The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes (#1 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes) Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes Release Date: December, 1996 [EBook #751] [This file was first posted on December 11, 1996] [Most recently updated: September 8, 2002] Edition: 10 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII
Transcribed from the 1873 James R. Osgood and Company edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE
THE AUTOCRAT’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of these
papers was just a quarter of a century in duration.
Two articles entitled “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table”
will be found in the “New England Magazine,” formerly published
in Boston by J. T. and E. Buckingham. The date of the first of
these articles is November 1831, and that of the second February 1832.
When “The Atlantic Monthly” was begun, twenty-five years
afterwards, and the author was asked to write for it, the recollection
of these crude products of his uncombed literary boyhood suggested the
thought that it would be a curious experiment to shake the same bough
again, and see if the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early
windfalls.
So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those earlier
attempts to my own notice and that of some few friends who were idle
enough to read them at the time of their publication. The man
is father to the boy that was, and I am my own son, as it seems to me,
in those papers of the New England Magazine. If I find it hard
to pardon the boy’s faults, others would find it harder.
They will not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor as I hope, anywhere.
But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing, and with
these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind being still breathes,
will be contented.
- “It is a capital plan to carry a tablet with you, and, when
you find yourself felicitous, take notes of your own conversation.”
-
- “When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary.
The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences.
The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and luftre
have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the fineft
fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will fhow
you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and
a more eloquent analogy.” -
- “Once on a time, a notion was ftarted, that if all the people
in the world would fhout at once, it might be heard in the moon.
So the projectors agreed it fhould be done in juft ten years.
Some thousand fhip-loads of chronometers were diftributed to the selectmen
and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year
beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was
to be made on the great occafion. When the time came, everybody
had their ears so wide open, to hear the universal ejaculation of BOO,
- the word agreed upon, - that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one
of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never
so ftill fince the creation.” -
There was nothing better than these things and there was not a little
that was much worse. A young fellow of two or three and twenty
has as good a right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in learning how
to write, as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his hat-full of eyes
in learning how to operate for cataract, or an elegant like Brummel
to point to an armful of failures in the attempt to achieve a perfect
tie. This son of mine, whom I have not seen for these twenty-five
years, generously counted, was a self-willed youth, always too ready
to utter his unchastised fancies. He, like too many American young
people, got the spur when he should have had the rein. He therefore
helped to fill the market with that unripe fruit which his father says
in one of these papers abounds in the marts of his native country.
All these by-gone shortcomings he would hope are forgiven, did he not
feel sure that very few of his readers know anything about them.
In taking the old name for the new papers, he felt bound to say that
he had uttered unwise things under that title, and if it shall appear
that his unwisdom has not diminished by at least half while his years
have doubled, he promises not to repeat the experiment if he should
live to double them again and become his own grandfather.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
BOSTON. Nov. 1st 1858.
CHAPTER I
I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many
ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical
intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension
or variation of the following arithmetical formula: 2+2=4. Every
philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression
a+b=c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists,
until we learn to think in letters instead of figures.
They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among
us to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to
take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent
questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion
by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation. - No, sir,
I replied, he has not. But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics,
that sounds something like it, and you found it, not in the original,
but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will tell the company what he
did say, one of these days.
- If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration? - I blush to say that
I do not at this present moment. I once did, however. It
was the first association to which I ever heard the term applied; a
body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired their
teacher, and to some extent each other. Many of them deserved
it; they have become famous since. It amuses me to hear the talk
of one of those beings described by Thackeray -
“Letters four do form his name” -
about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage of
civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors, philanthropists,
men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of Mutual Admiration.
A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred from admiring
the same quality in another, nor the other from returning his admiration.
They may even associate together and continue to think highly of each
other. And so of a dozen such men, if any one place is fortunate
enough to hold so many. The being referred to above assumes several
false premises. First, that men of talent necessarily hate each
other. Secondly, that intimate knowledge or habitual association
destroys our admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance.
Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine
and have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to glorify
themselves and to put down him and the fraction of the human race not
belonging to their number. Fourthly, that it is an outrage that
he is not asked to join them.
Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who sits
opposite said, “That’s it! that’s it!”
I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever people’s
hating each other, I think a little extra talent does sometimes
make people jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts
and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions. Unpretending
mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius
in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand
neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed
wineglass spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder the poor fellow
we spoke of, who always belongs to this class of slightly flavored mediocrities,
is puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity
working and playing together in harmony. He and his fellows are
always fighting. With them familiarity naturally breeds contempt.
If they ever praise each other’s bad drawings, or broken-winded
novels, or spavined verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration;
it was simply a contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer.
If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that alters
the question. But if they are men with noble powers and qualities,
let me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family affections,
there is no human sentiment better than that which unites the Societies
of Mutual Admiration. And what would literature or art be without
such associations? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration
Society of which Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher
were members? Or to that of which Addison and Steele formed the
centre, and which gave us the Spectator? Or to that where Johnson,
and Goldsmith, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell,
most admiring among all admirers, met together? Was there any
great harm in the fact that the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company?
or any unpardonable cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant
and Sands, and as many more as they chose to associate with them?
The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he abuses
this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries through
the knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a medium for
his popgun. Such a society is the crown of a literary metropolis;
if a town has not material for it, and spirit and good feeling enough
to organize it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a man of genius to
lodge in, but not to live in. Foolish people hate and dread and
envy such an association of men of varied powers and influence, because
it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the necessity of the case,
exclusive. Wise ones are prouder of the title M. S. M. A. than
of all their other honors put together.
- All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.”
They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does
not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which
they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready
to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization,
or pleasant fancy? I allow no “facts” at this table.
What! Because bread is good and wholesome and necessary and nourishing,
shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking?
Do not these muscles of mine represent a hundred loaves of bread? and
is not my thought the abstract of ten thousand of these crumbs of truth
with which you would choke off my speech?
[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar mind.
The reader will of course understand the precise amount of seasoning
which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of
his life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse
in incompetent hands.]
This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There
are men that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day’s
fasting would do. Mark this that I am going to say, for it is
as good as a working professional man’s advice, and costs you
nothing: It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than to
have a nerve tapped. Nobody measures your nervous force as it
runs away, nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation.
There are men of esprit who are excessively exhausting to some
people. They are the talkers who have what may be called jerky
minds. Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence.
They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack
you to death. After a jolting half-hour with one of these jerky
companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief. It
is like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.
What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times!
A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our
dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.
“Do not dull people bore you?” said one of the lady-boarders,
- the same that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request
for a few original stanzas, not remembering that “The Pactolian”
pays me five dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.
“Madam,” said I, (she and the century were in their teens
together,) “all men are bores, except when we want them.
There never was but one man whom I would trust with my latch-key.”
“Who might that favored person be?”
“Zimmermann.”
- The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the cobra-di-capello.
You remember what they tell of William Pinkney, the great pleader; how
in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his neck would swell and his
face flush and his eyes glitter, until he seemed on the verge of apoplexy.
The hydraulic arrangements for supplying the brain with blood are only
second in importance to its own organization. The bulbous-headed
fellows that steam well when they are at work are the men that draw
big audiences and give us marrowy books and pictures. It is a
good sign to have one’s feet grow cold when he is writing.
A great writer and speaker once told me that he often wrote with his
feet in hot water; but for this, all his blood would have run
into his head, as the mercury sometimes withdraws into the ball of a
thermometer.
- You don’t suppose that my remarks made at this table are like
so many postage-stamps, do you, - each to be only once uttered?
If you do, you are mistaken. He must be a poor creature that does
not often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent
piece of advice, “Know thyself,” never alluding to that
sentiment again during the course of a protracted existence! Why,
the truths a man carries about with him are his tools; and do you think
a carpenter is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty
board with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail?
I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall
use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.
Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech twice
over, and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer, after
performing in an inland city, where dwells a Littératrice
of note, was invited to meet her and others over the social teacup.
She pleasantly referred to his many wanderings in his new occupation.
“Yes,” he replied, “I am like the Huma, the bird that
never lights, being always in the cars, as he is always on the wing.”
- Years elapsed. The lecturer visited the same place once more
for the same purpose. Another social cup after the lecture, and
a second meeting with the distinguished lady. “You are constantly
going from place to place,” she said. - “Yes,” he
answered, “I am like the Huma,” - and finished the sentence
as before.
What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine speech,
word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the lady might
perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished his conversation
with the Huma daily during that whole interval of years. On the
contrary, he had never once thought of the odious fowl until the recurrence
of precisely the same circumstances brought up precisely the same idea.
He ought to have been proud of the accuracy of his mental adjustments.
Given certain factors, and a sound brain should always evolve the same
fixed product with the certainty of Babbage’s calculating machine.
- What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere mathematician!
A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too
stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller,
and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels
of them!
