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- 11598
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
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- 11547
- text
- exchange for his ditties. Such cases stand upon imperishable record, and
it were both folly and ingratitude to disown them.
But since the fine social position and noble patrimony of Pierre, had
thus far rendered it altogether unnecessary for him to earn the least
farthing of his own in the world, whether by hand or by brain; it may
seem desirable to explain a little here as we go. We shall do so, but
always including, the preamble.
Sometimes every possible maxim or thought seems an old one; yet it is
among the elder of the things in that unaugmentable stock, that never
mind what one's situation may be, however prosperous and happy, he will
still be impatient of it; he will still reach out of himself, and beyond
every present condition. So, while many a poor be-inked galley-slave,
toiling with the heavy oar of a quill, to gain something wherewithal to
stave off the cravings of nature; and in his hours of morbid
self-reproach, regarding his paltry wages, at all events, as an
unavoidable disgrace to him; while this galley-slave of letters would
have leaped with delight--reckless of the feeble seams of his
pantaloons--at the most distant prospect of inheriting the broad farms
of Saddle Meadows, lord of an all-sufficing income, and forever exempt
from wearing on his hands those treacherous plague-spots of
indigence--videlicet, blots from the inkstand;--Pierre himself, the
undoubted and actual possessor of the things only longingly and
hopelessly imagined by the other; the then top of Pierre's worldly
ambition, was the being able to boast that he had written such matters
as publishers would pay something for in the way of a mere business
transaction, which they thought would prove profitable. Yet altogether
weak and silly as this may seem in Pierre, let us preambillically
examine a little further, and see if it be so indeed.
Pierre was proud; and a proud man--proud with the sort of pride now
meant--ever holds but lightly those things, however beneficent, which he
did not for himself procure. Were such pride carried out to its
legitimate end, the man would eat no bread, the seeds whereof he had not
himself put into the soil, not entirely without humiliation, that even
that seed must be borrowed from some previous planter. A proud man likes
to feel himself in himself, and not by reflection in others. He likes to
be not only his own Alpha and Omega, but to be distinctly all the
intermediate gradations, and then to slope off on his own spine either
way, into the endless impalpable ether. What a glory it was then to
Pierre, when first in his two gentlemanly hands he jingled the wages of
labor! Talk of drums and the fife; the echo of coin of one's own earning
is more inspiring than all the trumpets of Sparta. How disdainfully now
he eyed the sumptuousness of his hereditary halls--the hangings, and the
pictures, and the bragging historic armorials and the banners of the
Glendinning renown; confident, that if need should come, he would not be
forced to turn resurrectionist, and dig up his grandfather's
Indian-chief grave for the ancestral sword and shield, ignominiously to
pawn them for a living! He could live on himself. Oh, twice-blessed now,
in the feeling of practical capacity, was Pierre.
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