Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863», sayfa 5
CHAPTER III
"They du say Swan Day's gun off for good!" said Cely Temple, as she returned from the store, with a Dutch-oven in her hand, which she had purchased,—"an' to th' East Injees!"
"I want to know!" rejoined Mrs. Fox.
"I know some'll be sorry!" continued Cely, while Dorcas diligently stirred a five-pail kettle of apple-sauce, that hung stewing over the low fire.
Mrs. Fox looked up quickly at her daughter, but Dorcas continued quietly stirring, and without turning round.
"Mahala Dorr, I guess," said she.
"Wall, M'hala'll be, an' so'll others," answered Cely, prudently. "But I expect likely Swan'll do well, ef he don't die. They say the atemuspere is pison there!—especially for dark-complected folks."
To this hopeful remark Mrs. Fox rejoined, that "old Miss Day come herself from a warm country, and 't was likely her son would settle there for good, and enjoy his health there better than what he would here."
"He'll look out well for Number One, anyhow!" said Cely, lifting the lid of the Dutch-oven from the fire.
Dorcas shot an angry glance at the apple-sauce.
Nothing further passed on the subject, and Dorcas somehow felt, as she stirred, as if Swan were already a long, long way off,—as if the ship had sailed, and would stay sailed, like an enchanted ship, hovering on the horizon, and never come near enough for the passengers to be distinguished,—or else, maybe, go up into the clouds, and rest there with all its masts and spars distinct against the rose-mist, as she had read of once in a book of travels,—or, perhaps, even be inverted, and stand there on its head, as it were, always: but everything must be upside down, of course, in China. Already the thought of Swan Day had mingled with the mists of the past. The outline became indefinite, and softened into a golden splendor, that belonged no more to her, but was essentially of another hemisphere. He had by this time cut loose from home and country. Whether a hundred, or a hundred thousand miles, it mattered not. Since she could not grasp the idea, the distance was as good as infinite to her.
This, you see, is not exactly coquetry. But events drifted her.
When supper was over, and Dinah had gone to sleep, and Cely to visit the neighbors, as usual, Dorcas shyly approached the subject which occupied her thoughts, by getting the little box of jewelry, and looking at it. Her mother called her from the kitchen, out of which the bed-room opened.
"Does mother want me?" asked Dorcas, turning round, with the box in her hand.
"No, no matter," answered the mother; and, possibly with an intuitive feeling of what was in her daughter's thought, she went into the bed-room, and looked with her at the pin and ring of Aunt Dorcas.
"Was it—was it a long time, mother,—I mean, before he came back?" said Dorcas.
"Who? Captain Waterhouse? Bless you! they was as good as merried for ten year, an' he was goin' all the time, an' then, jest at the last minute, to be 'racked! It's 'most always so, when people goes to sea," added she, in a plaintive tone.
Dorcas meditated; she looked wistfully at her mother.
"It's a pretty pin,—dreadful pretty round the edge."
"Yes, 't is! I expect likely them's di'mon's. 'T was made over in foreign parts. He was goin' to bring his picter, too, from there. But he's lost and gone! Your Aunt Dorcas never had no more suitors after that, and she kind o' gin in, and never had no sperits."
Dorcas's eyes filled, and she closed the box.
Henry Mowers would not come to the Fox farm till the next Sunday night. That was as much settled as the new moon. So Dorcas had the whole week to herself, to be thoroughly unhappy in,—all the more so, a thousand times more so, for being utterly incapable of saying or seeing why. An instinctive delicacy kept her from showing to any of the family that she was even depressed; and her voice was heard steadily warbling one of Wesley's hymns, or "Wolfe's Address to his Army," in clear, brilliant tones, that rang up-stairs and down. The general impression of distance and water associated her absent lover with all that was heroic and romantic in song; for of novels she knew nothing,—the Colonel's library being limited, in the imaginative line, to a torn copy of the "Iliad," which had been left at the house by a travelling cobbler.
