“one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves”
has become a reality, and the anthem in which there is no discordant note shall be joined by a voice from every life made “perfect through sufferings.”
Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years of companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend, in retracing which I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.
And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of intimacy with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than while he was here in living form and feature. I did not know how difficult a task I had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man whom all, or almost all, agree upon as one of the great lights of the New World, and whom very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah. Never before was I so forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of the work of a newspaper editor,—that threshing of straw already thrice beaten by the flails of other laborers in the same field. What could be said that had not been said of “transcendentalism” and of him who was regarded as its prophet; of the poet whom some admired without understanding, a few understood, or thought they did, without admiring, and many both understood and admired,—among these there being not a small number who went far beyond admiration, and lost themselves in devout worship? While one exalted him as “the greatest man that ever lived,” another, a friend, famous in the world of letters, wrote expressly to caution me against the danger of overrating a writer whom he is content to recognize as an American Montaigne, and nothing more.
After finishing this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism and the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the sparkle of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union of prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest audacity of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and was not ashamed, the feeling that I was in the company of a sibylline intelligence which was discounting the promises of the remote future long before they were due,—all this made the task a grave one. But when I found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill; the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical, estimate of hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they whirled, each around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very difficult to keep the faculties clear and the judgment unbiassed.
It is a great privilege to have lived so long in the society of such a man. “He nothing common” said, “or mean.” He was always the same pure and high-souled companion. After being with him virtue seemed as natural to man as its opposite did according to the old theologies. But how to let one's self down from the high level of such a character to one's own poor standard? I trust that the influence of this long intellectual and spiritual companionship never absolutely leaves one who has lived in it. It may come to him in the form of self-reproach that he falls so far short of the superior being who has been so long the object of his contemplation. But it also carries him at times into the other's personality, so that he finds himself thinking thoughts that are not his own, using phrases which he has unconsciously borrowed, writing, it may be, as nearly like his long-studied original as Julio Romano's painting was like Raphael's; and all this with the unquestioning conviction that he is talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way. So far as tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy of the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a misfortune for the borrower. But to share the inmost consciousness of a noble thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure and radiant soul,—this is indeed the highest form of teaching and discipline.
I have written these few memoirs, and I am grateful for all that they have taught me. But let me write no more. There are but two biographers who can tell the story of a man's or a woman's life. One is the person himself or herself; the other is the Recording Angel. The autobiographer cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, though he may tell nothing but the truth, and the Recording Angel never lets his book go out of his own hands. As for myself, I would say to my friends, in the Oriental phrase, “Live forever!” Yes, live forever, and I, at least, shall not have to wrong your memories by my imperfect record and unsatisfying commentary.
In connection with these biographies, or memoirs, more properly, in which I have written of my departed friends, I hope my readers will indulge me in another personal reminiscence. I have just lost my dear and honored contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when those four letters, “son b.” were written under the date of my birth, August 29th. Autumn had just begun when my great pre-contemporary entered this un-Christian universe and was made a member of the Christian church on the same day, for he was born and baptized on the 18th of September.
Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the great English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in the last century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking and doing; what were his feelings about life; what changes the years had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his reputation. It was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both playing that old familiar air, “Life,”—one a bassoon, if you will, and the other an oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still keeping pace with each other until the players both grew old and gray. At last the thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep accompaniment rolls out its thunder no more.
I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years has left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with many of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know him. I can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted him,—he hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample coat, too, I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs, and beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat, arching in front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence, involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons, and the strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns of support to the massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over it. I can hear him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened to make room for his portly figure. “A fine day,” says Sir Joshua. “Sir,” he answers, “it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and the skies are nebulous,” at which the great painter smiles, shifts his trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.
Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club, between you and the bony, “mighty-mouthed,” harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our “spiritualist's” paper in the Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what I shall find when it is opened.
Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,—I seem to find myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.
Among