I
The idea of a man's “interviewing” himself is rather odd, to be sure.
But then that is what we are all of us doing every day. I talk half
the time to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets
inside out to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of
personal property he had forgotten in his inventory.
--You don't know what your thoughts are going to be beforehand? said the
“Member of the Haouse,” as he calls himself.
--Why, of course I don't. Bless your honest legislative soul, I suppose
I have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and another in my
head as you have in your Representatives' library up there at the State
House. I have to tumble them over and over, and open them in a hundred
places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and there, to find what I
think about this and that. And a good many people who flatter themselves
they are talking wisdom to me, are only helping me to get at the shelf
and the book and the page where I shall find my own opinion about the
matter in question.
--The Member's eyes began to look heavy.
--It 's a very queer place, that receptacle a man fetches his talk out
of. The library comparison does n't exactly hit it. You stow away some
idea and don't want it, say for ten years. When it turns up at last it
has got so jammed and crushed out of shape by the other ideas packed
with it, that it is no more like what it was than a raisin is like a
grape on the vine, or a fig from a drum like one hanging on the tree.
Then, again, some kinds of thoughts breed in the dark of one's mind like
the blind fishes in the Mammoth Cave. We can't see them and they can't
see us; but sooner or later the daylight gets in and we find that some
cold, fishy little negative has been spawning all over our beliefs, and
the brood of blind questions it has given birth to are burrowing round
and under and butting their blunt noses against the pillars of faith we
thought the whole world might lean on. And then, again, some of our old
beliefs are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat,
or get poisoned as the case may be. And so, you see, you can't tell what
the thoughts are that you have got salted down, as one may say, till
you run a streak of talk through them, as the market people run a
butterscoop through a firkin.
Don't talk, thinking you are going to find out your neighbor, for you
won't do it, but talk to find out yourself. There is more of you--and
less of you, in spots, very likely--than you know.
--The Member gave a slight but unequivocal start just here. It does seem
as if perpetual somnolence was the price of listening to other people's
wisdom. This was one of those transient nightmares that one may have in
a doze of twenty seconds. He thought a certain imaginary Committee of
Safety of a certain imaginary Legislature was proceeding to burn down
his haystack, in accordance with an Act, entitled an Act to make the
Poor Richer by making the Rich Poorer. And the chairman of the committee
was instituting a forcible exchange of hats with him, to his manifest
disadvantage, for he had just bought him a new beaver. He told this
dream afterwards to one of the boarders.
There was nothing very surprising, therefore, in his asking a question
not very closely related to what had gone before.
--Do you think they mean business?
--I beg your pardon, but it would be of material assistance to me in
answering your question if I knew who “they” might happen to be.
--Why, those chaps that are setting folks on to burn us all up in our
beds. Political firebugs we call 'em up our way. Want to substitoot the
match-box for the ballot-box. Scare all our old women half to death.
--Oh--ah--yes--to be sure. I don't believe they say what the papers put
in their mouths any more than that a friend of mine wrote the letter
about Worcester's and Webster's Dictionaries, that he had to disown the
other day. These newspaper fellows are half asleep when they make up
their reports at two or three o'clock in the morning, and fill out the
speeches to suit themselves. I do remember some things that sounded
pretty bad,--about as bad as nitro-glycerine, for that matter. But I
don't believe they ever said 'em, when they spoke their pieces, or if
they said 'em I know they did n't mean 'em. Something like this, wasn't
it? If the majority didn't do something the minority wanted 'em to, then
the people were to burn up our cities, and knock us down and jump on our
stomachs. That was about the kind of talk, as the papers had it; I don't
wonder it scared the old women.
--The Member was wide awake by this time.
--I don't seem to remember of them partickler phrases, he said.
--Dear me, no; only levelling everything smack, and trampling us under
foot, as the reporters made it out. That means FIRE, I take it, and
knocking you down and stamping on you, whichever side of your person
happens to be uppermost. Sounded like a threat; meant, of course, for
a warning. But I don't believe it was in the piece as they spoke
it,--could n't have been. Then, again, Paris wasn't to blame,--as much
as to say--so the old women thought--that New York or Boston would n't
be to blame if it did the same thing. I've heard of political gatherings
where they barbecued an ox, but I can't think there 's a party in this
country that wants to barbecue a city. But it is n't quite fair to
frighten the old women. I don't doubt there are a great many people
wiser than I am that would n't be hurt by a hint I am going to give
them. It's no matter what you say when you talk to yourself, but when
you talk to other people, your business is to use words with reference
to the way in which those other people are like to understand them.
These pretended inflammatory speeches, so reported as to seem full
of combustibles, even if they were as threatening as they have been
represented, would do no harm if read or declaimed in a man's study
to his books, or by the sea-shore to the waves. But they are not so
wholesome moral entertainment for the dangerous classes. Boys must not
touch off their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine. This
kind of speech does n't help on the millennium much.
--It ain't jest the thing to grease your ex with ile o' vitrul, said the
Member.
--No, the wheel of progress will soon stick fast if you do. You can't
keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat to make it.
Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world were reduced ashes,
you'd have a new set of millionnaires in a couple of years or so, out
of the trade in potash. In the mean time, what is the use of setting the
man with the silver watch against the man with the gold watch, and the
man without any watch against them both?
--You can't go agin human natur', said the Member
--You speak truly. Here we are travelling through desert together like
the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more quails
than others and ought to help their hungry neighbors more than they do;
that will always be so until we come back to primitive Christianity, the
road to which does not seem to be via Paris, just now; but we don't want
the incendiary's pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night
to lead us in the march to civilization, and we don't want a Moses who
will smite rock, not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to
burn us all up with.
--It is n't quite fair to run an opposition to the other funny speaker,
Rev. Petroleum V. What 's-his-name,--spoke up an anonymous boarder.
