The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860

Purists deplore this, but it is inevitable; and if one searches beneath the surface, there is often a curious deposit of meaning, sometimes auriferous enough to repay our use of cradle and rocker. We "panned out," the other day, a phrase which gave us great delight, and which illustrated a fact in New England history worth noting. We were puzzling over the word "socdollager," which Bartlett, we think, defines as "Anything very large and striking,"–Anglicé, a "whopper,"–"also a peculiar fish-hook." The word first occurs in print, we believe, in Mr. Cooper's "Home as Found," applied to a patriarch among the white bass of Otsego Lake, which could never be captured. We assumed at once that there was a latent reason for the term, and all at once it flashed upon us that it was a rough fisherman's random-shot at the word "doxology." This, in New England congregations, as all know, was wont to be sung, or "j'ined in," by the whole assembly, and given with particular emphasis, both because its words were familiar to all without book, and because it served instead of the chanted creed of their Anglican forefathers. The last thing, after which nothing could properly follow, the most important and most conspicuous of all, it represented to our Yankee Walton the crowning hope of his life,–the big bass, after taking which he might put hook-and-line on the shelf. By a slight transposition, natural enough to untrained organs, "doxology" became "socdollager."

We are not making a dictionary of Americanisms, but merely wandering a little way into our native forests. We refer to the prevalent habit of idiomatic speech as a fact that makes part of our literature. It cannot be ignored, nor do we see how it is to be avoided. It is well, of course, to retain the sterling classic basis of our speech as we received it from abroad, and to this all that is best and purest in our literature past and present will tend. But we hold to no Know-Nothing platform which denies a right of naturalization to the worthy. As Ruskin says of the river, that it does not make its bed, but finds it, seeking out, with infinite pains, its appointed channel, so thought will seek its expression, guided by its inner laws of association and sympathy. If the mind and heart of a nation become barbarized, no classic culture can keep its language from corruption. If its ideas are ignoble, it will turn to the ignoble and vulgar side of every word in its tongue, it will affix the mean sense it desires to utter where it had of old no place. It converts the prince's palace into a stable or an inn; it pulls down the cathedral and the abbey to use the materials for the roads on which it tramples. It is good to sanctify language by setting some of its portions apart for holy uses,–at least, by preserving intact the high religious association which rests upon it. The same silver may be moulded to the altar-chalice or the Bacchic goblet; but we touch the one with reverent and clean hands, while the other is tossed aside in the madness of the revel. Men clamor for a new version of the Sacred Scriptures, and profess to be shocked at its plain outspokenness, forgetting that to the pure all things are pure, and that to the prurient all things are foul. It was a reverent and a worshipping age that gave us that treasure, and so long as we have the temper of reverence and worship we shall not ask to change it.

And to return once more to our original illustration. We have the two nations also in us, the Norman and the Saxon, the dominant and the aspiring, the patrician and the prolétaire. The one rules only by right of rule, the other rises only by right of rising. The power of conservatism perishes, when there is no longer anything to keep; the might of radicalism overflows into excess, when the proper check is taken away or degraded. So long as the noble is noble and "noblesse oblige," so long as Church and State are true to their guiding and governing duties, the elevation of the base is the elevation of the whole. If the standards of what is truly aristocratic in our language are standards of nobility of thought, they will endure and draw up to them, on to the episcopal thrones and into the Upper House of letters, all that is most worthy. Whatever makes the nation's life will make its speech. War was once the career of the Norman, and he set the seal of its language upon poetry. Agriculture was the Saxon's calling, and he made literature a mirror of the life he led. We in this new land are born to new heritages, and the terms of our new life must be used to tell our story. The Herald's College gives precedence to the Patent-Office, and the shepherd's pipe to the steam-whistle. And since all literature which can live stands only upon the national speech, we must look for our hopes of coming epics and immortal dramas to the language of the land, to its idioms, in which its present soul abides and breathes, and not to its classicalities, which are the empty shells upon its barren sea-shore.

MIDSUMMER AND MAY

[Continued.]

