Part 8

Merciful angels and benevolent fairies! it was Urquhart's translation of Rabelais! One short spell I read, no more; but it raised a devil which has never since been laid. Ear hath not heard, it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive, what I felt as I realised, like a young giant just awakened, that there was in me a stupendous mental strength to grasp and understand that magnificent mixture of ribaldry and learning, fun and wisdom, deviltry and divinity. In a few pages' time I knew what it all meant, and that I was gifted to understand it. I replaced the book; nor did I read it again for years, but from that hour I was never quite the same person. The next day I saw Callot's "Temptation of St. Anthony" for the first time in a shop-window, and felt with joy and pride that I understood it out of Rabelais. Two young gentlemen--lawyers apparently--by my side thought it was crazy and silly. To me it was more like an apocalypse.

I am speaking plain truth when I say that that one quarter of an hour's reading of Rabelais--standing up--was to me as the light which flashed upon Saul journeying to Damascus. It seems to me now as if it were the great event of my life. It came to such a pass in after years that I could have identified any line in the Chronicle of Gargantua, and I also was the suggester, father, and founder in London of the Rabelais Club, in which were many of the best minds of the time, but beyond it all and brighter than all was that first revelation.

It should be remembered that I had already perused Sterne, much of Swift, and far more comic and satiric literature than is known to boys, and, what is far more remarkable, had thoroughly taken it all into my _cor cordium_ by much repetition and reflection.

Mr. Hunt in time put me up to a great deal of very valuable or curious _belletristic_ fair-lettered or black-lettered reading, far beyond my years, though not beyond my intelligence and love. We had been accustomed to pass to our back-gate of the school through Blackberry Alley--

"Blackberry Alley, now Duponceau Street, A rose by any name will smell as sweet"--

which was tenanted principally by social evils. He removed to the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets. Under our schoolroom there was a gambling den. I am not aware that these surroundings had any effect whatever upon the pupils. Among the pupils in Seventh Street was one named Emile Tourtelot. We called him Oatmeal Turtledove. I had another friend who was newly come from Connecticut. His uncle kept a hotel and often gave him Havanna cigars. We often took long walks together out of town and smoked them. He taught me the song--

"On Springfield mountains there did dwell,"

with much more quaint rural New England lore.

About this time my grandfather Leland died. I wept sadly on hearing it. My father, who went to Holliston to attend the funeral, brought me back a fine collection of Indian stone relics and old American silver coins, for he had been in his way an antiquarian. _Bon sang ne peut mentir_. I had also the certificate of some Society or Order of Revolutionary soldiers to which he had belonged. One of his brothers had, as an officer, a membership of the hereditary Order of the Cincinnati. This passed to another branch of the family.

For many years the principal regular visitor at our house was Mr. Robert Stewart, a gentleman of good family and excellent education, who had during the wars with Napoleon made an adventurous voyage to France, and subsequently passed most of his life as Consul or diplomatic agent in Cuba. He had brought with him from Cuba a black Ebo-African slave named Juan. As the latter seemed to be discontented in Philadelphia, Mr. Stewart, who was kindness itself, offered to send him back freed to Cuba or Africa, and told him he might buy a modest outfit of clothing, such as suited his condition. The negro went to a first-class tailor and ordered splendid clothes, which were sent back, of course. The vindictive Ebo was so angry at this, that one summer afternoon, while Mr. Stewart slept, the former fell on him with an axe and knife, mangled his head horribly, cut the cords of his hand, &c., and thought he had killed him. But hearing his victim groan, he was returning, when he met another servant, who said, "Juan, where are you going?" He replied, "Me begin to kill Mars' Stewart--now me go back finish him!" He was, of course, promptly arrested. Mr. Stewart recovered, but was always blind of one eye, and his right hand was almost useless. Mr. Stewart had in his diplomatic capacity seen many of the pirates who abounded on the Spanish Main in those days. He was an admirable _raconteur_, abounding in reminiscences. His son William inherited from an uncle a Cuban estate worth millions of dollars, and lived many years in Paris. He was a great patron of (especially Spanish) art.

So I passed on to my fourteenth year, which was destined to be the beginning of the most critical period of my life. My illnesses had increased in number and severity, and I had shot up into a very tall weak youth. Mr. Hunt gave up teaching, and became editor of _Littell's Magazine_. I was sent to the school of Mr. Hurlbut--as I believe it was then spelled, but I may be wrong. He had been a Unitarian clergyman, but was an ungenial, formal, rather harsh man--the very opposite of Mr. Hunt. My schoolmates soon found that though so tall, I was physically very weak, and many of them continually bullied and annoyed me. Once I was driven into a formal stand-up fight with one younger by a year, but much stronger. I did my best, but was beaten. I offered to fight him then in Indian fashion with a hug, but this he scornfully declined. After this he never met me without insulting me, for he had a base nature, as his after-life proved. These humiliations had a bad effect upon me, for I was proud and nervous, and, like many such boys, often very foolish.

