Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862

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You may be startled and shocked, but I am stating fact, not theory. I
announce not an invention, but a discovery. You look around you, and
because you do not see tomahawks and tattooing you doubt my assertion.
But your observation is superficial. You have not penetrated into the
secret place where souls abide. You are staring only at the outside
layer of your neighbors; just peel them and see what you will find.

I speak from the highest possible authority,--my own. Representing the
gentler half of humanity, of respectable birth, tolerable parts, and
good education, as tender-hearted as most women, not unfamiliar with
the best society, mingling, to some extent, with those who understand
and practise the minor moralities, you would at once infer from my
circumstances that I was a very fair specimen of the better class of
Americans,--and so I am. For one that stands higher than I in the
moral, social, and intellectual scale, you will undoubtedly find ten
that stand lower. Yet through all these layers gleam the fiery eyes of
my savage. I thought I was a Christian, I have endeavored to do my duty
to my day and generation; but of a sudden Christianity and civilization
leave me in the lurch, and the "old Adam" within me turns out to be
just such a fierce Saxon pirate as hurtled down against the white
shores of Britain fifteen hundred years ago.

For we have been moving.

People who live in cities and move regularly every year from one good,
finished, right-side-up house to another will think I give a very small
reason for a very broad fact; but they do not know what they are
talking about. They have fallen into a way of looking upon a house only
as an exaggerated trunk, into which they pack themselves annually with
as much nonchalance as if it were only their preparation for a summer
trip to the seashore. They don't strike root anywhere. They don't have
to tear up anything. A man comes with cart and horses. There is a stir
in the one house,--they are gone;--there is a stir in the other
house,--they are settled,--and everything is wound up and set going to
run another year. We do these things differently in the country. We
don't build a house by way of experiment and live in it a few years,
then tear it down and build another. We live in a house till it cracks,
and then we plaster it over; then it totters, and we prop it up; then
it rocks, and we rope it down; then it sprawls, and we clamp it; then
it crumbles, and we have a new underpinning,--but keep living in it all
the time. To know what moving really means, you must move from just
such a rickety-rackety old farmhouse, where you have clung and grown
like a fungus ever since there was anything to grow,--where your life
and luggage have crept into all the crevices and corners, and every
wall is festooned with associations thicker than the cobwebs, though
the cobwebs are pretty thick,--where the furniture and the pictures and
the knick-knacks are so become a part and parcel of the house, so grown
with it and into it, that you do not know they are chiefly rubbish till
you begin to move them and they fall to pieces, and don't know it then,
but persist in packing them up and carrying them away for the sake of
auld lang syne, till, set up again in your new abode, you suddenly find
that their sacredness is gone, their dignity has degraded into
dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only
comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has
suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and
the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this
tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the _débris_ of many
generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary
new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough
for it, and you will perhaps comprehend how it is that I find a great
crack in my life. On the farther side are prosperity, science,
literature, philosophy, religion, society, all the refinements, and
amenities, and benevolences, and purities of life,--in short, all the
arts of peace, and civilization, and Christianity,--and on this
side--moving. You will also understand why that one word comprises, to
my thinking, all the discomforts short of absolute physical torture
that can be condensed into the human lot. Condensed, did I say? If it
were a condensed agony, I could endure it. One great, stunning,
overpowering blow is undoubtedly terrible, but you rally all your
fortitude to meet and resist it, and when it is over it is over and the
recuperative forces go to work; but a trouble that worries and baffles
and pricks and rasps you, that penetrates into all the ramifications of
your life, that fills you with profound disgust, and fires you with
irrepressible fury, and makes of you an Ishmaelite indeed, with your
hand against every man and every man's hand against you,--ah! that is
the _experimentum crucis_. Such is moving, in the country,--not an
act, but a process,--not a volition, but a fermentation.

