University of Virginia Library

12. XII.
THE DAGUERREOTYPIST.

It must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally
so active as Phœbe could be wholly confined within
the precincts of the old Pyncheon-house. Clifford's demands
upon her time were usually satisfied, in those long
days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet as his daily
existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the resources
by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that over-wearied
him; for — except that he sometimes wrought a
little with a hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy
weather, traversed a large, unoccupied room — it was his
tendency to remain only too quiescent, as regarded any toil
of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a smouldering
fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or
the monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing
effect over a mind differently situated was no monotony
to Clifford. Possibly, he was in a state of second
growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment
for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and
events, which passed as a perfect void to persons more
practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude
to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a
mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its
long-suspended life.

Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to
rest, thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still
melting through his window-curtains, or were thrown with
late lustre on the chamber wall. And while he thus slept

early, as other children do, and dreamed of childhood, Phœbe
was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder of the
day and evening.

This was a freedom essential to the health even of a
character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of
Phœbe. The old house, as we have already said, had both
the dry-rot and the damp-rot in its walls; it was not good
to breathe no other atmosphere than that. Hepzibah, though
she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown to be
a kind of lunatic, by imprisoning herself so long in one
place, with no other company than a single series of ideas,
and but one affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford,
the reader may perhaps imagine, was too inert to
operate morally on his fellow-creatures, however intimate
and exclusive their relations with him. But the sympathy
or magnetism among human beings is more subtle and universal
than we think; it exists, indeed, among different
classes of organized life, and vibrates from one to another.
A flower, for instance, as Phœbe herself observed, always
began to droop sooner in Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's,
than in her own; and by the same law, converting her
whole daily life into a flower-fragrance for these two sickly
spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade
much sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast.
Unless she had now and then indulged her brisk impulses,
and breathed rural air in a suburban walk, or ocean-breezes
along the shore, — had occasionally obeyed the impulse of
nature, in New England girls, by attending a metaphysical
or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile panorama,
or listening to a concert, — had gone shopping about the city,
ransacking entire depôts of splendid merchandise, and bringing
home a ribbon, — had employed, likewise, a little time to
read the Bible in her chamber, and had stolen a little more
to think of her mother and her native place, — unless for such

moral medicines as the above, we should soon have beheld
our poor Phœbe grow thin, and put on a bleached, unwholesome
aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.

Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly
to be regretted, although whatever charm it infringed upon
was repaired by another, perhaps more precious. She was
not so constantly gay, but had her moods of thought, which
Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her former phase
of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood
him better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted
him to himself. Her eyes looked larger, and darker,
and deeper; so deep, at some silent moments, that they
seemed like Artesian wells, down, down, into the infinite.
She was less girlish than when we first beheld her, alighting
from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.

The only youthful mind with which Phœbe had an
opportunity of frequent intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist.
Inevitably, by the pressure of the seclusion about
them, they had been brought into habits of some familiarity.
Had they met under different circumstances, neither
of these young persons would have been likely to bestow
much thought upon the other; unless, indeed, their extreme
dissimilarity should have proved a principle of mutual attraction.
Both, it is true, were characters proper to New England
life, and possessing a common ground, therefore, in their
more external developments; but as unlike, in their respective
interiors, as if their native climes had been at worldwide
distance. During the early part of their acquaintance,
Phœbe had held back rather more than was customary with
her frank and simple manners from Holgrave's not very
marked advances. Nor was she yet satisfied that she knew
him well, although they almost daily met and talked together,

in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
familiar way.

The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phœbe
something of his history. Young as he was, and had his
career terminated at the point already attained, there had
been enough of incident to fill, very creditably, an autobiographic
volume. A romance on the plan of Gil Blas,
adapted to American society and manners, would cease to
be a romance. The experience of many individuals among
us, who think it hardly worth the telling, would equal the
vicissitudes of the Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate
success, or the point whither they tend, may be incomparably
higher than any that a novelist would imagine for
his hero. Holgrave, as he told Phœbe, somewhat proudly,
could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the
scantiest possible, and obtained by a few winter-months'
attendance at a district school. Left early to his own guidance,
he had begun to be self-dependent while yet a boy;
and it was a condition aptly suited to his natural force of
will. Though now but twenty-two years old (lacking some
months, which are years in such a life), he had already
been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a
country store; and, either at the same time or afterwards,
the political editor of a country newspaper. He had subsequently
travelled New England and the Middle States, as a
pedler, in the employment of a Connecticut manufactory of
cologne-water and other essences. In an episodical way,
he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
success, especially in many of the factory-towns along
our inland streams. As a supernumerary official, of some
kind or other, aboard a packet-ship, he had visited Europe,
and found means, before his return, to see Italy, and part
of France and Germany. At a later period, he had spent

some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more
recently, he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for
which science (as he assured Phœbe, and, indeed, satisfactorily
proved, by putting Chanticleer, who happened to
be scratching near by, to sleep) he had very remarkable
endowments.

