My Unknown Chum Part 11

MEMORIALS OF MRS. GRUNDY

Of all the studies to which I was ever impelled in my youth, either by fear of the birch or by the hope of the laurel or the bays, mythology was perhaps the most charming. It was refres.h.i.+ng, after trying in vain to conjugate a verb, and being at last obliged to decline itafter adding up a column of figures several times, and getting many different results, and none of them the right oneand after making a vain attempt to comprehend the only algebraic knowledge that ever was forced into my unmathematical brain, viz., that _x_ equals an unknown quant.i.ty,it was, I say, refres.h.i.+ng to turn over the leaves of my Cla.s.sical Dictionary, and revel among the G.o.ds and heroes whose wondrous careers were embalmed in its well-thumbed pages. Lemprire was the great magician who summoned up before my delighted eyes the denizens of a sphere where existence was unvexed by any pestilent arithmetics, and where the slavery of the inky desk was unknown. It always seemed to me as if the knowledge that I gained out of those enchanted chronicles not only improved my mind, but made my body more robust; for I joined in the chase, fought desperate battles, as the G.o.ds willed it, and breathed all the while the pure, invigorating air of old Olympus. The consecrated groves were the dwelling-place of my mind, and I became for a time a sharer in the joys of beings in whom I believed with all the ardour and simplicity of childhood. I enjoyed my mythological readings all the more because they did not generally find favour with my school companions, most of whom vindicated their nationality by professing their affection for the Rule of Three. One of them, I remember, was especially severe on the uselessness of the studies in which I took pleasure. He, _parcus deorum cultor, et infrequens_, could get no satisfaction out of the books in which I revelled; if _he_ had got to study or read, he could not afford to waste his brains over the foolish superst.i.tions of three thousand years ago. He did not care how much romance and poetic beauty there might be in the ancient mythology: what did it all come to in the end?

It didnt pay. It was a humbug. Our paths in life separated when we graduated from jackets and peg-tops. He remained faithful to his boyish instincts, and pursued the practical as if it were a reality. After a few years his face lost all its youthful look; an intense spirit of acquisitiveness gleamed in his calculating eye, and an interest table seemed to be written in the lines of his care-worn countenance. We seldom had any conversation in our after years, for he always seemed to be under some restraint, as if he feared that I wished to borrow a little money of him, and he did not wish to refuse for the sake of the old time when we sat at the same desk, although he knew that my note was good for nothing. His devotion to his deity, the practical, did not go unrewarded. He became like the only mythological personage whom he would have envied, had he known any thing of the science he despised. His touch seemed to trans.m.u.te every thing into gold. His speculations during the war of 1812 were all successful. Eastern lands harmed him not. The financial panic of 1837 only put money in his purse. He rolled up a large fortune, and was happy. He looked anxious, but of course he was happy. What man ever devoted his life to the working out of the dreams of his youth in the acquisition of riches, and succeeded beyond his antic.i.p.ations, without being very happy? But, if his gains were something practical and real, his losses were doubly so. Each one of them was as a dagger stuck into that sere heart. His only son gave him much trouble by his wild life, and, what touched him still more, wasted the money he had laboured to pile up, at the gaming tables of Baden. I saw him walking down Tremont Street the other day, looking care-worn and miserable, and I longed to ask him what he thought of the real and practical after trying them. He would certainly have been willing to acknowledge that there is more reality in the romance and poetry of mythology than in the thousands which he invested in the Bay State Mills. His practical life has brought him vanity and vexation of spirit, while the old Lemprire, which he used to treat so contemptuously, flourishes in immortal youth, unhurt amid the wreck of fortunes and the depreciation of stocks.

But I am not writing an essay on mythology. I wish to treat of one who is sometimes considered a myth, but who is a living and breathing personality like all of us. This wide-spread scepticism is one of the most fatal signs of the times. Because the late Mrs. Sairey Gamp supposed herself justified in cultivating a little domestic mythology in the shade of the famous Mrs. Harris, are we to take all the personages who have ill.u.s.trated history as myths and unrealities? Shade of Herodotus, forbid it! There are some unbelieving and irreverent enough to doubt whether there is really such a person as Mrs. Partington; other some there are so hardened in their incredulity as to question the existence of the individual who smote Mr. William Patterson, and even of the immortal recipient of the blow himself. Therefore we ought not to think it strange that the lady whose name adorns the t.i.tle of this article should not have escaped the profane spirit of the age.

Unfortunately for us, Mrs. Grundy is no myth, but a terrible reality.

She is a widow. The late Mr. Grundy bore it with heroic patience as long as he could, and then, by a divine dispensation in which he gladly acquiesced, was relieved of the burden of life. If he be not happy now, the great doctrine of compensation is nought but a delusion and a sham.