II

When Miss Kent, the maternal great-aunt of Mr. Raleigh, devised her property, the will might possibly have been set aside as that of a monomaniac, but for the fact that he cared too little about anything to go to law for it, and for the still more important fact that the heirs-at-law were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property and leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had he done so; and on deserting it, he was better pleased to enrich the playfellow of his childhood than a host of unknown and unloved individuals. I cannot say that he did not more than once regret what he had lost: he was not of a self-denying nature, as we know; on the contrary, luxurious and accustomed to all those delights of life generally to be procured only through wealth. But, for all that, there had been intervals, ere his thirteen years' exile ended, in which, so far from regret, he experienced a certain joy at remembrance of this rough and rugged point of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to one of action and freedom and real life. He had been happy in reaching India before his uncle's death, in applying his own clear understanding to the intricate entanglements of the affairs before him, in rescuing his uncle's commercial good name, and in securing thus for himself a foothold on the ladder of life, although that step had not occurred to him till thrust there by the pressure of circumstances. For the rest, I am not sure that Mr. Raleigh did not find his path suiting him well enough. There was no longer any charm in home; he was forbidden to think of it. That strange summer, that had flashed into his life like the gleam of a carnival-torch into quiet rooms, must be forgotten; the forms that had peopled it, in his determination, should become shadows. Valiant vows! Yet there must have come moments, in that long lapse of days and years, when the whole season gathered up its garments and swept imperiously through his memory: nights, when, under the shadow of the Himmaleh, the old passion rose at spring-tide and flooded his heart and drowned out forgetfulness, and a longing asserted itself, that, if checked as instantly by honor as despair, was none the less insufferable and full of pain,–warm, wide, Southern nights, when all the stars, great and golden, leaned out of heaven to meet him, and all ripe perfumes, wafted by their own principle of motion, floated in the rich dusk and laden air about him, and the phantom of snow on topmost heights sought vainly to lend him its calm. Days also must have showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness. What region of spice did not recall the noons when they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, its joyous birches, its pale-blue, shadow-blanched violets? Nor was this regret, that had at last become a part of the man's identity, entirely a selfish one. He had no authority whatever for his belief, yet believe he did, that, firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the two fates his was not the harder. But a man, a man, too, in the stir of the world, has not the time for brooding over the untoward events of his destiny that a woman has; his tender memories are forever jostled by cent. per cent.; he meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and unchanging perpetuity sacredly before his thought. And so it happened that Mr. Raleigh became at last a silent, keen-eyed man, with the shadow of old and enduring melancholy on his life, but with no certain sorrow there.

In the course of time his business-connections extended themselves; he was associated with other men more intent than he upon their aim; although not wealthy, years might make him so; his name commanded respect. Something of his old indifference lingered about him; it was seldom that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and, except to maintain a clear integrity before God and men and his own soul, exerted scarcely an effort. It was not an easy thing for him to break up any manner of life; and when it became necessary for one of the firm to visit America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented to the proposition with not a heart-beat. America was as flat a wilderness to him as the Desert of Sahara. On landing in India, he had felt like a semi-conscious sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of phantasms: the Lascars swarming in the port,–the merchants wrapped in snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed bronzes faintly animate,–the strange faces, modes, and manners,–the stranger beasts, immense, and alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need of his nature. One day all was ready for his departure; and in the clipper ship Osprey, with a cargo for Day, Knight, and Company, Mr. Raleigh bade farewell to India.

The Osprey was a swift sailer and handled with consummate skill, so that I shall not venture to say in how few days she had weathered the Cape, and, ploughing up the Atlantic, had passed the Windward Islands, and off the latter had encountered one of the severest gales in Captain Tarbell's remembrance, although he was not new to shipwreck. If Mr. Raleigh had found no time for reflection in the busy current of affairs, when, ceasing to stand aside, he had mingled in the turmoil and become a part of the generations of men, he could not fail to find it in this voyage, not brief at best, and of which every day's progress must assure him anew toward what land and what people he was hastening. Moreover, Fate had woven his lot, it seemed, inextricably among those whom he would shun; for Mr. Laudersdale himself was deeply interested in the Osprey's freight, and it would be incumbent upon him to extend his civilities to Mr. Raleigh. But Mr. Raleigh was not one to be cozened by circumstances more than by men.

The severity of the gale, which they had met some three days since, had entirely abated; the ship was laid to while the slight damage sustained was undergoing repair, and rocked heavily under the gray sky on the long, sullen swell and roll of the grayer waters. Mr. Raleigh had just come upon deck at dawn, where he found every one in unaccountable commotion. "Ship to leeward in distress," was all the answer his inquiries could obtain, while the man on the topmast was making his observations. Mr. Raleigh could see nothing, but every now and then the boom of a gun came faintly over the distance. The report having been made, it was judged expedient to lower a boat and render her such assistance as was possible. Mr. Raleigh never could tell how it came to pass that he found himself one of the volunteers in this dangerous service.

