The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 46, August, 1861

CONCERNING VEAL:

A DISCOURSE OF IMMATURITY.

The man who, in his progress through life, has listened with attention to the conversation of human beings, who has carefully read the writings of the best English authors, who has made himself well acquainted with the history and usages of his native land, and who has meditated much on all he has seen and read, must have been led to the firm conviction that by VEAL those who speak the English language intend to denote the flesh of calves, and that by a calf is intended an immature ox or cow. A calf is a creature in a temporary and progressive stage of its being. It will not always be a calf; if it live long enough, it will assuredly cease to be a calf. And if impatient man, arresting the creature at that stage, should consign it to the hands of him whose business it is to convert the sentient animal into the impassive and unconscious meat, the nutriment which the creature will afford will be nothing more than immature beef. There may be many qualities of Veal; the calf which yields it may die at very different stages in its physical and moral development; but provided only it die as a calf,—provided only that its meat can fitly be styled Veal,—this will be characteristic of it, that the meat shall be immature meat. It may be very good, very nutritious and palatable; some people may like it better than Beef, and may feed upon it with the liveliest satisfaction; but when it is fairly and deliberately put to us, it must be admitted, even by such as like Veal the best, that Veal is but an immature production of Nature. I take Veal, therefore, as the emblem of IMMATURITY,—of that which is now in a stage out of which it must grow,—of that which, as time goes on, will grow older, will probably grow better, will certainly grow very different. That is what I mean by Veal.

And now, my reader and friend, you will discern the subject about which I trust we are to have some pleasant and not unprofitable thought together. You will readily believe that my subject is not that material Veal which may be beheld and purchased in the butchers' shops. I am not now to treat of its varied qualities, of the sustenance which it yields, of the price at which it may be procured, or of the laws according to which that price rises and falls. I am not going to take you to the green fields in which the creature which yielded the Veal was fed, or to discourse of the blossoming hawthorn hedges from whose midst it was reft away. Neither shall I speak of the rustic life, the toils, cares, and fancies of the farm-house near which it spent its brief lifetime. The Veal of which I intend to speak is Moral Veal, or (to speak with entire accuracy) Veal Intellectual, Moral, and Aesthetical. By Veal I understand the immature productions of the human mind,—immature compositions, immature opinions, feelings, and tastes. I wish to think of the work, the views, the fancies, the emotions, which are yielded by the human soul in its immature stages,—while the calf (so to speak) is only growing into the ox,—while the clever boy, with his absurd opinions and feverish feelings and fancies, is developing into the mature and sober-minded man. And if I could but rightly set out the thoughts which have at many different times occurred to me on this matter, if one could catch and fix the vague glimpses and passing intuitions of solid unchanging truth, if the subject on which one has thought long and felt deeply were always that on which one could write best, and could bring out to the sympathy of others what a man himself has felt, what an excellent essay this would be! But it will not be so; for, as I try to grasp the thoughts I would set out, they melt away and elude me. It is like trying to catch and keep the rainbow hues you have seen the sunshine cast upon the spray of a waterfall, when you try to catch the tone, the thoughts, the feelings, the atmosphere of early youth.

