My Unknown Chum: "Aguecheek"

"Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam;True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home."

Their only child, "one fair daughter, and no more," was a gentle and merry-hearted creature, who, in the short and murky days of November, filled that cottage with a more than June-like sunshine. Her parents always had a deep sympathy with that unfortunate Empress of France whose dismission from the throne was the commencement of the downward career of the first Napoleon, and bore witness to it by giving her name to their only child. They lived only three or four doors from my lodgings, and there were few days passed after the episode of the umbrella in which I did not find a welcome in their quiet home. Their daughter was their only idol, and I soon found myself a convert to their innocent system of paganism. We all three agreed that Josey was the incarnation of all known perfections, and the lapse of forty years has not sufficed to weaken that conviction in my mind. She had risen just above the horizon of girlhood, and the natural beauty of her character made the beholder content to forget even the promise of her riper years. I do not think she was what the world calls handsome. I sometimes distrust my judgment in the matter of female beauty; indeed, some of my candid friends have told me that I had no judgment in such things. Well, as I was saying, Josey was not remarkable for personal beauty – in fact, I think I remember some persons of her own sex who thought her "very plain" – "positively homely" – and wondered what there was attractive about her. There are circumstances under which I should not have hesitated to attribute such remarks to motives of envy and jealousy; but as they came from girls whose attractions of every kind were far below those of the gentle creature whom they delighted to criticise, how can I account for them? Josey's complexion was dark – her forehead, like those of the best models of female comeliness among the ancients, low. Her teeth were pearly and uniform, and her clear, dark eyes seemed to reflect the happiness and hope which were the companions of her youth. Her beauty was not of that kind which consists in mere regularity of features; it was far superior to that. You could discern under those traits, none of which were conspicuous, a combination of mental and social qualities which were far above the fleeting charms that delight so many, and which age, instead of destroying, would increase and perfect. She was quiet and gentle, without being dull or moody; light-hearted and cheery, without being frivolous; and witty, without being pert or conceited. Her unaffected goodness of heart found many an opportunity of exercise. I often heard of her among the poor, and among those who needed words of consolation even more than the necessaries of life. It was her delight to intercede with the magistrate who had inflicted a punishment on some disorderly brother of one of her poor clients, and to obtain his pardon by promising to watch over him and insure his future good behaviour; and there were very few, among the most reckless, who were not restrained by the thought that their offences would give pain to the kind-hearted girl who had so willingly become their protector.

During the months that I lived at Hampstead my intercourse with that excellent family was as familiar as if I had been one of their own kindred. A little attack of rheumatism, which confined me to my lodging for a fortnight or three weeks, proved the constancy of their friendship. The old gentleman came daily to see me – told me all the news from the city, and read to me; the mother sent me some of her favourite books; and Josey came to get assistance in her Latin and French, and brought me sundry little pots of grape jelly and other preserves, which tasted all the sweeter for being the work of her fair hands. It was a sad parting when I was called away to America – sad for me; for I told them that I hoped that my absence from England would be but temporary, when I felt inwardly that it might extend to several years.

Two or three months after my arrival at home, I received a letter from the old gentleman, written in his deliberate, round, clerk-like style, informing me of his wife's death. A note was enclosed from Josey, in which she described with her pencil the spot where her mother was buried in the old churchyard, and told me of her progress in her studies. More than a year passed by without my hearing from them at all, two or three of my letters to them having miscarried. Nearly seven years elapsed before I visited England again. Two years before that, I had read the decease of the old gentleman, in a stray London newspaper. I had written to Josey, sympathizing with her in her desolation, but had received no answer. So, the day after my arrival in London, I determined to make a search for the beloved Josey. I went to Hampstead, and my heart beat quicker as I approached the cottage where I had spent so many happy hours. My throat felt a little choky, as I recognized the neat bit of hedge before the door, the graceful vine which overhung it, and the familiar arrangement of the flower pots in the frames outside the windows; but my hopes received a momentary check when I found a strange name on the plate above the knocker. I knocked, and inquired concerning the former occupants of the house. After a severe effort to overcome the Bœotian stupidity of the housemaid, she ushered me into the little breakfast room, and said she would "call her missus." Almost before I had time to look about me, Josey entered the room. The little girl whose Latin exercises I had corrected, and who had always lived in my memory as she appeared in those days, suddenly came before me

"A perfect woman, nobly planned,To warn, to comfort, and command;And yet a spirit still and brightWith something of an angel light."

