The old Master had asked us, the Young Astronomer and myself, into his library, to hear him read some passages from his interleaved book.We three had formed a kind of little club without knowing it from the time when the young man began reading those extracts from his poetical reveries which I have reproduced in these pages.
Perhaps we agreed in too many things,--I suppose if we could have had a good hard-headed, old-fashioned New England divine to meet with us it might have acted as a wholesome corrective.For we had it all our own way; the Lady's kindly remonstrance was taken in good part, but did not keep us from talking pretty freely, and as for the Young Girl, she listened with the tranquillity and fearlessness which a very simple trusting creed naturally gives those who hold it.The fewer outworks to the citadel of belief, the fewer points there are to be threatened and endangered.
The reader must not suppose that I even attempt to reproduce everything exactly as it took place in our conversations, or when we met to listen to the Master's prose or to the Young Astronomer's verse.I do not pretend to give all the pauses and interruptions by question or otherwise.I could not always do it if I tried, but I do not want to, for oftentimes it is better to let the speaker or reader go on continuously, although there may have been many breaks in the course of the conversation or reading.When, for instance, I by and by reproduce what the Landlady said to us, I shall give it almost without any hint that it was arrested in its flow from time to time by various expressions on the part of the hearers.
I can hardly say what the reason of it was, but it is very certain that I had a vague sense of some impending event as we took our seats in the Master's library.He seemed particularly anxious that we should be comfortably seated, and shook up the cushions of the arm-chairs himself, and got them into the right places.
Now go to sleep--he said--or listen,--just which you like best.But I am going to begin by telling you both a secret.
Liberavi animam meam.That is the meaning of my book and of my literary life, if I may give such a name to that party-colored shred of human existence.I have unburdened myself in this book, and in some other pages, of what I was born to say.Many things that I have said in my ripe days have been aching in my soul since I was a mere child.I say aching, because they conflicted with many of my inherited beliefs, or rather traditions.I did not know then that two strains of blood were striving in me for the mastery,--two!
twenty, perhaps,--twenty thousand, for aught I know,--but represented to me by two,--paternal and maternal.Blind forces in themselves;shaping thoughts as they shaped features and battled for the moulding of constitution and the mingling of temperament.
Philosophy and poetry came--to me before I knew their names.
Je fis mes premiers vers, sans savoir les ecrire.
Not verses so much as the stuff that verses are made of.I don't suppose that the thoughts which came up of themselves in my mind were so mighty different from what come up in the minds of other young folks.And that 's the best reason I could give for telling 'em.Idon't believe anything I've written is as good as it seemed to me when I wrote it,--he stopped, for he was afraid he was lying,--not much that I 've written, at any rate,--he said--with a smile at the honesty which made him qualify his statement.But I do know this: Ihave struck a good many chords, first and last, in the consciousness of other people.I confess to a tender feeling for my little brood of thoughts.When they have been welcomed and praised it has pleased me, and if at any time they have been rudely handled and despitefully entreated it has cost me a little worry.I don't despise reputation, and I should like to be remembered as having said something worth lasting well enough to last.
But all that is nothing to the main comfort I feel as a writer.Ihave got rid of something my mind could not keep to itself and rise as it was meant to into higher regions.I saw the aeronauts the other day emptying from the bags some of the sand that served as ballast.It glistened a moment in the sunlight as a slender shower, and then was lost and seen no more as it scattered itself unnoticed.
But the airship rose higher as the sand was poured out, and so it seems to me I have felt myself getting above the mists and clouds whenever I have lightened myself of some portion of the mental ballast I have carried with me.Why should I hope or fear when Isend out my book? I have had my reward, for I have wrought out my thought, I have said my say, I have freed my soul.I can afford to be forgotten.
Look here!--he said.I keep oblivion always before me.---He pointed to a singularly perfect and beautiful trilobite which was lying on a pile of manuscripts.---Each time I fill a sheet of paper with what Iam writing, I lay it beneath this relic of a dead world, and project my thought forward into eternity as far as this extinct crustacean carries it backward.When my heart beats too lustily with vain hopes of being remembered, I press the cold fossil against it and it grows calm.I touch my forehead with it, and its anxious furrows grow smooth.Our world, too, with all its breathing life, is but a leaf to be folded with the other strata, and if I am only patient, by and by I shall be just as famous as imperious Caesar himself, embedded with me in a conglomerate.
He began reading:--"There is no new thing under the sun," said the Preacher.He would not say so now, if he should come to life for a little while, and have his photograph taken, and go up in a balloon, and take a trip by railroad and a voyage by steamship, and get a message from General Grant by the cable, and see a man's leg cut off without its hurting him.If it did not take his breath away and lay him out as flat as the Queen of Sheba was knocked over by the splendors of his court, he must have rivalled our Indians in the nil admarari line.
