Part 33

Oh, if we could all go out of flower as gracefully, as pleasingly, as we come into blossom! I always think of the morning-glory as the loveliest example of a graceful yielding to the inevitable. It is beautiful before its twisted corolla opens; it is comely as it folds its petals inward, when its brief hours of perfection are over. Women find it easier than men to grow old in a becoming way. A very old lady who has kept something, it may be a great deal, of her youthful feelings, who is daintily cared for, who is grateful for the attentions bestowed upon her, and enters into the spirit of the young lives that surround her, is as precious to those who love her as a gem in an antique setting, the fashion of which has long gone by, but which leaves the jewel the color and brightness which are its inalienable qualities. With old men it is too often different. They do not belong so much indoors as women do. They have no pretty little manual occupations. The old lady knits or stitches so long as her eyes and fingers will let her. The old man smokes his pipe, but does not know what to do with his fingers, unless he plays upon some instrument, or has a mechanical turn which finds business for them.

But the old writer, I said to The Teacups, as I say to you, my readers, labors under one special difficulty, which I am thinking of and exemplifying at this moment. He is constantly tending to reflect upon and discourse about his own particular stage of life. He feels that he must apologize for his intrusion upon the time and thoughts of a generation which he naturally supposes must be tired of him, if they ever had any considerable regard for him. Now, if the world of readers hates anything it sees in print, it is apology. If what one has to say is worth saying, he need not beg pardon fur saying it. If it is not worth saying I will not finish the sentence. But it is so hard to resist the temptation, notwithstanding that the terrible line beginning “Superfluous lags the veteran” is always repeating itself in his dull ear!

What kind of audience or reading parish is a man who secured his constituency in middle life, or before that period, to expect when he has reached the age of threescore and twenty? His coevals have dropped away by scores and tens, and he sees only a few units scattered about here and there, like the few beads above the water after a ship has gone to pieces. Does he write and publish for those of his own time of life? He need not print a large edition. Does he hope to secure a hearing from those who have come into the reading world since his coevals? They have found fresher fields and greener pastures. Their interests are in the out-door, active world. Some of them are circumnavigating the planet while he is hitching his rocking chair about his hearth-rug. Some are gazing upon the pyramids while he is staring at his andirons. Some are settling the tariff and fixing the laws of suffrage and taxation while he is dozing over the weather bulletin, and going to sleep over the obituaries in his morning or evening paper.

Nature is wiser than we give her credit for being; never wiser than in her dealings with the old. She has no idea of mortifying them by sudden and wholly unexpected failure of the chief servants of consciousness. The sight, for instance, begins to lose something of its perfection long before its deficiency calls the owner's special attention to it. Very probably, the first hint we have of the change is that a friend makes the pleasing remark that we are “playing the trombone,” as he calls it; that is, moving a book we are holding backward and forward, to get the right focal distance. Or it may be we find fault with the lamp or the gas-burner for not giving so much light as it used to. At last, somewhere between forty and fifty, we begin to dangle a jaunty pair of eye-glasses, half plaything and half necessity. In due time a pair of sober, business-like spectacles bestrides the nose. Old age leaps upon it as his saddle, and rides triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness comes which no glasses can penetrate. Nature is pitiless in carrying out the universal sentence, but very pitiful in her mode of dealing with the condemned on his way to the final scene. The man who is to be hanged always has a good breakfast provided for him.

Do not think that the old look upon themselves as the helpless, hopeless, forlorn creatures which they seem to young people. Do these young folks suppose that all vanity dies out of the natures of old men and old women? A dentist of olden time told me that a good-looking young man once said to him, “Keep that incisor presentable, if you can, till I am fifty, and then I sha'n't care how I look.” I venture to say that that gentleman was as particular about his personal appearance and as proud of his good looks at fifty, and many years after fifty, as he was in the twenties, when he made that speech to the dentist.

My dear friends around the teacups, and at that wider board where I am now entertaining, or trying to entertain, my company, is it not as plain to you as it is to me that I had better leave such tasks as that which I am just finishing to those who live in a more interesting period of life than one which, in the order of nature, is next door to decrepitude? Ought I not to regret having undertaken to report the doings and sayings of the members of the circle which you have known as The Teacups?

Dear, faithful reader, whose patient eyes have followed my reports through these long months, you and I are about parting company. Perhaps you are one of those who have known me under another name, in those far-off days separated from these by the red sea of the great national conflict. When you first heard the tinkle of the teaspoons, as the table was being made ready for its guests, you trembled for me, in the kindness of your hearts. I do not wonder that you did,--I trembled for myself. But I remembered the story of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who was seen all of a tremor just as he was going into action. “How is this?” said a brother officer to him. “Surely you are not afraid?” “No,” he answered, “but my flesh trembles at the thought of the dangers into which my intrepid spirit will carry me.” I knew the risk of undertaking to carry through a series of connected papers. And yet I thought it was better to run that risk, more manly, more sensible, than to give way to the fears which made my flesh tremble as did Sir Cloudesley Shovel's. For myself the labor has been a distraction, and one which came at a time when it was needed. Sometimes, as in one of those poems recently published,--the reader will easily guess which,--the youthful spirit has come over me with such a rush that it made me feel just as I did when I wrote the history of the “One-hoss Shay” thirty years ago. To repeat one of my comparisons, it was as if an early fruit had ripened on a graft upon an old, steady-going tree, to the astonishment of all its later-maturing products. I should hardly dare to say so much as this if I had not heard a similar opinion expressed by others.

Once committed to my undertaking, there was no turning back. It is true that I had said I might stop at any moment, but after one or two numbers it seemed as if there were an informal pledge to carry the series on, as in former cases, until I had completed my dozen instalments.

Writers and speakers have their idiosyncrasies, their habits, their tricks, if you had rather call them so, as to their ways of writing and speaking. There is a very old and familiar story, accompanied by a feeble jest, which most of my readers may probably enough have met with in Joe Miller or elsewhere. It is that of a lawyer who could never make an argument without having a piece of thread to work upon with his fingers while he was pleading. Some one stole it from him one day, and he could not get on at all with his speech,--he had lost the thread of his discourse, as the story had it. Now this is what I myself once saw. It was at a meeting where certain grave matters were debated in an assembly of professional men. A speaker, whom I never heard before or since, got up and made a long and forcible argument. I do not think he was a lawyer, but he spoke as if he had been trained to talk to juries. He held a long string in one hand, which he drew through the other band incessantly, as he spoke, just as a shoe maker performs the motion of waxing his thread. He appeared to be dependent on this motion. The physiological significance of the fact I suppose to be that the flow of what we call the nervous current from the thinking centre to the organs of speech was rendered freer and easier by the establishment of a simultaneous collateral nervous current to the set of muscles concerned in the action I have described.

I do not use a string to help me write or speak, but I must have its equivalent. I must have my paper and pen or pencil before me to set my thoughts flowing in such form that they can be written continuously. There have been lawyers who could think out their whole argument in connected order without a single note. There are authors,--and I think there are many,--who can compose and finish off a poem or a story without writing a word of it until, when the proper time comes, they copy what they carry in their heads. I have been told that Sir Edwin Arnold thought out his beautiful “Light of Asia” in this way.

I find the great charm of writing consists in its surprises. When one is in the receptive attitude of mind, the thoughts which are sprung upon him, the images which flash through his--consciousness, are a delight and an excitement. I am impatient of every hindrance in setting down my thoughts,--of a pen that will not write, of ink that will not flow, of paper that will not receive the ink. And here let me pay the tribute which I owe to one of the humblest but most serviceable of my assistants, especially in poetical composition. Nothing seems more prosaic than the stylographic pen. It deprives the handwriting of its beauty, and to some extent of its individual character. The brutal communism of the letters it forms covers the page it fills with the most uniformly uninteresting characters. But, abuse it as much as you choose, there is nothing like it for the poet, for the imaginative writer. Many a fine flow of thought has been checked, perhaps arrested, by the ill behavior of a goose-quill. Many an idea has escaped while the author was dipping his pen in the inkstand. But with the stylographic pen, in the hands of one who knows how to care for it and how to use it, unbroken rhythms and harmonious cadences are the natural products of the unimpeded flow of the fluid which is the vehicle of the author's thoughts and fancies. So much for my debt of gratitude to the humble stylographic pen. It does not furnish the proper medium for the correspondence of intimates, who wish to see as much of their friends' personality as their handwriting can hold,--still less for the impassioned interchange of sentiments between lovers; but in writing for the press its use is open to no objection. Its movement over the paper is like the flight of a swallow, while the quill pen and the steel pen and the gold pen are all taking short, laborious journeys, and stopping to drink every few minutes.

A chief pleasure which the author of novels and stories experiences is that of becoming acquainted with the characters be draws. It is perfectly true that his characters must, in the nature of things, have more or less of himself in their composition. If I should seek an exemplification of this in the person of any of my Teacups, I should find it most readily in the one whom I have called Number Seven, the one with the squinting brain. I think that not only I, the writer, but many of my readers, recognize in our own mental constitution an occasional obliquity of perception, not always detected at the time, but plain enough when looked back upon. What extravagant fancies you and I have seriously entertained at one time or another! What superstitious notions have got into our heads and taken possession of its empty chambers,--or, in the language of science, seized on the groups of nerve-cells in some of the idle cerebral convolutions!

The writer, I say, becomes acquainted with his characters as he goes on. They are at first mere embryos, outlines of distinct personalities. By and by, if they have any organic cohesion, they begin to assert themselves. They can say and do such and such things; such and such other things they cannot and must not say or do. The story-writer's and play-writer's danger is that they will get their characters mixed, and make A say what B ought to have said. The stronger his imaginative faculty, the less liable will the writer be to this fault; but not even Shakespeare's power of throwing himself into his characters prevents many of his different personages from talking philosophy in the same strain and in a style common to them all.

You will often observe that authors fall in love with the imaginary persons they describe, and that they bestow affectionate epithets upon them which it may happen the reader does not consider in any way called for. This is a pleasure to which they have a right. Every author of a story is surrounded by a little family of ideal children, as dear to him, it may be, as are flesh-and-blood children to their parents. You may forget all about the circle of Teacups to which I have introduced you,--on the supposition that you have followed me with some degree of interest; but do you suppose that Number Five does not continue as a presence with me, and that my pretty Delilah has left me forever because she is going to be married?

No, my dear friend, our circle will break apart, and its different members will soon be to you as if they had never been. But do you think that I can forget them? Do you suppose that I shall cease to follow the love (or the loves; which do you think is the true word, the singular or the plural?) of Number Five and the young Tutor who is so constantly found in her company? Do you suppose that I do not continue my relations with the “Cracked Teacup,”--the poor old fellow with whom I have so much in common, whose counterpart, perhaps, you may find in your own complex personality?

I take from the top shelf of the hospital department of my library--the section devoted to literary cripples, imbeciles, failures, foolish rhymesters, and silly eccentrics--one of the least conspicuous and most hopelessly feeble of the weak-minded population of that intellectual almshouse. I open it and look through its pages. It is a story. I have looked into it once before,--on its first reception as a gift from the author. I try to recall some of the names I see there: they mean nothing to me, but I venture to say the author cherishes them all, and cries over them as he did when he was writing their history. I put the book back among its dusty companions, and, sitting down in my reflective rocking-chair, think how others must forget, and how I shall remember, the company that gathered about this table.

Shall I ever meet any one of them again, in these pages or in any other? Will the cracked Teacup hold together, or will he go to pieces, and find himself in that retreat where the owner of the terrible clock which drove him crazy is walking under the shelter of the high walls? Has the young Doctor's crown yet received the seal which is Nature's warrant of wisdom and proof of professional competency? And Number Five and her young friend the Tutor,--have they kept on in their dangerous intimacy? Did they get through the tutto tremante passage, reading from the same old large edition of Dante which the Tutor recommended as the best, and in reading from which their heads were necessarily brought perilously near to each other?

It would be very pleasant if I could, consistently with the present state of affairs, bring these two young people together. I say two young people, for the one who counts most years seems to me to be really the younger of the pair. That Number Five foresaw from the first that any tenderer feeling than that of friendship would intrude itself between them I do not believe. As for the Tutor, he soon found where he was drifting. It was his first experience in matters concerning the heart, and absorbed his whole nature as a thing of course. Did he tell her he loved her? Perhaps he did, fifty times; perhaps he never had the courage to say so outright. But sometimes they looked each other straight in the eyes, and strange messages seemed to pass from one consciousness to the other. Will the Tutor ask Number Five to be his wife; and if he does, will she yield to the dictates of nature, and lower the flag of that fortress so long thought impregnable? Will he go on writing such poems to her as “The Rose and the Fern” or “I Like You and I Love You,” and be content with the pursuit of that which he never can attain? That is all very well, on the “Grecian Urn” of Keats,--beautiful, but not love such as mortals demand. Still, that may be all, for aught that we have yet seen.

“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never, canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal,--yet do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

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“More happy love! more happy, happy love! Forever warm, and still to be enjoyed, Forever panting and forever young!”

And so, good-bye, young people, whom we part with here. Shadows you have been and are to my readers; very real you have been and are to me,--as real as the memories of many friends whom I shall see no more.

As I am not in the habit of indulging in late suppers, the reader need not think that I shall spread another board and invite him to listen to the conversations which take place around it. If, from time to time, he finds a slight refection awaiting him on the sideboard, I hope he may welcome it as pleasantly as he has accepted what I have offered him from the board now just being cleared.

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It is a good rule for the actor who manages the popular street drama of Punch not to let the audience or spectators see his legs. It is very hard for the writer of papers like these, which are now coming to their conclusion, to keep his personality from showing itself too conspicuously through the thin disguises of his various characters. As the show is now over, as the curtain has fallen, I appear before it in my proper person, to address a few words to the friends who have assisted, as the French say, by their presence, and as we use the word, by the kind way in which they have received my attempts at their entertainment.

This series of papers is the fourth of its kind which I have offered to my readers. I may be allowed to look back upon the succession of serial articles which was commenced more than thirty years ago, in 1857. “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” was the first of the series. It was begun without the least idea what was to be its course and its outcome. Its characters shaped themselves gradually as the manuscript grew under my hand. I jotted down on the sheet of blotting paper before me the thoughts and fancies which came into my head. A very odd-looking object was this page of memoranda. Many of the hints were worked up into formal shape, many were rejected. Sometimes I recorded a story, a jest, or a pun for consideration, and made use of it or let it alone as my second thought decided. I remember a curious coincidence, which, if I have ever told in print,--I am not sure whether I have or not,--I will tell over again. I mention it, not for the pun, which I rejected as not very edifying and perhaps not new, though I did not recollect having seen it.

Mulier, Latin for woman; why apply that name to one of the gentle but occasionally obstinate sex? The answer was that a woman is (sometimes) more mulish than a mule. Please observe that I did not like the poor pun very well, and thought it rather rude and inelegant. So I left it on the blotter, where it was standing when one of the next numbers of “Punch” came out and contained that very same pun, which must have been hit upon by some English contributor at just about the same time I fell upon it on this side of the Atlantic. This fact may be added to the chapter of coincidences which belongs to the first number of this series of papers.

The “Autocrat” had the attraction of novelty, which of course was wanting in the succeeding papers of similar character. The criticisms upon the successive numbers as they came out were various, but generally encouraging. Some were more than encouraging; very high-colored in their phrases of commendation. When the papers were brought together in a volume their success was beyond my expectations. Up to the present time the “Autocrat” has maintained its position. An immortality of a whole generation is more than most writers are entitled to expect. I venture to think, from the letters I receive from the children and grandchildren of my first set of readers, that for some little time longer, at least, it will continue to be read, and even to be a favorite with some of its readers. Non omnis moriar is a pleasant thought to one who has loved his poor little planet, and will, I trust, retain kindly recollections of it through whatever wilderness of worlds he may be called to wander in his future pilgrimages. I say “poor little planet.” Ever since I had a ten cent look at the transit of Venus, a few years ago, through the telescope in the Mall, the earth has been wholly different to me from what it used to be. I knew from books what a speck it is in the universe, but nothing ever brought the fact home like the sight of the sister planet sailing across the sun's disk, about large enough for a buckshot, not large enough for a full-sized bullet. Yes, I love the little globule where I have spent more than fourscore years, and I like to think that some of my thoughts and some of my emotions may live themselves over again when I am sleeping. I cannot thank all the kind readers of the “Autocrat” who are constantly sending me their acknowledgments. If they see this printed page, let them be assured that a writer is always rendered happier by being told that he has made a fellow-being wiser or better, or even contributed to his harmless entertainment. This a correspondent may take for granted, even if his letter of grateful recognition receives no reply. It becomes more and more difficult for me to keep up with my correspondents, and I must soon give it up as impossible.