 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
III.
But it was more especially the Lecture invitations coming
from venerable, gray-headed metropolitan Societies, and indited
by venerable gray-headed Secretaries, which far from elating
filled the youthful Pierre with the sincerest sense of humility.
Lecture? lecture? such a stripling as I lecture to fifty benches,
with ten gray heads on each? five hundred gray heads in all!
Shall my one, poor, inexperienced brain presume to lay down
the law in a lecture to five hundred life-ripened understandings?
It seemed too absurd for thought. Yet the five hundred,
through their spokesman, had voluntarily extended this
identical invitation to him. Then how could it be otherwise,
than that an incipient Timonism should slide into Pierre, when
he considered all the disgraceful inferences to be derived from
such a fact. He called to mind, how that once upon a time,
during a visit of his to the city, the police were called out to
quell a portentous riot, occasioned by the vast press and contention
for seats at the first lecture of an illustrious lad of nineteen,
the author of “A Week at Coney Island.”
It is needless to say that Pierre most conscientiously and respectfully
declined all polite overtures of this sort.
Similar disenchantments of his cooler judgment did likewise
deprive of their full lusciousness several other equally marked
demonstrations of his literary celebrity. Applications for autographs
showered in upon him; but in sometimes humorously
gratifying the more urgent requests of these singular people
Pierre could not but feel a pang of regret, that owing to the
very youthful and quite unformed character of his handwriting,
his signature did not possess that inflexible uniformity, which
—for mere prudential reasons, if nothing more—should always
mark the hand of illustrious men. His heart thrilled with
sympathetic anguish for posterity, which would be certain to
of one supereminent name. Alas! posterity would be
sure to conclude that they were forgeries all; that no chirographic
relic of the sublime poet Glendinning survived to their
miserable times.
From the proprietors of the Magazines whose pages were
honored by his effusions, he received very pressing epistolary
solicitations for the loan of his portrait in oil, in order to take
an engraving therefrom, for a frontispiece to their periodicals.
But here again the most melancholy considerations obtruded.
It had always been one of the lesser ambitions of Pierre, to
sport a flowing beard, which he deemed the most noble corporeal
badge of the man, not to speak of the illustrious author.
But as yet he was beardless; and no cunning compound of
Rowland and Son could force a beard which should arrive at
maturity in any reasonable time for the frontispiece. Besides,
his boyish features and whole expression were daily changing.
Would he lend his authority to this unprincipled imposture
upon Posterity? Honor forbade.
These epistolary petitions were generally couched in an elaborately
respectful style; thereby intimating with what deep
reverence his portrait would be handled, while unavoidably
subjected to the discipline indispensable to obtain from it the
engraved copy they prayed for. But one or two of the persons
who made occasional oral requisitions upon him in this matter
of his engraved portrait, seemed less regardful of the inherent
respect due to every man's portrait, much more, to that of a
genius so celebrated as Pierre. They did not even seem to remember
that the portrait of any man generally receives, and
indeed is entitled to more reverence than the original man himself;
since one may freely clap a celebrated friend on the
shoulder, yet would by no means tweak his nose in his portrait.
The reason whereof may be this: that the portrait is better entitled
to reverence than the man; inasmuch as nothing belittling
unavoidably belittling things can be fancied as touching the
man.
Upon one occasion, happening suddenly to encounter a
literary acquaintance—a joint editor of the “Captain Kidd
Monthly”—who suddenly popped upon him round a corner,
Pierre was startled by a rapid—“Good-morning, good-morning;—just
the man I wanted:—come, step round now with
me, and have your Daguerreotype taken;—get it engraved
then in no time;—want it for the next issue.”
