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America, to the Elizabethans, wrote Leo Marx, "looked, or so they thought, the way the world might have been supposed to look before the beginning of civilization" [2] and the complex myth of the garden frontier has permeated the history and literature of the new continent. Bierce's active role with the Union forces followed during reconstruction by a spell of half-hearted carpetbagging then participation in General Hazen's surveying expedition of 1866, took him from the South, through wilderness and lands inhabited by Indians and Mormons, from Nebraska to California and provided firsthand experience of regional differences shaping the country. [3]
The entry for Indian not only makes admirable history, as for roundhead, of the "1776 and all that" type, but also its tragicomic verse provides a reminder of certain misconceptions surrounding the discovery of America and benevolence of its settlers. Not least of these concerned the red-skin whose misnomer did not extend to the post-operative state of having been scalped and whose only weapons were language, the arrow and the blade. Understandable was the indigenous people's "strong disposition to offend" with repartee, or by burying of the hatchet "in the White Man's head". The latter 'Thomas-hawk" may be a reference to General G. H. Thomas of Chickamauga and Chattanooga fame. Bierce served with the general, "considered as one of the few honest, decent figures in high command", [4] and while it is not clear why his name might have been lent to this blade, it is not unusual to find the names of figures who were in one way or another influential on the compiler appearing in the Dictionary. For example, when working for Hearst, Bierce was to disagree with his journalistic employer over boosting William Jennings Bryan into the White House. [5] The Democrat reformer's affliction, whangdepootenawah in "Ojibwa tongue", is provided with phonetic instruction and a pun on his first name which helps animalize him into a crane and was presumably also the laughing-stock of the 'Potomac tribesman" (Washingtonian).
"Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n" [6] and in all areas of life Bierce's Devil inherited a distaste for any authority save his own, an arrant cynicism equalled only perhaps by his contempt for those who, by active or passive support, put the leaders in power. There were too many chiefs and too many indians. Continuing the metaphor, one of the Sachem "Tammany tribe who makes presidents" cites John Kelly, Tammany boss, who in 1883 was involved in the disputed nomination of General Shaler with whom prospector Bierce had shared differences during mining company days in the Black Hills between 1879 and 1881 and of whom he had written: "As to Gen. Shaler's assertions of my 'lack of business experience,' he probably means business capacity, inasmuch as he can hardly know anything about my life; and he is welcome to his opinion as to that, his own business capacity being a factor in his judgment, and that being at least debatable." [7]
The third Indian weapon was the arrow, from a quiver "in which the ancient statesman and the aboriginal lawyer carried their lighter arguments", one of which would be the question of severalty, a "charming term" by which the process of stripping and deracinating the tribes of their lands was subjected to the euphemistic legal jargon, "lands that they have hitherto held as tribal organizations and could not sell to the Whites for waxen beads and potato whiskey". If Indians had white man's forked tongue of "hell and the grave behind", then in front lay the reservation, a place where religion takes over and "wicked Indians are taught the Christian virtues". The Elizabethans' America had found 'civilization' then, and so much for the aborigines (2).
The mule, which it is recalled Adam did not name, though a "popular type and exponent of obstinacy" is actually "a most intelligent animal" (obstinate). Furthermore, through the absence of a requirement for lexical exhaustiveness, omission, of for example the O.E.D.'s mulberry, mulch and mulct, [8] permits it juxtaposition with the etymologically derivative mulatto and hence a place, intentional or otherwise, in the ethnic mix of America's garden mythology.
Growing erect in the garden was "a tall vegetable intended by nature to serve as a penal apparatus", the tree which in "the stern West and the sensitive South its fruit (white and black respectively) though not eaten, is agreeable to the public taste ..." The budding injustices of such lynching - not to be attributed the "discovery of Judge Lynch" - are elaborated upon by the verse of "J Milton Sloluck" under sheriff, "the chief executive officer ... whose most characteristic duties in some of the Western and Southern States, are the catching and hanging of rogues". In a dictionary in which white is defined as "Black", one should not perhaps expect too precise a definition of racial differences in the spheres of politics, economics and justice, though the anthropological strains are touched upon in troglodyte, "a cave dweller ... after the Tree and before the Flat", pigmy, largely for the pun "... so called to distinguish them from the bulkier Caucasians - who are Hogmies" and Zanzibari whose "Sultana" is shot by the American consul abroad.
