Part 5

There is but one thing which can honorably draw the heart out of an American in Europe. He has wrought for himself the white ideal of government; he belongs to a growing, not a decaying society; there is much without, upon which he looks with wonder and even with pity; for he is, as the monkish chroniclers would say, _filius hujus sæculi_, a child of to-day and to-morrow. In "that state of life to which it has pleased God to call" him, he should be the proclaimed brother of mankind, and the outrider of civilization; he has an heroic post and outlook, and these bring their responsibilities: why should he, how can he, forego them for the accidental pleasure to be had in alien capitals? But one thing he sees far away which he can never live to call his, in the west; he cannot transfer hither the yesterday of his own race, the dark charm of London, the glamour of Paris, the majesty and melancholy of Rome. If he has a nature which looks deep and walks slowly, he shall not pass the image of any old kingdom unbeguiled; either to his living senses, or to his distant and hopeless meditations, that world beyond wide waters will seem to him the fairest of created things, like the unbought lamp worth all that Aladdin ever cherished in his narrow youth. For yesterday is ours also, to have and to hold, though it be an oak which grows not within our own garden walls, and is to be reached only by a going forth, and a wrenching of the heart-strings. And that which makes the worthy pilgrim into an exile and a cosmopolite is no vanity, no ambition, no mere restless energy: it is truly the love of man which calleth over seas, and from towers a great way off. His shrine is some common and unregarded place, a mediæval stair, it may be, worn hollow as a gourd by the long procession of mortality. That concave stone touches him, and makes his blood tingle: it has magic in it, of itself, without a record; for it speaks of the transit of human worth and human vices, both of which Dante makes his Ulysses long for, and seek to understand. It is our sunken footfall, ages ere we were born, while we were on forgotten errands, nursing irrecoverable thoughts. To have marked it, with perhaps the largest emotion of our lives, is to walk Broadway or a Texan tow-path humbler and better ever after.

Who is to be blamed if he do indeed go "abroad," or stay abroad, so strangely finding there, rather than here, the soul's peace? for the soul has rights which may cancel even the duties of the ballot. Of what avail is Americanism, unless it earn for a man the freedom of rival cities, wrap him in a good dream, taking rancor from him, and put him in harmony with all master events gone by? The young Republic has children who come into the field of historic Christendom, to bathe themselves in the dignity and roominess of life, and to walk gladly among the evergreen traditions, which surge like tall June grass about their knees. What they never had, natural piety teaches them to desire and to worship, and their happy Parthian faces are bright with the setting sun. There are hundreds such, and blessed are they; for they move meanwhile under an innocent spell, and ignobler visions cannot touch them. It is their vocation to make a thronged spiritual solitude of their own. Under the self-same night of stars, they are changed: they have found other minds, more reverent, more chastened, more sensitized. Because they are converts, they cannot always be judged fairly. You shall meet them in summertime at Bruges and Nuremberg, and in the transept of Westminster Abbey, elbowed by pilgrims of another clay, but ever rapt and mute: "whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth."

1894.

THE PRECEPT OF PEACE

A CERTAIN sort of voluntary abstraction is the oddest and choicest of social attitudes. In France, where all æsthetic discoveries are made, it was crowned long ago: _la sainte indifférence_ is, or may be, a cult, and _le saint indifférent_ an articled practitioner. For the Gallic mind, brought up at the knee of a consistent paradox, has found that not to appear concerned about a desired good is the only method to possess it; full happiness is given, in other words, to the very man who will never sue for it. This is a secret neat as that of the Sphinx: to "go softly" among events, yet domineer them. Without fear: not because we are brave, but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life that not even Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm us. Without solicitude: for the essential thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion to open the hand, and drop what appertains to us no longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the shorter stick of celery, or

"The friends to whom we had no natural right, The homes that were not destined to be ours,"

it is all one: let it fall away! since only so, by depletions, can we buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is diverting to study, at the feet of Antisthenes and of Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can live without; or how many he can gather together, make over into luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as full of divine pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city streets with his melancholy household caravans: fatal impedimenta for an immortal. No: furniture is clearly a superstition. "I have little, I want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the novice may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles and Venetian interrogation-marks; if so be that he may distinguish what is truly extrinsic to him, and bestow these toys, eventually, on the children of Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, unconsciously increased, he can always part with sixteen-seventeenths, by way of concession to his individuality, and think the subtraction so much concealing marble chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would be a donor from the beginning; before he can be seen to own, he will disencumber, and divide. Strange and fearful is his discovery, amid the bric-à-brac of the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit, is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the acquisition, and shake the touch of the tangible from his imperious wings. It is not enough to cease to strive for personal favor; your true _indifférent_ is Early Franciscan: caring not to have, he fears to hold. Things useful need never become to him things desirable. Towards all commonly-accounted sinecures, he bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walking a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered detentions. "I enjoy life," says Seneca, "because I am ready to leave it." _Ja wohl!_ and they who act with jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort, reap only indigestion, and crow's-foot traceries for their deluded eye-corners.

