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The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 by Various

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863




"This was what made William dead in love with me, before he saw me. I
used to wear my hair so for years after I married him; he liked me to."

It was a very delicately painted miniature, by Staigg, I think. Still a
very good likeness, and with the perpetual childhood of the large brown
eyes, and the clusters of chestnut curls over brow and neck, that gave
an added expression of extreme youth to the face.

"Will she never mature?" I thought.

But always there was the same promise, the same expectation, and the
same disappointment. I used to think I would as soon marry Hoffman's
machine, who looked so beautiful, and said, "Ah! ah!" and the husband
thought her very sensible. But Hoffman's husband thought he had an
admiring wife, and her "ah! ah-s!" were appreciative, whereas Mr. Lewis
could be under no such delusion. Once I heard him say, "he cared only
for love in a wife: intellect he could find in books, but the heart only
in woman." "Eyes that look kindly on me are full of good sense,--lips
that part over pearls are better than wisdom,--and the heart-beat is the
measure of true life."

He liked to talk in this proverb-fashion, and would often turn towards
his wife, giving his remarks point and affectionate direction by
smoothing her curls or gently touching her shoulder. He was very happy
in her beauty.

Notwithstanding this, he often brought in books of an evening, to read
to us, leaving Lulu to get her entertainment as she could, and would
sometimes sit a whole hour, discussing literary points with me, and
metaphysical ones with the Dominie, who was only too happy to pull the
Scotch professors over the coals, and lead to condign execution Brown,
Reid, and Stewart, in their turn. Sometimes Lulu would come in, with a
bird on each hand, and sit at our feet. She then never mingled in the
conversation, but just smoothed the birds' plumage, or fed them with
crumbs from her own lips, like a child, or a princess trifling in the
harem.

Once we were at Hoboken, where we had passed most of the warm day, and,
being weary with strolling among the trees, had seated ourselves on a
bank, whence we had a good view of the water and the vessels in the hazy
distance. Mr. Lewis took Wordsworth from his pocket, and read aloud the
"Ode to Immortality." It was so beautiful, and the images of "the calm
sea that brought us hither" so suggestive, that we listened with
rapture. Lulu twined oak-leaves into wreaths, sitting at her husband's
feet. I don't know whether she heard or not, but, as we discussed
afterwards the various beauties of the expression, and the exquisite
thoughts, Mr. Lewis leaned over and laid his hand lightly on his wife's
hair. He had done it a hundred times before. But to-day she shook her
head away from him, blushed angrily, and said, "Don't, William! I am not
a baby!"


VIII.

We stayed in New York over ten days. In that time we seemed to have
known the Lewises ten years. In the last three days I had some new
views, however, and puzzled myself over manners which were apparently
contradictory.

Lulu had told me in the morning that her husband was going to
Philadelphia, and wouldn't be back for two days. I asked her if she were
not going with him. She said, no,--that she wouldn't encounter the dust
of those Jersey wagons again; and then described, with much vivacity,
the method of transportation which was soon after succeeded by the
present railroad.

"There were a hundred horses, at least," said she, "to drag us.
Magnificent creatures, too. But nothing pays for having one's mouth and
eyes full of grit."

As she spoke, Mr. Lewis passed by the door, and looked at her. She went
to him at once, put up her lips to be kissed, and I heard his loving
good-bye, as they went along the entry to the top of the stairway.

When she came back to my room, which was half an hour after, she was
dressed to go out, in a new hat and pelisse of green silk, with a plume
of the same. With her bright color, it was very becoming to her.

"I have just got these home. William just hates me in green, but I would
have them. They make one think of fern-leaves and the deep woods, don't
they?" said she, standing before the mirror with childish admiration of
her own dress.

She turned slowly round, and faced me.

"Now I suppose you would dress up in a blue bag, if your husband liked
to see you in it?"

I said I supposed so, too.

"That's because you love him, and know that he loves you!"

"I am sure, you may say one is true of yourself," said I, surprised at
her knitted brow and flushed cheek.

"What was that you were reading last night in Plato's Dialogues? What
does he say is real love? for the body or the soul?"

I was confounded. For I had never supposed she listened to a word that
was read.

"If any one has been in love with the body of Alcibiades, that person
has not been in love with Alcibiades," said she, reciting from memory.

"Yes, I remember."

"But one that loves your soul does not leave you, but continues constant
after the flower of your beauty has faded, and all your admirers have
retired."

