Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859

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Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait, and
eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in certain
intimate communions,--to be _light in hand_ in conversation, to have
ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without them,--to
belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to have nothing
in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot afford to spoil it
and get another like it, yet to preserve the harmonies throughout your
person and dwelling: I should say that this was a fair capital of
manners to begin with.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
generic humanity. It is just here that the very highest society asserts
its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest _ton_,
you will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country
village. As nuns drop their birth-names and become Sister Margaret and
Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop their personal distinctions
and become brothers and sisters of conversational charity. Nor are
fashionable people without their heroism. I believe there are men that
have shown as much self-devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to
the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized
his name. There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing
can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed,
gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
corner, and distil their soft words upon him like dew upon the green
herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens
the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one
of these angels ask, _of her own accord_, that a desolate middle-aged
man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the
hostess. He wore no shirt-collar,--he had on black gloves,--and was
flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief! Match me this, ye proud
children of poverty, who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other!
Virtue in humble life! What is that to the glorious self-renunciation
of a martyr in pearls and diamonds? As I saw this noble woman bending
gracefully before the social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty
heaving under the foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed
them,--I should have wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears,
except as a private demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of
self-consciousness and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.

I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
our fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been
what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some
future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that
lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may
happen,--how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man
of coming political possibilities,--an unpresentable boor, sucked into
office by one of those eddies in the flow of popular sentiment which
carry straws and chips into the public harbor, while the prostrate
trunks of the monarchs of the forest hurry down on the senseless stream
to the gulf of political oblivion! Think of him, I say, and of the
concentrated gaze of good society through its thousand eyes, all
confluent, as it were, in one great burning-glass of ice that shrivels
its wretched object in fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an
unsunned cavern! No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as now,
to shield the victim of free institutions from himself and from his
torturers. I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife
which he would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance
of food,--or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by
imitating his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it
into her bosom, like Lucretia! I can see her studying his provincial
dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western or
Southern barbarisms. She has learned that _haeow_ means _what_; that
_thinkin'_ is the same thing as _thinking_; or she has found out the
meaning of that extraordinary monosyllable, which no single-tongued
phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson and
at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think they
say _first_, (_fe-eest,--fe_ as in the French _le_),--or that _cheer_
means _chair_,--or that _urritation_ means _irritation_,--and so of
other enormities. Nothing surprises her. The highest breeding, you know,
comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--_nil
admirari_,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
the same thing.

If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to
see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a little
older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your
complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact
to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the
divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like. I hate the sight
of the wretches. Don't for mercy's sake think I hate _them_; the
distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago. No matter where you
find such people; they are clowns. The rich woman who looks and talks in
this way is not half so much a lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty
"saving your presence," when she has to say something which offends
her natural sense of good manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of
courts, and the blood of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in
her veins,--thinned by two hundred years of potato, which, being an
underground fruit, tends to drag down the generations that are made
of it to the earth from which it came, and, filling their veins with
starch, turn them into a kind of human vegetable.

I say, if you like such people, go with them. But I am going to make a
practical application of the example at the beginning of this particular
record, which some young people who are going to choose professional
advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for. If you are making
choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if possible, with a cheerful
and serene countenance. A physician is not--at least, ought not to
be--an executioner; and a sentence of death on his face is as bad as a
warrant for execution signed by the Governor. As a general rule, no man
has a right to tell another by word or look that he is going to die. It
may be necessary in some extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last
extreme of impertinence which one human being can offer to another. "You
have killed me," said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told
him he was incurable. He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead
in six weeks. If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought to
know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of hope of
recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long as life is
comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of heaven, or at
least of rest, when life has become a burden which the bearer is ready
to let fall.

Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death. The chance
of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a certain
time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse people. As
you go down the social scale, you reach a point at length where the
common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and sepulchres, and a kind
of perpetual vivisection is forever carried on, upon the person of the
miserable sufferer.

And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer the
one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body. If you can get
along with people who carry a certificate in their faces that their
goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your children
cannot. And whatever offends one of these little ones cannot be right in
the eyes of Him who loved them so well.

After all, as _you_ are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably select
gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then all will be
right.

This repetition of the above words,--_gentleman and lady_,--which could
not be conveniently avoided, reminds me how much use is made of them by
those who ought to know what they mean. Thus, at a marriage ceremony,
once, of two very excellent persons who had been at service, instead
of, Do you take this man, etc.? and, Do you take this woman? how do you
think the officiating clergyman put the questions? It was, Do you, MISS
So and So, take this GENTLEMAN? and, Do you, MR. This or That, take
this LADY?! What would any English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England
herself, have thought, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her
and her bridegroom anything but plain woman and man at such a time?

