第32章

--When I was a boy,--he said,--some of the mothers in our small town, who meant that their children should know what was what as well as other people's children, laid their heads together and got a dancing-master to come out from the city and give instruction at a few dollars a quarter to the young folks of condition in the village.

Some of their husbands were ministers and some were deacons, but the mothers knew what they were about, and they did n't see any reason why ministers' and deacons' wives' children shouldn't have as easy manners as the sons and daughters of Belial.So, as I tell you, they got a dancing-master to come out to our place,--a man of good repute, a most respectable man,--madam (to the Landlady), you must remember the worthy old citizen, in his advanced age, going about the streets, a most gentlemanly bundle of infirmities,--only he always cocked his hat a little too much on one side, as they do here and there along the Connecticut River, and sometimes on our city sidewalks, when they've got a new beaver; they got him, I say, to give us boys and girls lessons in dancing and deportment.He was as gray and as lively as a squirrel, as I remember him, and used to spring up in the air and "cross his feet," as we called it, three times before he came down.Well, at the end of each term there was what they called an "exhibition ball," in which the scholars danced cotillons and country-dances; also something called a "gavotte," and I think one or more walked a minuet.But all this is not what--I wanted to say.At this exhibition ball he used to bring out a number of hoops wreathed with roses, of the perennial kind, by the aid of which a number of amazingly complicated and startling evolutions were exhibited; and also his two daughters, who figured largely in these evolutions, and whose wonderful performances to us, who had not seen Miss Taglioni or Miss Elssler, were something quite bewildering, in fact, surpassing the natural possibilities of human beings.Their extraordinary powers were, however, accounted for by the following explanation, which was accepted in the school as entirely satisfactory.A certain little bone in the ankles of each of these young girls had been broken intentionally, secundum artem, at a very early age, and thus they had been fitted to accomplish these surprising feats which threw the achievements of the children who were left in the condition of the natural man into ignominious shadow.

--Thank you,--said I,--you have helped out my illustration so as to make it better than I expected.Let me begin again.Every poem that is worthy of the name, no matter how easily it seems to be written, represents a great amount of vital force expended at some time or other.When you find a beach strewed with the shells and other spoils that belonged once to the deep sea, you know the tide has been there, and that the winds and waves have wrestled over its naked sands.And so, if I find a poem stranded in my soul and have nothing to do but seize it as a wrecker carries off the treasure he finds cast ashore, I know I have paid at some time for that poem with some inward commotion, were it only an excess of enjoyment, which has used up just so much of my vital capital.But besides all the impressions that furnished the stuff of the poem, there has been hard work to get the management of that wonderful instrument I spoke of,---the great organ, language.An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.I don't know that you must break any bones in a poet's mechanism before his thought can dance in rhythm, but read your Milton and see what training, what patient labor, it took before he could shape our common speech into his majestic harmonies.

It is rather singular, but the same kind of thing has happened to me not very rarely before, as I suppose it has to most persons, that just when I happened to be thinking about poets and their conditions, this very morning, I saw a paragraph or two from a foreign paper which is apt to be sharp, if not cynical, relating to the same matter.I can't help it; I want to have my talk about it, and if Isay the same things that writer did, somebody else can have the satisfaction of saying I stole them all.

[I thought the person whom I have called hypothetically the Man of Letters changed color a little and betrayed a certain awkward consciousness that some of us were looking at him or thinking of him;but I am a little suspicious about him and may do him wrong.]