Social Shams.
There is no axiom more fraught with meaning than the old Scripture promise, “The truth shall make you free.” But there is also no fact better authenticated in the civilized world of to-day than the practical nullification of this very promise. We speak as regards things human; for in spiritual matters, the home of truth is, to our belief, a fixed one, and the road to it staked out by a divine leader, that has power to find an unerring path in what otherwise seems but an ocean of shifting sand. We propose to apply this axiom to social life, and it is our complaint that it is not free. The pivot on which “society,” properly so called, turns is conventionality—a polite term for untruth.
The original Christian ideal of society was of course based on charity. It has been truly said that a perfect Christian is instinctively a finished gentleman. Courtesy is but an adaptation of charity; and the height of good-breeding (recognized as being the faculty of setting every one at his ease, and of saying the right thing at the right time to the right person) must answer to the Christian principle that to wilfully wound your neighbor in the slightest degree is a sin. But all this, call it tact or charity, as you will, is not in itself inconsistent with truth. The French have a proverb that Toute vérité n'est pas bonne à dire—“Every untruth is not necessarily expedient to all men;” but even that is not a declaration of war against the principle of truth in the main. Yet what is the reality, the thing constantly before our eyes, the fact of which no one can doubt who has ever lived beyond the strictest limits of home—nay, beyond the limits of his own mind? One in a thousand fulfils the ideal of Christian courtesy, while the other nine hundred and ninety-nine wear the regulation-mask prescribed by fashion. Some wear it of iron, so that, in the intercourse of a lifetime, you would never feel that you knew them any better than on the first day of acquaintance; some only of wire, so that the natural personality behind it is but partially hidden even from perfect strangers; some of silk, so cunningly painted that it betrays you into thinking it nature, until, by repeated experience, you discover the imposture. Again, some wear it as the women of Constantinople wear the yashmak, so filmy as only to veil, not to conceal, the features. Lord Lytton, in his romance, A Strange Story, speaks of the “three women” which exist in the single personality of every woman; this applies to men almost equally. There is, he says, the woman as she really is, the woman as she thinks herself to be, and the woman as she appears to the world—the conventional woman. This is by far the most curious product of natural history, or, more appropriately, of the history of mechanics. The human being under social manipulation is a study for philosophers. Conventional standards of human beauty, such as the compressed [pg 126] foot of the Chinese lady, or the artificially stimulated rotundity of form among the women of some of the Central African tribes, the staining of the finger-nails with henna among the Persians, etc., are as nothing and involve no deformation or suffering compared with that among the wholesale machine-products of civilized society.
Spiritual systems of penance have sometimes been impugned for aiming at subduing nature: taming the passions, restraining the expression of strong emotion, weaning the body from innocent indulgences, and so forth. But is there any more barefaced destroyer of nature than “society” as at present constituted? Are there any penances harder, any restraints stricter, than those imposed by our conventional code? The spiritual struggle with nature is voluntary, and aims at subduing our lower nature, only the more to honor the intellectual principle, and render its exercise freer from clogging and degrading influences. The conventional struggle with nature, on the contrary, is a compulsory one, into which you are thrust by others in early and unconscious childhood; it is, moreover, a deceptive one, as it tends to produce mere appearances—not to tame passion, but restrain its outward expression; not to elevate the mind, but to give it the semblance of those gifts most profitable in the social estimation of the day. It does not tend to make man supernatural, but unnatural. It takes from him even the freedom of the savage, without giving him in exchange the freedom of the Christian. It aims not at virtue, but at decorum. Its morality skips the whole of the Ten Commandments, but insists upon what facetious Englishmen sometimes call the eleventh—i.e., “Thou shalt not be found out.” It has rites and ceremonials of its own, more arbitrary than the law of the land, and, in the same breath, more lax; it has beliefs and formulas more binding outwardly than those of any religion; it has its own oracles, its own language, its own tribunals. It is a state within a state, condoning many moral delinquencies, exalting some into meritorious deeds, smoothing others over as pardonable follies. Where it is not wicked, it is inane or spiteful. Slander and gossip are its breath of life, except in the few instances where intrigue sweeps away such second-rate passe-temps.
Yet its wickedness is a subject that touches us less than its stupidity; for it is less of a daily experience, and has more denouncers to lash it. We also know less of its brilliancy than of its meanness; for the latter is visible in the smallest gathering and in the most insignificant place, while the former exists but in half a dozen great capitals, and even there only among one or two circles or strata of society. Paris and Vienna have their dull and respectable society, as well as other places, and they are by far the most numerous, and, we will venture to say it, the meanest. Downright license seems, strangely enough, to carry with it a certain reckless bonhomie which, while it is far from Christian charity, yet has many outward signs of it. The most abandoned are often found to be the most generous, or even philanthropic, while the pharisaical little-mindedness of many eminently “respectable” members of society is a constant reproach to the faith on which they pride themselves. The “milk of human kindness” is often [pg 127] scarce amid “saints” of a certain school. Noli me tangere is their motto, and an appropriate one, indeed; for you might tap their hearts till doomsday, and never draw from them one drop of the generous wine of sympathy.