So saying, this chief mate of Captain Kidd seized Pierre's
arm, and in the most vigorous manner was walking him off,
like an officer a pickpocket, when Pierre civilly said—“Pray,
sir, hold, if you please, I shall do no such thing.”—“Pooh,
pooh—must have it—public property—come along—only a
door or two now.”—“Public property!” rejoined Pierre, “that
may do very well for the `Captain Kidd Monthly;'—it's very
Captain Kiddish to say so. But I beg to repeat that I do
not intend to accede.”—“Don't? Really?” cried the other,
amazedly staring Pierre full in the countenance;—“why bless
your soul, my portrait is published—long ago published!”—
“Can't help that, sir”—said Pierre. “Oh! come along, come
along,” and the chief mate seized him again with the most
uncompunctious familiarity by the arm. Though the sweetest-tempered
youth in the world when but decently treated, Pierre
had an ugly devil in him sometimes, very apt to be evoked by
the personal profaneness of gentlemen of the Captain Kidd
school of literature. “Look you, my good fellow,” said he,
submitting to his impartial inspection a determinately double
fist,—“drop my arm now—or I'll drop you. To the devil
with you and your Daguerreotype!”
This incident, suggestive as it was at the time, in the sequel
had a surprising effect upon Pierre. For he considered with
what infinite readiness now, the most faithful portrait of any one
a faithful portrait was only within the power of the moneyed,
or mental aristocrats of the earth. How natural then the inference,
that instead, as in old times, immortalizing a genius,
a portrait now only dayalized a dunce. Besides, when every
body has his portrait published, true distinction lies in not having
yours published at all. For if you are published along
with Tom, Dick, and Harry, and wear a coat of their cut, how
then are you distinct from Tom, Dick, and Harry? Therefore,
even so miserable a motive as downright personal vanity helped
to operate in this matter with Pierre.
Some zealous lovers of the general literature of the age, as
well as declared devotees to his own great genius, frequently
petitioned him for the materials wherewith to frame his biography.
They assured him, that life of all things was most
insecure. He might feel many years in him yet; time might
go lightly by him; but in any sudden and fatal sickness, how
would his last hours be embittered by the thought, that he was
about to depart forever, leaving the world utterly unprovided
with the knowledge of what were the precise texture and hue
of the first trowsers he wore. These representations did certainly
touch him in a very tender spot, not previously unknown
to the schoolmaster. But when Pierre considered, that owing
to his extreme youth, his own recollections of the past soon
merged into all manner of half-memories and a general vagueness,
he could not find it in his conscience to present such materials
to the impatient biographers, especially as his chief verifying
authority in these matters of his past career, was now eternally
departed beyond all human appeal. His excellent nurse
Clarissa had been dead four years and more. In vain a young
literary friend, the well-known author of two Indexes and one
Epic, to whom the subject happened to be mentioned, warmly
espoused the cause of the distressed biographers; saying that
it was no use to stand back; and concluded by taking
from the crown of his hat the proof-sheets of his own biography,
which, with the most thoughtful consideration for the
masses, was shortly to be published in the pamphlet form, price
only a shilling.
It only the more bewildered and pained him, when still other
and less delicate applicants sent him their regularly printed
Biographico-Solicito Circulars, with his name written in ink;
begging him to honor them and the world with a neat draft of
his life, including criticisms on his own writings; the printed
circular indiscriminately protesting, that undoubtedly he knew
more of his own life than any other living man; and that only he
who had put together the great works of Glendinning could
be fully qualified thoroughly to analyze them, and cast the ultimate
judgment upon their remarkable construction.
Now, it was under the influence of the humiliating emotions
engendered by things like the above; it was when thus haunted
by publishers, engravers, editors, critics, autograph-collectors,
portrait-fanciers, biographers, and petitioning and remonstrating
literary friends of all sorts; it was then, that there stole into
the youthful soul of Pierre, melancholy forebodings of the utter
unsatisfactoriness of all human fame; since the most ardent
profferings of the most martyrizing demonstrations in his behalf,—these
he was sorrowfully obliged to turn away.
And it may well be believed, that after the wonderful vital
world-revelation so suddenly made to Pierre at the Meadows—
a revelation which, at moments, in some certain things, fairly
Timonized him—he had not failed to clutch with peculiar nervous
detestation and contempt that ample parcel, containing
the letters of his Biographico and other silly correspondents,
which, in a less ferocious hour, he had filed away as curiosities.
It was with an almost infernal grin, that he saw that particular
it was consumed before his eyes, so in his soul was forever
killed the last and minutest undeveloped microscopic germ of
that most despicable vanity to which those absurd correspondents
thought to appeal.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |