of water,
in short, are wanting. One would think that almost any intelligent man
might write one good thing in a lifetime, by reserving himself long
enough: it is the effort after quantity which proves destructive. The
greatest man has passed his zenith, when he once begins to cheapen
his style of work and sink into a book-maker: after that, though the
newspapers may never hint at it, nor his admirers own it, the decline of
his career is begun.

Yet the author is not alone to blame for this, but also the world which
first tempts and then reproves him. Goethe says, that, if a person once
does a good thing, society forms a league to prevent his doing another.
His seclusion is gone, and therefore his unconsciousness and his
leisure; luxuries tempt him from his frugality, and soon he must toil
for luxuries; then, because he has done one thing well, he is urged
to squander himself and do a thousand things badly. In this country
especially, if one can learn languages, he must go to Congress; if he
can argue a case, he must become agent of a factory: out of this comes
a variety of training which is very valuable, but a wise man must
have strength to call in his resources before middle-life, prune off
divergent activities, and concentrate himself on the main work, be it
what it may. It is shameful to see the indeterminate lives of many of
our gifted men, unable to resist the temptations of a busy land, and so
losing themselves in an aimless and miscellaneous career.

Yet it is unjust and unworthy in Marsh to disfigure his fine work on the
English language by traducing all who now write that tongue. "None seek
the audience, fit, though few, which contented the ambition of Milton,
and all writers for the press now measure their glory by their gains,"
and so indefinitely onward,--which is simply cant. Does Sylvanus Cobb,
Jr., who honestly earns his annual five thousand dollars from the "New
York Ledger," take rank as head of American literature by virtue of his
salary? Because the profits of true literature are rising,--trivial as
they still are beside those of commerce or the professions,--its merits
do not necessarily decrease, but the contrary is more likely to happen;
for in this pursuit, as in all others, cheap work is usually poor work.
None but gentlemen of fortune can enjoy the bliss of writing for nothing
and paying their own printer. Nor does the practice of compensation by
the page work the injury that has often been ignorantly predicted. No
contributor need hope to cover two pages of a periodical with what might
be adequately said in one, unless he assumes his editor to be as foolish
as himself. The Spartans exiled Ctesiphon for bragging that he could
speak the whole day on any subject selected; and a modern magazine is of
little value, unless it has a Spartan at its head.

Strive always to remember--though it does not seem intended that we
should quite bring it home to ourselves--that "To-Day is a king in
disguise," and that this American literature of ours will be just as
classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured.
There is a mirage over all literary associations. Keats and Lamb seem to
our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet
it is not an old man's life since Keats was an awkward boy at the
door of Hazlitt's lecture-room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to
Wordsworth as his own only admirer. In reading Spence's "Anecdotes,"
Pope and Addison appear no farther off; and wherever I open Bacon's
"Essays," I am sure to end at last with that one magical sentence,
annihilating centuries, "When I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in
the flower of her years."

And this imperceptible transformation of the commonplace present into
the storied past applies equally to the pursuits of war and to the
serenest works of peace. Be not misled by the excitements of the moment
into overrating the charms of military life. In this chaos of uniforms,
we seem to be approaching times such as existed in England after
Waterloo, when the splenetic Byron declared that the only distinction
was to be a little undistinguished. No doubt, war brings out grand
and unexpected qualities, and there is a perennial fascination in the
Elizabethan Raleighs and Sidneys, alike heroes of pen and sword. But the
fact is patent, that there is scarcely any art whose rudiments are
so easy to acquire as the military; the manuals of tactics have
no difficulties comparable to those of the ordinary professional
text-books; and any one who can drill a boat's crew or a ball-club can
learn in a very few weeks to drill a company or even a regiment. Given
in addition the power to command, to organize, and to execute,--high
qualities, though not rare in this community,--and you have a man
needing but time and experience to make a general. More than this can be
acquired only by an exclusive absorption in this one art; as Napoleon
said, that, to have good soldiers, a nation must be always at war.

