INTRODUCTORY AND EPISODICAL—MEASURING-WORMS, DUSSELDORF PICTURES, AND PARISIAN FORTUNE-TELLERS.
This is going to be an odd jumble.
Without being an odd jumble, it could not possibly reflect American life and manners at the present time with any degree of fidelity; for the foundations of the old in society have been broken up as effectually, within the past two years, as were those of the great deep at the time of Noah's flood, and the disruption has not taken place long enough ago for the new to have assumed any appearance of stability. The old deities of fashion have been swept away in the flood of revolution, and the new which are eventually to take their place have scarcely yet made themselves apparent through the general confusion. The millionaire of two years ago, intent at that time on the means by which the revenues from his brown-stone houses and pet railroad stocks could be spent to the most showy advantage, has become the struggling man of to-day, intent upon keeping up appearances, and happy if diminished and doubtful rents can even be made to meet increasing taxes. The struggling man of that time has meanwhile sprung into fortune and position, through lucky adventures in government transportations or army contracts; and the jewelers of Broadway and Chestnut street are busy resetting the diamonds of decayed families, to sparkle on brows and bosoms that only a little while ago beat with pride at an added weight of California paste or Kentucky rock-crystal. The most showy equipages that have this year been flashing at Newport and Saratoga, were never seen between the bathing-beach and Fort Adams, or between Congress Spring and the Lake, in the old days; and if opera should ever revive, and the rich notes of melody repay the impresario, as they enrapture the audience at the Academy, there will be new faces in the most prominent boxes, almost as outre and unaccustomed in their appearance there as was that of the hard-featured Western President, framed in a shock head and a turn-down collar, meeting the gaze of astonished Murray Hill, when he passed an hour here on his way to the inauguration.
Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly—impotent for good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the estimation men have held of themselves, and the light in which they presented themselves to each other.
Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we know to be truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability. The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through any thing more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live, has fallen and been destroyed; and yet the nation does not die, but gives promise of a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth the young and vigorous new. Change, transition, every where and in all things: how can society fail to be disrupted, and who can speak, write, or think with the calm decorum of by-gone days?
All this is obtrusively philosophical, of course, and correspondingly out of place. But it may serve as a sort of forlorn hope—mental food for powder—while the narrative reserve is brought forward; and there is a dim impression on the mind of the writer that it may be found to have some connection with that which is necessarily to follow.
So let the odd jumble be prepared, perhaps with ingredients as incongruous as those which at present compose what we used to call the republic, and as unevenly distributed as have been honors and emoluments during a struggle which should have found every man in his place, and every national energy employed to its best purpose.
I was crossing the City Hall Park to dinner at Delmonico's, one afternoon early in July, in company with a friend who had spent some years in Europe, and only recently returned. He may be called Ned Martin, for the purposes of this narration. He had left the country in its days of peace and prosperity, a frank, whole-souled young artist, his blue eyes clear as the day, and his faith in humanity unbounded. He had resided for a long time at Paris, and at other periods been sojourning at Rome, Florence, Vienna, Dusseldorf, and other places where art studies called him or artist company invited him. He had come back to his home and country after the great movements of the war were inaugurated, and when the great change which had been initiated was most obvious to an observing eye. I had heard of his arrival in New York, but failed to meet him, and not long after heard that he had gone down to visit the lines of our army on the Potomac. Then I had heard of his return some weeks after, and eventually I had happened upon him drinking a good-will glass with a party of friends at one of the popular down-town saloons, when stepping in for a post-prandial cigar. The result of that meeting had been a promise that we would dine together one evening, and the after-result was, that we were crossing the Park to keep that promise.
I have said that Ned Martin left this country a frank, blue-eyed, happy-looking young artist, who seemed to be without a care or a suspicion. It had only needed a second glance at his face, on the day when I first met him at the bar of the drinking-saloon, to know that a great change had fallen upon him. He was yet too young for age to have left a single furrow upon his face; not a fleck of silver had yet touched his brown hair, nor had his fine, erect form been bowed by either over-labor or dissipation. Yet he was changed, and the second glance showed that the change was in the eyes. Amid the clear blue there lay a dark, sombre shadow, such as only shows itself in eyes that have been turned inward. We usually say of the wearer of such eyes, after looking into them a moment, 'That man has studied much;' 'has suffered much;' or, 'he is a spiritualist.' By the latter expression, we mean that he looks more or less beneath the surface of events that meet him in the world—that he is more or less a student of the spiritual in mentality, and of the supernatural in cause and effect. Such eyes do not stare, they merely gaze. When they look at you, they look at something else through you and behind you, of which you may or may not be a part.
Let me say here, (this chapter being professedly episodical,) that the painter who can succeed in transferring to canvas that expression of seeing more than is presented to the physical eye, has achieved a triumph over great difficulties. Frequent visitors to the old Dusseldorf Gallery will remember two instances, perhaps by the same painter, of the eye being thus made to reveal the inner thought and a life beyond that passing at the moment. The first and most notable is in the 'Charles the Second Fleeing from the Battle of Worcester.' The king and two nobles are in the immediate foreground, in flight, while far away the sun is going down in a red glare behind the smoke of battle, the lurid flames of the burning town, and the royal standard just fluttering down from the battlements of a castle lost by the royal arms at the very close of Cromwell's 'crowning mercy.' Through the smoke of the middle distance can be dimly seen dusky forms in flight, or in the last hopeless conflict. Each of the nobles at the side of the fugitive king is heavily armed, with sword in hand, mounted on heavy, galloping horses going at high speed; and each is looking out anxiously, with head turned aside as he flies, for any danger which may menace—not himself, but the sovereign. Charles Stuart, riding between them, is mounted upon a dark, high-stepping, pure-blooded English horse. He wears the peaked hat of the time, and his long hair—that which afterward became so notorious in the masks and orgies of Whitehall, and in the prosecution of his amours in the purlieus of the capital—floats out in wild dishevelment from his shoulders. He is dressed in the dark velvet, short cloak, and broad, pointed collar peculiar to pictures of himself and his unfortunate father; shows no weapon, and is leaning ungracefully forward, as if outstripping the hard-trotting speed of his horse. But the true interest of this figure, and of the whole picture, is concentrated in the eyes. Those sad, dark eyes, steady and immovable in their fixed gaze, reveal whole pages of history and whole years of suffering. The fugitive king is not thinking of his flight, of any dangers that may beset him, of the companions at his side, or even of where he shall lay his periled head in the night that is coming. Those eyes have shut away the physical and the real, and through the mists of the future they are trying to read the great question of fate! Worcester is lost, and with it a kingdom: is he to be henceforth a crownless king and a hunted fugitive, or has the future its compensations? This is what the fixed and glassy eyes are saying to every beholder, and there is not one who does not answer the question with a mental response forced by that mute appeal of suffering thought: 'The king shall have his own again!'