Yet she was hardly changed at all. She had lost none of those charming qualities which had made the thought of her precious to me during long years of absence. She had gained the maturity and dignity of womanhood without losing any of the simplicity and light-heartedness of girlhood. She was married. Her husband was a literary man of considerable reputation. Though only in middle age, he was a great sufferer with the gout. He was, generally speaking, a patient man; but I found, after I became intimate with him, that his pains sometimes made him express himself with a force of diction somewhat in advance of the religious prejudices of his gentle Josey, who tended him and ministered to his wants like an angel, as she was. But excuse me for wandering so far from my theme. To make a long story short, Josey went to Italy with her husband, who had been ordered thither by his physicians, and I never saw her afterwards. She deposited her husband's remains in the cemetery where those of Shelley and Keats repose, and found for two or three years a consolation for her bereaved spirit in residence in that city which more than all others proclaims to our unwilling hearts the vanity and transitoriness of this world's hopes, and the glory of the unseen eternal. Years after, I met one of her husband's friends in Paris, who told me that some four years after his death, she had entered a convent of a religious order devoted to the reclaiming of the degraded of her sex, in Brussels. There she had found a fitting occupation for the natural benevolence of her heart, and the peace which the world could not give. She had concealed the glory of her good works under her vow of obedience – her personality was hidden under the common habit of her Order – the very name which was so dear to me had been exchanged for another on the day that saw her covered with the white veil of the novice. I was about returning to England from the continent when I heard this, and I resolved to take Belgium's fair capital in my route. I found the convent readily enough, and waited in its uncarpeted but scrupulously clean parlour some time for the Lady Superior. She was a lady of dignified mien, with the clear complexion, the serene brow, and the dovelike eyes so common among nuns, and her face lighted up, as she spoke, with a gentle smile, which seemed almost like a presage of immortality. I explained my errand, and she told me that the good English sister had been dead more than a year. The intelligence pained me, and it gave me a feeling of self-reproach to notice that the nun, who had been with her in her last hour, spoke of her as if she had merely passed into another part of the convent we were in. The Superior, perceiving my emotion, conducted me through the garden of the convent to a shady corner of the grounds, where there were several graves. She stopped before a mound, over which a rose bush bent affectionately, as if its white blossoms craved something of the purity which was enshrined beneath it. At its head was a simple wooden cross, on which was inscribed the name of "Sister Helen Agnes," the date of her death, and the common supplication that she might rest in peace; and that was the only memorial of Josey that remained to me.

I have not forgotten, dear reader, that I am writing about girls; but having brought forward one who always seemed to me to be about as near perfection as it is vouchsafed to poor humanity to approach, I could not help following her to the end, and showing how she went from a beautiful girlhood to a still more beautiful womanhood, and a death which all of us might envy; and how lovely and harmonious was her whole career. For I feel that the consideration of the contrast which most of the young female readers of these pages will discover between themselves and Josey, will do them some good.

I do not know of a more quietly funny sight than a group of school-girls, all talking as fast as their tongues can wag, (forty-woman power,) and clinging inextricably together like a parcel of macaroni, à la Napolitaine. Their independence is quite refreshing. Lady Blessington in her diamonds never descended the grand staircase at Covent Garden Opera House with half the consciousness of making a sensation, that you may notice in these school-girls whenever you take your walks abroad. It is delightful to see them step off so proudly, and look you in the face so coolly, thinking all the time of just nothing at all. Their boldness is the boldness of innocence; for perfect modesty does not even know how to blush. How vain they grow as they advance in their teens! How careful they are that the crinoline "sticks out" properly before they venture on the road to school! If Mother Goose (of blessed memory) could take a look into this world now, she would wish to revise her ancient rhyme to her patrons, —

"Come with a whoop – come with a call," &c., —

for she would find that it is now their custom to come with a hoop when they come for a call.

