Volume Ii Part 25 (2/2)
Some of the liveliest of the lighter papers of Franklin were written during the course of his French Mission. His inimitable _Journey to the Elysian Fields_ and _Conte_ have already received our attention in an earlier chapter. Among the others was _The Sale of the Hessians_, _The Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle_, _The Ephemera_, _The Whistle_, his letter to the Abbe de la Roche, communicating to him the _pet.i.te chanson a boire_ that he had written forty years before, his letter to the Abbe Morellet on wine, the _Dialogue between him and the Gout_, _The Handsome and Deformed Leg_ and _The Economical Project_. If there was nothing else to support the claim of Franklin to the authors.h.i.+p of _The Sale of the Hessians_, the difficulty of abridging it would be one proof. Its humor is as trenchant as that of Frederick the Great in levying the same toll upon these hirelings, when pa.s.sing through his dominions on their way to America, pursuant to the mercenary engagements between their German masters and George III., as that levied by him upon other cattle. The paper is thrown into the form of a letter from the Count De Schaumbergh to the Baron Hohendorf, commanding the Hessian troops in America. It begins as follows:
MONSIEUR DE BARON:--On my return from Naples, I received at Rome your letter of the 27th December of last year. I have learned with unspeakable pleasure the courage our troops exhibited at Trenton, and you cannot imagine my joy on being told that of the 1,950 Hessians engaged in the fight, but 345 escaped. There were just 1,605 men killed, and I can not sufficiently commend your prudence in sending an exact list of the dead to my minister in London. This precaution was the more necessary, as the report sent to the English Ministry does not give but 1,455 dead. This would make 483,450 florins instead of 643,500 which I am ent.i.tled to demand under our convention. You will comprehend the prejudice which such an error would work in my finances, and I do not doubt you will take the necessary pains to prove that Lord North's list is false and yours correct.
This is another paragraph:
I am about to send to you some new recruits. Don't economize them. Remember glory before all things. Glory is true wealth. There is nothing degrades the soldier like the love of money. He must care only for honour and reputation, but this reputation must be acquired in the midst of dangers. A battle gained without costing the conqueror any blood is an inglorious success, while the conquered cover themselves with glory by peris.h.i.+ng with their arms in their hands. Do you remember that of the 300 Lacedaemonians who defended the defile of Thermopylae, not one returned? How happy should I be could I say the same of my brave Hessians!
It is true that their King, Leonidas, perished with them: but things have changed, and it is no longer the custom for princes of the empire to go and fight in America for a cause with which they have no concern.
The Baron is further commended for sending back to Europe that Dr. Crumerus who was so successful in curing dysentery, and is told that it is better that the Hessians should burst in their barracks than fly in a battle, and tarnish the glory of the Count's arms.
Besides [the Count continues], you know that they pay me as killed for all who die from disease, and I don't get a farthing for runaways. My trip to Italy, which has cost me enormously, makes it desirable that there should be a great mortality among them. You will therefore promise promotion to all who expose themselves; you will exhort them to seek glory in the midst of dangers; you will say to Major Maundorff that I am not at all content with his saving the 345 men who escaped the ma.s.sacre of Trenton. Through the whole campaign he has not had ten men killed in consequence of his orders. Finally, let it be your princ.i.p.al object to prolong the war and avoid a decisive engagement on either side, for I have made arrangements for a grand Italian opera, and I do not wish to be obliged to give it up. Meantime I pray G.o.d, my dear Baron de Hohendorf, to have you in his holy and gracious keeping.
The _Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle_ is distinguished by the same sort of cool, dry mocking verisimilitude. Captain Gerrish, of the New England Militia, is supposed to write a letter in which he says that the members of a recent expedition against the Indians were struck with horror to find among the packages of peltry captured by them eight large ones containing scalps of their unhappy country-folks taken in the last three years by the Seneca Indians from the heads of inhabitants of the frontiers of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and sent by them as a present to Colonel Haldimand, the Governor of Canada; to be forwarded by him to England. The scalps, Captain Gerrish a.s.serts, were accompanied by a curious letter to the Governor from one, James Craufurd.
Then is set forth this letter which describes with the minuteness of a mercantile invoice the contents of each of the eight packages of scalps, some of Congress soldiers, some of farmers surprised in their houses at night, some of farmers killed in their houses by day, some of farmers killed in the fields, some of women, some of boys, some of girls and some of little infants ripped from the womb. The contents of several of the packages are described as mixed lots. The letter also fully explains the Indian triumphal marks painted upon the different scalps, which were all cured, dried and stretched like the pelts of the otter or beaver on hoops.
