The Molly O'Molly Papers.

No. III.

When Dogberry brought Conrade before Leonato, the only offense he seems to have had a clear idea of, was the one against himself: 'Moreover, sir, this plaintiff here, the offender, did call me ass. I beseech you, let it be remembered in his punishment.' Shakspeare has, by this 'one touch of nature,' made Dogberry kin to the whole world. It would be the most terrible of punishments to run the gauntlet of a company, every one of which you had called an ass; whatever may have been the original offense, this would be the one most remembered in your punishment, I don't think it would be possible to believe any thing good of one who had given you this appellation; on the contrary, the reputed long ears would be worse than the famous 'diabolical trumpet' for collecting and distorting the merest whispers of evil against him who planted them, or discovered them peeping through the assumed lion's skin. Apollo's music probably sounded no sweeter to Midas after he received his 'wonderful ear.'

But my object in introducing Dogberry was not to give a dissertation on this greatest of insults, but to illustrate our selfishness. Our patience will bear great crimes against others, but how it gives way under the slightest insult to ourselves. Now I am not going to denounce selfishness; I'd as soon think of denouncing gravitation. There is, in the best of us, an under-current of selfishness; indeed, selfishness and unselfishness are convertible terms; this is a higher kind of that, as the upper-current of the ocean is but the under-current risen to the surface.

Saint James says: 'The love of money is the root of all evil.' I am not exactly prepared to agree with him; it is a great branch, almost the trunk; but I think selfishness is the root. You know Hahnemann thought all diseases but a modification of one disease—psora. However it may be with his theory, the one moral disease is not an itching palm. This is but a modification of selfishness, which is not merely cutaneous.

But the form it is supposed to take in the system of Yankees, is the above-named plebeian form. The supposition may be correct. Don't we most feel our national troubles, the shock of the great national earthquake, when it causes an upheaval from the depths of the pocket? If Uncle Sam's sentiments are, as they are supposed to be, only a concentration of those of the majority, isn't his lamentation over his run-away South, who has changed her name without his consent, that of Shylock: 'My daughter! Oh! my ducats!'? Though not exactly connected with this branch of selfishness, I may as well, while speaking of our national difficulties, mention what struck me very forcibly: It is said, that on the eminence from which the spectators of the Bull Run battle so precipitately fled, were found sandwiches and bottles of wine; and that these refreshments actually lined the road to Washington. From this might be inferred that 'to-day's dinner' not only 'subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution,' but that it also subtends a larger angle than to-day's revolution. If one could ever forget one's own personal gratifications and comforts, it would be, I should think, in overlooking a nation's battle-field—our nation's battle-field. But it is not for a humble lay member, whose business it is to practice rather than preach, to criticise. Are not the honorable members representatives of the people; and when they are cheered and refreshed, are not the 'dear people' through them cheered and refreshed? Besides, they may have so reluctantly dropped the wine and sandwiches because they were loth to leave them to 'give aid and comfort to the enemy.' There are always envious people to rail at those above them; pawns on the world's chess-board, they pride themselves on their own straightforward course; but let them push their way to the highest row, how soon do they exchange this course for the 'crooked policy of the knight,' or jump over principles with queen, castle, or bishop! Woe to the poor pawn in their way.

How I have skipped! what connection can there be between members of Congress and crooked policy, or jumping over principles? yet there must have been a train of association that led me off the track; doubtless it was purely arbitrary. Well, we'll let it go; poor pawn as I am, I have but stepped aside to nab an idea.

But to return to the Yankee. The form which selfishness takes in his system is not that of the most intensified exclusiveness. You know the story of Rosicrucius' sepulcher, with its ever-burning lamp, guarded by an armor-encased, truncheon-armed statue, which statue, on the entrance of a man who accidentally discovered the sepulcher, arose, and at his advance, raised its truncheon and shivered the lamp to atoms, leaving the intruder in darkness. On examination, under the floor springs were found, connecting with others within the statue. Rosicrucius wished thus to inform the world that he had reïnvented the ever-burning lamp of the ancients, but meant that the world shouldn't profit by the information. Had a Yankee reïnvented those lamps, he would have got out a patent, and some brother Yankee would have improved upon it, and invented one warranted to burn 'forever and a day.' They would probably have thus raked together a great deal of the 'filthy lucre;' possibly this would have been their main object; but the world would have been benefited by them. All selfishness, to be sure, but exclusive selfishness benefits the world.

[Speaking of filthy lucre, I begin to see why those who have lost it all are said to be 'cleaned out.' But this is only par parenthèse.]

But exclusiveness is not peculiar to the Rosicrucians; there is too much of it in even the religious sects of this enlightened age; it is too much, 'Lord, bless me and my sect;' 'Lord, bless us, and no more.' There are self-constituted mountain-tops that would extract all the mercy and grace with which the winds come freighted from the great ocean of Love, so that they would pass over beyond them hot, dry winds of wrath. But I am glad that this is impossible; that in the moral world there are no Andes, no rainless regions.

I fear that I have not stuck very closely to the text furnished me by thick-headed, thick-tongued Dogberry.

Allow me to compress into closing sentences, a few general remarks.... Those lakes that have no outlet, grow salt and bitter; we all know the ennui and bitterness of those souls that receive many blessings, sending forth none; better drain your soul out for others, than have it become a Dead Sea.... Black, that absorbs all rays, reflecting none, is an anomaly in nature; it is true, but one earthly character has reflected all the rays of goodness, absorbing none, making the common light 'rich, like a lily in bloom;' yet every man can reflect at least one ray to gladden the earth.... It is not necessary, even in the cold atmosphere of this world, to become contractedly selfish; cold expands noble natures as it does water.... Lastly ...