His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more
importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent,
than any of the preceding ones. It had been taken up with
the careless alacrity of an adventurer, who had his bread to
earn. It would be thrown aside as carelessly, whenever he
should choose to earn his bread by some other equally
digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and,
perhaps, showed a more than common poise in the young
man, was the fact, that, amid all these personal vicissitudes,
he had never lost his identity. Homeless as he had been,
— continually changing his whereabout, and, therefore,
responsible neither to public opinion nor to individuals, —
putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
soon shifted for a third, — he had never violated the innermost
man, but had carried his conscience along with him.
It was impossible to know Holgrave, without recognizing
this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen it. Phœbe soon
saw it, likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence which
such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and
sometimes repelled, — not by any doubt of his integrity to
whatever law he acknowledged, — but by a sense that his
law differed from her own. He made her uneasy, and
seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his lack of
reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning,
it could establish its right to hold its ground.

Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in
his nature. He was too calm and cool an observer. Phœbe
felt his eye, often; his heart, seldom, or never. He took a

certain kind of interest in Hepzibah and her brother, and
Phœbe herself. He studied them attentively, and allowed
no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might;
but, after all, he never exactly made common cause with
them, nor gave any reliable evidence that he loved them
better, in proportion as he knew them more. In his relations
with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
not heart-sustenance. Phœbe could not conceive what
interested him so much in her friends and herself, intellectually,
since he cared nothing for them, or, comparatively, so
little, as objects of human affection.

Always, in his interviews with Phœbe, the artist made
especial inquiry as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except
at the Sunday festival, he seldom saw.

“Does he still seem happy?” he asked, one day.

“As happy as a child,” answered Phœbe; “but — like a
child, too — very easily disturbed.”

“How disturbed?” inquired Holgrave. “By things
without, or by thoughts within?”

“I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?” replied
Phœbe, with simple piquancy. “Very often, his humor
changes without any reason that can be guessed at, just as
a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have begun
to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow,
that his heart is made all solemn and sacred by it. When
he is cheerful, — when the sun shines into his mind, — then
I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no
further. It is holy ground where the shadow falls!”

“How prettily you express this sentiment!” said the
artist. “I can understand the feeling, without possessing it.
Had I your opportunities, no scruples would prevent me

from fathoming Clifford to the full depth of my plummet-line!”

“How strange that you should wish it!” remarked
Phœbe, involuntarily. “What is Cousin Clifford to you?”

“O, nothing, — of course, nothing!” answered Holgrave,
with a smile. “Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible
world! The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me;
and I begin to suspect that a man's bewilderment is the
measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and children,
too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be certain
that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have
been, from what he sees them to be, now. Judge Pyncheon!
Clifford! What a complex riddle — a complexity
of complexities — do they present! It requires intuitive
sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it. A mere observer,
like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at
best, only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray.”

The artist now turned the conversation to themes less
dark than that which they had touched upon. Phœbe and
he were young together; nor had Holgrave, in his premature
experience of life, wasted entirely that beautiful spirit
of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart and
fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as
bright as on the first day of creation. Man's own youth
is the world's youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and
imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not
yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape
he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely
about the world's old age, but never actually believed what
he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked
upon the world — that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate,
decrepit, without being venerable — as a tender stripling,
capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but
scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming.

He had that sense, or inward prophecy, — which a young
man had better never have been born than not to have, and
a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,
— that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the
old, bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers
abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his
own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave — as doubtless it has
seemed to the hopeful of every century, since the epoch of
Adam's grandchildren — that in this age, more than ever
before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down,
and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their
dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew.

As to the main point, — may we never live to doubt it! —
as to the better centuries that are coming, the artist was
surely right. His error lay in supposing that this age,
more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered
garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead
of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that
it mattered anything to the great end in view, whether he
himself should contend for it or against it. Yet it was well
for him to think so. This enthusiasm, infusing itself
through the calmness of his character, and thus taking an
aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep
his youth pure, and make his aspirations high. And
when, with the years settling down more weightily upon
him, his early faith should be modified by inevitable experience,
it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution of
his sentiments. He would still have faith in man's brightening
destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he
should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf; and the
haughty faith, with which he began life, would be well bartered
for a far humbler one, at its close, in discerning that

women. To this day, however, I hardly know whether
I then beheld Zenobia in her truest attitude, or whether
that were the truer one in which she had presented herself
at Blithedale. In both, there was something like
the illusion which a great actress flings around her.

“Have you given up Blithedale forever?” I inquired.

“Why should you think so?” asked she.

“I cannot tell,” answered I; “except that it appears
all like a dream that we were ever there together.”

“It is not so to me,” said Zenobia. “I should think
it a poor and meagre nature, that is capable of but one
set of forms, and must convert all the past into a dream
merely because the present happens to be unlike it.
Why should we be content with our homely life of a
few months past, to the exclusion of all other modes? It
was good; but there are other lives as good, or better.
Not, you will understand, that I condemn those who give
themselves up to it more entirely than I, for myself,
should deem it wise to do.”

It irritated me, this self-complacent, condescending,
qualified approval and criticism of a system to which
many individuals — perhaps as highly endowed as our
gorgeous Zenobia — had contributed their all of earthly
endeavor, and their loftiest aspirations. I determined to
make proof if there were any spell that would exorcise
her out of the part which she seemed to be acting. She
should be compelled to give me a glimpse of something
true; some nature, some passion, no matter whether
right or wrong, provided it were real.

“Your allusion to that class of circumscribed characters,
who can live only in one mode of life,” remarked I,
coolly, “reminds me of our poor friend Hollingsworth.
Possibly he was in your thoughts when you spoke thus.

just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful
things, but of whom, even after much and careful
inquiry, we never happen to hear another word. The
effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of
the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy,
which makes fools of themselves and other people.
Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show
finely in their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and
rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing-day.

But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on
this particular afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon-garden.
In that point of view, it was a pleasant sight to
behold this young man, with so much faith in himself, and
so fair an appearance of admirable powers, — so little
harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal, —
it was pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with
Phœbe. Her thought had scarcely done him justice, when
it pronounced him cold; or, if so, he had grown warmer
now. Without such purpose on her part, and unconsciously
on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a home
to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the
insight on which he prided himself, he fancied that he
could look through Phœbe, and all around her, and could
read her off like a page of a child's story-book. But these
transparent natures are often deceptive in their depth;
those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are further
from us than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might
judge of Phœbe's capacity, was beguiled, by some silent
charm of hers, to talk freely of what he dreamed of doing
in the world. He poured himself out as to another self.
Very possibly, he forgot Phœbe while he talked to her, and
was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought,
when rendered sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to
flow into the first safe reservoir which it finds. But, had

possesses the faculty of distinguishing heroism from
absurdity.”

I dared make no retort to Zenobia's concluding apothegm.
In truth, I admired her fidelity. It gave me a
new sense of Hollingsworth's native power, to discover
that his influence was no less potent with this beautiful
woman, here, in the midst of artificial life, than it had
been at the foot of the gray rock, and among the wild
birch-trees of the wood-path, when she so passionately
pressed his hand against her heart. The great, rude,
shaggy, swarthy man! And Zenobia loved him!

“Did you bring Priscilla with you?” I resumed.
“Do you know I have sometimes fancied it not quite
safe, considering the susceptibility of her temperament,
that she should be so constantly within the sphere of a
man like Hollingsworth. Such tender and delicate
natures, among your sex, have often, I believe, a very
adequate appreciation of the heroic element in men.
But then, again, I should suppose them as likely as any
other women to make a reciprocal impression. Hollingsworth
could hardly give his affections to a person capable
of taking an independent stand, but only to one whom
he might absorb into himself. He has certainly shown
great tenderness for Priscilla.”

Zenobia had turned aside. But I caught the reflection
of her face in the mirror, and saw that it was very pale,
— as pale, in her rich attire, as if a shroud were round her.

“Priscilla is here,” said she, her voice a little lower
than usual. “Have not you learnt as much from your
chamber window? Would you like to see her?”

She made a step or two into the back drawing-room,
and called,

“Priscilla! Dear Priscilla!”

a dead man's icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to
what point we may, a dead man's white, immitigable face
encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves, before we can begin to have our
proper influence on our own world, which will then be no
longer our world, but the world of another generation,
with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere.
I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's houses;
as, for instance, in this of the seven gables!”

