26.
II.—THE DANICHESTERS.
It did not seem so while I was writing it, but now that my book is finished, it strikes me as one of the oddest works I have ever read. You can never tell what is coming next. Even to me it was a series of surprises. Read the first ten lines of any chapter. Now read the last ten. Heavens, how did he get there! I seem never to know whither, or how far I am going. It has been the same with me all my life. Often, as a boy, I have set out for a neighbor’s on a mule, and not gone all the way.
Another singular trait about this book is what I must be allowed to call its unconscious humor. A strange thing to say about one’s own book; but somehow, when I am reading it, I can’t shake off the impression that some other fellow wrote it, or that I wrote it in my sleep,—so many things do I find in it which I could almost swear I never thought of in my life. And there are a dozen passages in it where I slapped my thigh, crying out, Good! Good! And more than once I caught myself saying, By Jove, I should like to know the old boy who wrote this!
Yet, never in my life was I more serious than when I sat down to write this work; for it was the solemn, theological, Huguenot molecules of my brain that set me to writing; and the book was to be too grave to bring a ripple to the beak of a Laughing Jackass,—that jovial kingfisher whose professional hilarity cheers the lone Australian shepherd.
Now, since man—as every college-boy knows—and it is well to know something—since man is but the sum of his ancestors modified by his environment, whence have I derived this trait of mine, this unconscious humor,—the gift, that is, of making people laugh without intending it? Many persons have it, but where did I get it?
Not from the business-like Whackers, surely. Still less from the Pope-hating Bouches. I must derive it from my Danichester blood. From this source, too, I must get another characteristic,—that of being sad when others are gay. In the midst of piping and fiddling I sometimes ask my heart what is the use of it all. And ofttimes, while I have stood smiling as I looked upon a group of merry children at play, I could feel the tears trickling back upon my heart.
Family traits are generally modified (Darwin, passim) from generation to generation. Thus, the grandson of a painter will be a musician, perhaps; and many literary people are sons of clergymen. There is similarity rather than identity. And so this vein of sadness, which lies so deep in me that few or none of my friends have ever suspected its existence, crops out in one of my progenitors. I allude to Olaf Danichester, Gent., whose daughter Gunhilda was married to John Whacker, merchant, London, in the seventeenth year of the reign of glorious Queen Bess.
Now, from all accounts, this ancestor of ours had a most extraordinary way of saying things that no one else would ever have thought of; added to which was the singularity that, after he had run through the fortune brought to him by his second wife, he was never known to smile. And it is no secret to the Whacker connection (though not generally known in literary circles) that the immortal Shakespeare, who often sat with him over a cold cut and a tankard of ale in the parlor of his prosperous son-in-law (J. W.), has embalmed him for posterity in the melancholy Jaques.
Now, the difference between Olaf Danichester and myself is simply that he gave utterance to his sad thoughts, while I keep mine to myself. I am a mere modification of him, just as he was of his valiant progenitor, Vagn Akason, the Viking. This Vagn, though an eminent waterman in his day, did not come over to America in the Mayflower,—chiefly because he was killed centuries before she sailed, but in part, also, because he felt no wish to make others worship God after his fashion; which was a very poor fashion, I fear, from the account given of him in our Records. At any rate, he was a marvellously handsome fellow, this Viking bold; and when he went forth to battle, a storm of yellow hair, as Motherwell says, floated over his broad shoulders,—so that he looked for all the world like Lohengrin. But I suspect he was not the kind of man we should select, at the present day, as superintendent of a Sunday-school. For one thing, he was a most omnipotous drinker; nor should I ever have admitted that I had a drop of his blood in my veins had it not been necessary for me, as a Darwinian, to account for my unconscious humor. And if these words savor of conceit, let us call it my trick of saying and doing the most unexpected things. Hear the account of the death of this brave young sea-rover, and see whether I do not come honestly by this trait:
He, with seventeen of his companions, had been captured, and had been made, according to the custom of those rude days, to straddle a large log, one behind the other, with their hands tied behind their backs. Up came, then, the victor, Jarl Hakon (after a leisurely breakfast of pork chops), to strike off their heads. This, to us, seems unkind; but having one’s head chopped off was such a matter of course in those days that no one ever thought for an instant of minding it in the least. Give and take was the way they looked at it.