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Page 54
Dennis himself, as I said, never spoke at all. But our experience this
session led me to think that if, by some such "general understanding" as
the reports speak of in legislation daily, every member of Congress
might leave a double to sit through those deadly sessions and answer to
roll-calls and do the legitimate party-voting, which appears stereotyped
in the regular list of Ashe, Bocock, Black, etc., we should gain
decidedly in working-power. As things stand, the saddest State prison I
ever visit is that Representatives' Chamber in Washington. If a man
leaves for an hour, twenty "correspondents" may be howling, "Where was
Mr. Pendergrast when the Oregon bill passed?" And if poor Pendergrast
stays there! Certainly the worst use you can make of a man is to put him
in prison!
I know, indeed, that public men of the highest rank have resorted to
this expedient long ago. Dumas's novel of the "Iron Mask" turns on the
brutal imprisonment of Louis the Fourteenth's double. There seems little
doubt, in our own history, that it was the real General Pierce who shed
tears when the delegate from Lawrence explained to him the sufferings of
the people there, and only General Pierce's double who had given the
orders for the assault on that town, which was invaded the next day. My
charming friend, George Withers, has, I am almost sure, a double, who
preaches his afternoon sermons for him. This is the reason that the
theology often varies so from that of the forenoon. But that double is
almost as charming as the original. Some of the most well defined men,
who stand out most prominently on the background of history, are in this
way stereoscopic men, who owe their distinct relief to the slight
differences between the doubles. All this I know. My present suggestion
is simply the great extension of the system, so that all public
machine-work may be done by it.
But I see I loiter on my story, which is rushing to the plunge. Let me
stop an instant more, however, to recall, were it only to myself, that
charming year while all was yet well. After the double had become a
matter of course, for nearly twelve months before he undid me, what a
year it was! Full of active life, full of happy love, of the hardest
work, of the sweetest sleep, and the fulfilment of so many of the fresh
aspirations and dreams of boyhood! Dennis went to every school-committee
meeting, and sat through all those late wranglings which used to keep me
up till midnight and awake till morning. He attended all the lectures to
which foreign exiles sent me tickets begging me to come for the love of
Heaven and of Bohemia. He accepted and used all the tickets for charity
concerts which were sent to me. He appeared everywhere where it was
specially desirable that "our denomination," or "our party," or "our
class," or "our family," or "our street," or "our town," or "our
country," or "our State," should be fully represented. And I fell back
to that charming life which in boyhood one dreams of, when he supposes
he shall do his own duty and make his own sacrifices, without being tied
up with those of other people. My rusty Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English began to take
polish. Heavens! how little I had done with them while I attended to my
_public_ duties! My calls on my parishioners became the friendly,
frequent, homelike sociabilities they were meant to be, instead of the
hard work of a man goaded to desperation by the sight of his lists of
arrears. And preaching! what a luxury preaching was when I had on Sunday
the whole result of an individual, personal week, from which to speak to
a people whom all that week I had been meeting as hand-to-hand
friend;--I, never tired on Sunday, and in condition to leave the sermon
at home, if I chose, and preach it extempore, as all men should do
always. Indeed, I wonder, when I think that a sensible people, like
ours,--really more attached to their clergy than they were in the lost
days, when the Mathers and Nortons were noblemen,--should choose to
neutralize so much of their ministers' lives, and destroy so much of
their early training, by this undefined passion for seeing them in
public. It springs from our balancing of sects. If a spirited
Episcopalian takes an interest in the almshouse, and is put on the Poor
Board, every other denomination must have a minister there, lest the
poorhouse be changed into St. Paul's Cathedral. If a Sandemanian is
chosen president of the Young Men's Library, there must be a Methodist
vice-president and a Baptist secretary. And if a Universalist
Sunday-School Convention collects five hundred delegates, the next
Congregationalist Sabbath-School Conference must be as large, "lest
'they'--whoever _they_ may be--should think 'we'--whoever _we_ may
be--are going down."
Freed from these necessities, that happy year I began to know my wife by
sight. We saw each other sometimes. In those long mornings, when Dennis
was in the study explaining to map-peddlers that, I had eleven maps of
Jerusalem already, and to school-book agents that I would see them
hanged before I would be bribed to introduce their text-books into the
schools,--she and I were at work together, as in those old dreamy
days,--and in these of our log-cabin again. But all this could not
last,--and at length poor Dennis, my double, overtasked in turn, undid
me.
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