Not that all persons whose path of life crosses your own by the chances bred of social conventionalities are of this type; many are generous, kind-hearted, impulsive; but it is part of the indictment we bring against “society” that its rules so smother this amiable individuality as seldom to allow it to be revealed to you save by some chance occurrence. You may have a “calling acquaintance” with a woman apparently frivolous (though obviously good-natured), and whose mind you judge to be probably as shallow as her conversation. Some sudden misfortune comes upon you, and, of all your acquaintances, this is, perhaps, the only one who will blossom into a friend. In emergencies, her native good sense and affectionate heart burst their artificial bonds, resume their proper place, and flow out in deeds of refined and considerate kindness. She will prove to have presence of mind, delicacy of heart, an active power of sympathy. This is the sort of woman you would choose to have by your dying-bed, or to whom you would consign the care of your children under unhappy circumstances, whether of poverty or absence—the woman whose nerve would not fail her in a hospital, and who would march boldly into a prison with bright looks and cheerful words, ever thinking of others before herself. But had it not been for an untoward accident, you might never have distinguished her from the herd of ordinary morning-callers. She goes through her part in society as glibly and cheerfully as your gray parrot, who is ever ready to repeat his lesson when the proper cue is given him, or as readily as your pet lap-dog, which has no objection to stand on its hind legs in a corner, and beg as long as you choose to hold the titbit up before it. What chance have you of recognizing a soul behind all that mass of conventionality? About as much as you would have of seeing the “angel imprisoned in the marble” in a sculptor's studio, or as much as Dante had of knowing the tormented souls hidden in the trunk of those grisly bleeding trees of the Inferno.
The more frequently and familiarly you mix with the world, the more your path is strewn with shattered ideals; for it is almost impossible to retain an ideal of anything which you see daily as a misshapen and blurred reality. Practical experience seems to coarsen and cheapen everything, and there never was yet a more melancholy truth than that of the old adage, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Professional life as well as domestic furnishes lamentable instances of this. In commerce, where it is very difficult for poetry and ideals to find room, the reality is hardly obnoxious to the thoughtful looker-on; for what refining influence could be expected from the perpetual jar and clash of engines, the constant chaffering, the feverish life, of the exchange? It is the realm of purely earthly, material influences, and naturally dwarfs the sympathies, while it concentrates the thoughts on one narrow point of selfish interest, if pursued for its own sake. But in the learned professions, whose aims are intellectually superior, and whose special province it is to elevate the human [pg 128] mind above selfish and individual interests, leading it, on the contrary, to the contemplation of abstract principles, and to the furtherance of the public weal, the ideal should be more apparent. And yet, in most cases, it is not so. There is no reverence left for a pursuit the trivial details of which are grown too familiar; petty jealousies take the place of scientific or philosophic emulation; man's innate vanity soon narrows the circle of interest round the ego, and subordinates the progress of the world to personal advancement. There is scarcely anything less venerable in a man's eyes than the particular branch of knowledge in which he is most proficient; and if it be with him a hobby, the love he bears to it is rather a shadow of the good opinion he holds of himself than a genuine devotion to science in the abstract. Of course, there are exceptions, numerous and honorable, but such are the plain facts in the ordinary, every-day experience of which life is in the main composed. “No one is a hero to his valet.” Home life is another ideal destroyed by society, with its arbitrary rules and its hard, practical axioms. The peace and holiness of home are rudely jarred by the demands which fashion makes on the time of its members. We have sometimes been tempted to think that this would be a very pleasant world to any one who could go through it as a spectator only. To act a part in it yourself means to subject yourself to one disenchantment after another. You see a family group at a distance—say through a street-window in a large city, or on the porch of a country villa. Old and young are mingled together; there may be beauty among the girls, there is refinement in their surroundings; they seem as thrifty as they are comfortable, for some are reading and some sewing: perhaps the tea-table is spread and housewifely treasures displayed; as a picture, it is perfect. But as a drama? Are you quite sure that you would like to see the real state of mind of each person there? If so, prepare yourself for almost inevitable disappointment. It will not be a safe investigation, and the ideal you may have formed will probably come out of the trial as an angel might if he trusted himself to the rough handling of common men.
