EPIGRAM.
On Easter Sunday, Lucy spoke, And said, "A saint you might provoke, Dear Sam, each day, since Monday last; But now I see your rage is past." Said Sam, "What Christian could be meek! You know, my love, 'twas Passion Week; And so, you see, the rage I've spent Was not my own—'twas only Lent." S. Lover.
INTRODUCTION TO THE BIOGRAPHY OF MY AUNT JEMIMA,
THE POLITICAL ECONOMIST.
BY FRIDOLIN.
PRELIMINARY DISQUISITION ON HUMAN GREATNESS,
TOUCHING UPON THE TRUE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MATTER.
"Some men are born great,
some acquire greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon them."
Thus read my aunt Jemima, and thus subsequently read I, in the days of our respective and respectable minorities; but with this difference—uncertain whether Greatness had not already clandestinely made its avatar into me at my birth, or whether it was destined hereafter to yield coyly to my wooing, or would force me in future years to cry in vain humility, "Nolo magnificari." I always felt confident of eminence; whereas my aunt Jemima often feelingly reverted to the misery of her young maidenly thoughts, when brooding over the certainty that she could never, under any circumstances, become a "great man."
"Great women" were unknown in her early days. There were no such things; save and except such as might be seen at St. Bartholomew's fair at inexpensive cost,—giantesses, who lowered themselves to gain a living by their height. But my aunt Jemima valued not such feminine greatness as theirs. Her aspiring spirit looked not "to measures, but to men." Our notions change!
It is very melancholy, and rather inconvenient, to drag through the last and heaviest stage of life a martyr to a marvel.
Horace, who forbids all wise men to wonder, himself exhibited a thriftless want of economy in the expenditure of his own wonder when he marvelled, in excellent metre, that any man should eat garlic who had not murdered his father; and also, that any mortal should have dared to venture on the sea before the discovery of Kyan's anti-dry-rot patent.
Nor can I much sympathise in the great marvel of that renowned French statesman, of esculent memory, who professed himself unable to discover any principle in nature, or in philosophy, that could explain how a certain Duke of Thuringia, passing through Strasburg on a diplomatic mission, should not have stopped to dine, en hâte, de foie gras. As for the "three, yea four," curious problems of olden time, which consumed the wise king with their inexplicability, they are as clear to modern apprehensions as plate-glass: nay, as my aunt Jemima used to observe, in the days when glory and greatness had come upon her,—"Thanks be praised!" (My aunt was a religious woman, and guarded herself from profane expressions.)—"Thanks be praised! owing to the enlightenment of the age in which we live, even in those seven wonders of the world there is nothing so very wonderful now." There can be no objection on my part to allow that eclipses were pretty marvellous transactions as long as they occurred in consequence of a bilious dragon needing a pill, and bolting the sun to correct digestion; but ever since dragons have adopted a different treatment, and abandoned the solar bolus, this phenomenon has subsided into one of common-place pretension. The age of wonders, like the New Marriage-act, has passed.
But one wonder—single, solitary, omnipotent—oppresses me. It is, that mankind, from ignorance of the meaning of true greatness, lay themselves open to perpetual insult,—nay, court it. Do we not lie down patiently as lambs, and bear impertinent biographies to be thrust before our eyes of persons who are facetiously termed great? Great! implying, in a paltry and indifferently disguised innuendo, that you, the reader, are of course small,—stunted, as it were, in intellectual growth,—an under-shrub,—a dwarf specimen. Without being in any way consulted in a matter, or examined, or probed, to see what stuff may be in you, it is taken for granted that the world has already made its odious comparisons between your unobtrusive self and its Great Man; and that, with the promptness of a police magistrate, it has summarily decided against you; that you, without knowing it, have been weighed in the scales and found wanting; have flown upwards as a feather, have kicked the beam, have moved lighter than a balloon textured of gossamer and inflated with rarefied essence of hydrogen: a very pretty and gratifying assumption!
Our primitive lessons in emulation generally consist, in great part, in a series of these insults.
The chubby little fellow, bribed to undergo the advantages of scholarship by tardy permission to harass his young nether limbs with trousers, usually of nankeen, finds himself immediately exhorted to strive, in order that in time he may become a Great man. He images the vague outline of a human mammoth, and sits down with scanty hope of modelling himself accordingly. In the pride and pomp of baby ambition he yearns to rival in stature and girth the sons of Amalek. He is small, and perfectly conscious that he is so; but frets to exchange his little pulpy fingers for a sinewy fist that can shake a weaver's beam: he meditates upon great men as pumpkins, compared with which he is but a gooseberry. He is not taught, by way of softening the injury done him by an unnecessary contrast, that the one may be full of sweetness as the other of insipidity.
He waxes in years and amplitude: still hears he of that obtrusive department in natural history, the Great men. He thinks not of them as before; he no longer deems their greatness to consist in the mere admeasurement of their cubic contents, as in the days of his young innocence, when an extensive pudding would, in his ceremonial, have taken precedence of name and fame. He now understands, and, by understanding, suffers the more acutely under the impertinence. If acts of valour and command, or of senatorial display,—if a tyranny over empires, or mighty influence over the minds and feelings of successive generations,—if literary renown or public benefaction constitute greatness, he is himself of most diminutive dimensions. He knows it. He never for a moment dreamed of denying it. He has enjoyed no scope for being otherwise. He is perfectly aware of the fact, and would at once have admitted it. He needs not to have it perpetually pushed into his face, and thrust before his eyes to glare at him. The pauper feels that he is not one of the wealthy ones of the earth, without being reminded at every instant of the incurious circumstance by some rich bullionist shaking his pockets that the wretch may hear the voice of the gold jingling. His memory requires not to be so jogged on the subject. He recognises the truth of his meagre estate, and derives not a whit of pleasure from such external corroboration. It is an insult; and any raciness or merit of originality in it is altogether lost upon him. The wit is purely thrown away.
How fares the boy when, like his primal sire, "he stands erect a man?" and in what spirit does he study the philosophy of "greatness?" He may bethink him of the false fruiterer's melon, how it lay on the stall, its sunny side laughing and coquetting with the eye of the wayfarer,—its rottenness and unsavoury portion in retirement and unseen below. He discovers that the "great" are gigantic in one line, but that "the line upon line" is not their predicate; in some matters they may perchance be far smaller than their neighbours. He is no longer the boy without experience of others, or the child who interprets literally; he measures not the monsters by his own standard; he endeavours not to poise them by his own weight,—with his own girth to buckle their circumference: his acquaintance serve his turn; society establishes and confirms his experience, that an average sprinkling of inherent "greatness" may be detected in all, though the world hath not cared to trumpet it.
It becomes of difficult endurance to see our intimates thrust, as it were, on one side,—morally cast into the mire,—their qualities trampled as by heels. It mars our equability to find our friends in intellectual, philosophical, or worldly utility insinuated as no better than they should be,—to hear them classed as of the herd, essentially and merely gregarious,—vague portions of an unmeritorious whole,—negative existences, positive only in combination,—cyphers without value, that multiply but by relative position. Whereas in our young days we felt personally insulted by contrast with your "great men," in maturity we resent the impertinence as offered to our friends; for in our friends we can trace a "greatness," although the thing may not have been blazoned. Even in a man's household shall he see greatness, though it be obscure; and he shall discover that, whilst it is true that no man is "great to his valet," the comfortable conundrum is equally demonstrable, that All are Great. Your groom shall indite you verses that shall stir the hearts and haunt the dreams of your village maidens—will they compare Homer to him?—and your cook-maid shall be no small domestic oracle on the unfathomable mysteries of phrenology—what cares she for Combe and Spurzheim? Who lives, while yet his father lives, that does not hear the old man "great" in prophecy on the coming "crisis," and rich and ponderous upon the currency question? Who, in the book of the generations of his family, might not inscribe the name of some brother, a mighty man of valour, great amongst his playmates; or a sister, whose attire has given tone for a season to an emulous neighbourhood? And then, in the nineteenth century, who possesses not "great" uncles, who during the war have swayed, although unknown, victories by their strategy or disciplined obedience; or, in more peaceful triumph, have mightily influenced the election of a candidate by the despotism of their oratory? Of aunts—maiden ones—it needs not to speak. They are of the fortunate who require not greatness to be "thrust upon them." Of them it is safely assumed, that they are "born great" prospectively. This privilege however, is guaranteed to the "maiden" only; for marriage absorbs the bride into unity with her combined-separate—and "the crown of a good wife is her husband."