However, romance is before all rules, and shapes its own adventures. The beauty of Swan Day, which, dark and slight as it was, gleamed with a power for Dorcas's eye and heart before which Buonarotti's would have been only pale stone forever,—that beauty dwelt in her imagination and memory, as only first romantic impressions can. Distance canonized him, enthroned him, glorified him. And when she thought of his setting forth so boldly, so bravely, to tread the wide water, to tempt the hot sun, the foreign exposure, the perpetual dangers of heathen countries, for her unworthy sake, all that was tenderest, most grateful, in her now first wakened nature, rose up in distressful tumult, and agitated the depths that are in all women's souls.
If there had been anybody to whom she could confide the sad wrenching of her spirit, any one who would have cleared her vision, and taught her to look on "this picture and on this," she might not have been so puzzled between her two Hyperions. But as it was, it was a sorrowful struggle. One had the advantage of distance and imagination,—one of presence, and of the magnetism of eye and lip.
"I am a wicked, wicked girl!" said she, as she stood before the glass, and loosened the locks that fell like sunshine over her shoulders. But this confession, with true New-England reticence, was uttered only to one listener,—herself.
Then, she recalled, for it was Monday night once more, the frank and noble nature of Henry: how he had not asked her to promise him, but seemed to take for granted her truth and faith; how he had looked so fondly, so clearly into her eyes, not for what he might find there, but to show the transparent goodness and sincerity of his own; and how he had told her of all his plans and hopes, of his wish and her father's intention that they should be married that very fall; how little he had said of his own overflowing affection, only that "he had never thought of anybody else." Dorcas only felt, without putting the sense into language, that in this life-boat there was safety. But then had she not sent her heart on a venture in the other,—that other which even now was tossing on the waves of a future, full-freighted with hope, and faith in her truth?
She opened the little box again, and looked at the ring and painted pin. How sorrowfully she looked at them now, seen through tears of conscious experience! How mournful seemed the ground hair, and the tints woven of so many broken hopes, sad thoughts, and wrecked expectations! the hair, kissed so many times in the weary years of waiting, and then wept over in the drearier desolation, when the sight could only bring thoughts of the salt waves dashing amongst it in the deep sea! What a life that had been of poor Aunt Dorcas! Then came across her busy thought the words of her mother,—"It's 'most always so!"
Swan sailed very far away, in these tearful reveries, and took hope and life with him.
When the next Sunday evening came, and the next, and the next,—and when Dorcas had ceased to say, blushing and smiling,—"Don't, Henry! you know I should make such a poor kind of a wife for you! and your mother wouldn't think anything of me!"—and when, Henry had had an offer to go to Western New York, where there were nobody knew how many beautiful girls, all waiting to pounce on the tall, fine-looking young farmer,—when Colonel Fox forgot he was a deacon, and swore that Dorcas was undeserving of such a happy lot as was offered to her,—when the tears, and the reveries, and the pictures of far-away lands, and the hopes that might wither with long years of waiting, were all merged and effaced in the healthy happiness of the present,—Dorcas dried her tears, and applied herself diligently to building up her flaxen trousseau, and smothered in her heart the image of dark and brilliant beauty that had for a time occupied it.
"She waited—a long time!—years—and years!" murmured Dorcas, sorrowfully, as she looked at the pin and ring, which in her mind were associated strongly with only one person,—and that one hereafter to be dead to her. As soon as events clearly defined her duties, Dorcas had no further questions with herself. If the box had been Pandora's, not the less resolutely would she have shut it forever, and so crushed the hope that it could never have leaped out.
So, with choking tears, and throbbing pulses, she followed many brilliant fancies and hopes to their last resting-place. Henceforth her path was open and clear, her duties defined, and with daily occupation of hand and thought she strove to displace all that had ever made her other than the cheerful and busy Dorcas. For the last time, she closed and put away the box.
* * * * *
THRENODY
[Among the imprinted papers of the author of "Charles Auchester" and "Counterparts" was found this poem, addressed to a father on the death of a favorite son, whose noble disposition and intellectual gifts were all enlisted on the side of suffering humanity.]
O mourner by the ever-mourning deep,
Full as the sea of tears! imperial heart,
King in thy sorrow over all who weep!
O wrestler with the darkness set apart
In clouds of woe whose lightnings are the throb
Of thy fast-flashing pulses! pause to hear
The lullabies of many an alien sob,
A storm of alien sighs,—so far! so near!
