Part 28

In the same character opposite faculties and qualities are sometimes so blended as to give very mysterious results. Every reader knows how difficult it often is to separate the irony and seriousness of Swift and De Foe, so very nicely they run together. Pure imagination is so realistic as to appear indubitable truth. The History of the Plague is an example; and Robinson Crusoe: what boy ever doubted the truth of the narrative? or, while he was reading them, the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, incredible as they are? There is a story of a peasant and The Vicar of Wakefield. The dull rustic was a slow reader, and could get through but a few pages in a long evening; yet he was absorbed by the story, and read it as if it were a veritable history. A wag in the family, discerning the situation, thought to amuse himself by putting back the book-mark each morning nearly to the point the man had read from the previous evening, so that it turned out he was all winter getting through the little volume. When he had finished it, the wag asked him his opinion of it. He answered that it was good,--that he had no doubt every word of it was true,--but it did seem to him there was some repetition in it!

A clergyman's widow of eighty, the mother of the first Sir David Dundas--at one time commander-in-chief of the British army--is thus described by Cockburn: "We used to go to her house in Bunker's Hill, [Edinburgh] when boys, on Sundays, between the morning and afternoon sermons, where we were cherished with Scotch broth and cakes, and many a joke from the old lady. Age had made her incapable of walking, even across the room; so, clad in a plain black-silk gown, and a pure muslin cap, she sat half-encircled by a high-backed, black leather chair, reading, with silver spectacles stuck on her thin nose, and interspersing her studies and her days with much laughter, and not a little sarcasm. What a spirit! There was more fun and sense round that chair than in the theatre or the church. I remember one of her grand-daughters stumbling, in the course of reading the newspapers to her, on a paragraph which stated that a lady's reputation had suffered from some indiscreet talk on the part of the Prince of Wales. Up she of fourscore sat, and said with an indignant shake of her shriveled fist and a keen voice,--'The dawmed villain! does he kiss and tell!'"

In the Barberini palace is the celebrated portrait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido. The melancholy and strange history of this beautiful girl has been told in a variety of ways, and is probably familiar to every reader. Guido saw her on her way to execution, and has painted her as she was dressed, in the gray habit and head-dress, made by her own hands, and finished but an hour before she put it on. "There are engravings and copies of the picture all over the world, but none that I have seen," said Willis, "give any idea of the excessive gentleness, and serenity of the countenance. The eyes retain traces of weeping, the child-like mouth, the soft, girlish lines of features that look as if they had never worn more than the one expression of youthfulness and affection, are all in repose, and the head is turned over the shoulder with as simple a sweetness as if she had but looked back to say a good-night before going to her chamber to sleep. She little looks like what she was--one of the firmest and boldest spirits whose history is recorded. After murdering her father for his fiendish attempts upon her virtue, she endured every torture rather than disgrace her family by confession, and was only moved from her constancy, at last, by the agonies of her younger brother on the rack. Who would read capabilities like these, in those heavenly and child-like features?"

There is related an incident of the American civil war which illustrates how ignorance and superstition sometimes give birth to eloquence. An army officer had been speaking of the ideas of power entertained by the poor negro slaves. He said they had an idea of God, as the Almighty, and they had realized in their former condition the power of their masters. Up to the time of the arrival among them of the Union forces, they had no knowledge of any other power. Their masters fled upon the approach of the federal soldiers, and this gave the negroes a conception of a power greater than that exercised by them. This power they called "Massa Linkum." Their place of worship was a large building which they called "the praise house;" and the leader of the meeting, a venerable black man, was known as "the praise man." On a certain day, when there was quite a large gathering of the people, considerable confusion was created by different persons attempting to tell who and what "Massa Linkum" was. In the midst of the excitement the white-headed leader commanded silence. "Brederin," said he, "you don't know nosein' what you're talkin' 'bout. Now, you just listen to me. Massa Linkum, he eberywhar. He know eberyting." Then, solemnly looking up, he added, "He walk de earf like de Lord!"

Curran, who was so merry and charming in conversation, was also very melancholy. He said he never went to bed in Ireland without wishing not to rise again. It seems to be a law of our nature that "as high as we have mounted in delight, in our dejection do we sink as low." Burns expresses it, "Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure, thrill the deepest notes of woe;" and Hood, "There's not a string attuned to mirth, but has its chord in melancholy;" and Burton, "Naught so sweet as melancholy," naught "so damned as melancholy;" and King Solomon, "I said of laughter, It is mad."