Such conflations are not for Bierce a way of ducking the issues of ethnology, but rather illustrate his reluctance to apportion right and wrong to the exclusive domain of any one section of humanity. There are no examples given for prejudice and he seldom displayed any himself, even when later called upon to do so by newspaper boss, Frank Pixley. [9] If Devil has a virtue it is that he does not discriminate. Underlying his views is an almost dismissive sympathy for the plight of the involuntary immigrants tempered by the pathos of their position but subservient to a contempt for the entire population of the United States and those in public service. The negro was "The pièce de résistance in the American political problem", which, as one of Bierce's several algebraic equations, [10] attributed here to the Republicans, "Let n = the white man", was as apparently insoluble as the optimist's own attempted definition of that colour.
The pseudo-etymology and medieval quatrain behind zigzag indicates that there is nothing new in the "carrying of the white man's burden" - the assumed role of assisting coloured development - yet for all its historical precedent, the weight, if anything, had been transferred. Now it was the pejoratively colloquial minstrel and the pickaninny who did the zigzagging, emancipation scant compensation for the freedman.
The shortcomings of the melting pot ideal are exemplified by the varied significance of a razor to three races, Caucasians, Mongolians and African-Americans, While the settlement of the second of these on the West coast provided the San Francisco journalist with unpleasant experience of yet another instance of man's indecent behaviour. Here recreation (1) was, on the face of it one of The Dictionary's least humanitarian entries, yet for the readers of the journal a terse jibe at the degeneracy in their city. [11]
Lengthy debate has surrounded Bierce's motive for participating in the Civil War, whether it was based on a desire for the excitement of danger and daring or idealism. He himself wrote later that "in my green and salad days I was sufficiently zealous for Freedom to engage in a four years' battle for its promotion. There were other issues involved but they did not count much with me." Fatout believed this claim should, "although his patriotic motives have generally been discounted ... be taken at face value". [12] Either way however, as for Hemingway after him, Bierce's experiences were to provide material for the story-writer's imagination. O'Connor describes the War as Bierce's "education; he would always look back upon it as the high point of his life", and quotes the first lieutenant's later reminiscence that the American volunteers under his command had "loved their country and fought for it with never a thought of grabbing it for themselves; that is a trick which the survivors were taught later by gentlemen desiring their votes." [13]
The political opportunism of generals was repugnant to Bierce. His own support (and that, at the last minute, of Garfield) for a stand of resistance against the rout at Chickamauga, he recalled as duty (or valor) rather than heroism (or valor), writing that he "never felt it ought to make me President" [14] Arguments that the Civil War was fought not so much to liberate slaves as to ensure Republican representatives from future states in the free territories are not contradicted by the definition for battle. The political expediency of war is also denigrated, the rear being "... that exposed part of the army that is nearest to Congress", a patriot "the dupe of statesmen ..." whose "most approved method of attesting his love of his country" is invasion and whose patriotism, "with all due respect to an enlightened lexicographer" (Johnson) is not "the last resort of a scoundrel" but "I beg to submit ... the first" - the "combustible rubbish" personified in abatis (2) and "shot" under the flag. An army found enjoyment in the barrack, away from the enemy. The irony implicit here attacks the selfish motivation of all those involved and is increased by the universality of definitions whereby their significance is bounded only by which side one is on.
Bierce's knowledge of cartography was a useful acquisition to his active service and contributed to his understanding of logistics, later to his gold-seeking exploits. However. While such knowledge helped earn him respect for his actions in, and commentaries on, war, it was the "basest of motives" which found their way into The Dictionary. The maritime metaphor in Brutus's call to arms for an advance is mockingly re-evaluated by the master of philippic in the march whilst hostility brought grist to the mill for a mathusiastic Devil who did not need to take sides. War was "a by-product of the arts of peace ... a thief in the night" and though Kubla Khan is quoted in support of American isolationism it was still "that elemental distrust that is the security of nations" and "professions of eternal amity provide the night" - a conclusion unlikely to endear him to the pacifist (undefined)! For belligerent serpent "generating disagreeable emotions or sensations" is only offensive on one side of the pun, the other being to kill the defenceless. In Europe, meanwhile, the war-cloud was rumbling ominously and with the Prussian siege and invasion of Paris in 1870, Bismarck pinned on another medal.