The black circle denoted that the victim had perished at night, the little red foot that he had died in defence of his life and family, the little yellow flame that he had been tortured at the stake. The hair braided in the Indian fas.h.i.+on meant that the victim was a mother, other tokens that the victim was a boy or a girl. A band fixed to the hoop of one of the scalps signified that the head to which it had been attached was that of a rebel clergyman. Many gruesome tokens are explained in the same systematic and businesslike manner. Along with several other pa.s.sages from a speech of Conejogatchie in Council, the letter also communicates one in which the speaker declares that his people wished the scalps to be sent across the water to the great King that he might regard them and be refreshed. In concluding his own letter, Captain Gerrish states that Lieutenant Fitzgerald would have undertaken to convey the scalps to England and to hang them all up some dark night on the trees in St. James' Park, where they could be seen from the King and Queen's Palaces in the morning. But this proposal, the _Chronicle_ says, was not approved in Boston. It was proposed instead to make the scalps up in decent little packets, and to seal and direct them; one to the King containing a sample of every kind for his museum, one to the Queen, with some of women and children; the rest to be distributed among both Houses of Parliament, and a double quant.i.ty to be given to the Bishops. The relations of the _Chronicle_ to this production were, of course, as purely fict.i.tious as every other part of it.
a.s.sociated with the performance, as another publication in the _Chronicle_, is a fict.i.tious letter, too, from Paul Jones to Sir Joseph Yorke, the English Amba.s.sador to Holland, in which he defends himself with considerable spirit from the charge of being a pirate, and reminds Sir Joseph of the freebooting principles upon which England was waging war against America. When he read this letter, Horace Walpole wrote to the Countess of Ossory, ”Have you seen in the papers an excellent letter of Paul Jones to Sir Joseph Yorke? Elle nous dit bien des verites! I doubt poor Sir Joseph cannot answer them! Dr. Franklin himself, I should think, was the author. It is certainly written by a first-rate pen, and not by a common man of war.”
_The Ephemera_ was addressed to Madame Brillon, and is one of the most justly famous of all Franklin's writings. In a letter to William Carmichael, he states that the thought was partly taken from a little piece of some unknown writer, which he had met with fifty years before in a newspaper. Another proof, we might say in pa.s.sing, how little disposed Franklin was to borrow from Richard Jackson, or any one else without due acknowledgment.
So dependent is every part of this paper for its effect upon the whole that to quote only a portion of it would be as futile as an effort to divide a bubble without destroying it. These are the precise words in full of this bewitching little production:
You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I stopt a little in one of our walks, and staid some time behind the company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told, were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues; my too great application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as they, in their national vivacity, spoke three or four together, I could make but little of their conversation. I found, however, by some broken expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on the merit of two foreign musicians, one a _cousin_, the other a _moscheto_; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living a month. Happy people! thought I, you are certainly under a wise, just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old grey-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the most pleasing of all amus.e.m.e.nts, her delicious company and heavenly harmony.
It was [said he] the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since, by the apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who _are now_, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for, by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor, in ama.s.sing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in, for the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! for, in politics, what can laws do without morals? Our present race of ephemerae will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress!
Alas! art is long, and life is short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name, they say, I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists? And what will become of all history in the eighteenth hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to its end, and be buried in universal ruin?
To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good lady ephemerae, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable _Brillante_.
_The Whistle_, too, was addressed to Madame Brillon and is also one of the most celebrated of Franklin's bagatelles, but is scarcely equal, we think, to the best of them.
In his opinion, Franklin said, they might all draw more good from the world than they did if they would take care not to give too much for whistles.
With this foreword, he tells his story. When a child of seven years of age, his friends on a holiday filled his pocket with coppers, and, being charmed with the sound of a whistle that he met by the way in the hands of another boy, he voluntarily offered, and gave all his money for one. He then came home, and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with his whistle, but disturbing the entire family. But his brothers and sisters told him that he had given four times as much for the whistle as it was worth, put him in mind of what good things he might have bought with the rest of the money and laughed at him so much for his folly that he cried with vexation.
The lesson, however, was of use to him, so that often, when he was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, he said to himself, ”_Don't give too much for the whistle_,” and he saved his money. And so, when he grew up, came into the world and observed the actions of men, he thought he met with many, very many who gave too much for the whistle.
He then mentions who some of these men were, the man ambitious of court favor, the man covetous of political popularity, the miser, the slave of pleasure, the devotee of fas.h.i.+on, the beautiful, sweet-tempered girl, married to an ill-natured brute of a husband, and, after the mention of each, comes the running comment, ”This man gives too much for his whistle,”
or its equivalent.
Yet [Franklin concludes], I ought to have charity for these unhappy people, when I consider, that, with all this wisdom of which I am boasting, there are certain things in the world so tempting, for example, the apples of King John, which happily are not to be bought; for if they were put to sale by auction, I might very easily be led to ruin myself in the purchase, and find that I had once more given too much for the _whistle_.
The reader has already had occasion to know what kind of fruit these apples of King John were, and in whose orchard they grew.
To realize what an indifferent poet Franklin was, and yet at the same time what a master of prose, one has but to first read his _pet.i.te chanson a boire_ beginning,
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