THE MARCH OF MIND.
Quoth Ralpho: nothing but the abuse
Of human learning you produce.—BUTLER.
“GOD bless my soul, sir!” exclaimed the Reverend Doctor Folliott,
bursting, one fine May morning, into the breakfast-room at Crotchet
Castle, “I am out of all patience with this march of mind. Here has my
house been nearly burned down by my cook taking it into her head to study
hydrostatics in a sixpenny tract, published by the Steam Intellect
Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing all the world’s
business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle
every branch of human knowledge. I have a great abomination of this
learned friend; as author, lawyer, and politician, he is _triformis_,
like Hecate; and in every one of his three forms he is _bifrons_, like
Janus; the true Mr. Facing-both-ways of Vanity Fair. My cook must read
his rubbish in bed; and, as might naturally be expected, she dropped
suddenly fast asleep, overturned the candle, and set the curtains in a
blaze. Luckily, the footman went into the room at the moment, in time to
tear down the curtains and throw them into the chimney, and a pitcher of
water on her nightcap extinguished her wick; she is a greasy subject, and
would have burned like a short mould.”
The reverend gentleman exhaled his grievance without looking to the right
or to the left; at length, turning on his pivot, he perceived that the
room was full of company, consisting of young Crotchet, and some visitors
whom he had brought from London. The Reverend Doctor Folliott was
introduced to Mr. Mac Quedy, the economist; Mr. Skionar, the
transcendental poet; Mr. Firedamp, the meteorologist; and Lord Bossnowl,
son of the Earl of Foolincourt, and member for the borough of
Rogueingrain.
The divine took his seat at the breakfast-table, and began to compose his
spirits by the gentle sedative of a large cup of tea, the demulcent of a
well-buttered muffin, and the tonic of a small lobster.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—You are a man of taste, Mr. Crotchet. A man of
taste is seen at once in the array of his breakfast-table. It is the
foot of Hercules, the far-shining face of the great work, according to
Pindar’s doctrine: ἀρχομένου ἔργου πρόςωπον χρὴ θέμεν πηλαυγές. The
breakfast is the πρόςωπον of the great work of the day. Chocolate,
coffee, tea, cream, eggs, ham, tongue, cold fowl, all these are good, and
bespeak good knowledge in him who sets them forth: but the touchstone is
fish: anchovy is the first step, prawns and shrimps the second; and I
laud him who reaches even to these: potted char and lampreys are the
third, and a fine stretch of progression; but lobster is, indeed, matter
for a May morning, and demands a rare combination of knowledge and virtue
in him who sets it forth.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—Well, sir, and what say you to a fine fresh trout, hot
and dry, in a napkin? or a herring out of the water into the frying-pan,
on the shore of Loch Fyne?
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—Sir, I say every nation has some eximious
virtue; and your country is pre-eminent in the glory of fish for
breakfast. We have much to learn from you in that line at any rate.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—And in many others, sir, I believe. Morals and
metaphysics, politics and political economy, the way to make the most of
all the modifications of smoke; steam, gas, and paper currency; you have
all these to learn from us; in short, all the arts and sciences. We are
the modern Athenians.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—I, for one, sir, am content to learn nothing
from you but the art and science of fish for breakfast. Be content, sir,
to rival the Boeotians, whose redeeming virtue was in fish, touching
which point you may consult Aristophanes and his scholiast in the passage
of Lysistrata, ἀλλ’ ἄφελε τὰς ἐγχέλεις, and leave the name of Athenians
to those who have a sense of the beautiful, and a perception of metrical
quantity.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—Then, sir, I presume you set no value on the right
principles of rent, profit, wages, and currency?
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—My principles, sir, in these things are, to take
as much as I can get, and pay no more than I can help. These are every
man’s principles, whether they be the right principles or no. There,
sir, is political economy in a nutshell.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—The principles, sir, which regulate production and
consumption are independent of the will of any individual as to giving or
taking, and do not lie in a nutshell by any means.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—Sir, I will thank you for a leg of that capon.