Oh that our vigils with thy gentle dead
Could charm thee from thy night-long agonies,
Could steep thy brain in slumber mild, and shed
Elysian dreams upon thy closing eyes!
In vain! all vain!—'tis yet the feast of tears;
Sorrow for sorrow is the only spell;
Nor wanders yet to melt in unspent years
The wringing murmur of our fresh farewell!
Thousands bereft strew wide the ashes dim;
Rich hearts, poor hands, the lovely, the unlearned,
Bemoan the angel of the age in him,
A star unto its starlight strength returned,
The City of Delights hath lost its gem,
The Sea the changeful glance so like its own,
Genius the darling of her diadem,
Whose smile made moonlight round her awful throne.
Those elfin steps their music moves no more
Beneath light domes to tune the festal train,
Nor at the moony eves along the shore
To brim with fairy forms that wizard brain.
Cold rocks, wild winds, and ever-changing waves,
Sad rains that fret the sea and drown the day,
We hail,—well pleased that stricken Autumn raves,
Though not with Winter shall our griefs decay.
On lurid mornings, when the lustrous sea
Is violet-shadowed from the warm blue air,
When the dark grasses brighten over thee,
And the winged sunbeams flutter golden there,—
Then to the wild green slope, thy chosen rest,
The blossoms of our spirits we will bring,
(Again a babe upon thy mother's breast,
An infant seed of the eternal Spring,)—
Thoughts bright and dark as violets in their dew,
Unfading memories of a smile more sweet
Than perfume of pale roses, hopes that strew
Ethereal lilies on those silent feet
The ghost of Pain haunts not that garden-land
Where Passion's phantom is so softly laid;
But Charity beside that earth doth stand,
Most lovely left of all, thy sister-shade.
Her baby-loves like trembling snowdrops lean
Above thy calm hands and thy quiet head,
When morn is fair, or noonday's glory keen
Or the white star-fire glistens on thy bed.
Her eyes of heaven upon thy slumbers brood,
Her watch is o'er thy pillow, and her breath
Tells every breeze that stirs thy solitude
How thou didst earn that rest on earth called Death,—
Earned in such quickening youth and brilliant years!
For us too early, not too soon for thee!—
So may we rest, when Death shall dry our tears,
Till everlasting Morning makes us free!
THE UTILITY AND THE FUTILITY OF APHORISMS
The best aphorisms are pointed expressions of the results of observation, experience, and reflection. They are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling. They furnish the largest amount of intellectual stimulus and nutriment in the smallest compass. About every weak point in human nature, or vicious spot in human life, there is deposited a crystallization of warning and protective proverbs. For instance, with what relishing force such sayings as the following touch the evil resident in indolence and delay!—"An unemployed mind is the Devil's workshop"; "The industrious tortoise wins the race from the lagging eagle"; "When God says, To-day, the Devil says, To-morrow." In like manner, another cluster of adages depict the certainty of the detection and punishment of crime:—"Murder will out"; "Justice has feet of wool, but hands of iron"; "God's mills grind slow, but they grind sure." So in relation to every marked exposure of our life, there will be found in the records of the common thought of mankind a set of deprecating aphorisms.
The laconic compactness of these utterances, their constant applicability, the pungent patness with which they hit some fact of experience, principle of human nature, or phenomenon of life, the ease with which their racy sense may be apprehended and remembered, give them a powerful charm for the popular fancy. Accordingly, a multitude of proverbs are afloat in the writings and in the mouths of every civilized people. Groups of national proverbs exist in most of the languages of the world, each family of apothegms revealing the chief traits of the people who gave them birth. In these collective expressions of national mind, we can recognize—if so incomplete a characterization may be ventured—the indrawn meditativeness of the Hindu, the fiery imagination of the Arab, the devout and prudential understanding of the Hebrew, the æsthetic subtilty of the Greek, the legal breadth and sensual recklessness of the Roman, the martial frenzy of the Goth, the chivalric and dark pride of the Spaniard, the treacherous blood of the Italian, the mercurial vanity of the Frenchman, the blunt realism of the Englishman.