No real happiness can exist in a life of perpetual excitement; and this a fashionable life can hardly fail to be. There is an intoxication of the mind as well as of the senses. The whirl of so-called pleasure never satisfies, but stimulates. More is required, and yet more, till, like the drunkard, you are a living paradox, never at peace unless in an atmosphere of excitement, just as he may be said to be never sober—or at least capable—unless when drunk. In the whirl of society, the mind withers; there is no time for thought, for study, for application. How many young girls there are who tell you candidly, “Oh! I have no time to practise my music. I used to do so four hours a day; but since I am in society, I can never find an hour to myself.” Then you inquire into this multiplicity of engagements, and you find—perhaps some religious occupation, some charitable work? Oh! no; only a call to be returned, cards to be left, a new toilet to be tried on, a little shopping, and a drive in the park. Pressing business, truly!
In great cities, during the season of balls and parties, a girl's life is one unbroken round of dissipation [pg 129] two-thirds of the day, and recuperation for coming “pleasure” during the remaining third. At the end of four or five months of this life, vitality is half extinct, the cheeks are pale, the mouth drawn, the eyes violet-circled; and against all this what prize is there to set? A bubble burst, a shadow vanished! These continual festivities, beginning late, ending in the early dawn, when the poor are just waking to their toil, and servants of God are rising to praise him—these repeated gatherings called “society” entirely upset the routine of domestic life. Instead of the blithe, healthy face sparkling at the head of the breakfast-table, there is a jaded, weary countenance, pale with a floury paleness, or flushed by late and disturbed slumbers; instead of the brisk tread and ringing voice that cheer the home, there is the listless step of the worn-out dancer, the peevish tone that tells plainly of bodily fatigue. In the evening there is no time for a cosy gathering round the hearth, a quiet game or chat, the reading aloud of some interesting book, or the simple delights of old-fashioned national airs. The dressing-room absorbs all that time—the choice of flowers or jewels takes long; the last finishing touches to the toilet must not be given in a hurry. The event of the day is about to begin; and so it will be to-morrow and the day after, and for an interminable tread-mill of days. If there is innate talent, there is no time to develop it; or, if it is cultivated at all, that, too, is distorted into a mere social “accomplishment,” the sole object of which is to add to the value of the possessor in the social market. The champion piece of embroidery is framed and pointed out as the work of the daughter of the house; the solitary basket of wax flowers is displayed in a conspicuous manner on an elaborate étagère; the water-colors are studiously hung in the best-lighted part of the drawing-room; the overture of William Tell is invariably called for on the slightest provocation, and played off indiscriminately before the least appreciative as well as the most artistic of the family's visiting list. And, by the way, what more egregious sham can there be than the conventional interest in music so universally professed? It is a matter of course to exclaim, “Oh! I dote on music”; and, on the basis of this broad assertion, what ludicrous exemplifications one is condemned to listen to! One will add, “Oh! yes, and I do so love Strauss' valses”; another will tell you there is no music like the bagpipes, and no dance like an Irish jig or an old-time Virginia reel. One gushing young lady will call the “Maud Valse” and the “Guards' Polka” “perfectly divine,” while her sentimental friend will murmur that “Home, Sweet Home” is her favorite. With many people, a collection of ballads is identical with the whole science of music; their sympathies and comprehension can go no further.
To many, again, music stands for comic songs and Christy's Minstrels. If an instrumental piece takes more than five minutes to get through, people begin to shift their feet and whisper to their neighbors; of course, when it is over, they will turn round and sweetly simper: “Oh! do play us something more; that last was so lovely.” In ninety-nine out of a hundred houses where you are doomed for your sins to hear music, you hear trash. It is hardly worth criticising, either in the choice or in the execution, and, one [pg 130] would therefore think, hardly worth telling a lie for. And yet this conventional admiration, what is it but a lie pure and simple?
To return to our belles and their murdered home-life. Not only is their time so mortgaged that they have none left for the joys of the family hearth, but they have none to spare for self-culture. A woman's education does not close on the threshold of the school-room. Every advance made later by voluntary application to study is a greater stride than all the compulsory teaching she receives in her school-life. If society materially interferes with this self-development, it has a heavy responsibility to bear. Each mind thus stunted, crude, and unevenly balanced reduces the sum total of usefulness in this world, and adds to the dead-weight of shiftless beings whose room would be decidedly better than their company in the scheme of human advancement. A frivolous, fashionable man or woman is a monster upon earth, a being whom nature certainly does not recognize, and whom religion reprobates.