We will say that the first of September is the time appointed for the
transit. The day approaches. It is the twenty-ninth of August. I
prepare to take hold of the matter in earnest. I am nipped in the bud
by learning that the woman who was to help about the carpets cannot
come, because her baby is taken with the croup. I have not a doubt of
it. I never knew a baby yet that did not go and have the croup, or the
colic, or the cholera infantum, just when it was imperatively necessary
that it should not have them. But there is no help for it. I shudder
and bravely gird myself for the work. I tug at the heavy, bulky,
unwieldy carpets, and am covered with dust and abomination. I think
carpets are the most untidy, unwholesome nuisances in the whole world.
It is impossible to be clean with them under your feet. You may sweep
your carpet twenty times and raise a dust on the twenty-first. I am
sure I heard long ago of some new fashion that was to be
introduced,--some Italian style, tiles, or mosaic-work, or something of
the sort. I should welcome anything that would dispense with these vile
rags. I sigh over the good old sanded floors that our grandmothers
rejoiced in,--and so, apotheosizing the past and anathematizing the
present, I pull away, and the tacks tear my fingers, and the hammer
slips and lets me back with a jerk, and the dust fills my hair and nose
and eyes and mouth and lungs, and my hands grow red and coarse and
ragged and sore and begrimed, and I pull and choke and cough and
strangle and pull.

So the carpets all come up and the curtains all come down. The bureaus
march out of the chamber-windows and dance on a tight-rope down into
the yard below. The chairs are set at "heads and points." The clothes
are packed into the trunks. The flour and meal and sugar, all the
wholesale edibles, are carted down to the new house and stored. The
forks are wrapped up and we eat with our fingers, and have nothing to
eat at that. Then we are informed that the new house will not be ready
short of two weeks at least. Unavoidable delays. The plasterers were
hindered; the painters misunderstood orders; the paperers have
defalcated, and the universe generally comes to a pause. It is no
matter in what faith I was nurtured, I am now a believer in total
depravity. Contractors have no conscience; masons are not men of their
word; carpenters are tricky; all manner of cunning workmen are bruised
reeds. But there is nothing to do but submit and make the best of
it,--a horrible kind of mechanism. We go forthwith into a chrysalis
state for two weeks. The only sign of life is an occasional lurch
towards the new house, just sufficient to keep up the circulation. One
day I dreamily carry down a basket of wine-glasses. At another time I
listlessly stuff all my slippers into a huge pitcher and take up the
line of march. Again a bucket is filled with tea-cups, or I shoulder
the fire-shovel. The two weeks drag themselves away, and the cry is
still, "Unfinished!" To prevent petrifying into a fossil remain, or
relapsing into primitive barbarism, or degenerating into a dormouse, I
rouse my energies and determine to put my own shoulder to the wheel and
see if something cannot be accomplished. I rise early in the morning
and walk to Dan, to hire a painter who is possessed of "gumption,"
"faculty." Arrived in Dan, I am told that he is in Beersheba. Nothing
daunted, I take a short cut across the fields to Beersheba, bearding
manifold dangers from rickety stone-walls, strong enough to keep women
in, but not strong enough to keep bears, bulls, and other wild beasts
out,--toppling enough to play the mischief with draperies, but not
toppling enough to topple over when urgently pressed to do so. But I
secure my man, and remember no more my sorrow of bulls and stones for
joy at my success. From Beersheba I proceed to Padan-aram to buy seven
pounds of flour, thence to Galilee of the Gentiles for a pound of
cheese, thence to the land of Uz for a smoked halibut, thence to the
ends of the earth for a lemon to make life tolerable,--and the days
hobble on.

"The flying gold of the ruined woodlands" drives through the air, the
signal is given, and there is no longer "quiet on the Potomac." The
unnatural calm gives way to an unearthly din. Once more I bring myself
to bear on the furniture and the trumpery, and there is a small
household whirlpool. All that went before "pales its ineffectual
fires." Now comes the strain upon my temper, and my temper bends, and
quivers, and creaks, and cracks. Ithuriel touches me with his spear;
all the integuments of my conventional, artificial, and acquired
gentleness peel off, and I stand revealed a savage. Everything around
me sloughs off its usual habitude and becomes savage. Looking-glasses
are shivered by the dozen. A bit is nicked out of the best China
sugar-bowl. A pin gets under the matting that is wrapped around the
centre-table and jags horrible hieroglyphics over the whole polished
surface. The bookcase that we are trying to move tilts, and trembles,
and goes over, and the old house through all her frame gives signs of
woe. A crash detonate on the stairs brings me up from the depths of the
closet where I am burrowing. I remember seeing Petronius disappear a
moment ago with my lovely and beloved marble Hebe in his arms. I rush
rampant to the upper landing in time to see him couchant on the lower.
"I have broken my leg," roars Petronius, as if I cared for his leg. A
fractured leg is easily mended; but who shall restore me the nose of
my nymph, marred into irremediable deformity and dishonor?

