The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Charles Dudley Warner

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A very pretty idea for Mandeville; and I fear he is getting to have
private thoughts about the Young Lady. Mandeville naturally likes
the robustness and sparkle of winter, and it has been a little
suspicious to hear him express the hope that we shall have an early
spring.

I wonder how many people there are in New England who know the glory
and inspiration of a winter walk just before sunset, and that, too,
not only on days of clear sky, when the west is aflame with a rosy
color, which has no suggestion of languor or unsatisfied longing in
it, but on dull days, when the sullen clouds hang about the horizon,
full of threats of storm and the terrors of the gathering night. We
are very busy with our own affairs, but there is always something
going on out-doors worth looking at; and there is seldom an hour
before sunset that has not some special attraction. And, besides, it
puts one in the mood for the cheer and comfort of the open fire at
home.

Probably if the people of New England could have a plebiscitum on
their weather, they would vote against it, especially against winter.
Almost no one speaks well of winter. And this suggests the idea that
most people here were either born in the wrong place, or do not know
what is best for them. I doubt if these grumblers would be any
better satisfied, or would turn out as well, in the tropics.
Everybody knows our virtues,--at least if they believe half we tell
them,--and for delicate beauty, that rare plant, I should look among
the girls of the New England hills as confidently as anywhere, and I
have traveled as far south as New Jersey, and west of the Genesee
Valley. Indeed, it would be easy to show that the parents of the
pretty girls in the West emigrated from New England. And yet--such
is the mystery of Providence--no one would expect that one of the
sweetest and most delicate flowers that blooms, the trailing.
arbutus, would blossom in this inhospitable climate, and peep forth
from the edge of a snowbank at that.

It seems unaccountable to a superficial observer that the thousands
of people who are dissatisfied with their climate do not seek a more
congenial one--or stop grumbling. The world is so small, and all
parts of it are so accessible, it has so many varieties of climate,
that one could surely suit himself by searching; and, then, is it
worth while to waste our one short life in the midst of unpleasant
surroundings and in a constant friction with that which is
disagreeable? One would suppose that people set down on this little
globe would seek places on it most agreeable to themselves. It must
be that they are much more content with the climate and country upon
which they happen, by the accident of their birth, than they pretend
to be.




III

Home sympathies and charities are most active in the winter. Coming
in from my late walk,--in fact driven in by a hurrying north wind
that would brook no delay,--a wind that brought snow that did not
seem to fall out of a bounteous sky, but to be blown from polar
fields,--I find the Mistress returned from town, all in a glow of
philanthropic excitement.

There has been a meeting of a woman's association for Ameliorating
the Condition of somebody here at home. Any one can belong to it by
paying a dollar, and for twenty dollars one can become a life
Ameliorator,--a sort of life assurance. The Mistress, at the
meeting, I believe, "seconded the motion" several times, and is one
of the Vice-Presidents; and this family honor makes me feel almost as
if I were a president of something myself. These little distinctions
are among the sweetest things in life, and to see one's name
officially printed stimulates his charity, and is almost as
satisfactory as being the chairman of a committee or the mover of a
resolution. It is, I think, fortunate, and not at all discreditable,
that our little vanity, which is reckoned among our weaknesses, is
thus made to contribute to the activity of our nobler powers.
Whatever we may say, we all of us like distinction; and probably
there is no more subtle flattery than that conveyed in the whisper,
"That's he," "That's she."

There used to be a society for ameliorating the condition of the
Jews; but they were found to be so much more adept than other people
in ameliorating their own condition that I suppose it was given up.
Mandeville says that to his knowledge there are a great many people
who get up ameliorating enterprises merely to be conspicuously busy
in society, or to earn a little something in a good cause. They seem
to think that the world owes them a living because they are
philanthropists. In this Mandeville does not speak with his usual
charity. It is evident that there are Jews, and some Gentiles, whose
condition needs ameliorating, and if very little is really
accomplished in the effort for them, it always remains true that the
charitable reap a benefit to themselves. It is one of the beautiful
compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help
another without helping himself.

OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR. Why is it that almost all philanthropists
and reformers are disagreeable?