I have an immense respect for a man of talents plus “the
mathematics.” But the calculating power alone should seem
to be the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount
of reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three
or four calculators, and better than any one of them. Sometimes
I have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension
of the relations of numbers. But the triumph of the ciphering
hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I can hear the wheels
clicking in a calculator’s brain. The power of dealing with
numbers is a kind of “detached lever” arrangement, which
may be put into a mighty poor watch - I suppose it is about as common
as the power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare
endowment.
- Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized
knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about.
Nature is very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many small
talents and little accomplishments would be neglected! Talk about
conceit as much as you like, it is to human character what salt is to
the ocean; it keeps it sweet, and renders it endurable. Say rather
it is like the natural unguent of the sea-fowl’s plumage, which
enables him to shed the rain that falls on him and the wave in which
he dips. When one has had all his conceit taken out of
him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon
soak through, and he will fly no more.
“So you admire conceited people, do you?” said the young
lady who has come to the city to be finished off for - the duties of
life.
I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. It
does not follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a
salt-water plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is just as natural
a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded
people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’
conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ
from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel as its centre,
it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the
most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously imply any individual
centre.
Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing.
What resplendent beauty that must have been which could have authorized
Phryne to “peel” in the way she did! What fine speeches
are those two: “Non omnis mortar,” and “I have
taken all knowledge to be my province”! Even in common people,
conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his
wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally
unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable
to be tedious at times.
- What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want
of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think.
I don’t doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil
more good talks than anything else; - long arguments on special points
between people who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these
points depend. No men can have satisfactory relations with each
other until they have agreed on certain ultimata of belief not
to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense
enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate
beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written constitution
is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a
necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking
is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on
the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out
their music.
- Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your
minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and
language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide - that
is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate
meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden. Manslaughter,
which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man’s laughter,
which is the end of the other. A pun is primâ facie
an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter
indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious.
I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the
subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking
with such a person. I should like to commit him, but cannot, because
he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological convulsions, and he
asks me what was the cosine of Noah’s ark; also, whether the Deluge
was not a deal huger than any modern inundation.
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow
were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges
both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an
aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
Thus, in a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe
a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering humanity.
Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a top? It was in
evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said,
“When it begins to hum.” Doe then - and not till then
- struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of the Monthly
Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification ensued, with a
fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of the law to his
brother justices, who unanimously replied, “Jest so.”
The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being punished
for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted, and the pun
ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound volume was forfeited
as a deodand, but not claimed.
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad
tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little
trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered
witticism.
I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will mark
the places on this slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may say
that this boy, our land-lady’s youngest, is called BENJAMIN FRANKLIN,
after the celebrated philosopher of that name. A highly merited
compliment.)
I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as
to listen. The great moralist says: “To trifle with the
vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with
the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities
of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till
without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion.”
And, once more, listen to the historian. “The Puritans hated
puns. The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The
Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of license. Majesty itself
must have its Royal quibble. ‘Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,’
said Queen Elizabeth, ‘but ye shall make less stir in our realm
than my Lord of Leicester.’ The gravest wisdom and the highest
breeding lent their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully
declared himself a descendant of ‘Og, the King of Bashan.
Sir Philip Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who
brought him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man.
A courtier, who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked,
that the blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. ‘Thou hast
reason,’ replied a great Lord, ‘according to Plato his saying;
for this be a two-legged animal with feathers.’ The
fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted.
The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings
naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the
new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation.
What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution
in the age of the Stuarts.”
Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the Macaulay-flowers
of literature? - There was a dead silence. - I said calmly, I shall
henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change my
boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If I have
used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show up a
drunken helot. We have done with them.
- If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic? - I should
say that its most frequent work was to build a pons asinorum
over chasms which shrewd people can bestride without such a structure.
You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that
you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon
never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought.
The great minds are those with a wide span, which couple truths related
to, but far removed from, each other. Logicians carry the surveyor’s
chain over the track of which these are the true explorers. I
value a man mainly for his primary relations with truth, as I understand
truth, - not for any secondary artifice in handling his ideas.
Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment.
I should not trust the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that
of a good chess-player. Either may of course advise wisely, but
not necessarily because he wrangles or plays well.
The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts
his forefoot, at the expression, “his relations with truth, as
I understand truth,” and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and
said I talked like a transcendentalist. For his part, common sense
was good enough for him.
Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, as you understand
it. We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our own
minds, either of things or persons. A man who is willing to take
another’s opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice of
whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of things
for one’s self. On the whole, I had rather judge men’s
minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of thoughts
by knowing who utter them. I must do one or the other. It
does not follow, of course, that I may not recognize another man’s
thoughts as broader and deeper than my own; but that does not necessarily
change my opinion, otherwise this would be at the mercy of every superior
mind that held a different one. How many of our most cherished
beliefs are like those drinking-glasses of the ancient pattern, that
serve us well so long as we keep them in our hand, but spill all if
we attempt to set them down! I have sometimes compared conversation
to the Italian game of mora, in which one player lifts his hand
with so many fingers extended, and the other gives the number if he
can. I show my thought, another his; if they agree, well; if they
differ, we find the largest common factor, if we can, but at any rate
avoid disputing about remainders and fractions, which is to real talk
what tuning an instrument is to playing on it.
- What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a copy
of verses, with critical remarks by the author? Any of the company
can retire that like.
ALBUM VERSES.
When Eve had led her lord away,
And Cain had killed his brother,
The stars and flowers, the poets say,
Agreed with one another
To cheat the cunning tempter’s art,
And teach the race its duty,
By keeping on its wicked heart
Their eyes of light and beauty.
A million sleepless lids, they say,
Will be at least a warning;
And so the flowers would watch by day,
The stars from eve to morning.
On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
Their dewy eyes upturning,
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn
Till western skies are burning.
Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.
But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor’s smile, the murderer’s frown,
The lips of lying lovers,
They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavour
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink forever.
What do you think of these verses my friends? - Is that piece
an impromptu? said my landlady’s daughter. (Aet. 19 +.
Tender-eyed blonde. Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold
pencil-case on a chain. Locket. Bracelet. Album.
Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus
Cobb, junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Says “Yes?”
when you tell her anything.) - Oui et non, ma petite, - Yes and
no, my child. Five of the seven verses were written off-hand;
the other two took a week, - that is, were hanging round the desk in
a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as long as that. All poets
will tell you just such stories. C’est le DERNIER
pas qui coute. Don’t you know how hard it is for
some people to get out of a room after their visit is really over?
They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don’t
know how to manage it. One would think they had been built in
your parlour or study, and were waiting to be launched. I have
contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which
being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them down, metaphorically
speaking, stern-foremost, into their “native element,” the
great ocean of out-doors. Well, now, there are poems as hard to
get rid of as these rural visitors. They come in glibly, use up
all the serviceable rhymes, day, ray, beauty, duty, skies, eyes,
other, brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; and so they go
on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won’t
come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the
sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet
upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many
“impromptus” could tell just such a story as the above.
- Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased
the company much at the time, and has since been highly commanded.
“Madam,” I said, “you can pour three gills and three
quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less than one
minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last quarter of a gill,
though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the vessel upside
down for a thousand years.
One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that
copy of verses, - which I don’t mean to abuse, or to praise either.
I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an
old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these
venerable jingles.
. . . . youth
. . . . . morning
. . . . . truth
. . . . . warning
Nine tenths of the “Juvenile Poems” written spring
out of the above musical and suggestive coincidences.
“Yes?” said our landlady’s daughter.
I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her
limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to
my next neighbour.
When a young female wears a flat circular side - curl, gummed on each
temple, - when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against
the back of hers, - and when she says “Yes?” with the note
of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what wages she
gets, and who the “feller” was you saw her with.
“What were you whispering?” said the daughter of the house,
moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.
“I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis.”
“Yes?”
- It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same implements
and modes of expression in all times and places. The young ladies
of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook’s Voyages, had a sort of crinoline
arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest spread of our own lady-baskets.
When I fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am only taking a
lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before me.
A blanket-shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like
the aborigines, and not like the Highlanders.
- We are the Romans of the modern world, - the great assimilating people.
Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as
with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon.
Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans;
and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the
daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom
not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:-
The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.
Corollary. It was the Polish lance that left Poland
at last with nothing of her own to bound.
“Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear!”
What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot
pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but
clutched the old Roman and young American weapon, and come to close
quarters, there might have been a chance for her; but it would have
spoiled the best passage in “The Pleasures of Hope.”
- Self-made men? - Well, yes. Of course everybody likes and respects
self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way
than not to be made at all. Are any of you younger people old
enough to remember that Irishman’s house on the marsh at Cambridgeport,
which house he built from drain to chimney-top with his own hands?
It took him a good many years to build it, and one could see that it
was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in outline, and a little
queer and uncertain in general aspect. A regular hand could certainly
have built a better house; but it was a very good house for a “self-made”
carpenter’s house, and people praised it, and said how remarkably
well the Irishman had succeeded. They never thought of praising
the fine blocks of houses a little farther on.
Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife, deserves
more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-turned article,
shaped by the most approved pattern, and French-polished by society
and travel. But as to saying that one is every way the equal of
the other, that is another matter. The right of strict social
discrimination of all things and persons, according to their merits,
native or acquired, is one of the most precious republican privileges.
I take the liberty to exercise it, when I say, that, other things
being equal, in most relations of life I prefer a man of family.
What do I mean by a man of family? - O, I’ll give you a general
idea of what I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it
costs us nothing.
Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a
member of his Majesty’s Council for the Province, a Governor or
so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later
than the time of top-boots with tassels.
Family portraits. The member of the Council, by Smibert.
The great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair,
in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the
range of his commercial transactions, and letters with large red seals
lying round, one directed conspicuously to The Honourable etc. etc.
Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine,
hands superlative; grand old lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her
mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist.
A pair of Stuarts, viz., 1. A superb full-blown, mediaeval gentleman,
with a fiery dash of Tory blood in his veins, tempered down with that
of a fine old rebel grandmother, and warmed up with the best of old
India Madeira; his face is one flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled
shirt rushes out of his bosom with an impetuous generosity, as if it
would drag his heart after it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand
dollars to the Hospital, besides ample bequests to all relatives and
dependants. 2. Lady of the same; remarkable cap; high waist,
as in time of Empire; bust à la Josephine; wisps of curls,
like celery-tips, at sides of forehead; complexion clear and warm, like
rose-cordial. As for the miniatures by Malbone, we don’t
count them in the gallery.
Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them, - family
names; - you will find them at the head of their respective classes
in the days when students took rank on the catalogue from their parents’
condition. Elzevirs, with the Latinized appellations of youthful
progenitors, and Hic liber est meus on the title-page.
A set of Hogarth’s original plates. Pope, original edition,
15 volumes, London, 1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio.
Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octo-decimos.
Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms
of the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden aunt.
If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in, furnished
with claw-footed chairs and black mahogany tables, and tall bevel-edged
mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit is complete.
No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man
who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least
four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should
have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books,
who have not handled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear
didascalos over there ever read Poli Synopsis, or consulted
Castelli Lexicon, while he was growing up to their stature?
Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and leather
garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs sweated through
the bat’s handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is
at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather.
No self-made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents
I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may
have none of them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then
let them change places. Our social arrangement has this great
beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific gravity,
without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I still insist
on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery
of family portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype,
unless I find out that the last is the better of the two.
- I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought
the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken;
and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot
bring myself to think was made for nothing. If certain things,
which seem to me essential to a millennium, had come to pass, I should
have been frightened; but they haven’t. Perhaps you would
like to hear my
LATTER-DAY WARNINGS.
When legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle - rasp - and straw -
Grow bigger downwards through the box, -
When he that selleth house or land
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right, -
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light, -
When preachers tell us all they think,
And party leaders all they mean, -
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean, -
When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take, -
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience’ sake, -
When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof, -
When in the usual place for rips
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair, -
When Cuba’s weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harber not
Such dimples as would hold your fist, -
When publishers no longer steal,
And pay for what they stole before, -
When the first locomotive’s wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel’s bore; -
Till then let Cumming a blaze away,
And Miller’s saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
Then order your ascension robe!
The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read others
occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course they
would not expect it every morning. Neither must the reader suppose
that all these things I have reported were said at any one breakfast-time.
I have not taken the trouble to date them, as Raspail, père,
used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but they were scattered
over several breakfasts; and I have said a good many more things since,
which I shall very possibly print some time or other, if I am urged
to do it by judicious friends.
I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the Professor,
of whom you may perhaps hear more by and by. The Professor read
them, he told me, at a farewell meeting, where the youngest of our great
Historians met a few of his many friends at their invitation.
Yes, we knew we must lose him, - though friendship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
’Tis the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.
As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel, -
As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel, -
As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.
What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!
In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,
There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,
There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!
Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed
From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!
Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,
Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!
* * * * *
The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
On pampas, on prairie, o’er mountain and lake,
To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,
With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.
So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
When the dead summer’s jewels were trampled and crushed:
THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING, - the world holds him dear, -
Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career!
CHAPTER II
I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too
precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend
said the other day to one that was talking good things, - good enough
to print? “Why,” said he, “you are wasting
mechantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I
can tell, of fifty dollars an hour.” The talker took him
to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.
“Nothing but a very dusty street,” he said, “and a
man driving a sprinkling-machine through it.”
“Why don’t you tell the man he is wasting that water?
What would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive
our thought-sprinklers through them with the valves open, sometimes?
“Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you
forget. It shapes our thoughts for us; - the waves of conversation
roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify
the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist
models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic, - you can pat and
coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so
easily when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like
it for modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into
marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such.
Or, to use another illustration, writing or printing is like shooting
with a rifle; you may hit your reader’s mind, or miss it; - but
talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it
is within reach, and you have time enough, you can’t help hitting
it.”
The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior excellence,
or, in the phrase used by them, “Fust-rate.” I acknowledged
the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression. “Fust-rate,”
“prime,” “a prime article,” “a superior
piece of goods,” “a handsome garment,” “a gent
in a flowered vest,” - all such expressions are final. They
blast the lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up
and down. There is one other phrase which will soon come to be
decisive of a man’s social status, if it is not already:
“That tells the whole story.” It is an expression
which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect, and which well-meaning
ones, who know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop
all debate, like the previous question in the General Court. Only
it doesn’t; simply because “that” does not usually
tell the whole, nor one half of the whole story.
- It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a professional
education. To become a doctor a man must study some three years
and hear a thousand lectures, more or less. Just how much study
it takes to make a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not more than this.
Now most decent people hear one hundred lectures or sermons (discourses)
on theology every year, - and this, twenty, thirty, fifty years together.
They read a great many religious books besides. The clergy, however,
rarely hear any sermons except what they preach themselves. A
dull preacher might be conceived, therefore, to lapse into a state of
quasi heathenism, simply for want of religious instruction.
And on the other hand, an attentive and intelligent hearer, listening
to a succession of wise teachers, might become actually better educated
in theology than any one of them. We are all theological students,
and more of us qualified as doctors of divinity than have received degrees
at any of the universities.
It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often find
it difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed upon
a sermon treating feebly a subject which they have thought vigorously
about for years, and heard able men discuss scores of times. I
have often noticed, however, that a hopelessly dull discourse acts inductively,
as electricians would say, in developing strong mental currents.
I am ashamed to think with what accompaniments and variations and fioriture
I have sometimes followed the droning of a heavy speaker, - not willingly,
- for my habit is reverential, - but as a necessary result of a slight
continuous impression on the senses and the mind, which kept both in
action without furnishing the food they required to work upon.
If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image
of a dull speaker and a lively listener. The bird in sable plumage
flaps heavily along his straight-forward course, while the other sails
round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks
out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of him,
and finally reaches the crow’s perch at the same time the crow
does, having cut a perfect labyrinth of loops and knots and spirals
while the slow fowl was painfully working from one end of his straight
line to the other.
[I think these remarks were received rather coolly. A temporary
boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than middle-aged
female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little “frisette”
shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, a black dress
too rusty for recent grief and contours in basso-rilievo, left the table
prematurely, and was reported to have been very virulent about what
I said. So I went to my good old minister, and repeated the remarks,
as nearly as I could remember them, to him. He laughed good-naturedly,
and said there was considerable truth in them. He thought he could
tell when people’s minds were wandering, by their looks.
In the earlier years of his ministry he had sometimes noticed this,
when he was preaching; - very little of late years. Sometimes,
when his colleague was preaching, he observed this kind of inattention;
but after all, it was not so very unnatural. I will say, by the
way, that it is a rule I have long followed, to tell my worst thoughts
to my minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.]
- I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody has
made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes,
because I have read some of them at this table. (The company assented,
- two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought, as if
they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going to read half
a dozen books or so for their benefit.) - I continued. Of course
I write some lines or passages which are better than others; some which,
compared with the others, might be called relatively excellent.
It is in the nature of things that I should consider these relatively
excellent lines or passages as absolutely good. So much must be
pardoned to humanity. Now I never wrote a “good” line
in my life, but the moment after it was written it seemed a hundred
years old. Very commonly I had a sudden conviction that I had
seen it somewhere. Possibly I may have sometimes unconsciously
stolen it, but I do not remember that I ever once detected any historical
truth in these sudden convictions of the antiquity of my new thought
or phrase. I have learned utterly to distrust them, and never
allow them to bully me out of a thought or line.
This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the company
was diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula which suddenly
emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought;
it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized
growths of our intellect. Any crystalline group of musical words
has had a long and still period to form in. Here is one theory.
But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts.
It is this. The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories
is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance. Their
apparent age runs up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as they
increase in magnitude. A great calamity, for instance, is as old
as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It stains backward
through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of life, before
its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we are turning.
For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed in dreams that we
leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the “dissolving
views” of dark day-visions; all omens pointed to it; all paths
led to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the first sleep
that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as a surprise,
at waking; in a few moments it is old again, - old as eternity.
[I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known
better. The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was looking
at me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression. All at once
the blood dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops from a broken
barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat like an image of snow;
a slung-shot could not have brought her down better. God forgive
me!
After this little episode, I continued, to some few that remained balancing
teaspoons on the edges of cups, twirling knives, or tilting upon the
hind legs of their chairs until their heads reached the wall, where
they left gratuitous advertisements of various popular cosmetics.]
When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new position of trial,
he finds the place fits him as if he had been measured for it.
He has committed a great crime, for instance, and is sent to the State
Prison. The traditions, prescriptions, limitations, privileges,
all the sharp conditions of his new life, stamp themselves upon his
consciousness as the signet on soft wax; - a single pressure is enough.
Let me strengthen the image a little. Did you ever happen to see
that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint?
The smooth piston slides backward and forward as a lady might slip her
delicate finger in and out of a ring. The engine lays one of its
fingers calmly, but firmly, upon a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and
will remember that touch, and tell a new race about it, when the date
upon it is crusted over with twenty centuries. So it is that a
great silent-moving misery puts a new stamp on us in an hour or a moment,
- as sharp an impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave
it.
It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional dealers
in misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a moment, and
you pass out of the individual life you were living into the rhythmical
movements of their horrible machinery. Do the worst thing you
can, or suffer the worst that can be thought of, you find yourself in
a category of humanity that stretches back as far as Cain, and with
an expert at your elbow who has studied your case all out beforehand,
and is waiting for you with his implements of hemp or mahogany.
I believe, if a man were to be burned in any of our cities tomorrow
for heresy, there would be found a master of ceremonies that knew just
how many fagots were necessary, and the best way of arranging the whole
matter.
- So we have not won the Goodwood cup; au contraire, we were
a “bad fifth,” if not worse than that; and trying it again,
and the third time, has not yet bettered the matter. Now I am
as patriotic as any of my fellow-citizens, - too patriotic in fact,
for I have got into hot water by loving too much of my country; in short,
if any man, whose fighting weight is not more than eight stone four
pounds, disputes it, I am ready to discuss the point with him.
I should have gloried to see the stars and stripes in front at the finish.
I love my country, and I love horses. Stubbs’s old mezzotint
of Eclipse hangs over my desk, and Herring’s portrait of Plenipotentiary,
- whom I saw run at Epsom, - over my fireplace. Did I not elope
from school to see Revenge, and Prospect, and Little John, and Peacemaker
run over the race-course where now yon suburban village flourishes,
in the year eighteen hundred and ever-so-few? Though I never owned
a horse, have I not been the proprietor of six equine females, of which
one was the prettiest little “Morgin” that ever stepped?
Listen, then, to an opinion I have often expressed long before this
venture of ours in England. Horse-racing is not a republican
institution; horse-trotting is. Only very rich persons
can keep race-horses, and everybody knows they are kept mainly as gambling
implements. All that matter about blood and speed we won’t
discuss; we understand all that; useful, very, - of course, -
great obligations to the Godolphin “Arabian,” and the rest.
I say racing horses are essentially gambling implements, as much as
roulette tables. Now I am not preaching at this moment; I may
read you one of my sermons some other morning; but I maintain that gambling,
on the great scale, is not republican. It belongs to two phases
of society, - a cankered over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies,
and the reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism
of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real Republicanism
is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of government, but
in the omnipotence of public opinion which grows out of it. This
public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, but it can
and does compel it to keep comparatively quiet. But horse-racing
is the most public way of gambling, and with all its immense attractions
to the sense and the feelings, - to which I plead very susceptible,
- the disguise is too thin that covers it, and everybody knows what
it means. Its supporters are the Southern gentry, - fine fellows,
no doubt, but not republicans exactly, as we understand the term, -
a few Northern millionnaires more or less thoroughly millioned, who
do not represent the real people, and the mob of sporting men, the best
of whom are commonly idlers, and the worst very bad neighbors to have
near one in a crowd, or to meet in a dark alley. In England, on
the other hand, with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural
growth enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all classes,
from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a shelled corn-cob
on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the money
to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down on his
office-stool the next day without wincing.
Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment. The
racer is incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet upon,
as much as the thimble-rigger’s “little joker.”
The trotter is essentially and daily useful, and only incidentally a
tool for sporting men.
What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is most cultivated
and reaches his greatest perfection in England, and that the trotting
horses of America beat the world? And why should we have expected
that the pick - if it was the pick - of our few and far-between racing
stables should beat the pick of England and France? Throw over
the fallacious time-test, and there was nothing to show for it but a
natural kind of patriotic feeling, which we all have, with a thoroughly
provincial conceit, which some of us must plead guilty to.
We may beat yet. As an American, I hope we shall. As a moralist
and occasional sermonizer, I am not so anxious about it. Wherever
the trotting horse goes, he carries in his train brisk omnibuses, lively
bakers’ carts, and therefore hot rolls, the jolly butcher’s
wagon, the cheerful gig, the wholesome afternoon drive with wife and
child, - all the forms of moral excellence, except truth, which does
not agree with any kind of horse-flesh. The racer brings with
him gambling, cursing, swearing, drinking, the eating of oysters, and
a distaste for mob-caps and the middle-aged virtues.
And by the way, let me beg you not to call a trotting match a
race, and not to speak of a “thoroughbred” as a “blooded”
horse, unless he has been recently phlebotomized. I consent to
your saying “blood horse,” if you like. Also, if,
next year, we send out Posterior and Posterioress, the winners of the
great national four-mile race in 7 18.5, and they happen to get beaten,
pay your bets, and behave like men and gentlemen about it, if you know
how.
[I felt a great deal better after blowing off the ill-temper condensed
in the above paragraph. To brag little, - to show well, - to crow
gently, if in luck, - to pay up, to own up, and to shut up, if beaten,
are the virtues of a sporting man, and I can’t say that I think
we have shown them in any great perfection of late.]
- Apropos of horses. Do you know how important good jockeying
is to authors? Judicious management; letting the public see your
animal just enough, and not too much; holding him up hard when the market
is too full of him; letting him out at just the right buying intervals;
always gently feeling his mouth; never slacking and never jerking the
rein; - this is what I mean by jockeying.
- When an author has a number of books out a cunning hand will keep
them all spinning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; fetching
each one up, as it begins to “wabble,” by an advertisement,
a puff, or a quotation.
- Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast
in the papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new
edition coming. The extracts are ground-bait.
- Literary life is fun of curious phenomena. I don’t
know that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call conventional
reputations. There is a tacit understanding in every community
of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting
this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various reasons
for this forbearance: one is old; one is rich; one is good-natured;
one is such a favorite with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss
him from the manager’s box. The venerable augurs of the
literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe
is mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese
comic scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with you with
the implied compact between you that he shall by no means think of doing
it. A poor wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one
of these bandbox reputations. A Prince-Rupert’s-drop, which
is a tear of unannealed glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from
meddling hands; but break its tail off, and it explodes and resolves
itself into powder. These celebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert’s-drops
of the learned and polite world. See how the papers treat them!
What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which can be arranged
in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service! How kind
the “Critical Notices” - where small authorship comes to
pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy - always are to
them! Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and other
fictions; so let them pass current. Don’t steal their chips;
don’t puncture their swimming-bladders; don’t come down
on their pasteboard boxes; don’t break the ends of their brittle
and unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names
will be household words a thousand years from now.
“A thousand years is a good while,” said the old gentleman
who sits opposite, thoughtfully.
- Where have I been for the last three or four days? Down at the
Island, deer-shooting. - How many did I bag? I brought home one
buck shot. - The Island is where? No matter. It is the most
splendid domain that any man looks upon in these latitudes. Blue
sea around it, and running up into its heart, so that the little boat
slumbers like a baby in lap, while the tall ships are stripping naked
to fight the hurricane outside, and storm-stay-sails banging and flying
in ribbons. Trees, in stretches of miles; beeches, oaks, most
numerous; - many of them hung with moss, looking like bearded Druids;
some coiled in the clasp of huge, dark-stemmed grape-vines. Open
patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep, and the winds come
so finely sifted that they are as soft as swan’s down. Rocks
scattered about, - Stonehenge-like monoliths. Fresh-water lakes;
one of them, Mary’s lake, crystal-clear, full of flashing pickerel
lying under the lily-pads like tigers in the jungle. Six pounds
of ditto killed one morning for breakfast. EGO fecit.
The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question my Latin.
No, sir, I said, - you need not trouble yourself. There is a higher
law in grammar, not to be put down by Andrews and Stoddard. Then
I went on.
Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the like
of in these our New England sovereignties. There is nothing in
the shape of kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful, which
has not found its home in that ocean-principality. It has welcomed
all who were worthy of welcome, from the pale clergyman who came to
breathe the sea-air with its medicinal salt and iodine, to the great
statesman who turned his back on the affairs of empire, and smoothed
his Olympian forehead, and flashed his white teeth in merriment over
the long table, where his wit was the keenest and his story the best.
[I don’t believe any man ever talked like that in this world.
I don’t believe I talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting
one’s conversation, one cannot help Blair-ing it up more
or less, ironing out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping
and plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at the
looking-glass.]
- How can a man help writing poetry in such a place? Everybody
does write poetry that goes there. In the state archives, kept
in the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of unpublished
verse, - some by well-known hands, and others quite as good, by the
last people you would think of as versifiers, - men who could pension
off all the genuine poets in the country, and buy ten acres of Boston
common, if it was for sale, with what they had left. Of course
I had to write my little copy of verses with the rest; here it is, if
you will hear me read it. When the sun is in the west, vessels
sailing in an easterly direction look bright or dark to one who observes
them from the north or south, according to the tack they are sailing
upon. Watching them from one of the windows of the great mansion,
I saw these perpetual changes, and moralized thus:-
SUN AND SHADOW.
As I look from the isle, o’er its billows of green,
To the billows of foam-crested blue,
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
The sun gleaming bright on her sail.
Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, -
Of breakers that whiten and roar;
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
They see him that gaze from the shore!
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
To the rock that is under his lee,
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O’er the gulfs of the desolate sea.
Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade;
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark,
We’ll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore!
- Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything
is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their
motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself;
stupidity often saves a man from going mad. We frequently see
persons in insane hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called
religious mental disturbances. I confess that I think better
of them than of many who hold the same notions, and keep their wits
and appear to enjoy life very well, outside of the asylums. Any
decent person ought to go mad, if he really holds such or such opinions.
It is very much to his discredit in every point of view, if he does
not. What is the use of my saying what some of these opinions
are? Perhaps more than one of you hold such as I should think
ought to send you straight over to Somerville, if you have any logic
in your heads or any human feeling in your hearts. Anything that
is brutal, cruel, heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most
of mankind and perhaps for entire races, - anything that assumes the
necessity of the extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated,
- no matter by what name you call it, - no matter whether a fakir, or
a monk, or a deacon believes it, - if received, ought to produce insanity
in every well-regulated mind. That condition becomes a normal
one, under the circumstances. I am very much ashamed of some people
for retaining their reason, when they know perfectly well that if they
were not the most stupid or the most selfish of human beings, they would
become non-compotes at once.
[Nobody understood this but the theological student and the schoolmistress.
They looked intelligently at each other; but whether they were thinking
about my paradox or not, I am not clear. - It would be natural enough.
Stranger things have happened. Love and Death enter boarding-houses
without asking the price of board, or whether there is room for them.
Alas, these young people are poor and pallid! Love should
be both rich and rosy, but must be either rich or rosy.
Talk about military duty! What is that to the warfare of a married
maid-of-all-work, with the title of mistress, and an American female
constitution, which collapses just in the middle third of life, and
comes out vulcanized India-rubber, if it happen to live through the
period when health and strength are most wanted?]
- Have I ever acted in private theatricals? Often. I have
played the part of the “Poor Gentleman,” before a great
many audiences, - more, I trust, than I shall ever face again.
I did not wear a stage-costume, nor a wig, nor moustaches of burnt cork;
but I was placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the
proper hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer’s smile upon
my countenance, and made my bow and acted my part. I have seen
my name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself
in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a sober literary
essay in my pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced as the most
desperate of buffos, - one who was obliged to restrain himself
in the full exercise of his powers, from prudential considerations.
I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses, in the pursuit of
my histrionic vocation. I have travelled in cars until the conductors
all knew me like a brother. I have run off the rails, and stuck
all night in snow-drifts, and sat behind females that would have the
window open when one could not wink without his eyelids freezing together.
Perhaps I shall give you some of my experiences one of these days; -
I will not now, for I have something else for you.
Private theatricals, as I have figured in them in country lyceum-halls,
are one thing, - and private theatricals, as they may be seen in certain
gilded and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are another. Yes,
it is pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies, who do not think it
necessary to mouth, and rant, and stride, like most of our stage heroes
and heroines, in the characters which show off their graces and talents;
most of all to see a fresh, unrouged, unspoiled, high bred young maiden,
with a lithe figure, and a pleasant voice, acting in those love-dramas
which make us young again to look upon, when real youth and beauty will
play them for us.
- Of course I wrote the prologue I was asked to write. I did not
see the play, though. I knew there was a young lady in it, and
that somebody was in love with her, and she was in love with him, and
somebody (an old tutor, I believe) wanted to interfere, and, very naturally,
the young lady was too sharp for him. The play of course ends
charmingly; there is a general reconciliation, and all concerned form
a line and take each others’ hands, as people always do after
they have made up their quarrels, - and then the curtain falls, - if
it does not stick, as it commonly does at private theatrical exhibitions,
in which case a boy is detailed to pull it down, which he does, blushing
violently.
Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going to change my caesuras
and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or iambic
trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear it
THIS IS IT.
A Prologue? Well, of course the ladies know; -
I have my doubts. No matter, - here we go!
What is a Prologue? Let our Tutor teach:
Pro means beforehand; logos stands for speech.
’Tis like the harper’s prelude on the strings,
The prima donna’s courtesy ere she sings; -
Prologues in metre are to other pros
As worsted stockings are to engine-hose.
“The world’s a stage,” as Shakspeare said, one day;
The stage a world - was what he meant to say.
The outside world’s a blunder, that is clear;
The real world that Nature meant is here.
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma;
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa;
Misers relent, the spendthrift’s debts are paid,
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid;
One after one the troubles all are past
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last,
When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all,
Join hands, so happy at the curtain’s fall.
- Here suffering virtue ever finds relief,
And black-browed ruffians always come to grief,
- When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech,
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach,
Cries, “Help, kyind Heaven!” and drops upon her knees
On the green - baize, - beneath the (canvas) trees,-
See to her side avenging Valor fly:-
“Ha! Villain! Draw! Now, Terraitorr, yield or die!”
- When the poor hero flounders in despair,
Some dear lost uncle turns up millionnaire, -
Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy,
Sobs on his neck, “My boy! MY BOY!! MY BOY!!!”
Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night.
Of love that conquers in disaster’s spite.
Ladies, attend! While woful cares and doubt
Wrong the soft passion in the world without,
Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
One thing is certain: Love will triumph here!
Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule, -
The world’s great masters, when you’re out of school, -
Learn the brief moral of our evening’s play:
Man has his will, - but woman has her way!
While man’s dull spirit toils in smoke and fire,
Woman’s swift instinct threads the electric wire, -
The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves
Beats the black giant with his score of slaves.
All earthly powers confess your sovereign art
But that one rebel, - woman’s wilful heart.
All foes you master; but a woman’s wit
Lets daylight through you ere you know you’re hit.
So, just to picture what her art can do,
Hear an old story made as good as new.
Rudolph, professor of the headsman’s trade,
Alike was famous for his arm and blade.
One day a prisoner Justice had to kill
Knelt at the block to test the artist’s skill.
Bare-armed, swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy-browed,
Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd.
His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam,
As the pike’s armor flashes in the stream.
He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go;
The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow.
“Why strikest not? Perform thy murderous act,”
The prisoner said. (Hs voice was slightly cracked.)
“Friend I have struck,” the artist straight replied;
“Wait but one moment, and yourself decide.”
He held his snuff-box, - “Now then, if you please!”
The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing sneeze,
Off his head tumbled, - bowled along the floor, -
Bounced down the steps; - the prisoner said no more!
Woman! thy falchion is a glittering eye;
If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die!
Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head;
We die with love, and never dream we’re dead!
The prologue went off very well, as I hear. No alterations were
suggested by the lady to whom it was sent, so far as I know. Sometimes
people criticize the poems one sends them, and suggest all sorts of
improvements. Who was that silly body that wanted Burns to alter
“Scots wha hae,” so as to lengthen the last line, thus
“Edward!” Chains and slavery!
Here is a little poem I sent a short time since to a committee for a
certain celebration. I understood that it was to be a festive
and convivial occasion, and ordered myself accordingly. It seems
the president of the day was what is called a “teetotaller.”
I received a note from him in the following words, containing the copy
subjoined, with the emendations annexed to it.
“Dear Sir, - your poem gives good satisfaction to the committee.
The sentiments expressed with reference to liquor are not, however,
those generally entertained by this community. I have therefore
consulted the clergyman of this place, who has made come slight changes,
which he thinks will remove all objections, and keep the valuable portions
of the poem. Please to inform me of your charge for said poem.
Our means are limited, etc., etc., etc.
Yours with respect,”
HERE IT IS - WITH THE SLIGHT ALTERATIONS!
Come! fill a fresh bumper, - for why should we go
While the [nectar] [logwood] still reddens our cups as they flow?
Pour out the [rich juices] [decoction] still bright with the sun,
Till o’er the brimmed crystal the [rubies] [dye-stuff] shall run.
The [purple glebed clusters] [half-ripened apples] their life-dews have
bled;
How sweet is the [breath] [taste] of the [fragrance they shed] [sugar
of lead]!
For summer’s [last roses] [rank poisons] lie hid in the [wines]
[wines!!!]
That were garnered by [maidens who laughed through the vines.] [stable-boys
smoking long-nines.]
Then a [smile] [scowl], and a [glass] [howl], and a [toast] [scoff],
and a [cheer] [sneer],
For all [the good wine, and we’ve some of it here] [strychnine
and whiskey, and ratsbane and beer]
In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
[Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all!] [Down, down, with
the tyrant that masters us all!]
The company said I had been shabbily treated, and advised me to charge
the committee double, - which I did. But as I never got my pay,
I don’t know that it made much difference. I am a very particular
person about having all I write printed as I write it. I require
to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof
rectified impression of all my productions, especially verse.
A misprint kills a sensitive author. An intentional change of
his text murders him. No wonder so many poets die young!
I have nothing more to report at this time, except two pieces of advice
I gave to the young women at table. One relates to a vulgarism
of language, which I grieve to say is sometimes heard even from female
lips. The other is of more serious purport, and applies to such
as contemplate a change of condition, - matrimony, in fact.
- The woman who “calculates” is lost.
- Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
CHAPTER III
[The “Atlantic” obeys the moon, and its LUNIVERSARY has
come round again. I have gathered up some hasty notes of my remarks
made since the last high tides, which I respectfully submit. Please
to remember this is talk; just as easy and just as formal as
I choose to make it.]
- I never saw an author in my life - saving, perhaps, one - that did
not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat, (Felis Catus,
LINN.,) on having his fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful hand.
But let me give you a caution. Be very careful how you tell an
author he is droll. Ten to one he will hate you; and if
he does, be sure he can do you a mischief, and very probably will.
Say you cried over his romance or his verses, and he will love
you and send you a copy. You can laugh over that as much as you
like - in private.
- Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny? - Why, there
are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown knows
very well that the women are not in love with him, but with Hamlet,
the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs.
The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.
If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more time to tell
it. There is a perfect consciousness in every form of wit - using
that term in its general sense - that its essence consists in a partial
and incomplete view of whatever it touches. It throws a single
ray, separated from the rest, - red, yellow, blue, or any intermediate
shade, - upon an object; never white light; that is the province of
wisdom. We get beautiful effects from wit, - all the prismatic
colors, - but never the object as it is in fair daylight. A pun,
which is a kind if wit, is a different and much shallower trick in mental
optics throwing the shadows of two objects so that one overlies
the other. Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects,
but always keeps its essential object in the purest white light of truth.
- Will you allow me to pursue this subject a little further?
[They didn’t allow me at that time, for somebody happened to scrape
the floor with his chair just then; which accidental sound, as all must
have noticed, has the instantaneous effect that the cutting of the yellow
hair by Iris had upon infelix Dido. It broke the charm, and that
breakfast was over.]
- Don’t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say
disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer
you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and
courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare,
leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they
are ready enough to tell them. Good-breeding never forgets
that amour-propre is universal. When you read the
story of the Archbishop and Gil Blas, you may laugh, if you will, at
the poor old man’s delusion; but don’t forget that the youth
was the greater fool of the two, and that his master served such a booby
rightly in turning him out of doors.
- You need not get up a rebellion against what I say, if you find everything
in my sayings is not exactly new. You can’t possibly mistake
a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I once
read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for its latitude.
On examination, I found all its erudition was taken ready-made from
D’Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown
up the little great man, who had once belabored me in his feeble way.
But one can generally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough, and
they are not worth the trouble of putting them in the pillory.
I doubt the entire novelty of my remarks just made on telling unpleasant
truths, yet I am not conscious of any larceny.
Neither make too much of flaws and occasional overstatements.
Some persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly
stated propositions, is all that conversation admits. This is
precisely as if a musician should insist on having nothing but perfect
chords and simple melodies, - no diminished fifths, no flat sevenths,
no flourishes, on any account. Now it is fair to say, that, just
as music must have all these, so conversation must have its partial
truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths. It is
in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits the ideal element
as much as pictures or statues. One man who is a little too literal
can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit. - “Yes,”
you say, “but who wants to hear fanciful people’s nonsense?
Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!” - Certainly, if
a man is too fond of paradox, - if he is flighty and empty, - if, instead
of striking those fifths and sevenths, those harmonious discords, often
so much better than the twinned octaves, in the music of thought, -
if, instead of striking these, he jangles the chords, stick a fact into
him like a stiletto. But remember that talking is one of the fine
arts, - the noblest, the most important, and the most difficult, - and
that its fluent harmonies may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single
harsh note. Therefore conversation which is suggestive rather
than argumentative, which lets out the most of each talker’s results
of thought, is commonly the pleasantest and the most profitable.
It is not easy, at the best, for two persons talking together to make
the most of each other’s thoughts, there are so many of them.
[The company looked as if they wanted an explanation.]
When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it is natural
enough that among the six there should be more or less confusion and
misapprehension.
[Our landlady turned pale; - no doubt she thought there was a screw
loose in my intellects, - and that involved the probable loss of a boarder.
A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek,
fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the
professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain
lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat
rasping voce di petto, to Falstaff’s nine men in buckram.
Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman opposite was
afraid I should seize the carving-knife; at any rate, he slid it to
one side, as it were carelessly.]
I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here, that
there are at least six personalities distinctly to be recognized as
taking part in that dialogue between John and Thomas.
Three Johns.
1. The real John; known only to his Maker.
2. John’s ideal John; never the real one, and often very
unlike him.
3. Thomas’s ideal John; never the real John, nor John’s
John, but often very unlike either.
Three Thomas.
1. The real Thomas.
2. Thomas’s ideal Thomas.
3. John’s ideal Thomas.
Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a platform-balance;
but the other two are just as important in the conversation. Let
us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and ill-looking. But
as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the gift of seeing themselves
in the true light, John very possibly conceives himself to be youthful,
witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point of view of this ideal.
Thomas, again, believes him to be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore
he is, so far as Thomas’s attitude in the conversation is concerned,
an artful rogue, though really simple and stupid. The same conditions
apply to the three Thomases. It follows, that, until a man can
be found who knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself
as others see him, there must be at least six persons engaged in every
dialogue between two. Of these, the least important, philosophically
speaking, is the one that we have called the real person. No wonder
two disputants often get angry, when there are six of them talking and
listening all at the same time.
[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made by
a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at table.
A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known to boarding-houses,
was on its way to me viâ this unlettered Johannes.
He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that
there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical
inference was hasty and illogical, but in the mean time he had eaten
the peaches.]
- The opinions of relatives as to a man’s powers are very commonly
of little value; not merely because they sometimes overrate their own
flesh and blood, as some may suppose; on the contrary, they are quite
as likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the habit of
considering like themselves. The advent of genius is like what
florists style the breaking of a seedling tulip into what we
may call high-caste colors, - ten thousand dingy flowers, then one with
the divine streak; or, if you prefer it, like the coming up in old Jacob’s
garden of that most gentlemanly little fruit, the seckel pear, which
I have sometimes seen in shop-windows. It is a surprise, - there
is nothing to account for it. All at once we find that twice two
make five. Nature is fond of what are called “gift-enterprises.”
This little book of life which she has given into the hands of its joint
possessors is commonly one of the old story-books bound over again.
Only once in a great while there is a stately poem in it, or its leaves
are illuminated with the glories of art, or they enfold a draft for
untold values signed by the million-fold millionnaire old mother herself.
But strangers are commonly the first to find the “gift”
that came with the little book.
It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of its own flavor.
Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still more eloquently
silent animal that might be mentioned, is aware of any personal peculiarity,
may well be doubted. No man knows his own voice; many men do not
know their own profiles. Every one remembers Carlyle’s famous
“Characteristics” article; allow for exaggerations, and
there is a great deal in his doctrine of the self-unconsciousness of
genius. It comes under the great law just stated. This incapacity
of knowing its own traits is often found in the family as well as in
the individual. So never mind what your cousins, brothers, sisters,
uncles, aunts, and the rest, say about that fine poem you have written,
but send it (postage-paid) to the editors, if there are any, of the
“Atlantic,” - which, by the way, is not so called because
it is a notion, as some dull wits wish they had said, but are
too late.
- Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled
with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory
facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get
a bullying habit of mind; - not of manners, perhaps; they may be soft
and smooth, but the smile they carry has a quiet assertion in it, such
as the Champion of the Heavy Weights, commonly the best-natured, but
not the most diffident of men, wears upon what he very inelegantly calls
his “mug.” Take the man, for instance, who deals in
the mathematical sciences. There is no elasticity in a mathematical
fact; if you bring up against it, it never yields a hair’s breadth;
everything must go to pieces that comes in collision with it.
What the mathematician knows being absolute, unconditional, incapable
of suffering question, it should tend, in the nature of things, to breed
a despotic way of thinking. So of those who deal with the palpable
and often unmistakable facts of external nature; only in a less degree.
Every probability - and most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities
- is provided with buffers at both ends, which break the force
of opposite opinions clashing against it; but scientific certainty has
no spring in it, no courtesy, no possibility of yielding. All
this must react on the minds which handle these forms of truth.
- Oh, you need net tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most gracious,
unassuming people in the world, and yet preëminent in the ranges
of science I am referring to. I know that as well as you.
But mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force
enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen most
obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only in single
file from this day forward. A rash man, once visiting a certain
noted institution at South Boston, ventured to express the sentiment,
that man is a rational being. An old woman who was an attendant
in the Idiot School contradicted the statement, and appealed to the
facts before the speaker to disprove it. The rash man stuck to
his hasty generalization, notwithstanding.
[ - It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am associated
in my daily relations. I not unfrequently practise the divine
art of music in company with our landlady’s daughter, who, as
I mentioned before, is the owner of an accordion. Having myself
a well-marked barytone voice of more than half an octave in compass,
I sometimes add my vocal powers to her execution of
“Thou, thou reign’st in this bosom.”
not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is present,
to prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also taken a good
deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to, sometimes
called B. F., or more frequently Frank, in imitation of that felicitous
abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience, adopted by some of
his betters. My acquaintance with the French language is very
imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere but in Paris, which is
awkward, as B. F. devotes himself to it with the peculiar advantage
of an Alsacian teacher. The boy, I think, is doing well, between
us, notwithstanding. The following is an uncorrected French
exercise, written by this young gentleman. His mother thinks it
very creditable to his abilities; though, being unacquainted with the
French language, her judgment cannot be considered final.
LE RAT DIES SALONS À LECTURE.
Ce rat çi est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes
de derrière sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant
dont il fait usage pour tenir les journaux. Cet animal a la peau
noire pour le plupart, et porte un cerele blanchâtre autour de
son cou. On le trouve tous les jours aux dits salons, on il demeure,
digere, s’il y a do quoi dans son interieur, respire, tousse,
eternue, dort, et renfle quelquefois, ayant toujours le semblant de
lire. On ne sait pas s’il a une autre gite que çelà.
Il a l’air d’une bête très stupide, mais il
est d’une sagacité et d’une vitesse extraordinaire
quand il s’agit de saisir un journal nouveau. On ne sait
pas pourquoi il lit, parcequ’il ne parait pas avoir des idées.
Il vocalise rarement, mais en revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux divers.
Il porte un crayon dans une de ses poches pectorales, avec lequel il
fait des marques sur les bords des journaux et des livres, semblable
aux suivans: !!! - Bah! Pooh! Il ne faut pas cependant les
prendre pour des signes d’intelligence. Il ne vole pas,
ordinairement; il fait rarement même des echanges de parapluie,
et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau a toujours un caractère
specifique. On ne sait pas au juste ce dont il se nourrit.
Feu Cuvier était d’avis que c’etait de l’odeur
du cuir des reliures; ce qu’on dit d’être une nourriture
animale fort saine, et peu chère. Il vit bien longtems.
Enfin il meure, en laissant à ses héritiers une carte
du Salon à Lecture on il avait existé pendant sa vie.
On pretend qu’il revient toutes les nuits, après la mort,
visiter le Salon. On peut le voir, dit on, à minuit, dans
sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir, et ayant à sa
main un crayon de charbon. Le lendemain on trouve des caractères
inconnus sur les bords du journal. Ce qui prouve que le spiritualisme
est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professeurs de Cambridge sont des imbeçiles
qui ne savent rien du tout, du tout.
I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed to be
touched in any way, is not discreditable to B. F. You observe
that he is acquiring a knowledge of zoölogy at the same time that
he is learning French. Fathers of families in moderate circumstances
will find it profitable to their children, and an economical mode of
instruction, to set them to revising and amending this boy’s exercise.
The passage was originally taken from the “Histoire Naturelle
des Bêtes Ruminans et Rongeurs, Bipèdes et Autres,”
lately published in Paris. This was translated into English and
published in London. It was republished at Great Pedlington, with
notes and additions by the American editor. The notes consist
of an interrogation-mark on page 53d, and a reference (p. 127th) to
another book “edited” by the same hand. The additions
consist of the editor’s name on the title-page and back, with
a complete and authentic list of said editor’s honorary titles
in the first of these localities. Our boy translated the translation
back into French. This may be compared with the original, to be
found on Shelf 13, Division X, of the Public Library of this metropolis.]
- Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don’t write
a story, or a novel, or something of that kind. Instead of answering
each one of you separately, I will thank you to step up into the wholesale
department for a few moments, where I deal in answers by the piece and
by the bale.
That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for one
novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a cherished belief.
It has been maintained, on the other hand, that many persons cannot
write more than one novel, - that all after that are likely to be failures.
- Life is so much more tremendous a thing in its heights and depths
than any transcript of it can be, that all records of human experience
are as so many bound herbaria to the innumerable glowing, glistening,
rustling, breathing, fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling
leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies. All we can
do with books of human experience is to make them alive again with something
borrowed from our own lives. We can make a book alive for us just
in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form to our own experience.
Now an author’s first novel is naturally drawn, to a great extent,
from his personal experiences; that is, is a literal copy of nature
under various slight disguises. But the moment the author gets
out of his personality, he must have the creative power, as well as
the narrative art and the sentiment, in order to tell a living story;
and this is rare.
Besides, there is great danger that a man’s first life-story shall
clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts. Most lives,
though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial waste,
drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along. Oftentimes
a single cradling gets them all, and after that the poor man’s
labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles. All which proves
that I, as an individual of the human family, could write one novel
or story at any rate, if I would.
- Why don’t I, then? - Well, there are several reasons against
it. In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain
that verse is the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and
rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the
fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness of
a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in the luminous
halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A beauty shows
herself under the chandeliers, protected by the glitter of her diamonds,
with such a broad snowdrift of white arms and shoulders laid bare, that,
were she unadorned and in plain calico, she would be unendurable - in
the opinion of the ladies.
Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends. I
should like to know if all story-tellers do not do this? Now I
am afraid all my friends would not bear showing up very well; for they
have an average share of the common weakness of humanity, which I am
pretty certain would come out. Of all that have told stories among
us there is hardly one I can recall who has not drawn too faithfully
some living portrait that might better have been spared.
Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be too dull
to write such a story as I should wish to write.
And finally, I think it very likely I shall write a story one
of these days. Don’t be surprised at any time, if you see
me coming out with “The Schoolmistress,” or “The Old
Gentleman Opposite.” [Our schoolmistress and our
old gentleman that sits opposite had left the table before I said this.]
I want my glory for writing the same discounted now, on the spot, if
you please. I will write when I get ready. How many people
live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
- I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my being too
dull to write a good story. I don’t pretend to know what
you meant by it, but I take occasion to make a remark which may hereafter
prove of value to some among you. - When one of us who has been led
by native vanity or senseless flattery to think himself or herself possessed
of talent arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is
really dull, it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions
that can enter a mortal’s mind. All our failures, our shortcomings,
our strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted
from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian’s pack, at
the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant
gift of high intelligence, - with which one look may overflow us in
some wider sphere of being.
- How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, “I hate
books!” A gentleman, - singularly free from affectations,
- not learned, of course, but of perfect breeding, which is often so
much better than learning, - by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge
of the world and society, but certainly not clever either in the arts
or sciences, - his company is pleasing to all who know him. I
did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so distinctly
as I did simplicity of character and fearless acknowledgment of his
inaptitude for scholarship. In fact, I think there are a great
many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark to keep their place,
that really “hate books,” but never had the wit to find
it out, or the manliness to own it. [Entre nous,
I always read with a mark.]
We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an “intellectual
man” was, as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or thereabouts,
of book-learning, and one-tenth himself. But even if he is actually
so compounded, he need not read much. Society is a strong solution
of books. It draws the virtue out of what is best worth reading,
as hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves. If I were
a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in which I
would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well. The
infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre. You understand
me; I would have a person whose sole business should be to read day
and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the
man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows
history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he
can use handily, and the same of all useful arts and sciences; knows
all the common plots of plays and novels, and the stock company of characters
that are continually coming on in new costume; can give you a criticism
of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares
for nobody except for the virtue there is in what he says; delights
in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming
and unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as tender and
reverential to all that bears the mark of genius, - that is, of a new
influx of truth or beauty, - as a nun over her missal. In short,
he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a living.
Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life’s
chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape
of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take - to
wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In
a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, “put
him through” all the material part of life; see him sheltered,
warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on
his talk when I liked, - with the privilege of shutting it off at will.
A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with about
a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord of the macrocosm.
They do well to dine together once in a while. A dinner-party
made up of such elements is the last triumph of civilization over barbarism.
Nature and art combine to charm the senses; the equatorial zone of the
system is soothed by well-studied artifices; the faculties are off duty,
and fall into their natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and
science in a short jacket.
The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take for
granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out; nothing
short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies their dull apprehensions.
But look at two masters of that noble game! White stands well
enough, so far as you can see; but Red says, Mate in six moves; - White
looks, - nods; - the game is over. Just so in talking with first-rate
men; especially when they are good-natured and expansive, as they are
apt to be at table. That blessed clairvoyance which sees into
things without opening them, - that glorious license, which, having
shut the door and driven the reporter from its key-hole, calls upon
Truth, majestic virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic
poses, and take a festive garland and the vacant place on the medius
lectus, - that carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments,
large axioms bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from professional
mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored fire,
and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons pelting everybody that
shows himself, - the picture of a truly intellectual banquet is one
which the old Divinities might well have attempted to reproduce in their
-
- “Oh, oh, oh!” cried the young fellow whom they call John,
- “that is from one of your lectures!”
I know it, I replied, - I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.
“The trail of the serpent is over them all!”
All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and grooves
in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually sliding.
Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still June evening,
suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum of air, and in
a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere beyond? Did
you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back Bay, - where the
Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating the “Metropolitan”
boat-clubs, - find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local gulf-stream,
a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone, through which your glistening
shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back to the cold realities of full-sea
temperature? Just so, in talking with any of the characters above
referred to, one not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the style
of the conversation. The lack-lustre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street
door-plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings
itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom
enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small
prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you
were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile, - you have a giant and a
trumpet-tongued angel before you! - Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar
lecture. - As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column
springs into the air before the astonished passer-by, - silver-footed,
diamond-crowned, rainbow-scarfed, - from the bosom of that fair sheet,
sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams of
a less amiable and less elevated order of reptilia in other latitudes.
- Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying
that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the
higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going
on in India, - a white, superior “Caucasian” race, against
a dark-skinned, inferior, but still “Caucasian” race, -
and where are English and American sympathies? We can’t
stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the
brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and
it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the
brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals, - tame
it or crush it. The India mail brings stories of women and children
outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers.
England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with
empire, and makes a correction thus: [DELPHI] Dele. The
civilized world says, Amen.
- Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly, that
I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them and dilute
it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college themes and
water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric heroes did with
their melas oinos, - that black sweet, syrupy wine (?) which
they used to alloy with three parts or more of the flowing stream.
[Could it have been melasses, as Webster and his provincials
spell it, - or Molossa’s, as dear old smattering, chattering,
would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the “Magnalia”?
Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make barn-door-fowl flights
of learning in “Notes and Queries!” - ye Historical Societies,
in one of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time,
while other hands tug at the oars! - ye Amines of parasitical literature,
who pick up your grains of native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged
upon less honest fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of,
you have “made a Golgotha” of your pages! - ponder thereon!]
- Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses.
You will understand by the title that they are written in an imaginary
character. I don’t doubt they will fit some family-man well
enough. I send it forth as “Oak Hall” projects a coat,
on a priori grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody.
There is no loftier illustration of faith than this. It believes
that a soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and
nurtured it; that its mysterious compages or frame-work has survived
its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity; that the Man,
now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to the traditions and
habits of the race in favor of artificial clothing; that he will, having
all the world to choose from, select the very locality where this audacious
generalization has been acted upon. It builds a garment cut to
the pattern of an Idea, and trusts that Nature will model a material
shape to fit it. There is a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets
are full of inspiration. - Now hear the verses.
THE OLD MAN DREAMS.
O for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I’d rather laugh a bright-haired boy
Than reign a gray-beard king!
Off with the wrinkled spoils of age!
Away with learning’s crown!
Tear out life’s wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!
One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood’s fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!
- My listening angel heard the prayer,
And calmly smiling, said,
“If I but touch thy silvered hair,
Thy hasty wish hath sped.
“But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?”
- Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee, what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I’ll take - my - precious wife!
- The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
“The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!”
- “And is there nothing yet unsaid
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years!”
Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
I could not bear to leave them all;
I’ll take - my - girl - and - boys!
The smiling angel dropped his pen, -
“Why this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!”
And so I laughed, - my laughter woke
The household with its noise, -
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the gray-haired boys.
CHAPTER IV
[I am so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to remain
there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great many
conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of different tone
and on different subjects. The talks are like the breakfasts,
- sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must take them
as they come. How can I do what all these letters ask me to?
No. 1. want serious and earnest thought. No. 2. (letter smells
of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a “good
storey” which he has copied out for me. (I suppose two letters
before the word “good” refer to some Doctor of Divinity
who told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand) - more poetry.
No. 4. wants something that would be of use to a practical man.
(Prahctical mahn he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged,
sweet-scented) - “more sentiment,” - “heart’s
outpourings.” -
My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks
as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character
will depend on many accidents, - a good deal on the particular persons
in the company to whom they were addressed. It so happens that
those which follow were mainly intended for the divinity-student and
the school-mistress; though others, whom I need not mention, saw to
interfere, with more or less propriety, in the conversation. This
is one of my privileges as a talker; and of course, if I was not talking
for our whole company, I don’t expect all the readers of this
periodical to be interested in my notes of what was said. Still,
I think there may be a few that will rather like this vein, - possibly
prefer it to a livelier one, - serious young men, and young women generally,
in life’s roseate parenthesis from - years of age to - inclusive.
Another privilege of talking is to misquote. - Of course it wasn’t
Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair, - but Iris.
(As I have since told you) it was the former lady’s regular business,
but Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d’Enfer stood
firm on the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here - Juno,
in Latin - sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased
to see that one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for the
celebrated “Oceanic Miscellany” misquoted Campbell’s
line without any excuse. “Waft us home the message”
of course it ought to be. Will he be duly grateful for the correction?]
- The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to
be governed, not by, but according to laws, such as we observe
in the larger universe. - You think you know all about walking,
- don’t you, now? Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs
are held to your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels,
(“cotyloid” - cup-like - cavities,) and held there as long
as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you move them
backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don’t
you? - On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing,
at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this
by muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and
make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the
same mechanism as the movements of the solar system.
[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to certain
German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, which,
however, he said he had often verified. I appropriated it to my
own use; what can one do better than this, when one has a friend that
tells him anything worth remembering?
The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost
nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had
got it already. - Why, - said the Professor, - they might have hired
an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]
Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the bodily
movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its regular cycles.
Such or such a thought comes round periodically, in its turn.
Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere with the regular cycles,
that we may find them practically beyond our power of recognition.
Take all this for what it is worth, but at any rate you will agree that
there are certain particular thoughts that do not come up once a day,
nor once a week, but that a year would hardly go round without your
having them pass through your mind. Here is one which comes up
at intervals in this way. Some one speaks of it, and there is
an instant and eager smile of assent in the listener or listeners.
Yes, indeed; they have often been struck by it.
All at once a conviction flashes through us that we have been
in the same precise circumstances as at the present instant,
once or many times before.
O, dear, yes! - said one of the company, - everybody has had that
feeling.
The landlady didn’t know anything about such notions; it was an
idee in folks’ heads, she expected.
The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew
the feeling well, and didn’t like to experience it; it made her
think she was a ghost, sometimes.
The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he had
just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous conviction all
at once came over him that he had done just that same thing ever so
many times before. I looked severely at him, and his countenance
immediately fell - on the side toward me; I cannot answer for
the other, for he can wink and laugh with either half of his face without
the other half’s knowing it.
- I have noticed - I went on to say - the following circumstances connected
with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which
seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial, - one
that might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that
the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled
by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed.
Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances,
and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words.
Fourthly, I have often felt that the duplicate condition had not only
occurred once before, but that it was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual.
Lastly, I have had the same convictions in my dreams.
How do I account for it? - Why, there are several ways that I can mention,
and you may take your choice. The first is that which the young
lady hinted at; - that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous
existence. I don’t believe that; for I remember a poor student
I used to know told me he had such a conviction one day when he was
blacking his boots, and I can’t think he had ever lived in another
world where they use Day and Martin.
Some think that Dr. Wigan’s doctrine of the brain’s being
a double organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes,
accounts for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose,
and the small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the
sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the second
perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old. But
even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see no good
reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the time, nor any
analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most likely that the
coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but that we take this
partial resemblance for identity, as we occasionally do resemblances
of persons. A momentary posture of circumstances is so far like
some preceding one that we accept it as exactly the same, just as we
accost a stranger occasionally, mistaking him for a friend. The
apparent simil