Etexts from Mosses From An Old Manse
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Etexts from Mosses From An Old Manse
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Tracts of land and golden mansions, situate in the Celestial
City, were often exchanged, at very disadvantageous rates, for a
few years' lease of small, dismal, inconvenient tenements in
Vanity Fair. Prince Beelzebub himself took great interest in this
sort of traffic, and sometimes condescended to meddle with
smaller matters. I once had the pleasure to see him bargaining
with a miser for his soul, which, after much ingenious
skirmishing on both sides, his highness succeeded in obtaining at
about the value of sixpence. The prince remarked with a smile,
that he was a loser by the transaction.
Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity, my manners and
deportment became more and more like those of the inhabitants.
The place began to seem like home; the idea of pursuing my
travels to the Celestial City was almost obliterated from my
mind. I was reminded of it, however, by the sight of the same
pair of simple pilgrims at whom we had laughed so heartily when
Apollyon puffed smoke and steam into their faces at the
commencement of our journey. There they stood amidst the densest
bustle of Vanity; the dealers offering them their purple and fine
linen and jewels, the men of wit and humor gibing at them, a pair
of buxom ladies ogling them askance, while the benevolent Mr.
Smooth-it-away whispered some of his wisdom at their elbows, and
pointed to a newly-erected temple; but there were these worthy
simpletons, making the scene look wild and monstrous, merely by
their sturdy repudiation of all part in its business or
pleasures.
One of them--his name was Stick-to-the-right--perceived in my
face, I suppose, a species of sympathy and almost admiration,
which, to my own great surprise, I could not help feeling for
this pragmatic couple. It prompted him to address me.
"Sir," inquired he, with a sad, yet mild and kindly voice. "do
you call yourself a pilgrim?"
"Yes," I replied, "my right to that appellation is indubitable. I
am merely a sojourner here in Vanity Fair, being bound to the
Celestial City by the new railroad."
"Alas, friend," rejoined Mr. Stick-to-the-truth, "I do assure
you, and beseech you to receive the truth of my words, that that
whole concern is a bubble. You may travel on it all your
lifetime, were you to live thousands of years, and yet never get
beyond the limits of Vanity Fair. Yea, though you should deem
yourself entering the gates of the blessed city, it will be
nothing but a miserable delusion."
"The Lord of the Celestial City," began the other pilgrim, whose
name was Mr. Foot-it-to-heaven, "has refused, and will ever
refuse, to grant an act of incorporation for this railroad; and
unless that be obtained, no passenger can ever hope to enter his
dominions. Wherefore every man who buys a ticket must lay his
account with losing the purchase money, which is the value of his
own soul."
"Poh, nonsense!" said Mr. Smooth-it-away, taking my arm and
leading me off, "these fellows ought to be indicted for a libel.
If the law stood as it once did in Vanity Fair we should see them
grinning through the iron bars of the prison window."
This incident made a considerable impression on my mind, and
contributed with other circumstances to indispose me to a
permanent residence in the city of Vanity; although, of course, I
was not simple enough to give up my original plan of gliding
along easily and commodiously by railroad. Still, I grew anxious
to be gone. There was one strange thing that troubled me. Amid
the occupations or amusements of the Fair, nothing was more
common than for a person--whether at feast, theatre, or church,
or trafficking for wealth and honors, or whatever he might be
doing, to vanish like a soap bubble, and be never more seen of
his fellows; and so accustomed were the latter to such little
accidents that they went on with their business as quietly as if
nothing had happened. But it was otherwise with me.
Finally, after a pretty long residence at the Fair, I resumed my
journey towards the Celestial City, still with Mr. Smooth-it-away
at my side. At a short distance beyond the suburbs of Vanity we
passed the ancient silver mine, of which Demas was the first
discoverer, and which is now wrought to great advantage,
supplying nearly all the coined currency of the world. A little
further onward was the spot where Lot's wife had stood forever
under the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious travellers have
long since carried it away piecemeal. Had all regrets been
punished as rigorously as this poor dame's were, my yearning for
the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have produced a
similar change in my own corporeal substance, and left me a
warning to future pilgrims.
The next remarkable object was a large edifice, constructed of
moss-grown stone, but in a modern and airy style of architecture.
The engine came to a pause in its vicinity, with the usual
tremendous shriek.