If, therefore, duty and opportunity call, count it a privilege to obtain
your share in the new career; throw yourself into it as resolutely and
joyously as if it were a summer-campaign in the Adirondack, but never
fancy for a moment that you have discovered any grander or manlier life
than you might be leading every day at home. It is not needful here to
decide which is intrinsically the better thing, a column of a newspaper
or a column of attack, Wordsworth's "Lines on Immortality" or
Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras; each is noble, if nobly done,
though posterity seems to remember literature the longest. The writer
is not celebrated for having been the favorite of the conqueror, but
sometimes the conqueror only for having favored or even for having
spurned the writer. "When the great Sultan died, his power and glory
departed from him, and nothing remained but this one fact, that he knew
not the worth of Ferdousi." There is a slight delusion in this dazzling
glory. What a fantastic whim the young lieutenants thought it, when
General Wolfe, on the eve of battle, said of Gray's "Elegy," "Gentlemen,
I would rather have written that poem than have taken Quebec." Yet,
no doubt, it is by the memory of that remark that Wolfe will live the
longest,--aided by the stray line of another poet, still reminding us,
not needlessly, that "Wolfe's great name's cotemporal with our own."

Once the poets and the sages were held to be pleasing triflers, fit for
hours of relaxation in the lulls of war. Now the pursuits of peace are
recognized as the real, and war as the accidental. It interrupts
all higher avocations, as does the cry of fire: when the fire is
extinguished, the important affairs of life are resumed. Six years ago
the London "Times" was bewailing that all thought and culture in England
were suspended by the Crimean War. "We want no more books. Give us good
recruits, at least five feet seven, a good model for a floating-battery,
and a gun to take effect at five thousand yards,--and Whigs and Tories,
High and Low Church, the poets, astronomers, and critics, may settle it
among themselves." How remote seems that epoch now! and how remote will
the present soon appear! while art and science will resume their sway
serene, beneath skies eternal. Yesterday I turned from treatises on
gunnery and fortification to open Milton's Latin Poems, which I had
never read, and there, in the "Sylvarum Liber," I came upon a passage
as grand as anything in "Paradise Lost,"--his description of Plato's
archetypal man, the vast ideal of the human race, eternal, incorrupt,
coeval with the stars, dwelling either in the sidereal spaces, or among
the Lethean mansions of souls unborn, or pacing the unexplored confines
of the habitable globe. There stood the majestic image, veiled in a dead
language, yet still visible; and it was as if one of the poet's own
sylvan groves had been suddenly cut down, and opened a view of Olympus.
Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and diplomacy
ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there seemed nothing
real in the universe but Plato's archetypal man.

Indeed, it is the same with all contemporary notorieties. In all free
governments, especially, it is the habit to overrate the _dramatis
personae_ of the hour. How empty to us are now the names of the great
politicians of the last generation, as Crawford and Lowndes!--yet it
is but a few years since these men filled in the public ear as large a
space as Clay or Calhoun afterwards, and when they died, the race of the
giants was thought ended. The path to oblivion of these later idols
is just as sure; even Webster will be to the next age but a mighty
tradition, and all that he has left will seem no more commensurate with
his fame than will his statue by Powers. If anything preserves the
statesmen of to-day, it will be only because we are coming to a contest
of more vital principles, which may better embalm the men. Of all gifts,
eloquence is the most short-lived. The most accomplished orator fades
forgotten, and his laurels pass to some hoarse, inaudible Burke,
accounted rather a bore during his lifetime, and possessed of a faculty
of scattering, not convincing, the members of the House. "After all,"
said the brilliant Choate, with melancholy foreboding, "a book is the
only immortality."

So few men in any age are born with a marked gift for literary
expression, so few of this number have access to high culture, so few
even of these have the personal nobleness to use their powers well,
and this small band is finally so decimated by disease and manifold
disaster, that it makes one shudder to observe how little of the
embodied intellect of any age is left behind. Literature is attar of
roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms. Think how Spain and
Portugal once divided the globe between them in a treaty, when England
was a petty kingdom of illiterate tribes!--and now all Spain is
condensed for us into Cervantes, and all Portugal into the fading fame
of the unread Camoens. The long magnificence of Italian culture has
left us only _I Quattro Poeti_, the Four Poets. The difference between
Shakspeare and his contemporaries is not that he is read twice, ten
times, a hundred times as much as they: it is an absolute difference; he
is read, and they are only printed.

