Chapter 12
The Daguerreotypist
IT MUST NOT BE
supposed
that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe 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, Phoebe 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
Phoebe. 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 Phoebe 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 depots 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 Phoebe 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 Phoebe 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 world-wide
distance. During the early part of their acquaintance, Phoebe
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 Phoebe 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
Phoebe, 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
peddler, 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 super-numerary 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 Phoebe, 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. Phoebe 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. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his heart, seldom or
never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah and her
brother, and Phoebe 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. Phoebe 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
Phoebe, 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 Phoebe; "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 Phoebe, 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 Phoebe,
involuntarily. "What is Cousin Clifford to you?"
"Oh,
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. Phoebe 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
die at once than not to have, and a mature man had better never
have been born than utterly to relinquish,--that we are not
doomed to creep on for ever 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 man's best-directed
effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker
of realities.
Holgrave had read very little, and that
little in passing through the thoroughfare of life, where the
mystic language of his books, was necessarily mixed up with the
babble of the multitude, so that both one and the other were apt
to lose any sense that might have been properly their own. He
considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a thoughtful
turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly yet
reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The
true value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of
inward strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely
like a change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he
scarcely knew of its existence, but which gave a warmth to
everything that he laid his hand on; in that personal ambition,
hidden--from his own as well as other eyes--among his more
generous impulses, but in which lurked a certain efficacy, that
might solidify him from a theorist into the champion of some
practicable cause. Altogether, in his culture and want of
culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
practical experience that counter-acted some of its tendencies;
in his magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness
of whatever the ages had established in man's behalf; in his
faith, and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he
lacked,--the artist might fitly enough stand forth as the
representative of many compeers in his native land.
His
career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be
qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is
free to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some
of the world's prizes within his reach. But these matters are
delightfully uncertain. At almost every step in life, we meet
with young men of 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 Phoebe. 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 Phoebe, 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 Phoebe'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 Phoebe 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 you peeped at them
through the chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's
earnestness and heightened color might have led you to suppose
that he was making love to the young girl!
At length,
something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for Phoebe
to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old
Pyncheon-house. Without directly answering her, he turned from
the Future, which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse,
and began to speak of the influences of the Past. One subject,
indeed, is but the reverberation of the other.
"Shall we
never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the
earnest tone of his preceding conversation.--"It lies upon
the Present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just
as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in
carrying about the corpse of the
old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only
needs to be decently buried. just think a moment, and it will
startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times,--to
Death, if we give the matter the right word!"
"But I do
not see it," observed Phoebe.
"For example, then,"
continued Holgrave; "a dead man, if he happen to have made a
will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of
men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our
judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat
his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh at dead
men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos! We are sick of dead
men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies
with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the
living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds. Whatever
we seek to do, of our own free motion, 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 Phoebe,
"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
there-abouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform
the institutions which they symbolize."
"How you hate everything old! " said
Phoebe, 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 bow 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 Phoebe, a
little piqued.
"Oh, 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 Phoebe; "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, Phoebe; 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 Phoebe, debating with
herself whether she ought to take offence.
"I speak true
thoughts to a true mind! " answered Holgrave, with a vehemence
which Phoebe 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 Phoebe,
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 Phoebe.
"Is it possible you did not know it?" cried
Holgrave.-- "Well,
such is literary fame! Yes, Miss Phoebe 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 Phoebe,--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.