It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order
of composition, my faculties would not have been found so
pointless and inefficacious. I might, for instance, have
contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran
shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most
ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he
did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous
gifts as a story-teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque
force of his style, and the humourous colouring which nature
taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I
honestly believe, would have been something new in literature.
Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a
folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so
intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into
another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world
out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty
of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual
circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to diffuse
thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day,
and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the
burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the
true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and
wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters with which I was
now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was
spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace only because I
had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall
ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me,
just as it was written out by the reality of the flitting hour,
and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted
the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At some
future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered
fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find
the letters turn to gold upon the page.
These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a
hopeless toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about
this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably
poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor
of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything
but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect
is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like
ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a
smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be
no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was led to
conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favourable to the mode of life in question.
In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these
effects. Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer of
long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or
respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure
by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of
his business, which--though, I trust, an honest one--is of such
a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.