Yet, if our life be immortal, this temporary distinction is of little
moment, and we may learn humility, without learning despair, from
earth's evanescent glories. Who cannot bear a few disappointments, if
the vista be so wide that the mute inglorious Miltons of this sphere
may in some other sing their Paradise as Found? War or peace, fame or
forgetfulness, can bring no real injury to one who has formed the fixed
purpose to live nobly day by day. I fancy that in some other realm of
existence we may look back with some kind interest on this scene of our
earlier life, and say to one another,--"Do you remember yonder planet,
where once we went to school?" And whether our elective study here lay
chiefly in the fields of action or of thought will matter little to us
then, when other schools shall have led us through other disciplines.

* * * * *

JOHN LAMAR.

The guard-house was, in fact, nothing but a shed in the middle of a
stubble-field. It had been built for a cider-press last summer; but
since Captain Dorr had gone into the army, his regiment had camped over
half his plantation, and the shed was boarded up, with heavy wickets at
either end, to hold whatever prisoners might fall into their hands
from Floyd's forces. It was a strong point for the Federal troops, his
farm,--a sort of wedge in the Rebel Cheat counties of Western Virginia.
Only one prisoner was in the guard-house now. The sentry, a raw
boat-hand from Illinois, gaped incessantly at him through the bars, not
sure if the "Secesh" were limbed and headed like other men; but the
November fog was so thick that he could discern nothing but a short,
squat man, in brown clothes and white hat, heavily striding to and fro.
A negro was crouching outside, his knees cuddled in his arms to keep
warm: a field-hand, you could be sure from the face, a grisly patch of
flabby black, with a dull eluding word of something, you could not tell
what, in the points of eyes,--treachery or gloom. The prisoner stopped,
cursing him about something: the only answer was a lazy rub of the
heels.

"Got any 'baccy, Mars' John?" he whined, in the middle of the hottest
oath.

The man stopped abruptly, turning his pockets inside out.

"That's all, Ben," he said, kindly enough. "Now begone, you black
devil!"

"Dem's um, Mars'! Goin' 'mediate,"--catching the tobacco, and lolling
down full length as his master turned off again.

Dave Hall, the sentry, stared reflectively, and sat down.

"Ben? Who air you next?"--nursing his musket across his knees,
baby-fashion.

Ben measured him with one eye, polished the quid in his greasy hand, and
looked at it.

"Pris'ner o' war," he mumbled, finally,--contemptuously; for Dave's
trousers were in rags like his own, and his chilblained toes stuck
through the shoe-tops. Cheap white trash, clearly.

"Yer master's some at swearin'. Heow many, neow, hes he like you, down
to Georgy?"

The boatman's bony face was gathering a woful pity. He had enlisted to
free the Uncle Toms, and carry God's vengeance to the Legrees. Here they
were, a pair of them.

Ben squinted another critical survey of the "miss'able Linkinite."

"How many wells hev _yer_ poisoned since yer set out?" he muttered.

The sentry stopped.

"How many 'longin' to de Lamars? 'Bout as many as der's dam' Yankees in
Richmond 'baccy-houses!"

Something in Dave's shrewd, whitish eye warned him off.

"Ki yi! yer white nigger, yer!" he chuckled, shuffling down the stubble.

Dave clicked his musket,--then, choking down an oath into a grim
Methodist psalm, resumed his walk, looking askance at the coarse-moulded
face of the prisoner peering through the bars, and the diamond studs in
his shirt,--bought with human blood, doubtless. The man was the black
curse of slavery itself in the flesh, in his thought somehow, and he
hated him accordingly. Our men of the Northwest have enough brawny
Covenanter muscle in their religion to make them good haters for
opinion's sake.