There can be no question at all as to the fact, that clever young men and women, when their minds begin to open, when they begin to think for themselves, do pass through a stage of mental development which they by-and-by quite outgrow, and entertain opinions and beliefs, and feel emotions, on which afterwards they look back with no sympathy or approval. This is a fact as certain as that a calf grows into an ox, or that veal, if spared to grow, will become beef. But no analogy between the material and the moral must be pushed too far. There are points of difference between material and moral Veal. A calf knows it is a calf. It may think itself bigger and wiser than an ox, but it knows it is not an ox. And if it be a reasonable calf, modest, and free from prejudice, it is well aware that the joints it will yield after its demise will be very different from those of the stately and well-consolidated ox which ruminates in the rich pasture near it. But the human boy often thinks he is a man, and even more than a man. He fancies that his mental stature is as big and as solid as it will ever become. He fancies that his mental productions—the poems and essays he writes, the political and social views he forms, the moods of feeling with which he regards things—are just what they may always be, just what they ought always to be. If spared in this world, and if he be one of those whom years make wiser, the day comes when he looks back with amazement and shame on those early mental productions. He discerns now how immature, absurd, and extravagant they were,—in brief, how Vealy. But at the time, he had not the least idea that they were so. He had entire confidence in himself,—not a misgiving as to his own ability and wisdom. You, clever young student of eighteen years old, when you wrote your prize essay, fancied that in thought and style it was very like Macaulay,—and not Macaulay in that stage of Vealy brilliancy in which he wrote his essay on Milton, not Macaulay the fairest and most promising of calves, but Macaulay the stateliest and most beautiful of oxen. Well, read over your essay now at thirty, and tell us what you think of it. And you, clever, warm-hearted, enthusiastic young preacher of twenty-four, wrote your sermon; it was very ingenious, very brilliant in style, and you never thought but that it would be felt by mature-minded Christian people as suiting their case, as true to their inmost experience. You could not see why you might not preach as well as a man of forty. And if people in middle age had complained, that, eloquent as your preaching was, they found it suited them better and profited them more to listen to the plainer instructions of some good man with gray hair, you would not have understood their feeling, and you might perhaps have attributed it to many motives rather than the true one. But now at five-and-thirty, find out the yellow manuscript, and read it carefully over; and I will venture to say, that, if you were a really clever and eloquent young man, writing in an ambitious and rhetorical style, and prompted to do so by the spontaneous fervor of your heart and readiness of your imagination, you will feel now little sympathy even with the literary style of that early composition,—you will see extravagance and bombast, where once you saw only eloquence and graphic power. And as for the graver and more important matter of the thought of the discourse, I think you will be aware of a certain undefinable shallowness and crudity. Your growing experience has borne you beyond it. Somehow you feel it does not come home to you, and suit you as you would wish it should. It will not do. That old sermon you cannot preach now, till you have entirely recast and rewritten it. But you had no such notion when you wrote the sermon. You were satisfied with it. You thought it even better than the discourses of men as clever as yourself, and ten or fifteen years older. Your case was as though the youthful calf should walk beside the sturdy ox, and think itself rather bigger.

Let no clever young reader fancy, from what has been said, that I am about to make an onslaught upon clever young men. I remember too distinctly how bitter, and indeed ferocious, I used to feel, about eleven or twelve years ago, when I heard men of more than middle age and less than middling ability speak with contemptuous depreciation of the productions and doings of men considerably their juniors, and vastly their superiors,—describing them as boys, and as clever lads, with looks of dark malignity. There are few more disgusting sights than the envy and jealousy of their juniors, which may be seen in various malicious, commonplace old men; as there is hardly a more beautiful and pleasing sight than the old man hailing and counselling and encouraging the youthful genius which he knows far surpasses his own. And I, my young friend of two-and-twenty, who, relatively to you, may be regarded as old, am going to assume no preposterous airs of superiority. I do not claim to be a bit wiser than you; all I claim is to be older. I have outgrown your stage; but I was once such as you, and all my sympathies are with you yet. But it is a difficulty in the way of the essayist, and, indeed, of all who set out opinions which they wish to be received and acted on by their fellow-creatures, that they seem, by the very act of offering advice to others, to claim to be wiser and better than those whom they advise. But in reality it is not so. The opinions of the essayist or of the preacher, if deserving of notice at all, are so because of their inherent truth, and not because he expresses them. Estimate them for yourself, and give them the weight which you think their due. And be sure of this, that the writer, if earnest and sincere, addressed all he said to himself as much as to any one else. This is the thing which redeems all didactic writing or speaking from the charge of offensive assumption and self-assertion. It is not for the preacher, whether of moral or religious truth, to address his fellows as outside sinners, worse than himself, and needing to be reminded of that of which he does not need to be reminded. No, the earnest preacher preaches to himself as much as to any in the congregation; it is from the picture ever before him in his own weak and wayward heart that he learns to reach and describe the hearts of others, if, indeed, he do so at all. And it is the same with lesser things.

It is curious and it is instructive to remark how heartily men, as they grow towards middle age, despise themselves as they were a few years since. It is a bitter thing for a man to confess that he is a fool; but it costs little effort to declare that he was a fool, a good while ago. Indeed, a tacit compliment to his present self is involved in the latter confession: it suggests the reflection, what progress he has made, and how vastly he has improved, since then. When a man informs us that he was a very silly fellow in the year 1851, it is assumed that he is not a very silly fellow in the year 1861. It is as when the merchant with ten thousand a year, sitting at his sumptuous table, and sipping his '41 claret, tells you how, when he came as a raw lad from the country, he used often to have to go without his dinner. He knows that the plate, the wine, the massively elegant apartment, the silent servants, so alert, yet so impassive, will appear to join in chorus with the obvious suggestion, "You see he has not to go without his dinner now!" Did you ever, when twenty years old, look back at the diary you kept when you were sixteen,—or when twenty-five, at the diary you kept when twenty,—or at thirty, at the diary you kept when twenty-five? Was not your feeling a singular mixture of humiliation and self-complacency? What extravagant, silly stuff it seemed that you had thus written five years before! What Veal! and, oh, what a calf he must have been who wrote it! It is a difficult question, to which the answer cannot be elicited, Who is the greatest fool in this world? But every candid and sensible man of middle age knows thoroughly well the answer to the question, Who was the greatest fool that he himself ever knew? And after all, it is your diary, especially if you were wont to introduce into it poetical remarks and moral reflections, that will mainly help you to the humiliating conclusion. Other things, some of which I have already named, will point in the same direction. Look at the prize essays you wrote when you were a boy at school; look even at your earlier prize essays written at college (though of these last I have something to say hereafter); look at the letters you wrote home when away at school or even at college, especially if you were a clever boy, trying to write in a graphic and witty fashion; and if you have reached sense at last, (which some, it may be remarked, never do,) I think you will blush even through the unblushing front of manhood, and think what a terrific, unutterable, conceited, intolerable blockhead you were. It is not till people attain somewhat mature years that they can rightly understand the wonderful forbearance their parents must have shown in listening patiently to the frightful nonsense they talked and wrote. I have already spoken of sermons. If you go early into the Church, say at twenty-three or twenty-four, and write sermons regularly and diligently, you know what landmarks they will be of your mental progress. The first runnings of the stream are turbid, but it clears itself into sense and taste month by month and year by year. You wrote many sermons in your first year or two; you preached them with entire confidence in them, and they did really keep up the attention of the congregation in a remarkable way. You accumulate in a box a store of that valuable literature and theology, and when by-and-by you go to another parish, you have a comfortable feeling that you have a capital stock to go on with. You think that any Monday morning, when you have the prospect of a very busy week, or when you feel very weary, you may resolve that you shall write no sermon that week, but just go and draw forth one from the box. I have already said what you will probably find, even if you draw forth a discourse which cost much labor. You cannot use it as it stands. Possibly it may be structural and essential Veal: the whole framework of thought may be immature. Possibly it may be Veal only in style; and by cutting out a turgid sentence here and there, and, above all, by cutting out all the passages which you thought particularly eloquent, the discourse may do yet. But even then you cannot give it with much confidence. Your mind can yield something better than that now. I imagine how a fine old orange-tree, that bears oranges with the thinnest possible skin and with no pips, juicy and rich, might feel that it has outgrown the fruit of its first years, when the skin was half an inch thick, the pips innumerable, and the eatable portion small and poor. It is with a feeling such as that that you read over your early sermon. Still, mingling with the sense of shame, there is a certain satisfaction. You have not been standing still; you have been getting on. And we always like to think that.

