University of Virginia Library

18. BOOK XVIII.
PIERRE, AS A JUVENILE AUTHOR, RECONSIDERED.

I.

Inasmuch as by various indirect intimations much more
than ordinary natural genius has been imputed to Pierre, it
may have seemed an inconsistency, that only the merest magazine
papers should have been thus far the sole productions of
his mind. Nor need it be added, that, in the soberest earnest,
those papers contained nothing uncommon; indeed—entirely
now to drop all irony, if hitherto any thing like that has been
indulged in—those fugitive things of Master Pierre's were the
veriest common-place.

It is true, as I long before said, that Nature at Saddle Meadows
had very early been as a benediction to Pierre;—had
blown her wind-clarion to him from the blue hills, and murmured
melodious secrecies to him by her streams and her
woods. But while nature thus very early and very abundantly
feeds us, she is very late in tutoring us as to the proper methodization
of our diet. Or,—to change the metaphor,—there
are immense quarries of fine marble; but how to get it out;
how to chisel it; how to construct any temple? Youth must
wholly quit, then, the quarry, for awhile; and not only go
forth, and get tools to use in the quarry, but must go and
thoroughly study architecture. Now the quarry-discoverer is
long before the stone-cutter; and the stone-cutter is long before

the architect; and the architect is long before the temple;
for the temple is the crown of the world.

Yes; Pierre was not only very unarchitectural at that time,
but Pierre was very young, indeed, at that time. And it is
often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in
the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely
handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the
fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first
brought to light. Happy would it be, if the man possessed in
himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but
he is like the occupant of a dwelling, whose refuse can not be
clapped into his own cellar, but must be deposited in the street
before his own door, for the public functionaries to take care
of. No common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by
essentially emptying one's self of it into a book; for once
trapped in a book, then the book can be put into the fire, and
all will be well. But they are not always put into the fire;
and this accounts for the vast majority of miserable books over
those of positive merit. Nor will any thoroughly sincere man,
who is an author, ever be rash in precisely defining the period,
when he has completely ridded himself of his rubbish, and
come to the latent gold in his mine. It holds true, in every
case, that the wiser a man is, the more misgivings he has on
certain points.

It is well enough known, that the best productions of the
best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects
as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in
themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University
of God after death. Certain it is, that if any inferences can
be drawn from observations of the familiar lives of men of the
greatest mark, their finest things, those which become the foolish
glory of the world, are not only very poor and inconsiderable
to themselves, but often positively distasteful; they would
rather not have the book in the room. In minds comparatively

inferior as compared with the above, these surmising considerations
so sadden and unfit, that they become careless of what
they write; go to their desks with discontent, and only remain
there—victims to headache, and pain in the back—by the hard
constraint of some social necessity. Equally paltry and despicable
to them, are the works thus composed; born of unwillingness
and the bill of the baker; the rickety offspring of a parent,
careless of life herself, and reckless of the germ-life she contains.
Let not the short-sighted world for a moment imagine, that
any vanity lurks in such minds; only hired to appear on the
stage, not voluntarily claiming the public attention; their utmost
life-redness and glow is but rouge, washed off in private
with bitterest tears; their laugh only rings because it is hollow;
and the answering laugh is no laughter to them.

There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become
sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do;
we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.
Even so, it may possibly be, that arrived at this quiet retrospective
little episode in the career of my hero—this shallowly
expansive embayed Tappan Zee of my otherwise deep-heady
Hudson—I too begin to loungingly expand, and wax harmlessly
sad and sentimental.