It is narrated that one day Philip III., King of Spain, was standing in one of the balconies of his palace observing a young Spanish student, who was sitting in the sun and reading a book, while he was bursting out into fits of laughter. The farther the student read, the more his gayety increased, until at last he was so violently excited that he let the book fall from his hands, and rolled on the ground in a state of intense hilarity. The king turned to his courtiers and said, "That young man is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote." One of the guards of the palace went to pick up the book and found that his majesty had guessed rightly. Yet Miguel Cervantes, the author of this book which is so amusing, had dragged on the most wretched and melancholy existence. He was groaning and weeping while all Spain was laughing at the numerous adventures of the Knight of La Mancha and the wise sayings of Sancho Panza.

The biographer of Grimaldi speaks of the devouring melancholy which pursued the celebrated clown whenever he was off the stage, or left to his own resources; and it is well known that Liston, whose face was sufficient to set an audience in a good humor, was a confirmed hypochondriac. It is said he used to sit up after midnight to read Young's Night Thoughts, delighting in its monotonous solemnity.

"The gravest nations," says Landor, "have been the wittiest; and in those nations some of the gravest men. In England, Swift and Addison; in Spain, Cervantes. Rabelais and La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men have been graver than Pascal; few have been wittier." Robert Chambers tells in one of his essays of a person residing near London, who could make one's sides ache at any time with his comic songs, yet had so rueful, woe-begone a face that his friends addressed him by the name of Mr. Dismal. Nothing remains of Butler's private history but the record of his miseries; and Swift, we are told, was never known to smile. Burns confessed in one of his letters that his design in seeking society was to fly from constitutional melancholy. "Even in the hour of social mirth," he tells us, "my gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner." The most facetious of all Lamb's letters was written to Barton in a fit of the deepest melancholy.

"The elaboration of humor," said Irving, "is often a very serious task; and we have never witnessed a more perfect picture of mental misery than was once presented to us by a popular dramatic writer whom we found in the agonies of producing a farce which subsequently set the theatre in a roar."

Moliere was a grave and silent man. There is a story told of a lady of distinction who invited him to meet a party, thinking that he would entertain them with his wit; he came, but throughout the evening scarcely opened his lips. At Pezenas they used to show a chair in a barber's shop, where he would sit for hours without speaking a word.

Jerrold was a little ashamed of the immense success of the Caudle Lectures, many of which were written to dictation on a bed of sickness, racked by rheumatism. As social drolleries they set nations laughing. He took their celebrity rather sulkily. He did not like to be talked of as a funny man. His mixture of satire and kindliness reminded one of his friends of those lanes near Beyrout, in which you ride with the prickly-pear bristling alongside of you, and yet can pluck the grapes which force themselves among it from the fields.

There is an account of a singer and his wife who were to sing a number of humorous couplets at a restaurant in Leipsic. The wife made her appearance there at the appointed hour, but, owing to the unexplained absence of her husband, she was compelled to amuse the visitors by singing couplets alone. While her droll performance was eliciting shouts of laughter, her husband hung himself in the court-yard of the restaurant.

Some one said to Dr. Johnson that it seemed strange that he, who so often delighted his company by his lively conversation, should say he was miserable. "Alas! it is all outside," replied the sage; "I may be cracking my joke and cursing the sun: sun, how I hate thy beams!" "Are we to think Pope was happy," said he, on another occasion, "because he says so in his writings? We see in his writings what he wished the state of his mind to appear. Dr. Young, who pined for preferment, talks with contempt of it in his writings, and affects to despise everything he did not despise." The author of John Gilpin said of himself and his humorous poetry, "Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been when in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, would never have been written at all." Sir Walter Scott, in the height of his ill-fortune, was ever giving vent in his diary or elsewhere to some whimsical outburst or humorous sally, and after an extra gay entry in his journal just before leaving his dingy Edinburgh lodgings for Abbotsford, he follows it up next day with this bit of self-portraiture: "Anybody would think from the fal-de-ral conclusion of my journal of yesterday that I left town in a very good humor. But nature has given me a kind of buoyancy--I know not what to call it--that mingles with my deepest afflictions and most gloomy hours. I have a secret pride--I fancy it will be most truly termed--which impels me to mix with my distress strange snatches of mirth which have no mirth in them."

The Grand Duke of Weimar, entertaining an American author at his table, spoke of Poe, whose poem of The Raven he had never heard of until the evening previous. "The conception is terrible," he said. "Of course the Raven can only symbolize Despair, and he makes it perch upon the bust of Pallas, as if Despair even broods over Wisdom."