Yours, MOLLY O'MOLLY.

No. IV.

The old trout knows enough to keep off the fisherman's hook; the squirrel never cracks an empty nut; the crow soon learns the harmlessness of the scarecrow. But man, though he may have twenty times wriggled off the hook, the patient angler catches him at last. He always cracks the empty shell, then cries: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' This cry he might be spared would he learn a lesson from the squirrel, who weighs his nuts and throws away the light, hollow shell.... And there are scarescrows, the harmlessness of which the human biped learns not in a a lifetime. How long is it since that horned, cloven-footed monster whom the monks made of Pan theos and called him Devil, was an object of fear? How 'the real, genuine, no mistake' (savin' his presence) must have laughed at his own effigy! Then there is Grim Death, too, a creation of the Dark Ages, for in no age of light could this horror have been ever conceived. Unlike the other, against him no exorcism avails.... As if the soul about to be launched on the dim sea Eternity, after all lights and forms of the loved shore have become indistinct, must be cut loose from her moorings by this phantom. The idea that 'Death comes to set us free,' would hardly make us 'meet him cheerily, as our true friend,' were this his real shape. But were I disposed to enumerate our scarecrows, the list would be incomplete; as there are doubtless many that I have not the shrewdness to recognize as such.

The only humbugs are not those that work on our fears. There are humbugs that work on our hopes. These have been likened to bubbles that dance on the wave, burst, and are no more. They are too often like bomb-shells, that in exploding scatter ruin on all around. They have also been named air-castles, chateaux en Espagne, 'baseless fabrics of a vision.' The baseless fabric of a vision is built of 'airy nothingness;' but men found on a wish, structures that tower to heaven, put real, solid material into them, and when they fall, as fall they must—I'll not attempt to give an idea of the utter desolation they leave, of the waste place they make of the heart, lest you should think I have thus humbugged myself; for self-humbug it certainly is; and this is the most intensely human. Not a fish, or reptile, bird, or beast; not a thing crawling, swimming, flying, or walking, but the human creature, humbugs himself. 'Man was made to mourn,' I would change into, Man was made to be humbugged. It is better to be greatly gullible, than a 'cunning dog,' for gulled we will be. It is better to be caught at once, than to have our gills torn by wriggling off the hook the twenty times, to be caught at last. It is better to walk straight into the net than to fatigue ourselves by coming to it in a roundabout way. A Nova-Scotian once rallied a Down-Easter on the famous wooden hams. 'Yaas,' was the reply, 'and they say that one of you actilly ate one and didn't know the difference.' Well, it is better to swallow our humbugs, as the Nova-Scotian did the Connecticut-cured ham, without detecting any thing peculiar in their flavor, than it is to find our mistake at the first cut or saw. By the way, saltpeter is so needed for other purposes, that probably the Virginia cured will not now have as fine a flavor as formerly.

But, in the way: You dissent from some of these remarks? You've cut your eye-teeth, have you? Possibly you forget that trip in the cars, when you 'cutely passed by the swell in flashy waistcoat and galvanized jewelry, and took a seat by a 'plain blunt man' in snuff-color; and after he had left the cars at the first station, and the conductor came to you and demanded, 'Your ticket, sir!' you probably forgot how in fumbling for it in your pocket, you found it, but not your porte-monnaie. You perhaps set down in your mental memorandum, under the head of Appearances, not to be deceived by plain bluntness and snuff-color. There you were wrong; your boasted reason is of no avail in detecting humbugs; there is no such thing as classifying them. Then, too, we are in greater danger of being humbugged by another class of appearances.

In material things we are compelled to acknowledge that things the most reliable are the most unpretending. The star, by which the mariner has steered for ages, is not a 'bright particular star;' the needle of his compass is shaped from one of the baser metals, (though in a figurative sense gold is highly magnetic.) The inner bears such a relation to the outer, that the inner senses are named from the outer; we are slow to perceive that also all objects of the outer senses, are but types of those of the inner. You see how I have been obliged to borrow from the outer vocabulary. I give this idea, in a nebular state, trusting that you will consolidate it. Were we, in a figurative sense, to choose a guiding-star, it would be a comet, we are so taken with flash and show. A great truth, though angels heralded its birth, and a star were drawn from its orbit to stand over its cradle, if that cradle were a manger, we would reject it; if it assumed not the 'pomp and circumstance' of royalty, though it worked miracles, we would cry, Away with it. Eighteen hundred years have not completely transformed or transmuted the world; we are yet ready to reject the true, and be humbugged by the false. More than eighteen hundred and sixty-two years may yet elapse before the bells that 'ring out the old and ring in the new,' will 'ring out the false and ring in the true.' Then farewell humbug.

Yes, it is altogether probable that long before humbug is no more, you and I will—I was about to say be in the narrow house, but prefer an expression of Carlyle's—we will have 'vanished into infinite space.' I prefer this for the same reason that one of Hood's characters was thankful that 'Heaven was boundless.' She it was whom the physician pronounced 'dying by inches.' 'Only think,' exclaimed the consternated husband, 'how long she will be dying!' I suppose to the poor man Grim Death appeared to hold in his skeleton fingers, instead of an hour-glass, a twenty-year glass.

That the sands of his glass may, for you, married or single, neither run too fast nor too slow, is sincerely the wish of

Your well-wisher,

MOLLY O'MOLLY.