What is it that makes intellectual Veal? What are the things about a composition which stamp it as such? Well, it is a certain character in thought and style hard to define, but strongly felt by such as discern its presence at all. It is strongly felt by professors reading the compositions of their students, especially the compositions of the cleverest students. It is strongly felt by educated folk of middle age, in listening to the sermons of young pulpit orators, especially of such as think for themselves, of such as aim at a high standard of excellence, of such as have in them the makings of striking and eloquent preachers. Dull and stupid fellows never deviate into the extravagance and absurdity which I specially understand by Veal. They plod along in a humdrum manner; there is no poetry in their soul,—none of those ambitious stirrings which lead the man who has in him the true spark of genius to try for grand things and incur severe and ignominious tumbles. A heavy dray-horse, walking along the road, may possibly advance at a very lagging pace, or may even stand still; but whatever he may do, he is not likely to jump violently over the hedge, or to gallop off at twenty-five miles an hour. It must be a thoroughbred who will go wrong in that grand fashion. And there are intellectual absurdities and extravagances which hold out hopeful promise of noble doings yet: the eagle, which will breast the hurricane yet, may meet various awkward tumbles before he learns the fashion in which to use those iron wings. But the substantial goose, which probably escapes those tumbles in trying to fly, will never do anything very magnificent in the way of flying. The man who in his early days writes in a very inflated and bombastic style will gradually sober down into good sense and accurate taste, still retaining something of liveliness and eloquence. But expect little of the man who as a boy was always sensible, and never bombastic. He will grow awfully dry. He is sure to fall into the unpardonable sin of tiresomeness. The rule has exceptions; but the earliest productions of a man of real genius are almost always crude, flippant, and affectedly smart, or else turgid and extravagant in a high degree. Witness Mr. Disraeli; witness Sir E.B. Lytton; witness even Macaulay. The man who as mere boy writes something very sound and sensible will probably never become more than a dull, sensible, commonplace man. Many people can say, as they bethink themselves of their old college companions, that those who wrote with good sense and good taste at twenty have mostly settled down into the dullest and baldest of prosers; while such as dealt in bombastic flourishes and absurd ambitiousness of style have learned, as time went on, to prune their early luxuriances, while still retaining something of raciness, interest, and ornament.