Ranks of adjutant, private, recruit, cadet, dragoon, corporal, colonel and admiral are defined knowingly but dismissively as might be expected from an ex-combatant, now suspicious of the structures of authority. The hardware of war mere cannon, projectile (2), bayonet, bomb or bomb-shell and what "Milton says ... was invented by the devil to dispel angels with ..." - gunpowder. A further weapon provides a reminder of an inherently violent undercurrent in the very fabric of American society. The Colt '45, one of which Bierce always kept "as close to hand as his inkpot", [15] and on several occasions nearly used, had been given the pseudonym 'Peacemaker' on the grounds that anybody possessing one had the potential for equality in matters of dispute. This embryonic example of the paradoxical deterrent value argued to be inherent in American weaponry, civil or military, is not acknowledged by the definition of revolver, doubtless deranged, but it should be remembered that 'making peace', let alone ensuring its endurance, was not uppermost in Devil's mind. A truce was a fairweather "friendship" but hiss meteorological forecasts did not usually include fair weather for the friend's ship or for that matter much peace.
Despite the death and destruction witnessed by Bierce in the Civil War, sentimentality could not quench the flames of his satire or his thirst for the macabre. A wound in his head may have lost him the affection of affianced Bernie Wright [16] and caused him much pain, but for the asthmatic under attack every breath is a pyrrhic conquest over suffocation, over expiry, over the pulmonary constriction of that "spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay" (life). [17] The bullet which ricocheted around his skull was not to be the Miltonic death-blow to Serpent's head, that was sought out later by Bierce in the fierce heat of the Mexican Revolution, found, possibly, in a fiery squad, who knows, what the hell, gone was he to join Samson Agonistes, [18] "Done with the work of breathing; done / With all the world; the mad race run / Through to the end; the golden goal / Attained - and found to be a hole!" (dead).
The death brought into pastoral America by man's first disobedience ("the silver lining to the cloud of servitude") was the grass ("all flesh") in which hidden Serpent slid. The deaf mute in one of Bierce's short stories had lost his home to fire, his mother's head blown open and he
moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures.
He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries
- something between the chattering of an ape and the
gobbling of a turkey - a startling, soulless, unholy sound,
the language of a devil. [19]
Whether Bierce received his visions of the supernatural from spending an asthmatic night in a cemetery [20] or from lying in an unattended field hospital, it is clear from his lexicon, as from the short stories, that life was a commodity of tenuous value.
If Devil was an enthusiastic adder then his subtraction was equally hot. Since abridgement would run somewhat counter not only to The Enlarged Dictionary but also to this dissertation, it is to be hoped that a few examples of the way in which the scimitar and its cousins connect with the head will not fall on deaf ears, or if so, that they will at least meet with forgiveness. The blades of Indians and weapons of war impale onto insignificance against the proliferation of methods for cheating G.J.'s immortality, that "toy which people cry for ... And if allowed / Would be right proud / Eternally to die for." The guillotine "makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason", yet it was traditionally the king who did the executioner a service and not vice versa. The courts of old empires are littered with the acephalous remains of redundant cabbages while the 'judibrastic' admonition for the Venetian Moor is "a gentle reproof as with a meat axe". "An official who hasn't influence at headquarters" was removable and indeed, so traditional was the craft that even the "now extinct" abelians were predated by the bringer of death into this world. Adam's apple was "a protuberance in the throat of man, thoughtfully provided by Nature to keep the rope in place", the rope, in lieu of "a more complex electrical device", being of hemp, jute or linen, the corsair, the punster in exile or the macrobian archbishop, arrayed on the gallows by the hangman (1 & 2) - and his short story's daughter - without redress.
This whole field of decapitation and execution is entangled with the wider area of Bierce's views and it may be unravelled initially through some of his etymological puns. Under capital the definition of "capital punishment" is linked to that headword's multiple signification, that of the capital city, "seat of misgovernment", the capital finances, presumably for the anarchist wishing to overthrow it, and implicitly, the Latinate capitalis, the head. Such a common link is made explicit in the definitions for coroner, ("Lat. corona, a crown") and hence in coronation. The executioner's* proximity to the executive is not accidental and the potential pun is touched on by "The Lunarian" in the latter's dialogue. The final line of "G.J."'s verse on head-money gives inevitable desserts in negation of its initial definition as "capitation tax". Beyond simply recognizing the historically terminal mutability of authoritarian figures, these examples relate to the wider fields of politics and justice, as do the neck-twistings of amazon to misogynist Serpent's approach to women. The various methods of execution under cross. freethinker, iconoclast and centaur expose the extremes to which individuals go in the name of religion or its attempted extinction. With careful avoidance of the axe of "Judibras" it is first necessary however to complete the examination of that monosyllabic theme with which Bierce, if not obsessed ("vexed by an evil spirit ... ") was at least increasing his intimacy, ("a relation into which fools are providently drawn for their mutual destruction").
