FROM THE OAK TO THE OLIVE.
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PRELIMINARIES.
Not being, at this moment, in the pay of any press, whether foreign or domestic, I will not, at this my third landing in English country, be in haste to accomplish the correspondent's office of extroversion, and to expose all the inner processes of thought and of nature to the gaze of an imaginary public, often, alas! a delusory one, and difficult to be met with. No individual editor, nor joint stock company, bespoke my emotions before my departure. I am, therefore, under no obligation to furnish for the market, with the elements of time and of postage unhandsomely curtailed. Instead, then, of that breathless steeple chase after the butterfly of the moment, with whose risks and hurry I am intimately acquainted, I feel myself enabled to look around me at every step which I shall take on paper, and to represent, in my small literary operations, the three dimensions of time, instead of the flat disc of the present.
And first as to my pronoun. The augmentative We is essential for newspaper writing, because people are liable to be horsewhipped for what they put in the sacred columns of a daily journal. We may represent a vague number of individuals, less inviting to, and safer from, the cowhide, than the provoking egomet ipse. Or perhaps the We derives from the New Testament incorporation of devils, whose name was legion, for we are many. In the Fichtean philosophy, also, there are three pronouns comprised in the personal unity whose corporeal effort applies this pen to this paper, to wit, the I absolute, the I limited, and the I resulting from the union of these two. So that a philosopher may say we as well as a monarch or a penny-a-liner. Yet I, at the present moment, incline to fall back upon my record of baptism, and to confront the white sheet, whose blankness I trust to overcome, in the character of an agent one and indivisible.
Nor let it be supposed that these preliminary remarks undervalue the merits and dignity of those who write for ready money, whose meals and travels are at the expense of mysterious corporations, the very cocktail which fringes their daily experience being thrown in as a brightener of their wits and fancies. Thus would I, too, have written, had anybody ordered me to do so. I can hurry up my hot cakes like another, when there is any one to pay for them. But, leisure being accorded me, I shall stand with my tablets in the marketplace, hoping in the end to receive my penny, upon a footing of equality with those who have borne the burden and heat of the day.
With the rights of translation, however, already arranged for in the Russian, Sclavonian, Hindustanee, and Fijian dialects, I reserve to myself the right to convert my pronoun, and to write a chapter in we whenever the individual I shall seem to be insufficient. With these little points agreed upon beforehand, to prevent mistakes,—since a book always represents a bargain,—I will enter, without further delay, upon what I intend as a very brief but cogent chronicle of a third visit to Europe, the first two having attained no personal record.
THE VOYAGE.
The steamer voyage is now become a fact so trite and familiar as to call for no special illustration at these or any other hands. Yet voyages and lives resemble each other in many particulars, and differ in as many others. Ours proves almost unprecedented for smoothness, as well as for safety. We start on the fatal Wednesday, as twice before, expecting the fatal pang. Our last vicarious purchase on shore was a box of that energetic mustard, so useful as a counter-irritant in cases of internal commotion. The bitter partings are over, the dear ones heartily commended to Heaven, we see, as in a dream, the figure of command mounted upon the paddle-box. We cling to a camp stool near the red smoke-stack, and cruelly murmur to the two rosy neophytes who are our companions, "In five minutes you will be more unhappy than you ever were or ever dreamed of being." They reply with sweet, unconscious looks of wonder, that ignorance of danger which the recruit carries into his first battle, or which carries him into it. But five minutes pass, and twelve times five, and the moment for going below does not come. In the expected shape, in fact, it does not arrive at all. We do not resolve upon locomotion, nor venture into the dining saloon; but leaning back upon a borrowed chaise longue, we receive hurried and fragmentary instalments of victuals, and discuss with an improvised acquaintance the aspects of foreign and domestic travel. The plunge into the state-room at bedtime, and the crawl into the narrow berth, are not without their direr features, which the sea-smells and confined air aggravate. We hear bad accounts of A, B, and C, but our neophytes patrol the deck to the last moment, and rise from their dive, on the second morning, fresher than ever.