But I had a few very good friends. Among these was Charles Macalester. One day when I had been bullied shamefully by the knot of boys who always treated me badly, he ran after me up Walnut Street, and, almost with tears in his eyes, assured me of his sympathy. There were two other intimates. George Patrullo, of Spanish parentage, and Richard Seldener, son of the Swedish Consul. They read a great deal. One day it chanced that Seldener had in his bosom a very large old-fashioned flint-lock horse-pistol loaded with shot. By him and me stood Patrullo and William Henry Hurlbut, who has since become a very well-known character. Thinking that Seldener's pistol was unloaded, Patrullo, to frighten young Hurlbut, pulled the weapon suddenly from Seldener's breast, put it between Hurlbut's eyes and fired. The latter naturally started to one side, so it happened that he only received one shot in his ear. The charge went into the wall, where it made a mark like a bullet's, which was long visible. George Patrullo was drowned not long after while swimming in the Schuylkill river, and Richard Seldener perished on an Atlantic steamer, which was never heard of.

On the other hand, something took place which cast a marvellous light into this darkened life of mine. For one day my father bought and presented to me a share in the Philadelphia Library. This was a collection which even then consisted of more than 60,000 well-chosen volumes. And then began such a life of reading as was, I sincerely believe, unusual in such youth. My first book was "Arthur of Little Britaine," which I finished in a week; then "Newes from New Englande, 1636," and the "Historie of Clodoaldus." Before long I discovered that there were in the Loganian section of the library several hundred volumes of occult philosophy, a collection once formed by an artist named Cox, and of these I really read nearly every one. Cornelius Agrippa and Barret's "Magus," Paracelsus, the black-letter edition of Reginald Scot, Glanville, and Gaffarel, Trithemius, Baptista Porta, and God knows how many Rosicrucian writers became familiar to me. Once when I had only twenty-five cents I gave it for a copy of "Waters of the East" by Eugenius Philalethes, or Thomas Vaughan.

All of this led me to the Mystics and Quietists. I read Dr. Boardman's "History of Quakerism," which taught me that Fox grew out of Behmen; and I picked up one day Poiret's French work on the Mystics, which was quite a handbook or guide to the whole literature. But these books were but a small part of what I read; for at one time, taking another turn towards old English, I went completely through Chaucer and Gower, both in black letter, the collections of Ritson, Weber, Ellis, and I know not how many more of mediaeval ballads and romances, and very thoroughly and earnestly indeed Warton's "History of English Poetry." Then I read Sismondi's "Literature of Southern Europe" and Longfellow's "Poets and Poetry of Europe," which set me to work on Raynouard and other collections of Provencal poetry, in the knowledge of which I made some progress, and also St. Pelaye's, Le Grand's, Costello's, and other books on the Trouveurs. I translated into rhyme and sent to a magazine, of which I in after years became editor, one or two _lais_, which were rejected, I think unwisely, for they were by no means bad. Then I had a fancy for Miscellanea, and read the works of D'Israeli the elder and Burton's "Anatomy."

One day I made a startling discovery, for I took at a venture from the library the black-letter first edition of the poems of Francois Villon. I was then fifteen years old. Never shall I forget the feeling, which Heine compares to the unexpected finding of a shaft of gold in a gloomy mine, which shot through me as I read for the first time these _ballades_. Now-a-days people are trained to them through second-hand sentiment. Villon has become--Heaven bless the mark!--_fashionable_! and aesthetic. I got at him "straight" out of black-letter reading in boyhood as a find of my own, and it was many, many years ere I ever met with a single soul who had heard of him. I at once translated the "Song of the Ladies of the Olden Time"; and I knew what _bon bec_ meant, which is more than one of Villon's great modern translators has done! Also _heaulmiere_, which is _not_ helmet-maker, as another supposes.

I went further in this field than I have room to describe. I even read the rococo-sweet poems of Joachim du Bellay. In this year my father gave me "The Doctor," by Robert Southey, a work which I read and re-read assiduously for many years, and was guided by it to a vast amount of odd reading, Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny being one of the books. This induced me to read all of Southey's poems, which I did, not from the library, but from a bookstore, where I had free run and borrowing privileges, as I well might, since my father lost 4,000 pounds by its owner.

