 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
I.
In the lower old-fashioned part of the city, in a narrow street
—almost a lane—once filled with demure-looking dwellings, but
now chiefly with immense lofty warehouses of foreign importers;
and not far from the corner where the lane intersected
with a very considerable but contracted thoroughfare for merchants
and their clerks, and their carmen and porters; stood at
this period a rather singular and ancient edifice, a relic of the
more primitive time. The material was a grayish stone, rudely
cut and masoned into walls of surprising thickness and strength;
along two of which walls—the side ones—were distributed as
many rows of arched and stately windows. A capacious,
square, and wholly unornamented tower rose in front to twice
the height of the body of the church; three sides of this tower
were pierced with small and narrow apertures. Thus far, in its
external aspect, the building—now more than a century old,—
sufficiently attested for what purpose it had originally been
founded. In its rear, was a large and lofty plain brick structure,
with its front to the rearward street, but its back presented
to the back of the church, leaving a small, flagged, and quadrangular
vacancy between. At the sides of this quadrangle,
three stories of homely brick colonnades afforded covered communication
between the ancient church, and its less elderly
fencing in a small courtyard in front of the rearward building,
seemed to hint, that the latter had usurped an unoccupied space
formerly sacred as the old church's burial inclosure. Such a
fancy would have been entirely true. Built when that part of
the city was devoted to private residences, and not to warehouses
and offices as now, the old Church of the Apostles had
had its days of sanctification and grace; but the tide of change
and progress had rolled clean through its broad-aisle and side-aisles,
and swept by far the greater part of its congregation
two or three miles up town. Some stubborn and elderly old
merchants and accountants, lingered awhile among its dusty
pews, listening to the exhortations of a faithful old pastor, who,
sticking to his post in this flight of his congregation, still
propped his half-palsied form in the worm-eaten pulpit, and
occasionally pounded—though now with less vigorous hand—
the moth-eaten covering of its desk. But it came to pass, that
this good old clergyman died; and when the gray-headed and
bald-headed remaining merchants and accountants followed his
coffin out of the broad-aisle to see it reverently interred; then
that was the last time that ever the old edifice witnessed the
departure of a regular worshiping assembly from its walls.
The venerable merchants and accountants held a meeting, at
which it was finally decided, that, hard and unwelcome as the
necessity might be, yet it was now no use to disguise the fact,
that the building could no longer be efficiently devoted to its
primitive purpose. It must be divided into stores; cut into
offices; and given for a roost to the gregarious lawyers. This
intention was executed, even to the making offices high up in
the tower; and so well did the thing succeed, that ultimately
the church-yard was invaded for a supplemental edifice, likewise
to be promiscuously rented to the legal crowd. But this
new building very much exceeded the body of the church in
height. It was some seven stories; a fearful pile of Titanic
sacred tower.
In this ambitious erection the proprietors went a few steps, or
rather a few stories, too far. For as people would seldom willingly
fall into legal altercations unless the lawyers were always
very handy to help them; so it is ever an object with lawyers
to have their offices as convenient as feasible to the street; on
the ground-floor, if possible, without a single acclivity of a step;
but at any rate not in the seventh story of any house, where
their clients might be deterred from employing them at all, if
they were compelled to mount seven long flights of stairs, one
over the other, with very brief landings, in order even to pay
their preliminary retaining fees. So, from some time after its
throwing open, the upper stories of the less ancient attached
edifice remained almost wholly without occupants; and by the
forlorn echoes of their vacuities, right over the head of the
business-thriving legal gentlemen below, must—to some few of
them at least—have suggested unwelcome similitudes, having
reference to the crowded state of their basement-pockets, as
compared with the melancholy condition of their attics;—alas!
full purses and empty heads! This dreary posture of affairs,
however, was at last much altered for the better, by the gradual
filling up of the vacant chambers on high, by scores of
those miscellaneous, bread-and-cheese adventurers, and ambiguously
professional nondescripts in very genteel but shabby
black, and unaccountable foreign-looking fellows in blue spectacles;
who, previously issuing from unknown parts of the
world, like storks in Holland, light on the eaves, and in the attics
of lofty old buildings in most large sea-port towns. Here
they sit and talk like magpies; or descending in quest of improbable
dinners, are to be seen drawn up along the curb in
front of the eating-houses, like lean rows of broken-hearted
pelicans on a beach; their pockets loose, hanging down and
flabby, like the pelican's pouches when fish are hard to be caught.
amends for their physical forlornness, by resolutely reveling in
the region of blissful ideals.
They are mostly artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors,
or indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or
fugitive French politicians, or German philosophers. Their
mental tendencies, however heterodox at times, are still very
fine and spiritual upon the whole; since the vacuity of their
exchequers leads them to reject the coarse materialism of Hobbs,
and incline to the airy exaltations of the Berkelyan philosophy.
Often groping in vain in their pockets, they can not but give in
to the Descartian vortices; while the abundance of leisure in
their attics (physical and figurative), unite with the leisure in
their stomachs, to fit them in an eminent degree for that undivided
attention indispensable to the proper digesting of the
sublimated Categories of Kant; especially as Kant (can't) is
the one great palpable fact in their pervadingly impalpable lives.