If endless happiness could only be attained through such a purgatory as poor Grundys life, few of us, I fear, would yearn to be counted among the elect. Martyrs, and confessors, and saints of every degree have won their crowns of beat.i.tude with comparative ease; if they had been subjected to a twenty years novitiate with Mrs. Grundy and her tireless tongue, they would have found how much more terrible that was than the laborious life or cruel death by which they pa.s.sed from earth, and fewer bulls of canonization would have received the Seal of the Fisherman. I have heard from those who were acquainted with that estimable and uncomplaining man that he married for love. His wife was a person of considerable attractions, of an inquiring turn of mind, and of uncommon energy of character. In her care of his household there was nothing of which he might with reason complain. She kept a sharp look-out over all those matters in which the prudent housewife delights to show her skill; her table was worthy to receive regal legs beneath its s.h.i.+ning mahogany and spotless cloth, and I have even heard that her husband never had occasion to curse mentally over the lack of a s.h.i.+rt-b.u.t.ton. Yet was Giles Grundy, Esquire, one of the most miserable of men. Of what avail was it to him that his wife could preserve quinces, if she could not preserve her own peace of mind? What did it matter how well she cured hams, if she always failed so miserably in curing her tongue? What profit was it that her accounts with her butcher and grocer were always correctly kept, if her accounts of all her neighbours constantly overran and kept her and her spouse in a perpetual state of moral bankruptcy?

What difference did it make how well she took care of her own family, if they were to be kept in an unending turmoil by her solicitude concerning that of every body else?

If you had visited Mrs. Grundy, and remarked the brightness of the door-knocker, the stair-rods, the andirons, and every other part of her premises that was susceptible of polish, and the scrupulous cleanliness that held absolute sway around her, you would have sworn that she was gifted with the hundred arms of Briareus: if you had listened for fifteen minutes to her observations of men and things, you would have had a conviction amounting to absolute certainty that she possessed the eyes of Argus. n.o.body ever doubted that she was a most religious person.

She attended to all her religious duties with most edifying exactness.

She was always in her seat at church, and could tell you, to a bonnet ribbon, the dress of every person who honoured the sacred edifice with his or her presence. If you would know who of the congregation were so lacking in fervour of spirit as to neglect to bow in the creed, or to commit the impropriety of nodding during the sermon, Mrs. Grundy could give you all the information you could wish. She carried out the divine precept to the letter: she watched as well as prayed. But her religion did not waste itself in mere devotional ecstasy; it took the most attractive form of religionthat of active benevolence. And her pious philanthropy was not of that exclusively telescopic character that looks out for the interests of the Cannibal Islands and the king thereof, and cannot understand that there is any spiritual dest.i.tution nearer home.

She subscribed, it is true, to support the missionaries with their wives and numerous children, who were devoted to the G.o.dly work of converting the Chinese and the Juggernauts; but she did something also in the way of food and flannel for the victims of want in her own neighbourhood.

She established a sewing circle in the parish where she lived, and never appeared happier than when busily engaged with her female companions in their weekly task and talk. I am afraid that there was other sowing done in that circle besides plain sewing. The seeds of domestic unhappiness and strife were carried from thence into all parts of the parish.

Reputations as well as garments took their turn among those benevolent ladies, and were cut out, and fitted, and basted, and sewed up, and overcast. The sewing circle was Mrs. Grundys confessional. Do not misapprehend meI would not asperse her character by accusing her of what are known at the present day as "Romanizing tendencies"; for she lived long before the "scarlet fever" invaded the University of Oxford and carried off its victims by hundreds; and n.o.body ever suspected her of any desire to tell her own offences in the ear of any human being.

No, she detested the Roman confessional in a becoming manner; but she upheld, by word and example, that most scriptural inst.i.tution, the sewing circlethe Protestant confessional, where each one confesses, not her own sins, but the sins of her neighbours. Mrs. Grundys success with her favourite inst.i.tution encouraged others to emulate her example; and now sewing circles are common wherever the mother tongue of that benevolent lady is spoken. It must in justice be acknowledged that there are few inst.i.tutions of human invention which have departed from the spirit of their original founder so little as the sewing circle.

Yet, in spite of all her virtues as a housekeeper, a philanthropist, and a Christian, Mrs. Grundy had her enemies. Some people were uncharitable enough to say that she was the cause of more trouble than all the rest of the female population of the town. They accused her of setting herself up as a censor, and giving judgments founded upon hearsay testimony rather than sound legal evidence. They even said that she made her visits among the poor a cloak for the gratification of her inquisitiveness; and, if it is ever pardonable to judge of the motives of a fellow-being, I think that, in consideration of their exasperation, they must be excused for making so unkind a charge, it seemed to be so well founded. Far be it from me to say that Mrs. Grundy ever wilfully misrepresented. She would have shrunk instinctively from a falsehood.

But she delighted to draw inferences; and no fact or rumour ever came to her without being cla.s.sified properly in her mental history of her neighbours, and being made to shed its full influence upon her next conversation. It is astonis.h.i.+ng how much one pair of eyes and ears will do in the collection of information when a person is devoted to it in earnest. In her younger days, Mrs. Grundy had taken pleasure in watching her neighbours and keeping up a running commentary on their movements; as she advanced in life, it became her business. Her efforts in that way were rather in the style of an amateur up to the time of her marriage; afterwards she adopted a professional air. She placed herself at her favourite window, ornamenting its seat with her spools, and though she st.i.tched away with commendable industry, nothing escaped her that came within range of her keen powers of observation.