I nodded, as much nonplussed as if she had been Socrates.

"That is a love worth having, is it not, which will continue, though the
cheek be white and furrowed, and the eye dim?"

I nodded again, staring at her.

"And what is that worth," said she, stamping her foot, "which does not
recognize a soul at all? If he ever encouraged me to improve,--if he
ever read to me, or talked to me as he does to you, I might make
something of myself! I am in earnest. I do want to be something,--to
think, to learn, if I only knew how!"

Childish tears ran down her face as she spoke. Presently she went into
her room and brought me a set of malachite, in exquisite cameo-cuttings.
I took up a microscope, and began admiring and examining them,
recognizing the subjects, which were taken from Raphael's History of
Psyche.

"Beautiful! where did they come from?"

"William bought them of Lloyd, who had them long ago of the Emperor's
jeweller. They had been ordered for Marie Louise."

"And why didn't she have them, pray?"

"Just the question I asked. He said, 'Oh, because the Emperor was down
and the Allies in Paris, and the Emperor's jeweller nobody, and glad to
sell the cameos for one-third their cost, when they were finished.'"

"Oh, yes! I see,--at the time of Waterloo."

Mrs. Lewis looked at me again with the same knitted brow and flushed
cheek as before.

"All you say is Greek to me. I don't know what malachite is, nor who
Raphael is, nor who Psyche is, nor who Marie Louise is, scarcely who
Napoleon, and nothing about Waterloo. A pretty present to make to me, is
it not? I could make nothing of it. To you it is a whole volume."

I said, with some embarrassment, that it was easy to learn, and that if
she--that is, that women should endeavor to improve themselves, and so
on. She heard me through, and then said, dryly,--

"How old were you when you were married?"

"I was nearly twenty."

"Were you well-informed? had you read a great deal?"

"What one gets in a country-school,--and being fond of reading;--but
then I had always been in an atmosphere of books; and one takes in, one
knows not how, a thousand facts"--

I stopped; for I saw by her impatient nodding that she understood me.

"Yes, yes. I knew it must be so. Now, if William would ever bring me
books, instead of jewels, or talk to me and with me, I might have been a
rational being too, instead of being absolutely ashamed to open my
mouth!"

She clasped the jewel-case and went out; and I heard her chatting a
minute after with some gentlemen in the house, as if she were perfectly
and childishly happy.


IX.

How I wished I could give Mr. Lewis some hint of what had passed between
his wife and myself! But that I could not do. Besides that it was always
best to let matrimonial improvements originate with the parties
themselves, I had an inability to interfere usefully. I could talk to
her a little,--not at all to him. He seemed fond and proud of her as she
was, and her dissatisfaction with herself was a good sign. It was
strange to me, accustomed to intellectual sympathy, that he could do
without that of his wife. But I suppose he had come to feel that she
would not understand him, and so did not try to hit her apprehension,
much less to raise or cultivate her intellect. He had lived too long at
the South.

Her moral nature was very oddly developed, showing how starved and
stunted some of the faculties, naturally good, become without their
proper nourishment. As, intellectually, she seemed not to comprehend
herself, except that she had a vague sense of want and waste, so, from
the habit of occupying herself with the external, she had not only a
keen sense of the beautiful in outward form, but as ready a perception
of character as could consist with a want of tact. Adaptation she
certainly had. Tact she could not have, since her sympathies were so
limited and her habit so much of external perception and appreciation.
All this desolate tract in her nature might yet possibly be cultivated.
But thus far it had never been. Beyond a small circle of thoughts and
feelings, she was incapable of being interested. She didn't say, "Anan!"
but she looked it.

There was the same want of comprehension, I may call it, in reference to
propriety of conduct. A certain nobleness, and freedom from all that was
petty and cold, kept her from coquetry. At the same time she had a
womanish vanity about her admirers, and entire freedom in speaking of
them. In vain I endeavored to insinuate the unpleasant truth, that the
fervency of her adorers was no compliment to her. She could not
understand that she ought to shrink from the implied imputation of such
manifestations.

Somewhat out of patience, one day, at her pleasure in receiving a
bouquet of rare flowers from one of these adorers, I said,--

"Isn't this the person who you said professed an attachment to you, or
rather sent heliotrope to you and told you it meant _je vous aime?_"

"The very man!" said she, smiling.

"Then I am sure you are, as I should be, sadly mortified at his
continuing these attentions."

"I don't see why I should be mortified," said she, "He may be, if he
likes."

"You know what the poet says, Lulu, and it is excellent sense,--

'In part she is to blame that has been tried,
He comes too near that comes to be denied.'"

The crimson tide rippled over her forehead at this, but it was only a
passing disturbance, and she answered sweetly,--

"I don't think you are quite fair," as if she had been playing at some
game with me.

Apparently, too, she had as little religious as moral sense, though she
called herself a member of the Church, and said she was confirmed at
twelve years old.

But once, in speaking of Mr. Lewis's going to church, she told me,
"William has no religion at all." Much in the same way she would have
said he had not had luncheon. A strange responsibility, if he felt it,
had this William, a man nearly forty years old, for this young creature
not yet twenty-three, and with powers so undeveloped and a character so
unbalanced!

In the ten days we passed together I often wished I could have known her
early, or that I now had a right to say to her what I would. However,
perhaps I overestimated the influence of outward circumstances.

We parted rather suddenly, and in the next three years they were mostly
in Cuba, while my husband was called to leave Weston for a larger field
of usefulness.

We had lived more than a year in Boston, and it was in the autumn of
1833 that I sat alone by a sea-coal fire, thinking, and making out faces
in the coal. I was too absorbed to hear the bell ring, or the door open,
till I felt a little rustle, and a soft, sudden kiss on my lips. I was
no way surprised, for Lulu's was the foremost face in the coals. Mr.
Lewis was close behind her, with my husband. As soon as the astral was
lighted, we gazed wistfully for a few moments at each other. Each looked
for possible alteration.

"You have been ill!"

"And you have had something besides Time."

We had had grief and bereavement. Mr. Lewis had been very ill, and very
near death, with the fever of the country. It had left traces on his
worn face, and thinned his already thin enough figure.

But a greater change had come over Mrs. Lewis. Personally, she was
fuller and handsomer than ever. She had the same grace in every motion,
the same lulling music in her sweet voice. But a soul seemed to be born
into that fine body. The brown eyes were deeper, and the voice had
thrills of feeling and sentiment. For all that, she had the same
incompleteness that she had when I last saw her, and an inharmoniousness
that was felt by the hearer whenever she spoke. It was very odd, this
impression I constantly had of her; but they were to remain in Boston
through the winter, and I supposed time would develop the mystery to me.


X.

One evening, soon after Lulu's return, for she soon took up her old
habits of intimacy, she sat listlessly by the fire, holding her two
hands in her lap, as usual, and not even dawdling at netting. Perhaps
the still evening and the quiet room induced confidence, or she may have
felt the effect of my "receptivity," as she called it. (She always
insisted that she could not help telling me everything.) She turned away
abruptly from the fire, saying,--

"Do you know I don't love William a particle,--not the smallest atom?"

"I hope you are only talking nonsense," said I, rising, and ringing for
lights; "but it is painful for me to hear you. Don't! I beg!"

"No, it isn't nonsense. It is the simple truth. And it is best you
should know it. Because,--you don't want me to be a living lie, do you?
To the world I can keep up the old seeming. But it is better you should
know the truth."

"There I differ from you entirely, Lulu. If you are so sadly
unfortunate, so wretched, as not to love your husband, it is too painful
and serious a matter lightly to be talked of. It is a matter for
grievous lamentation,--a matter between your conscience and your God. I
don't think any friend can help you; and if not, of course you can have
no motive in confiding it."

She had the same old look, as if she would say, "Anan!" but presently
added,--

"He cares only for himself,--not at all for me. Don't I see that every
day? Am I but the plume in his cap? but the lace on his sleeve? but the
jewel in his linen? Whatever I might have felt for him, I am sure I have
no need to feel now; and I repeat to you, I should not care at all if I
were never again to lay my eyes on him!"

I shuddered to hear this talk. It was said, however, without anger, and
with the air rather of a simple child who thought it right not to have
false pretences. Her frankness, if it had been united with deep feeling,
would have touched me exceedingly. As it was, I was bewildered, yet only
anxious to avoid explanations, which it seemed to me would only increase
the evil.

Thoughts of the ill-training that had made such a poor piece of
life-work out of the rich materials before me made my heart ache. She
sat still, looking in the fire, like a child, rebuked and chidden for
some unconscious fault. So many fine traits of character, yet such a
hopeless want of balance, such an utter wrongheadedness! I turned, and
did what I very seldom do, yielded to my impulses of compassionate
tenderness and kissed her. To my surprise, she burst into a hearty fit
of crying.

"If I had known you early! or if my mother had lived!" she sobbed; "but
now I am good for nothing! I don't know what is right nor what is
wrong!"

"Don't say so,--we can always try."

"Not this. I could at first. But to be always treated like a baby,--and
if I express any contrary opinion, or show that I've a mind of my
own,--a sick baby! I can tell you this comes pretty hard three hundred
and sixty-five days in a year! Oh, I wish I were a free woman! There! I
am going to stop now. But you know."

I was only too glad to be interrupted by our two husbands. Lulu ran
up-stairs,--I supposed, to bathe her eyes and compose herself. She,
however, was down again in a minute, with some drapery which she wound
about her after the fashion Lady Hamilton was said to do, and
represented, like her, the Muses, and various statues. With the curtain
and one light she managed to give a very statuesque effect. Mr. Lewis
was evidently very proud of her grace and talent, and she had a pretty,
wilful, bird-like way with him, that was fascinating, and did not seem,
as I thought it must really be, mechanical. I felt, more than ever, how
idle it must be to talk with her. The affectionate respect, the joyful
uplooking of wifehood, was not to be taught by words, nor to be taught,
in fact, any way. Mr. Lewis's manner to his wife, which I criticized
carefully, was always tender and dignified. And, from my knowledge of
him, I felt sure that his expression was that of genuine feeling.
Evidently he did not understand her feelings at all. She longed for
encouragement and improvement. He looked at her as a lovely child only.

Being a minister's wife, I felt called on to labor in my vocation, and
from time to time watch the pliant moment, and endeavor to lead Lulu's
mind to the foundation of all truth. But, surely, never fell seed on
such stony ground. To be sure, the flowers sprang up. Dewy, rich, and
running, they climbed over the rocks beneath; but they shed their
perfume, and shrank dead in a day, leaving the stones bare. I was
discouraged about sowing seed.

The Lewises had been but a few weeks in Boston, when Lulu brought Mr.
Remington in one morning to make a call. He was dressed in black, and
told me he had been a widower six months. His bright, genial face and
healthful nature seemed not to have sustained any severe shock, however,
and he spoke with great composure of his loss.

He was at Mr. Lewis's a great deal. It seemed as a matter of course. As
an accomplished man, with great powers of entertaining, he must
naturally be acceptable there; but we were too much occupied with family
and parish matters to see much of him, and about that time went on a
journey of some weeks.

* * * * *

THE CONQUEST OF CUBA.


One hundred years ago the people of America were as much moved by
martial ardor as are the American people of to-day. The year 1762 was,
indeed, a far more warlike time than was 1862. "Great war" is now
confined to the territory of the United States, and exists neither in
Asia, Africa, nor Europe. Garibaldi's laudable attempt to get it up in
Italy failed dismally. There was a flash of spirit, and there were a few
flashes of gunpowder, and all was over. "The rest is silence." There are
numerous questions unsettled in the Old World, but the disputants are
inclined to wait for settlement, it would seem, until our affairs shall
have been brought into a healthful state. Europeans complain that our
quarrel has wrought them injury, and very great injury, too. They are
right as to the fact. England has suffered more from the consequences of
the Southern Rebellion than have the Free States of the Union, and
France quite as much, and Spain as severely as any one of our States. In
Germany, in Switzerland, and in Belgium, thousands of families have had
bitter reasons for joining in the cry that Americans do not know how to
manage their politics. We have heard of riots in Moravia, not far from
the scene of Lafayette's imprisonment and that of Napoleon's greatest
victory, caused by the scarcity of cotton. Yankee cloths that used to go
into remote and barbarous regions, through the medium of the
caravan-commerce, will be known no more there for some time. Perhaps
those African chiefs who had condescended to shirt themselves, thus
taking a step toward civilization, will have to fall back upon their
skins, because Mr. Jefferson Davis and some others of the Southern
Americans chose to make war on their country, and so stop the supply of
cotton. The "too-many-shirts" cry, which so revolted the benevolent
heart of Mr. Carlyle twenty years since, has ceased to be heard. The
supply is getting exhausted. The old shirts are vanishing, and the new
ones, instead of being of good stout cloth, are of such stuff as dreams
are made of. There might be a new version of "The Song of the Shirt"
published, specially adapted to the state of the times, and which would
come home to the bosoms and backs of many men. Mr. Davis's war may be
considered as a personal one against all civilized men, for it affects
every one's person. The great civil war between Charles I. and the
English Parliament was in part caused by soap, which the monopolists
made of so bad a quality that it destroyed the clothes which it should
have cleaned. Of "the monopolers and polers of the people," as he called
them, Sir John Culpeper said, "We find them in the dye-fat, the
wash-bowl, and the powdering-tub." As a monarchy was made to fall
through the monopoly of soap and other ordinary articles, so was it
purposed that a republic should be crushed through the monopoly of the
material from which the sheets and shirts of laborers are manufactured.
There was not much chivalry in the basis of Southern power, but most
grand revolutions are brought about by acting on the lives of the
masses, who are more easily moved by appeals to their sense of immediate
interest than by reference to the probable consequences of a certain
kind of political action. Our party-men know this, and hence it is,
that, while they have not much to say about the excellence of slavery,
they ask the Irish to oppose the overthrow of that institution, on the
ground, that, if it were to cease to exist, all the negroes of the South
would come to the North, and work for a dime a day,--which nonsense
there are some persons so ignorant as to believe.