I ought to explain who our next-door neighbor is. He is the person
who comes in without knocking, drops in in the most natural way, as
his wife does also, and not seldom in time to take the after-dinner
cup of tea before the fire. Formal society begins as soon as you
lock your doors, and only admit visitors through the media of bells
and servants. It is lucky for us that our next-door neighbor is
honest.

THE PARSON. Why do you class reformers and philanthropists together?
Those usually called reformers are not philanthropists at all. They
are agitators. Finding the world disagreeable to themselves, they
wish to make it as unpleasant to others as possible.

MANDEVILLE. That's a noble view of your fellow-men.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Well, granting the distinction, why are both apt to
be unpleasant people to live with?

THE PARSON. As if the unpleasant people who won't mind their own
business were confined to the classes you mention! Some of the best
people I know are philanthropists,--I mean the genuine ones, and not
the uneasy busybodies seeking notoriety as a means of living.

THE FIRE-TENDER. It is not altogether the not minding their own
business. Nobody does that. The usual explanation is, that people
with one idea are tedious. But that is not all of it. For few
persons have more than one idea,--ministers, doctors, lawyers,
teachers, manufacturers, merchants,--they all think the world they
live in is the central one.

MANDEVILLE. And you might add authors. To them nearly all the life
of the world is in letters, and I suppose they would be astonished if
they knew how little the thoughts of the majority of people are
occupied with books, and with all that vast thought circulation which
is the vital current of the world to book-men. Newspapers have
reached their present power by becoming unliterary, and reflecting
all the interests of the world.

THE MISTRESS. I have noticed one thing, that the most popular
persons in society are those who take the world as it is, find the
least fault, and have no hobbies. They are always wanted to dinner.

THE YOUNG LADY. And the other kind always appear to me to want a
dinner.

THE FIRE-TENDER. It seems to me that the real reason why reformers
and some philanthropists are unpopular is, that they disturb our
serenity and make us conscious of our own shortcomings. It is only
now and then that a whole people get a spasm of reformatory fervor,
of investigation and regeneration. At other times they rather hate
those who disturb their quiet.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Professional reformers and philanthropists are
insufferably conceited and intolerant.

THE MISTRESS. Everything depends upon the spirit in which a reform
or a scheme of philanthropy is conducted.

MANDEVILLE. I attended a protracted convention of reformers of a
certain evil, once, and had the pleasure of taking dinner with a
tableful of them. It was one of those country dinners accompanied
with green tea. Every one disagreed with every one else, and you
would n't wonder at it, if you had seen them. They were people with
whom good food wouldn't agree. George Thompson was expected at the
convention, and I remember that there was almost a cordiality in the
talk about him, until one sallow brother casually mentioned that
George took snuff,--when a chorus of deprecatory groans went up from
the table. One long-faced maiden in spectacles, with purple ribbons
in her hair, who drank five cups of tea by my count, declared that
she was perfectly disgusted, and did n't want to hear him speak. In
the course of the meal the talk ran upon the discipline of children,
and how to administer punishment. I was quite taken by the remark of
a thin, dyspeptic man who summed up the matter by growling out in a
harsh, deep bass voice, "Punish 'em in love!" It sounded as if he had
said, "Shoot 'em on the spot!"

THE PARSON. I supposed you would say that he was a minister. There
is another thing about those people. I think they are working
against the course of nature. Nature is entirely indifferent to any
reform. She perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue.
There's a split in my thumb-nail that has been scrupulously continued
for many years, not withstanding all my efforts to make the nail
resume its old regularity. You see the same thing in trees whose
bark is cut, and in melons that have had only one summer's intimacy
with squashes. The bad traits in character are passed down from
generation to generation with as much care as the good ones. Nature,
unaided, never reforms anything.

MANDEVILLE. Is that the essence of Calvinism?

THE PARSON. Calvinism has n't any essence, it's a fact.

MANDEVILLE. When I was a boy, I always associated Calvinism and
calomel together. I thought that homeopathy--similia, etc.--had done
away with both of them.

OUR NEXT DOOR (rising). If you are going into theology, I'm off..