If Mr. Brown called on Mrs. White over the way, Mrs. Grundy set it down as a remarkable occurrence: if he repeated his visit a week later, she would not declare it positively scandalous, but it was evident that her nicer sense of propriety was deeply wounded: if he pa.s.sed by the door without calling, it was clear that there had been a falling outthat Mrs. White had seen the error of her ways, or that her husband had, and had given Brown a warning. If a stranger was seen exercising Joness bell-pull on two consecutive days, this indefatigable woman allowed not her eyes to sleep nor her eyelids to slumber until she had satisfied herself concerning his name and purpose. If Mr. Thompson waited upon pretty Miss Jenkins home in a shower, and treated her kindly and politely, (and who could do otherwise with a young angel in blue and drab, who might charm a Kaffir or a Sepoy into urbanity?) Mrs. Grundy straightway inst.i.tuted inquiries among all the neighbours as to whether it was true that they were engaged. After this fas.h.i.+on did Mrs. Grundy live. Her words have been known to blast a reputation which under the suns.h.i.+ne of prosperity and the storms of misfortune had sustained itself with equal grace and honour. It was useless to bring up proofs of a life of integrity against her sentence or her knowing smile. There was no appeal from her decision. Not that she was uncharitable,only it did seem as if she were rather more willing to believe evil of her neighbours than good; and she appeared slow to trust in the repentance of any one who had ever fallen into sin, especially if the person were of her own s.e.x. I am not complaining of this peculiarity; we must be circ.u.mspect and strict, and mercy is a quality too rare and divine to be wasted on every trivial occasion. But I cannot help thinking that, if the penitent found it as hard to gain the absolving smile of that Power to which alone we are answerable for our misdeeds as to reinstate himself in the good graces of Mrs. Grundy, how few of us could have any hope of the beatific vision!

Mrs. Grundy had great influence; she was respected and feared. People found that she would give her opinion _ex cathedra_, and that, however unfounded that opinion might be, there were those who would recho it until common repet.i.tion gave it the force of truth; so they tried to conciliate her by graduating their actions according to what they supposed would be her judgment. When this was seen, she began to be envied by some who had once hated her, and her idiosyncrasies were made the study of many of her s.e.x who longed to share her empire over the thoughts and actions of their fellow-creatures. Thus, by a sort of multiplex metempsychosis, were Mrs. Grundys virtues perpetuated, and she was endowed with a species of omnipresence. In this country Mrs.

Grundy is a power. She is the absolute sovereign of America. Her reign there is none to dispute. Our national motto ought to be, instead of _E pluribus unum_, "What will Mrs. Grundy say?" There is no cla.s.s in our community over which she does not exercise more or less power. Our politicians, when they cease to regard their influence as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, act, not from any fixed principles, but with a single eye to the good will of Mrs. Grundy. If a man is buying a house, it is ten chances to one that Mrs. Grundys opinion concerning gentility of situation will carry the day against cosiness and real comfort. If your wife or daughter goes to buy a dress, Mrs. Grundys taste will be consulted in preference to the durability of the fabric or the condition of your purse. Mrs. Grundy dictates to us how we shall furnish our houses, and prescribes to us our whole rule of life. Under her stern sway, mult.i.tudes are living beyond their means, and trying to avert the bankruptcy and unhappiness that inevitably await them. It is not merely in the management of temporal affairs that Mrs. Grundy makes her power felt. Her vigilance checks many a generous impulse, stands between the resolution to do justice and its execution, and is a fruitful source of hypocrisy. She presides over the pulpit; the power of wardens and vestrymen is swallowed up by her; and the minister who can dress up his weekly dish of moral commonplaces so as not to offend her discriminating taste deserves to retain his place, and merits the unanimous admiration of the whole sewing circle. She is to be found in courts of law, animating the opposing parties, and enjoying the contest; actions of slander are an agreeable recreation to her; pet.i.tions for divorce give her unmixed joy. Like the fury, Alecto, so finely described by Virgil, Mrs. Grundy can arm brothers to deadly strife against each other, and stir up the happiest homes with infernal hatred; to her belong a thousand woful arts_Sibi nomina mille, mille nocendi artes_.

Mrs. Grundys philanthropy confines itself to no particular cla.s.s; it is universal. Nothing that relates to human kind is alien to her. There is nothing earthly so high that she does not aspire to control it, nor any thing too contemptible for her not to wish to know all about it.

Mrs. Grundy is omnipresent. Go where you will, you cannot escape from her presence. She stands guard unceasingly over your front door and back windows. Her watchful eye follows you wheneer you take your walks abroad. Your name is never mentioned that she is not by, and seriously inclined to hear aught that may increase her baleful stock of knowledge.

