No. IV.
The old trout knows enough to keep off the fisherman's hook; the squirrel never cracks an empty nut; the crow soon learns the harmlessness of the scarecrow. But man, though he may have twenty times wriggled off the hook, the patient angler catches him at last. He always cracks the empty shell, then cries: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' This cry he might be spared would he learn a lesson from the squirrel, who weighs his nuts and throws away the light, hollow shell.... And there are scarescrows, the harmlessness of which the human biped learns not in a a lifetime. How long is it since that horned, cloven-footed monster whom the monks made of Pan theos and called him Devil, was an object of fear? How 'the real, genuine, no mistake' (savin' his presence) must have laughed at his own effigy! Then there is Grim Death, too, a creation of the Dark Ages, for in no age of light could this horror have been ever conceived. Unlike the other, against him no exorcism avails.... As if the soul about to be launched on the dim sea Eternity, after all lights and forms of the loved shore have become indistinct, must be cut loose from her moorings by this phantom. The idea that 'Death comes to set us free,' would hardly make us 'meet him cheerily, as our true friend,' were this his real shape. But were I disposed to enumerate our scarecrows, the list would be incomplete; as there are doubtless many that I have not the shrewdness to recognize as such.
The only humbugs are not those that work on our fears. There are humbugs that work on our hopes. These have been likened to bubbles that dance on the wave, burst, and are no more. They are too often like bomb-shells, that in exploding scatter ruin on all around. They have also been named air-castles, chateaux en Espagne, 'baseless fabrics of a vision.' The baseless fabric of a vision is built of 'airy nothingness;' but men found on a wish, structures that tower to heaven, put real, solid material into them, and when they fall, as fall they must—I'll not attempt to give an idea of the utter desolation they leave, of the waste place they make of the heart, lest you should think I have thus humbugged myself; for self-humbug it certainly is; and this is the most intensely human. Not a fish, or reptile, bird, or beast; not a thing crawling, swimming, flying, or walking, but the human creature, humbugs himself. 'Man was made to mourn,' I would change into, Man was made to be humbugged. It is better to be greatly gullible, than a 'cunning dog,' for gulled we will be. It is better to be caught at once, than to have our gills torn by wriggling off the hook the twenty times, to be caught at last. It is better to walk straight into the net than to fatigue ourselves by coming to it in a roundabout way. A Nova-Scotian once rallied a Down-Easter on the famous wooden hams. 'Yaas,' was the reply, 'and they say that one of you actilly ate one and didn't know the difference.' Well, it is better to swallow our humbugs, as the Nova-Scotian did the Connecticut-cured ham, without detecting any thing peculiar in their flavor, than it is to find our mistake at the first cut or saw. By the way, saltpeter is so needed for other purposes, that probably the Virginia cured will not now have as fine a flavor as formerly.
But, in the way: You dissent from some of these remarks? You've cut your eye-teeth, have you? Possibly you forget that trip in the cars, when you 'cutely passed by the swell in flashy waistcoat and galvanized jewelry, and took a seat by a 'plain blunt man' in snuff-color; and after he had left the cars at the first station, and the conductor came to you and demanded, 'Your ticket, sir!' you probably forgot how in fumbling for it in your pocket, you found it, but not your porte-monnaie. You perhaps set down in your mental memorandum, under the head of Appearances, not to be deceived by plain bluntness and snuff-color. There you were wrong; your boasted reason is of no avail in detecting humbugs; there is no such thing as classifying them. Then, too, we are in greater danger of being humbugged by another class of appearances.
In material things we are compelled to acknowledge that things the most reliable are the most unpretending. The star, by which the mariner has steered for ages, is not a 'bright particular star;' the needle of his compass is shaped from one of the baser metals, (though in a figurative sense gold is highly magnetic.) The inner bears such a relation to the outer, that the inner senses are named from the outer; we are slow to perceive that also all objects of the outer senses, are but types of those of the inner. You see how I have been obliged to borrow from the outer vocabulary. I give this idea, in a nebular state, trusting that you will consolidate it. Were we, in a figurative sense, to choose a guiding-star, it would be a comet, we are so taken with flash and show. A great truth, though angels heralded its birth, and a star were drawn from its orbit to stand over its cradle, if that cradle were a manger, we would reject it; if it assumed not the 'pomp and circumstance' of royalty, though it worked miracles, we would cry, Away with it. Eighteen hundred years have not completely transformed or transmuted the world; we are yet ready to reject the true, and be humbugged by the false. More than eighteen hundred and sixty-two years may yet elapse before the bells that 'ring out the old and ring in the new,' will 'ring out the false and ring in the true.' Then farewell humbug.
Yes, it is altogether probable that long before humbug is no more, you and I will—I was about to say be in the narrow house, but prefer an expression of Carlyle's—we will have 'vanished into infinite space.' I prefer this for the same reason that one of Hood's characters was thankful that 'Heaven was boundless.' She it was whom the physician pronounced 'dying by inches.' 'Only think,' exclaimed the consternated husband, 'how long she will be dying!' I suppose to the poor man Grim Death appeared to hold in his skeleton fingers, instead of an hour-glass, a twenty-year glass.
That the sands of his glass may, for you, married or single, neither run too fast nor too slow, is sincerely the wish of
Your well-wisher,
MOLLY O'MOLLY.