“Ah, my son, my son,” he replied, with a rueful shake of the head but a smile upon his lips, “we must not think too much of improving our fare, especially on meagre days; but the fish is a very fine fish notwithstanding, and we will have it for dinner to-morrow.”
I have dwelt long upon this little incident; for it was a very important one in my eyes at the time, and was not altogether without its influence upon my life. But I shall only pause to state here that Father Bonneville made more of me from that time forth than he had ever done before. Previously he had contented himself by giving me my lessons daily, by speaking a few kindly words to me at meal times, and turning me over for the rest of the day to his good old housekeeper. Now, however, I seemed to be fit for something better. Father Bonneville was very fond of fish, as most priests are, and every Tuesday and Thursday evening I was down at the banks of the lake or of the river; and as I had great perseverance, and rapidly became skillful, Father Bonneville very rarely went without fish of some kind for his dinner on Wednesdays and Fridays, so that fasting became somewhat of a farce—except in Lent indeed—except in Lent, when he made tremendous work with us.
——
A PRIEST’S HOUSEHOLD.
I must give my pictures of the early part of my life, detached and phantasmagoria-like as they appear to the eye of memory. But yet I will supply as far as possible any links of connection which are afforded by that power which is to memory what the second rainbow, which we sometimes see, is to the first—the reflection of a reflection—I am not quite sure that that is philosophical—but it is a figure, and it is pretty—so let it stand, it will do for Boston—the power I speak of is commonly termed reminiscence—a shadow of remembrance which overtops the mountain, and is seen indistinctly after the prototype has sunk behind the steep—God bless me, I am getting into Boston again. Well, upon my life I will be sober, notwithstanding the sixteen gallon act.
The catching a fish was my first great exploit in life, and I could evidently see that Father Bonneville paused and pondered over it, as was his character; for he was a very considerate and thoughtful man, by no means without powers of observation, and a great habit of reasoning a priori, which sometimes misled him a little. He made me tell him the whole story of the catching of the fish, and of how I had managed it. You may judge I dilated not a little, partly from the interest of the subject to myself, and partly from the difficulty which every child, and every novelist in three volumes, finds in clothing his thoughts in brief language. I found afterward that he had deduced his own conclusions from premises which I had afforded; and I am happy to say they were all favorable to me. He had deduced, I learnt, from my catching the rod before it fell into the water, that I possessed considerable quickness and presence of mind. He had inferred from the fact of my having got the line through my hands before I attempted to strain the rod, that there was a great deal of cautiousness and foresight in my disposition; and by the pains I had taken, and the labor I had undergone, without flinching, or growing rash or angry, he was led to believe that I was of a most persevering, undaunted, and resolute disposition. In a word, he learned to think me a being more deserving of care and cultivation than he had previously imagined; that I was not a mere baby to be taught his A B C in any science, and that there was a soil, beneath the green freshness of my youth, which might be cultivated to great advantage.
But let us give a slight sketch of the good Father, as he sat with his little tight-fitting black cap upon his head, looking like one half of a negro melon. The dress was insignificant—mean—out of the way, which is worse. The plain cassock and bands, the scapulary and the cross, and the grand three-cornered hat, had not surely much to recommend the individual member of the profession. There was no trickery of dress. There was no superfluous ornament. Even the assumption of manner was repressed, and, as far as I can recollect, he always seemed to remember sensitively, that a priest in the chair or the confessional derived whatever authority he possessed from a higher source, which conferred none upon him as an individual. The reverse of this feeling is the crying sin of the priesthood of all the creeds I know, and especially of his own. Most men would listen reverently to the expounders of God’s will, when they are expounding his will, if they would not carry their cathedra into the drawing-room or the parlor with them. It is very wise, indeed, to make a marked distinction between the minister and the man, and still more wise to make a marked distinction between the functions of the minister and the man; for where the two are blended together—either through the stupidity of the people or the arrogance of the priest—it will be found nine times out of ten that the weaknesses of the man (not to notice vices or crimes) overwhelm the qualities of the teacher. Amongst a nation, indeed, who, as a nation, acknowledge no authority but themselves, either in matters civil, politic or religious—where every man is at liberty to set up his own little God Almighty in his garden, and to worship him after what fashion he pleases—this distinction is not so necessary; for each minister being chosen by the flock which he has to instruct, must know beforehand tolerably well what is the sort of pabula best suited to their palates, while the flock, on their part, having chosen their man, with their eyes very wide open, must either stultify themselves, or cry him up as one of the bright lights of the age. If not, why did they choose him to light them? They become as much interested in his personal as in his public character—for it is very disagreeable for an elder of a congregation, unless he have some personal quarrel with his dear friend, the minister, to lay his hand upon his heart and say, “I have been grievously mistaken”—and many a small offense—nay, many a great one in the pastor is smoothed over and polished with the varnish-vanity of a loving congregation, who adore themselves in the minister they have selected, and even in the very church are worshiping themselves, in him, instead of the Deity. Of all sorts of idolatry in the world—and there are many—surely the worst in the eyes of a pure Being must be self idolatry.