The Chronicle of Lueneburg, says Heine, "records that during the year 1480 there were whistled and sung throughout all Germany certain songs, which for sweetness and tenderness surpassed any previously known in German realms. Young and old, and the women in particular, were quite bewitched by these ballads, which might be heard the livelong day. But these songs, so the chronicle goes on to say, were composed by a young priest who was afflicted with leprosy and lived a forlorn, solitary life, secluded from all the world. You are surely aware, gentle reader, what a horrible disease was leprosy during the Middle Ages, and how the wretched beings afflicted with this incurable malady were driven out from all society, and from the abodes of men, and were forbidden to approach any human being. Living corpses, they wandered to and fro, muffled from head to foot, a hood drawn over the face, and carrying in the hand a bell, the Lazarus-bell, as it was called, through which they were to give timely warning of their approach, so that every one could avoid their path. The poor priest, whose fame as a lyric poet the chronicle praised so highly, was such a leper; and while all Germany, shouting and jubilant, sang and whistled his songs, he, a wretched outcast, in the desolation of his misery sat sorrowful and alone."

"There have been times in my life," said Goethe, "when I have fallen asleep in tears; but in my dreams the most charming forms have come to console and to cheer me."

After Scott began the Bride of Lammermoor, he had one of his terrible seizures of cramp, yet during his torment he dictated that fine novel; and when he rose from his bed, and the published book was placed in his hands, "he did not," James Ballantyne explicitly assured Lockhart, "recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained."

Jean Paul wrote a great part of his comic romance (Nicholas Margraf) in an agony of heart-break from the death of his promising son Max. He could not, one of his biographers says, bear the sight of any book his son had touched; and the word philology (the science in which Max excelled) went through his heart like a bolt of ice. He had such wonderful power over himself as to go on with his comic romance while his eyes continually dropped tears. He wept so much in secret that his eyes became impaired, and he trembled for the total loss of sight. Wine, that had previously, after long sustained labor, been a cordial to him, he could not bear to touch; and after employing the morning in writing, he spent the whole afternoon lying on the sofa in his wife's apartment, his head supported by her arm.

Washington Irving completed that most extravagantly humorous of all his works--the History of New York--while he was suffering from the death of his sweetheart, Matilda Hoffman, which nearly broke his heart. He says, in a memorandum found amongst his private papers after his death, "She was but about seventeen years old when she died. I cannot tell what a horrid state of mind I was in for a long time. I seemed to care for nothing; the world was a blank to me. I went into the country, but could not bear solitude, yet could not enjoy society. There was a dismal horror continually in my mind, that made me fear to be alone. I had often to get up in the night, and seek the bedroom of my brother, as if the having a human being by me would relieve me from the frightful gloom of my own thoughts.... When I became more calm and collected, I applied myself, by way of occupation, to the finishing of my work. I brought it to a close, as well as I could, and published it; but the time and circumstances in which it was produced rendered me almost unable to look upon it with satisfaction. Still it took with the public, and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America.... I seemed to drift about without aim or object, at the mercy of every breeze; my heart wanted anchorage. I was naturally susceptible, and tried to form other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it would continually roam to what it had lost; and whenever there was a pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement, I would sink into dismal dejection. For years I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly."

Heine, for several years preceding his death, was a miserable paralytic. All that time, it is stated, he lay upon a pile of mattresses, racked by pain and exhausted by sleeplessness, till his body was reduced below all natural dimensions, and his long beard fell over the coverlet like swan's down or a baby's hair. The muscular debility was such that he had to raise the eyelid with his hand when he wished to see the face of any one about him; and thus in darkness, he thought, and listened, and dictated, preserving to the very last his clearness of intellect, his precision of diction, and his invincible humor.

The wretchedness of poor Scarron, at whose jests, burlesques, and buffooneries all France was laughing, may be guessed at from his own description. His form, to use his own words, "had become bent like a Z." "My legs," he adds, "first made an obtuse angle with my thighs, then a right and at last an acute angle; my thighs made another with my body. My head is bent upon my chest; my arms are contracted as well as my legs, and my fingers as well as my arms. I am, in truth, a pretty complete abridgment of human misery." His head was too big for his diminutive stature, one eye was set deeper than the other, and his teeth were the color of wood. At the time of his marriage (to the beautiful and gifted Mademoiselle d'Aubigne, afterward Madame de Maintenon, the wife for thirty years of Louis XIV.!) he could only move with freedom his hand, tongue, and eyes. His days were passed in a chair with a hood, and so completely the abridgment of man he describes himself, that his wife had to kneel to look in his face. He could not be moved without screaming from pain, nor sleep without taking opium. The epitaph which he wrote on himself is touching from its truth:--

"Tread softly--make no noise To break his slumbers deep; Poor Scarron here enjoys His first calm night of sleep."

Balzac said of him, "I have often met in antiquity with pain that was wise, and with pain that was eloquent; but I never before saw pain joyous, nor found a soul merrily cutting capers in a paralytic frame." He continued to jest to the last; and seeing the bystanders in tears, he said, "I shall never, my friends, make you weep as much as I have made you laugh."