Lamar, the prisoner, watched him with a lazy drollery in his sluggish
black eyes. It died out into sternness, as he looked beyond the sentry.
He had seen this Cheat country before; this very plantation was his
grandfather's a year ago, when he had come up from Georgia here, and
loitered out the summer months with his Virginia cousins, hunting. That
was a pleasant summer! Something in the remembrance of it flashed into
his eyes, dewy, genial; the man's leather-covered face reddened like a
child's. Only a year ago,--and now----The plantation was Charley Dorr's
now, who had married Ruth. This very shed he and Dorr had planned last
spring, and now Charley held him a prisoner in it. The very thought of
Charley Dorr warmed his heart. Why, he could thank God there were such
men. True grit, every inch of his little body! There, last summer, how
he had avoided Ruth until the day when he (Lamar) was going away!--then
he told him he meant to try and win her. "She cared most for you
always," Lamar had said, bitterly; "why have you waited so long?" "You
loved her first, John, you know." That was like a man! He remembered
that even that day, when his pain was breathless and sharp, the words
made him know that Dorr was fit to be her husband.

Dorr was his friend. The word meant much to John Lamar. He thought less
meanly of himself, when he remembered it. Charley's prisoner! An odd
chance! Better that than to have met in battle. He thrust back the
thought, the sweat oozing out on his face,--something within him
muttering, "For Liberty! I would have killed him, so help me God!"

He had brought despatches to General Lee, that he might see Charley, and
the old place, and--Ruth again; there was a gnawing hunger in his heart
to see them. Fool! what was he to them? The man's face grew slowly
pale, as that of a savage or an animal does, when the wound is deep and
inward.

The November day was dead, sunless: since morning the sky had had only
enough life in it to sweat out a few muddy drops, that froze as they
fell: the cold numbed his mouth as he breathed it. This stubbly slope
was where he and his grandfather had headed the deer: it was covered
with hundreds of dirty, yellow tents now. Around there were hills like
uncouth monsters, swathed in ice, holding up the soggy sky; shivering
pine-forests; unmeaning, dreary flats; and the Cheat, coiled about the
frozen sinews of the hills, limp and cold, like a cord tying a dead
man's jaws. Whatever outlook of joy or worship this region had borne on
its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation,
a great death. He wondered idly, looking at it, (for the old Huguenot
brain of the man was full of morbid fancies,) if it were winter alone
that had deadened color and pulse out of these full-blooded hills, or if
they could know the colder horror crossing their threshold, and forgot
to praise God as it came.

Over that farthest ridge the house had stood. The guard (he had been
taken by a band of Snake-hunters, back in the hills) had brought him
past it. It was a heap of charred rafters. "Burned in the night," they
said, "when the old Colonel was alone." They were very willing to
show him this, as it was done by his own party, the Secession
"Bush-whackers"; took him to the wood-pile to show him where his
grandfather had been murdered, (there was a red mark,) and buried, his
old hands above the ground. "Colonel said 't was a job fur us to pay up;
so we went to the village an' hed a scrimmage,"--pointing to gaps in
the hedges where the dead Bush-whackers yet lay unburied. He looked at
them, and at the besotted faces about him, coolly.

Snake-hunters and Bush-whackers, he knew, both armies used in Virginia
as tools for rapine and murder: the sooner the Devil called home his
own, the better. And yet, it was not God's fault, surely, that there
were such tools in the North, any more than that in the South Ben
was--Ben. Something was rotten in freer States than Denmark, he thought.

One of the men went into the hedge, and brought out a child's golden
ringlet as a trophy. Lamar glanced in, and saw the small face in its
woollen hood, dimpled yet, though dead for days. He remembered it. Jessy
Birt, the ferryman's little girl. She used to come up to the house every
day for milk. He wondered for which flag _she_ died. Ruth was teaching
her to write. _Ruth!_ Some old pain hurt him just then, nearer than even
the blood of the old man or the girl crying to God from the ground. The
sergeant mistook the look. "They'll be buried," he said, gruffly. "Ye
brought it on yerselves." And so led him to the Federal camp.