Death was the end of the player and his "Tambourine", an apparent dislike for any musical instrument which Bierce extends, by pun, to the meerschaum as played or smoked to death. [21] Two other vices are similarly given health warnings, candy "composed of terra alba, glucose, flour and premature death", and brandy, "one part thunder and lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death hell and the grave, two parts clarified Satan and four parts holy Moses!", yet it would hardly be surprising if his erroneous attribution of the subsequent quotation to Emerson - it was actually that "harmless drudge" Johnson's, - had been made while under the fiendish influence of the latter favourite tipple! [22]
Another "probably very good ... drink" for the bloodthirsty Bierce is spilled with diabolic abandon throughout. Next to the epigram, the epitaph (1 & 2) provided opportunity for the rhymster's wit as well as for a dig at the endearing Charles Crocker, one of those whom sandlotter Denis Kearney called the "hell-born, the hell-bound villains, the bloated bondholders" by which, according to O'Connor, he meant "such exemplars of free enterprise ... who had enriched themselves in the mines and on the railroads". [23] Bierce did not subscribe to the sansculotte creed, less to Kearney's militant and racist brand of socialism, preferring his own euphemism (2) Which let Crocker off lightly as "ninety-nine kinds a knave". It was at least as easy for men With riches, such as Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Eugene Debs, to go to hell as it was for a needle to go through the eye of a "Splaypes humpidorsus" and the sychophant's attempt to "level / The royal highway to the Devil" by naming it demise is marked in stone by "the final and funniest folly of the rich", the mausoleum. For those who have neither the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead" there was the eulogy while for the "favourites" of "the minor poets" a requiem or "dirge" would suffice.
The common or garden cemetery meanwhile was "an isolated suburban spot where ... poets write at a target", the funeral "a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker" and transfer the dead from a hearse, "Death's baby-carriage" into a grave "to await the coming of the medical student" or body-snatcher, "a robber of grave-worms". Such academic spadework was the province of "famous Egyptologist", "Dr Berosus Huggyns (1591)" who when not robbing a cairn was justifying his investigations on the grounds of 'the soul being then all exhaled" from the tomb, that "house of indifference" where the corpse "manifests the highest possible degree of [the same] that is consistent with a civil regard for the solicitude of others". The monument and cenotaph are not quite so useful to the archaeologist and might be left by "the learned Dr Drigge" to R.I.P. ("reductus in pulvis").
Devil's concern for the souls of the dead is equalled by his fascination with the fate of their bodies. The liver it may be recalled made existential "Strasbourg pâum;té" while by cremation "the cold meats of humanity are warmed over", out of fashion the asbestos shroud now that "it is no longer believed that the soul will be permitted to wear the body's cerements". No more vegetarian than abstemious he brings home a few truths about the abattoir where "cattle slaughter kine ... " and worms away through Ilkley Moor to find something edible, so much worms'-meat and food for the "unreckoned flies" of which he, "a monster of the air owing allegiance to Beelzebub" (fly) is but one. The family butcher exercises fratricide, "killing a jackass for meat" and parricide, "a fillial coup de grâce whereby one is released from the fingering torments of paternity". For those requiring kosher he will embalm (1) the better to keep - or not, as the case may be!
If such attitudes appear somewhat callous then it might be borne in mind that there is little chance of survival for that "sickly half-brother of Thought", sentiment, in a lexicon in which the "canians" have wiped out the abelians*. An "uncommon extension of the fear of death" only leads to longevity while "the question 'is LIFE worth living?' has been much discussed", coming down to preference, "a sentiment or frame of mind" by which death may be "no better than life" but "it is longer". mortality is "the part of immortality that we know about" yet while Bierce's overriding curiosity in life may have been with "whether or not woman is cursed with curiosity", the circumstances of Bierce's final Mexican jaunt to the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns qualified him as a martyr, that is "one who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death". To condole the departure would be "to show that bereavement is a smaller evil than sympathy" and since existence is but "a transient, horrible, fantastic dream", affliction "an acclimatizing process preparing the soul for another and bitter world", there is no rub.