The most satisfactory reflection whereby to dispel the effect of this dismal picture is this: the thing carries its antidote with it to all but hopelessly narrow minds. The pleasures of dancing within an area of a yard square, and of listening night after night to the same insipid gallantries and insincere congratulations, cannot fail to pall after a time. A French author says that after the age of thirty, a woman of any account does not dance; she leaves this pleasure to those who have no other.[64] As with all pleasures which address the senses rather than the intellect, a surfeit often proves a cure. You have tasted all the delights to be got from certain things, and the sameness at last begins to pall. There could be no more effectual check on the levelling spirit of the age than a voluntary renunciation for a time on the part of the possessors of wealth and power, and a temporary enjoyment of these honors on the part of those who envy them. How soon should we see the harassed artisan fly from the post he once coveted, the working-girl tear off the finery she envied, the millionaire pro tem. entreat his coachman to change places with him! Those who, in the midst of their grinding toil, envy the man in broadcloth, the woman in her barouche, whom they pass and repass day by day, quite leave out of the scales the weight of inner anxiety, grief, or often only ennui, which burdens the rich and fashionable. If they could tell how this one's heart is devoured by jealousy, how that one's home is rendered gloomy by his too plodding ambition, or unhappy by his wife's irritable temper! If they could guess how that sickly, white child, seated among its furs in that dark, handsome clarence, causes sleepless nights and heavy fears to that anxious mother in velvet robe and seal-skin cloak! If they only knew the secret remorse for ever gnawing at the heart of this exquisite of the clubs, whispering the name of a girl once happy and innocent—a name now to him the synonym of a crime; or if they could tell the thoughts of the substantial merchant, as he turns away with heavy steps from a counting-house which, the more astounding is its financial success, the more it resembles, in all but in name, a [pg 131] gambling-den! And, above all, did they but know how often the sad votary of fashion, in some moment of long-repressed but untamable natural emotion, cries out for the freedom of the poor and their robust health! That is the saddest part of this grim masque—no one is contented, no one believes in himself or in his fellow-man; it is a drama in which the actors know full well that when the foot-lights are put out and the curtain of night falls, they will no longer be what they seem. So the gigantic sham grows day by day, stifling nature, burying the intellect, blurring the moral sense, fossilizing the whole being. Outward shapes of humanity remain, but, by some fell enchantment, the spiritual essence is sucked away, and an automaton, skilfully contrived, represents what once was a man.
Even pleasure no longer lurks in its outward forms when “society” has thus worked its will on men. The real enjoyment is gone, but its dismal appearance must be assumed. Not to shock the world—your world—the flavorless fruit must be eaten with a good grace, the graceful draperies of social decorum must be hung on the skeleton. The wheel goes round, and it is so long since you have trusted to your own feet for guidance that you must needs keep hold of the conventional support. It is very difficult to win back your independence once it has been surrendered. The world—your world—is a pitiless task-master, and does not pension off its former servants. If you leave it, you do so at your own risk; and if you can conquer no position which merit and your own individuality are enough to gain, you may resign yourself to the rôle of a dummy. We are not sure that some of the happiest people on earth are not, socially speaking, dummies. But when you come to think of it, what a strange, magnetic power has the little circle that forms your world! When a lady has crowded from five to six hundred guests in her narrow drawing-rooms, she sees before her all the persons who, to her, constitute society. Of these, perhaps one-third are of hazy position; they are but outsiders, candidates for the social honors which will only be bestowed fully and ungrudgingly on their grandchildren. Their opinion is not of much value. When you dissect the remaining thirds, you mentally check off many a respectable and amiable person as incapable of forming any independent opinion; others you secretly stigmatize as gossips, shallow-minded, or spiteful; and the circle of responsible people becomes gradually narrower and narrower. Hardly a score do you credit with sound judgment and discriminating sense. But these are precisely the judges you do not fear, unless your conscience pricks you. They are generous and large-minded; they stand apart from the crowd, with wider sympathies and larger appreciation; they see beyond the present, and unconsciously you find yourself classing them as exceptions to the rule. They do not form the impalpable social tribunal, then? It must be, therefore, the mediocre company of gossips. Search a little into your consciousness or your memory, and you will doubtless find it is so. A recent novelist gives an apt illustration of the relative proportion, in the eyes of an old English country gentleman, between his county, England, and the world. A diagram contains, first, a large, irregular outline representing the county; [pg 132] a round ball ten times smaller typifies England, and an infinitesimal point in space denotes the whole civilized world. This is the way we all look at things. No doubt it is instinctive. To us, “the world” consists of a hundred old women, eminently respectable and unctuously compassionate, who gossip about our private affairs over their tea and hot rolls. This is the core of that dread tribunal which we tremble to offend. It is indeed a hard tyrant, if it can succeed in chaining us to its car, after the pleasures which it dispenses have lost their flavor for us. But, unfortunately, half mankind acknowledge this species of bondage, and we must presume voluntarily, or at least passively.
Were it not that this thraldom is so unspeakably sad, it would seem such a farce, if looked upon dispassionately from without! One might almost liken a ball or great official reception in one of the capitals of fashion to the mediæval Dance of Death. The scene is brilliant with deceptive gaiety; the whole surface of society ripples with smiles; the maskers all wear their brightest garments and their stereotyped badges of mirth. There, in the doorway, stands a lovely woman, in rose-color from head to foot—a cherub's face enshrined in a sunset cloud, so perhaps an artist would fancy. She smiles bewitchingly, and coquets with her fan, while talking to a gray-bearded hero from India. But she has made up her mind to sacrifice her honor to her love; tomorrow, at dawn, she will leave her husband's home and her baby's cradle; and, poor victim! she is panting under the weight of this wretched secret even while she listens to old-world gallantry from her fatherly admirer. Not far from her stands another fair form, not more pure in outward semblance, hardly less beautiful—a gifted woman, a true wife, smiling and conversing as calmly as any one in the room; but she knows that she has a fatal internal disease, and that at any moment death might suddenly overtake her. Not to alarm her husband, she joins in every festivity, carrying her secret with her as the Spartan did the fox who was gnawing at his bosom. Amid the whirl of the dance, you perhaps single out that young girl, fair, fresh, seventeen. She is not as happy as she seems; her eyes roam shyly around; there is one whom she both longs and dreads to see, for she is not sure whether she will not find him by the side of her school friend, now her rival. And among the men, how many, beneath their masks, bear sorrowing or anxious hearts! That elderly man, so calmly listening to a fluent diplomate, knows that to-morrow it will be noised abroad that he is bankrupt—utterly ruined. When he leaves this gay scene to-night, it will be for the railway, which will bear him out of the country in a few hours. Yonder pale man, who wears his regulation smile so listlessly that you cannot help likening it to a garment loosely hung, is here in the interest of a friend, and is waiting an opportunity to speak a word of cordial recommendation to a ministerial acquaintance, formerly a college friend, now a power in the cabinet. His heart is heavy with a private grief; his child lies dangerously ill at home, and his poor distracted wife needs his comfort and support; but, true to his word, he forgets himself for an hour or two, that he may not miss the golden opportunity on which [pg 133] hang the hopes of his friend's whole future. In the centre of the dance, the tall form of a Life-guardsman is prominent; to-morrow he will have disappeared from the world, and only his intimates will know that he had long determined to enter a Catholic seminary, and study for the priesthood. He did not want his decision discussed beforehand, and took the best means of silencing curiosity by appearing the gayest of the gay. Every one here to-night has a long record oppressing his heart—something that makes the present scene quite secondary in his thoughts, and that causes in his breast a bitter feeling of reaction against the mockery of which he forms a part. And this is the thing called pleasure! How little we know of the people with whom we spend our lives—those that touch our hands daily, and speak to us commonplace words of courtesy! Surely the bees in their hive, the ants on their hill, the beavers and prairie-dogs of a “village,” know each other better than we do our next-door neighbors! We cut the thread of a guilty reverie by some observation about the weather, or we laugh the unmeaning laugh that supplies the place of an answer, perhaps inconvenient to ourselves, and this laugh jars on the tenderest memories of a sorrowful past uppermost just then in our neighbor's mind. There is something appalling in all this—the tragedy lies so near the surface, and we tread upon it so often!
The trivial aspect of society is oftener still before us—the inanity of morning calls, the gossip of a provincial town, the petty local interests that absorb three-fourths of mankind. Why, we wonder, should general conversation invariably breed gossip, while a tête-à-tête sometimes elicits real information and rational interchange of ideas? The same person who in a company of five or six has nothing but commonplace remarks to offer, often opens out in private though yet only ceremonial conversation, and startles you by original opinions and valuable suggestions. The French are perhaps the only people who shine in mixed conversation; they have the talent of causerie—a thing that with us hardly exists; the very word is untranslatable. A Frenchwoman can be sparkling where we can only be dull; she can dance on a cobweb, while we should break down on a cart-rope. Gallic vivacity can make even the details of the kitchen amusing, while we should be insufferably prosy on the same subject.
How well we remember the ponderous magnates of our neighborhood in the county! The stately morning calls, the inevitable topics of local interest, the solemnity of that “quarter of an hour” which we were fain to liken to that rendered famous by an old author. Unfailing resources, O Court Journal! the royal visit to such and such a place, the marriage of so-and-so, etc., etc. Then the flower-garden and the poultry-yard (hereditary hobbies with English ladies), the agricultural show, the coming election. And then the formidable ordeal comes to an end, probably to the great relief of both parties. Neither of the two cared for the subjects discussed or for the interlocutor discussing them; but etiquette demanded the waste of fifteen minutes, and the laws of society are as those of the Medes and Persians. In a lower rank of life, the proprieties are perhaps still more rigidly enforced, and the only [pg 134] difference would be in the choice of topics. George Eliot's inimitable gossip in The Mill on the Floss describes that to a nicety, and indeed, although written in England, might do duty almost as well anywhere else. The quality of the house linen, the antiquity of the silver spoons, the solemn conclave over a new bonnet, and the delinquencies of the maid-servant—such would be the staple. In every case you see the mask is on, it fits close, and no form of “society” is disregarded!