I have been speaking very generally of the characteristics of Veal in composition. It is difficult to give any accurate description of it that shall go into minuter details. Of course it is easy to think of little external marks of the beast,—that is, the calf. It is Veal in style, when people, writing prose, think it a fine thing to write o'er instead of over, ne'er instead of never, poesie instead of poetry, and methinks under any circumstances whatsoever. References to the heart are generally of the nature of Veal; also allusions to the mysterious throbbings and yearnings of our nature. The word grand has of late come to excite a strong suspicion of Veal; and when I read the other day in a certain poem something about a great grand man, I concluded that the writer of that poem was meanwhile a great grand calf. The only case in which the words may properly be used together is in speaking of your great-grandfather. To talk about mine affections, meaning my affections, is Veal; and mine bonnie love was decided Veal, though it was written by Charlotte Bronté. Wife mine is Veal, though it stands in "The Caxtons." I should rather like to see the man who in actual life is accustomed to address his spouse in that fashion. To say Not, oh, never shall we do so and so is outrageous Veal. Sylvan grove or sylvan vale in ordinary conversation is Veal. The word glorious should be used with caution; when applied to trees, mountains, or the like, there is a strong suspicion of Veal about it. But one feels that in saying these things we are not getting at the essence of Veal. Veal in thought is essential Veal, and it is very hard to define. Beyond extravagant language, beyond absurd fine things, it lies in a certain lack of reality and sobriety of sense and view,—in a certain indefinable jejuneness in the mental fare provided, which makes mature men feel that somehow it does not satisfy their cravings. You know what I mean better than I can express it. You have seen and heard a young preacher, with a rosy face and an unlined brow, preaching about the cares and trials of life. Well, you just feel at once he knows nothing about them. You feel that all this is at second-hand. He is saying all this because he supposes it is the right thing to say. Give me the pilot to direct me who has sailed through the difficult channel many a time himself. Give me the friend to sympathize with me in sorrow who has felt the like. There is a hollowness, a certain want, in the talk about much tribulation of the very cleverest man who has never felt any great sorrow at all. The great force and value of all teaching lie in the amount of personal experience which is embodied in it. You feel the difference between the production of a wonderfully clever boy and of a mature man, when you read the first canto of "Childe Harold," and then read "Philip van Artevelde." I do not say but that the boy's production may have a liveliness and interest beyond the man's. Veal is in certain respects superior to Beef, though Beef is best on the whole. I have heard Vealy preachers whose sermons kept up breathless attention. From the first word to the last of a sermon which was unquestionable Veal, I have witnessed an entire congregation listen with that audible hush you know. It was very different, indeed, from the state of matters when a humdrum old gentleman was preaching, every word spoken by whom was the maturest sense, expressed in words to which the most fastidious taste could have taken no exception; but then the whole thing was sleepy: it was a terrible effort to attend. In the case of the Veal there was no effort at all. I defy you to help attending. But then you sat in pain. Every second sentence there was some outrageous offence against good taste; every third statement was absurd, or overdrawn, or almost profane. You felt occasional thrills of pure disgust and horror, and you were in terror what might come next. One thing which tended to carry all this off was the manifest confidence and earnestness of the speaker. He did not think it Veal that he was saying. And though great consternation was depicted on the faces of some of the better-educated people in church, you could see that a very considerable part of the congregation did not think it Veal either. There can be no doubt, my middle-aged friend, if you could but give your early sermons now with the confidence and fire of the time when you wrote them, they would make a deep impression on many people yet. But it is simply impossible for you to give them; and if you should force yourself some rainy Sunday to preach one of them, you would give it with such a sense of its errors, and with such an absence of corresponding feeling, that it would fall very flat and dead. Your views are maturing; your taste is growing fastidious; the strong things you once said you could not bring yourself to say now. If you could preach those old sermons, there is no doubt they would go down with the mass of uncultivated folk,—go down better than your mature and reasonable ones. We have all known such cases as that of a young preacher who, at twenty-five, in his days of Veal, drew great crowds to the church at which he preached, and who at thirty-five, being a good deal tamed and sobered, and in the judgment of competent judges vastly improved, attracted no more than a respectable congregation. A very great and eloquent preacher lately lamented to me the uselessness of his store of early discourses. If he could but get rid of his present standard of what is right and good in thought and language, and preach them with the enchaining fire with which he preached them once! For many hearers remain immature, though the preacher has matured. Young people are growing up, and there are people whose taste never ripens beyond the enjoyment of Veal. There is a period in the mental development of those who will be ablest and maturest, at which Vealy thought and language are accepted as the best. Veal will be highly appreciated by sympathetic calves; and the greatest men, with rare exceptions, are calves in youth, while many human beings are calves forever. And here I may remark, as something which has afforded me consolation on various occasions within the last year, that it seems unquestionable that sermons which are utterly revolting to people of taste and sense have done much good to large masses of those people in whom common sense is most imperfectly developed, and in whom taste is not developed at all; and accordingly, wherever one is convinced of the sincerity of the individuals, however foolish and uneducated, who go about pouring forth those violent, exaggerated, and all but blasphemous discourses of which I have read accounts in the newspapers, one would humbly hope that a Power which works by many means would bring about good even through an instrumentality which it is hard to contemplate without some measure of horror. The impression produced by most things in this world is relative to the minds on which the impression is produced. A coarse ballad, deficient in rhyme and rhythm, and only half decent, will keep up the attention of a rustic group to whom you might read from "In Memoriam" in vain. A waistcoat of glaring scarlet will be esteemed by a country bumpkin a garment every way preferable to one of aspect more subdued. A nigger melody will charm many a one who would yawn at Beethoven. You must have rough means to move rough people. The outrageous revival-orator may do good to people to whom Bishop Wilberforce or Dr. Caird might preach to no purpose; and if real good be done, by whatever means, all right-minded people should rejoice to hear of it.