The Edenic plutocracy of America, then, had been introduced to death and its animals named. Richard Hofstadter has traced the post-bellum movement from college, political and Protestant church support for laissez faire and Social Darwinism to a ferment of reform in the 1890's when "members of these professions [lawyers and journalists] deserted the standpat conservatism of the post-Civil War era to join the main stream [sic] of liberal dissent". [24] Having extended his honeymoon in England from 1872 to 1875, a time spent drinking in Fleet Street and writing for various satirical magazines, Bierce returned to San Francisco, to his third-time pregnant wife and to journalism. America had been plunged into depression and times were hard. From the two definitions of reform it is apparent that such a movement did not hold much attraction unless as a target for hiss pen, but for the journalist, now working in the interim between the mint and gold-rushing on the infallible Col. Frank Pixley Esquire's Argonaut, the problems facing America obviously warranted attention.
The animal, "an organism which, requiring a great number of other animals for its sustenance, illustrates in a marked way the bounty of providence in preserving the lives of his creatures", along with insectivora, has been shown to include its political cousin through animalism, in which "we flatter ourselves we resemble 'the beasts that perish'". The pun on descent undermines any justification, stolen from Darwinian theory, for the unlimited accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few but, again, the barb is not aimed explicitly at one class. A descendant is "any person proceeding from an ancestor in any degree", including one "Oscar Wilde" whose baboon evolves from the quatrain to the second part of a story, wherein, as Adam, otherwise called General Barry, he smokes General Wotherspoon's cigars and, in a bout of intemperance ("survival of the fightest"), drinks his champagne. Further examples of the universality of the fall of the human species through evolution are "Man from the Assisted Immigrant, the Office-Holder from the Ward Boss, the Thief from the Office-Holder". Although each of these species suffers progressively more pejorative treatment as it climbs the socio-political ladder, the imputation is that the guilt is shared, the ambition hereditary. Neither allowed to escape ridicule were the misinterpretations of the concomitant displacement by Darwinism of Old Testament anthropocentrism. The monkey was "an arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees" while its possibly coincidental neighbour, the monogenist was "one who worships at the shrine of his ancestral cell" - the "cell" presumably being a pre-Adamite amoebic chromosome, living "under conditions not easily conceived" (pun), rather than a purgatory "calaboose" for our post-lapsarian parents!
As fallen angel Devil has a clearer memory of the origin of the world than most, though speculation on Leibniz's monad goes little further than to suggest that the "ultimate, indivisible unit of matter" is a gentleman, that is, "a rare animal ..." and one already dealt with at some length by Noah Webster and his ever-decreasing arc of followers. As serpent, Satan set to work transforming the Garden into a pre-Orwellian farm and doing hiss own bit of natural selection. Such irreverence was in the Bierce who would "call no man 'your majesty,' nor 'your lordship'" [25] and who, while in London, had refused to accept an honour from the deposed French Empress Eugénie for his part in vilifying ex-communard Henri Rochefort when the working journalist's "republican independence took alarm". [26] To anoint was "to grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery" in the manner of "pigs" while the ass, among other people, was a Dekota Senator, the "harangue-Outang" an opponent given to the political speech by harangue (2). However, despite the prominence of emblematic animals in the United States system, the "Asinine ... Co-Creator" was sparing with his hind legs. Certainly, an arena was "in politics, an imaginary rat-pit where the statesman wrestles with his record", but nothing if not democratic, the ring was also "a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool" (circus).
The family consisted of "male, female, young. servants, dog, cat, dicky-bird, cockroaches, bedbugs and fleas - the 'unit' of modern civilization", living in a house, while the babe or baby was a "misshapen creature" kept in "a trough ... to keep it sweet" (cradle). When it was not reposing on "one of the most important organs of the female system" of which "the male of our species" has only a "rudimentary" version (lap), it was "put ... out to nurse, or ... bottle" as are "civilized and enlightened" mammalia. The "genus" of maiden should be seen rather than heard at her music, that of the male had "two varieties: good providers and bad". The animal kingdom itself was plundered for specimens of human degeneracy, as in the retrospective crayfish, or the fox, rabbit and bear in a war setting fabled by the "Rev Father Gassalasca Jape, of the Mission of San Diablo" with cunning (1) - that very non-Darwinian "faculty that distinguishes a weak animal or person from a strong one" (2).