It is obvious enough that the masses of moral statements or standing exhortations composing the aphorisms of a language cannot mix in the daily minds of men without deep cause and effect. It will be worth our while to inquire into the bearings of this matter; for, though many a gatherer has carried his basket through these diamond districts of the mind, we do not remember that any one has sharply examined the value of the treasures so often displayed, set forth the methods of their influence and its qualifications, and determined the respective limits of their use and their worthlessness. Undertaking this task, we must, in the outset, divide aphorisms into the two classes of proverbs and maxims, plebeian perceptions and aristocratic conclusions, moral axioms and philosophic rules. This distinction may easily be made clear, and will prove useful.
Popular proverbs are national, or cosmopolitan, and they are anonymous,—rising from among the multitude, and floating on their breath. They are generalizations of the average observation of a people. Undoubtedly, as a general thing, each one was first struck out by some superior mind. But usually this happened so early that the name of the author is lost. Proverbs—as the etymology hints—are words held before the common mind, words in front of the public. Wise maxims, on the contrary, are individual, may more commonly be traced to their origin in the writings of some renowned author, and are more limited in their audience. They are the results of comprehensive insight, the ripened products of searching meditation, the weighty utterances of weighty minds. The proverb, "A burnt child dreads the fire," flies over all climes and alights on every tongue. The maxim, "All true life begins with renunciation," appeals to comparatively few, and tarries only in prepared and thoughtful minds. Proverbs are often mere statements of facts, barren truisms, too obvious to instruct our thought, affect our feeling, or in any way change our conduct, though the accuracy with which the arrow is shot fixes our attention. Notice a few examples of this sort:—"A friend in need is a friend indeed"; "Many a little makes a mickle"; "Anger is a brief madness"; "It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good." Such affirmations are too general and obvious to be provocative awakeners of original reflection, sentiment, or will. Maxims, on the other hand, instead of being general descriptions or condensed common-places, are usually definite directions, discriminative exhortations. Notice such specimens as these:—"Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves"; "When angry, count ten before you speak"; "Do the duty nearest your hand, and the next will already have grown clearer"; "Remember that a thing begun is half done." Proverbs, then, are results of observation, often affirmations of quite evident facts, as, "Necessity is the mother of invention," or, "Who follows the river will arrive at the sea." Maxims, in distinction, are results of reflection. They are experience generalized into rules for the guidance of action, as, "Think twice before you speak once," or, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Proverbs are statical; maxims are dynamic. Those are wisdom embalmed; these wisdom vitalized. The former are literary fodder; the latter are literary pemmican.
The commonest application of proverbs is as mental economics, substitutes for thought. They are constantly employed by the ordinary sort of persons as provisions to avoid spiritual exertion, artifices to dispose of a matter with the smallest amount of intellectual trouble, as when one ends a controversy with the adage, "Least said, soonest mended." The majority of people desire to get along with the least possible expenditure of thinking. To many a hard-headed laborer, five minutes of girded and continuous thinking are more exhaustive than a whole day of muscular toil. No fact is more familiar than that illiterate minds are furnished with an abundance of trite sayings which they readily cite on all occasions. They thus hit, or at least fancy they hit, the principle which applies to the exigency, without the trouble of extemporaneously thinking it out for themselves on the spot. Such saws as, "The pot must not call the kettle black," "One swallow does not make a Spring," "Nought is never in danger," "Out of sight, out of mind," often give employment to an otherwise freightless tongue, and serve as excusing makeshifts for a mind incompetent, from ignorance, indolence, or fatigue, to discharge the duty of furnishing its own thought and expression for the occasion.