Now, what has been hitherto presented in reference to
Pierre, concerning rubbish, as in some cases the unavoidable
first-fruits of genius, is in no wise contradicted by the fact, that
the first published works of many meritorious authors have
given mature token of genius; for we do not know how many
they previously published to the flames; or privately published
in their own brains, and suppressed there as quickly. And in
the inferior instances of an immediate literary success, in very
young writers, it will be almost invariably observable, that for
that instant success they were chiefly indebted to some rich and
peculiar experience in life, embodied in a book, which because,
for that cause, containing original matter, the author himself,

forsooth, is to be considered original; in this way, many very
original books, being the product of very unoriginal minds.
Indeed, man has only to be but a little circumspect, and away
flies the last rag of his vanity. The world is forever babbling
of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the
sense intended by the world; the first man himself—who according
to the Rabbins was also the first author—not being an
original; the only original author being God. Had Milton's
been the lot of Caspar Hauser, Milton would have been vacant
as he. For though the naked soul of man doth assuredly contain
one latent element of intellectual productiveness; yet never
was there a child born solely from one parent; the visible world
of experience being that procreative thing which impregnates
the muses; self-reciprocally efficient hermaphrodites being but
a fable.

There is infinite nonsense in the world on all of these matters;
hence blame me not if I contribute my mite. It is impossible
to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself
helplessly open; the Invulnerable Knight wears his visor
down. Still, it is pleasant to chat; for it passes the time ere
we go to our beds; and speech is further incited, when like
strolling improvisatores of Italy, we are paid for our breath.
And we are only too thankful when the gapes of the audience
dismiss us with the few ducats we earn.

II.

It may have been already inferred, that the pecuniary plans
of Pierre touching his independent means of support in the
city were based upon his presumed literary capabilities. For
what else could he do? He knew no profession, no trade.
Glad now perhaps might he have been, if Fate had made him

a blacksmith, and not a gentleman, a Glendinning, and a genius.
But here he would have been unpardonably rash, had
he not already, in some degree, actually tested the fact, in his
own personal experience, that it is not altogether impossible for
a magazine contributor to Juvenile American literature to receive
a few pence in exchange for his ditties. Such cases stand
upon imperishable record, and it were both folly and ingratitude
to disown them.

But since the fine social position and noble patrimony of
Pierre, had thus far rendered it altogether unnecessary for him
to earn the least farthing of his own in the world, whether by
hand or by brain; it may seem desirable to explain a little
here as we go. We shall do so, but always including, the preamble.

Sometimes every possible maxim or thought seems an old
one; yet it is among the elder of the things in that unaugmentable
stock, that never mind what one's situation may be, however
prosperous and happy, he will still be impatient of it; he
will still reach out of himself, and beyond every present condition.
So, while many a poor be-inked galley-slave, toiling
with the heavy oar of a quill, to gain something wherewithal
to stave off the cravings of nature; and in his hours of morbid
self-reproach, regarding his paltry wages, at all events, as an
unavoidable disgrace to him; while this galley-slave of letters
would have leaped with delight—reckless of the feeble seams
of his pantaloons—at the most distant prospect of inheriting
the broad farms of Saddle Meadows, lord of an all-sufficing income,
and forever exempt from wearing on his hands those
treacherous plague-spots of indigence—videlicet, blots from the
inkstand;—Pierre himself, the undoubted and actual possessor of
the things only longingly and hopelessly imagined by the other;
the then top of Pierre's worldly ambition, was the being able
to boast that he had written such matters as publishers would
pay something for in the way of a mere business transaction,

which they thought would prove profitable. Yet altogether
weak and silly as this may seem in Pierre, let us preambillically
examine a little further, and see if it be so indeed.