It is all the same to her whether you have lived uprightly or viciously; beneath her Gorgon glance all human actions are petrified alike. And if she does not succeed in sowing discord around your hearthstone, and in driving you to despair and self-murder, as she did poor Henry Herbert the other day, it will be because you are not cursed with his fiery sensitiveness, and not because she lacks the will to do it.

There is but one way in which the Grundian yoke can be thrown off. We must treat her as the English wit treated an insignificant person who had insulted him; we must "let her alone severely." We pay a certain kind of allegiance to her if we take notice of her for the purpose of running counter to her notions. We must ignore her altogether. It is true, this requires a great deal of moral courage, particularly in a country where every body knows every body elses business; but it is an easier task to acquire that courage than to submit patiently to Mrs.

Grundys dictation and interference. Who shall estimate the happiness of that millennial period when we shall cease to ask ourselves before our every action, "What will Mrs. Grundy say?" and shall begin in earnest to live up to the golden rule that counsels us to mind our own business?

When that day comes, what a world this will be! How will superficial morality and skin-deep propriety, envy and uncharitableness, be diminished! How will contentment, and mutual good will, and domestic peace be augmented! Think on these things, O beloved reader; mind your own business, and the day is not far distant when, for you at least, the iron sceptre of Dame Grundy shall be powerless, and the spell broken that held you in so humiliating a thraldom.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

Life is what we make it. The same scenes wear a very different appearance to an ingenuous youth "in the bright morning of his virtues, in the full spring blossom of his hopes," and to the disappointed wretch who gazes on them "with the eyes of sour misanthropy." The horse that was turned by his benevolent owner into a carpenters shop, with a pair of green spectacles prefixed to his nose, and mistook the dry pine shavings for his legitimate fodder, was very much in the condition of a youth looking upon life and yielding to the natural enthusiasm of his unwarped spirit. Like the n.o.ble brute, however, the young man is undeceived as soon as he tries to sustain himself with the vanities which look so tempting and nutritious. He may, like a Wolsey, a Charles V., or a Napoleon, attain to the heights of power before the delusive gla.s.ses drop off; but even though the moment be delayed until he lies gasping in the clutch of that monarch to whom the most absolute of sovereigns and the most radical of republicans alike must yield allegiance, it is sure to come, and show him the ashes that lay hid beneath the fair, ripe-looking rind of the fruit he climbed so high to obtain. Life pa.s.ses before us like a vast panorama, day by day and year by year unrolling and disclosing new scenes to charm us into self-forgetfulness. At one time, we breathe the bracing air of the mountains; at another, our eyes are gladdened by the sight of suns.h.i.+ny meadows, or of fertile and far-reaching prairies; and then the towered city, with its grove of masts and its busy wharves, makes all mere natural beauty seem insignificant in comparison with the enterprise and ambition of man; until, at last, the canvas is rolled away, the music ceases, the lights are put out, and we are left to realize that all in which we delighted was but an illusion and a "fleeting show."

Nevertheless, in spite of the vanities that surround us,in spite of the sublime world-sickness of Solomon and the Preacher, and the fierce satire of Juvenal, (who was as anxious to ascertain the precise weight of Hannibal as if that ill.u.s.trious _dux_ had been a prize-fighter,)there is considerable reality in life. The existence of so much sham and make-believe implies the existence of the real and true. Sir Thomas Browne tells us that "in seventy or eighty years a man may have a deep gust of the world"; and it were indeed melancholy if any one with hair as gray as mine should look despairingly over the field of human existence and effort, and cry, "All is barren."

Life, as I have before said, is whatever we choose to make it. Its true philosophy is that divine art which enables us to trans.m.u.te its every moment into the pure gold of heroic and changeless immortality. Without that philosophy, it is impossible for the world not to seem at times as it did to the desponding Danish prince, "a sterile promontory," and a "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." Without it, life is like an elaborate piece of embroidery, looked at from the wrong side; we cannot but acknowledge the brilliancy of some of its threads, and the delicate texture of the work, but its lack of system, and of any appearance of utility, fatigues the mind that hungers after perfection, and tempts it to doubt the divine wisdom and goodness from which it originated. With it, however, we gaze with admiration and awe upon the front of the same marvellous work. Our sense is no longer puzzled by any straggling threads, or loose ends; the exquisite colours, the contrast of light and shade, and the perfect symmetry and harmony of the design, fill the heart of the beholder with wonder and delight, and draw him nearer to the source of those ineffable perfections which are but imperfectly symbolized in the marvels of the visible universe.

The philosophy which can do all this is _sincerity_. "I think sincerity is better than grace," says Mr. T. Carlyle; and the Scotch savage is right. All the amenities of life that spring from any other source than a true heart, are but gratuitous hypocrisy. The kind-hearted knight whom I have already quoted showed how highly he esteemed this virtue when he said, "Swim smoothly in the stream of nature, _and live but one man_."