Now nothing is farther from _le saint indifférent_ than cheap indifferentism, so-called: the sickness of sophomores. His business is to hide, not to display, his lack of interest in fripperies. It is not he who looks languid, and twiddles his thumbs for sick misplacedness, like Achilles among girls. On the contrary, he is a smiling industrious elf, monstrous attentive to the canons of polite society. In relation to others, he shows what passes for animation and enthusiasm; for at all times his character is founded on control of these qualities, not on the absence of them. It flatters his sense of superiority that he may thus pull wool about the ears of joint and several. He has so strong a will that it can be crossed and counter-crossed, as by himself, so by a dozen outsiders, without a break in his apparent phlegm. He has gone through volition, and come out at the other side of it; everything with him is a specific act: he has no habits. _Le saint indifférent_ is a dramatic wight: he loves to refuse your proffered six per cent, when, by a little haggling, he may obtain three-and-a-half. For so he gets away with his own mental processes virgin: it is inconceivable to you that, being sane, he should so comport himself. Amiable, perhaps, only by painful propulsions and sore vigilance, let him appear the mere inheritor of easy good-nature. Unselfish out of sheer pride, and ever eager to claim the slippery side of the pavement, or the end cut of the roast (on the secret ground, be it understood, that he is not as Capuan men, who wince at trifles), let him have his ironic reward in passing for one whose physical connoisseurship is yet in the raw. That sympathy which his rule forbids his devoting to the usual objects, he expends, with some bravado, upon their opposites; for he would fain seem a decent partisan of some sort, not what he is, a bivalve intelligence, _Tros Tyriusque_. He is known here and there, for instance, as valorous in talk; yet he is by nature a solitary, and, for the most part, somewhat less communicative than

"The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride, Lonely and terrible, on the Andëan height."

Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of grave events, he condoles and congratulates with the genteelest air in the world. In short, while there is anything expected of him, while there are spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove inexhaustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he drops his jaw, and stretches his legs; then, heigho! arises like a smoke, and envelops him becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of poetic boredom, of "the Oxford manner."

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!"

sighed Hamlet of this mortal outlook. As it came from him in the beginning, that plaint, in its sincerity, can come only from the man of culture, who feels about him vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face of creation is but comparative and symbolic. Nor will he breathe it in the common ear, where it may woo misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him, and, for lack of perspective, think his own fist the size of the sun. The social prizes, which, with mellowed observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order of desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs, seem to him first and sole; and to them he clings like a barnacle. But to our _indifférent_, nothing is so vulgar as close suction. He will never tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity; he is a gentleman, the hero of the habitually relaxed grasp. A light unprejudiced hold on his profits strikes him as decent and comely, though his true artistic pleasure is still in "fallings from us, vanishings." It costs him little to loose and to forego, to unlace his tentacles, and from the many who push hard behind, to retire, as it were, on a never-guessed-at competency, "richer than untempted kings." He would not be a life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. While the tranquil Sabine Farm is his delight, well he knows that on the dark trail ahead of him, even Sabine Farms are not sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to play the guest under his own cedars, and, with disciplinary intent, goes often from them; and, hearing his heart-strings snap the third night he is away, rejoices that he is again a freedman. Where his foot is planted (though it root not anywhere), he calls that spot home. No Unitarian in locality, it follows that he is the best of travellers, tangential merely, and pleased with each new vista of the human Past. He sometimes wishes his understanding less, that he might itch deliciously with a prejudice. With cosmic congruities, great and general forces, he keeps, all along, a tacit understanding, such as one has with beloved relatives at a distance; and his finger, airily inserted in his outer pocket, is really upon the pulse of eternity. His vocation, however, is to bury himself in the minor and immediate task; and from his intent manner, he gets confounded, promptly and permanently, with the victims of commercial ambition.