To return to 1762: the people of the Colonies were as martially disposed
as are the people of the States in these days. "In the heat of the Old
French War," says Mr. Hawthorne, speaking of the inhabitants of New
England, "they might be termed a martial people. Every man was a
soldier, or the father or brother of a soldier; and the whole land
literally echoed with the roll of the drum, either beating up for
recruits among the towns and villages, or striking the march toward the
frontier. Besides the provincial troops, there were twenty-three British
regiments in the northern colonies. The country has never known a period
of such excitement and warlike life, except during the
Revolution,--perhaps scarcely then; for that was a lingering war, and
this a stirring and eventful one." There has not been so much movement
in the Secession War as characterized that in which our ancestors were
engaged a century ago, and which was fought in America and in India, in
Germany and in Portugal, in Italy and in Africa, in France and in
Bohemia. As the great Lisbon earthquake had been felt on the shores of
Ontario, so had the war which began the year of that earthquake's
occurrence shaken the world that lay on the American lakes. Forty years
ago, old men talked as much of the Old French War--the Seven Years' War
of European historians--as of the War of the Revolution. It was a
contest but for the happening of which there could have been no American
Revolution, at least none of the character that now occupies so high a
place in history. Or, had it happened, and had the event been different,
our annals would have been made to read differently, and the Fourth of
July could never have become an institution. It opened well for the
French, and, had not fortune changed, the colonists, instead of looking
to Paris for aid, only a dozen years after its conclusion, might have
been ruled by proconsuls sent from that "centre of civilization," as it
delights to call itself. And even if the terms of the treaty which put
an end to that war had been a little differently arranged, England might
have triumphed in the war that she carried on against our ancestors.
Both the war itself, and the manner of concluding it, were necessary to
the creation of that American empire which, according to Earl Russell,
we are fighting to maintain,--as unquestionably we are, though not in
the ignoble sense in which the noble Earl meant that his words should be
taken and understood.

Of the many conquests which were made by the English in the Seven Years'
War, no one was more remarkable than that which placed the Havana and
its neighborhood in their hands, virtually giving them possession of the
island of Cuba; and the manner in which they disposed of their
magnificent prize, when George III. forced peace upon his unwilling
subjects, was among the causes of their failure to conquer the Thirteen
States in the War for Independence.

That England should have been favored with the opportunity to seize Cuba
was not the least singular of the incidents of a contest that was waged
wherever Christians could meet for the pious purpose of cutting one
another's throats. The English owed it to the hatred for them that was
felt by one man, who assailed them in their hour of triumph, in the hope
of gratifying his love of revenge, but who reaped only new humiliations
from his crusade. He had better luck in after days; but in 1762 he must
have entertained some pretty strong doubts as to the wisdom of hating
his neighbors, and of allowing that sentiment to get the better of his
judgment. Charles III., King of the Spains, the best of all the Spanish
Bourbons, had, when he was King of Naples, been most grossly insulted by
a British naval commander, and he had had to swallow the affront. "Being
a good Christian, and vindictive," though he swallowed the affront, he
could not digest it. He cherished the hope of being able to repay the
English with that usurious interest with which men of all grades love to
discharge their debts of the kind. He little thought that he was to wait
near forty years for the settlement of his account, and that a
generation was to pass away before he should be able to feel as Loredano
felt when he heard of the death of Francesco Foscari.

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