 | Mosses from an old manse |  |
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 monied 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 artifical 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
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
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 crowd
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
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!
Aye, 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, 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
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 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
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
alms-house, 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
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
love-lorn 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 dooms-day trumpet-blast,
let him sound it now! The dread alarm 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 invincible 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
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 frost-work. Yet he now finds his place.
Why do that pair of flaunting girls, with the pert, affected laugh,
and the sly leer at the bystanders, 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 proprietries 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.
We shall make short work of this miserable class; each member
of which is entitled to grasp any other member's hand, by
that vile degradation wherein guilty error has buried all alike.
The foul fiend, to whom it properly belongs, must relieve us of our
loathsome task. Let the bond-servants of sin pass on. But neither
man nor woman, in whom good predominates, will smile or
sneer, nor bid the Rogues' March be played, in derision of their
array. Feeling within their breasts a shuddering sympathy,
which at least gives token of the sin that might have been, they
will thank God for any place in the grand procession of human
existence, save among those most wretched ones. Many, however,
will be astonished at the fatal impulse that drags them
thitherward. Nothing is more remarkable than the various deceptions
and oftenest, perhaps, by the splendor of its garments.
Statesmen, rulers, generals, and all men who act over an extensive
sphere, are most liable to be deluded in this way; they
commit wrong, devastation, and murder, on so grand a scale, that
it impresses them as speculative rather than actual; but, in our
procession, we find them linked in detestable conjunction with the
meanest criminals, whose deeds have the vulgarity of petty details.
Here the effect of circumstance and accident is done away,
and a man finds his rank according to the spirit of his crime, in
whatever shape it may have been developed.
We have called the Evil; now let us call the Good. The
trumpet's brazen throat should pour heavenly music over the
earth, and the herald's voice go forth with the sweetness of an
angel's accents, as if to summon each upright man to his reward.
But how is this? Does none answer to the call? Not one: for
the just, the pure, the true, and all who might most worthily obey
it, shrink sadly back, as most conscious of error and imperfection.
Then let the summons be to those whose pervading principle is
Love. This classification will embrace all the truly good, and
none in whose souls there exists not something that may expand
itself into a heaven, both of well-doing and felicity.
The first that presents himself is a man of wealth, who has bequeathed
the bulk of his property to a hospital; his ghost, methinks,
would have a better right here than his living body. But
here they come, the genuine benefactors of their race. Some
have wandered about the earth with pictures of bliss in their imagination,
and with hearts that shrank sensitively from the idea
of pain and woe, yet have studied all varieties of misery that
human nature can endure. The prison, the insane asylum, the
squalid chamber of the alms-house, the manufactory where the
demon of machinery annihilates the human soul, and the cotton-field
where God's image becomes a beast of burthen; to these,
the apostles of humanity have penetrated. This missionary,
black with India's burning sunshine, shall give his arm to a pale-faced
brother who has made himself familiar with the infected
alleys and loathsome haunts of vice, in one of our own cities.
The generous founder of a college shall be the partner of a maiden
lady, of narrow substance, one of whose good deeds it has been,
to gather a little school of orphan children. If the mighty merchant
whose benefactions are reckoned by thousands of dollars,
deem himself worthy, let him join the procession with her whose
love has proved itself by watchings at the sick bed, and all those
lowly offices which bring her into actual contact with disease and
wretchedness. And with those whose impulses have guided them
to benevolent actions, we will rank others, to whom Providence
has assigned a different tendency and different powers. Men
who have spent their lives in generous and holy contemplation
for the human race; those who, by a certain heavenliness of
spirit, have purified the atmosphere around them, and thus supplied
a medium in which good and high things may be projected
and performed,—give to these a lofty place among the benefactors
of mankind, although no deed, such as the world calls deeds, may
be recorded of them. There are some individuals, of whom we
cannot conceive it proper that they should apply their hands to
any earthly instrument, or work out any definite act; and others,
perhaps not less high, to whom it is an essential attribute to labor,
in body as well as spirit, for the welfare of their brethren. Thus,
if we find a spiritual sage, whose unseen, inestimable influence
has exalted the moral standard of mankind, we will choose for
his companion some poor laborer, who has wrought for love in the
potatoe field of a neighbor poorer than himself.
We have summoned this various multitude—and, to the credit
of our nature, it is a large one—on the principle of Love. It is
singular, nevertheless, to remark the shyness that exists among
to recognize one another by the free-masonry of mutual goodness,
and to embrace like brethren, giving God thanks for such various
specimens of human excellence. But it is far otherwise. Each
sect surrounds its own righteousness with a hedge of thorns. It
is difficult for the good Christian to acknowledge the good Pagan;
almost impossible for the good Orthodox to grasp the hand of the
good Unitarian, leaving to their Creator to settle the matters in
dispute, and giving their mutual efforts strongly and trustingly to
whatever right thing is too evident to be mistaken. Then again,
though the heart be large, yet the mind is often of such moderate
dimensions as to be exclusively filled up with one idea.
When a good man has long devoted himself to a particular kind
of beneficence—to one species of reform—he is apt to become
narrowed into the limits of the path wherein he treads, and to
fancy that there is no other good to be done on earth but that self-same
good to which he has put his hand, and in the very mode
that best suits his own conceptions. All else is worthless; his
scheme must be wrought out by the united strength of the whole
world's stock of love, or the world is no longer worthy of a position
in the universe. Moreover, powerful Truth, being the rich
grape-juice expressed from the vineyard of the ages, has an intoxicating
quality, when imbibed by any save a powerful intellect,
and often, as it were, impels the quaffer to quarrel in his cups.
For such reasons, strange to say, it is harder to contrive a friendly
arrangement of these brethren of love and righteousness, in the
procession of life, than to unite even the wicked, who, indeed,
are chained together by their crimes. The fact is too preposterous
for tears, too lugubrious for laughter.
But, let good men push and elbow one another as they may,
during their earthly march, all will be peace among them when
the honorable array of their procession shall tread on heavenly
ground. There they will doubtless find, that they have been
stroke, which, with an honest purpose, any mortal struck, even
for a narrow object, was indeed stricken for the universal cause
of good. Their own view may be bounded by country, creed,
profession, the diversities of individual character—but above them
all is the breadth of Providence. How many, who have deemed
themselves antagonists, will smile hereafter, when they look back
upon the world's wide harvest field, and perceive that, in unconscious
brotherhood, they were helping to bind the self-same sheaf!
But, come! The sun is hastening westward, while the march
of human life, that never paused before, is delayed by our attempt
to re-arrange its order. It is desirable to find some comprehensive
principle, that shall render our task easier by bringing thousands
into the ranks, where hitherto we have brought one. Therefore
let the trumpet, if possible, split its brazen throat with a
louder note than ever, and the herald summon all mortals who,
from whatever cause, have lost, or never found, their proper
places in the world.
Obedient to this call, a great multitude come together, most of
them with a listless gait, betokening weariness of soul, yet with
a gleam of satisfaction in their faces, at a prospect of at length
reaching those positions which, hitherto, they have vainly sought.
But here will be another disappointment; for we can attempt no
more than merely to associate, in one fraternity, all who are
afflicted with the same vague trouble. Some great mistake in
life is the chief condition of admittance into this class. Here
are members of the learned professions, whom Providence endowed
with special gifts for the plough, the forge, and the wheel-barrow,
or for the routine of unintellectual business. We will
assign them, as partners in the march, those lowly laborers and
handicraftsmen, who have pined, as with a dying thirst, after the
unattainable fountains of knowledge. The latter have lost less
than their companions; yet more, because they deem it infinite.
another. Here are Quakers with the instinct of battle in them;
and men of war who should have worn the broad-brim. Authors
shall be ranked here, whom some freak of Nature, making game
of her poor children, had imbued with the confidence of genius,
and strong desire of fame, but has favored with no corresponding
power; and others, whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied with
the faculty of expression, or any of that earthly machinery, by
which ethereal endowments must be manifested to mankind. All
these, therefore, are melancholy laughing-stocks. Next, here
are honest and well-intentioned persons, who by a want of tact—
by inaccurate perceptions—by a distorting imagination—have
been kept continually at cross-purposes with the world, and bewildered
upon the path of life. Let us see, if they can confine
themselves within the line of our procession. In this class, likewise,
we must assign places to those who have encountered that
worst of ill-success, a higher fortune than their abilities could
vindicate; writers, actors, painters, the pets of a day, but whose
laurels wither unrenewed amid their hoary hair; politicians,
whom some malicious contingency of affairs has thrust into conspicuous
station, where, while the world stands gazing at them,
the dreary consciousness of imbecility makes them curse their
birth-hour. To such men, we give for a companion him whose
rare talents, which perhaps require a revolution for their exercise,
are buried in the tomb of sluggish circumstances.
Not far from these, we must find room for one whose success
has been of the wrong kind; the man who should have lingered
in the cloisters of a university, digging new treasures out of the
Herculaneum of antique lore, diffusing depth and accuracy of
literature throughout his country, and thus making for himself a
great and quiet fame. But the outward tendencies around him
have proved too powerful for his inward nature, and have drawn
him into the arena of political tumult, there to contend at disadvantage,
giants of actual life. He becomes, it may be, a name for brawling
parties to bandy to and fro, a legislator of the Union; a
governor of his native State; an ambassador to the courts of kings
or queens; and the world may deem him a man of happy stars.
But not so the wise; and not so himself, when he looks through
his experience, and sighs to miss that fitness, the one invaluable
touch which makes all things true and real. So much achieved,
yet how abortive is his life! Whom shall we choose for his companion?
Some weak-framed blacksmith, perhaps, whose delicacy
of muscle might have suited a tailor's shop-board better than the
anvil.
Shall we bid the trumpet sound again? It is hardly worth the
while. There remain a few idle men of fortune, tavern and
grog-shop loungers, lazzaroni, old bachelors, decaying maidens,
and people of crooked intellect or temper, all of whom may find
their like, or some tolerable approach to it, in the plentiful diversity
of our latter class. There too, as his ultimate destiny, must
we rank the dreamer, who, all his life long, has cherished the
idea that he was peculiarly apt for something, but never could
determine what it was; and there the most unfortunate of men,
whose purpose it has been to enjoy life's pleasures, but to avoid
a manful struggle with its toil and sorrow. The remainder, if
any, may connect themselves with whatever rank of the procession
they shall find best adapted to their tastes and consciences.
The worst possible fate would be to remain behind, shivering in
the solitude of time, while all the world is on the move toward
eternity. Our attempt to classify society is now complete. The
result may be anything but perfect; yet better—to give it the
very lowest phrase—than the antique rule of the herald's office,
or the modern one of the tax-gatherer, whereby the accidents and
superficial attributes, with which the real nature of individuals
has least to do, are acted upon as the deepest characteristics of
move!
Yet pause awhile! We had forgotten the Chief-Marshal.
Hark! That world-wide swell of solemn music, with the clang
of a mighty bell breaking forth through its regulated uproar,
announces his approach. He comes; a severe, sedate, immovable,
dark rider, waving his truncheon of universal sway, as he
passes along the lengthened line, on the pale horse of the Revelations.
It is Death! Who else could assume the guidance of a
procession that comprehends all humanity? And if some, among
these many millions, should deem themselves classed amiss, yet
let them take to their hearts the comfortable truth, that Death
levels us all into one great brotherhood, and that another state of
being will surely rectify the wrong of this. Then breathe thy
wail upon the earth's wailing wind, thou band of melancholy
music, made up of every sigh that the human heart, unsatisfied, has
uttered! There is yet triumph in thy tones. And now we
move! Beggars in their rags, and Kings trailing the regal purple
in the dust; the Warrior's gleaming helmet; the Priest in his
sable robe; the hoary grandsire, who has run life's circle and
come back to childhood; the ruddy School-boy with his golden
curls, frisking along the march; the Artisan's stuff-jacket: the
Noble's star-decorated coat;—the whole presenting a motley
spectacle, yet with a dusky grandeur brooding over it. Onward,
onward, into that dimness where the lights of Time, which have
blazed along the procession, are flickering in their sockets! And
whither! We know not, and Death, hitherto our leader, deserts
us by the wayside, as the tramp of our innumerable footsteps pass
beyond his sphere. He knows not, more than we, our destined
goal. But God, who made us, knows, and will not leave us on
our toilsome and doubtful march, either to wander in infinite uncertainty,
or perish by the way!
| Mosses from an old manse | |