Chapter 10

But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look over these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not agree with most of these things that were said amongst us. If he agrees with most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does not accept, or an expression or illustration a little too vivacious. I don't know that I shall report any more conversations on these topics; but I do insist on the right to express a civil opinion on this class of subjects without giving offence, just when and where I please,--unless, as in the lecture-room, there is an implied contract to keep clear of doubtful matters. You did n't think a man could sit at a breakfast-table doing nothing but making puns every morning for a year or two, and never give a thought to the two thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into another state during every hour that he sits talking and laughing. Of course, the one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going to become of them and of him. And the plain truth is, that a good many people are saying one thing about it and believing another.

--How do I know that? Why, I have known and loved to talk with good people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can remember. Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. It is in their hearts that the “sentimental” religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its source. The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the other,--these are the “sentiments” that have kept our soulless systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and withered in their delusion.

I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose creed many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond all praise. When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the honor of figuring,--and, far worse than these, the reluctant, pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,--and then recall the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how thousands of women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but their holy duties,--while men are torturing and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the “Prometheus,” to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!

--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that one on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our moments of trial. But we are false to our new conditions of life, if we do not resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political freedom, in the face of any and all supposed monopolies. Certain men will, of course, say two things, if we do not take their views: first, that we don't know anything about these matters; and, secondly, that we are not so good as they are. They have a polarized phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that. To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something; and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left to make a bonfire for all the heretics.

As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of managing it, if you like. I don't believe it will hurt you or anybody. Besides, I had a great deal rather finish our talk with pleasant images and gentle words than with sharp sayings, which will only afford a text, if anybody repeats them, for endless relays of attacks from Messrs. Ananias, Shimei, and Rabshakeh.

[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the hands of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for the rights of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women, to whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and tender anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]

A MOTHER'S SECRET.

How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed In my slight verse such holy things are named --Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy, Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy! Ave, Maria! Pardon, if I wrong Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!

The choral host had closed the angel's strain Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain; And now the shepherds, hastening on their way, Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay. They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er, They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn, Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn; And some remembered how the holy scribe, Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe, Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won. So fared they on to seek the promised sign That marked the anointed heir of David's line.

At last, by forms of earthly semblance led, They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed. No pomp was there, no glory shone around On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground; One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed, In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!

The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale; Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed; Told how the shining multitude proclaimed “Joy, joy to earth! Behold the hallowed morn! In David's city Christ the Lord is born! 'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high, 'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!”

They spoke with hurried words and accents wild; Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child. No trembling word the mother's joy revealed, One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed; Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart, But kept their words to ponder in her heart.

Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall, Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all. The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill, The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun, Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son. No voice had reached the Galilean vale Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale; In the meek, studious child they only saw The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.

So grew the boy; and now the feast was near, When at the holy place the tribes appear. Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen Beyond the hills that girt the village-green, Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands, Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands, A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast, Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.

Then Joseph spake: “Thy boy hath largely grown; Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown; Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest Goes he not with us to the holy feast?”

And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white; Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light. The thread was twined; its parting meshes through From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew, Till the full web was wound upon the beam, Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!

They reach the holy place, fulfil the days To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise. At last they turn, and far Moriah's height Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight. All day the dusky caravan has flowed In devious trails along the winding road, (For many a step their homeward path attends, And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.) Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy; Hush! hush!--that whisper,-“Where is Mary's boy?”

O weary hour! O aching days that passed Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last: The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword, The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord, The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath, The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!

Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light, Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night, Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth, Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.

At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more The Temple's porches, searched in vain before; They found him seated with the ancient men, The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen, Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near; Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear, Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.

And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long, Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong, “What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done? Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!” Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone, Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown; Then turned with them and left the holy hill, To all their mild commands obedient still.

The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men, And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again; The maids retold it at the fountain's side; The youthful shepherds doubted or denied; It passed around among the listening friends, With all that fancy adds and fiction fends, Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.

But Mary, faithful to its lightest word, Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard, Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil, And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

VI

You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back. Bloated some, I expect.

This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.

Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and particularly unpleasant world. This is so much a matter of course, that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color. He took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting forward over the chapped sideboard. The image it returned to him had the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled. The scenery of a long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,---Earth saying to the mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, “You have scarred my bosom, but you are forgiven”; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting posture.

And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless and position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.

They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance. On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground archives. He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the direction in which his downward path was tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far as appearances went. But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out in the cold, take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by its little bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you find it is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the breast where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a bad way.--The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-pictorial.

Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch, cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time. I'll come up 'n' show you how to mix it. Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man exhibitin' down in Hanover Street?

Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place where the fat man was exhibitin'. Tried to get in at half-price, but the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten year old.

It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton. Whiskey--that's what did it,--real Burbon's the stuff. Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice; take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls wear on the sides of their foreheads.

But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young fellow had just drawn.

He took up his hat and went out.

I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.--I don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for he looks as if his mind were made up to something.

I followed him at a reasonable distance. He walked doggedly along, looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street, and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office. Luckily, the doctor was there and overhauled him on the spot. There was nothing the matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a sound one. He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.

This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of well-bred and ill-bred people.

I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity. Every look, movement, tone, expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is habitually excluded from conversational intercourse. This is the reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than others.

--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin Tutor's daughter.

I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the quality.

Who are the “quality,”--said the Model, etc., in a community like ours?

I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said. --Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define. The great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-presidents are nothing to them. How well we know this, and how seldom it finds a distinct expression! Now I tell you truly, I believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has crystallized according to its own true laws. But the essence of equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.

Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality, there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this of social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but superior as a body to all else.

Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent this subdivision of society into classes from taking place everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in old European monarchies. Only there position is more absolutely hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.

--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and who are the electors?--said the Model.

Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal vote. The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well what is presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred tone, an angular movement, everything that betrays a coarse fibre and cheap training. As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood doubtless comes,--quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great people are so fond of tracing their descent through a line of small artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held “base” fluid enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!

Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.

Almost. And with good reason. For though there are numerous exceptions, rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most agreeable companions. The influence of a fine house, graceful furniture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and, above all, a position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it, gives a harmony and refinement to the character and manners which we feel, if we cannot explain their charm. Yet we can get at the reason of it by thinking a little.

All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial influences. In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil and incased in soft gloves. The whole nature becomes subdued into suavity. I confess I like the quality ladies better than the common kind even of literary ones. They have n't read the last book, perhaps, but they attend better to you when you are talking to them. If they are never learned, they make up for it in tact and elegance. Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less self-assertion in diamonds than in dogmas. I don't know where you will find a sweeter portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before her lord. I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of Sisera. The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. The highest fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it is a good word) as a dahlia. As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is much more agreeable than that where it is spoken. Don't you see why? Attention and deference don't require you to make fine speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning all the compliments paid you. This is one reason.

--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the Model.

[My reflection. Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married. Served you right.] My remark. Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that, which they are not. But a woman who does not carry about with her wherever she goes a halo of good feeling and desire to make everybody contented,--an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman; she may do well enough to hold discussions with.

--I don't think the Model exactly liked this. She said,--a little spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the habit of getting much.

Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco. It is notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.

--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my cigars and burnt 'em all up.