Your village oracle, seated on his throne—the old oaken bench under the village elm-tree, after his weekly labours, on the Saturday night embalming his tongue in the aroma of the fragrant weed, and bribing his lips into complacent humour by sips from the chirping old October, is truly great. He is surrounded by listeners who love to pay homage to his power. Whilst he whiffs, they consult him on great interests,—it may be respecting the destiny of nations, or the desolating march of hostile armies,—it may be on the devastations of the turnip-fly. He lays his pipe aside; his words issue, like the syllables of the Pythoness, in the midst of fragrant fumes. They fix at once the unsettled,—they establish the doubtful,—they convict the speculative.
On points of international law, Puffendorf and Grotius would shrink into nut-shells before him; they would discover their littleness: yet some deem them great!
Bilious disputants may deny that any can be great whom the world has not thought fit to canonise. "Indeed!" do I reply with the sarcastic smile of superiority with which it is customary to spill the arguments of men of straw whom controversialists set up for the sake of knocking down again—"Indeed! Were the Andes a whit smaller before their exact height was proclaimed to the same arrogant world? Was not the moon as great a ball in the days when the world esteemed it a green cheese, as it is now, when men are acquainted with its diameter?"
"Ay," may reply my subtle disputant; "but these are physical facts, independent of opinion: mental, moral, social greatness, are widely different. They have no altitudes subject to trigonometrical survey by an ordnance-board like the Andes; they admit not of parallax, like the planets. Master Fridolin, your illustrations are no more worth than the kernel of a vicious nut."
"What!" I answer, "you want a metaphysical instance, do you? Physics are too coarse. Well, sir, 'Magna est veritas—Truth is great,'—that is to say, your canoniser, the world say so. Now, pray, what does the world, much more a man of straw, know about truth? Confessedly less than it knows about my groom, who is great in poetry,—my cook-maid, who is great in phrenology,—my father, who is great on those hobgoblins the coming crises; and, let me say, amazingly less than it knows, or will know, of my aunt Jemima, who was great in political economy; let alone our village oracle, who is regarded, pipe and all, as great by a larger portion of the inhabitants of the world than can boast any intimate acquaintance with abstract verity.
"And now, man of straw! a word in your ear:—unless you are dull in grain, methinks you will admit yourself answered."
No fallacy is more palpable when examined, and, consequently, none is more preposterous, than that of connecting Greatness with the world's applause; yet for this, men fume and fret, struggle and strive, elbow their neighbours, and tread on their own bunnions, forgetting that they might be quite as great if they would only be quiet; nay, that their chance of being so, without exertion, lies, according to Shakspeare's nice and accurate calculation, in the very comfortable proportion of two to one in their favour. Two Great men out of every three, find themselves so, without the least trouble on their own parts. They are born so, or their greatness "is thrust upon them." They have nothing to do in life but to button in the morning, unbutton at night, sip, masticate, and sleep, if their conscience and digestion will permit: they find themselves not a whit less great. The third alone—the "odd one"—acquires Greatness; and "odd" enough it is, to discover a sample of this meagre class.
But the case may be settled to mathematical certainty. Statistical inquirers—men, the breath of whose nostrils are the bills of mortality—have discovered that a tenth part of all men born into the world die and are buried before one brief year has passed. It follows, therefore, as a corollary, that of those "born great" a great proportion die great when extremely little. Their nurses see one tenth of all "the great men" born, fade and expire, hydrocephalic or rickety, ere their tendencies and tastes have toddled beyond the pap-boat. What does the world know about this evanescent tenth? What does mankind trouble about the grave offence of the sepulchre in seizing and gobbling up annually these great and small tithes? What say they against its appropriating clause? Why, the world is clearly ignorant of the departed great ones,—the buried little ones; yet their greatness is indisputable.
The true philosophy of the matter, is the philosophy of the matters herein set forth; and, in her latter days, my aunt Jemima acknowledged it, for she felt it. There were no great women when she was youthful; but she lived to perceive greatness come upon her. It was not thrust—it was inherent: but it took time and acted leisurely in developing itself. It was not a creation or an acquisition, but a developement, an exudation of that which would out,—nolens volens.
The real truth is this,—All under circumstances are great, although few are aware that they are so. Celebrity has nothing to do with the affair; it may proclaim the fact, but does not constitute it;—as will hereafter be shown in the instance of my aunt Jemima.
F. Harrison Rankin.