Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 by Various

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In those few days arrangements were made for his being received at
the Sanatorium,--an institution in which sick persons who had either
previously subscribed, or who were the nominees of subscribers, were
received, and well tended for a guinea a week, under the comfortable
circumstances of a private house. Each patient had a separate chamber;
and the medical attendance, diet, and arrangements were of a far higher
order than poor Patrick could have commanded in lodgings. Above all, the
resident surgeon--now a distinguished physician, superintendent of a
lunatic asylum--was a man to make a friend of,--a man of cultivated
mind, tender heart, and cheerful and gentle manners. Patrick won his
heart at once; and every note of Patrick's glowed with affection for
Doctor H--. After a few weeks of alternating hope and fear, after a
natural series of fluctuations of spirits, Patrick wrote me a remarkably
quiet letter. He told me that both his doctors had given him a plain
answer to his question whether he could recover. They had told him
that it was impossible; but he could not learn from them how long they
thought he would live. He saw now, however, that he must give up his
efforts to work. He believed he could have worked a little: but perhaps
he was no judge; and if he really was dying, he could not be wrong in
obeying the directions of those who had the care of him. Once afterwards
he told me that his physicians did not, he saw, expect him to live many
months,--perhaps not even many weeks.

It was now clear to my mind what would please him best. I told him,
that, if he liked to furnish me with the address of that house in Dublin
in which his thoughts chiefly lived, I would take care that the young
lady there should know that he died in honor, having fairly entered upon
the literary career which had always been his aspiration, and surrounded
by friends whose friendship was a distinction. His words in reply were
few, calm, and fervent, intimating that he now had not a care left in
the world: and Doctor H--wondered what had happened to make him so gay
from the hour he received my letter.

His decline was a rapid one; and I soon learned, by very short notes,
that he hardly left his bed. When it was supposed that he would never
leave his room again, he surprised the whole household by a great feat.
I should have related before what a favorite he was with all the other
patients. He was the sunshine of the house while able to get to the
drawing-room, and the pet of each invalid by the chamber-fire. On
Christmas morning, he slipped out of bed, and managed to get his clothes
on, while alone, and was met outside his own door, bent on giving a
Christmas greeting to everybody in the house. He was indulged in this;
for it was of little consequence now what he did. He appeared at each
bedside, and at every sofa,--and not with any moving sentiment, but with
genuine gayety. It was full in his thoughts that he had not many days to
live, but he hoped the others had; and he entered into their prospect
of renewed health and activity. At night they said that Patrick had
brightened their Christmas Day.

He died very soon after,--sinking at last with perfect
consciousness,--writing messages to me on his slate while his fingers
would hold the pencil,--calm and cheerful without intermission. After
his death, when the last offices were to be begun, my letters were taken
warm from his breast. Every line that I had ever written to him was
there; and the packet was sent to me by Doctor H--bound round with the
green ribbon which he had himself tied before he quite lost the power.
The kind friends who had watched over him during the months of his
London life wrote to me not to trouble myself about his funeral. They
buried him honorably, and two of his distinguished friends followed him
to the grave.

Of course, I immediately performed my promise. I had always intended
that not only the young lady, but her father, should know what we
thought of Patrick, and what he might have been, if he had lived. I
wrote to that potential personage, telling him of all the facts of the
case, except the poverty, which might be omitted as essentially a slight
and temporary circumstance. I reported of his life of industry and
simple self-denial,--of his prospects, his friendships, his sweet and
gay decline and departure, and his honorable funeral. No answer was
needed; and I had supposed there would hardly be one. If there should
be one, it was not likely to be very congenial to the mood of Patrick's
friends: but I could hardly have conceived of anything so bad as it was.
The man wrote that it was not wonderful that any young man should get on
under the advantage of my patronage; and that it was to be hoped that
this young man would have turned out more worthy of such patronage than
he was when he ungratefully returned his obligations to his employer by
engaging the affections of his daughter. The young man had caused great
trouble and anxiety to one who, now he was dead, was willing to forgive
him; but no circumstance could ever change the aspect of his conduct,
in regard to his treacherous behavior to his benefactor; and so forth.
There was no sign of any consciousness of imprudence on the father's
own part; but strong indications of vindictive hatred, softened in
the expression by being mixed up with odious flatteries to Patrick's
literary friends. The only compensation for the disgust of this letter
was the confirmation it afforded of Patrick's narrative, in which, it
was clear, he had done no injustice to his oppressor.