Many of Hood's most humorous productions were dictated to his wife, while he himself was in bed from distressing and protracted sickness. His own family was the only one which was not delighted with the Comic Annual, so well thumbed in every house. "We, ourselves," writes his son, "did not enjoy it till the lapse of many years had mercifully softened down some of the sad recollections connected with it." Fun and suffering seemed to be natural to him, and to be constantly helping each other. When a boy, he drew the figure of a demon with the smoke of a candle on the staircase ceiling near his bedroom door, to frighten his brother. Unfortunately he forgot that he had done so, and, when he went to bed, succeeded in terrifying himself into fits almost--while his brother had not observed the picture. Joke he would, suffering as he might be. It is recorded of him, that upon a mustard plaster being applied to his attenuated feet, as he lay in the direst extremity, he was heard feebly to remark that there was "very little meat for the mustard." But if his wit was marvelous, so was his pathos--tender beyond comparison. His first child scarcely survived its birth. "In looking over some old papers," says his son, "I found a few tiny curls of golden hair, as soft as the finest silk, wrapped in a yellow and time-worn paper, inscribed in my father's handwriting:--

'Little eyes that scarce did see, Little lips that never smiled; Alas! my little dear dead child, Death is thy father, and not me; I but embraced thee soon as he!'"

Here are a few sentences from the long letters which the author of the Bridge of Sighs wrote to the children of his friend, Dr. Elliot, then residing at Sandgate, almost from his death-bed: "My dear Jeanie,--So you are at Sandgate! Of course, wishing for your old play fellow to help you to make little puddles in the sand, and swing on the gate. But perhaps there are no sand and gate at Sandgate, which, in that case, nominally tells us a fib.... I have heard that you bathe in the sea, which is very refreshing, but it requires care; for if you stay under water too long, you may come up a mermaid, who is only half a lady, with a fish's tail--which she can boil if she likes. You had better try this with your doll, whether it turns her into half a 'doll-fin.'... I hope you like the sea. I always did when I was a child, which was about two years ago. Sometimes it makes such a fizzing and foaming, I wonder some of our London cheats do not bottle it up and sell it for ginger-pop. When the sea is too rough, if you pour the sweet oil out of the cruet all over it, and wait for a calm, it will be quite smooth--much smoother than a dressed salad.... Do you ever see any boats or vessels? And don't you wish, when you see a ship, that somebody was a sea-captain instead of a doctor, that he might bring you home a pet lion, or calf-elephant, ever so many parrots, or a monkey from foreign parts? I knew a little girl who was promised a baby-whale by her sailor-brother, and who blubbered because he did not bring it. I suppose there are no whales at Sandgate, but you might find a seal about the beach; or at least a stone for one. The sea-stones are not pretty when they are dry, but look beautiful when they are wet--and we can always keep sucking them!" To Jeanie's brother, among other things he writes, "I used to catch flat-fish with a very long string line. It was like swimming a kite. Once I caught a plaice, and seeing it all over red spots, thought I had caught the measles." To Mary Elliot, a still more youthful correspondent, he says, "I remember that when I saw the sea, it used sometimes to be very fussy and fidgety, and did not always wash itself quite clean; but it was very fond of fun. Have the waves ever run after you yet, and turned your little two shoes into pumps, full of water? Have you been bathed yet in the sea, and were you afraid? I was the first time, and the time before that; and, dear me, how I kicked and screamed--or, at least, meant to scream; but the sea, ships and all, began to run into my mouth, and so I shut it up. I think I see you being dipped into the sea, screwing your eyes up, and putting your nose, like a button, into your mouth, like a button-hole, for fear of getting another smell and taste. Did you ever try, like a little crab, to run two ways at once? See if you can do it, for it is good fun; never mind tumbling over yourself a little at first.... And now good-by; Fanny has made my tea, and I must drink it before it gets too hot, as we all were last Sunday week. They say the glass was eighty-eight in the shade, which is a great age. The last fair breeze I blew dozens of kisses for you, but the wind changed, and, I am afraid, took them all to Miss H----, or somebody that it shouldn't."

You remember the anecdote Southey repeats in his Doctor, of a physician who, being called in to an unknown patient, found him suffering under the deepest depression of mind, without any discoverable disease, or other assignable cause. The physician advised him to seek for cheerful objects, and recommended him especially to go to the theatre and see a famous actor then in the meridian of his powers, whose comic talents were unrivaled. Alas! the comedian who kept crowded theatres in a roar was this poor hypochondriac himself!

XII.

CONDUCT.