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Page 49
The ship is stanch and sound. The "last voyage" which we have described
will not, let us hope, be the last voyage of her career. But wherever
she goes, under the English flag or under our own, she will scarcely
ever crowd more adventure into one cruise than into that which sealed
the discovery of the Northwest Passage; which gave new lands to England,
nearest to the pole of all she has; which spent more than a year, no man
knows where, self-governed and unguided; and which, having begun under
the strict _r�gime_ of the English navy, ended under the remarkable
mutual rules, adopted by common consent, on the business of American
whalemen.
Is it not worth noting that in this chivalry of Arctic adventure, the
ships which have been wrecked have been those of the fight or horror?
They are the "Fury," the "Victory," the "Erebus," the "Terror." But the
ships which never failed their crews,--which, for all that man knows,
are as sound now as ever,--bear the names of peaceful adventure; the
"Hecla," the "Enterprise," and "Investigator," the "Assistance" and
"Resolute," the "Pioneer" and "Intrepid," and our "Advance" and "Rescue"
and "Arctic," never threatened any one, even in their names. And they
never failed the men who commanded them or who sailed in them.
MY DOUBLE, AND HOW HE UNDID ME
ONE OF THE INGHAM PAPERS.
[A Boston journal, in noticing this story, called it improbable. I think
it is. But I think the moral important. It was first published in the
Atlantic Monthly for September, 1859.]
* * * * *
It is not often that I trouble the readers of the Atlantic Monthly. I
should not trouble them now, but for the importunities of my wife, who
"feels to insist" that a duty to society is unfulfilled, till I have
told why I had to have a double, and how he undid me. She is sure, she
says, that intelligent persons cannot understand that pressure upon
public servants which alone drives any man into the employment of a
double. And while I fear she thinks, at the bottom of her heart, that my
fortunes will never be remade, she has a faint hope that, as another
Rasselas, I may teach a lesson to future publics, from which they may
profit, though we die. Owing to the behavior of my double, or, if you
please, to that public pressure which compelled me to employ him, I have
plenty of leisure to write this communication.
I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian connection. I was
settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the
finest water-powers in Maine. We used to call it a Western town in the
heart of the civilization of New England. A charming place it was and
is. A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might
have all "the joy of eventful living" to our heart's content.
Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination, and in those
halcyon moments of our first house-keeping. To be the confidential
friend in a hundred families in the town,--cutting the social trifle, as
my friend Haliburton says, "from the top of the whipped syllabub to the
bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation,"--to keep abreast of
the thought of the age in one's study, and to do one's best on Sunday to
interweave that thought with the active life of an active town, and to
inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses of the Eternal Glory,
seemed such an exquisite forelook into one's life! Enough to do, and all
so real and so grand! If this vision could only have lasted!
The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor,
indeed, half bright enough. If one could only have been left to do his
own business, the vision would have accomplished itself and brought out
new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original. The misery was
and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that besides the
vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in life (such as
breaking the old pitcher that came over in the "Mayflower" and putting
into the fire the Alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont
Blanc),--besides these, I say (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe),
there were pitchforked in on us a great rowen-heap of humbugs, handed
down from some unknown seed-time, in which we were expected, and I
chiefly, to fulfil certain public functions before the community, of the
character of those fulfilled by the third row of supernumeraries who
stand behind the Sepoys in the spectacle of the "Cataract of the
Ganges." They were the duties, in a word, which one performs as member
of one or another social class or subdivision, wholly distinct from what
one does as A. by himself A. What invisible power put these functions on
me, it would be very hard to tell. But such power there was and is. And
I had not been at work a year before I found I was living two lives, one
real and one merely functional,--for two sets of people, one my parish,
whom I loved, and the other a vague public, for whom I did not care two
straws. All this was in a vague notion, which everybody had and has,
that this second life would eventually bring out some great results,
unknown at present, to somebody somewhere.
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