The afternoon grew colder, as he stood looking out of the guard-house.
Snow began to whiten through the gray. He thrust out his arm through the
wicket, his face kindling with childish pleasure, as he looked closer at
the fairy stars and crowns on his shaggy sleeve. If Floy were here! She
never had seen snow. When the flakes had melted off, he took a case out
of his pocket to look at Floy. His sister,--a little girl who had no
mother, nor father, nor lover, but Lamar. The man among his brother
officers in Richmond was coarse, arrogant, of dogged courage, keen
palate at the table, as keen eye on the turf. Sickly little Floy, down
at home, knew the way to something below all this: just as they of the
Rommany blood see below the muddy boulders of the streets the enchanted
land of Boabdil bare beneath. Lamar polished the ivory painting with his
breath, remembering that he had drunk nothing for days. A child's face,
of about twelve, delicate,--a breath of fever or cold would shatter such
weak beauty; big, dark eyes, (her mother was pure Castilian,) out of
which her little life looked irresolute into the world, uncertain what
to do there. The painter, with an unapt fancy, had clustered about the
Southern face the Southern emblem, buds of the magnolia, unstained, as
yet, as pearl. It angered Lamar, remembering how the creamy whiteness of
the full-blown flower exhaled passion of which the crimsonest rose knew
nothing,--a content, ecstasy, in animal life. Would Floy----Well, God
help them both! they needed help. Three hundred souls was a heavy weight
for those thin little hands to hold sway over,--to lead to hell or
heaven. Up North they could have worked for her, and gained only her
money. So Lamar reasoned, like a Georgian: scribbling a letter to
"My Baby" on the wrapper of a newspaper,--drawing the shapes of the
snowflakes,--telling her he had reached their grandfather's plantation,
but "have not seen our Cousin Ruth yet, of whom you may remember I have
told you, Floy. When you grow up, I should like you to be just such a
woman; so remember, my darling, if I"----He scratched the last words
out: why should he hint to her that he could die? Holding his life loose
in his hand, though, had brought things closer to him lately,--God and
death, this war, the meaning of it all. But he would keep his brawny
body between these terrible realities and Floy, yet awhile. "I want
you," he wrote, "to leave the plantation, and go with your old maumer to
the village. It will be safer there." He was sure the letter would reach
her. He had a plan to escape to-night, and he could put it into a post
inside the lines. Ben was to get a small hand-saw that would open the
wicket; the guards were not hard to elude. Glancing up, he saw the negro
stretched by a camp-fire, listening to the gaunt boatman, who was off
duty. Preaching Abolitionism, doubtless: he could hear Ben's derisive
shouts of laughter. "And so, good bye, Baby Florence!" he scrawled. "I
wish I could send you some of this snow, to show you what the floor of
heaven is like."

While the snow fell faster--without, he stopped writing, and began idly
drawing a map of Georgia on the tan-bark with a stick. Here the Federal
troops could effect a landing: he knew the defences at that point. If
they did? He thought of these Snake-hunters who had found in the war a
peculiar road for themselves downward with no gallows to stumble over,
fancied he saw them skulking through the fields at Cedar Creek, closing
around the house, and behind them a mass of black faces and bloody
bayonets. Floy alone, and he here,--like a rat in a trap! "God keep my
little girl!" he wrote, unsteadily. "God bless you, Floy!" He gasped for
breath, as if he had been writing with his heart's blood. Folding up the
paper, he hid it inside his shirt and began his dogged walk, calculating
the chances of escape. Once out of this shed, he could baffle a
blood-hound, he knew the hills so well.

His head bent down, he did not see a man who stood looking at him over
the wicket. Captain Dorr. A puny little man, with thin yellow hair, and
womanish face: but not the less the hero of his men,--they having found
out, somehow, that muscle was not the solidest thing to travel on in
war-times. Our regiments of "roughs" were not altogether crowned with
laurel at Manassas! So the men built more on the old Greatheart soul
in the man's blue eyes: one of those souls born and bred pure, sent to
teach, that can find breath only in the free North. His hearty "Hillo!"
startled Lamar.

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