Part 6
Neither do I propose on this occasion to allude to the astounding number of resolutions which I make on the first day of the year and break regularly before I reach the second week of January. If I have one faculty better developed than another, it is that of making and breaking resolutions. Didn't I firmly resolve the first of last January that I would be very temperate in the use of the King's English for the space of three hundred and sixty-five days? And when two hours later I slipped down on the sidewalk, and in the operation sat down on my new hat and looked up to see a thoughtless young man laughing at me, didn't I break that resolution and address some remarks to that thoughtless young man which were rather more emphatic than elegant?
I fancy I did.
Equally when I was a little boy did I not resolve one New Year's Day that I would keep the whole Ten Commandments, and was I not caught in the preserve closet the same day and subjected to a degree of corporal punishment which made me break nearly all the rest of them before night?
I never saw but one person who succeeded in keeping a New Year's resolution, and he had pined away so rapidly in his physical and grown so abnormally in his moral man, that it was really painful to look at him. He was the nearest approach to an angel on half rations I ever expect to see. A good meal would have made him sick, but I really believe he would have bolted at one gulp the entire nine tons of tracts which some New York individual has kindly forwarded to the Young Men's Christian Association.
I cannot but admire the theological cheek of this man. His brass is of no ordinary description. It is sonorous, stately, magnificent. Nine tons of tracts! Twenty thousand one hundred and sixty pounds of appeal to the ungodly! Three hundred and twenty-two thousand five hundred and sixty ounces of the essence of doctrine! About thirty miles of grace!
December 28, 1867.
_OLE BULL._
My last recollection of Farwell Hall is connected with a tall, graceful, sweet-faced old man, his head lovingly bending over a violin that old Stradivarius made centuries ago, his eyes closed, transfigured in a vision of music, until he seemed to me to wear the face that Beethoven, the Master, might have worn. In his hands the dull wood was again in life. It was part of an organism, and it told the old man of the rustle of leaves in the summer gales; of the songs of birds in the branches; of the brawling waters of the brooks that moistened the roots; of the rude winds that smote the tree on Italian hills; of the star that looked down upon it in delicious Italian nights; of the vernal thrill, the summer glow, the autumnal decay, and the wintry death in life--the great miracle which Nature performs for us each year; and the old man interpreted it in bewitching strains to some who gave themselves up to the spell and were drawn nearer together by the sympathy which music produces, to some who heard the sound and not the soul, and to some who heard neither, in the sound of their own small gabble.
And the next day, when a heap of smoking bricks, and charred beams, and twisted iron was all that was left of the beautiful hall, it seemed to me that I had met with an irreparable loss--that some friend had suddenly vanished.
January 11, 1868.
* * * * *
One of the most charmingly chatty things Leigh Hunt ever wrote was his "Earth Upon Heaven," in which he imagined himself following out his earthly occupations in the upper world; dining with all the good fellows of past ages; reading new plays of Shakspeare and new novels of Scott; eating sugar that was not sanded, and drinking milk from celestial cows in the Milky Way.
It is to be hoped the earthly concert nuisances will be abated there also, and that we may hope to hear the Malibrans and the Linds, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Bach and Gluck in new and diviner symphonies and songs (think of that!), without being annoyed by a garrulous angel behind us commenting on the cut of this angel's wings, the color of that angel's feathers, and the awkward manner in which some other angel flies to her seat, and the dreadfully stupid way in which young Highflier sat down upon Blanche's wings. It would be horrible to think of an eternity of music with an eternity of nuisance.
Ibid.
_SMALL TALK._
There are two kinds of small talk--one which is very silly, and when it does not run to twaddle, takes the worse form of slander and cruel gossip. These two phases are not inconsistent with each other, for it takes a very silly person to be a good gossiper. The greater amount of nonsense that a woman can talk to your face, the worse will be the gossip that she will talk behind you. Her wits may be very small in one direction, but they will be very sharp in the other.
The other kind of small talk is very delightful. It is chatty, sunny, spicy and brilliant. It may not be as deep as the ocean, but is not a little brook, singing over the pebbles, flashing in the sunlight, and whispering pretty little stories it learned from the naiads in the fountain where it was born, to the scarlet cardinals and golden-rods that lean over to listen, just as delightful as the uncertain depths of the ocean with dim suggestions of dirty sea-weed, slimy monsters, ribs of argosies and dead men's bones? Is not the little brook which can take the most distant star right into its heart, just as beautiful as the heavy ocean into whose depths no star beam can penetrate?