Pierre was proud; and a proud man—proud with the sort
of pride now meant—ever holds but lightly those things, however
beneficent, which he did not for himself procure. Were
such pride carried out to its legitimate end, the man would eat
no bread, the seeds whereof he had not himself put into the
soil, not entirely without humiliation, that even that seed must
be borrowed from some previous planter. A proud man likes
to feel himself in himself, and not by reflection in others. He
likes to be not only his own Alpha and Omega, but to be distinctly
all the intermediate gradations, and then to slope off on
his own spine either way, into the endless impalpable ether.
What a glory it was then to Pierre, when first in his two gentlemanly
hands he jingled the wages of labor! Talk of drums
and the fife; the echo of coin of one's own earning is more inspiring
than all the trumpets of Sparta. How disdainfully now
he eyed the sumptuousness of his hereditary halls—the hangings,
and the pictures, and the bragging historic armorials and
the banners of the Glendinning renown; confident, that if need
should come, he would not be forced to turn resurrectionist, and
dig up his grandfather's Indian-chief grave for the ancestral
sword and shield, ignominiously to pawn them for a living!
He could live on himself. Oh, twice-blessed now, in the feeling
of practical capacity, was Pierre.

The mechanic, the day-laborer, has but one way to live; his
body must provide for his body. But not only could Pierre in
some sort, do that; he could do the other; and letting his
body stay lazily at home, send off his soul to labor, and his
soul would come faithfully back and pay his body her wages.
So, some unprofessional gentlemen of the aristocratic South,
who happen to own slaves, give those slaves liberty to go and
seek work, and every night return with their wages, which constitute

those idle gentlemen's income. Both ambidexter and
quadruple-armed is that man, who in a day-laborer's body, possesses
a day-laboring soul. Yet let not such an one be over-confident.
Our God is a jealous God; He wills not that any
man should permanently possess the least shadow of His own
self-sufficient attributes. Yoke the body to the soul, and put
both to the plough, and the one or the other must in the end
assuredly drop in the furrow. Keep, then, thy body effeminate
for labor, and thy soul laboriously robust; or else thy soul
effeminate for labor, and thy body laboriously robust. Elect!
the two will not lastingly abide in one yoke. Thus over the
most vigorous and soaring conceits, doth the cloud of Truth
come stealing; thus doth the shot, even of a sixty-two-pounder
pointed upward, light at last on the earth; for strive we how
we may, we can not overshoot the earth's orbit, to receive the
attractions of other planets; Earth's law of gravitation extends
far beyond her own atmosphere.

In the operative opinion of this world, he who is already
fully provided with what is necessary for him, that man shall
have more; while he who is deplorably destitute of the same,
he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath.
Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact,
plodding, humane sort of world. It is governed only by
the simplest principles, and scorns all ambiguities, all transcendentals,
and all manner of juggling. Now some imaginatively
heterodoxical men are often surprisingly twitted upon their
willful inverting of all common-sense notions, their absurd and
all-displacing transcendentals, which say three is four, and two
and two make ten. But if the eminent Jugglarius himself
ever advocated in mere words a doctrine one thousandth partso
ridiculous and subversive of all practical sense, as that doctrine
which the world actually and eternally practices, of giving
unto him who already hath more than enough, still more of
the superfluous article, and taking away from him who hath

nothing at all, even that which he hath,—then is the truest
book in the world a lie.

Wherefore we see that the so-called Transcendentalists are
not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary,
we seem to see that the Utilitarians,—the every-day
world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists
by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims.
And—what is vastly more—with the one party, their Transcendentals
are but theoretic and inactive, and therefore
harmless; whereas with the other, they are actually clothed in
living deeds.

The highly graveling doctrine and practice of the world,
above cited, had in some small degree been manifested in the
case of Pierre. He prospectively possessed the fee of several
hundred farms scattered over part of two adjoining counties; and
now the proprietor of that popular periodical, the Gazelle Magazine,
sent him several additional dollars for his sonnets. That
proprietor (though in sooth, he never read the sonnets, but referred
them to his professional adviser; and was so ignorant,
that, for a long time previous to the periodical's actually being
started, he insisted upon spelling the Gazelle with a g for
the z, as thus: Gagelle; maintaining, that in the Gazelle connection,
the z was a mere impostor, and that the g was soft;
for he was a judge of softness, and could speak from experience);
that proprietor was undoubtedly a Transcendentalist;
for did he not act upon the Transcendental doctrine previously
set forth?