Staying for a few days at a friend's house is a terrible trial in polite society. You are never a moment off duty; you have to change costumes as often as an actress in a play where the “unities” are “nowhere”; and, above all, if you are a woman, you have the dismal prospect of three hours' morning talk with a bevy of your own sex, your hands meanwhile engaged in some useless piece of fancy-work. The topics of conversation may be guessed, their range not being very extensive; of course, somebody's marriage or probable engagement is discussed, silks and laces are made up into imaginary toilets with surprising rapidity, the history of some refractory scholar and the details of the clothing club are next drawn upon, and it is very seldom that the talk glides into any interesting or rational channel. It really is a pity that people will persist in talking of each other and not of things. So much might be altered for the better in society, if conversation were not so exclusively personal. Mutual improvement is a thing altogether overlooked in the civilized world. Even men succumb to gossip; for what is the staple of club-talk? So-and-so has “sold out,” and gone into a less expensive regiment; such an one seems very attentive to Miss So-and-so; such another was deeply offended because he was not asked to Lady So-and-so's party; the shooting in Lord C——'s preserves is confoundedly bad this year; Mr. A—— thinks of contesting the next election at B——. Interminable waves of gossip flood the world from the club as from the boudoir, though the latter certainly does by far the most mischief.
We are told that “no man can serve two masters.” In all relations in life this is eminently true. Intellect and Mammon scarcely agree better than God and Mammon. The proper atmosphere of intellectual life is peace, and a student's career should be blameless in morals as well as tranquil in experience. Fashion and society forbid this; they necessitate loss of time, and unsettle the even balance of the mind. For one who values his calmness of spirit and his health of body there is a golden rule, which, if he weigh all external pleasures by it, will infallibly secure him the peace he needs: No pleasure is safe but that which leaves no regret behind it on the morrow. Who has not felt the wretched sensation left by pleasures not fulfilling this condition? Who does not remember the feverish pulse, the troubled dreams, the vague uneasiness, the sickly apathy that follow on a night spent in violent and unnatural amusement? One wiser than our generation has said:
“The desires of sensuality draw thee abroad; but, when the hour is past, what dost thou bring home but a weight upon thy conscience and a dissipation of heart? A joyful going abroad often brings forth a sorrowful coming home, and a [pg 135] merry evening makes a sad morning.”[65]
These words, written centuries ago, contain volumes, and are not less applicable now than in the middle ages.
We often hear it said that man is a gregarious animal. He needs companionship, and clings to his kind. This it is that induces that more stirring life which distinguishes the city from the province; which quickens the perceptions and enlarges the sympathies. But the perfection of the intellectual life is not found in cities. The world-wide influences that stir great centres have locomotive powers that are superior to the channels of human contrivance. It needs not the friction of mind with mind to originate great ideas or engender great deeds. The companionship needful for men of talent lies not in the social circle, but in the library. As Ruskin has said in one of his lectures, we should each of us be proud of being admitted to the friendship of some great poet, artist, or philosopher; and yet we neglect that inner communion which is open to us at any moment with the spirits of all the departed heroes of the mind, whose choicest thoughts are stored on the shelves of our libraries. It is true that the straitened circumstances of many a scholar keep him chain-bound within the limits of great, black, smoky cities; for, since he cannot possess individually the literary treasures that are the necessary food of his intellectual life, he is obliged to slake his thirst at the common fountain of the public libraries and lecture-rooms. But we were speaking rather of the ideal, the perfect scholarly life, which implies a combination of pursuits. The mind which looks to the highest products of ancient and modern thought for its legitimate pabulum can never be but half satisfied with anything less than perfection in its accessory surroundings. Such a mind is naturally allied to a sensitive and imaginative organization, and the coarse contrasts between the peaceful study and the common street-sights of every large city must necessarily be painful to it. Even so the petty gossip and “storms in a tea-cup” of a rural centre; for all that is mean and small is foreign to that calm atmosphere in which sages and poets live. Those sages, those poets, in their day, may have lived, it is true, among the turmoil and strife of small interests; but death and the lapse of time seem to have bereft them, in our eyes, of any such disenchantments; we see them transformed and idealized, and we gladly aim at reproducing, not their commonplace lives, but their spiritual existence. This existence still survives, and it is to this that we wish to ally our own. For this perfection of lofty companionship, the solitude of a country life is most conducive, but it must be a solitude of leisure, of freedom from conventionalities, and, unluckily, of at least some degree of wealth. This latter condition is fulfilled in so few cases that our ideal remains but too often unrealized in this work-a-day world, yet none the less is it the true and only dignified ideal of the intellectual life. The instinct of those born with a spark of genius will bear us out in this assertion; no miser longs for wealth more thirstingly than a book-worm. There is an innate sympathy with the outward beauties of nature which distinguishes the scholar even more than it does the gipsy.