"This was formerly the castle of the redoubted giant Despair,"
observed Mr. Smooth-it-away; "but since his death Mr.
Flimsy-faith has repaired it, and keeps an excellent house of
entertainment here. It is one of our stopping-places."
"It seems but slightly put together," remarked I, looking at the
frail yet ponderous walls. "I do not envy Mr. Flimsy-faith his
habitation. Some day it will thunder down upon the heads of the
occupants."
"We shall escape at all events," said Mr. Smooth-it-away, "for
Apollyon is putting on the steam again."
The road now plunged into a gorge of the Delectable Mountains,
and traversed the field where in former ages the blind men
wandered and stumbled among the tombs. One of these ancient
tombstones had been thrust across the track by some malicious
person, and gave the train of cars a terrible jolt. Far up the
rugged side of a mountain I perceived a rusty iron door, half
overgrown with bushes and creeping plants, but with smoke issuing
from its crevices.
"Is that," inquired I, "the very door in the hill-side which the
shepherds assured Christian was a by-way to hell?"
"That was a joke on the part of the shepherds," said Mr.
Smooth-itaway, with a smile. "It is neither more nor less than
the door of a cavern which they use as a smoke-house for the
preparation of mutton hams."
My recollections of the journey are now, for a little space, dim
and confused, inasmuch as a singular drowsiness here overcame me,
owing to the fact that we were passing over the enchanted ground,
the air of which encourages a disposition to sleep. I awoke,
however, as soon as we crossed the borders of the pleasant land
of Beulah. All the passengers were rubbing their eyes, comparing
watches, and congratulating one another on the prospect of
arriving so seasonably at the journey's end. The sweet breezes of
this happy clime came refreshingly to our nostrils; we beheld the
glimmering gush of silver fountains, overhung by trees of
beautiful foliage and delicious fruit, which were propagated by
grafts from the celestial gardens. Once, as we dashed onward like
a hurricane, there was a flutter of wings and the bright
appearance of an angel in the air, speeding forth on some
heavenly mission. The engine now announced the close vicinity of
the final station-house by one last and horrible scream, in which
there seemed to be distinguishable every kind of wailing and woe,
and bitter fierceness of wrath, all mixed up with the wild
laughter of a devil or a madman. Throughout our journey, at every
stopping-place, Apollyon had exercised his ingenuity in screwing
the most abominable sounds out of the whistle of the
steam-engine; but in this closing effort he outdid himself and
created an infernal uproar, which, besides disturbing the
peaceful inhabitants of Beulah, must have sent its discord even
through the celestial gates.
While the horrid clamor was still ringing in our ears we heard an
exulting strain, as if a thousand instruments of music, with
height and depth and sweetness in their tones, at once tender and
triumphant, were struck in unison, to greet the approach of some
illustrious hero, who had fought the good fight and won a
glorious victory, and was come to lay aside his battered arms
forever. Looking to ascertain what might be the occasion of this
glad harmony, I perceived, on alighting from the cars, that a
multitude of shining ones had assembled on the other side of the
river, to welcome two poor pilgrims, who were just emerging from
its depths. They were the same whom Apollyon and ourselves had
persecuted with taunts, and gibes, and scalding steam, at the
commencement of our journey--the same whose unworldly aspect and
impressive words had stirred my conscience amid the wild
revellers of Vanity Fair.
"How amazingly well those men have got on," cried I to Mr.
Smoothit--away. "I wish we were secure of as good a reception."
"Never fear, never fear!" answered my friend. "Come, make haste;
the ferry boat will be off directly, and in three minutes you
will be on the other side of the river. No doubt you will find
coaches to carry you up to the city gates."
A steam ferry boat, the last improvement on this important route,
lay at the river side, puffing, snorting, and emitting all those
other disagreeable utterances which betoken the departure to be
immediate. I hurried on board with the rest of the passengers,
most of whom were in great perturbation: some bawling out for
their baggage; some tearing their hair and exclaiming that the
boat would explode or sink; some already pale with the heaving of
the stream; some gazing affrighted at the ugly aspect of the
steersman; and some still dizzy with the slumberous influences of
the Enchanted Ground. Looking back to the shore, I was amazed to
discern Mr. Smooth-it-away waving his hand in token of farewell.
"Don't you go over to the Celestial City?" exclaimed I.