The true use of the much-praised Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, has hardly been apprehended: he is simply the patron saint of _indifférents_. From first to last, almost alone in that discordant time, he seems to have heard far-off resolving harmonies, and to have been rapt away with foreknowledge. Battle, to which all knights were bred, was penitential to him. It was but a childish means: and to what end? He meanwhile,--and no man carried his will in better abeyance to the scheme of the universe,--wanted no diligence in camp or council. Cares sat handsomely on him who cared not at all, who won small comfort from the cause which his conscience finally espoused. He labored to be a doer, to stand well with observers; and none save his intimate friends read his agitation and profound weariness. "I am so much taken notice of," he writes, "for an impatient desire for peace, that it is necessary I should likewise make it appear how it is not out of fear for the utmost hazard of war." And so, driven from the ardor he had to the simulation of the ardor he lacked, loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of two transient opinions, and inly impartial as a star, Lord Falkland fell: the young never-to-be-forgotten martyr of Newbury field. The imminent deed he made a work of art; and the station of the moment the only post of honor. Life and death may be all one to such a man: but he will at least take the noblest pains to discriminate between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, if he has to write a book about the variations of their antennæ. And like the Carolian exemplar is the disciple. The _indifférent_ is a good thinker, or a good fighter. He is no "immartial minion," as dear old Chapman suffers Hector to call Tydides. Nevertheless, his sign-manual is content with humble and stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the Himalayas of life affects him, very palpably, as "tall talk." He deals not with things, but with the impressions and analogies of things. The material counts for nothing with him: he has moulted it away. Not so sure of the identity of the higher course of action as he is of his consecrating dispositions, he feels that he may make heaven again, out of sundries, as he goes. Shall not a beggarly duty, discharged with perfect temper, land him in "the out-courts of Glory," quite as successfully as a grand Sunday-school excursion to front the cruel Paynim foe? He thinks so. Experts have thought so before him. Francis Drake, with the national alarum instant in his ears, desired first to win at bowls, on the Devon sward, "and afterwards to settle with the Don." No one will claim a buccaneering hero for an _indifférent_, however. The Jesuit novices were ball-playing almost at that very time, three hundred years ago, when some too speculative companion, figuring the end of the world in a few moments (with just leisure enough, between, to be shriven in chapel, according to his own thrifty mind), asked Louis of Gonzaga what he, on his part, should do in the precious interval. "I should go on with the game," said the most innocent and most ascetic youth among them. But to cite the behavior of any of the saints is to step over the playful line allotted. Indifference of the mundane brand is not to be confounded with their detachment, which is emancipation wrought in the soul, and the ineffable efflorescence of the Christian spirit. Like most supernatural virtues, it has a laic shadow; the counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, is one not only of perfection, but also of polity. A very little non-adhesion to common affairs, a little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide the moral immunity which is the only real estate. The _indifférent_ believes in storms: since tales of shipwreck encompass him. But once among his own kind, he wonders that folk should be circumvented by merely extraneous powers! His favorite catch, woven in among escaped dangers, rises through the roughest weather, and daunts it:

"Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners, For we be come into a quiet rode."

No slave to any vicissitude, his imagination is, on the contrary, the cheerful obstinate tyrant of all that is. He lives, as Keats once said of himself, "in a thousand worlds," withdrawing at will from one to another, often curtailing his circumference to enlarge his liberty. His universe is a universe of balls, like those which the cunning Oriental carvers make out of ivory; each entire surface perforated with the same delicate pattern, each moving prettily and inextricably within the other, and all but the outer one impossible to handle. In some such innermost asylum the right sort of devil-may-care sits smiling, while we rage or weep.

1894.

ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER WITH A PICKPOCKET

I WAS in town the other evening, walking by myself, at my usual rapid pace, and ruminating, in all likelihood, on the military affairs of the Scythians, when, at a lonely street corner not adorned by a gas-lamp, I suddenly felt a delicate stir in my upper pocket. There is a sort of mechanical intelligence in a well-drilled and well-treated body, which can act, in an emergency, without orders from headquarters. My mind, certainly, was a thousand years away, and is at best drowsy and indifferent. It had besides, no experience, nor even hearsay, which would have directed it what to do at this thrilling little crisis. Before it was aware what had happened, and in the beat of a swallow's wing, my fingers had brushed the flying thief, my eyes saw him, and my legs (retired race-horses, but still great at a spurt) flew madly after him. I protest that from the first, though I knew he had under his wicked thumb the hard-earned wealth of a notoriously poor poet (let the double-faced phrase, which I did not mean to write, stand there, under my hand, to all posterity), yet I never felt one yearning towards it, nor conceived the hope of revenge. No: I was fired by the exquisite dramatic situation; I felt my blood up, like a charger

"that sees The battle over distances."