But, as a crowning condition to the enjoyment of these beauties, he must be free from the common cares and interests of men; he must walk in a higher sphere than those whose sympathies cannot mingle with his; he must walk alone in spirit, even though his body may jostle the unthinking crowd. Have we made our scholar a misanthrope? Yes, if thereby is meant a hater of society, with its shams and its stage-like scenery; no, if you understand thereby a hater of humankind. But be sure of one thing: a man learns to love men more the less he sees of them, and the more, by their absence, they leave him his charitable estimate of their probable good qualities. No doubt the earth itself looks fairer from the standpoint of a fixed star than it does to-day to any toiling wayfarer on its rough pathway.
To S. Joseph: On The Day Of My First Mass.
Type of the Priesthood with its Virgin Spouse,
The Immaculate Church, our Mother ever fair!
Since even to me God's wondrous grace allows
An office more than seraphim may share,
I kneel to thee, most gentle Saint, and dare
To choose thee patron of the trust. Oh! make
My evermore fidelity thy care,
And keep me Mary's, for her own sweet sake!
Her knight before, and poet, now her priest
(Nor less her slave—a thousandfold the more),
I glory in a bondage but increased,
And kiss the chain her dear De Montfort wore,
With “Omnia per Mariam” mottoed o'er:
Which seals me her apostle, though the least.
Feast of the Seven Dolors, March 31, 1871.
Odd Stories. VI.—King Ruli.
Once upon a time there was, on this side of the Hartz Mountains, a secret place, where, touching a hidden spring, you found yourself in a trice between immense walls of rock, whence a mysterious person, dressed in red from top to toe, took you into a great cavern, the first of a series of vast caves filled with hogsheads and tuns of wine and beer, and lighted up in such a manner that the brilliant stalactites with which it was hung sparkled and flashed like the most precious gems in a jeweller's dream. The awe inspired by this scene hardly left you a moment to observe that the nose of your guide was even redder than his body, when you were ushered through another secret door into the domain of a grand old castle, the battlements of which, covered with moss, overlooked a pastoral valley and its white flocks, and seemed to rule the landscape, notwithstanding the presence of many other castles, as if it were the house of a monarch. And so it was. Here dwelt King Ruli, the patron of minnesingers and jolly cavaliers—that stalwart king whose brow, and beard, and port were the very signs of genial majesty. Pleasure ruled the board where he sat; and when the juice of the Weinberg warmed up in the blood of the lords and minstrels in Weinbergland, the ten noble companions of King Ruli swept the mystic chords of the harp, and with voices free sang in echoing strain their merry roundelay:
We're rovers all, we're singers five
And rhymers five; come round, come round;
Ye five shall give us honest rhyme,
And we shall give you sound.
Let laurels crown his great gray head,
A big arm-chair his throne be made.
Then sing:
Ruli, King Ruli! And he shall be our king.
To sounds of cheerful thoughts like these each royal night wore on, while the castled lords of hill and valley feasted at the king's table, and made merry over jest and story, to the clinking of many glasses and in the pleasant uproar of many voices. Seated in his chair at the head of the table, he drank from a great flagon of crystal, or smoked from a pipe as long as his body, the bowl of which required a page-in-waiting to support it, lest, in a drowsy moment, it should drop from the mouth of the king. Below him were ranged the ten minnesingers, who smoked from one immense bowl of tobacco, having long stems that led to all their mouths, whence issued a volume of smoke, which, as it rose around the great burning bowl, was like the fume of a conflagration; and thus betimes the merry minnesingers sang:
Ah! never once so jolly face
In green old Arcady appeared;
And as he drinks, the drink flows down
His flowing, streaming beard.
He's six feet high, his beard is long,
And broad his body is and strong.
Then sing:
King Ruli, King Ruli! He shall be our king.
No king could resist such flattery as this, and it was with truth that his minstrels pictured him standing, and, in a tone of majestic joviality, wishing the health of the whole company:
“True liegemen all, I give ye joy,
For I am host and landlord here;
Ho! varlets, bring me Rhenish wine,
And flagons fill of beer!”
Right red Rhine wine! right red Rhine wine!
Was ever glass so clear and fine?
So sing:
Ruli, King Ruli! And he shall be our king!
Late in the night the sound of song and story made for the gentle monarch a lullaby, and his head rested on his bosom in slumber, as he laid down his flagon. Had his chief minstrel then tickled his great ear, it would not have waked him up; and so, seeing that the king had filled himself with slumber as with the drugs of Morpheus, his lieges sang:
But, hold! the monarch's sleepy grown;
His pipe has dropt, he's drowsed and sped.