“And why not,” said Phœbe, “so long as we can be
comfortable in them?”

“But we shall live to see the day, I trust,” went on the
artist, “when no man shall build his house for posterity.
Why should he? He might just as reasonably order a
durable suit of clothes, — leather, or gutta percha, or whatever
else lasts longest, — so that his great-grandchildren
should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely the same
figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation
were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that
single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would
imply almost every reform which society is now suffering
for. I doubt whether even our public edifices — our capitols,
state-houses, court-houses, city-halls, and churches —
ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or
brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin, once
in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to
examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize.”

“How you hate everything old!” said Phœbe, in dismay.
“It makes me dizzy to think of such a shifting world!”

“I certainly love nothing mouldy,” answered Holgrave.
“Now, this old Pyncheon-house! Is it a wholesome place
to live in, with its black shingles, and the green moss that
shows how damp they are? — its dark, low-studded rooms?

— its grime and sordidness, which are the crystallization on
its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn and
exhaled here, in discontent and anguish? The house
ought to be purified with fire, — purified till only its ashes
remain!”

“Then why do you live in it?” asked Phœbe, a little
piqued.

“O, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however,”
replied Holgrave. “The house, in my view, is
expressive of that odious and abominable Past, with all its
bad influences, against which I have just been declaiming.
I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better how to
hate it. By-the-by, did you ever hear the story of Maule,
the wizard, and what happened between him and your
immeasurably great-grandfather?”

“Yes indeed!” said Phœbe; “I heard it long ago, from
my father, and two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah,
in the month that I have been here. She seems to
think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons began from
that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you,
Mr. Holgrave, look as if you thought so too! How singular,
that you should believe what is so very absurd, when
you reject many things that are a great deal worthier of
credit!”

“I do believe it,” said the artist, seriously; “not as a
superstition, however, but as proved by unquestionable facts,
and as exemplifying a theory. Now, see; — under those
seven gables, at which we now look up, — and which old
Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his descendants,
in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far
beyond the present, — under that roof, through a portion of
three centuries, there has been perpetual remorse of conscience,
a constantly defeated hope, strife amongst kindred,
various misery, a strange form of death, dark suspicion,

unspeakable disgrace, — all, or most of which calamity, I
have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate
desire to plant and endow a family. To plant a family!
This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief
which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half
century, at longest, a family should be merged into the
great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its
ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness,
should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct
is conveyed in subterranean pipes. In the family existence
of these Pyncheons, for instance, — forgive me, Phœbe; but
I cannot think of you as one of them, — in their brief New
England pedigree, there has been time enough to infect
them all with one kind of lunacy or another!”

“You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred,” said
Phœbe, debating with herself whether she ought to take
offence.

“I speak true thoughts to a true mind!” answered Holgrave,
with a vehemence which Phœbe had not before witnessed
in him. “The truth is as I say! Furthermore, the
original perpetrator and father of this mischief appears to
have perpetuated himself, and still walks the street, — at
least, his very image, in mind and body, — with the fairest
prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched
an inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the
daguerreotype, and its resemblance to the old portrait?”

“How strangely in earnest you are!” exclaimed Phœbe,
looking at him with surprise and perplexity: half alarmed,
and partly inclined to laugh. “You talk of the lunacy of
the Pyncheons; — is it contagious?”

“I understand you!” said the artist, coloring and laughing.
“I believe I am a little mad. This subject has taken
hold of my mind with the strangest tenacity of clutch, since
I have lodged in yonder old gable. As one method of

throwing it off, I have put an incident of the Pyncheon family
history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine.”

“Do you write for the magazines?” inquired Phœbe.

“Is it possible you did not know it?” cried Holgrave.
— “Well, such is literary fame! Yes, Miss Phœbe Pyncheon,
among the multitude of my marvellous gifts, I have
that of writing stories; and my name has figured, I can
assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making
as respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any
of the canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In
the humorous line, I am thought to have a very pretty way
with me; and as for pathos, I am as provocative of tears as
an onion. But shall I read you my story?”

“Yes, if it is not very long,” said Phœbe, — and added,
laughingly, — “nor very dull.”

As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist
could not decide for himself, he forthwith produced his roll
of manuscript, and, while the late sunbeams gilded the
seven gables, began to read.