The disabled vessel proved to be a schooner from the West Indies in a sinking condition. A few moments sufficed to relieve a portion of her passengers, sad wretches who for two days had stared death in the face, and they pulled back toward the Osprey. A second and third journey across the waste, and the remaining men prepared to lower the last woman into the boat, when a stout, but extremely pale individual, who could no longer contain his frenzy of fear, clambered down the chains and dropped in her place. There was no time to be lost, and nothing to do but submit; the woman was withdrawn to wait her turn with the captain and crew, and the laden boat again labored back to the ship. Each trip in the heavy sea and the blinding rain occupied no less than a couple of hours, and it was past noon when, uncertain just before if she might yet be there, they again came within sight of the little schooner, slowly and less slowly settling to her doom. As they approached her at last, Mr. Raleigh could plainly detect the young woman standing at a little distance from the anxious group, leaning against the broken mast with crossed arms, and looking out over the weary stretch with pale, grave face and quiet eyes. At the motion of the captain, she stepped forward, bound the ropes about herself, and was swung over the side to await the motion of the boat, as it slid within reach on the top of the long wave, or receded down its shining, slippery hollow. At length one swell brought it nearer, Mr. Raleigh's arms snatched the slight form and drew her half-fainting into the boat, a cloak was tossed after, and one by one the remainder followed; they were all safe, and some beggared. The bows of the schooner already plunged deep down in the gaping gulfs, they pulled bravely away, and were tossed along from billow to billow.

"You are very uncomfortable, Mademoiselle Le Blanc?" asked the rescued captain at once of the young woman, as she sat beside him in the stern-sheets.

"Moi?" she replied. "Mais non, Monsieur."

Mr. Raleigh wrapped the cloak about her, as she spoke. They were equidistant from the two vessels, neither of which was to be seen, the rain fell fast into the hissing brine, their fate still uncertain. There was something strangely captivating and reassuring in this young girl's equanimity, and he did not cease speculating thereon till they had again reached the Osprey, and she had disappeared below.

By degrees the weather lightened; the Osprey was on the wing again, and a week's continuance of this fair wind would bring them into port. The next day, toward sunset, as Mr. Raleigh turned about in his regular pacing of the deck, he saw at the opposite extremity of the ship the same slight figure dangerously perched upon the taffrail, leaning over, now watching the closing water, and now eagerly shading her eyes with her hand to observe the ship which they spoke, as they lay head to the wind, and for a better view of which she had climbed to this position. It was not Mr. Raleigh's custom to interfere; if people chose to drown themselves, he was not the man to gainsay them; but now, as his walk drew him toward her, it was the most natural thing in the world to pause and say,–

"Il serait fâcheux, Mademoiselle, lorsqu' on a failli faire naufrage, de se noyer"–and, in want of a word, Mr. Raleigh ignominiously descended to his vernacular–"with a lee-lurch."

The girl, resting on the palm of one hand, and unsupported otherwise, bestowed upon him no reply, and did not turn her head. Mr. Raleigh looked at her a moment, and then continued his walk. Returning, the thing happened as he had predicted, and, with a little quick cry, Mademoiselle Le Blanc was hanging by her hands among the ropes. Reaching her with a spring, "Viens, petite!" he said, and with an effort placed her on her feet again before an alarm could have been given.

"Ah! mais je crus c'en était fait de moi!" she exclaimed, drawing in her breath like a sob. In an instant, however, surveying Mr. Raleigh, the slight emotion seemed to yield to one of irritation, that she had been rescued by him; for she murmured quickly, in English, head haughtily thrown back and eyes downcast,–"Monsieur thinks that I owe him much for having saved my life!"

"Mademoiselle best knows its worth," said he, rather amused, and turning away.

The girl was still looking down; now, however, she threw after him a quick glance.

"Tenez!" said she, imperiously, and stepping toward him. "You fancy me very ungrateful," she continued, lifting her slender hand, and with the back of it brushing away the floating hair at her temples. "Well, I am not, and at some time it may be that I prove it. I do not like to owe debts; but, since I must, I will not try to cancel them with thanks."

Mr. Raleigh bowed, but said nothing. She seemed to think it necessary to efface any unpleasant impression, and, with a little more animation and a smile, added,–

"The Captain Tarbell told me your name, Mr. Raleigh, and that you had not been at home for thirteen years. Ni moi non plus,–at least, I suppose it is home where I am going; yet I remember no other than the island and my"–

And here the girl opened her eyes wide, as if determined that they should not fill with tears, and looked out over the blue and sparkling fields around them. There was a piquancy in her accent that made the hearer wish to hear further, and a certain artlessness in her manner not met with recently by him. He moved forward, keeping her beside him.

"Then you are not French," he said.

"I? Oh, no,–nor Creole. I was born in America; but I have always lived with mamma on the plantation; et maintenant, il y a six mois qu'elle est morte!"

Here she looked away again. Mr. Raleigh's glance followed hers, and, returning, she met it bent kindly and with a certain grave interest upon her. She appeared to feel reassured, somewhat protected by one so much her elder.

"I am going now to my father," she said, "and to my other mother."

"A second marriage," thought Mr. Raleigh, "and before the orphan's crapes are"–Then, fearful lest she should read his thought, he added,–"And how do you speak such perfect English?"

"Oh, my father came to see us every other year, and I have written home twice a week since I was a little child. Mamma, too, spoke as much English as French."

"I have not been in America for a long time," said Mr. Raleigh, after a few steps. "But I do not doubt that you will find enjoyment there. It will be new: womanhood will have little like youth for you; but, in every event, it is well to add to our experience, you know."

"What is it like, Sir? But I know! Rows of houses, very counterparts of rows of houses, and they of rows of houses yet beyond. Just the toy-villages in boxes, uniform as graves and ugly as bricks"–

"Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember one, low and wide, possessed of countless gables, covered with vines and shaded with sycamores; it could not have been so picturesque, if built of the marble of Paros, and gleaming temple-white through masks of verdure."

"It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one," said she, dreamily. "Mais non, je m'y perds. Yet, for all that, I shall not find the New York avenues lined with them."

"No; the houses there are palaces."

"I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace," she answered, with a light tinkling laugh. "That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the whiteness and coolness. How one must feel the roof!"

"Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?" said Mr. Raleigh.

"At home," she replied, "our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those cities they must be iron shrouds. Ainsi soit il!" she added, and shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.

"You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps you will not be obliged to wear the shroud."

"Not long, to be sure, at first. We go to freeze in the country, a place with distant hills of blue ice, my old nurse told me,–old Ursule. Oh, Sir, she was drowned! I saw the very wave that swept her off!"

"That was your servant?"

"Yes."

"Then, perhaps, I have some good news for you. She was tall and large?"

"Oui."

"Her name was Ursule?"

"Oui! je dis que oui!"

Mr. Raleigh laughed at her eagerness. "She is below, then," he said,–"not drowned. There is Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds, will you take this young lady to her servant, Ursule, the woman you rescued?"

And Mademoiselle Le Blanc disappeared under that gentleman's escort.

The ordinary restraints of social life not obtaining so much on board ship as elsewhere, Mr. Raleigh saw his acquaintance with the pale young stranger fast ripening into friendliness. It was an agreeable variation from the monotonous routine of his voyage, and he felt that it was not unpleasant to her. Indeed, with that childlike simplicity that was her first characteristic, she never saw him without seeking him, and every morning and every evening it became their habit to pace the deck together. Sunrise and twilight began to be the hours with which he associated her; and it was strange, that, coming, as she did, out of the full blaze of tropical suns, she yet seemed a creature that had taken life from the fresh, cool, dewy hours, and that must fairly dissolve beneath the sky of noon. She puzzled him, too, and he found singular contradictions in her: to-night, sweetness itself,–to-morrow, petulant as a spoiled child. She had all a child's curiosity, too; and he amused himself by seeing, at one time, with what novelty his adventures struck her, when, at another, he would have fancied she had always held Taj and Himmaleh in her garden. Now and then, excited, perhaps, by emulation and wonder, her natural joyousness broke through the usually sad and quiet demeanor; and she related to him, with dramatic abandon, scenes of her gay and innocent island-life, so that he fancied there was not an emotion in her experience hidden from his knowledge, till, all-unaware, he tripped over one reserve and another, that made her, for the moment, as mysterious a being as any of those court-ladies of ancient régimes, in whose lives there were strange lacunae, and spaces of shadow. And a peculiarity of their intercourse was, that, let her depart in what freak or perversity she pleased, she seemed always to have a certainty of finding him in the same mood in which she had left him,–as some bright wayward vine of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that enticing point, yet, winding back, will find its first support unchanged. Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from any but the most casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and, without thinking how lately it had begun or how soon it must cease, he yielded himself to its presence. At one hour she seemed to him an impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection the accident of his companionship was extremely fortunate,–at another hour, a woman too strangely sweet to part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that in all his years he had really known but two women, and one of these had not spent a week in his memory.

Mademoiselle Le Blanc came on deck, one evening, and, wrapping a soft, thick mantle round her, looked about for a minute, shaded her eyes from the sunset, meantime, with a slender, transparent hand, bowed to one, spoke to another, slipped forward and joined Mr. Raleigh, where he leaned over the ship's side.