Now, the dollars derived from his ditties, these Pierre had
always invested in cigars; so that the puffs which indirectly
brought him his dollars were again returned, but as perfumed
puffs; perfumed with the sweet leaf of Havanna. So that
this highly-celebrated and world-renowned Pierre—the great
author—whose likeness the world had never seen (for had he
not repeatedly refused the world his likeness?), this famous

poet, and philosopher, author of “The Tropical Summer: a
Sonnet;” against whose very life several desperadoes were
darkly plotting (for had not the biographers sworn they would
have it?); this towering celebrity—there he would sit smoking,
and smoking, mild and self-festooned as a vapory mountain.
It was very involuntarily and satisfactorily reciprocal. His
cigars were lighted in two ways: lighted by the sale of his
sonnets, and lighted by the printed sonnets themselves.

For even at that early time in his authorial life, Pierre,
however vain of his fame, was not at all proud of his paper.
Not only did he make allumettes of his sonnets when published,
but was very careless about his discarded manuscripts;
they were to be found lying all round the house; gave a great
deal of trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went for kindlings
to the fires; and were forever flitting out of the windows,
and under the door-sills, into the faces of people passing the
manorial mansion. In this reckless, indifferent way of his,
Pierre himself was a sort of publisher. It is true his more
familiar admirers often earnestly remonstrated with him, against
this irreverence to the primitive vestments of his immortal productions;
saying, that whatever had once felt the nib of his
mighty pen, was thenceforth sacred as the lips which had but
once saluted the great toe of the Pope. But hardened as he
was to these friendly censurings, Pierre never forbade that
ardent appreciation of “The Tear,” who, finding a small fragment
of the original manuscript containing a dot (tear), over an
i (eye), esteemed the significant event providential; and begged
the distinguished favor of being permitted to have it for a
brooch; and ousted a cameo-head of Homer, to replace it with
the more invaluable gem. He became inconsolable, when being
caught in a rain, the dot (tear) disappeared from over the i (eye);
so that the strangeness and wonderfulness of the sonnet was still
conspicuous; in that though the least fragment of it could
weep in a drought, yet did it become all tearless in a shower.

But this indifferent and supercilious amateur—deaf to the
admiration of the world; the enigmatically merry and renowned
author of “The Tear;” the pride of the Gazelle Magazine, on
whose flaunting cover his name figured at the head of all contributors—(no
small men either; for their lives had all been
fraternally written by each other, and they had clubbed, and
had their likenesses all taken by the aggregate job, and published
on paper, all bought at one shop) this high-prestiged
Pierre—whose future popularity and voluminousness had become
so startlingly announced by what he had already written,
that certain speculators came to the Meadows to survey its
water-power, if any, with a view to start a paper-mill expressly
for the great author, and so monopolize his stationery dealings;
—this vast being,—spoken of with awe by all merely youthful
aspirants for fame; this age-neutralizing Pierre;—before whom
an old gentleman of sixty-five, formerly librarian to Congress,
on being introduced to him at the Magazine publishers', devoutly
took off his hat, and kept it so, and remained standing,
though Pierre was socially seated with his hat on;—this wonderful,
disdainful genius—but only life-amateur as yet—is now
soon to appear in a far different guise. He shall now learn,
and very bitterly learn, that though the world worship Mediocrity
and Common Place, yet hath it fire and sword for all contemporary
Grandeur; that though it swears that it fiercely assails
all Hypocrisy, yet hath it not always an ear for Earnestness.

And though this state of things, united with the ever multiplying
freshets of new books, seems inevitably to point to a
coming time, when the mass of humanity reduced to one level
of dotage, authors shall be scarce as alchymists are to-day, and
the printing-press be reckoned a small invention:—yet even
now, in the foretaste of this let us hug ourselves, oh, my
Aurelian! that though the age of authors be passing, the
hours of earnestness shall remain!