Hark! how he snores! Wide open doors;
We'll bury him in bed.
Then, while our loyal shoulders bear
His burden, thus our burden hear:
King Ruli!
The king is dead; long live the king!
And live again, King Ruli!
But as night after night of song and wine went by, the king grew older and older in his cups. Little he saw or cared that new revellers, new minstrels, new lords, had one by one taken the places of old ones, and that the speech of the new-comers was loud and hoarse, and their song ribald and discordant. Those who remained with him of his old friends and retainers had gradually imbibed the character of the latest revellers, and their potations were deeper and their jests broader than ever. Once in a while the king groaned and complained that his beer was too bitter; but they so flattered his jokes, and praised his beard, and spoke of his noble brow, and his royal blood, and his glorious voice, that he sang and roared as of old, and swallowed his beer without further complaint. On such an occasion as this it required the cynical courage of the minstrel Knipfenbausenstein to sing, as he did, from the end of the hall, which he had just entered after a long absence:
There were ten vintners old and sick,
And all their wine had gone to lees;
Of empty casks they made them cells:
Oh! very bitter folks were these.
Misgives me now, good friends, to think
A king should be a king of drink.
But sing:
Ruli, King Ruli! this night shall be our king!
The minstrel doubtless had in mind the ten companions of the king, who, being no longer able to keep up with the stalwart Ruli in the vigor of his potations, had cried out as with one voice against their sovereign, declaring that his beer was bitter beyond endurance, and his pleasures a gilded despotism. For this offence the king, swearing roundly that they were traitor knights, who knew not how to be moderate drinkers or loyal feasters, consigned them to his darkest wine caverns, where they were doomed to dwell in empty hogsheads for many a year.
Now, after a life of good living, the rare old king sat in his great velvet-cushioned chair, warming his legs, which were rather swollen, and his feet, which were encased in large slippers, before a fire sufficient to cook an ox. Glided to his side his eldest child, the queenly Hermengilde, and said softly: “Alas! sire, and hast thou not heard that my first-born has killed young Siegbert of Bierhalle, in a drunken brawl, and wilt thou persist in these foolish feasts?”
“Tut, tut, silly girl! This feasting hurts not thy fasting. 'Twere better to kill his man in drink than sober; and, tut, tut! we must not grieve for ever, child. Wine is for the drinking, and life for the living. Heaven send thee luck!” With this the jovial king took a draught from his flagon.
Ere he had smoked his pipe, the fair Joanna, second princess of the blood, whose wont it was to fill the king's pipe with affectionate care, said to him musingly: “Methinks it is the night when our brother Max fell over into the chasm and was killed. Ill befits that its peace be marred by roysterers whom, say they, he had most to blame for his death.”
“What! and have ye turned dames [pg 139] of the cloister, that ye seek to make crows' nests of my beard and gray hairs? Umph! my lady counsellors; and ye would have no more wine drank because rocks are steep! Did not sober Hans fall into the well, and ere thou wast born? Ay, but a brave lad was Max, and a merry one. A glass to his memory!”
The king was unaware, as he thus spoke, of the near presence of a reverend and noble matron, whose face bore marks of care and grief. It was the queen Roxalana. A child of tender years ran from her side to climb her grandsire's knee, but, seeing that the royal flagon stood in the way, exclaimed: “O grandfather! that horrid drink!” The king, with a majestic motion, waved the child away, and she returned in tears to the side of the mute queen.
“So, my lady, queen of woebegones and nurse of whimperings, thou art here to tease thy lord and trouble his gout. 'Tis well. Train the brats of the land to do imps' work to their fathers, and make your daughters have long faces; but have a care, goodwife, lest an old man's patience be too weak for this old maid's gossip. Pray, what new worm is in thy brain, that thou tellest we must not drink the cup of our fathers?”
Not long after this scene, a loud clash of arms was heard in the court, and the debauched minnesinger, Wittekind, staggered into the hall, his face stained with blood as with wine. The king's guests had just drunk their tenth glass, when a crowd of rioters, armed to the teeth, rushed in upon them, and, breaking glasses right and left, proclaimed the downfall of King Ruli. With a bitter and heavy heart, the king recognized among the crowds who now drank to his perdition many of his old revellers; and, seizing a favorable moment, fled totteringly into the wine mountain. There, to his great surprise, he found that all the tuns and hogsheads of wine and beer which had been stored away were quite empty. Once more he joined his ten companions locked up in the wine caves, lamenting bitterly that the wine of his life had gone to lees, and much tormented by the man in red, whose nose was like fire.
Epigram. The Widow's Mites.
Two mites, two drops—yet all her house and land—
Falle from a steady heart though trembling hand.
The others' wanton wealth foams high and brave.
The others cast away; she only gave.
—Crashaw.