"Oh, no!" answered he with a queer smile, and that same
disagreeable contortion of visage which I had remarked in the
inhabitants of the Dark Valley. "Oh, no! I have come thus far
only for the sake of your pleasant company. Good-by! We shall
meet again."
And then did my excellent friend Mr. Smooth-it-away laugh
outright, in the midst of which cachinnation a smoke-wreath
issued from his mouth and nostrils, while a twinkle of lurid
flame darted out of either eye, proving indubitably that his
heart was all of a red blaze. The impudent fiend! To deny the
existence of Tophet, when he felt its fiery tortures raging
within his breast. I rushed to the side of the boat, intending to
fling myself on shore; but the wheels, as they began their
revolutions, threw a dash of spray over me so cold--so deadly
cold, with the chill that will never leave those waters until
Death be drowned in his own river--that with a shiver and a
heartquake I awoke. Thank Heaven it was a Dream!
THE PROCESSION OF LIFE
Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession. All
of us have our places, and are to move onward under the direction
of the Chief Marshal. The grand difficulty results from the
invariably mistaken principles on which the deputy marshals seek
to arrange this immense concourse of people, so much more
numerous than those that train their interminable length through
streets and highways in times of political excitement. Their
scheme is ancient, far beyond the memory of man or even the
record of history, and has hitherto been very little modified by
the innate sense of something wrong, and the dim perception of
better methods, that have disquieted all the ages through which
the procession has taken its march. Its members are classified by
the merest external circumstances, and thus are more certain to
be thrown out of their true positions than if no principle of
arrangement were attempted. In one part of the procession we see
men of landed estate or moneyed capital gravely keeping each
other company, for the preposterous reason that they chance to
have a similar standing in the tax-gatherer's book. Trades and
professions march together with scarcely a more real bond of
union. In this manner, it cannot be denied, people are
disentangled from the mass and separated into various classes
according to certain apparent relations; all have some artificial
badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to
consider as a genuine characteristic. Fixing our attention on
such outside shows of similarity or difference, we lose sight of
those realities by which nature, fortune, fate, or Providence has
constituted for every man a brotherhood, wherein it is one great
office of human wisdom to classify him. When the mind has once
accustomed itself to a proper arrangement of the Procession of
Life, or a true classification of society, even though merely
speculative, there is thenceforth a satisfaction which pretty
well suffices for itself without the aid of any actual
reformation in the order of march.
For instance, assuming to myself the power of marshalling the
aforesaid procession, I direct a trumpeter to send forth a blast
loud enough to be heard from hence to China; and a herald, with
world-pervading voice, to make proclamation for a certain class
of mortals to take their places. What shall be their principle of
union? After all, an external one, in comparison with many that
might be found, yet far more real than those which the world has
selected for a similar purpose. Let all who are afflicted with
like physical diseases form themselves into ranks.
Our first attempt at classification is not very successful. It
may gratify the pride of aristocracy to reflect that disease,
more than any other circumstance of human life, pays due
observance to the distinctions which rank and wealth, and poverty
and lowliness, have established among mankind. Some maladies are
rich and precious, and only to be acquired by the right of
inheritance or purchased with gold. Of this kind is the gout,
which serves as a bond of brotherhood to the purple-visaged
gentry, who obey the herald's voice, and painfully hobble from
all civilized regions of the globe to take their post in the
grand procession. In mercy to their toes, let us hope that the
march may not be long. The Dyspeptics, too, are people of good
standing in the world. For them the earliest salmon is caught in
our eastern rivers, and the shy woodcock stains the dry leaves
with his blood in his remotest haunts, and the turtle comes from
the far Pacific Islands to be gobbled up in soup. They can afford
to flavor all their dishes with indolence, which, in spite of the
general opinion, is a sauce more exquisitely piquant than
appetite won by exercise. Apoplexy is another highly respectable
disease. We will rank together all who have the symptom of
dizziness in the brain, and as fast as any drop by the way supply
their places with new members of the board of aldermen.
