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 Litteratrice 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 prima 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 heartTheir 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 tellsA tale of shame so crushing,That some turn white as sea-bleached shells, And some are always blushing. But when the patient stars look downOn 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 endeavourWe 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 a 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 landShows leak in roof or flaw in right, – When haberdashers choose the standWhose 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 saleShall bring his merit to the proof, Without a lie for every nailThat holds the iron on the hoof, – When in the usual place for ripsOur gloves are stitched with special care, And guarded well the whalebone tipsWhere first umbrellas need repair, – When Cuba’s weeds have quite forgotThe power of suction to resist,And claret-bottles harber notSuch dimples as would hold your fist, – When publishers no longer steal,And pay for what they stole before, – When the first locomotive’s wheelRolls 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, pere, 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 prosAs 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 pastTill 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 witLets 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.
- 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.
- 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 via 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 preeminent 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 A LECTURE. Ce rat ci est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes de derriere 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 blanchatre 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 cela. Il a l’air d’une bete tres stupide, mais il est d’une sagacite 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 idees. 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 meme des echanges de parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau a toujours un caractere specifique. On ne sait pas au juste ce dont il se nourrit. Feu Cuvier etait d’avis que c’etait de l’odeur du cuir des reliures; ce qu’on dit d’etre une nourriture animale fort saine, et peu chere. Il vit bien longtems. Enfin il meure, en laissant a ses heritiers une carte du Salon a Lecture on il avait existe pendant sa vie. On pretend qu’il revient toutes les nuits, apres la mort, visiter le Salon. On peut le voir, dit on, a minuit, dans sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir, et ayant a sa main un crayon de charbon. Le lendemain on trouve des caracteres inconnus sur les bords du journal. Ce qui prouve que le spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professeurs de Cambridge sont des imbeciles 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 zoology 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 Betes Ruminans et Rongeurs, Bipedes 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;