The pig is nearly human and the magpie! has learned a lesson or two from that race. Pulp of oxen is made into men by gastric juice and the "hierarchy of dogs" is subtly linked to the class system in cur, the implication being that humans are no better than canines at any level. For Henry James's Isabel Archer, whose "idea of happiness" was "a swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see", [27] the definition of mustang as "In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman" might have induced the inverted "Sallie Ann Splurge" to permit Lord Warburton a fairer crack of the whip, but speculation is idle and as that Tzetze (or Tsetse) fly* would have been the first to profess, albeit through sub-subordinate clause, or preface, when vanity gets in the way it is upon "the nearest ass" which one invariably ends.
So much for romance (1)! With deference to Ben Jonson's contrary assertion, the "greatest Ass" was "Harrie McDowell", presumably a journalist [28]- and one of Bierce's competitors who under great is mocked along with San Francisco poet, Hector Stuart, ("his only earthly chance of being remembered is through his humble connection with what I write"), [29] art-critic William Bartlett, ("old he-hen") [30] and drama critic Peter Robertson ("How better is a grave-worm in the head / Than brain like yours"). [31] The more established Dickensian quadruped of that species, the law - "devil seize you" - is not animalized as such in its definition, but litigation is "a machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage", primogeniture "a peculiar law, which gives all the grub to the chicken which first gets out of the shell" and a trial "a formal inquiry" in which "the accused is usually a human being, or a socialist"! Devil looks after his own and Bierce the editor "himself is an ass", the enigma a "Morning Call editorial ... written with the dried tail of a jackass". Conversely the press "changes the squeak of a mouse into the roar of an editorial lion", a piece of audio-transference which might explain the cacophonous concatenation inherent in the bray if not those "utterances" on which "the nation (presumably) hangs with bated breath". Crossing metaphors, print are "feathers, in which many sickly ideas strut about and crow, that had better never have been hatched" and a quill "an implement of torture yielded by a goose and commonly wielded by an ass". [32] The giving of names of all the animals to men continued apace through the orchard of religion (1), an apostate being "a leech who, having penetrated the shell of a turtle only to find that the creature (like the guillotined* Frenchman) has long been dead", the werewolf a metamorphic "Lutheran" and the orthodox "an ox wearing the popular religious yoke". Lent "is supposed to have been originally a modified form of hibernation", giving one time to meditate upon whether the soul lies in the in'ards [33] or tail. So much for piety.
Serpentine ancestor of "our prostrate brother, Homo ventrambulans" rattlesnake, set the standard for any reptile which "lives on a woman's shame", such as salamander, "anthropomorphous immortal, but still a pyrophile", and tortoise who as "Father of possibilities" is called upon to take over after man's extinction. However, any self-respecting Mephistophelean ought to be able to determine just where the souls are seated and certain factors are isolated which distinguish man from the animals: "Liability to attacks of laughter", "vulgar curiosity" to see a mummy on display, and an ability to overeat and use science to convert water into something more potable. The seal has been replaced by "the initials L.S. ... an admirable example of conservatism distinguishing Man from the beasts that perish." If the picture of a conservatively flea-bitten obese alcoholic laughing in a museum seems a poor distinction for Bierce's civilization (not defined), then it may help if the philistine were to stagger across to the Laocoon sculpture, where "the skill and diligence with which the old man and lads support the serpents and keep them up to their work have been justly regarded as one of the noblest artistic illustrations of the mastery of human intelligence over brute inertia".
Ever-present as an environmental determinant for San Franciscans is the Pacific ocean, part of "a body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills" and who by pedigree had evolved "from an arboreal ancestor with a swim bladder to an urban descendant with a cigarette". Changes being brought about by mechanism and urbanity on the other third of the globe included the showering of "deviled human kidney" from exploding powder mills and an alienation whose "commonest expression is .... 'I beg your pardon.' and it is not inconsistent with disregard of the rights of others". The rural idyll was "mud, hogs, and badly cooked food, in which " queer people are always 'raising'" produce in "peculiar" provincial settings. The pilgrim fathers' bay had given way to the "science of vegetables - those that are not good to eat, as well as those that are" (botany), or that "undressed farm", the ranch.