While at Mr. Greene's school I had given me Alsopp's "Life and Letters of Coleridge," which I read through many times; then in my thirteenth year, in Philadelphia, I read with great love Charles Lamb's works and most of the works of Coleridge. Mr. Alcott had read Wordsworth into us in illimitable quantities, so that I soon had a fair all-round knowledge of the Lakers, whom I dearly loved. Now there was a certain _soupcon_ of Mysticism or Transcendentalism and Pantheism in Coleridge, and even in Wordsworth, which my love of rocks and rivers and fairy lore easily enabled me to detect by sympathy.

But all of this was but a mere preparation for and foreshadowing of a great mental development and very precocious culture which was rapidly approaching. I now speak of what happened to me from 1838 to 1840, principally in the latter year. If I use extravagant, vain words, I beg the reader to pardon me. Perhaps this will never be published, therefore _sit verbo venia_!

I had become deeply interested in the new and bold development which was then manifesting itself in the Unitarian Church. Channing, whom I often heard preach, had something in common with the Quietists; Mr. Furness was really a thinker "out of bounds," while in reality as gentle and purely Christian as could be. There was something new in the air, and this Something I, in an antiquated form, had actually preceded. It was really only a _rechauffe_ of the Neo-Platonism which lay at the bottom of Porphyry, Proclus, Psellus, Jamblichus, with all of whom I was fairly well acquainted. Should any one doubt this, I can assure him that I still possess a full copy of the "Poemander" or "Pimander" of Hermes Trismegistus, made by me in my sixteenth year, which most assuredly no mortal could ever have understood or made, or cared to make, if he had not read the Neo-Platonists; for Marsilius Ficinus himself regarded this work as a pendant to them, and published it as such. Which work I declared was not a Christian Platonic forgery, but based on old Egyptian works, as has since been well-nigh proved from recent discoveries. (I think it was Dr. Garnett who, hearing me once declare in the British Museum that I believed Hermes was based on an ancient Egyptian text, sent for a French work in which the same view was advanced.)

The ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and _odium theologicum_ which prevailed in America until 1840 was worse than that in Europe under the Church in the Middle Ages, for even in the latter there had been an Agobard and an Abelard, Knight-Templar agnostics, and _illuminati_ of different kinds. The Unitarians, who believed firmly in every point of Christianity, and that man was saved by Jesus, and would be damned if he did not put faith in him as the Son of God, were regarded literally and truly by everybody as no better than infidels because they believed that Christ was _sent_ by God, and that Three could not be One. Every sect, with rare exceptions, preached, especially the Presbyterians, that the vast majority even of Christians would be damned, thereby giving to the devil that far greater power than God against which Bishop Agobard had protested. As for a freethinker or infidel, he was pointed at in the streets; and if a man had even seen a "Deist," he spoke of it as if he had beheld a murderer. Against all this some few were beginning to revolt.

There came a rumour that there was something springing up in Boston called Transcendentalism. Nobody knew what it was, but it was dreamy, mystical, crazy, and infideleterious to religion. Firstly, it was connected with Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and finally with everything German. The new school of liberal Unitarians favoured it. I had a quick intuition that here was something for me to work at. I bought Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_, first edition, and read it through forty times ere I left college, of which I "kept count."

My record here as regards some books may run a little ahead; but either before I went to college or during my first year there (almost all before or by 1840-'41), I had read Carlyle's "Miscellanies" thoroughly, Emerson's "Essays," a translation of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," the first half of it many times; Dugald Stewart's works, something of Reid, Locke, and Hobbes's "Leviathan"; had bought and read French versions of Schelling's "Transcendental Idealism" and Fichte's fascinating "Destiny of Man"; studied a small handbook of German philosophy; the works of Campanella and Vanini (Bruno much later, for his works were then exceeding rare. I now have Weber's edition), and also, with intense relish and great profit, an old English version of Spinoza's _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_. In which last work I had the real key and clue to all German philosophy and Rationalism, as I in time found out. I must here modestly mention that I had, to a degree which I honestly believe seldom occurs, the art of _rapid_ yet of carefully-observant reading. George Boker once, quite unknown to me, gave me something to read, watched my eyes as I went from line to line, timed me by watch, and finally examined me on what I had read. He published the incident long after, said he had repeated it more than once _a mon insu_, and that it was remarkable.

