Chapter 24

Looking at the matter from the point of theory only, we should say that a physician could not be otherwise than melancholy. A merry doctor! Why, one might as well talk of a laughing death's-head,--the cachinnation of a monk's _memento mori_. This life of ours is sorrowful enough at its best estate; the brightest phase of it is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast" of the future or the past. But it is the special vocation of the doctor to look only upon the shadow; to turn away from the house of feasting and go down to that of mourning; to breathe day after day the atmosphere of wretchedness; to grow familiar with suffering; to look upon humanity disrobed of its pride and glory, robbed of all its fictitious ornaments, --weak, helpless, naked,--and undergoing the last fearful metempsychosis from its erect and godlike image, the living temple of an enshrined divinity, to the loathsome clod and the inanimate dust. Of what ghastly secrets of moral and physical disease is he the depositary! There is woe before him and behind him; he is hand and glove with misery by prescription,--the ex officio gauger of the ills that flesh is heir to. He has no home, unless it be at the bedside of the querulous, the splenetic, the sick, and the dying. He sits down to carve his turkey, and is summoned off to a post-mortem examination of another sort. All the diseases which Milton's imagination embodied in the lazar-house dog his footsteps and pluck at his doorbell. Hurrying from one place to another at their beck, he knows nothing of the quiet comfort of the "sleek-headed men who sleep o' nights." His wife, if he has one, has an undoubted right to advertise him as a deserter of "bed and board." His ideas of beauty, the imaginations of his brain, and the affections of his heart are regulated and modified by the irrepressible associations of his luckless profession. Woman as well as man is to him of the earth, earthy. He sees incipient disease where the uninitiated see only delicacy. A smile reminds him of his dental operations; a blushing cheek of his hectic patients; pensive melancholy is dyspepsia; sentimentalism, nervousness. Tell him of lovelorn hearts, of the "worm I' the bud," of the mental impalement upon Cupid's arrow, like that of a giaour upon the spear of a janizary, and he can only think of lack of exercise, of tightlacing, and slippers in winter. Sheridan seems to have understood all this, if we may judge from the lament of his Doctor, in St. Patrick's Day, over his deceased helpmate. "Poor dear Dolly," says he. "I shall never see her like again; such an arm for a bandage! veins that seemed to invite the lancet! Then her skin,--smooth and white as a gallipot; her mouth as round and not larger than that of a penny vial; and her teeth,--none of your sturdy fixtures,--ache as they would, it was only a small pull, and out they came. I believe I have drawn half a score of her dear pearls. (Weeps.) But what avails her beauty? She has gone, and left no little babe to hang like a label on papa's neck!"

So much for speculation and theory. In practice it is not so bad after all. The grave-digger in Hamlet has his jokes and grim jests. We have known many a jovial sexton; and we have heard clergymen laugh heartily at small provocation close on the heel of a cool calculation that the great majority of their fellow-creatures were certain of going straight to perdition. Why, then, should not even the doctor have his fun? Nay, is it not his duty to be merry, by main force if necessary? Solomon, who, from his great knowledge of herbs, must have been no mean practitioner for his day, tells us that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine;" and universal experience has confirmed the truth of his maxim. Hence it is, doubtless, that we have so many anecdotes of facetious doctors, distributing their pills and jokes together, shaking at the same time the contents of their vials and the sides of their patients. It is merely professional, a trick of the practice, unquestionably, in most cases; but sometimes it is a "natural gift," like that of the "bonesetters," and "scrofula strokers," and "cancer curers," who carry on a sort of guerilla war with human maladies. Such we know to be the case with Dr. Holmes. He was born for the "laughter cure," as certainly as Priessnitz was for the "water cure," and has been quite as successful in his way, while his prescriptions are infinitely more agreeable.

The volume now before us gives, in addition to the poems and lyrics contained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of the later productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by the brilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former were noteworthy. His longest and most elaborate poem, _Urania_, is perhaps the best specimen of his powers. Its general tone is playful and humorous; but there are passages of great tenderness and pathos. Witness the following, from a description of the city churchgoers. The whole compass of our literature has few passages to equal its melody and beauty.

"Down the chill street, which winds in gloomiest shade, What marks betray yon solitary maid? The cheek's red rose, that speaks of balmier air, The Celtic blackness of her braided hair; The gilded missal in her kerchief tied; Poor Nora, exile from Killarney's side! Sister in toil, though born of colder skies, That left their azure in her downcast eyes, See pallid Margaret, Labor's patient child, Scarce weaned from home, a nursling of the wild, Where white Katahdin o'er the horizon shines, And broad Penobscot dashes through the pines; Still, as she hastes, her careful fingers hold The unfailing hymn-book in its cambric fold: Six days at Drudgery's heavy wheel she stands, The seventh sweet morning folds her weary hands. Yes, child of suffering, thou mayst well be sure He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor."