This kind of small talk is an eloquent art, and fortunate are the favored few who have mastered it. It may commence with the weather, which you discover is not threadbare, for it is the weather which breaks the ice for you, and it runs from the weather to the opera, from opera to music in general, from music to art, art to books, and from books to men and women. Neat little criticisms; characteristic observations; flashes of wit; pleasant satire which never wounds--fragmentary yet always polished--superficial, perhaps, yet here and there giving you indications of lower depths which would be worth exploring at the proper time. These are the main characteristics of accomplished small talk.
This species of small talk can only exist between the opposite sexes. Between women, small talk becomes silly or it runs to confidences. In the one case it is soon exhausted, in the other it is vulgarly supposed to be eternal; and the amount of smothered grief, of heart-rending woe, of poignant anguish, of amorous doubts, of Sphynx-like mysteries, of secret grief which cannot be whispered even to her pillow, which one young woman will confide to four hundred other young women, is only equalled by the rapidity with which the latter will dispossess themselves of _les confidences_ and the fertile imagination which will clothe them entirely new even before they are divulged for the second time.
Between men, small talk is simply idiotic.
You pass an evening with Serafina, and you get only simpers and syllabubs. She will not give you the ghost of a thought, although her tongue has been running like a mill-clapper for two mortal hours. She will run the whole gamut of talk, and you shall never once get a taste of the amber wine beneath the foam.
_Per contra_, in an evening with Blanche, she will dive like a humming bird into every flower, sweet or bitter, beautiful or ugly, and extract honey from each. She does not linger long on anything. She does not go too deep to be tiresome, and yet you are aware that she would lead you a terrible chase into the real if you gave the word. With that infinite tact which no one but a clever woman possesses, she will draw you out and give you cues for conversation without your ever dreaming of it. If you have a hobby, she will quietly saddle it and help you to mount, and spur it up to a rattling pace with little ingenuous confessions of ignorance, and implied flatteries which show you at once your superiority over the rest of mankind; and she will take you off your hobby and turn him out to grass so gracefully that you will be thoroughly satisfied with your ride. She will read you a charming little homily on her gold cross, which "Jews might kiss or infidels adore," and she will lead you with that narrow edge of lace around her pretty throat, which a rude breath might dissipate, through meadows of talk, where every flower is "a thing of beauty" and "a joy forever."
But to effectually do this, she must have no hobbies, and she must assume an ignorance if she have it not. Ignorance is one of the strongest weapons in the female armory, and if the small talk assumes the form of an argument, a graceful yielding, especially if one is obstinate, is also politic.
January 18, 1868.
_FLAT ON THE BACK._
I write to you to-day with a sugar-coated pill and a small bottle of suspicious-looking fluid, which Æsculapius has designated with the cabalistic abbreviations "_Aq. Cret. Rhu. Pulv. 2 jiii_," between myself and the delirious chaos of fever.
My surroundings are not of a character to induce extravagant cheerfulness, or to resolve a very decided precipitate out of the mixture of virtue and necessity--a severely chemico-moral test I have been working at for the past three days.
I think a man might dig into a cucumber for sunbeams or a mushroom for moonlight, with better chances of success, than I shall have in attempting to extract humor from the scanty material at hand, viz: Several wet towels, ice water, a mustard plaster, sundry hot bricks, pills, potions and lotions _ad libitum_, and a small piece of toasted cracker.
The last item is the connecting link between myself and the good goddess Hygeia, and I regard it with an interest I never knew before, considering the clutch with which Febris has seized me.
Thus, skirting along the shore of Febris, sufficiently near to catch with full force the burning simooms which blow across its miasmatic lands--near enough to burn from its equator and to freeze from its poles, to feel its clamps and hooks, with which it is tugging at bone and muscle, while the soul has gone visiting, and not even left the Will at home to resist disease--near enough all night long, as I sail in the darkness, to see the will-o'-the-wisps, and goblins, and chimeras, the skeletons of dead fancies, the ghosts of dreams and the realities of horror which are the only inhabitants of this land over which Febris reigns--behind me the very bright light of day, and before, only a very uncertain star--under a red-hot bed quilt, flanked with a small drug store--the great world outside only recognizable by a confused hum--isolated from complete sights and sounds--I vegetate and moralize.
If one should feed luxuriously on almond paste and comfits all his life, he would never appreciate the products of sour apple trees and the extracts of much-maligned herbs. So also if one should forever pursue the beaten track of good health, which is only the case in perfection among buffaloes and Digger Indians, one would never know the luxury and the blessing of being sick. We must have, now and then, a cessation of the good to appreciate the bad.
