Memoirs of Eighty Years

by Thomas Gordon Hake

I would altogether cease from work, but that time would hang so heavily. I shall be as idle as I can, and so end mine as Byron began his “Hours.”

In writing my memoirs the years have shrunk into days, but they fairly depict my part of Nature’s message of which she made me a commissionaire. She has told through me, in the fragmentary form of opinion, what her purpose is after being filtered through my brain, not what it is prior to the process of filtration, which leaves behind the insoluble matters, which, try as one will, are not to be got at. All things are comical in the process of production—the furnaces, the looms, the raw material, now a fibre, now a thread dipped in dye, now in mad haste rolling into a texture, now snipped with scissors into a man’s or woman’s shape, now on their backs as they make each other a bow, or kiss hands across a street, the bricks of which a year before were in a clay field growing wheat.

The epigrams that I have ready for the press, whenever the public may be disposed for a fresh jeu d’esprit, are three hundred and sixty-six in number, to correspond with leap-year.

They more or less pourtray the laughing side of life, but are not without their earnest moments, and they have references of ludicrous applicability.

It may be remarked that while that species of humour is liked and largely pervades our best authors, epigram has never been made a specialty by any one of them. There exists, therefore, a blank under this heading; and my attempt is to fill this vacancy in our literature, strange as it is that such should still be left among its crowded pages.

A poem, of whatever length, should start vividly, so as to wind up the ear and set the mind ticking. I have known poems with much latent beauty in them, set aside as rubbish, from failing to wake up the thoughts at starting. I remember a sonnet which an admirer pronounced the finest in the language (with about as much sense as George No. IV. called himself the first gentleman in Europe), and which had a clear-cut symmetry and depth, being called trashy by one who had critical power, but who did not warm his wax before taking its impression. Short poems have value to the author of them as being written on passing occasions, and thus becoming biographic. I possess a volume of this sort, called “Many Moods,” some of which have had publication.

Life is a comedy during this filtration, by means of which it receives its mysterious consciousness through a vulgar brain; death would be a comedy but that the joke is stale.

Nature seems as opinionated as she is universal. She uses millions of millions of brain-filters, all different, and all at the same time, in her thought-factory; the results some of us refilter to render them purer! The proceeding is ludicrous in the extreme at first sight, but it is amusing; and, strange to say, like the uproar of a mob, or sounds from a thousand blacksmiths’ forges, they unite into final harmoniousness.

Of my latter works above named, “The New Day” only has passed from darkness through man’s cerebral filter into the light. They have all been written during the mental cheerfulness of much bodily suffering, of which I have a pretty good twinge as I now scribble. A cracked hip never ceases to reproach me for having fallen on it, and cracked dreams pursue me through the night; but I can still smile, though I have no teeth to add grace to that labial twist which is so expressive of contentment.

All is for the best, devils on ticket-of-leave notwithstanding. Apparent evil generates and brings about good. Could we only obtain one glimpse of the invisible, which is so vast in comparison with all we dream of, how amazingly concurrent in this my view would men become. All would be judges; as on the delivery of a judgment from a full bench, all would say, “I concur.”