Occasionally a gleam of sunshine shoots athwart the darkness to keep me
back from rash deeds. Behind the sideboard I find a little cross of
dark, bright hair and gold and pearls, that I lost two years ago and
would not be comforted. O happy days woven in with the dark, bright
hair! O golden, pearly days, come back to me again! "Never mind your
gewgaws," interposes real life; "what is to be done with the things in
this drawer?" Lying atop of a heap of old papers in the front-yard,
waiting the match that is to glorify them into flame, I find a letter
that mysteriously disappeared long since and caused me infinite alarm
lest indelicate eyes might see it and indelicate hands make ignoble use
of its honest and honorable meaning. I learn also sundry new and
interesting facts in mechanics. I become acquainted for the first time
with the _modus operandi_ of "roller-cloths." I never understood
before how the roller got inside the towel. It was one of those gentle
domestic mysteries that repel even while they invite investigation. I
shall not give the result of my discovery to the public. If you wish
very much to find out, you can move, as I did.

But the rifts of sunshine disappear, the clouds draw together and close
in. The savage walks abroad once more, and I go to bed tired of life.

I have scarcely fallen asleep, when I am reluctantly, by short and
difficult stages, awakened. A rumbling, grating, strident noise first
confuses, then startles me. Is it robbers? Is it an earthquake? Is it
the coming of fate? I lie rigid, bathed in a cold perspiration. I hear
the tread of banditti on the moaning stairs. I see the flutter of
ghostly robes by the uncurtained windows. A chill, uncanny air rushes
in and grips at my damp hair. I am nerved by the extremity of my
terror. I will die of anything but fright. I jerk off the bedclothes,
convulse into an upright posture, and glare into the darkness. Nothing.
I rise softly, creep cautiously and swiftly over the floor, that always
creaked, but now thunders at every footfall. A light gleams through
the open door of the opposite room whence the sound issues. A familiar
voice utters an exclamation which I recognize. It is Petronius, the
unprincipled scoundrel, who is uncording a bed, dragging remorselessly
through innumerable holes the long rope whose doleful wail came near
giving me an epilepsy. My savage lets loose the dogs of war. Petronius
would fain defend himself by declaring that it is morning. I
indignantly deny it. He produces his watch. A fig for his watch! I
stake my consciousness against twenty watches, and go to bed again; but
Sleep, angry goddess, once repulsed, returns no more. The dawn comes up
the sky and confirms the scorned watch. The golden daggers of the
morning prick in under my eyelids, and Petronius introduces himself
upon the scene once more to announce, that, if I don't wish to be
corded up myself, I must abdicate that bed. The threat does not terrify
me. Indeed, nothing at the moment seems more inviting than to be corded
up and let alone; but duty still binds me to life, and, assuring
Petronius that the just law will do that service for him, if he does
not mend his ways, I slowly emerge again into the world,--the dreary,
chaotic world,--the world that is never at rest.

And there is hurrying to and fro, and a clang of many voices, and the
clatter of much crockery, and a lifting, and balancing, and battering
against walls and curving around corners, and sundry contusions, and a
great waste of expletives, and a loading of wagons, and a driving of
patient oxen back and forth with me generally on the top of the load,
steadying a basket of eggs with one foot, keeping a tin can of
something from upsetting with the other, and both arms stretched around
a very big and very square picture-frame that knocks against my nose or
my chin every time the cart goes over a stone or drops into a rut, and
the wind threatening to blow my hat off, and blowing it off, and my
"back-hair" tumbling down,--and the old house is at last despoiled. The
rooms stand bare and brown and desolate. The sun, a hand-breadth above
the horizon, pours in through the unblinking windows. The last load is
gone. The last man has departed. I am left alone to lock up the house
and walk over the hill to the new home. Then, for the first time, I
remember that I am leaving. As I pass through the door of my own room,
not regretfully, I turn. I look up and down and through and through the
place where I shall never rest again, and I rejoice that it is so. As I
stand there, with the red, solid sunshine lying on the floor, lying on
the walls, unfamiliar in its new profusion, the silence becomes
audible. In the still October evening there is an effort in the air.
The dumb house is striving to find a voice. I feel the struggle of its
insensate frame. The old timbers quiver with the unusual strain. The
strong, blind, vegetable energy agonizes to find expression, and,
wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the
weight of Its superincumbent inertia. Slowly, gently, most sorrowfully
through the golden air cleaves a voice that is somewhat a wail, yet not
untuned by love. Inarticulate at first, I catch only the low
mournfulness; but it clears, it concentrates, it murmurs into cadence,
it syllables into intelligence, and thus the old house speaks:--

"Child, my child, forward to depart, stay for one moment your eager
feet. Put off from your brow the crown which the sunset has woven, and
linger yet a little longer in the shadow which enshrouds me forever. I
remember, in this parting hour, the day of days which the tremulous
years bore in their bosom,--a day crimson with the woodbine's happy
flush and glowing with the maple's gold. On that day a tender, tiny
life came down, and stately Silence fled before the pelting of
baby-laughter. Faint memories of far-off olden time were softly
stirred. Blindly thrilled through all my frame a vague, dim sense of
swelling buds, and singing-birds, and summer-gales,--of the purple
beauty of violets, the smells of fragrant earth, and the sweetness of
summer dews and darks. Many a harvest-moon since then has filled her
yellow horn, and queenly Junes crowned with roses have paled before the
sternness of Decembers. But Decembers and Junes alike bore royal gifts
to you,--gifts to the busy brain and the awakening heart. In dell and
copse and meadow and gay green-wood you drank great draughts of life.
Yet, even as I watched, your eyes grew wistful. Your lips framed
questions for which the Springs found no reply, and the sacred mystery
of living brought its sweet, uncertain pain. Then you went away, and a
shadow fell. A gleam passed out of the sunshine and a note from the
robin's song. The knights that pranced on the household hearth grew
faint and still, and died for want of young eyes to mark their
splendor. But when your feet, ever and anon, turned homeward, they used
a firmer step, and I knew, that, though the path might be rough, you
trod it bravely. I saw that you had learned how doing is a nobler thing
than dreaming, yet kept the holy fire burning in the holy place. But
now you go, and there will be no return. The stars are faded from the
sky. The leaves writhe on the greensward. The breezes wail a dirge. The
summer rain is pallid like winter snow. And--O bitterest cup of
all!--the golden memories of the past have vanished from your heart. I
totter down to the grave, while you go on from strength to strength.
The Junes that gave you life brought death to me, and you sorrow not. O
child of my tender care, look not so coldly on my pain! Breathe one
sigh of regret, drop one tear of pity, before we part!"

The mournful murmur ceased. I am not adamant. My savage crouched out of
sight among the underbrush. I think something stirred in the back of my
eyes. There was even a suspicion of dampness in front. I thrust my hand
in my pocket to have my handkerchief ready in case of a catastrophe. It
was an unfortunate proceeding. My pocket was crammed full. I had to
push my fingers in between all manner of rubbish, to get at the
required article, and when I got hold of it, I had to pull with all my
might to get it out, and when it did come, out with it came a tin box
of mustard seed, a round wooden box of tooth-powder, a ball of twine, a
paper of picture-books, and a pair of gloves. Of course, the covers of
both the boxes came off. The seed scattered over the floor. The
tooth-powder puffed a white cloud into my face. The ball of twine
unrolled and trundled to the other side of the room. I gathered up what
I could, but, by the time order was restored and my handkerchief ready
for use, I had no use for it. The stirring in the back of my eyes had
stopped. The dewiness had disappeared. My savage sprang out from the
underbrush and brandished his tomahawk. And to the old house I made
answer as a Bushman of Caffraria might, or a Sioux of the
Prae-Pilgrimic Age:--

"Old House, hush up! Why do you talk stuff? 'Golden memories' indeed!
To hear you, one might suppose you were an ivied castle on the Rhine,
and I a fair-haired princess, cradled in the depths of regal luxury,
feeding on the blossoms of a thousand generations, and heroic from
inborn royalty. 'Tender care'! Did you not wake me in the middle of the
night, last summer, by trickling down water on my face from a passing
shower? and did I not have to get up at that unearthly hour to move the
bed, and step splash into a puddle, and come very near being floated
away? Did not the water drip, drip, drip upon my writing-desk, and soak
the leather and swell the wood, and stain the ribbon and spoil the
paper inside, and all because you were treacherous at the roof and let
it? Have you not made a perfect rattery of yourself, yawning at every
possible chink and crumbling at the underpinning, and keeping me awake
night after night by the tramp of a whole brigade of the Grand Army
that slaughtered Bishop Hatto? Whenever a breeze comes along stout
enough to make an aspen-leaf tremble, don't you immediately go into
hysterics, and rock, and creak, and groan, as if you were the shell of
an earthquake? Don't you shrivel at every window to let in the
northeasters and all the snow-storms that walk abroad? Whenever a
needle, or a pencil, or a penny drops, don't you open somewhere and
take it in? 'Golden memories'! Leaden memories! Wooden memories! Madden
memories!"

My savage gave a war-whoop. I turned scornfully. I swept down the
staircase. I banged the front-door. I locked it with an accent, and
marched up the hill. A soft sighing breathed past me. I knew it was the
old house mourning for her departing child. The sun had disappeared,
but the western sky was jubilant in purple and gold. The cool evening
calmed me. The echoes of the war-whoop vibrated almost tenderly along
the hushed hillside. I paused on the summit of the hill and looked
back. Down in the valley stood the sorrowful house, tasting the first
bitterness of perpetual desolation. The maples and the oaks and the
beech-trees hung out their flaming banners. The pond lay dark in the
shadow of the circling hills. The years called to me,--the happy,
sun-ripe years that I had left tangled in the apple-blossoms, and
moaning among the pines, and tinkling in the brook, and floating in the
cups of the water-lilies. They looked up at me from the orchard, dark
and cool. They thrilled across from the hill-tops, glowing still with
the glowing sky. I heard their voice by the lilac-bush. They smiled at
me under the peach-trees, and where the blackberries had ripened
against the southern wall. I felt them once more in the clover-smells
and the new-mown hay. They swayed again in the silken tassels of the
crisp, rustling corn. They hummed with the bees in the garden-borders.
They sang with the robins in the cherry-trees, and their tone was
tender and passing sweet. They besought me not to cast away their
memory for despite of the black-browed troop whose vile and sombre
robes had mingled in with their silver garments. They prayed me to
forget, but not all. They minded me of the sweet counsel we had taken
together, when summer came over the hills and walked by the
watercourses. They bade me remember the good tidings of great joy which
they had brought me when my eyes were dim with unavailing tears. My
lips trembled to their call. The war-whoop chanted itself into a
vesper. A happy calm lifted from my heart and quivered out over the
valley, and a comfort settled on the sad old house as I stretched forth
my hands and from my inmost soul breathed down a _Benedicite!_

* * * * *

METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY.

It may seem to some of my readers that I have wandered from my subject
and forgotten the title of these articles, which purport to be a series
of papers on "Methods of Study in Natural History." But some idea of
the progress of Natural History, of its growth as a science, of the
gradual evolving of general principles out of a chaotic mass of facts,
is a better aid to the student than direct instruction upon special
modes of investigation; and it is with the intention of presenting the
study of Natural History from this point of view that I have chosen my
title.

I have endeavored thus far to show how scientific facts have been
systematized so as to form a classification that daily grows more true
to Nature, in proportion as its errors are corrected by a more intimate
acquaintance with the facts; but I will now attempt a more difficult
task, and try to give some idea of the mental process by which facts
are transformed into scientific truth. I fear that the subject may seem
very dry to my readers, and I would again ask their indulgence for
details absolutely essential to my purpose, but which would indeed be
very wearisome, did they not lead us up to an intelligent and most
significant interpretation of their meaning.

I should be glad to remove the idea that science is the mere amassing
of facts. It is true that scientific results grow out of facts, but not
till they have been fertilized by thought The facts must be collected,
but their mere accumulation will never advance the sum of human
knowledge by one step;--it is the comparison of facts and their
transformation into ideas that lead to a deeper insight into the
significance of Nature. Stringing words together in incoherent
succession does not make an intelligible sentence; facts are the words
of God, and we may heap them together endlessly, but they will teach
us little or nothing till we place them in their true relations and
recognize the thought that binds them together as a consistent whole.

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