Part 4

“It was my fortune this summer to witness several storms of such intensity that I became impressed with the routine of their procedure. The sea--grown dark, heavy, and oily--is first flicked and spotted, and then strangely lighted, all over, with the dash of rain and hail; the sun is made lurid, then shrouded, and then hidden by a metallic sky; the clouds grow gloomy and sullen until they are shattered by peals of thunder and riven by livid lightnings. Then the wind rushes, howls, and roars; tearing and hurtling the clouds and tumbling and lashing the waves until they leap and plunge, reel and writhe, flinging up hissing foam and whirling spray ‘shrewd with salt.’ It is undoubtedly glorious--but I like it best when it is over, leaving the torn waves heavy with foam as a reminder, by contrast, of the quieter beauties of a calmer sea.

“Even the sky, the most beautiful thing that we know, seems to multiply its beauty by the sea. One day I saw night gradually lapsing into dawn. The sea glimmered as though the stars had come down, and then flashed until, in the language of Swinburne, it blossomed rosily and flowered in the sun, floating all fiery upon the burning water. I saw many long mornings of sapphire sky and lapis-lazuli sea, and many noons when the waves glittered until their spray became diamonds. Through long afternoons the sea reflected sky and clouds in every shade of silver, blue, and green. The amber fire of the setting sun not only made the heavens splendid, but poured both direct and reflected rays upon the sea until nothing but the idea of a stupendous opal could suggest its coloring. Later, all would fade until land was lost, the sea grew deep and dark, and the only light was the foam and the reflections of the stars. With the moon, all grew new again. Rising low and large, it threw a broad, undulating pathway as golden as that of the sun was silver. Where it reached the shore its glitter extended along the surf, gleaming over the sands, and twinkling wherever spray or dew had fallen. Later yet, as the moon quietly sank, the general illumination grew dim, until obscurity covered land and sea alike, and the sea seemed to merge into infinite space.

“Then, as at no other time, one hears the sound of the sea. I spent many hours listening, endeavoring to analyze it, and to interpret its effect. Its continuity and variety are perhaps its most striking characteristics. It is so ceaseless that it suggests the everlasting. Within this perpetuity it rises and sinks, leaps and falls, gathers and dissolves; it sweeps and rolls, sways and trembles; it seems to approach and withdraw, to flow and overflow; it sounds and resounds, repeats and changes. And well it may do all this and more, considering that its source is a countless number and variety of waves, surging, breaking, and seething among themselves; rushing, plashing, lapping on the shore, chafing sand, rattling pebbles, grating shells, grinding rocks:--all of the resulting sound being constantly varied as well as augmented by breeze, wind, and storm; by the configuration and reverberating qualities of the shore; and by the varying acoustic properties of the atmosphere.

“Analysis being thus nearly baffled, I turned to analogy, and found the sound like the rumble of thunder, the crash of falling rocks, the rush of cataracts; like the quiver of green branches and the rustle of dry leaves; like the bellow and roar of animals; the clash of arms and armor. It is very much like music in its elements of monotone, chord, cadence, melody, and harmony; its relations of continuity, rhythm, repetition, and variation; in its sounds as of cymbal, tympani, bell, trumpet, viol, harp, or organ; its suggestions of symphony or chorale. It is, perhaps, most of all like the human voice, half audible in whisper or murmur; inarticulate in sigh or sob; muffled in mutter or moan; hushed in lullaby or croon; blended in a unison of song or supplication; confused in the hum and rumor, the call and shout, the clamor or tumult of great crowds.

“From such prosing of my own I turned to the record and interpretation of sea music by the poets. From them I collected an alphabetical list of characterizations, and by the time that I had accumulated about one hundred I fell so into their spirit that I, myself, produced the following--as yet unnamed--poetic fragment:

_Always attunéd, its anthem billowing, breaking is blown; Ceaseless, its cadenced complaining deepens to dirge or to drone; Ever its eloquent echo falling, again flies free, Till it gathers and grows in grandeur like heaven’s high harmony._

“I stopped there, because ‘kissing’ was the next striking epithet and that seemed rather too fanciful, although the Swinburnian spirit aroused by the composition yearned, so to speak, to go on to ‘mightily murmured the main’ and ‘sonorously sounded the sibilant sea.’

“Seriously, however, the problem of adequately recording and interpreting the aspects of the sea is as fascinating as it is difficult. The best media are, of course, sculpture for its form and substance, painting for its light and color, music for its movement and sound. Poetry and prose reflect something of all of these, poetry more suggestively, prose more accurately. The poets, however, turn so quickly from actual aspects and impressions to their mental and emotional accompaniments, that they seem devoted rather to exploiting their own poetic gifts than the richness of their subject. Their observation is usually sensitive and keen, but it is quickly checked and often distorted by the action of fancy. Accuracy of expression is frequently disturbed by spontaneous or deliberate search for the picturesque or figurative utterance, made so easy by the enormous vocabulary that the sea has impressed upon our language. Poets who are gifted with rhythmical or harmonic power habitually exceed in those directions also. Happily there are some sea poems that are true as well as beautiful, but it seems quite too bad that such masters as Shelley, Arnold, and Emerson should intellectualize, and Coleridge, Rossetti, and Poe should dream, about the sea until they make it appear merely a minister to their moods rather than the immense, unspoiled, cosmic thing it really is.”

“Man overboard?” said Professor Maturin suddenly, as he halted abruptly before me in the perambulation he had begun after rising to secure the manuscript of his poetic fragment, and had slowly continued ever since back and forth along the long rug that he calls his “beat”--“I have flowed in good earnest. Your submerged appearance indicates that you agree with me that my experience was well-nigh overwhelming.”

Accepting his helping hand, I pulled myself out of the depths of the huge leather chair into which I had sunk, and expressed my genuine appreciation by saying, along with my good-nights, “The next time we meet, I should like just such another dip.”

VII

_Christmas_

It is always possible to divine something of the state of Professor Maturin’s mind from the order or the congestion of his books and papers. When, therefore, the other day, I found him behind a perfect rampart of volumes bristling with paper-markers, I knew that he was loading with some new knowledge or other, and meditated how I might draw his fire. But he anticipated my efforts by sallying from his fortification, dishevelled but beaming, with the salvo:

“_God rest you, merry gentleman; Let nothing you dismay!--_

“What will you give for the Christmas spirit?” he continued. “I have been seeking it, seasonably, and believe that I have found it.”

I capitulated immediately, and we sat down by the fire for a parley, which he began promptly.

“The Christmas spirit appears to be inherent in human nature, in the climatic change from summer seed-time, through autumn harvest, to hearty winter relaxation and cheer over the garnered fruits of husbandry or art. In the South it began as the winter feast of Saturn, celebrated with masking and gifts. In the North it was Odin’s, with log fires and feasting. Then the early Christian fathers chose it for celebrating their Founder’s new teaching of peace and good-will.

“Gradually all of this blended into the most interesting mingling of the material and the spiritual that we have in all our manners and customs. The traditions of the shepherds and the star, the nativity, and the wise men of the East became the centre of the celebration. But the mediaeval popularity of Macrobius’s book on the Saturnalia perpetuated its carnival and games, its candles and garlands, and its giving of gifts, especially to children. The descending Teutons brought their wassail and their tree ceremonials. Germany added Saint Nicholas, Santa Claus, and the filling of stockings. France seems to have furnished the carols. England elaborated the season’s food and drink, and America contributed the turkey.

“With the growth of church and state the day became one of pomp and circumstance. Westminster Abbey was consecrated on Christmas in 1065, and William was crowned there the next Christmas. Other episcopal and royal functions followed, until more was spent on this season than in all the year beside. There were special buildings, elaborate pageants elaborately set, and feasts of five hundred dishes with sixty oxen for one course and eight-hundred-pound plum puddings. There were jousts at which three hundred spears were broken, and the presentation of as many as thirty plays. Earlier, the plays were religious; later, Shakespeare provided the court play for Christmas, 1601, and Ben Jonson for 1616. Milton’s ‘Comus’ was presented at Ludlow Castle during the Christmas season of 1634.

“The universities and the inns of court were likewise keen for plays and for ‘the boar’s head served with minstrelsy.’ The aristocracy and gentry kept open house, for sometimes as many as three hundred persons. Sir Roger de Coverley sent a string of puddings and a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish; and rich decedents left Christmas dinners and gifts to the poor. The peasantry entered heartily into seasonable mummery and games, dances and songs, so industriously thumbing the many early printed books of carols that almost none of them remain.

“Everywhere indoor leisure and the seasonable mood gave rise to all sorts and conditions of legendary lore--of spirits, of trees that flower and animals that speak on Christmas eve, and of weather wisdom, like:

_If Christmasse day on fryday be, The frost of wynter harde shal be._

“From the beginning, the spirit of the celebration had to wage war with the flesh. The fathers of the church never ceased to remonstrate that festivity endangered the solemnity of the season. There were constant failures to remember the peaceful character of the feast. The Danes fell on King Alfred while he was celebrating Christmas in 878, and William the Conqueror got into York on Christmas in 1069 by sending in spies with good-will gifts of food. The mediaeval Lords of Misrule, originally established to control festivity, became themselves uncontrolled, and had to be abolished.”

“Even though they made some very good laws,” I interrupted, “against eating two dinners in one day, and kissing without leave.”

“The Pilgrim fathers at Plymouth frowned on current excesses by working on Christmas day in 1620 and by later prohibiting its celebration. Cromwell’s Parliament sat every Christmas day from 1644 to 1656, and sermonized and legislated against the celebration as a carnal feast, ordering churches shut, shops open, and decorations down. But this was too extreme, and the people smashed the shop windows and put up more evergreens than the Lord Mayor’s men could burn; and Evelyn delighted in being arrested for going to church on Christmas in 1657. In five years all was so changed that Pepys could for once combine preaching and practice, by hearing a Christmas sermon on joyousness and having plum pudding and mince pie for dinner.

“From the beginning, too, the spirit of benevolence has had its difficulties. Watchmen left verses at doors, wanderers sang carols, and children chanted, ‘I’ve got a little pocket to put a penny in,’ until such suggestion to benevolence became a little too definite, and it was legislated against. In 1668 Pepys says tipping ‘cost me much money this Christmas already, and will do more.’ Half a century later Swift writes: ‘By the Lord Harry, I shall be done with Christmas boxes. The rogues at the coffee house have raised their tax, every one giving a crown, and I gave mine for shame; besides a great many half-crowns, to great men’s porters, etc.’

“Of other giving Swift writes: ‘Making agreeable presents ... [is] an affair as delicate as most in the course of life,’ and he never fails to caution Stella against a new danger, that of losing her money in Christmas gaming. Concerning this custom Walpole wrote on twelfth-day in 1752: ‘His Majesty, according to annual custom, offered myrrh, frankincense, and a small bit of gold; and, at night, in commemoration of the three kings or wise men, the King and royal family played at hazard ... his most sacred Majesty won three guineas, and his R. H. the duke, three thousand four hundred pounds.’

“Concerning gifts, Walpole instances the charming presents devised for a little girl of ten by the Duchess of Suffolk and Lord Chetwynd, aged seventy-six and eighty, respectively; and he prescribes the theory, ‘Pray remember not to ruin yourself in presents. A very slight gift of a guinea or two obliges as much, is more fashionable, and not a moment sooner forgotten than a magnificent one; and then you may cheaply oblige the more persons.’”

“Such being the earlier history and tradition of the festival, what should be its modern spirit?” I inquired.

“For that, too,” continued Professor Maturin, “there is no lack of leading. Charles Lamb is frankly for ‘the good old munching system ... _ingens gloria apple-pasty-orum_,’ and does not hesitate to prescribe for Christmas, 1800, ‘snipes exactly at nine, punch at ten, with argument; difference of opinion expected about eleven, perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve.’

“Thomas Love Peacock makes his Rev. Dr. Opimian say, about 1860: ‘I think much of Christmas and all its associations. I like the idea of the yule-log. I like the festoons of holly on the walls and windows; the dance under the mistletoe; the gigantic sausage; the baron of beef; the vast globe of plum pudding; the tapping of the old October; the inexhaustible bowl of punch.... I like the idea of what has gone, and I can still enjoy the reality of what remains.’

“Dr. Opimian further prescribes for the season such merry tales as his contemporary ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ provide in the distinguished career, but inglorious end, of ‘The Spectre of Tappington,’ which nightly made away with the trousers of the guest who occupied the haunted room at Christmas. All of these same hearty traditions are perpetuated by Fenimore Cooper in his description of Christmas festivity in ‘The Pioneers.’”

“Does not Washington Irving,” I asked, “have an important place in the tradition?”

“Precisely so,” continued Professor Maturin; “it was reserved for him, from his knowledge of Dutch and English customs, to make a new selection and recombination of Christmas ideals so appealing as to have set the standard ever since. His half-dozen Christmas papers dwell, with his characteristic love of the past, on the superior honesty, kindliness, and joy of the old holiday customs. No refinement of elegance can replace, he maintains, the family gatherings, the perfecting of sympathies, the realization of mutual dependence, and the increase of mutual affection, instinct in the ancient hospitality. To his own question as to the worth of Christmas observances, he gives the most characteristic answer in his philosophy--there is plenty of wisdom in the world, but we need more sound pleasure to beguile care and increase benevolence and good humor.

“It was this ethical intention to reëstablish the old tradition of kindliness that Dickens followed, with the result of again endearing the season, as Mr. Howells has said, ‘to the whole English-speaking world, with a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before ... the chief agency in universalizing the great Christmas holiday as we now have it.’

“There is no need to remind any one how the whole baker’s dozen of Dickens’s ‘Christmas Stories’ delightfully champion hard work and good cheer, sympathy and benevolence, affection and self-sacrifice, and even the softening effects of suffering and sorrow--sometimes by directly illustrating these blessings, again by picturing the misery of their opposites. His satires at pretended benevolence and commercial greed, and his championship of the common man, answer in advance all later criticisms concerning the burden and the cost of Christmas and current complaints over popular ingratitude.

“‘I have great faith in the poor,’ Dickens once wrote. ‘To the best of my ability I always endeavour to present them in a favourable light to the rich; and I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost improvement, will admit.’

“Thackeray called Dickens’s ‘Christmas Stories’ a national benefit, and to any man or woman who reads them a personal kindness; and Thackeray, too, served the season with Christmas pieces of sympathy, humor, and pantomime, and with his famous onslaught on pretentious misanthropy. You recall how the _Times_ slated one of his Christmas stories as worthless on the very day that the publishers asked for a second edition; and how Thackeray, in the preface to the second edition,--‘An Essay on Thunder and Small Beer,’--made such delightful fun of the review’s futility, its absurd superciliousness, its inflated language, and its false figures of speech, that snarling criticism learned at least a temporary lesson.

“Thackeray waged his war differently from Dickens, but, on the whole, I have found nothing more compactly adequate on the Christmas spirit than Thackeray’s

_I wish you health, and love, and mirth, As fits the solemn Christmas-tide,_

unless it be the conclusion to old Nicholas Breton’s ‘Fantasticks,’ written in 1626: ‘In brief I thus conclude it: I hold it a memory of Heaven’s love and the world’s peace, the mirth of the honest and the meeting of the friendly. Farewell.’”