Air was naturally a factor in determining many of asthmatic Devil's movements. If the fog of London had necessitated the use of a respirator for the area above hiss diaphragm then pollution was making life impossible elsewhere. The sylph which "inhabited the air when the air was an element and before it was polluted by factory smoke, sewer gas and similar products of civilization" was also "allied to gnomes, nymphs and salamanders ... which dwelt, respectively in earth, water and fire, all now insalubrious". The "tourist and his appetite" ensured that the Olympian mountain was "now a repository of yellowing newspapers, beer bottles and mutilated sardine cans".
The ideal of the settlers' 'manifest destiny' to open up and take possession of land on the continent was exposed to the railroad (1 & 2), the "power behind the throne" which was "enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off", probably to the desert. Of course it could also facilitate a celestial escape to the country for the Babbits of this world, but their excursion was awkward.
The Union and Central Pacific railroads had met in Utah in 1869, the Southern Pacific reached the coast in 1881, the Northern Pacific and Santa Fe both in 1883, but with them came problems. [34] Corruption was rife with the Central Pacific giving shady bribes to the California State governors and the dashing of expectations for a bonanza from trade and immigration had helped fuel the mid-70's depression. [35] This combination of factors, depression and the possibility of reversed mobility inland, led to an exodus of disillusioned entrepreneurs and intellectuals, journalist and writer Mark Twain included. Bierce left Pixley's Argonaut on surprisingly friendly terms and in 1880 went by rail to Deadwood Gulch in the Black Hills of Dakota. Working for a company whose president was poor Cornelius Vanderbilt, he put his map-making abilities, experience of and contacts from expeditionary and mint days to the making of a fast buck. The gold-rush bad lands had been wrested from the Custer - powdering Indians at Little Bighorn after a disagreement over compensation but illusions of remunerative abundance for the robber (1), sinking his shaft on the whims of divination were shattered and after running the gauntlet of bandits with a convicted murderer as bodyguard, [36] the less than competent businessman resigned and returned to his family in San Francisco and editorship of E.C. MacFarlane's Wasp ("see" satire, 1). [37]
Serving the divine "GO'l'D" was no task for Fly when there was a city full of fools awaiting his sting, those who among other things, "invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude and the circle of the sciences". electricity "seems destined to play a most important part in the arts and industries" but as with the gas-meter, "the question of its economical application to some purposes is still unsettled." This suspicion of progress was not confined to Franklin's discovery. An inventor was "a person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization". His works, patently as useful in The Dictionary as a barometer in the forecasting of weather, included the devil's own telephone, and its intrusive partner, the telescope. The phonograph and photograph were retrogressive steps in the field of arts.
Revolutions in other forms of transport would continue to threaten the railroads. In 1870 the besieged Parisians had maintained contact with the outside world by hot air postal system and in 1873 Verne had made his imaginary Tour de Monde en quatre-vingts jours but in the years prior to the Wright Brothers, the balloon provided fools with an unhappy landing. The bicycle, meanwhile, led women "to the devil," smashing them to smithereens, and things were no better for the pedestrian. It would not need a scientist to tell serpent when "an apple will fall to the ground", since he is adequately skilled at employing women to take over the role, but Devil who "said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence" [38] did not have it all hiss own way as the Newtonian "successors" had stolen a predictive march on the meteorologists and come up with "a lovely and edifying illustration ..." (gravitation). The application of such discoveries might be as useful as the definitions for magnetism and magnet but the philosophical area of cause and effect is kept in motion by quotations from Galileo ("E pur si muove") and Milton (Comus, line 476) which for all their contextual uprooting continue to drop apples in a straight line until acted upon by some external force - such as the "pounded head".
The whole question of definition as a means of rendering indissoluble an area of knowledge which by its very nature opens up questions beyond its immediate reach is probably one for philosophy, but it is not the intention of this author to stray too far along it. Bierce's Devil, however, could, and his burning urge to lead his readers to the core of the matter, to "the ultimate, indivisible unit", leads to the molecule, see monad*, "see MOLECULE". Food for the God alone is what Einstein and Oppenheimer make of the definition for radium but Serpent will not get hiss crop eaten if too busy swallowing his tail to tempt.
Andrew Graham, Keele University
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