Proverbs are more frequently used as explanations than as guides of conduct, as the reason why we have acted in a certain manner than as a reason why we should act so. "Look before you leap," is usually said after we have leaped. When a miserly man refuses to give anything in behalf of some distant object, his refusal is not prompted by the remembrance of the proverb, "Charity begins at home"; but the stingy propensity first stirs in the man and actuates him, and then he expresses his motive, or evades the true issue, by quoting the selfish old saw ever ready at his hand. In such cases the axiom is not the forerunning cause of the action, but its justifying explanation. Sometimes, undeniably, an applicable proverb coming to mind does influence a man and decide his conduct. Coming at the right moment, in the wavering of his will, it suggests the principle which determines him, lends the needful balance of impulse for which he waited. An old proverb, indorsed by the usage of generations, strikes on the ear like a voice falling from the heights of antiquity; it is clothed with a kind of authority. Doubtless many a poor boy has received a sound flogging which he would have escaped, had not his father happened to recall the somewhat cruel and questionable aphorism of Solomon, currently abbreviated into "Spare the rod and spoil the child." When Charles IX. was hesitating as to the enactment of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre, his bigoted mother, infuriated with sectarian hate, whispered in his ear, "Clemency is sometimes cruelty, and cruelty clemency,"—and the fatal decree was sealed. But such instances are exceptional, and partly deceptive, too. Man is usually governed by his own passions, his own circumstances, or his own reason, not by any verbal propositions. And when an apt and timely adage seems to determine him, it is, for the most part, because it acts upon responsive feelings preëxistent in him and already struggling to express themselves. And thus, upon the whole, it is to be concluded that proverbs are the children of Epimetheus, or afterthought, rather than of Prometheus, or forethought. They are rather products than producers,—intellectual forms rather than intellectual forces. The prevalent notion of their influence is a huge and singular error. One of our wisest authors, himself a great aphorist, says,—"Proverbs are the sanctuaries of the intuitions." But the intuitions, for the very reason that they are intuitive, need no advisory guidance, and admit of no verbal help.
But when we turn from the aphoristic proverbs of the people to the aphoristic maxims of the wise, a deep distinction and contrast confront us. These, so far from being evasions of effort or substitutes for thought, are direct stimulants to thought, provocative summonses to more earnest mental application. Seneca says, "Wouldst thou subject all things to thyself? Subject thyself to reason." A modern writer says, "They are not kings who have thrones, but they who know how to govern." Now any one meeting these maxims, if they have any effect on him, will be set a-thinking to discover the principle contained in them. He will feel that there is a profound significance in them; and his curiosity will be awakened, his intellect fired, to find out the grounds and bearings of the law they denote. In this way the words of the wise are goads to prick and urge the faculties of inferior minds. Pointed expressions of the experience of the sovereign masters of life and the world impel feebler and less agile natures to follow the tracks of light and emulate the choice examples set before them, with swifter movements and with richer results than they could ever have attained, if not thus encouraged. Proverbial axioms flourish copiously in the idiomatic ground and vernacular climate of unlearned, undisciplined, unreflective minds, as thistles on the highway where every ass may gather them. But precious maxims, those "short sentences drawn from a long experience," as Cervantes calls them, are found mostly in the writings of the greatest geniuses, Solomon, Aristotle, Shakspeare, Bacon, Goethe, Richter, Emerson: and they appeal comparatively but to a select class of minds, kindred in some degree to those that originated them.
To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it. In order to secure genuine profit here, the disciple must for himself repeat the processes of the teacher, reach the same conclusion, see the same truth. Wisdom cannot be mechanically taken, but must be spiritually assimilated,—cannot be put on as a coat or hat, used as a hammer or a sling, but must be intelligently grasped, digested, and organized into the mental structure and habits. The truth of this is at once so palpable and so important that it has found embodiment in numerous proverbs known to almost every one: "An ounce of mother-wit is worth a pound of school-wit"; "A pennyweight of your own wit is worth a ton of other people's"; "Who cannot work out his salvation by heart will never do it by book."