I can conceive that it would be the height of wretchedness to be compelled to live with a saint on earth. This world was not made for saints, and those who have made the foolish attempt to be saints, have wisely climbed pillars, gone into caves or wandered in deserts, getting as far out of the world as possible. Those who have persisted in being saints and remaining in the world, have usually been hanged or burned by other saints.
Equally, the man who is always well, becomes a nuisance after a time. His ruddy face hangs out a constant banner of presumptuous defiance, and the only person who can conscientiously love him is a life insurance agent. He never knows the soft ministrations of small female hands, or the hygienic virtue in the hem of an old lady's robe. Consequently his milk of human kindness is very apt to freeze up. He can have but small sympathy, for no one can sympathize, who has not learned sympathy by experience. At this present moment I fairly burn with pity, and extend a red right hand of sympathy to every man, woman and child, who has ever had a fever, who has a fever now, or who is going to have a fever. In his great, strong animal existence he goes crashing and smashing about like a whale among minnows, with this difference--that the whale is bent upon legitimate prey, while your healthy man is simply trying to show that he _is_ a whale.
As who should say, "Here am I, Mr. Merryman, the great American Healthist. Any lady or gentleman in the audience, wishing to show liver, lights or lungs, will please step forward into the arena."
But, of course, there are compensations for all this. In the next world our healthy friend will probably take twice as much punishment as some of the poor devils who took half of theirs before they went there.
A person whose wings have sprouted and grown, and who has become a precocious angel in the prescribed three score and ten, is certainly leaving a very narrow margin for angelic growth hereafter, and, equally, a man who goes through his three score and ten without any terrene ails, I fancy will need Hippocrates and Galen when he gets to the other shore.
At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back.
* * * * * * * * *
Which stars are to be considered equivalent to the time consumed in taking the sugar-coated pill before referred to, reminding one, in its passage down the æsophagus, of the cathartic literature which St. John swallowed, sweet above and bitter below.
Which recalls to me that the most of us are more or less sugar-coated--sweet outside, but quite bitter, or quite sad, or quite bad inside.
The partition between body and soul with some of us is so thin that the light shines through easily.
Some of us, again, cover up our little sepulchres so thickly with vines and roses, and fix such a laughing mask on the door, that we pass for very Ariels, God help us!
While others of us still, living in ourselves, isolated from all intimate relations, carry in our faces no sign of the toil and the weariness and the struggle. It is all blank on the outside; on the inside, it is isolation, death and expiation.
But, then, there are some of us who get our pills coated so badly that a child wouldn't touch them. For instance, good Deacon Jones, who slept all through Parson Primrose's sermon, and told Deacon Brown, who didn't sleep, that the Parson's doctrine was correct; Prof. Blather, who hitches himself to the tail of every high-flying kite, hoping thereby to be brought before the popular eyes; old Mrs. Peacock, who still persists in being young, making admirers, mincing through her spavined paces, leering with her faded eyes out of that painted face, when all Japonicadom knows there is not a genuine feather about her. And so one might go on for hours, for the number of these badly coated pills is legion.
At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back.
* * * * * * * * *
More stars for the Doctor who has been to see me. He is a jolly, sanguine dog, and assures me I shall be up in time for the opera--if not for the whole season, at least that I shall have two days off--one for Bellini's _Englishman_ and one for Hermanns' _Mephisto_.
What a blessing these jolly doctors are. They give one an invoice of moral courage, wherewith to make a stout fight against disease. They light up your room as beautifully as the sun this morning kindled my frosty window-panes with burning gold. And my jolly doctor will not take it unkindly of me if I say that I have more confidence in his jolliness than in his cabalistic abbreviations.
On the other hand, I can conceive that if I were compelled to receive the attentions of one of those solemn, owl-like doctors--those funereal-looking personages in deep black, whose noses and chins meet--who wear heavy canes, the knobs of which do heavy thinking for the wearers--whose only remark is an ominous shake of the head, and the preparation of a bill at the neighboring drug store--who have made the very sunlight look mercurial, and who cut off the supply of that delicious Muscat which Blanche sent in--I think, after one visit from such a walking Bolus, I should say, with Elijah of old: "It is enough; now let me die. You may call in your friend Sir." For I should know that as soon as he came into the house Death would sneak after him, and wait outside the door.
At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back.