I have not bestowed so much thought as this on the man and his letter,
from the day I received it, till now; but it was necessary to speak of
it at the close of the story. I lose sight of the painful incidents in
thinking of Patrick himself. I only wish I had once seen his face, that
I might know how near the truth is the image that I have formed of him.

There may have been, there no doubt have been, other such young
Irishmen, whose lives have been misdirected for want of the knowledge
which Patrick gained in good time by the accident of his coming to
England. I fear that many such have lived a life of turbulence,
or impotent discontent, under the delusion that their country was
politically oppressed. The mistake may now be considered at an end.
It is sufficiently understood in Ireland that her woes have been from
social and not political causes, from the day of Catholic emancipation.
But it is a painful thought what Patrick's short life might have been,
if he had remained under the O'Connell influence; and what the lives of
hundreds more have been,--rendered wild by delusion, and wretched by
strife and lawlessness, for want of a gleam of that clear daylight which
made a sound citizen of a passionate Young Repealer.

BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.

This is the new version of the _Panem et Circenses_ of the Roman
populace. It is our _ultimatum_, as that was theirs. They must have
something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have
something to eat, and the papers to read.

Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our
carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to
Europe _sine die_. If we live in a small way, there are at least new
dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with.
If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform,
its respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a
caraway-umbel late in the season. He will cheerfully calm the perturbed
nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying a new one,
if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a
pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only _bread and the
newspaper_ we must have, whatever else we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions,
as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his
fever. Our common mental food has become distasteful, and what would
have been intellectual luxuries at other times are now absolutely
repulsive.

All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have
experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later
betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many among
us. We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency with which
diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the terrible
emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. Laennec
tells the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director,
where all the nuns were subjected to the severest penances and schooled
in the most painful doctrines. They all became consumptive soon after
their entrance, so that, in the course of his ten years' attendance, all
the inmates died out two or three times, and were replaced by new ones.
He does not hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suffered
to those depressing moral influences to which they were subjected.

So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous
system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants. Take
the first trifling example which comes to our recollection. A sad
disaster to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of
two gentlemen and a lady. Both the gentlemen complained of a sudden
feeling at the _epigastrium_, or, less learnedly, the pit of the
stomach, changed color, and confessed to a slight tremor about the
knees. The lady had a _"grande revolution_," as French patients
say,--went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day. Perhaps the
reader may smile at the mention of such trivial indispositions, but in
more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from no more
serious cause. An old gentleman fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on
hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba. One of our early friends, who
recently died of the same complaint, was thought to have had his attack
mainly in consequence of the excitements of the time.

We all know what the _war fever_ is in our young men,--what a devouring
passion it becomes in those whom it assails. Patriotism is the fire
of it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of
adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of
participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal
distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which
we often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most
ardent of our soldiers. But something of the same fever in a different
form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a
drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their families. Some
of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain
in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that
is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men
cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They
stroll up and down the streets, they saunter out upon the public places.
We confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume
of his work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as
interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before
the red light of the terrible present. Meeting the same author not long
afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time
that we had closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth
century any more than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was
in the very agony and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had
fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic
despatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were
new, until he felt as if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same
thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of the
fever is over? Another person always goes through the side streets on
his way for the noon _extra_,--he is so afraid somebody will meet him
and _tell_ the news he wishes to _read_, first on the bulletin-board,
and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself
in our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go
tramping round in circle through the brain like the supernumeraries that
make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round
through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as
deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for
twenty years. This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived
since the twelfth of April last, and, to state it more generally, for
that _ex post facto_ operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful
impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading
backwards from the leaf of life open before us through all those which
we have already turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not
wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from
peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we
cannot at first think what,--and then groping our way about through the
twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like
some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us
on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the
feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is,
after all, only a dream,--if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and
shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed
grief is unreal. This attempt to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact
always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in the
dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for their especial use.

