Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/524

482 A friend of ours, in his rash youth, was at the pains, in his case the very great pains, to learn Spanish. He learned it altogether out of books, for he was seven or eight hundred miles away from any Spanish-speaking person, and he did not clearly imagine what he was doing it for. Though he came to read several Spanish authors, he did so without much joy in them, and he ended with the vain regret that he had not given the same study to some other language which would have been more immediately related to the noiseless tenor of his way in that cool sequestered vale of life where he kept it. But when his sober wishes had learned to stray, and he found himself much nearer the madding crowd's ignoble strife than he had expected to be when he studied Spanish, an ambitious actor one day sighed out his regret to him that he could not get hold of the version of a Spanish play which he had seen fail, but which he felt sure he could make succeed. Then the acquirer of useless information bethought himself of the language on which he had wasted, as he had come to think, so much of his youth, and he said vaguely, "Why, I know Spanish," and the actor retorted: "You do! Then why don't you make me another version?" Said, done. The version was made, and became the actor's battle-horse, which carried him through the struggle of life while he lived, and remained for that term a means of honor and profit to both.

This fable—for of course it is not a true history—teaches that you cannot always be sure of the lasting uselessness of any piece of information. We should say that it would be well to exercise a wise improvidence in such matters, and even to gamble a little on the chances. To our friend who apparently learned Spanish so aimlessly, so almost wantonly, not only did profits accrue finally, but he experienced in time a high pleasure from it, for he found the language a distinct advantage in reading the modern Spanish novelists, who are among the most charming of all the novelists, ancient or modern. In our own case, we still have hopes that the painful inquiry which it cost us to learn the hour of the departure of the night train from Florence to Rome may have contributed to form habits of close and exact thinking, though the proof of this is yet to appear.

On the other hand, there was once a young lady of tender feelings but firm resolves who was inflexibly determined to live unmarried, even at the risk of living an old maid, but who wished so much to spare the susceptibilities of her potential admirers that she long made it her study how to refuse them without wounding them. To this end she read all the novels she could lay her hands on, and as much poetry as she could bear. She went constantly to the theatre, and in the intervals of her social duties she took serious books, like biographies and memoirs, out of the libraries, and informed herself of the methods and manners of the heroines who declined offers from high motives. She was, upon the whole, a good deal disappointed, especially with the novels. These manuals of the impassioned emotions seemed to render in almost every case a blind allegiance to the law of ending well, which in the low conception of the author was getting the hero and heroine married, and then dropping them. In the very, very few cases where they suffered a girl to refuse a lover, it was that she might leave him to some other girl who secretly loved him, and who would probably pine away, or partly away, if she did not have him. This the young lady thought simply disgusting and idiotic; she was a young lady of strong expressions as well as tender feelings and fixed resolves; and she found the poets not much, if any, more instructive than the novelists. They gave examples enough of girls who did not marry, but it was because their lovers died, or did not ask them; when their lovers both survived and proposed the girls refused them from pride or from shame, or from want of presence of mind; and bitterly regretted it ever afterwards. The personal histories were largely those of women distinguished in the arts, letters, and sciences, whose courtships and marriages were dismissed in a few cold and indifferent phrases, as incidents of small consequence in their several careers. Where they did not marry they seemed not to have been courted; and where they were loved it was in a vague, tentative sort that never arrived at passion.