The Delicious Vice | Page 8

reflections, and as open to
impression as sensitized paper, upon which pictures may be printed and
from which they may also fade out. The greater the variety of
impressions that fall upon the young mind the more certain it is that the
greatest strength of natural tendency will be touched and revealed.
Good or bad, whichever it may be, let it come out as quickly as
possible. How many men have never developed their fatal weaknesses
until success was within reach and the edifice fell upon other innocent
ones. Believe me, no innate scoundrel or brute will be much helped or
hindered by stories. These have no turn or leisure for dreaming. They
are eager for the actual touch of life. What would a dull-eyed glutton,
famishing, not with hunger but with the cravings of digestive ferocity,
find in Thackeray's "Memorials of Gormandizing" or "Barmecidal
Feasts?" Such banquets are spread for the frugal, not one of whom
would swap that immortal cook-book review for a dinner with Lucullus.
Rascals will not read. Men of action do not read. They look upon it as
the gambler does upon the game where "no money passes." It may
almost be said that the capacity for novel-reading is the patent of just
and noble minds. You never heard of a great novel-reader who was
notorious as a criminal. There have been literary criminals, I grant

you--Eugene Aram Dr. Dodd, Prof. Webster, who murdered Parkmaan,
and others. But they were writers, not readers And they did not write
novels. Mr. Aram wrote scientific and school books, as did Prof.
Webster, and Dr. Wainwright wrote beautiful sermons. We never do
sufficiently consider the evil that lies behind writing sermons. The
nearest you can come to a writer of fiction who has been steeped in
crime is in Benvenuto Cellini, whose marvelous autobiographical
memoir certainly contains some fiction, though it is classed under the
suspect department of History.
How many men actually have been saved from a criminal career by the
miraculous influence of novels? Let who will deny, but at the age of six
I myself was absolutely committed to the abandoned purpose of riding
barebacked horses in a circus. Secretly, of course, because there were
some vague speculations in the family concerning what seemed to be
special adaptability to the work of preaching. Shortly after I gave that
up to enlist in the Continental Army, under Gen. Francis Marion, and
no other soldier slew more Britons. After discharge I at once
volunteered in an Indiana regiment quartered in my native town in
Kentucky, and beat the snare drum at the head of that fine body of men
for a long time. But the tendency was downward. For three months I
was chief of a of robbers that ravaged the backyards of the vicinity.
Successively I became a spy for Washington, an Indian fighter, a tragic
actor.
With character seared, abandoned and dissolute in habit through and by
the hearing and seeing and reading of history, there was but one
desperate step left So I entered upon the career of a pirate in my ninth
year. The Spanish Main, as no doubt you remember, was at that time
upon an open common across the street from our house, and it was a
hundred feet long, half as wide and would average two feet in depth. I
have often since thanked Heaven that they filled up that pathless ocean
in order to build an iron foundry upon the spot. Suppose they had
excavated for a cellar! Why during the time that Capt. Kidd, Lafitte and
I infested the coast thereabout, sailing three "low, black-hulled
schooners with long rakish masts," I forced hundreds of merchant
seamen to walk the plank--even helpless women and children. Unless
the sharks devoured them, their bones are yet about three feet under the
floor of that iron foundry. Under the lee of the Northernmost

promontory, near a rock marked with peculiar crosses made by the
point of the stiletto which I constantly carried in my red silk sash, I
buried tons of plate, and doubloons, pieces of eight, pistoles, Louis
d'ors, and galleons by the chest. At that time galleons somehow meant
to me money pieces in use, though since then the name has been given
to a species of boat. The rich brocades, Damascus and Indian stuffs,
laces, mantles, shawls and finery were piled in riotous profusion in our
cave where--let the whole truth be told if it must--I lived with a bold,
black-eyed and coquettish Spanish girl, who loved me with
ungovernable jealousy that occasionally led to bitter and terrible scenes
of rage and despair. At last when I brought home a white and red
English girl whose life I spared because she had begged me her knees
by the memory of my