--You may have been thinking, perhaps, that it was I,--I, the Poet, who
was the chief talker in the one-sided dialogue to which you have
been listening. If so, you were mistaken. It was the old man in the
spectacles with large round glasses and the iron-gray hair. He does a
good deal of the talking at our table, and, to tell the truth, I rather
like to hear him. He stirs me up, and finds me occupation in various
ways, and especially, because he has good solid prejudices, that one
can rub against, and so get up and let off a superficial intellectual
irritation, just as the cattle rub their backs against a rail (you
remember Sydney Smith's contrivance in his pasture) or their sides
against an apple-tree (I don't know why they take to these so
particularly, but you will often find the trunk of an apple-tree as
brown and smooth as an old saddle at the height of a cow's ribs). I
think they begin rubbing in cold blood, and then, you know, l'appetit
vient en mangeant, the more they rub the more they want to. That is the
way to use your friend's prejudices. This is a sturdy-looking personage
of a good deal more than middle age, his face marked with strong manly
furrows, records of hard thinking and square stand-up fights with life
and all its devils. There is a slight touch of satire in his discourse
now and then, and an odd way of answering one that makes it hard to
guess how much more or less he means than he seems to say. But he is
honest, and always has a twinkle in his eye to put you on your guard
when he does not mean to be taken quite literally. I think old Ben
Franklin had just that look. I know his great-grandson (in pace!) had
it, and I don't doubt he took it in the straight line of descent, as he
did his grand intellect.
The Member of the Haouse evidently comes from one of the lesser inland
centres of civilization, where the flora is rich in checkerberries
and similar bounties of nature, and the fauna lively with squirrels,
wood-chucks, and the like; where the leading sportsmen snare patridges,
as they are called, and “hunt” foxes with guns; where rabbits are
entrapped in “figgery fours,” and trout captured with the unpretentious
earth-worm, instead of the gorgeous fly; where they bet prizes for
butter and cheese, and rag-carpets executed by ladies more than seventy
years of age; where whey wear dress-coats before dinner, and cock their
hats on one side when they feel conspicuous and distinshed; where they
say--Sir to you in their common talk and have other Arcadian and bucolic
ways which are highly unobjectionable, but are not so much admired in
cities, where the people are said to be not half so virtuous.
There is with us a boy of modest dimensions, not otherwise especially
entitled to the epithet, who ought be six or seven years old, to judge
by the gap left by his front milk teeth, these having resigned in favor
of their successors, who have not yet presented their credentials. He
is rather old for an enfant terrible, and quite too young to have grown
into the bashfulness of adolescence; but he has some of the qualities
of both these engaging periods of development, The member of the Haouse
calls him “Bub,” invariably, such term I take to be an abbreviation
of “Beelzeb,” as “bus” is the short form of “omnibus.” Many eminently
genteel persons, whose manners make them at home anywhere, being
evidently unaware of true derivation of this word, are in the habit
of addressing all unknown children by one of the two terms, “bub” and
“sis,” which they consider endears them greatly to the young people, and
recommends them to the acquaintance of their honored parents, if
these happen to accompany them. The other boarders commonly call our
diminutive companion That Boy. He is a sort of expletive at the table,
serving to stop gaps, taking the same place a washer does that makes a
loose screw fit, and contriving to get driven in like a wedge between
any two chairs where there is a crevice. I shall not call that boy by
the monosyllable referred to, because, though he has many impish traits
at present, he may become civilized and humanized by being in good
company. Besides, it is a term which I understand is considered vulgar
by the nobility and gentry of the Mother Country, and it is not to be
found in Mr. Worcester's Dictionary, on which, as is well known, the
literary men of this metropolis are by special statute allowed to be
sworn in place of the Bible. I know one, certainly, who never takes his
oath on any other dictionary, any advertising fiction to the contrary,
notwithstanding.
I wanted to write out my account of some of the other boarders, but a
domestic occurrence--a somewhat prolonged visit from the landlady, who
is rather too anxious that I should be comfortable broke in upon the
continuity of my thoughts, and occasioned--in short, I gave up writing
for that day.
--“I wonder if anything like this ever happened. Author writing, jacks?”
“To be, or not to be: that is the question
Whether 't is nobl--”
--“William, shall we have pudding to-day, or flapjacks?”
--“Flapjacks, an' it please thee, Anne, or a pudding, for that matter;
or what thou wilt, good woman, so thou come not betwixt me and my
thought.”
--Exit Mistress Anne, with strongly accented closing of the door and
murmurs to the effect: “Ay, marry, 't is well for thee to talk as if
thou hadst no stomach to fill. We poor wives must swink for our masters,
while they sit in their arm-chairs growing as great in the girth through
laziness as that ill-mannered fat man William hath writ of in his books
of players' stuff. One had as well meddle with a porkpen, which hath
thorns all over him, as try to deal with William when his eyes be
rolling in that mad way.”
William--writing once more--after an exclamation in strong English of
the older pattern,--
“Whether 't is nobler--nobler--nobler--”
To do what? O these women! these women! to have puddings or flapjacks!
Oh!--
“Whether 't is nobler--in the mind--to suffer
The slings--and arrows--of--”
Oh! Oh! these women! I will e'en step over to the parson's and have a
cup of sack with His Reverence for methinks Master Hamlet hath forgot
that which was just now on his lips to speak.
So I shall have to put off making my friends acquainted with the other
boarders, some of whom seem to me worth studying and describing. I have
something else of a graver character for my readers. I am talking, you
know, as a poet; I do not say I deserve the name, but I have taken
it, and if you consider me at all it must be in that aspect. You will,
therefore, be willing to run your eyes over a few pages read, of course
by request, to a select party of the boarders.