[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 of 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 Proserpina's
cutting the yellow hair 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 Professor, 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.
{1. The real John; known only
{ to his Maker.
{
{2. John's ideal John; never the
Three Johns { 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.
{1. The real Thomas.
Three Thomases. {2. Thomas's ideal Thomas.
{3. John's ideal Thomas
Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a
platform-balance; but the other two are just as important in the
conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and
ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the
gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly
conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks
from the point of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes him to
be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he _is_, so far as
Thomas's attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful rogue,
though really simple and stupid. The same conditions apply to the
three Thomases. It follows, that, until a man can be found who knows
himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as others see him,
there must be at least six persons engaged in every dialogue between
two. Of these, the least important, philosophically speaking, is the
one that we have called the real person. No wonder two disputants
often get angry, when there are six of them talking and listening
all at the same time.
[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made by
a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at
table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known
to boarding-houses, was on its way to me _viâ_ this unlettered
Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket,
remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him
that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the
mean time he had eaten the peaches.]
--The opinions of relatives as to a man's powers are very commonly
of little value; not merely because they 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 millionfold 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, sister, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say about
the 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 that
handle these forms of truth.
--Oh, you need not tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most
gracious, unassuming people in the world, and yet preëminent in the
ranges of science I am referring to. I know that as well as you. But
mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force
enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen
most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only
in single file from this day forward. A rash man, once visiting a
certain noted institution at South Boston, ventured to express the
sentiment, that man is a rational being. An old woman who was an
attendant in the Idiot School contradicted the statement, and
appealed to the facts before the speaker to disprove it. The rash
man stuck to his hasty generalization, notwithstanding.
[--It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am associated
in my daily relations. I not unfrequently practise the divine art of
music in company with our landlady's daughter, who, as I mentioned
before, is the owner of an accordion. Having myself a well-marked
barytone voice of more than half an octave in compass, I sometimes
add my vocal powers to her execution of:
"Thou, thou reign'st in this bosom,"--
not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is
present, to prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also taken a
good deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to,
sometimes called B.F. or more frequently Frank, in imitation of that
felicitous abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience, adopted
by some of his betters. My acquaintance with the French language is
very imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere but in Paris,
which is awkward, as B.F. devoted 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.