* * * * * * * * *
Another night in the darkness, sailing along these shores of Febris, and this crystal Saturday morning, it seems all bright and clear ahead. I feel no more the breath of the burning gales, but in its place an ecstasy of pain. My hand wearies and the head tires with this trifling work which has run through three days of nullity.
At least, so it seems to a man flat on his back.
January 31, 1868.
_GETTING OUT OF BED._
Getting out of bed is one of the little circumstances which shows man in his abstract essence. He is then a pure animal with all his instincts on the surface. There is no dignity in him then, no majesty, no true religion, no concealment of his nature. In fact he is worse off than the lower orders of the brute creation, as they awake in the full plenitude of their life. A butterfly, which has slept all night in a tulip, rises from his gorgeously curtained couch just as beautiful as he is under the noonday sun, when he lazily flutters among the languid roses. Man, when he rises, is a fragmentary being and has to be set up piece by piece and arrayed in his conventional garments before he can say good morning to the world.
There are various methods of getting out of bed. One man in a thousand wakes up all over at once, kicks off his bedclothes and bounds out of bed as Minerva bounded out of Jupiter's brain, armed and equipped as the law directs. He never tasted lotus in his life. He owns no real estate in Spain, but a good deal of outside city property. He never saw the point of a joke in his life. He never dreams. He is fiendishly healthy, and will, therefore, have much to answer for in the next world. He has no idea of the _dolce far niente_. If he has imagination, he clipped its wings long ago. A _post mortem_ examination of his internal economy would reveal nothing to speak of but columns of logarithms, interest tables and bills of lading in his skull, a complete set of office furniture in his stomach, and his abdominal canal crowded with cargoes of lumber and perches of stone. And he is apt to forget to say his prayers.
There are men who get out of bed a little at a time. The first symptoms of life are uneasy movements and a gentle rustling of the bedclothes. Slowly one arm appears from under the coverlid, and is thrown over the head. Then out comes another arm, disposed of in a similar manner. His legs are uneasy. One eye opens in a very uncertain manner and blinks, and the other opens and winks, and then both blink and wink for some minutes. He then commences to uncoil himself and straighten himself out. This is the stretching process. He mutters to himself incoherent nothings. He tries to go to sleep again, but the charm is broken. He yawns, and the process fairly opens his eyes. He sneezes, and the grand currents of life are once more in motion. One more stretch all over, and he accepts the hard necessity of nature which condemns him to quit his lotus to feed on hash, and he slowly gets out of bed as one utterly disgusted.
There is another class of men who always get out of bed over the footboard, and are uncomfortable all day after it. Their idea of happiness is realized in making somebody wretched, and they are singularly fortunate in the realization of that idea. They are sour in aspect and in disposition. No one has any rights they are bound to respect. Mrs. Gilliflower and her daughter, who always come late and go away early from the concerts, get out over the footboard. The man who mistakes a horse car for a hog pen and acts accordingly, although in some respects he is not much mistaken, gets out over the footboard. The man who worries his butcher or his baker over an insignificant trifle, and is too mean to have the snow shoveled off his sidewalk; the man who makes his lady clerks stand on their feet all day whether engaged or not; the woman who has a keen scent for ferreting out other persons' foibles and attending to other persons' business; the woman who is constantly lamenting over the wickedness and follies of the times; the man whose clumsiness trips him over and who then anathematizes an innocent curbstone; the man who raises a domestic war every morning over a lost button which he ripped off the night before, over an open window which he left open himself, over the discovery of his boots under the bed, where he placed them himself, over a dried up beefsteak which has been waiting an hour for him; the man whose pious nose goes heavenward at the sight of innocent pleasure, and who doesn't give his clerks time enough for dinner; the man who is sour himself and sours everything he touches--all these people get up over the footboard, and they won't get up any other way. If the footboard was forty feet high they would go over it with a step ladder, and curse every rung of it all the way up.
Then, there are men who get up only half awake, and don't fairly wake up until it is time to go to bed again. These are the unlucky ones, against whom fate and nature have a grudge. In the grand lottery of life they draw all the blanks. They usually receive all the broken limbs and fractured legs. They have come within a hair's breadth of making a fortune a number of times, but the hair was always too much. Such a man is always the one killed on a railway train. If he hears of a case of small-pox in West Wheeling, he will catch it. He is always the man in the great crowd who loses his pocket-book, and although he is one of the best of fellows, it will be just his luck to be overlooked by St. Peter at the gate of Heaven.