This double existence, that most of us support,that is, what we really are, and what we wish to be considered,is the source of many of our faults, and most of our vexation and wretchedness. He is the truly happy man who forgets that "appearances must be kept up," and remembers only that "each of us is as great as he appears in the sight of his Creator, and no greater." A great French philosopher has truly said, "How many controversies would be terminated, if the disputants were obliged to speak out exactly what they thought!" And surely he might have gone farther in the same line of thought; for how much heartburning, domestic unhappiness, dishonesty, and shameful poverty might be prevented, if my neighbour Jinkins and his wife were content to pa.s.s in the world for what they are, instead of a.s.suming a princely style of living that only makes their want of true refinement more apparent, and if Johnson and his wife could be induced not to imitate the vulgar follies of the Jinkinses! Believe me, incredulous reader, there is more wisdom in old Sir Thoma.s.s exhortation to "live but one man" than appears at first sight.

But to leave this great primary virtue, which policy teaches most men to practise, though they love it not,there are two or three principles of action which I have found very useful in my career, and which form a part of my philosophy of life. The first is, never to antic.i.p.ate troubles. Many years ago, I was travelling in a part of our common country not very thickly settled, and, coming to a place where two roads met, I applied, in my doubt as to which one I ought to take, to an old fellow (with a pair of shoulders like those of Hercules, and a face on which half a century of suns.h.i.+ne, and storm, and toddies had made an indelible record) who was repairing a rickety fence by the wayside. He scanned me with a look that seemed to take in not only my personal appearance, but the genealogy of my brave ancestor, who might have fallen in a duel if he had not learned how "to distinguish between the man and the act," and then directed me to turn to the left, as that road saved some three or four miles of the distance to the farm-house to which I was journeying. As it was spring-time, I manifested some anxiety to know whether the freshets, which had been having quite a run of business in some parts of the country, had done any damage to a bridge which I knew I must cross if I took the shorter road. He sneered at my forethought, and said he supposed that the bridge was all right, and that I had better "go ahead, and see." I was acting upon his advice, when a shout from his hoa.r.s.e, nasal voice caused me to look back. "I say, young man," he bawled out to me, "never cross a bridge till you come to it!" There was wisdom in the old mans rough-spoken sentence"solid chunks of wisdom," as Captain Edard Cuttle would fain express itand it sank deep into my memory. There are very few of us who have not a strong propensity to diminish our present strength by entertaining fears of future weakness. If we could content ourselves to "act in the living present,"if we could keep these telescopic evils out of sight, and use all our energies in grappling with the difficulties that actually beset our path,how much more we should achieve, and how greatly would our sum of happiness be increased!

Another most salutary principle in my philosophy is, never to allow myself to be frightened until I have examined and fairly established the necessity of such a humiliation. I adopted this principle in my childhood, being led to it in the following manner: I was visiting my grandfather, who lived in a fine old mansion-house in the country, with high wainscotings, capacious fireplaces, heavy beams in the ceilings, and wide-arching elms overshadowing the snug porch where two or three generations had made love. Sixty years and more have elapsed since that happy time, yet it seems fresher in my memory than the events of only quarter of a century back. My grandfather was a lover of books, and possessed a good deal of general information. He thought it as advisable to keep up with the history of his own times as to be skilled in that of empires long since pa.s.sed away. It is not to be wondered at that he should have treasured every newspaperespecially every foreign journalthat he could lay his hands upon. It was under his auspices that I first read the dreadful story of the Reign of Terror, and acquired my anti-revolutionary principles.

I shall never forget the bright autumnal afternoon when the mail coach from Boston brought a package of books and papers to my grandfather. It was the last friendly favour, in fact the last communication, that he ever received from his old Tory friend, Mr. Barmesyde, whom I mentioned with respect in a former essay; for that genial old gentleman died in London not long after. The parcel had made a quick transit for those days, Mr. Barmesydes letter being dated only forty-six days before it was opened by my grandsire, and we enjoyed the strong fragrance of its uncut contents together. The old gentleman seized upon a copy of Burkes splendid Essay on the French Revolution, which the package contained, and left me to revel in the newspapers, which were full of the dreadful details of that b.l.o.o.d.y Saturnalia. I got leave from my grandfather (who was so deep in Burke that he answered me at random) to sit up an hour later than usual. Terrible as all the things of which I read seemed to my young mind, there was a fascination about the details of that sanguinary orgie that completely enchanted me. My imagination was full of horrible shapes when I was obliged to leave the warm, cheerful parlour, and Robespierre, Danton, and Marat were the infernal chamberlains that attended me as I went up the broad, creaking staircase unwillingly to bed. A fresh north-west breeze was blowing outside, and the sere woodbines and honeysuckles that filled the house with fragrance, and gave it such a rural look in summer, startled me with their struggles to escape from bondage. Had it been spring, my young imagination was so excited that I should have feared that they might imitate the insurgents of whom I had been reading and begin to shoot! In the night my troubled slumbers were disturbed by a noise that seemed to me louder than the discharge of a heavy cannon. I sat up in the high, old-fas.h.i.+oned bed, and glared around the room, which was somewhat lighted by the beams of the setting moon. There was no mistake about my personal ident.i.tyI was neither royalist nor jacobin; there was no doubt that I was in the best "spare chamber" of my grandfathers house, and not in the Bastile, and that the dark-looking thing in the corner was a solid mahogany chest of drawers, and not a guillotine; but all these things only served to increase my terror when I noticed a dark form standing near the foot of the bed and staring at me with pale, fiery eyes. I rubbed my own eyes hard, and pinched myself severely, to make sure that I was awake. The room was as still as the great chamber in the pyramid of Cheops. I could hear the old clock tick at the foot of the stairs as plainly as if I had been shut up in its capacious case. In the midst of my perturbation it made every fibre of my frame tremble by striking _one_ with a solemn clangour that I thought must have waked every sleeper in the house. The stillness that followed was deeper and more terrifying than before. I heard distinctly the breathing of the monster at the foot of the bed. I tried to whistle at the immovable shape, but I had lost the power to pucker. At last, I formed a desperate resolution. I knew that, if the being whose big, fierce eyes filled me with terror were a genuine supernatural fiend, it was all over with me, and I might as well give up at once. But, if perchance a human form were hid beneath that dreadful disguise, there was some room for hope of ultimate escape. To settle this point, therefore, became necessary to my peace of mind, and I determined that it should be done. Bending up "each corporal agent to the terrible feat," I slid quietly out of bed. The monster was as motionless as before, but I noticed that his head was covered with a white cloth, which made his head seem ghastlier than ever. Setting my teeth firmly together, and clinching my little fists to persuade myself that I was not afraid, I made the last, decisive effort.