When unhappy Romeo stands in old Capulet's garden, under the pale beams of the "envious moon," and watches the unconscious Juliet upon the balcony, he utters, in the course of his incoherent soliloquial apostrophe, these remarkable words concerning that interesting young person: —

"She speaks, yet she says nothing."

I have seen many young ladies of Juliet's time of life in my day of whom the same thing might be said. They indeed speak, yet say nothing. Yet take them on such a subject as the trimming of a new bonnet for Easter Sunday, or any of those entertaining topics more or less connected with the adornment of their persons, and how voluble they are! To the stronger sex, which of course cares nothing about dress, being entirely free from vanity, the terms used in their never-ending colloquies on such themes are mere unmeaning words; but I must do the gentler side of humanity the justice to say that they are not all vanity, as their fathers and husbands find to their dismay, when the quarterly bills come in, that gimp, and flounces, and trimming generally, have a real, tangible existence.

How sentimental they are! In my young days albums were all the rage among young ladies; but now they seem to be somewhat out of date, and young ministers have taken their place. What pains will they not take to get a bow from the Rev. Mr. Simkins! They swarm around him after service, like flies around the bung of a molasses cask. Raphael never had such a face as his; Massillon never preached as he does. What a wilderness of worsted work are they not willing to travel over for his sake! How do they exhaust their inventive faculties in the search after new patterns for lamp mats, watch cases, pen wipers, and slippers to encase the feet at which they delight to sit! But when Simkins marries old Thompson's youngest daughter and a snug property, he finds a sad abatement in his popularity. The Rev. Mr. Jenkins, a young preacher with a face every whit as milk-and-watery as his own, succeeds to the throne he occupied, and reigns in his stead among the volatile devotees; and Simkins then sees that his popularity was no more an evidence of the favour his preaching of the gospel found among those thoughtless young people than was the popularity of the good-looking light comedian, after whom the girls ran as madly as they did after his own white neckerchief and nicely-brushed black frock coat.

Exaggeration is one of the great faults of girlhood. Whatever meets their eyes is either "splendid" or "horrid." They delight to exaggerate their likes and dislikes. Self-restraint seems to be a term not contained in their lexicon. They take a momentary fancy to a young man, and flatter him with their smiles until some new face takes his place in their fleeting memory. In this way many young hearts are frittered away in successive flirtations before their possessors have reached womanhood. But it would be wrong to confine action from mere blind impulse and exaggeration to young girls alone. I think it is St. Paul who gives us some good counsel about "speaking the truth in love." I fear that very few victims of the tender passion, from Pyramus and Thisbe down to Petrarch and Laura, and from the latter couple down to Mr. Smith with Miss Brown hanging on his arm, – who have not sadly needed the advice of the Apostle of the Gentiles. I have seen very few people in my day who really speak the truth in love. Therefore I will not blame girls for a fault which is common to all mankind.

Impulse is commonly supposed to be inconsistent with cunning; but in most girls I think the two things are singularly combined. I am told that there is an academy in this city, frequented by many young women, known as the School of Design. The fact is a gratifying one to me; for my observation of girlish nature had led me to suppose that there were very few indeed of the young ladies of these days who required any tuition in the arts of design. I hail the fact as a good omen for the sex. Action from impulse carries its young victims to the extremes of good and evil. Queen Dido is a fair type of the majority of her sex. Defeated in their hopes, they are willing to make a funeral pile of all that remains to them. But there is a spirit of generosity in them which does not find a place in the hearts of men. It was the part of Eve to bring death into this world, and all our woe, by her inquisitiveness and credulity; but it was reserved for Adam to inaugurate the meanness of mankind by laying all the blame to his silly little wife. The accusation ought to have blistered Adam's cowardly tongue.

