第10章 INTRODUCTION(9)

I have told you that I have just finished a long memoir,and that it has cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,--if I have overcome them,which others must decide.And I feel exactly as honest Dobbin feels when his harness is slipped off after a long journey with a good deal of up-hill work.He wants to rest a little,then to feed a little;then,if you will turn him loose in the pasture,he wants to roll.I have left my starry and ethereal companionship,--not for a long time,I hope,for it has lifted me above my common self,but for a while.And now I want,so to speak,to roll in the grass and among the dandelions with the other pachyderms.So I have kept to the outside of the portfolio as yet,and am disporting myself in reminiscences,and fancies,and vagaries,and parentheses.

How well I understand the feeling which led the Pisans to load their vessels with earth from the Holy Land,and fill the area of the Campo Santo with that sacred soil!The old house stood upon about as perverse a little patch of the planet as ever harbored a half-starved earth-worm.It was as sandy as Sahara and as thirsty as Tantalus.

The rustic aid-de-camps of the household used to aver that all fertilizing matters "leached"through it.I tried to disprove their assertion by gorging it with the best of terrestrial nourishment,until I became convinced that I was feeding the tea-plants of China,and then I gave over the attempt.And yet I did love,and do love,that arid patch of ground.I wonder if a single flower could not be made to grow in a pot of earth from that Campo Santo of my childhood!

One noble product of nature did not refuse to flourish there,--the tall,stately,beautiful,soft-haired,many-jointed,generous maize or Indian corn,which thrives on sand and defies the blaze of our shrivelling summer.What child but loves to wander in its forest-like depths,amidst the rustling leaves and with the lofty tassels tossing their heads high above him!There are two aspects of the cornfield which always impress my imagination:the first when it has reached its full growth,and its ordered ranks look like an army on the march with its plumed and bannered battalions;the second when,after the battle of the harvest,the girdled stacks stand on the field of slaughter like so many ragged Niobes,--say rather like the crazy widows and daughters of the dead soldiery.

Once more let us come back to the old house.It was far along in its second century when the edict went forth that it must stand no longer.

The natural death of a house is very much like that of one of its human tenants.The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs of age.Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off,and leave bald the boards that supported them;shingles darken and decay,and soon the garret or the attic lets in the rain and the snow;by and by the beams sag,the floors warp,the walls crack,the paper peels away,the ceilings scale off and fall,the windows are crusted with clinging dust,the doors drop from their rusted hinges,the winds come in without knocking and howl their cruel death-songs through the empty rooms and passages,and at last there comes a crash,a great cloud of dust rises,and the home that had been the shelter of generation after generation finds its grave in its own cellar.Only the chimney remains as its monument.Slowly,little by little,the patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their chemistry pick out the mortar from between the bricks;at last a mighty wind roars around it and rushes against it,and the monumental relic crashes down among the wrecks it has long survived.So dies a human habitation left to natural decay,all that was seen above the surface of the soil sinking gradually below it,Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell Save home's last wrecks,the cellar and the well.

But if this sight is saddening,what is it to see a human dwelling fall by the hand of violence!The ripping off of the shelter that has kept out a thousand storms,the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork,the wrench of the inexorable crowbar,the murderous blows of the axe,the progressive ruin,which ends by rending all the joints asunder and flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,--what a brutal act of destruction it seems!