For the reason just indicated, we think the common estimate of the actual influence of even the costliest preceptive sayings is monstrously exaggerated. That an aphorism should really be of use, it must virtually be reproduced by the faculties of your own soul. But the mental energy and acquirement which thus recreate it in a great degree supersede the necessity of it, render it an expression not of a guidance you need from without, but of an insight and force already working within. Your character determines what maxims you will select or create far more than the maxims you choose or make determine what your character will be. Herbart says, "Characters with ruling plans are energetic; characters with ruling maxims are virtuous." This is true, since a continuous plan subsidizes the forces that would without it run to waste, and a deliberately chosen authority girds and guides the soul from perilous dallying and dissipation. Nevertheless, it is not so much that characters are energetic or virtuous because they have ruling plans or maxims as it is that they have ruling plans or maxims because they are energetic or virtuous. Say to a penurious, hard, grumpy man, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Will you thus make him liberal, sympathetic, affable? No, his character will neutralize your precept, as vinegar receiving the sunshine into its bosom becomes more sour. Some persons seem to imagine that a wise maxim is a sort of fairy's wand, one touch of which will transform the loaded panniers of a donkey into the fiery wings of a Pegasus. Surely, it is a great error. Trench says, with an amusing naïveté, "There is scarcely a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it." The two comprehensive conditions, "had we known and attended to its lesson," are discharging conductors, that empty the sentence of all proper meaning, and leave only a rank of hollow words behind. He might as well say, "Had we never been tempted, we had never fallen,—had we possessed all wisdom, we had never committed an error," The best maxim that ever was made cannot directly impart or create knowledge or virtue or spiritual force. It can only give a voice to those qualities where they already exist, and so set in motion a strengthening interchange of action and reaction. Though a fool's mouth be stuffed with proverbs, he still remains as much a fool as before. He is past preaching to who does not care to mend. As the brave Schiller affirms, "Heaven and earth fight in vain against a dunce." Eternal contact with nutritious wisdom can teach no lesson, nor profit at all one who has not a coöperative and assimilative mind. The anchor is always in the sea, but it never learns to swim. Philosophic precepts address the reason; but the springs of motive and regeneration are in the sentiments. To attempt the reformation of a bad man by means of fine aphorisms is as hopeless as to bombard a fortress with diamonds, or to strive to exhilarate the brain by pelting the forehead with grapes.
And yet, notwithstanding these large limitations and abatements, it is not to be denied that both proverbs and maxims, when habitually recalled, generally have some effect, often are strongly influential, and may, by a faithful observance of the conditions, be made extremely efficacious. What, then, are the conditions of deriving profit from the contemplation of aphorisms? How can we make their futility end, their utility begin? The first, ever indispensable condition is fresh discrimination. There are false, cynical, mean, devilish aphorisms, as well as sound and worthy ones. Each style of character, kind and grade of experience breathes itself out in corresponding expressions. "Self is the man"; "Look out for Number One"; "Devil take the hindmost"; "One for me is as good as two for you"; "Every man has his price"; "Draw the snake from its hole by another man's hand"; "Vengeance is a feast fit for the gods." The fact that such infernal sentiments are proverbs must be no excuse for not trampling them out of sight with disgust and scorn. Discrimination is needed not only to reject bad sayings, but also to correct incomplete or extravagant ones. The maxim, "Never judge by appearances," must be modified, because in reality appearances are all that we have to judge from. Its true rendering is, "Judge cautiously, for appearances are often deceptive." A proverb is almost always partial, presenting one aspect of the matter,—or excessive, making no allowance for exceptions. Here independent insight is requisite, that we may not err. As a general thing, aphorisms are particular truths put into forms of universality, and they must be severely scrutinized, lest a mere characteristic of the individual be mistaken for a normal faculty of the race. For instance, it is said, "A reconciled friend is an enemy in disguise." Not always, by any means; it depends greatly on the character of the man, "Forewarned is forearmed." Generally this is true, but not invariably; as sometimes a man, by being forewarned of danger, is unnerved with terror, and undone. So the two maxims, "Never abandon a certainty for an uncertainty," "Nothing venture, nothing have," destroy each other. Whether you shall give up the one bird in the hand and try for the two in the bush depends on the relative worth of the one and the two, and the probabilities of success in the trial. No abstract maxim can help solve that problem: it requires living intelligence. To follow a foreign rule empirically will often be to fare as the monkey fared, who, undertaking to shave, as he had seen his master do, gashed his face and paws. Fearful incisions of the soul will he get who accepts unqualifyingly the class of impulsive proverbs with their enormously overdrawn inferences: such as that of David, when he said in his haste, "All men are liars"; or that of Moore, when he said in his song, "The world is all a fleeting show, for man's illusion given"; or that maxim of Schopenhauer, so full of deadly misanthropy and melancholy that one would gladly turn his back on a world in which he believed such a rule necessary, "Love no one, hate no one, is the first half of all worldly wisdom; say nothing, believe nothing, is the other half."
