The Function of the Poet and Other Essays Part 11

Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late Town Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general.

_He_, at least, never betrayed his clients. As it is, there is no end to it. We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal Schoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the same ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.

We are the victims of a droll ant.i.thesis. Daniel would not give in to Nebuchadnezzar's taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down and wors.h.i.+p an image of Daniel which the a.s.syrian monarch would have gone to gra.s.s again sooner than have it in his back-parlor. I do not think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one is so apt to encounter;--I met one once at an evening party. But I would be thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that statue. Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the monumental line! Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late visit, got off without a single speech. The cheerful hospitalities of Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but nothing more melancholy. In his case I doubt the expediency of the omission. Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers of the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together.

In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what s.h.i.+fts our friends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) are put to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay for it. The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the Stark Mills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for making a very dead bronze horse stand on his hind legs. For twenty-five cents I have seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful,--make a very living bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occurs to me that _hind legs_ is indelicate) posterior extremities to the wayward music of an out-of-town (_Scotice_, out-o'-toon) band. Now, I will make a handsome offer to the public. I propose for twenty-five thousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of a distinguished general officer as he _would have_ appeared at the Battle of Buena Vista. This monument is intended as a weatherc.o.c.k to crown the new dome of the Capitol at Was.h.i.+ngton. By this happy contrivance, the horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth at all,--thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for originality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which way the wind blows by going along with it. The inferior animal I have resolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection. In this way I shall combine two striking advantages. The advocates of the Ideal in Art cannot fail to be pleased with a charger which embodies, as it were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attention of the spectator will not be distracted from the princ.i.p.al figure. The material to be pure bra.s.s. I have also in progress an allegorical group commemorative of Governor Wise. This, like-Wise, represents only a potentiality. I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment when and the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury at Was.h.i.+ngton. His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of his speeches. Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling on his own steel pen; a broken telegraph wire hints at the weight of the thoughts to which it has found itself inadequate; while the Army and Navy of the United States are conjointly typified in a horse-marine who flies headlong with his hands pressed convulsively over his ears. I think I shall be able to have this ready for exhibition by the time Mr.

Wise is nominated for the Presidency,--certainly before he is elected.

The material to be plaster, made of the sh.e.l.ls of those oysters with which Virginia shall have paid her public debt. It may be objected, that plaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itself could hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor's speeches. But it must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype, have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of the spectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some reasonable hope of silence. This design, also, is intended only _in terrorem_, and will be suppressed for an adequate consideration.

I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cus.h.i.+ng has begun to feel a wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new victims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the wooden horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr.

Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short of a general.

Mr. Cus.h.i.+ng advises extreme measures. He counsels us to sell our real estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's reputation with posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor. To a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose military reputation insures his cutting and running (I mean, of course, in marble and bronze), the question becomes an interesting one,--To whom, in case of a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have the land all to themselves,--until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancient heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness will revive the traditions of the cla.s.sic period of Mexican Art. For my own part, I never look at one of them now without thinking of at least one human sacrifice.

I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cus.h.i.+ng's proposal, and yet something ought to be done. We must put up with what we have already, I suppose, and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand rests,--no bad type of the great man's state of mind after the nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a penal statue. But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues? I go back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment. I had even gone so far as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our graven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects enumerated in the divine ordinance. Perhaps a double-barrelled statute might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the monumental difficulty. Let a law be pa.s.sed that all speeches delivered more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all eulogistic ones of whatever description, be p.r.o.nounced in the chapel of the Deaf and Dumb asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds of the Inst.i.tution for the Blind. Let the penalty for infringement in the one case be to read the last President's Message, and in the other to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual punishments.

Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should pa.s.s so self-denying an ordinance. They might, perhaps, make all oratory but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed by a pa.s.sion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be by an appet.i.te for slate pencils. _Vita brevis, lingua longa._ I protest that among lawgivers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence. The ancient Greeks also (though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions, especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the advantage of communication with America. Now the Greeks had a Muse of Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more excellent Muse of Leaving-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her out and kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a G.o.ddess to be wors.h.i.+pped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!

Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch's lives of demiG.o.ds and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are as dust in the balance to those of speech.

We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.

There are now two debating clubs, seminaries of multiloquence. A few of us old-fas.h.i.+oned fellows have got up an opposition club and called it "The Jolly Oysters." No member is allowed to open his mouth except at high-tide by the calendar. We have biennial festivals on the evening of election day, when the const.i.tuency avenges itself in some small measure on its Representative elect by sending a baker's dozen of orators to congratulate him.

But I am falling into the very vice I condemn,--like Carlyle, who has talked a quarter of a century in praise of holding your tongue. And yet something should be done about it. Even when we get one orator safely underground, there are ten to p.r.o.nounce his eulogy, and twenty to do it over again when the meeting is held about the inevitable statue. I go to listen: we all go: we are under a spell. 'T is true, I find a casual refuge in sleep; for Drummond of Hawthornden was wrong when he called Sleep the child of Silence. Speech begets her as often. But there is no sure refuge save in Death; and when my life is closed untimely, let there be written on my head-stone, with impartial application to these Black Brunswickers mounted on the high horse of oratory and to our equestrian statues,--

_Os sublime_ did it!

THE END