_Lord Bossnowl_.—But, sir, by-the-bye, how came your footman to be going
into your cook’s room? It was very providential to be sure, but—
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—Sir, as good came of it, I shut my eyes, and ask
no questions. I suppose he was going to study hydrostatics, and he found
himself under the necessity of practising hydraulics.
_Mr. Firedamp_.—Sir, you seem to make very light of science.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—Yes, sir, such science as the learned friend
deals in: everything for everybody, science for all, schools for all,
rhetoric for all, law for all, physic for all, words for all, and sense
for none. I say, sir, law for lawyers, and cookery for cooks: and I wish
the learned friend, for all his life, a cook that will pass her time in
studying his works; then every dinner he sits down to at home, he will
sit on the stool of repentance.
_Lord Bossnowl_.—Now really that would be too severe: my cook should read
nothing but Ude.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—No, sir! let Ude and the learned friend singe
fowls together; let both avaunt from my kitchen. Θύρας δ’ ἐπίθεσθε
βεβήλοις. Ude says an elegant supper may be given with sandwiches.
_Horresco referens_. An elegant supper. _Dî meliora piis_. No Ude for
me. Conviviality went out with punch and suppers. I cherish their
memory. I sup when I can, but not upon sandwiches. To offer me a
sandwich, when I am looking for a supper, is to add insult to injury.
Let the learned friend, and the modern Athenians, sup upon sandwiches.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—Nay, sir; the modern Athenians know better than that. A
literary supper in sweet Edinbro’ would cure you of the prejudice you
seem to cherish against us.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—Well, sir, well; there is cogency in a good
supper; a good supper in these degenerate days bespeaks a good man; but
much more is wanted to make up an Athenian. Athenians, indeed! where is
your theatre? who among you has written a comedy? where is your Attic
salt? which of you can tell who was Jupiter’s great-grandfather? or what
metres will successively remain, if you take off the three first
syllables, one by one, from a pure antispastic acatalectic tetrameter?
Now, sir, there are three questions for you: theatrical, mythological,
and metrical; to every one of which an Athenian would give an answer that
would lay me prostrate in my own nothingness.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—Well, sir, as to your metre and your mythology, they may
e’en wait a wee. For your comedy there is the “Gentle Shepherd” of the
divine Allan Ramsay.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—The “Gentle Shepherd”! It is just as much a
comedy as the Book of Job.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—Well, sir, if none of us have written a comedy, I cannot
see that it is any such great matter, any more than I can conjecture what
business a man can have at this time of day with Jupiter’s
great-grandfather.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—The great business is, sir, that you call
yourselves Athenians, while you know nothing that the Athenians thought
worth knowing, and dare not show your noses before the civilised world in
the practice of any one art in which they were excellent. Modern Athens,
sir! the assumption is a personal affront to every man who has a
Sophocles in his library. I will thank you for an anchovy.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—Metaphysics, sir; metaphysics. Logic and moral
philosophy. There we are at home. The Athenians only sought the way,
and we have found it; and to all this we have added political economy,
the science of sciences.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—A hyperbarbarous technology, that no Athenian
ear could have borne. Premises assumed without evidence, or in spite of
it; and conclusions drawn from them so logically, that they must
necessarily be erroneous.
_Mr. Skionar_.—I cannot agree with you, Mr. Mac Quedy, that you have
found the true road of metaphysics, which the Athenians only sought. The
Germans have found it, sir: the sublime Kant and his disciples.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—I have read the sublime Kant, sir, with an anxious
desire to understand him, and I confess I have not succeeded.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—He wants the two great requisites of head and
tail.
_Mr. Skionar_.—Transcendentalism is the philosophy of intuition, the
development of universal convictions; truths which are inherent in the
organisation of mind, which cannot be obliterated, though they may be
obscured, by superstitious prejudice on the one hand, and by the
Aristotelian logic on the other.
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—Well, sir, I have no notion of logic obscuring a
question.
_Mr. Skionar_.—There is only one true logic, which is the transcendental;
and this can prove only the one true philosophy, which is also the
transcendental. The logic of your Modern Athens can prove everything
equally; and that is, in my opinion, tantamount to proving nothing at
all.
_Mr. Crotchet_.—The sentimental against the rational, the intuitive
against the inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense
against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical; these are great
and interesting controversies, which I should like, before I die, to see
satisfactorily settled.
_Mr. Firedamp_.—There is another great question, greater than all these,
seeing that it is necessary to be alive in order to settle any question;
and this is the question of water against human life. Wherever there is
water, there is malaria, and wherever there is malaria, there are the
elements of death. The great object of a wise man should be to live on a
gravelly hill, without so much as a duck-pond within ten miles of him,
eschewing cisterns and waterbutts, and taking care that there be no
gravel-pits for lodging the rain. The sun sucks up infection from water,
wherever it exists on the face of the earth.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—Well, sir, you have for you the authority of the
ancient mystagogue, who said: ’Εστιν ὔδωρ ψυχῇ θάνατος. For my part I
care not a rush (or any other aquatic and inesculent vegetable) who or
what sucks up either the water or the infection. I think the proximity
of wine a matter of much more importance than the longinquity of water.
You are here within a quarter of a mile of the Thames, but in the cellar
of my friend, Mr. Crotchet, there is the talismanic antidote of a
thousand dozen of old wine; a beautiful spectacle, I assure you, and a
model of arrangement.
_Mr. Firedamp_.—Sir, I feel the malignant influence of the river in every
part of my system. Nothing but my great friendship for Mr. Crotchet
would have brought me so nearly within the jaws of the lion.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—After dinner, sir, after dinner, I will meet you
on this question. I shall then be armed for the strife. You may fight
like Hercules against Achelous, but I shall flourish the Bacchic thyrsus,
which changed rivers into wine: as Nonnus sweetly sings, Οίνω κυματόεντι
μέλας κελάρυζεν Υδάςπης.
_Mr. Crotchet_, _jun._—I hope, Mr. Firedamp, you will let your friendship
carry you a little closer into the jaws of the lion. I am fitting up a
flotilla of pleasure-boats, with spacious cabins, and a good cellar, to
carry a choice philosophical party up the Thames and Severn, into the
Ellesmere canal, where we shall be among the mountains of North Wales;
which we may climb or not, as we think proper; but we will, at any rate,
keep our floating hotel well provisioned, and we will try to settle all
the questions over which a shadow of doubt yet hangs in the world of
philosophy.
_Mr. Firedamp_.—Out of my great friendship for you, I will certainly go;
but I do not expect to survive the experiment.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—_Alter erit tum Tiphys_, _et altera quæ vehat
Argo Delectos Heroas_. I will be of the party, though I must hire an
officiating curate, and deprive poor dear Mrs. Folliott, for several
weeks, of the pleasure of combing my wig.
_Lord Bossnowl_.—I hope, if I am to be of the party, our ship is not to
be the ship of fools: He! he!
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—If you are one of the party, sir, it most
assuredly will not: Ha! ha!
_Lord Bossnowl_.—Pray sir, what do you mean by Ha! ha!?
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—Precisely, sir, what you mean by He! he!
_Mr. Mac Quedy_.—You need not dispute about terms; they are two modes of
expressing merriment, with or without reason; reason being in no way
essential to mirth. No man should ask another why he laughs, or at what,
seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a
responsible agent. Laughter is an involuntary action of certain muscles,
developed in the human species by the progress of civilisation. The
savage never laughs.
_The Rev. Dr. Folliott_.—No, sir, he has nothing to laugh at. Give him
Modern Athens, the “learned friend,” and the Steam Intellect Society.
They will develop his muscles.