I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
happened to have been in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered
these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the
ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that
seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed what a
sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck,
the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,--so
inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of
religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the good man would have
given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown
vulgarism. Any persons whom it could please have no better notion of
what the words referred to signify than of the meaning of _apsides_ and
_asymptotes_.

MAN! Sir! WOMAN! Sir! Gentility is a fine thing, not to be undervalued,
as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes before that.

"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Where was then the gentleman?"

The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from the
finest training is not to be understood by those whose _habitat_ is
below a certain level. Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the
graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the
elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through
the social scale. Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life,
and last pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism,
where they do not flourish greatly.

--I had almost forgotten about our boarders. As the Model of all the
Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason
we are not all very sorry. Surely we all like good persons. She is a
good person. Therefore we like her.--Only we don't.

This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the principle
which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit and embodied
in the lines by which _Dr. Fell_ is made unamiably immortal,--this
syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had occasion to
construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as I have done for
the Model. "Pious and painefull." Why has that excellent old phrase gone
out of use? Simply because these good _painefull_ or painstaking persons
proved to be such nuisances in the long run, that the word "painefull"
came, before people thought of it, to mean _paingiving_ instead of
_painstaking_.

--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.

Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?

Why, the chap that came with our little beauty,--the old boy in
petticoats.

--Now that means something,--said I to myself.--These rough young
rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
their eyes shut. A real woman does a great many things without knowing
why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their intellects
with everything they do, just like men. They can't help it, no doubt;
but we can't help getting sick of them, either. Intellect is to a
woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to her dress; it ought
to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not to show itself too
staringly on the outside.--You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell
you;--the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart
the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place
it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and
color of its birthplace.

The young man John did not hear my _soliloque_, of course, but sent
up one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a
statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives no
visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.

Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did anybody
any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and intelligent, nay,
a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of society, fail to
inspire interest, love, and devotion? Because of the _reversed current_
in the flow of thought and emotion. The red heart sends all its
instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed, chilled, blanched, and
so become pure reason, which is just exactly what we do not want of
woman as woman. The current should run the other way. The nice, calm,
cold thought, which in women shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly
know it as thought, should always travel to the lips _via_ the heart. It
does so in those women whom all love and admire. It travels the wrong
way in the Model. That is the reason why the Little Gentleman said, "I
hate her, I hate her." That is the reason why the young man John called
her the "old fellah," and banished her to the company of the great
Unpresentable. That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her
to pieces with scalpel and forceps. That is the reason why the young
girl whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which lie
sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes. I can see her, as she
sits between this estimable and most correct of personages and the
misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man on the
other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she speaks, and
looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain in them at which
her soul could quiet its thirst.

Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and high
culture. It is not

"The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr with Aurora playing,"

when the two meet

----"on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"

that claim such women as their offspring. It is rather the east wind, as
it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a clear-eyed wintry
noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England ice-quarry.--Don't throw
up your cap now, and hurrah as if this were giving up everything, and
turning against the best growth of our latitudes,--the daughters of the
soil. The brain-women never interest us like the heart-women; white
roses please less than red. But our Northern seasons have a narrow green
streak of spring, as well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have
a glowing band of summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their
many-colored wardrobe; and women are born to us that wear all these hues
of earth and heaven in their souls. Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no more.
Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those babbling,
chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know enough even to
keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only as specimens of
_arrest of development_ for our psychological cabinets.

Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues! We can spare you now. A little clear
perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way. Go! be
useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable, talk pure
reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of an achromatic
understanding. Good-bye! Where is my Beranger? I must read "Fretillon."

Fair play for all. But don't claim incompatible qualities for anybody.
Justice is a very rare virtue in our community. Everything that public
sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's digester, and boiled under
high pressure till all is turned into one homogeneous pulp, and the very
bones give up their jelly. What are all the strongest epithets of our
dictionary to us now? The critics and politicians, and especially
the philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of
syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power.

Justice! A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by
accident, he always erases the one that stands _second_; has not the
first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust
many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious
anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute wickedness of human
dispositions. Why doesn't a man always strike out the _first_ of the two
words, to gratify his diabolical love of _in_justice?

So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.
They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the world of
thought through them. But the rose and purple tints of richer natures
they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to ask it.

Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way one
would hardly at first think of. It loves vitality above all things,
sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept under by the
laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant life, opulent and
showy organizations,--the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry
of female architecture,--plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, tropical
voices, and forms that bear the splendors of dress without growing pale
beneath their lustre. Among these you will find the most delicious women
you will ever meet,--women whom dress and flattery and the round of city
gayeties cannot spoil,--talking with whom, you forget their diamonds
and laces,--and around whom all the nice details of elegance, which
the cold-blooded beauty next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one
harmonious whole, too perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of
a jewel, or the yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.

There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion or
wealth. Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and loyalty,
I think I love ease and independence better than the golden slavery of
perpetual _matinees_ and _soirees_, or the pleasures of accumulation.

But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the
frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff
about. Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and
social intercourse. What business has a man who knows nothing about the
beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word _view_, to talk about fashion
to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a card at their
doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of their heap of the
names of their two-story acquaintances, till it was as yellow as the
Codex Vaticanus?

Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish
trivialities about it! Take the single fact of its alleged uncertain
tenure and transitory character. In old times, when men were all the
time fighting and robbing each other,--in those tropical countries where
the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a man's cattle and camels, and
there were frightful tornadoes and rains of fire from heaven, it was
true enough that riches took wings to themselves not unfrequently in a
very unexpected way. But, with common prudence in investments, it is not
so now. In fact, there is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the
whole, as money. A man's learning dies with him; even his virtues fade
out of remembrance; but the dividends on the stocks he bequeathes to his
children live and keep his memory green.

I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving utterance
to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by conventional
trumpery. The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to
feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the breadth and depth of
that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous
power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one,
nor the meanness which often degrades the other.

A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is not
generally to be taken "neat," but watered with the ideas of common-sense
and commonplace people. So, if any of my young friends should be tempted
to waste their substance on white kids and "all-rounds," or to insist
on becoming millionnaires at once, by anything I have said, I will give
them references to some of the class referred to, well known to the
public as literary diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is
not an old woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.

I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean to
flatter them. I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness. But there
is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which, of course,
draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people into the glare
of their candelabra, but which have a real respectability and meaning,
if we will only look at them stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of
one,) that I thought it a duty to speak a few words for them. Why can't
somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says,
and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in these
lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the following
lesson for the day.

THE TWO STREAMS.

Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
In rushing river-tides!

Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.

So from the heights of Will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends,--

From the same cradle's side,
From the same mother's knee,--
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea!

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Sixty Years' Gleanings from Life's Harvest._ A Genuine Autobiography.
By JOHN BROWN, Proprietor of the University Billiard-Rooms, Cambridge.
New York: Appleton & Company. 1859.

We are all familiar with that John Brown whom the minstrel has
immortalized as being the possessor of a diminutive youth of the
aboriginal American race, who, in the course of the ditty, is multiplied
from "one little Injun" into "ten little Injuns," and who, in a
succeeding stanza, by an ingenious amphisbaenic process, is again
reduced to the singular number. As far as we are aware, the author of
this "genuine autobiography" claims no relationship with the famous
owner of tender redskins. The multiplicity of adventures of which he
has been the hero demands for him, however, the same notice that a
multiplicity of "Injuns" has insured to his illustrious namesake.

We have always had a pet theory, that a plain and minute narrative
of any ordinary man's life, stated with simplicity and without any
reference to dramatic effect or the elegances of composition, would
possess an immediate interest for the public. We cannot know too much
about men. No man's life is so uneventful as to be incapable of amusing
and instructing. The same event is never the same to more than one
person; no two see it from the same point of view. And as we want to
know more of men than of incidents, every one's record of trifles
is useful. A book written by a Cornish miner, whose life passes in
subterranean monotony, sparing none of the petty and ever-recurring
details that make up his routined existence, would, if set down in the
baldest language, be a valuable contribution to literature. But we
rarely, if ever, find a man sufficiently free from vanity and the demon
of composition to tell us plainly what has happened to him. The moment
the working-man gets a pen into his hand, he is, as it were, possessed.
He is no longer himself. He has not the courage to come out naked
and show himself in all his grime and strength. The instant that he
conceives the idea of putting himself on paper he borrows somebody
else's clothes, and, instead of a free, manly figure, we have a wretched
scarecrow in a coat too small or too large for him,--generally the
latter. For it is a curious fact, that the more uneducated a man
is,--in which condition his ordinary language must of necessity be
proportionately idiomatic,--the greater pains he takes, when he has
formed the resolution of composing, to be splendid and expansive in his
style. He racks his brains until he rummages out imperfect memories of
the turgid paragraphs of cheap newspapers and novels which he has
some time or other read, and forthwith struts off with all the finest
feathers in the dictionary rustling about him.

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