Such a dual life as I at this time led it has seldom entered into the head of man to imagine. I was, on the one hand, a school-boy in a jacket, leading a humiliated life among my kind, all because I was sickly and weak; while, on the other hand, utterly alone and without a living soul to whom I could exchange an idea, I was mastering rapidly and boldly that which was _then_ in reality the tremendous problem of the age. I can now see that, as regards its _real_ antique bases, I was far more deeply read and better grounded than were even its most advanced leaders in Anglo-Saxony. For I soon detected in Carlyle, and much more in Emerson, a very slender knowledge of that stupendous and marvellous ancient Mysticism which sent its soul in burning faith and power to the depth of "the downward-borne elements of God," as Hermes called them. I missed even the rapt faith of such a weak writer as Sir Kenelm Digby, much more Zoroaster! Vigourous and clever and bold writers they were--Carlyle was far beyond me in literary _art_--but true Pantheists they were _not_. And they were men of great genius, issuing essays to the age on popular, or political, or "literary" topics; but _philosophers_ they most assuredly were _not_, nor men tremendous in spiritual truth. And yet it was precisely as _philosophers_ and thaumaturgists and revealers of _occulta_ that they posed--especially Emerson. And they dabbled or trifled with free thought and "immorality," crying Goethe up as the Light of Lights, while all their inner souls were bound in the most Puritanical and petty goody-goodyism. Though there were traces of grim Scotch humour in Carlyle, my patron saint and master, Rabelais, or aught like him, had no credit with them.

They _paddled_ in Pantheism, but as regards it, both lacked the stupendous faith and inspiration of the old adepti, who flung their whole souls into God; and yet they sneered at Materialism and Science.

I did not then see _all_ of this so clearly as I now do, but I very soon found that, as in after years it was said that Comteism was Catholicism without Christianity, so the Carlyle-Emersonian Transcendentalism was Mysticism without mystery. Nor did I reflect that it was a calling people from the nightmared slumber of frozen orthodoxy or bigotry to come and see a marvellous new thing. And when they came, they found out that this marvellous thing was that they had been _awakened_, "only that and nothing more"; and _that_ was the great need of the time, and worth more than any magic or theosophy. But I had expected, in simple ignorant faith, that the sacred mysteries of some marvellous cabala would be revealed, and not finding what I wanted (though indeed I discovered much that was worldly new to me), I returned to the good old ghost-haunted paths trodden by my ancestors, to dryads and elves and voices from the stars, and the _archaeus_ formed by the astral spirit (not the modern Blavatsky affair, by-the-bye), which entyped all things . . . and so went elving and dreaming on 'mid ruins old.

Be it observed that all this time I really did not know what I knew. Boys are greatly influenced by their surroundings, and in those days every one about me never spoke of Transcendentalism or "Germanism," or even "bookishness," without a sneer. I was borne by a mysterious inner impulse which I could not resist into this terrible whirlpool of _belles- lettres_, occulta, facetiae, and philosophy; but I had, God knows, little cause for pride that I read so much, for it was on every hand in some way turned against me. If it had only been reading like that of other human beings, it might have been endured; but I was always seen coming and going with parchment-bound tomes. Once I implored my father, when I was thirteen or fourteen, to let me buy a certain book, which he did. This work, which was as dear to me as a new doll to a girl for a long time, was the _Reductorium_ or moralisation of the whole Bible by Petrus Berchorius, black-letter, folio, Basle, 1511. It was from the library of a great and honest scholar, and, as the catalogue stated, "contained MS. notes on the margin by Melanchthon."

Promising, this, for an American youth who was expected to go into business or study a profession!

While at Hurlbut's school I took lessons in Spanish. There was a Spanish boy from Malaga, a kind of half-servant, _half-protege_ in a family near us, with whom I practised speaking the language, and also had some opportunity with a few Cubans who visited our family. One of them had been a governor-general. He was a Gallician by birth, but I did not know this, and innocently asked him one day if _los Gallegos no son los Irlandeses d'Espana_?--if the Gallicians were not the Irish of Spain--which drew a grave caution from my brother, who knew better than I how the land lay. I really attained some skill in Spanish, albeit to this day "Don Quixote" demands from me a great deal of dictionary. But, as I said before, I learn languages with _incredible_ difficulty, a fact which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I take in philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which I have made; as, for instance, that of _Shelta_ in England, or my labours in jargons, such as Pidgin-English, Slang, and Romany. But, as the reader has probably perceived, I was a boy with an inherited good constitution only from the paternal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while my mind, weakened by long illness, had been strangely stimulated by many disorders, nervous fevers being frequent among them. In those days I was, as my mother said, almost brought up on calomel--and she might have added quinine. The result of so much nervousness, excessive stimulating by medicine, and rapid growth was a too great susceptibility to poetry, humour, art, and all that was romantic, quaint, and mysterious, while I found it very hard to master any really dry subject. What would have set me all right would have been careful physical culture, boxing, so as to protect me from my school persecutors, and _amusement_ in a healthy sense, of which I had almost none whatever.