I walked across the room, and stood face to face with that formidable shape. My grandfathers best coat hung there against the wall, its velvet collar protected from the dust by a white cloth, and the two gilt b.u.t.tons on its back glittering in the moonlight. This was the tremendous presence that had appalled me. The weakness in the knees, the chattering of my teeth, and the profuse perspiration which followed my recognition of that harmless garment, bore witness to the severity of my fright.

Before I crawled back into the warm bed, I resolved never in future to yield to fear, until I had ascertained that there was no escape from it; and I have had many occasions since to act upon that principle.

Speaking of fear, a friend of mine has a favourite maxim, "Always do what you are afraid to do;" to which (in a limited sense, so far as it relates to bodily fear) I subscribed even in my boyhood. I was returning one evening to my grandfathers house, during one of my vacation visits, and yielded to the base sentiment of timidity so far as to choose the long way thither by the open road, rather than to take the short cut, through the graveyard and a little piece of woodland, which was the ordinary path in the daytime. I pursued my way, thinking of what I had done, until I got within sight of the old mansion and its guardian elms, when shame for my own cowardice compelled me to retrace my steps a quarter of a mile or more, and take the pathway I had so foolishly dreaded. The victory then achieved has lasted to this hour. Dead people and their habitations have not affrighted me since; indeed, some grave men whom I have met have excited my mirth rather than my fears.

But overcome our fears and our propensity to borrow trouble, as we may,in spite of all our philosophy, life is a severe task. I have heard of a worthy Connecticut parson of the old school, who enlarged upon the goodness of that Providence which dealt out time to a man, divided into minutes, and hours, and days, and months, and years, instead of giving it to him, as it were, in a lump, or in so large a quant.i.ty that he could not conveniently use it! Laugh as much as you please, gentle reader, at the seeming absurdity of the venerable divine, but do not neglect the great truth which inspired his thought. Do not forget what a great mercy it is that we are obliged to live but one day at a time. Do not overlook the loving kindness which softens the memory of past sorrows, and conceals from us those which are to come. I have no respect for that newest heresy of our age, which pretends to read the secrets of the unseen world, nor any sympathy with those morbid minds that yearn to tear away the veil which infinite wisdom and mercy hangs between us and the future. With all our boasted learning we know little enough; but that little is far too much for our happiness. How many of our trials and afflictions could we have borne, if we had been able to foresee their full extent and to antic.i.p.ate their combined poignancy? Truly we might say with Shakespeare,

"O, if this were seen, The happiest youthviewing his progress through, What perils past, what crosses to ensue Would shut the book, and sit him down and die."

He only is the true philosopher who uses life as the usurer does his gold, and employs each s.h.i.+ning hour so as to insure an ever-increasing rate of interest. He does not bury his gift, nor waste it in frivolity.

Like the old Doge of Venice, he grows old but does not wear out: _Senescit, non segnescit_. And he truly lives twice, as an old cla.s.sical poet expresses it, inasmuch as he renews his enjoyment of the past in the recollection of his good actions and of pleasures "such as leave no sting behind."