On the other hand, here come whole tribes of people whose
physical lives are but a deteriorated variety of life, and
themselves a meaner species of mankind; so sad an effect has been
wrought by the tainted breath of cities, scanty and unwholesome
food, destructive modes of labor, and the lack of those moral
supports that might partially have counteracted such bad
influences. Behold here a train of house painters, all afflicted
with a peculiar sort of colic. Next in place we will marshal
those workmen in cutlery, who have breathed a fatal disorder into
their lungs with the impalpable dust of steel. Tailors and
shoemakers, being sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one
part of the procession and march under similar banners of
disease; but among them we may observe here and there a sickly
student, who has left his health between the leaves of classic
volumes; and clerks, likewise, who have caught their deaths on
high official stools; and men of genius too, who have written
sheet after sheet with pens dipped in their heart's blood. These
are a wretched quaking, short-breathed set. But what is this
cloud of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb the ear with
the multiplicity of their short, dry coughs? They are
seamstresses, who have plied the daily and nightly needle in the
service of master tailors and close-fisted contractors, until now
it is almost time for each to hem the borders of her own shroud.
Consumption points their place in the procession. With their sad
sisterhood are intermingled many youthful maidens who have
sickened in aristocratic mansions, and for whose aid science has
unavailingly searched its volumes, and whom breathless love has
watched. In our ranks the rich maiden and the poor seamstress may
walk arm in arm. We might find innumerable other instances, where
the bond of mutual disease--not to speak of nation-sweeping
pestilence--embraces high and low, and makes the king a brother
of the clown. But it is not hard to own that disease is the
natural aristocrat. Let him keep his state, and have his
established orders of rank, and wear his royal mantle of the
color of a fever flush and let the noble and wealthy boast their
own physical infirmities, and display their symptoms as the
badges of high station. All things considered, these are as
proper subjects of human pride as any relations of human rank
that men can fix upon.
Sound again, thou deep-breathed trumpeter! and herald, with thy
voice of might, shout forth another summons that shall reach the
old baronial castles of Europe, and the rudest cabin of our
western wilderness! What class is next to take its place in the
procession of mortal life? Let it be those whom the gifts of
intellect have united in a noble brotherhood.
Ay, this is a reality, before which the conventional distinctions
of society melt away like a vapor when we would grasp it with the
hand. Were Byron now alive, and Burns, the first would come from
his ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the
inherited honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the
mighty peasant who grew immortal while he stooped behind his
plough. These are gone; but the hall, the farmer's fireside, the
hut, perhaps the palace, the counting-room, the workshop, the
village, the city, life's high places and low ones, may all
produce their poets, whom a common temperament pervades like an
electric sympathy. Peer or ploughman, we will muster them pair by
pair and shoulder to shoulder. Even society, in its most
artificial state, consents to this arrangement. These factory
girls from Lowell shall mate themselves with the pride of
drawing-rooms and literary circles, the bluebells in fashion's
nosegay, the Sapphos, and Montagues, and Nortons of the age.
Other modes of intellect bring together as strange companies.
Silk-gowned professor of languages, give your arm to this sturdy
blacksmith, and deem yourself honored by the conjunction, though
you behold him grimy from the anvil. All varieties of human
speech are like his mother tongue to this rare man.
Indiscriminately let those take their places, of whatever rank
they come, who possess the kingly gifts to lead armies or to sway
a people--Nature's generals, her lawgivers, her kings, and with
them also the deep philosophers who think the thought in one
generation that is to revolutionize society in the next. With the
hereditary legislator in whom eloquence is a far-descended
attainment--a rich echo repeated by powerful voices from Cicero
downward--we will match some wondrous backwoodsman, who has
caught a wild power of language from the breeze among his native
forest boughs. But we may safely leave these brethren and
sisterhood to settle their own congenialities. Our ordinary
distinctions become so trifling, so impalpable, so ridiculously
visionary, in comparison with a classification founded on truth,
that all talk about the matter is immediately a common place.
Yet the longer I reflect the less am I satisfied with the idea of
forming a separate class of mankind on the basis of high
intellectual power. At best it is but a higher development of
innate gifts common to all. Perhaps, moreover, he whose genius
appears deepest and truest excels his fellows in nothing save the
knack of expression; he throws out occasionally a lucky hint at
truths of which every human soul is profoundly, though
unutterably, conscious. Therefore, though we suffer the
brotherhood of intellect to march onward together, it may be
doubted whether their peculiar relation will not begin to vanish
as soon as the procession shall have passed beyond the circle of
this present world. But we do not classify for eternity.
And next, let the trumpet pour forth a funereal wail, and the
herald's voice give breath in one vast cry to all the groans and
grievous utterances that are audible throughout the earth. We
appeal now to the sacred bond of sorrow, and summon the great
multitude who labor under similar afflictions to take their
places in the march.
How many a heart that would have been insensible to any other
call has responded to the doleful accents of that voice! It has
gone far and wide, and high and low, and left scarcely a mortal
roof unvisited. Indeed, the principle is only too universal for
our purpose, and, unless we limit it, will quite break up our
classification of mankind, and convert the whole procession into
a funeral train. We will therefore be at some pains to
discriminate. Here comes a lonely rich man: he has built a noble
fabric for his dwelling-house, with a front of stately
architecture and marble floors and doors of precious woods; the
whole structure is as beautiful as a dream and as substantial as
the native rock. But the visionary shapes of a long posterity,
for whose home this mansion was intended, have faded into
nothingness since the death of the founder's only son. The rich
man gives a glance at his sable garb in one of the splendid
mirrors of his drawing-room, and descending a flight of lofty
steps instinctively offers his arm to yonder poverty stricken
widow in the rusty black bonnet, and with a check apron over her
patched gown. The sailor boy, who was her sole earthly stay, was
washed overboard in a late tempest. This couple from the palace
and the almshouse are but the types of thousands more who
represent the dark tragedy of life and seldom quarrel for the
upper parts. Grief is such a leveller, with its own dignity and
its own humility, that the noble and the peasant, the beggar and
the monarch, will waive their pretensions to external rank
without the officiousness of interference on our part. If
pride--the influence of the world's false distinctions--remain in
the heart, then sorrow lacks the earnestness which makes it holy
and reverend. It loses its reality and becomes a miserable
shadow. On this ground we have an opportunity to assign over
multitudes who would willingly claim places here to other parts
of the procession. If the mourner have anything dearer than his
grief he must seek his true position elsewhere. There are so many
unsubstantial sorrows which the necessity of our mortal state
begets on idleness, that an observer, casting aside sentiment, is
sometimes led to question whether there be any real woe, except
absolute physical suffering and the loss of closest friends. A
crowd who exhibit what they deem to be broken hearts--and among
them many lovelorn maids and bachelors, and men of disappointed
ambition in arts or politics, and the poor who were once rich, or
who have sought to be rich in vain--the great majority of these
may ask admittance into some other fraternity. There is no room
here. Perhaps we may institute a separate class where such
unfortunates will naturally fall into the procession. Meanwhile
let them stand aside and patiently await their time.
If our trumpeter can borrow a note from the doomsday trumpet
blast, let him sound it now. The dread alarum should make the
earth quake to its centre, for the herald is about to address
mankind with a summons to which even the purest mortal may be
sensible of some faint responding echo in his breast. In many
bosoms it will awaken a still small voice more terrible than its
own reverberating uproar.
The hideous appeal has swept around the globe. Come, all ye
guilty ones, and rank yourselves in accordance with the
brotherhood of crime. This, indeed, is an awful summons. I almost
tremble to look at the strange partnerships that begin to be
formed, reluctantly, but by the in vincible necessity of like to
like in this part of the procession. A forger from the state
prison seizes the arm of a distinguished financier. How
indignantly does the latter plead his fair reputation upon
'Change, and insist that his operations, by their magnificence of
scope, were removed into quite another sphere of morality than
those of his pitiful companion! But let him cut the connection if
he can. Here comes a murderer with his clanking chains, and pairs
himself--horrible to tell--with as pure and upright a man, in all
observable respects, as ever partook of the consecrated bread and
wine. He is one of those, perchance the most hopeless of all
sinners, who practise such an exemplary system of outward duties,
that even a deadly crime may be hidden from their own sight and
remembrance, under this unreal frostwork. Yet he now finds his
place. Why do that pair of flaunting girls, with the pert,
affected laugh and the sly leer at the by-standers, intrude
themselves into the same rank with yonder decorous matron, and
that somewhat prudish maiden? Surely these poor creatures, born
to vice as their sole and natural inheritance, can be no fit
associates for women who have been guarded round about by all the
proprieties of domestic life, and who could not err unless they
first created the opportunity. Oh no; it must be merely the
impertinence of those unblushing hussies; and we can only wonder
how such respectable ladies should have responded to a summons
that was not meant for them.
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