But I am making a long preachment, and yet I have said very little. I must leave my young friends, however, to draw their own lessons from the portrait I have given of one whose perfections would far outweigh the silliness and vanity of a generation of girls. Let them take the gentle Josey as the model of their youth, and they will not wish to sculpture their later career after any less perfect shape. There will then be fewer heartless flirts, fewer vain exhibitors of the works of the milliner and dressmaker parading the streets, and more true women presiding over the homes of America. The imitation of her virtues will be found a better preservative of beauty than any eau lustrale; for it will create a beauty which "time's effacing fingers" are powerless to destroy, and give to those who practise it a serene and lovely old age, whose recollection of the past, instead of awakening any self-reproach, shall be a source of perpetual benediction.

SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMMENTATORS

It was a favourite wish of the beneficent Caligula that all mankind had but one neck, that he might finish them off at a single chop. It would ill comport with my known modesty, were I to lay claim to any thing like the all-embracing humanity of the old Roman philanthropist; but I must acknowledge that I have frequently felt inclined to apply his pious aspiration to the commentators on Shakespeare. Impatience is not my prevailing weakness; but these pestilent annotators have often been instrumental in convincing me that I am no stoic. I have frequently regretted the days of my youth, when no envious commentary obscured the brilliancy of that genius which has consecrated the language through which it finds utterance, and made it venerable to the scholars of all lands and ages. My love of Shakespeare, like the gout which has been stinging my right foot all the morning, is hereditary. My revered grandmother was very fond of solid English literature. She had not had, it is true, the advantages which the young people of the present day rejoice in; she had not studied in any of those seminaries which polish off an education in a most Arabian-Nightsy style of expedition, and send a young lady home in the middle of her teens, accomplished in innumerous ologies, and knowing little or nothing that is really useful, or that will attract her to intellectual pursuits or pleasure in after life. She had acquired what is infinitely better than the superficial omniscience which is so much cultivated in these days. The more active duties of life pleased her not; and Shakespeare was the never-failing resource of her leisure hours. Mr. Addison's Spectator was for her a "treasure of contentment, a mine of delight, and, with regard to style, the best book in the world." I shall never forget that happy day (anterior even to the jacket era of my life) when she took me upon her knee, and read to me the speeches of Marullus, and Mark Antony, and Brutus. In that hour I became as sincere a devotee as ever bent down before the shrine of Shakespeare's genius. Nor has that innocent fanaticism abated any of its ardour under the weight laid upon me by increasing years. The theatre has lost many of its old charms for me. The friendships of youth – the only enduring intimacies, for our palms grow callous in the promiscuous intercourse of the world, and cannot easily receive new impressions – have either been terminated by that inexorable power whose chilling touch is merciless alike to love and enmity, or have been interfered with by the varying pursuits of life. But Shakespeare still maintains his wonted sway, and my loyalty to him has not been disturbed by any of the revolutionary movements which have made such changes in most other things. Martin Farquhar Tupper has written, but I am so old-fashioned in my prejudices that I find myself constantly turning to my Shakespeare, in preference even to that gifted and proverbially philosophic bard.