BEHIND THE SCENES

There is no pleasure so satisfactory as that which an old man feels in recalling the happiness of his youthful days. All the woes, and anxieties, and heart-burnings that disturbed him then have pa.s.sed away, and left only suns.h.i.+ne in his memory. And this retrospective enjoyment increases with every repeated recital, until the scenes of his past history a.s.sume a magnificence of proportion that bewilders the narrator himself, and sets the principles of optics entirely at defiance. It is with old men looking back on their younger days very much as it is with people who have travelled in Italy. How do the latter glow with enthusiasm at the mere mention of the "land of the melting lyre and conquering spear"! How do their eyes glisten as they tell of the time when they mused among the broken columns of the Forum, or breathed the air of ancient consecration under the majestic vaults of the old basilicas, or walked along the sh.o.r.es of the worlds most beautiful bay, and watched the black form of Vesuvius striving in vain to tarnish with its foul breath the blue canopy above it! They have forgotten their squabbles with the _vetturini_, the draughtless chimneys in their lodgings, and the dirty staircase that conducted to them; the fleas, with all the other disagreeable accompaniments of Italian life, have fled into oblivion; and Italy lives in their memories only as a land of gorgeous sunsets, and of a history that dwarfs all other human annals.

And so it is with an old man looking back upon his youth: he forgets how he cried over his arithmetic lessons; how unfilial his feelings were when his governor refused him permission to set up a theatre in the cellar; how sheepishly he slunk through all the back alleys on the day when he first mounted a tail-coat and a hat; how unhappy he was when he saw his hearts idol, Mary Smith, walking home from school with his implacable foe, Brown; how his head used to ache after those _noctes cnque dem_ with his club at the old Exchange Coffee House; and what a void was created in his heart when his crony of cronies was ordered off by a commission from the war department. There is no room in his crowded memory for such things as these. Sitting by his fireside, as I do now, he recalls his youth only as a season of bats and b.a.l.l.s, and marbles, of sleds, and skates, and bright b.u.t.tons, and clean ruffled collars, of Christmas cornucopias of hosiery, and no end of Artillery Elections and Fourths of July, with coppers enough to secure the potentiality of obtaining egg-pop to an alarming extent.

How he fires up if you mention the theatre to him! He will allow that Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Warren are most excellent in their way; but bless your simple heart, what is the stage now compared to what it was in the first part of this century? And he is about right. It is useless for us, who remember the old Federal Street playhouse, and the triumphs of Cooke and the great Kean, to try to go to the theatre now. Our new theatre is more stately and splendid than Old Drury was, but our players do not reach my youthful standard. I miss those old familiar faces and voices that delighted me in times long past, and the stage has lost most of its charms. I can find my best theatrical entertainment here at home. I call up from among the shadows that the flickering firelight casts upon the wall, the tall, knightly figure of Duff, the brisk, busy, scolding Mrs.

Barnes, the sedate and judicious d.i.c.kson, the grotesque Finn, the stately and elegant Mrs. Powell, looking like the personification of tragedy, and bluff old Kilner, fat and pleasant to the sight, and with that hearty laugh that made all who heard it love him.

What is the excitement occasioned by the Ellsler or Miss Lind compared to that which attended the advent of the elder Kean? What crowds used to beset the box office in the ten-footer next to the theatre, from the earliest dawn until the opening! I often think, when I meet some of our gravest and grayest citizens in their daily walks, what a figure they cut now compared with the days when they were fighting their way into the box office of the old theatre! Talk of enthusiasm! What are all our political campaigns and public commemorations compared with that evening during the last war with Great Britain, when Commodore Bainbridge came into Boston Bay after his victory over the Java! That admirable actor, the late Mr. Cooper, was playing Macbeth, and interrupted his performance to announce the victory.

But, pardon me, I did not sit down here to lose myself in the reminiscences of half a century ago. Let me try to govern this truant pen, and keep it more closely to my chosen theme. Do you remember, beloved reader, your second visit to the theatre? If you do, cherish it; let it not depart from you, for in the days that are in store for you, when age and infirmity shall stand guard over you, and you are obliged to find all your pleasures by your fireside, the memory of your second play will be very precious to you. You will find, on looking back to it through a vista of sixty years or more, that all the pleasure you then enjoyed was placed on the credit side of your account, and has been increasing by a sort of moral compound interest during the long years that you have devoted to delights less innocent, perhaps, and certainly less satisfactory, or to the pursuit of objects far more fleeting and unreal than those which then fascinated your youthful mind. I say your "second play," for the first dramatic performance that the child witnesses is too astonis.h.i.+ng to afford him its full measure of gratification. It is only after he has told his playmates all about it, and imitated the wonderful hero who rescued the beautiful lady in white satin, and dreamed of the splendour of the last great scene, when all the persons of the drama stood in a semicircle, and the king, with a crown of solid gold upon his head, addressed to the magnanimous hero the thrilling words,

"It is enough: the princess is thine own!"

and all the characters struck impressive att.i.tudes, and the curtain descended upon a tableau lighted up by coloured fires of ineffable brilliancy,it is only after all these things have sunk deep into the young mind, and he has resolved to write a play himself, and never to rest satisfied until he can bring down the house with the best of the actors he has seen, that he fully appreciates the entertainment which has been vouchsafed to him.

What a charm invests the place where we made our first acquaintance with the drama! It becomes an enchanted spot for us, and I doubt if the greatest possible familiarity in after life can ever breed contempt for it in our hearts. For my own part, I regarded the destruction of the old theatre in Federal Street, and the erection of warehouses on its hallowed site, as a positive sacrilege. And I cannot pa.s.s that spot, even at this late day, without mentally recurring to the joys I once tasted there. Perhaps some who read this may cherish similar sentiments about the old Tremont Theatre, a place for which I had as great a fondness as one can have for a theatre in which he did not see his first play. The very mention of it calls up its beautiful interior in my minds eye,its graceful proscenium, its chandeliers around the front of the boxes, its comfortable pit, where I enjoyed so much good acting, and all the host of worthies who graced that s.p.a.cious stage. Mr. Gilbert was not so fat in those days as he is now, nor Mr. Barry so gray. What a picturesque hero was old Brough in the time when the Woods were in their golden prime, and the appearance of the Count Rodolpho on the distant bridge was the signal for a tempest of applause! Who can forget how Mr.

Ostinellis bald head used to s.h.i.+ne, as he presided over that excellent orchestra, or how funny old Gears serious face looked, as he peered at the house through those heavy, silver-bowed spectacles? Perhaps for some of my younger readers the stage of the Museum possesses similar charms, and they will find themselves, years hence, looking back to the happy times when Mr. Angier received their glittering quarters, and they hastened up stairs, to forget the wanderings of neas and the perplexities of arithmetic in the inimitable fun of that prince-regent among comedians, Mr. William Warren.

But wherever we may have commenced our dramatic experience, and whatever that experience may have been, we have all, I am sure, felt the influence of that mysterious charm which hangs over the stage. We have all felt that keen curiosity to penetrate to the source of so much enjoyment. Who has not had a desire to enter that mysterious door which conducts the "sons of harmony" from the orchestra to the unknown depths below the stage? It looks dark and forbidding, but we feel instinctively that it is not so, when we see our venerated uncle Tom Comer carrying his honest and suns.h.i.+ny face through it so often. That green curtain, which is the only veil between us and a world of heroes and demiG.o.ds,how enviously do we look at its dusty folds! With what curiosity do we inspect the shoes of varied make and colour that figure in the little s.p.a.ce between it and the stage! How do we long to follow the hero who has strutted his hour upon the stage into the invisible recesses of P. S. and O. P., and to know what takes the place of the full audience and the glittering row of footlights in his eyes when he makes his exit at the "upper entrance, left," or through the "door in flat" which always moves so noiselessly on its hinges! I think that the performance of the "Forty Thieves" awakened this curiosity in my mind more than almost any other play. I longed to inspect more closely those n.o.ble steeds that came with such a jerky gait over the distant mountains, and to know what produced the fearful noise that attended the opening of the robbers cave. I believed in the untold wealth that was said to be heaped up in those subterranean depths, but still I wished to look at the "cavern goblet," and see how it compared with those that adorned the cases of my excellent friends, Messrs. Davis and Brown. I can never forget the thrill that shot through me when Morgiana lifted the cover of the oil jar, and the terrible question, "Is it time?"

issued from it, nor my admiration for the fearlessness of that self-possessed maiden when she answered with those eloquent and memorable words, "Not yet, but presently." I believed that the compound which Morgiana administered so freely to the concealed banditti was just as certain death to every mothers son of them as M. Fousels _Pabulum Vit_ is renewed life to the consumptives of the present day; and, years after I had supposed my recollections of the "Forty Thieves" to have become very misty and shapeless, I found myself startled in an oriental city by coming upon several oil jars of the orthodox model, and I astonished the malignant and turbaned Turk who owned them, and amused the companion of my walks about Smyrna, by lifting the lid of one of them, and quoting the words of Morgiana. My superst.i.tions concerning that pleasant old melodrama of course pa.s.sed away when I became familiar with the theatre by daylight, and was accustomed to exchange the compliments of the morning with the estimable gentleman who played Ha.s.sarac; but the illusion of its first performance has never been entirely blotted from my mind.

Some years ago it was my privilege to visit a place which is cla.s.sical to every lover of the drama and its literature. Drury Lane Theatre, now that its ancient rival, Covent Garden, has pa.s.sed away, and been replaced by a house exclusively devoted to the lyric muse, is the only theatre of London which is a.s.sociated in every mind with that host of geniuses who have ill.u.s.trated dramatic art from the times of Garrick to our own. That gifted and versatile actor, Mr. Davenport, who stands as high in the favour of the English as of the American public, conducted me through that immense establishment. We entered the door, which I had often looked at with curiosity as I pa.s.sed through the long colonnade of the theatre, encountering several of those clean-shaven personages in clothes that would be much refreshed if they were allowed to take a nap, and, after traversing two or three dark corridors, found ourselves upon the stage. The scene of so many triumphs as have there been achieved is not without its attractions, even though it may look differently _en dshabille_ from what it does in the glitter of gaslight. The stage which has been trod by the Kembles, the Keans, Siddons, Macready, Young, Palmer Dowton, Elliston, Munden, Liston, and Farren, is by no means an ordinary combination of planks. We know, for Campbell has told us, that

"by the mighty actor brought, Illusions perfect triumphs come; Verse ceases to be airy thought, And sculpture to be dumb."