IV

I fear we are not getting on much with the joyousness of winter. In
order to be exhilarating it must be real winter. I have noticed that
the lower the thermometer sinks the more fiercely the north wind
rages, and the deeper the snow is, the higher rise the spirits of the
community. The activity of the "elements" has a great effect upon
country folk especially; and it is a more wholesome excitement than
that caused by a great conflagration. The abatement of a snow-storm
that grows to exceptional magnitude is regretted, for there is always
the half-hope that this will be, since it has gone so far, the
largest fall of snow ever known in the region, burying out of sight
the great fall of 1808, the account of which is circumstantially and
aggravatingly thrown in our way annually upon the least provocation.
We all know how it reads: "Some said it began at daylight, others
that it set in after sunrise; but all agree that by eight o'clock
Friday morning it was snowing in heavy masses that darkened the air."

The morning after we settled the five--or is it seven?--points of
Calvinism, there began a very hopeful snow-storm, one of those
wide-sweeping, careering storms that may not much affect the city,
but which strongly impress the country imagination with a sense of
the personal qualities of the weather,--power, persistency,
fierceness, and roaring exultation. Out-doors was terrible to those
who looked out of windows, and heard the raging wind, and saw the
commotion in all the high tree-tops and the writhing of the low
evergreens, and could not summon resolution to go forth and breast
and conquer the bluster. The sky was dark with snow, which was not
permitted to fall peacefully like a blessed mantle, as it sometimes
does, but was blown and rent and tossed like the split canvas of a
ship in a gale. The world was taken possession of by the demons of
the air, who had their will of it. There is a sort of fascination in
such a scene, equal to that of a tempest at sea, and without its
attendant haunting sense of peril; there is no fear that the house
will founder or dash against your neighbor's cottage, which is dimly
seen anchored across the field; at every thundering onset there is no
fear that the cook's galley will upset, or the screw break loose and
smash through the side, and we are not in momently expectation of the
tinkling of the little bell to "stop her." The snow rises in
drifting waves, and the naked trees bend like strained masts; but so
long as the window-blinds remain fast, and the chimney-tops do not
go, we preserve an equal mind. Nothing more serious can happen than
the failure of the butcher's and the grocer's carts, unless, indeed,
the little news-carrier should fail to board us with the world's
daily bulletin, or our next-door neighbor should be deterred from
coming to sit by the blazing, excited fire, and interchange the
trifling, harmless gossip of the day. The feeling of seclusion on
such a day is sweet, but the true friend who does brave the storm and
come is welcomed with a sort of enthusiasm that his arrival in
pleasant weather would never excite. The snow-bound in their Arctic
hulk are glad to see even a wandering Esquimau.

On such a day I recall the great snow-storms on the northern New
England hills, which lasted for a week with no cessation, with no
sunrise or sunset, and no observation at noon; and the sky all the
while dark with the driving snow, and the whole world full of the
noise of the rioting Boreal forces; until the roads were obliterated,
the fences covered, and the snow was piled solidly above the
first-story windows of the farmhouse on one side, and drifted before
the front door so high that egress could only be had by tunneling the
bank.

After such a battle and siege, when the wind fell and the sun
struggled out again, the pallid world lay subdued and tranquil, and
the scattered dwellings were not unlike wrecks stranded by the
tempest and half buried in sand. But when the blue sky again bent
over all, the wide expanse of snow sparkled like diamond-fields, and
the chimney signal-smokes could be seen, how beautiful was the
picture! Then began the stir abroad, and the efforts to open up
communication through roads, or fields, or wherever paths could be
broken, and the ways to the meeting-house first of all. Then from
every house and hamlet the men turned out with shovels, with the
patient, lumbering oxen yoked to the sleds, to break the roads,
driving into the deepest drifts, shoveling and shouting as if the
severe labor were a holiday frolic, the courage and the hilarity
rising with the difficulties encountered; and relief parties, meeting
at length in the midst of the wide white desolation, hailed each
other as chance explorers in new lands, and made the whole
country-side ring with the noise of their congratulations. There was
as much excitement and healthy stirring of the blood in it as in the
Fourth of July, and perhaps as much patriotism. The boy saw it in
dumb show from the distant, low farmhouse window, and wished he were
a man. At night there were great stories of achievement told by the
cavernous fireplace; great latitude was permitted in the estimation
of the size of particular drifts, but never any agreement was reached
as to the "depth on a level." I have observed since that people are
quite as apt to agree upon the marvelous and the exceptional as upon
simple facts.