But I am wandering. From the day I have mentioned, Robinson Crusoe was obliged to abdicate, and England's "monarch bard" (as Mr. Sprague calls Anne Hathaway's husband) reigned in his stead. I first devoured the Julius Cæsar. I say "devoured," for no other word will express the eager earnestness with which I read. The last time I read that play through, it was "within a bowshot where the Cæsars dwelt," and but a few minutes' walk from the palace which now holds great Pompey's statua, at whose foot the mighty Julius fell. Increase of appetite grew rapidly by what it fed on, and I was not long in learning as much about the black-clad prince, the homeless king, the exacting usurer, the fat knight and his jolly companions, the remorseful Thane, and generous, jealous Moor, as I knew about Brutus and the other red republican assassins of imperial Rome. My love of Shakespeare was greatly edified by a friendship which I formed in my earliest foreign journeyings. It was before the days of railways, – which, convenient as they are, have robbed travelling of half its zest, by rendering it so common. I had been making a little tour through the north of France. I had admired the white caps and pious simplicity of the peasants of Normandy, and had drunk in that exaltation of soul which the lofty nave of the majestic Cathedral of Amiens always imparts, and was about returning to Paris, when a rheumatic attack arrested my progress and prolonged my stay in the pleasant city of Douai. I there met accidentally with an English monk of that grand old Benedictine order, whose history for more than twelve centuries has been the history of civilization, and literature, and religion. He was descended from one of those old families which refused to modify their creed at the demand of a divorce-seeking king. He was a man of clear intellect and fascinating simplicity of character. He seemed to carry sunshine with him wherever he went. He occupied a professional chair in the English College attached to the Benedictine Monastery at Douai, and when his class hours were ended, he daily came to visit me. His sensible and sprightly conversation did more towards untying the rheumatic knots in my poor shoulder, than all the pills and lotions for which M. le Médecin charged me so roundly. When I visited him in his cell, I found that a well-worn copy of Shakespeare was the only companion of his Breviary, his Aquinas and St. Bernard on his study table. He loved Shakespeare for himself alone. He never used him as a lay figure on which he might display the drapery of a pedant. He hated commentators as heartily as a man so sincerely religious can hate any thing except sin, and was as earnest in his predilection for Shakespeare, "without note or comment," as his dissenting fellow-countrymen would have wished him to be for a similar edition of the only other inspired book in the world. He had his theories, however, concerning Shakespeare's characters, and we often talked them over together; but I must do him the justice to say that he never published any of them. I always regarded this fact as a splendid evidence of the entireness of his self-abnegation, and of his extraordinary advancement in the path of religious perfection. Many have taken the three monastic vows by which he was bound, and have lived up to them with conscientious fidelity; but few scholars have studied Shakespeare as he did, and yet resisted the temptation to tell the world all about it in a book.

Mousing the other day in the library of a venerable citizen of Boston, who is no less skilled in the gospel (let us hope) than in the law, I stumbled over a seedy-looking folio containing A Treatise of Original Sinne, by one Anthony Burgesse, who flourished in England something more than two centuries ago. One of the discoloured fly-leaves of this entertaining tome informed me, in a hand-writing which resembled a dilapidated rail-fence looked at from the window of an express train, that Jacobus Keith me possedit, An. Dom. 1655; and also bore this inscription, so pertinent to my present theme: "Expositors are wise when they are not otherwise." I feel that it is safe to leave my readers to make the application of this apothegm to the Shakespearean annotators of their acquaintance, so few of whom are wise, so many otherwise. I think it was the late Mr. Hazlitt who said (and if it was not, it ought to have been) that if you desire to know to what sublimity human genius is capable of ascending, you must read Shakespeare; but that if you seek to ascertain to what a depth of imbecility the intellect of man may be brought down, you must read his commentators.

Notwithstanding the low estimate which I am inclined to place upon the labour of the majority of the commentators on Shakespeare, still I have often felt a strong temptation to enroll myself among them. Not all their stupidity in explaining things which are clear to the meanest capacity, not all their pedantry in elucidating matters which are simply inexplicable, not all their inordinate voluminousness, could quench my ambition to fasten my roll of waste paper to the bob (already so unwieldy) of the Shakespearean kite. Others have soared into fame by such means; why should not I? We ought not to study Shakespeare so many years for nothing, and I feel that a sacred duty would be neglected if the result of my researches were withheld from my suffering fellow-students. But let me be more merciful than other commentators; let me confine my remarks to a single play. From that one you may learn the tenor of my theories concerning the others; and if you wish for another specimen, I shall consider that I have achieved an unheard-of triumph in this department of literature.