Watch one of them. He does not feel quite well,--at least, he suspects
himself of indisposition. Nothing serious,--let us just rub our
fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us rubs
his hands, and all will be right. He rubs them with that peculiar
twisting movement of his, and pauses for the effect. No! all is not
quite right yet.--Ah! it is our head that is not set on just as it ought
to be. Let us settle _that_ where it should be, and _then_ we shall
certainly be in good trim again. So he pulls his head about as an old
lady adjusts her cap, and passes his fore-paw over it like a kitten
washing herself.--Poor fellow! It is not a fancy, but a fact, that he
has to deal with. If he could read the letters at the head of the sheet,
he would see they were _Fly-Paper_.--So with us, when, in our waking
misery, we try to think we dream! Perhaps very young persons may not
understand this; as we grow older, our waking and dreaming life run more
and more into each other.

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of
old habits. The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be
had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must
go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner
nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us in company, it will not stand
on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine
right of its telegraphic despatches.

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of
Americans. Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers the
Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll,
which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, then growing
uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from the neighboring
heights at all hours,--in token of which see the tower of Brattle-Street
Church at this very day? War in her memory means '76. As for the brush
of 1812, "we did not think much about that"; and everybody knows that
the Mexican business did not concern us much, except in its political
relations. No! War is a new thing to all of us who are not in the last
quarter of their century. We are learning many strange matters from our
fresh experience. And besides, there are new conditions of existence
which make war as it is with us very different from war as it has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron
nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and
from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single
living body. The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it
were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What was
the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th
of April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts
with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous
action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a breathless
courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight
of for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know
for a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden
with truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always
for the last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements of
our armies. To-night the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under
their own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the
tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The war passion burned
like scattered coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times;
now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie. And
this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another
singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We
may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed,
a week afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would
have been in a whole season before our national nervous system was
organized.

"As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,
Thou only teachest all that man can be!"

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of
long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful
prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that Society.

Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind, we
have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,--especially when one
of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build and
keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop would give us
a new professor. Now we begin to think that there was some meaning in
our poor couplet. War _has_ taught us, as nothing else could, what we
can be and are. It has exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and driven
us all back upon our substantial human qualities, for a long time more
or less kept out of sight by the spirit of commerce, the love of art,
science, or literature, or other qualities not belonging to all of us as
men and women.

It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social
distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than the
preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do. We are finding out
that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism is gentility.
All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery.
The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like
a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of
Crecy and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his
straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or
leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs
as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.

Even our poor "Brahmins,"--whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the
same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his
supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the "bloated
aristocracy," whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized,
shy, sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an aptitude for
learning,--even these poor New England Brahmins of ours, _subvirates_
of an organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if their
courage is big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their
slender figures.

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our
windows. A few days afterwards a field-piece was dragged to the water's
edge and fired many times over the river. We asked a bystander, who
looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to "break the gall,"
he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface. A strange
physiological fancy and a very odd _non sequitur_; but that is not our
present point. A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the
surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as when they roared
over Charleston harbor.

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable
grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with
the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and
unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of
fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed
by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable
not unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary
times had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern
people as the English in the last centuries used to talk about the
French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be remembered, called one
Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English,
again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider
the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,--forgetting
that Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon
gold, and Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor
of forging iron.

These persons have learned better now. The bravery of our free
working-people was overlaid, but not smothered, sunken, but not drowned.
The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change
their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer
the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build
towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute
matter into every shape civilization can ask for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in
new shapes,--that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a
man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our
bones and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Poor
Winthrop, marching with the city _elegants_, seems almost to have been
astonished to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the
Eighth Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or
ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is
distributed over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to
think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up
turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-Ninth, to show us
that continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New
Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen
chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief. When the
masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in his
heart that God takes better care of him than of his "Congregationalist"
Colonel? Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young
fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country,
the _Homoousians_ are received to the mansions of bliss, and the
_Homoiousians_ translated from the battle-field to the abodes of
everlasting woe? War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches
also what he must not be. He must not be a bigot and a fool in the
presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls
to battle, and where a man should have but two thoughts: to do his duty,
and trust his Maker. Let our brave dead come back from the fields where
they have fallen for law and liberty, and if you will follow them to
their graves, you will find out what the Broad Church means; the narrow
church is sparing of its exclusive formulae over the coffins wrapped in
the flag which the fallen heroes had defended! Very little comparatively
do we hear at such times of the dogmas on which men differ; very much of
the faith and trust in which all sincere Christians can agree. It is a
noble lesson, and nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach
it so that it shall be heard over all the angry voices of theological
disputants.

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