I was in for the chase in the keen winter air, with the moon just rising over the city roofs, as rapturously as if I were a very young dog again. My able bandit, clearly viewed the instant of his assault, was a tiger-lily of the genus "tough": short, pallid, sullen, with coat-collar up and hat-brim down, and a general air of mute and violent executive ability. My business in devoting this chapter to reminiscences of my only enemy, is to relate frankly what were my contemporaneous sensations. As I wheeled about, neatly losing the chance of confronting him, and favored with a hasty survey, in the dark, of his strategic mouth and chin, the one sentiment in me, if translated into English, would have uttered itself in this wise: "After years of dulness and decorum, O soul, here is some one come to play with thee; here is Fun, sent of the immortal gods!"

This divine emissary, it was evident, had studied his ground, and awaited no activity on the part of the preoccupied victim, in a hostile and unfamiliar neighborhood. He suffered a shock when, remembering my ancient prowess in the fields of E----, I took up a gallop within an inch of his nimble heels. Silently, as he ran, he lifted his right arm. We were soon in the blackness of an empty lot across the road, among coal-sheds and broken tins, with the far lights of the thoroughfare full in our faces. Quick as kobolds summoned up from earth, air, and nowhere, four fellows, about twenty years old, swarmed at my side, as like the first in every detail as foresight and art could make them; and these darting, dodging, criss-crossing, quadrilling, and incessantly interchanging as they advanced, covering the expert one's flight, and multiplying his identity, shot separately down a labyrinth of narrow alleys, leaving me confused and checkmated, after a brief and unequal game, but overcome, nay, transported with admiration and unholy sympathy! It was the prettiest trick imaginable.

It was near Christmas; and, brought to bay, and still alone, I conjured up a vision of a roaring cellar-fire, and the snow whistling at the bulkhead, as the elect press in, with great slapping of hands and stamping of shoes, to a superfine night-long and month-long bowl of grog, MY grog, dealt out by Master Villon, with an ironic toast to the generous founder. I might have followed the trail, as I was neither breathless nor afraid, but it struck me that the sweet symmetry of the thing ought not to be spoiled; that I was serving a new use and approximating a new experience; that it would be a stroke of genius, in short, almost equal to the king pickpocket's own, to make love to the inevitable. Whereupon, bolstered against an aged fence, I laughed the laugh of Dr. Johnson, "heard, in the silence of the night, from Fleet Ditch to Temple Bar." I thought of the good greenbacks won by my siren singing in the _Hodgepodge Monthly_; I thought of my family, who would harbor in their memories the inexplicable date when the munificent church-mouse waxed stingy. I thought even of the commandment broken and of the social pact defied, gave my collapsed pocket a friendly dig, and laughed again. The police arrived, with queries, and ineffective note-books. I went home, a shorn lamb, conscious of my exalted financial standing; for had I not been robbed? All the way I walked with Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who came to mind promptly as my corporeal blessings departed. He intoned no requiem for the lost, but poured a known philosophy, in which I had now taken my degree, into my liberal ear:--

"Why shouldst thou vex thyself, that never willingly vexed anybody?"

"A man has but two concerns in life: to be honorable in what he does, and resigned under what happens to him."

"If any one misconduct himself towards thee, what is that to thee? The deed is his; and therefore let him look to it."

"Welcome everything that happens as necessary and familiar."

Marry, a glow of honest self-satisfaction is cheaply traded for a wad of current specie, and an inkling into the ways of a bold and thirsty world. Methinks I have "arrived"; I have attained a courteous composure proof against mortal hurricanes. Life is no longer a rude and trivial comedy with the Beautifully Bulldozed, who feels able to warm to his own catastrophe, and even to cry, "Pray, madam, don't mention it," to an apologizing lady in a gig, who drives over him and kills him, and does so, moreover, in the most bungling manner in the world.

1892.

REMINISCENCES OF A FINE GENTLEMAN

MY friend was of illustrious ancestry. While so many trace their life-stream to pirates or usurpers who shed their brothers' blood to possess their brothers' power, it is a distinction worth recording, that this Fine Gentleman was descended from a princely person in Switzerland who saved some sixty lives, and whose ancient portrait is loaded, like a French marshal's, with the ribbons and medals of recognition. Though of foreign origin, he did an American thing at my introduction to him: he shook hands. I dropped the white pebble of the Cretans to mark the day he arrived. It is needless to say I loved and understood him,--blond, aggressive, wilful, from the first. He had then, despite his extreme youth, the air of a fighting aristocrat, a taking swashbuckler attitude, as he stood at the open door: the look of one who has character, and a defined part to play, and whose career can never reach a common nor ignoble end. Comely in the full sense he was not; but impressive he was, despite the precocious leanness and alertness which come of too rapid growth.