I have strayed from my subject; but a bold leap, and we are back again. See him there, sitting in his easy arm-chair, with the little black cap upon his head, to cover the work of time rather than the ravages of the razor, with the soft, silky locks, now almost snow-white, floating from underneath it, and the dark garments, never laid aside except when at rest, enveloping the whole figure. Yet what an air of calm and tranquil dignity in the very disposition of that figure, and in that mild, benignant face. Where are the cares and sorrows of life? What have anxious thought, and the arduous duties, well performed, of a laborious profession done in this case? Where are the pangs, the sicknesses, the wasting force of disease, the corporeal pains, the uneasy weakness of senility? They are not there. He rests in his chair as easily as a child—ay, and as gracefully too. Oh, the balm, the blessed balm, such as Gilead never knew, of a pure, high, and holy heart, which, preserving and refreshing continually the spirit that dwells within it, with that aromatic odor of the tree of life, imparts a portion of the sovereign antidote even to the frail form of clay, and guards it against the shock of time, or the wearying war of circumstances! Few of the impatient, the irritable, the passionate, the children of caprice, the slaves of vice, the hunters of excitement, ever see the age to which Father Bonneville had already attained, and those who do, reach it enfeebled, worn out, toil-broken, and shriveled up by the struggles, and the wanderings, and the difficult passes, and the burning suns, which they themselves have sought and found upon the way. Father Bonneville’s had been a quiet and a placid life—I know nothing of his history—I never heard it—but the part I speak of was written on his face. Father Bonneville’s had been a quiet and a placid life—I am quite sure of it: otherwise he could have never lived to be the calm, happy, benignant old man he was at sixty-three. On his face you hardly saw his age; for it was as smooth as a boy’s, but those white hairs, and the necessity of using spectacles now and then, betrayed the fact that he was not quite so young as he once had been. His teeth—I recollect them as they were even then, quite well—were beautifully white and even, but the old man used to say, that though he hoped his tongue was true, his mouth was an artful hypocrite; for it put its best arguments forward, and kept all that were worthless and unserviceable behind; in other words, that the front teeth might be good enough, but that those hard-working slaves of the stomach, the grinders, were gone—and this was, probably, the cause of his love of fish. Heaven bless the finny fellows! they are seldom, any of them, tough, and the worst one has to fear is a bone or an indigestion; though it is rather hard, I think, to be pulled out of a fresh stream, and put upon a gridiron.
Father Bonneville was a very learned man, too, as well as a good one. He had read very much, for he had much leisure; had studied many languages and many things, and moreover had reasoned upon what he studied. All this I found out afterward; for at the time I speak of, though he made a point of instructing me himself every day, the store of erudition required for my mental food was but small. His lessons were given in a very different way from any other lessons that I ever received or ever heard of. He would sit down and open a book, and then begin to talk to me upon some apparently indifferent subject; but somehow before five minutes had passed, he had always contrived to bring the conversation round to something which the book contained, or which it explained, or which it elucidated. Then we would read a sentence or two, and then pause, and comment, and converse, sometimes remarking the language, and the niceties of style and grammar, sometimes dwelling upon the thoughts expressed or the facts related. It is wonderful how this course impressed every thing upon my mind. All that I read seemed to be surrounded by a sort of artificial memory; for every word was connected with these conversations, and the one always served to bring the other to remembrance. It took a little longer time, it is true; I read one page of Cæsar where another boy might read two; but I both remembered and understood what I had read, and possibly the other might not; nor am I at all sure that I did not make as much progress in the end.
Where I got the first rudiments of education I do not know; for I cannot remember the period that I could not read or write, when I could not add up a sum with tolerable exactness, or draw helmets, and swords, and battle-axes, and very ugly faces, and men with enormous pig-tails, on the first leaf of a spelling-book. I have a faint idea that I was very ill when I first came to the house of Father Bonneville, and that illness may probably be the sort of gauze curtain which hangs between the eye of memory and the period antecedent, not altogether hiding the figures beyond, but rendering them confused and indistinct.