These are the glorious paupers, from whom I learn the profoundest
mysteries of things; since their very existence in the
midst of such a terrible precariousness of the commonest means
of support, affords a problem on which many speculative nutcrackers
have been vainly employed. Yet let me here offer up
three locks of my hair, to the memory of all such glorious paupers
who have lived and died in this world. Surely, and truly
I honor them—noble men often at bottom—and for that very
reason I make bold to be gamesome about them; for where
fundamental nobleness is, and fundamental honor is due, merriment
is never accounted irreverent. The fools and pretenders
of humanity, and the impostors and baboons among the gods,
these only are offended with raillery; since both those gods
and men whose titles to eminence are secure, seldom worry
themselves about the seditious gossip of old apple-women, and
the skylarkings of funny little boys in the street.
When the substance is gone, men cling to the shadow.
that loftiness, even when converted to the meanest uses. It
would seem, as if forced by imperative Fate to renounce the
reality of the romantic and lofty, the people of the present
would fain make a compromise by retaining some purely
imaginative remainder. The curious effects of this tendency
is oftenest evinced in those venerable countries of the old
transatlantic world; where still over the Thames one bridge
yet retains the monastic title of Blackfriars; though not a
single Black Friar, but many a pickpocket, has stood on that
bank since a good ways beyond the days of Queen Bess;
where still innumerable other historic anomalies sweetly and
sadly remind the present man of the wonderful procession that
preceded him in his new generation. Nor—though the comparative
recentness of our own foundation upon these Columbian
shores, excludes any considerable participation in these
attractive anomalies,—yet are we not altogether, in our more
elderly towns, wholly without some touch of them, here and
there. It was thus with the ancient Church of the Apostles—
better known, even in its primitive day, under the abbreviative
of The Apostles—which, though now converted from its original
purpose to one so widely contrasting, yet still retained its
majestical name. The lawyer or artist tenanting its chambers,
whether in the new building or the old, when asked where he
was to be found, invariably replied,—At the Apostles'. But
because now, at last, in the course of the inevitable transplantations
of the more notable localities of the various professions
in a thriving and amplifying town, the venerable spot offered
not such inducements as before to the legal gentlemen; and as
the strange nondescript adventures and artists, and indigent
philosophers of all sorts, crowded in as fast as the others left;
therefore, in reference to the metaphysical strangeness of these
curious inhabitants, and owing in some sort to the circumstance,
that several of them were well-known Teleological
of all manner of heterodoxical tenets; therefore, I say, and
partly, peradventure, from some slight wagishness in the
public; the immemorial popular name of the ancient church
itself was participatingly transferred to the dwellers therein.
So it came to pass, that in the general fashion of the day, he
who had chambers in the old church was familiarly styled an
Apostle.
But as every effect is but the cause of another and a subsequent
one, so it now happened that finding themselves thus
clannishly, and not altogether infelicitously entitled, the occupants
of the venerable church began to come together out of
their various dens, in more social communion; attracted
toward each other by a title common to all. By-and-by, from
this, they went further; and insensibly, at last became organized
in a peculiar society, which, though exceedingly inconspicuous,
and hardly perceptible in its public demonstrations,
was still secretly suspected to have some mysterious ulterior
object, vaguely connected with the absolute overturning of
Church and State, and the hasty and premature advance of
some unknown great political and religious Millennium. Still,
though some zealous conservatives and devotees of morals,
several times left warning at the police-office, to keep a wary
eye on the old church; and though, indeed, sometimes an
officer would look up inquiringly at the suspicious narrow window-slits
in the lofty tower; yet, to say the truth, was the
place, to all appearance, a very quiet and decorous one, and
its occupants a company of harmless people, whose greatest reproach
was efflorescent coats and crack-crowned hats all
podding in the sun.
Though in the middle of the day many bales and boxes
would be trundled along the stores in front of the Apostles';
and along its critically narrow sidewalk, the merchants would
now and then hurry to meet their checks ere the banks should
purposes, and not used as a general thoroughfare, it was at
all times a rather secluded and silent place. But from an hour
or two before sundown to ten or eleven o'clock the next morning,
it was remarkably silent and depopulated, except by the
Apostles themselves; while every Sunday it presented an aspect
of surprising and startling quiescence; showing nothing
but one long vista of six or seven stories of inexorable iron shutters
on both sides of the way. It was pretty much the same
with the other street, which, as before said, intersected with the
warehousing lane, not very far from the Apostles'. For though
that street was indeed a different one from the latter, being full
of cheap refectories for clerks, foreign restaurants, and other
places of commercial resort; yet the only hum in it was restricted
to business hours; by night it was deserted of every
occupant but the lamp-posts; and on Sunday, to walk through
it, was like walking through an avenue of sphinxes.
Such, then, was the present condition of the ancient Church
of the Apostles; buzzing with a few lingering, equivocal lawyers
in the basement, and populous with all sorts of poets,
painters, paupers and philosophers above. A mysterious professor
of the flute was perched in one of the upper stories of the
tower; and often, of silent, moonlight nights, his lofty, melodious
notes would be warbled forth over the roofs of the ten thousand
warehouses around him—as of yore, the bell had pealed over
the domestic gables of a long-departed generation.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |