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

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861

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Finding no one at home, and so not being able to learn about the price
of lots in the church-yard, I walked on to the hotel, and asked to see
Mr. J.B. Booth. I was shown into a private parlor, where he and another
gentleman were sitting by a table. On the table were candles, a decanter
of wine, and glasses, a plate of bread, cigars, and a book. Mr. Booth
rose when I announced myself, and I at once recognized the distinguished
actor. I had met him once before, and travelled with him for part of a
day. He was a short man, but one of those who seem tall when they choose
to do so. He had a clear blue eye and fair complexion. In repose
there was nothing to attract attention to him; but when excited, his
expression was so animated, his eye was so brilliant, and his figure so
full of life, that he became another man.

Having told him that I had not been successful in procuring the
information he desired, but would bring it to him on the following
morning, he thanked me, and asked me to sit down. It passed through my
mind, that, as he had lost a friend and was a stranger in the place, I
might be of use to him. Perhaps he needed consolation, and it was my
office to sympathize with the bereaved. So I sat down. But it did not
appear that he was disposed to seek for such comfort, or engage in such
discourse. Once or twice I endeavored, but without success, to turn
the conversation to his presumed loss. I asked him if the death of his
friend was sudden.

"Very," he replied.

"Was he a relative?"

"Distant," said he, and changed the subject.

It is twenty-seven years since these events took place, and I do not
pretend to give the conversation very accurately, but what occurred was
very much like this. It was a dialogue between Booth and myself, the
third party saying not a word during the evening. Mr. Booth first asked
me to take a glass of wine, or a cigar, both of which I declined.

"Well," said he, "let me try to entertain you in another way. When you
came in, I was reading aloud to my friend. Perhaps you would like to
hear me read."

"I certainly should," said I.

"What shall I read?"

"Whatever you like best. What you like to read I shall like to hear."

"Then suppose I attempt Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner'? Have you time for
it? It is long."

"Yes, I should like it much."

So he read aloud the whole of this magnificent poem. I have listened to
Macready, to Edmund Kean, to Rachel, to Jenny Lind, to Fanny Kemble,--to
Webster, Clay, Everett, Harrison Gray Otis,--to Dr. Channing, Henry
Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, Father Taylor, Ralph Waldo Emerson,--to
Victor Hugo, Coquerel, Lacordaire; but none of them affected me as I was
affected by this reading. I forgot the place where I was, the motive of
my coming, the reader himself. I knew the poem almost by heart, yet I
seemed never to have heard it before. I was by the side of the doomed
mariner. I was the wedding-guest, listening to his story, held by his
glittering eye. I was with him in the storm, among the ice, beneath
the hot and copper sky. Booth became so absorbed in his reading, so
identified with the poem, that his tone and manner were saturated with
a feeling of reality. He actually thought himself the mariner,--so I am
persuaded,--while he was reading. As the poem proceeded, and we plunged
deeper and deeper into its mystic horrors, the actual world receded
into a dim, indefinable distance. The magnetism of this marvellous
interpreter had caught up himself, and me with him, into Dreamland, from
which we gently descended at the end of Part VI., and "the spell was
snapt."

"And now, all in my own countree,
I stood on the firm land,"--

returned from a voyage into the inane. Again I found myself sitting in
the little hotel parlor, by the side of a man with glittering eye, with
a third somebody on the other side of the table.

I drew a long breath.

Booth turned over the leaves of the volume. It was the collected Works
of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.

"Did you ever read," said he, "Shelley's argument against the use of
animal food, at the end of 'Queen Mab'?"

"Yes, I have read it."

"And what do you think of the argument?"

"Ingenious, but not satisfactory."

"To me it _is_ satisfactory. I have long been convinced that it is wrong
to take the life of an animal for our pleasure. I eat no animal food.
There is my supper,"--pointing to the plate of bread. "And, indeed,"
continued he, "I think the Bible favors this view. Have you a Bible with
you?"

I had not.

Booth thereupon rang the bell, and when the boy presented himself,
called for a Bible. _Garcon_ disappeared, and came back soon with a
Bible on a waiter.

Our tragedian took the book, and proceeded to argue his point by means
of texts selected skilfully here and there, from Genesis to Revelation.
He referred to the fact that it was not till after the Deluge men were
allowed, "for the hardness of their hearts," as he maintained, to eat
meat. But in the beginning it was not so; only herbs were given to man,
at first, for food. He quoted the Psalmist (Psalm civ. 14) to show that
man's food came from the earth, and was the green herb; and contended
that the reason why Daniel and his friends were fairer and fatter than
the children who ate their portion of meat was that they ate only pulse
(Daniel i. 12-15). These are all of his Scriptural arguments which I now
recall; but I thought them very ingenious at the time.

The argument took some time. Then he recited one or two pieces bearing
on the same subject, closing with Byron's Lines to his Newfoundland Dog.

"In connection with that poem," he continued, "a singular event once
happened to me. I was acting in Petersburg, Virginia. My theatrical
engagement was just concluded, and I dined with a party of friends
one afternoon before going away. We sat after dinner, singing songs,
reciting poetry, and relating anecdotes. At last I recited those lines
of Byron on his dog. I was sitting by the fireplace, my feet resting
against the jamb, and a single candle was burning on the mantel. It had
become dark. Just as I came to the end of the poem,--

"'To mark a friend's remains these stones arise,
I never knew but one, and here he lies,'--

"my foot slipped down the jamb, and struck a _dog_, who was lying
beneath. The dog sprang up, howled, and ran out of the room, and at the
same moment the candle went out. I asked whose dog it was. No one knew.
No one had seen the dog till that moment. Perhaps you will smile at me,
Sir, and think me superstitious,--but I could not but think that the
animal was brought there by _occult sympathy_."

Having uttered these oracular words in a very solemn tone, Booth rose,
and, taking one of the candles, said to me, "Would you like to look at
the remains?"

I assented. Asking our silent friend to excuse us, he led me into an
adjoining chamber. I looked toward a bed in the corner of the room,
expecting to see a corpse. There was none there. But Booth went to
another corner of the room, where, spread out upon a large sheet, I
saw--what do you suppose, dear reader?

_About a bushel of Wild Pigeons!_

Booth knelt down by the side of the birds, and with every evidence of
sincere affliction began to mourn over them. He took them up in his
hands tenderly, and pressed them to his heart. For a few moments he
seemed to forget my presence. For this I was glad, for it gave me a
little time to recover from my astonishment, and to consider rapidly
what it might mean. As I look back now, and think of the oddity of
the situation, I rather wonder at my own self-possession. It was a
sufficiently trying position. At first I thought it was a hoax, an
intentional piece of practical fun, of which I was to be the object. But
even in the moment allowed me to think, I decided that this could not
be. For I recalled the long and elaborate Bible argument against taking
the life of animals, which could hardly have been got up for the
occasion. I considered also that as a joke it would be too poor in
itself, and too unworthy a man like Booth. So I decided that it was a
sincere conviction,--an idea, exaggerated perhaps to the borders of
monomania, of the sacredness of all life. And I determined to treat
the conviction with respect, as all sincere and religious convictions
deserve to be treated.

I also saw the motive for this particular course of action. During the
week immense quantities of the Wild Pigeon (Passenger Pigeon, _Columba
Migratoria_) had been flying over the city, in their way to and from
a _roost_ in the neighborhood. These birds had been slaughtered by
myriads, and were for sale by the bushel at the corners of every street
in the city. Although all the birds which could be killed by man made
the smallest impression on the vast multitude contained in one of these
flocks,--computed by Wilson to consist of more than twenty-two hundred
millions,--yet to Booth the destruction seemed wasteful, wanton, and
from his point of view was a wilful and barbarous murder.

Such a sentiment was perhaps an exaggeration; still I could not but
feel a certain sympathy with its humanity. It was an error in a good
direction. If an insanity, it was better than the cold, heartless sanity
of most men. By the time, therefore, that Booth was ready to speak, I
was prepared to answer.

"You see," said he, "these innocent victims of man's barbarity. I wish
to testify in some public way against this wanton destruction of life.
And I wish you to help me. Will you?"

"Hardly," I replied. "I expected something very different from this,
when I received your note. I did not come to see you expecting to be
called to assist at the funeral solemnities of birds."

"Nor did I send for you," he answered. "I merely wrote to ask about the
lot in the grave-yard. But now you are here, why not help me? Do you
fear the laugh of man?"

"No," I returned. "If I agreed with you in regard to this subject, I
might, perhaps, have the courage to act out my convictions. But I do
not look at it as you do. There is no reason, then, why I should have
anything to do with it. I respect your convictions, but do not share
them."

"That is fair," he said. "I cannot ask anything more. I am obliged to
you for coming to see me. My intention was to purchase a place in the
burial-ground, and have them put into a coffin and carried in a hearse.
I might do it without any one's knowing that it was not a human body.
Would you assist me, then?"

"But if no one _knew_ it," I said, "how would it be a public testimony
against the destruction of life?"

"True, it would not. Well, I will consider what to do. Perhaps I may
wish to bury them privately in some garden."

"In that case," said I, "I will find you a place in the grounds of some
of my friends."

He thanked me, and I took my leave,--exceedingly astonished and amused
by the incident, but also interested in the earnestness of conviction of
the man.

I heard, in a day or two, that he had actually purchased a lot in the
cemetery, two or three miles below the city, that he had had a coffin
made, hired a hearse and carriage, and had gone through all the
solemnity of a regular funeral. For several days he continued to visit
the grave of his little friends, and mourned over them with a grief
which did not seem at all theatrical.

Meantime he acted every night at the theatre, and my friends told me
that his acting was of unsurpassed excellence. A vein of insanity began,
however, to mingle in his conduct. His fellow-actors were afraid of
him. He looked terribly in earnest on the stage; and when he went behind
the scenes, he spoke to no one, but sat still, looking sternly at the
ground. During the day he walked about town, giving apples to the
horses, and talked to the drivers, urging them to treat their animals
with kindness.

An incident happened, one day, which illustrated still further his
sympathy for the humbler races of animals. One of the sudden freshets
which come to the Ohio, caused commonly by heavy rains melting the snow
in the valleys of its tributary streams, had raised the river to an
unusual height. The yellow torrent rushed along its channel, bearing
on its surface logs, boards, and the _debris_ of fences, shanties, and
lumber-yards. A steamboat, forced by the rapid current against the stone
landing, had been stove, and lay a wreck on the bottom, with the water
rising rapidly around it. A horse had been left, fastened on the boat,
and it looked as if he would be drowned. Booth was on the landing, and
he took from his pocket twenty dollars, and offered it to any one who
would get to the boat and cut the halter, so that the horse might swim
ashore. Some one was found to do it, and the horse's life was saved.

So this golden thread of human sympathy with all creatures whom God had
made ran through the darkening moods of his genius. He had well laid to
heart the fine moral of his favorite poem,--that

"He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man, and bird, and beast.

"He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things, both great and small;
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

In a week or less the tendency to derangement in Booth became more
developed. One night, when he was to act, he did not appear; nor could
he be found at his lodgings. He did not come home that night. Next
morning he was found in the woods, several miles from the city,
wandering through the snow. He was taken care of. His derangement proved
to be temporary, and his reason returned in a few days. He soon left the
city. But before he went away he sent to me the following note, which I
copy from the original faded paper, now lying before me:--

"--_Theatre_,

"January 18, 1834.

"MY DEAR SIR,

"Allow me to return you my grateful acknowledgments for your prompt and
benevolent attention to my request last Wednesday night. Although I am
convinced _your_ ideas and _mine_ thoroughly coincide as to the _real_
cause of man's bitter degradation, yet I fear human means to redeem him
are now fruitless. The Fire must burn, and Prometheus endure his agony.
The Pestilence of Asia must come again, ere the savage will be taught
humanity. May _you_ escape! God bless you, Sir!

"J.B. BOOTH."

Certainly I may call this "an odd adventure" for a young minister,
less than six months in his profession. But it left in my mind a very
pleasant impression of this great tragedian. It may be asked why he came
to me, the youngest and newest clergyman in the place. The reason he
gave me himself. I was a Unitarian. He said he had more sympathy with me
on that account, as he was of Jewish descent, and a Monotheist.

MY OUT-DOOR STUDY.

The noontide of the summer-day is past, when all Nature slumbers, and
when the ancients feared to sing, lest the great god Pan should be
awakened. Soft changes, the gradual shifting of every shadow on every
leaf, begin to show the waning hours. Ineffectual thunder-storms have
gathered and gone by, hopelessly defeated. The floating-bridge is
trembling and resounding beneath the pressure of one heavy wagon, and
the quiet fishermen change their places to avoid the tiny ripple that
glides stealthily to their feet above the half-submerged planks. Down
the glimmering lake there are miles of silence and still waters and
green shores, overhung with a multitudinous and scattered fleet of
purple and golden clouds, now furling their idle sails and drifting away
into the vast harbor of the South. Voices of birds, hushed first by
noon and then by possibilities of tempest, cautiously begin once more,
leading on the infinite melodies of the June afternoon. As the freshened
air invites them forth, so the smooth and stainless water summons us.
"Put your hand upon the oar," says Charon in the old play to Bacchus,
"and you shall hear the sweetest songs." The doors of the boathouse
swing softly open, and the slender wherry, like a water-snake, steals
silently in the wake of the dispersing clouds.

The woods are hazy, as if the warm sunbeams had melted in among the
interstices of the foliage and spread a soft film throughout the whole.
The sky seems to reflect the water, and the water the sky; both are
roseate with color, both are darkened with clouds, and between them
both, as the boat recedes, the floating-bridge hangs suspended, with its
motionless fishermen and its moving team. The wooded islands are poised
upon the lake, each belted with a paler tint of softer wave. The air
seems fine and palpitating; the drop of an oar in a distant row-lock,
the sound of a hammer on a dismantled boat, pass into some region of
mist and shadows, and form a metronome for delicious dreams.

Every summer I launch my boat to seek some realm of enchantment beyond
all the sordidness and sorrow of earth, and never yet did I fail to
ripple with my prow at least the outskirts of those magic waters. What
spell has fame or wealth to enrich this midday blessedness with a joy
the more? Yonder barefoot boy, as he drifts silently in his punt beneath
the drooping branches of yonder vine-clad bank, has a bliss which no
Astor can buy with money, no Seward conquer with votes,--which yet is
no monopoly of his, and to which time and experience only add a more
subtile and conscious charm. The rich years were given us to increase,
not to impair, these cheap felicities. Sad or sinful is the life of
that man who finds not the heavens bluer and the waves more musical in
maturity than in childhood. Time is a severe alembic of youthful joys,
no doubt; we exhaust book after book and leave Shakespeare unopened; we
grow fastidious in men and women; all the rhetoric, all the logic, we
fancy we have heard before; we have seen the pictures, we have listened
to the symphonies: but what has been done by all the art and literature
of the world towards describing one summer day? The most exhausting
effort brings us no nearer to it than to the blue sky which is its dome;
our words are shot up against it like arrows, and fall back helpless.
Literary amateurs go the tour of the globe to renew their stock of
materials, when they do not yet know a bird or a bee or a blossom beside
their homestead-door; and in the hour of their greatest success they
have not an horizon to their life so large as that of yon boy in his
punt. All that is purchasable in the capitals of the world is not to be
weighed in comparison with the simple enjoyment that may be crowded into
one hour of sunshine. What can place or power do here? "Who could be
before me, though the palace of Caesar cracked and split with emperors,
while I, sitting in silence on a cliff of Rhodes, watched the sun as he
swung his golden censer athwart the heavens?"

It is pleasant to observe a sort of confused and latent recognition of
all this in the instinctive sympathy which is always rendered to any
indication of out-door pursuits. How cordially one sees the eyes of
all travellers turn to the man who enters the railroad-station with
a fowling-piece in hand, or the boy with water-lilies! There is a
momentary sensation of the freedom of the woods, a whiff of oxygen for
the anxious money-changers. How agreeably sounds the news--to all
but his creditors--that the lawyer or the merchant has locked his
office-door and gone fishing! The American temperament needs at this
moment nothing so much as that wholesome training of semi-rural life
which reared Hampden and Cromwell to assume at one grasp the sovereignty
of England, and which has ever since served as the foundation of
England's greatest ability. The best thoughts and purposes seem ordained
to come to human beings beneath the open sky, as the ancients fabled
that Pan found the goddess Ceres when he was engaged in the chase, whom
no other of the gods could find when seeking seriously. The little I
have gained from colleges and libraries has certainly not worn so well
as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and
insect. That "weight and sanity of thought," which Coleridge so finely
makes the crowning attribute of Wordsworth, is in no way so well matured
and cultivated as in the society of Nature.

There may be extremes and affectations, and Mary Lamb declared that
Wordsworth held it doubtful if a dweller in towns had a soul to be
saved. During the various phases of transcendental idealism among
ourselves, in the last twenty years, the love of Nature has at times
assumed an exaggerated and even a pathetic aspect, in the morbid
attempts of youths and maidens to make it a substitute for vigorous
thought and action,--a lion endeavoring to dine on grass and green
leaves. In some cases this mental chlorosis reached such a height as
almost to nauseate one with Nature, when in the society of the victims;
and surfeited companions felt inclined to rush to the treadmill
immediately, or get chosen on the Board of Selectmen, or plunge into any
conceivable drudgery, in order to feel that there was still work enough
in the universe to keep it sound and healthy. But this, after all, was
exceptional and transitory, and our American life still needs, beyond
all things else, the more habitual cultivation of out-door habits.

Probably the direct ethical influence of natural objects may be
overrated. Nature is not didactic, but simply healthy. She helps
everything to its legitimate development, but applies no goads, and
forces on us no sharp distinctions. Her wonderful calmness, refreshing
the whole soul, must aid both conscience and intellect in the end, but
sometimes lulls both temporarily, when immediate issues are pending. The
waterfall cheers and purifies infinitely, but it marks no moments, has
no reproaches for indolence, forces to no immediate decision, offers
unbounded to-morrows, and the man of action must tear himself away, when
the time comes, since the work will not be done for him. "The natural
day is very calm, and will hardly reprove our indolence."

And yet the more bent any man is upon action, the more profoundly he
needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium. The
radical himself needs nothing so much as fresh air. The world is called
conservative; but it is far easier to impress a plausible thought on the
complaisance of others than to retain an unfaltering faith in it for
ourselves. The most dogged reformer distrusts himself every little
while, and says inwardly, like Luther, "Art thou alone wise?" So he is
compelled to exaggerate, in the effort to hold his own. The community is
bored by the conceit and egotism of the innovators; so it is by that of
poets and artists, orators and statesmen; but if we knew how heavily
ballasted all these poor fellows need to be, to keep an even keel amid
so many conflicting tempests of blame and praise, we should hardly
reproach them. But the simple enjoyments of out-door life, costing next
to nothing, tend to equalize all vexations. What matter, if the Governor
removes you from office? he cannot remove you from the lake; and if
readers or customers will not bite, the pickerel will. We must keep
busy, of course; yet we cannot transform the world except very slowly,
and we can best preserve our patience in the society of Nature, who does
her work almost as imperceptibly as we.

And for literary training, especially, the influence of natural beauty
is simply priceless Under the present educational systems, we need
grammars and languages far less than a more thorough out-door experience.
On this flowery bank, on this ripple-marked shore, are the true literary
models. How many living authors have ever attained to writing a single
page which could be for one moment compared, for the simplicity and
grace of its structure, with this green spray of wild woodbine or yonder
white wreath of blossoming clematis? A finely organized sentence should
throb and palpitate like the most delicate vibrations of the summer
air. We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and
measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical
perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies
in the future; tried by the out-door standard, there is as yet no
literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet
succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional
sentence, that fresh and perfect charm. If by the training of a lifetime
one could succeed in producing one continuous page of perfect cadence,
it would be a life well spent, and such a literary artist would fall
short of Nature's standard in quantity only, not in quality.

It is one sign of our weakness, also, that we commonly assume Nature to
be a rather fragile and merely ornamental thing, and suited for a model
of the graces only. But her seductive softness is the last climax of
magnificent strength. The same mathematical law winds the leaves around
the stem and the planets round the sun. The same law of crystallization
rules the slight-knit snow-flake and the hard foundations of the earth.
The thistle-down floats secure upon the same summer zephyrs that are
woven into the tornado. The dew-drop holds within its transparent cell
the same electric fire which charges the thunder-cloud. In the softest
tree or the airiest waterfall, the fundamental lines are as lithe and
muscular as the crouching haunches of a leopard; and without a pencil
vigorous enough to render these, no mere mass of foam or foliage,
however exquisitely finished, can tell the story. Lightness of touch is
the crowning test of power.

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