But this churchyard of the soul passed through, where every step is upon some buried hope, what is the petty noise and dust of the highway about which others fume and complain? What is it to the unconscious if rudely jostled in passing? What is it if a malicious whipster spatter mud? What is it if a rude voice accost, or the right of the road be clamorously contended? when all voices, all roads are alike; when delay or speed matters not; when a choice about anything seems utterly ridiculous, and all one's faculties are lost in astonishment at the worry and fret and perturbation of those who have not undergone the same ossifying process as yourself.
After all, some great sorrow is surely essential to the humanizing of every soul. Never till then can it offer anything but lip sympathy to those who have gasped through the sea of trouble. How can he who has known only days of comparative prosperity interpret the despairing sigh of the friendless? How can he who has never dropped tears into the open grave of his own dead measure the agony of that last, lingering look, as they are hidden forever from human sight? Till a vacant chair stands by his own hearth, how can he ever understand why one should still keep on grieving for that which can never be recalled? Till his heart turns sickening away from some festive anniversary in which a missing voice once made music, how can he see why one need be doleful on such a day as that? Till he has closed his ears to some familiar strain which evoked associations too painful to bear, how can he tell "Why you cannot forget all that, since it makes you so miserable"? To answer such, is to talk to the blind of colors, to the deaf of sounds, to the dead of life and motion. Never, till his own house is darkened, till the badge of desolation flutters from his own door, till sunshiny days return merciless in their brightness, and stormy ones send his thoughts shuddering to a shelterless grave; never till he has tried changing the place, but still always only to keep the old pain, can he understand the desperation with which at last one sits helplessly down, to face that which it can neither look upon nor flee from.
DIGNITY OF HUMAN NATURE.
The philosopher is fond of talking to me about what he calls "the dignity of human nature." The pains he takes to bolster himself up in this shaky belief of his, would do credit to a better cause. Obstinacy of course is at the bottom of it, for he no more believes in it than I do. How can he, and he living and breathing in this sublunary sphere himself? That's just what I said to him this morning; for, thank Providence, I can generally speak my mind on most points. What did he say? That's my affair; suffice it to say, he sticks to it. I made him sit down; then I sat down on his knee, to make sure of a listener. Then I took in my hand the morning papers. In the first place, there was a man of sixty who had been coaxed in where he shouldn't go, and robbed while there. Secondly, there was a justice of the peace sentenced to the Penitentiary for robbery. Thirdly, there was a clergyman convicted of bigamy. Fourthly, there was a husband, who had been trying, with an iron shovel, to find out whether his wife had any brains. Fifthly, there was another who had decided an argument by biting off a portion of his antagonist's nose. Sixthly, there were two lads, of the respective ages of eight and thirteen, who had been murderously perforating each other's intestines with sharp penknives. Seventhly, there was a man in Massachusetts who had lately numbered his twenty-fifth child. Eighthly, there was a "gentleman" found, in the small hours, sitting on the cold sidewalk in —— street, hiccupping for a waiter "to bring him another bottle of champagne."
"Well," says the philosopher, when I stopped to take breath, "these are only the exceptions that prove the rule." Exceptions, quotha! when I hadn't yet dug into the nauseous kennel of the advertising list! Exceptions? but what's the use of talking? Does not every morning's new issue furnish similar "exceptions"? Certainly. Besides, didn't I put this catechism to him? How came —— to give the wife of an official high in power that splendid grand piano? There's a dignified way to secure, through a wheedling female tongue, a fat office. Not to mention a carriage and horses unexpectedly placed at the disposal of Senator ----'s wife. Last, but not least, look at "Jeff.," first and last, from his attempted flight to his boyish refusal to eat his prison fare, bestowing it gratuitously in the faces of his guards; and then kicking and swearing, while his naughty little hands and feet were being fastened together therefor. Dignity? when I look at human beings, and think of what they daily and hourly do, I am seized with convulsions of laughter at the idea. Sometimes the devil possesses me, in the presence of some solemn "hark from the tombs" kind of an individual, to picture it, till I am tied up with cramps trying to keep from laughing. Nobody will ever know what I've suffered in this way. Dignity? You should see it with its boots up on the window-sill of some hotel lounging-room facing Broadway, with its mouth wide open, thus—O; its hat rakishly set on one temple, and its eyes somnolently closed to the charms of the lady pedestrians, who wouldn't miss the picture for sixpence. Dignity? Yesterday I saw a man nearly cut in two with corsets. Another trying to hop round hilariously in a pair of corn-murdering boots. Another roaring out in an omnibus like a mad bull because the cold-fingered driver gave him a "soiled stamp."
Dignity of human nature? Where is it when a man is in the dentist's chair? Where, when a waiter spills coffee on his shirt-bosom or hot soup on his trousers? One might as well not stiffen himself up against facts like these, said I to the philosopher. We don't stop being children, this side the grave, that ever I could find out. The toys we mostly scramble for, like those that dangle from the Christmas-tree, suit but the present hour, and, with all their gilding and glittering lights, will one day be but broken rubbish on our hands. When a man is dead he looks dignified; but while he is alive, with a pipe stereotyped to his lips, or alternately dipping his soup-erfluous mustache in a plate of soup and sopping it with a napkin; or, as the country-woman said of her pet minister, "sitting down, spitting round socionable," I really can't entertain the idea of "Dignity." The more I try the more I laugh. Frivolous, I grant; but what were woman without frivolity? Not a man would speak to us.