This is but one of many passages, showing that the author is capable of moving the heart as well as of tickling the fancy. There is no straining for effect; simple, natural thoughts are expressed in simple and perfectly transparent language.

_Terpsichore_, read at an annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, sparkles throughout with keen wit, quaint conceits, and satire so good-natured that the subjects of it can enjoy it as heartily as their neighbors. Witness this thrust at our German-English writers:--

"Essays so dark, Champollion might despair To guess what mummy of a thought was there, Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase, Looks like a zebra in a parson's chaise."

Or this at our transcendental friends:--

"Deluded infants! will they never know Some doubts must darken o'er the world below Though all the Platos of the nursery trail Their clouds of glory at the go-cart's tail?"

The lines _On Lending a Punch-Bowl_ are highly characteristic. Nobody but Holmes could have conjured up so many rare fancies in connection with such a matter. Hear him:--

"This ancient silver bowl of mine, it tells of good old times, Of joyous days, and jolly nights, and merry Christmas chimes; They were a free and jovial race, but honest, brave, and true, That dipped their ladle in the punch when this old bowl was new.

"A Spanish galleon brought the bar; so runs the ancient tale; 'T was hammered by an Antwerp smith, whose arm was like a flail; And now and then between the strokes, for fear his strength should fail, He wiped his brow, and quaffed a cup of good old Flemish ale.

"'T was purchased by an English squire to please his loving dame, Who saw the cherubs, and conceived a longing for the same; And oft as on the ancient stock another twig was found, 'T was filled with candle spiced and hot and handed smoking round.

"But, changing hands, it reached at length a Puritan divine, Who used to follow Timothy, and take a little wine, But hated punch and prelacy; and so it was, perhaps, He went to Leyden, where he found conventicles and schnaps.

"And then, of course, you know what's next,--it left the Dutchman's shore With those that in the Mayflower came,--a hundred souls and more,-- Along with all the furniture, to fill their new abodes,-- To judge by what is still on hand, at least a hundred loads.

"'T was on a dreary winter's eve, the night was closing dim, When brave Miles Standish took the bowl, and filled it to the brim; The little Captain stood and stirred the posset with his sword, And all his sturdy men-at-arms were ranged about the board.

"He poured the fiery Hollands in,--the man that never feared,-- He took a long and solemn draught, and wiped his yellow beard; And one by one the musketeers--the men that fought and prayed-- All drank as 't were their mother's milk, and not a man afraid.

"That night, affrighted from his nest, the screaming eagle flew, He heard the Pequot's ringing whoop, the soldier's wild halloo; And there the sachem learned the rule he taught to kith and kin, 'Run from the white man when you find he smells of Hollands gin!'"

In his _Nux Postcoenatica_ he gives us his reflections on being invited to a dinner-party, where he was expected to "set the table in a roar" by reading funny verses. He submits it to the judgment and common sense of the importunate bearer of the invitation, that this dinner-going, ballad- making, mirth-provoking habit is not likely to benefit his reputation as a medical professor.

"Besides, my prospects. Don't you know that people won't employ A man that wrongs his manliness by laughing like a boy, And suspect the azure blossom that unfolds upon a shoot, As if Wisdom's oldpotato could not flourish at its root?

"It's a very fine reflection, when you're etching out a smile On a copperplate of faces that would stretch into a mile. That, what with sneers from enemies and cheapening shrugs from friends, It will cost you all the earnings that a month of labor lends."

There are, as might be expected, some commonplace pieces in the volume,-- a few failures in the line of humor. The _Spectre Pig_, the _Dorchester Giant_, the _Height of the Ridiculous_, and one or two others might be omitted in the next edition without detriment. They would do well enough for an amateur humorist, but are scarcely worthy of one who stands at the head of the profession.

It was said of James Smith, of the Rejected Addresses, that "if he had not been a witty man, he would have been a great man." Hood's humor and drollery kept in the background the pathos and beauty of his sober productions; and Dr. Holmes, we suspect, might have ranked higher among a large class of readers than he now does had he never written his _Ballad of the Oysterman_, his _Comet_, and his _September Gale_. Such lyrics as _La Grisette_, the _Puritan's Vision_, and that unique compound of humor and pathos, _The Last Leaf_; show that he possesses the power of touching the deeper chords of the heart and of calling forth tears as well as smiles. Who does not feel the power of this simple picture of the old man in the last-mentioned poem?

"But now he walks the streets, And he looks at all he meets Sad and wan, And he shakes his feeble head, That it seems as if he said, 'They are gone.'

"The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb."

Dr. Holmes has been likened to Thomas Hood; but there is little in common between them save the power of combining fancy and sentiment with grotesque drollery and humor. Hood, under all his whims and oddities, conceals the vehement intensity of a reformer. The iron of the world's wrongs had entered into his soul; there is an undertone of sorrow in his lyrics; his sarcasm, directed against oppression and bigotry, at times betrays the earnestness of one whose own withers have been wrung. Holmes writes simply for the amusement of himself and his readers; he deals only with the vanity, the foibles, and the minor faults of mankind, good naturedly and almost sympathizingly suggesting excuses for the folly which he tosses about on the horns of his ridicule. In this respect he differs widely from his fellow-townsman, Russell Lowell, whose keen wit and scathing sarcasm, in the famous Biglow Papers, and the notes of Parson Wilbur, strike at the great evils of society and deal with the rank offences of church and state. Hosea Biglow, in his way, is as earnest a preacher as Habakkuk Mucklewrath or Obadiah Bind-their-kings- in-chains-and-their-nobles-in-fetters-of-iron. His verse smacks of the old Puritan flavor. Holmes has a gentler mission. His careless, genial humor reminds us of James Smith in his _Rejected Addresses_ and of Horace in _London_. Long may he live to make broader the face of our care- ridden generation, and to realize for himself the truth of the wise man's declaration that a "merry heart is a continual feast."

FAME AND GLORY.

Notice of an Address before the Literary Society of Amherst College, by Charles Sumner.

THE learned and eloquent author of the pamphlet lying before us with the above title belongs to a class, happily on the increase in our country, who venture to do homage to unpopular truths in defiance of the social and political tyranny of opinion which has made so many of our statesmen, orators, and divines the mere playthings and shuttlecocks of popular impulses for evil far oftener than for good. His first production, the _True Grandeur of Nations_, written for the anniversary of American Independence, was not more remarkable for its evidences of a highly cultivated taste and wide historical research than for its inculcation of a high morality,--the demand for practical Christianity in nations as well as individuals. It burned no incense under the nostrils of an already inflated and vain people. It gratified them by no rhetorical falsehoods about "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It did not apostrophize military heroes, nor strut "red wat shod" over the plains of battle, nor call up, like another Ezekiel, from the valley of vision the dry bones thereof. It uttered none of the precious scoundrel cant, so much in vogue after the annexation of Texas was determined upon, about the destiny of the United States to enter in and possess the lands of all whose destiny it is to live next us, and to plant everywhere the "peculiar institutions" of a peculiarly Christian and chosen people, the landstealing propensity of whose progressive republicanism is declared to be in accordance with the will and by the grace of God, and who, like the Scotch freebooter,--

"Pattering an Ave Mary When he rode on a border forray,"--

while trampling on the rights of a sister republic, and re-creating slavery where that republic had abolished it, talk piously of "the designs of Providence" and the Anglo-Saxon instrumentalities thereof in "extending the area of freedom." On the contrary, the author portrayed the evils of war and proved its incompatibility with Christianity,-- contrasting with its ghastly triumphs the mild victories of peace and love. Our true mission, he taught, was not to act over in the New World the barbarous game which has desolated the Old; but to offer to the nations of the earth, warring and discordant, oppressed and oppressing, the beautiful example of a free and happy people studying the things which make for peace,--Democracy and Christianity walking hand in hand, blessing and being blessed.

His next public effort, an Address before the Literary Society of his Alma Mater, was in the same vein. He improved the occasion of the recent death of four distinguished members of that fraternity to delineate his beautiful ideal of the jurist, the scholar, the artist, and the philanthropist, aided by the models furnished by the lives of such men as Pickering, Story, Allston, and Channing. Here, also, he makes greatness to consist of goodness: war and slavery and all their offspring of evil are surveyed in the light of the morality of the New Testament. He looks hopefully forward to the coming of that day when the sword shall devour no longer, when labor shall grind no longer in the prison-house, and the peace and freedom of a realized and acted-out Christianity shall overspread the earth, and the golden age predicted by the seers and poets alike of Paganism and Christianity shall become a reality.

The Address now before us, with the same general object in view, is more direct and practical. We can scarcely conceive of a discourse better adapted to prepare the young American, just issuing from his collegiate retirement, for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. It treats the desire of fame and honor as one native to the human heart, felt to a certain extent by all as a part of our common being,--a motive, although by no means the most exalted, of human conduct; and the lesson it would inculcate is, that no true and permanent fame can be founded except in labors which promote the happiness of mankind. To use the language of Dr. South, "God is the fountain of honor; the conduit by which He conveys it to the sons of men are virtuous and generous practices." The author presents the beautiful examples of St. Pierre, Milton, Howard, and Clarkson,--men whose fame rests on the firm foundation of goodness,--for the study and imitation of the young candidate for that true glory which belongs to those who live, not for themselves, but for their race. "Neither present fame, nor war, nor power, nor wealth, nor knowledge alone shall secure an entrance to the true and noble Valhalla. There shall be gathered only those who have toiled each in his vocation for the welfare of others." "Justice and benevolence are higher than knowledge and power It is by His goodness that God is most truly known; so also is the great man. When Moses said to the Lord, Show me Thy glory, the Lord said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee."

We copy the closing paragraph of the Address, the inspiring sentiment of which will find a response in all generous and hopeful hearts:--

"Let us reverse the very poles of the worship of past ages. Men have thus far bowed down before stocks, stones, insects, crocodiles, golden calves,--graven images, often of cunning workmanship, wrought with Phidian skill, of ivory, of ebony, of marble, but all false gods. Let them worship in future the true God, our Father, as He is in heaven and in the beneficent labors of His children on earth. Then farewell to the siren song of a worldly ambition! Farewell to the vain desire of mere literary success or oratorical display! Farewell to the distempered longings for office! Farewell to the dismal, blood-red phantom of martial renown! Fame and glory may then continue, as in times past, the reflection of public opinion; but of an opinion sure and steadfast, without change or fickleness, enlightened by those two sons of Christian truth,--love to God and love to man. From the serene illumination of these duties all the forms of selfishness shall retreat like evil spirits at the dawn of day. Then shall the happiness of the poor and lowly and the education of the ignorant have uncounted friends. The cause of those who are in prison shall find fresh voices; the majesty of peace other vindicators; the sufferings of the slave new and gushing floods of sympathy. Then, at last, shall the brotherhood of man stand confessed; ever filling the souls of all with a more generous life; ever prompting to deeds of beneficence; conquering the heathen prejudices of country, color, and race; guiding the judgment of the historian; animating the verse of the poet and the eloquence of the orator; ennobling human thought and conduct; and inspiring those good works by which alone we may attain to the heights of true glory. Good works! Such even now is the heavenly ladder on which angels are ascending and descending, while weary humanity, on pillows of storfe, slumbers heavily at its feet."

We know how easy it is to sneer at such anticipations of a better future as baseless and visionary. The shrewd but narrow-eyed man of the world laughs at the suggestion that there car: be any stronger motive than selfishness, any higher morality than that of the broker's board. The man who relies for salvation from the consequences of an evil and selfish life upon the verbal orthodoxy of a creed presents the depravity and weakness of human nature as insuperable obstacles in the way of the general amelioration of the condition of a world lying in wickedness. He counts it heretical and dangerous to act upon the supposition that the same human nature which, in his own case and that of his associates, can confront all perils, overcome all obstacles, and outstrip the whirlwind in the pursuit of gain,--which makes the strong elements its servants, taming and subjugating the very lightnings of heaven to work out its own purposes of self-aggrandizement,--must necessarily, and by an ordination of Providence, become weak as water, when engaged in works of love and goodwill, looking for the coming of a better day for humanity, with faith in the promises of the Gospel, and relying upon Him, who, in calling man to the great task-field of duty, has not mocked him with the mournful necessity of laboring in vain. We have been pained more than words can express to see young, generous hearts, yearning with strong desires to consecrate themselves to the cause of their fellow-men, checked and chilled by the ridicule of worldly-wise conservatism, and the solemn rebukes of practical infidelity in the guise of a piety which professes to love the unseen Father, while disregarding the claims of His visible children. Visionary! Were not the good St. Pierre, and Fenelon, and Howard, and Clarkson visionaries also?

What was John Woolman, to the wise and prudent of his day, but an amiable enthusiast? What, to those of our own, is such an angel of mercy as Dorothea Dix? Who will not, in view of the labors of such philanthropists, adopt the language of Jonathan Edwards: "If these things be enthusiasms and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be evermore possessed with this happy distemper"?

It must, however, be confessed that there is a cant of philanthropy too general and abstract for any practical purpose,--a morbid sentimentalism,--which contents itself with whining over real or imaginary present evil, and predicting a better state somewhere in the future, but really doing nothing to remove the one or hasten the coming of the other. To its view the present condition of things is all wrong; no green hillock or twig rises over the waste deluge; the heaven above is utterly dark and starless: yet, somehow, out of this darkness which may be felt, the light is to burst forth miraculously; wrong, sin, pain, and sorrow are to be banished from the renovated world, and earth become a vast epicurean garden or Mahometan heaven.

"The land, unploughed, shall yield her crop; Pure honey from the oak shall drop; The fountain shall run milk; The thistle shall the lily bear; And every bramble roses wear, And every worm make silk."

(Ben Jenson's Golden Age Restored.)