V

By the firelight and the twilight, the Young Lady is finishing a
letter to Herbert,--writing it, literally, on her knees, transforming
thus the simple deed into an act of devotion. Mandeville says that
it is bad for her eyes, but the sight of it is worse for his eyes.
He begins to doubt the wisdom of reliance upon that worn apothegm
about absence conquering love.

Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend
absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable.
Mandeville begins to wish he were in New South Wales.

I did intend to insert here a letter of Herbert's to the Young Lady,
--obtained, I need not say, honorably, as private letters which get
into print always are,--not to gratify a vulgar curiosity, but
to show how the most unsentimental and cynical people are affected by
the master passion. But I cannot bring myself to do it. Even in the
interests of science one has no right to make an autopsy of two
loving hearts, especially when they are suffering under a late attack
of the one agreeable epidemic.

All the world loves a lover, but it laughs at him none the less in
his extravagances. He loses his accustomed reticence; he has
something of the martyr's willingness for publicity; he would even
like to show the sincerity of his devotion by some piece of open
heroism. Why should he conceal a discovery which has transformed the
world to him, a secret which explains all the mysteries of nature and
human-ity? He is in that ecstasy of mind which prompts those who
were never orators before to rise in an experience-meeting and pour
out a flood of feeling in the tritest language and the most
conventional terms. I am not sure that Herbert, while in this glow,
would be ashamed of his letter in print, but this is one of the cases
where chancery would step in and protect one from himself by his next
friend. This is really a delicate matter, and perhaps it is brutal
to allude to it at all.

In truth, the letter would hardly be interesting in print. Love has
a marvelous power of vivifying language and charging the simplest
words with the most tender meaning, of restoring to them the power
they had when first coined. They are words of fire to those two who
know their secret, but not to others. It is generally admitted that
the best love-letters would not make very good literature.
"Dearest," begins Herbert, in a burst of originality, felicitously
selecting a word whose exclusiveness shuts out all the world but one,
and which is a whole letter, poem, confession, and creed in one
breath. What a weight of meaning it has to carry! There may be
beauty and wit and grace and naturalness and even the splendor of
fortune elsewhere, but there is one woman in the world whose sweet
presence would be compensation for the loss of all else. It is not
to be reasoned about; he wants that one; it is her plume dancing down
the sunny street that sets his heart beating; he knows her form among
a thousand, and follows her; he longs to run after her carriage,
which the cruel coachman whirls out of his sight. It is marvelous to
him that all the world does not want her too, and he is in a panic
when he thinks of it. And what exquisite flattery is in that little
word addressed to her, and with what sweet and meek triumph she
repeats it to herself, with a feeling that is not altogether pity for
those who still stand and wait. To be chosen out of all the
available world--it is almost as much bliss as it is to choose. "All
that long, long stage-ride from Blim's to Portage I thought of you
every moment, and wondered what you were doing and how you were
looking just that moment, and I found the occupation so charming that
I was almost sorry when the journey was ended." Not much in that!
But I have no doubt the Young Lady read it over and over, and dwelt
also upon every moment, and found in it new proof of unshaken
constancy, and had in that and the like things in the letter a sense
of the sweetest communion. There is nothing in this letter that we
need dwell on it, but I am convinced that the mail does not carry any
other letters so valuable as this sort.

I suppose that the appearance of Herbert in this new light
unconsciously gave tone a little to the evening's talk; not that
anybody mentioned him, but Mandeville was evidently generalizing from
the qualities that make one person admired by another to those that
win the love of mankind.

MANDEVILLE. There seems to be something in some persons that wins
them liking, special or general, independent almost of what they do
or say.

THE MISTRESS. Why, everybody is liked by some one.

MANDEVILLE. I'm not sure of that. There are those who are
friendless, and would be if they had endless acquaintances. But, to
take the case away from ordinary examples, in which habit and a
thousand circumstances influence liking, what is it that determines
the world upon a personal regard for authors whom it has never seen?

THE FIRE-TENDER. Probably it is the spirit shown in their writings.

THE MISTRESS. More likely it is a sort of tradition; I don't believe
that the world has a feeling of personal regard for any author who
was not loved by those who knew him most intimately.

THE FIRE-TENDER. Which comes to the same thing. The qualities, the
spirit, that got him the love of his acquaintances he put into his
books.

MANDEVILLE. That does n't seem to me sufficient. Shakespeare has
put everything into his plays and poems, swept the whole range of
human sympathies and passions, and at times is inspired by the
sweetest spirit that ever man had.

THE YOUNG LADY. No one has better interpreted love.

MANDEVILLE. Yet I apprehend that no person living has any personal
regard for Shakespeare, or that his personality affects many,--except
they stand in Stratford church and feel a sort of awe at the thought
that the bones of the greatest poet are so near them.

THE PARSON. I don't think the world cares personally for any mere
man or woman dead for centuries.

MANDEVILLE. But there is a difference. I think there is still
rather a warm feeling for Socrates the man, independent of what he
said, which is little known. Homer's works are certainly better
known, but no one cares personally for Homer any more than for any
other shade.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Why not go back to Moses? We've got the evening
before us for digging up people.

MANDEVILLE. Moses is a very good illustration. No name of antiquity
is better known, and yet I fancy he does not awaken the same kind of
popular liking that Socrates does.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Fudge! You just get up in any lecture assembly and
propose three cheers for Socrates, and see where you'll be.
Mandeville ought to be a missionary, and read Robert Browning to the
Fijis.

THE FIRE-TENDER. How do you account for the alleged personal regard
for Socrates?

THE PARSON. Because the world called Christian is still more than
half heathen.

MANDEVILLE. He was a plain man; his sympathies were with the people;
he had what is roughly known as "horse-sense," and he was homely.
Franklin and Abraham Lincoln belong to his class. They were all
philosophers of the shrewd sort, and they all had humor. It was
fortunate for Lincoln that, with his other qualities, he was homely.
That was the last touching recommendation to the popular heart.

THE MISTRESS. Do you remember that ugly brown-stone statue of St.
Antonio by the bridge in Sorrento? He must have been a coarse saint,
patron of pigs as he was, but I don't know any one anywhere, or the
homely stone image of one, so loved by the people.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Ugliness being trump, I wonder more people don't win.
Mandeville, why don't you get up a "centenary" of Socrates, and put
up his statue in the Central Park? It would make that one of Lincoln
in Union Square look beautiful.

THE PARSON. Oh, you'll see that some day, when they have a museum
there illustrating the "Science of Religion."

THE FIRE-TENDER. Doubtless, to go back to what we were talking of,
the world has a fondness for some authors, and thinks of them with an
affectionate and half-pitying familiarity; and it may be that this
grows out of something in their lives quite as much as anything in
their writings. There seems to be more disposition of personal
liking to Thackeray than to Dickens, now both are dead,--a result
that would hardly have been predicted when the world was crying over
Little Nell, or agreeing to hate Becky Sharp.

THE YOUNG LADY. What was that you were telling about Charles Lamb,
the other day, Mandeville? Is not the popular liking for him
somewhat independent of his writings?

MANDEVILLE. He is a striking example of an author who is loved.
Very likely the remembrance of his tribulations has still something
to do with the tenderness felt for him. He supported no dignity and
permitted a familiarity which indicated no self-appreciation of his
real rank in the world of letters. I have heard that his
acquaintances familiarly called him "Charley."

OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a relief to know that! Do you happen to know
what Socrates was called?

MANDEVILLE. I have seen people who knew Lamb very well. One of them
told me, as illustrating his want of dignity, that as he was going
home late one night through the nearly empty streets, he was met by a
roystering party who were making a night of it from tavern to tavern.
They fell upon Lamb, attracted by his odd figure and hesitating
manner, and, hoisting him on their shoulders, carried him off,
singing as they went. Lamb enjoyed the lark, and did not tell them
who he was. When they were tired of lugging him, they lifted him,
with much effort and difficulty, to the top of a high wall, and left
him there amid the broken bottles, utterly unable to get down. Lamb
remained there philosophically in the enjoyment of his novel
adventure, until a passing watchman rescued him from his ridiculous
situation.