VIII

_The Sovran Herb_

“You are come most opportunely,” said Professor Maturin, as I was shown into his study. “Just in time for coffee and a cigar and some good talk with my friend the Vicar of All Souls.” And he presented me to a gentleman whose clerical dress graced a more than ordinarily handsome figure. His chair and Professor Maturin’s being on opposite sides of the fireplace, I drew mine between them, and noted, during the pouring of the coffee, the fine seriousness and serenity of the clergyman’s face. He made no remark, however, until he said, “None, I thank you,” slightly raising his hand when I proffered the cigars that Professor Maturin had passed. But, after I had made my selection and had returned the box to Professor Maturin, the Vicar reconsidered and joined us.

“Smoking rests me greatly when I am tired,” he continued, after we had lighted, “but I am thinking of giving it up. I am moved to do so by such statements as this from my afternoon paper”--and extracting a clipping from his pocket and adjusting his eye-glasses, he read: “Medical opinion and statistics unite to prove that smoking irritates the respiratory system, decreases lung capacity, prevents the purification of the blood, depresses the nerve centres, checks heart action, impairs digestion, retards growth, reduces weight, strength, and endurance; restricts the therapeutic effects of medicines, delays the healing of wounds, and impairs, if it does not destroy, mental life--all of which effects, inevitable although perhaps hidden for years, would make tobacco one of the gravest dangers of the century even if it did not harm the eyes, excite thirst, and induce intemperance.”

“If we believed that,” said Professor Maturin, getting out of his chair, “we should not only abandon tobacco instantly, but organize a crusade for its total prohibition. But my medical friends inform me that the statistics are still quite too scanty to generalize from, and that there have been no scientific experiments, except a few which have apparently proved that smoking aids digestion.

“As for personal opinion, it has long been equally violent on both sides of the question. Here,” he continued, opening a volume of pamphlets which he had drawn from one of his bookcases, “is a three-century-old illustration,” and he read: “There cannot be a more base, and yet hurtful corruption in a country than this barbarous and beastly habit borrowed from wild Indians, a habit unnatural, urgent, expensive, unclean--loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs--and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

“That,” resumed Professor Maturin, “is the personal opinion of James the First of England in the ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco,’ which he followed up by imposing a duty of six shillings eightpence a pound in addition to the modest tuppence previously demanded.

“But here also is a counterblast to King James’s, by one of the most learned physicians of his time, William Barclay. He proclaims tobacco to be a heavenly panacea of wondrous curative power, the fuel of life divinely sent to a cold, phlegmatic land. He characterizes all other opinions as ‘raving lies, forged by scurvy, lewd, unlearned leeches.’” As Professor Maturin put the book up and returned to his chair he concluded: “I cannot feel that personal opinion on the subject to-day has any sounder basis.”

“Possibly not,” replied the Vicar, after a short pause,--“possibly not. But can we not conclude something from the standing of the witnesses? Is there not some significance in the cordial affiliation between the weed and alcohol? How shall we answer Horace Greeley’s offer to give two white blackbirds for one blackguard who did not use tobacco?”

“The collocation of Bacchus and tobacco is, of course, historic,” responded Professor Maturin, “but, on the other hand, as a substitute for alcohol, tobacco is certainly on the side of temperance. If, moreover, it is to be judged by the company it has kept, we must reckon with the practical advocacy of many good men and true from Milton to Emerson, as well as of all the smoking roysterers from Ben Jonson to Burns.”

“I must admit that I can recall only Sir Isaac Newton and Horace Walpole, Dr. Holmes and Mr. Swinburne, in specific opposition,” said the Vicar, “although I venture to think that the Greeks would have opposed it.”

“And the Romans have approved it,” rejoined Professor Maturin. “There is an immense mass of literature on both sides. I agree neither with King James nor with his counterblasters. But I do believe with Cowper that smoking quickens thought, with Lowell that it mellows conversation, with Dr. Johnson that it induces tranquillity, and with Molière that it prompts benevolence.”

“But Dr. Holmes held that it muddled thought,” retorted the Vicar, “and it certainly silenced two eloquent talkers on that occasion when Carlyle and Emerson smoked together a whole evening with never a word. I fear that only too often it relaxes divine discontent into ill-timed resignation, turns thought to reverie, and lulls the stir of action into dreams.”