There is no use in burdening my table with those letters of inquiry as
to where our meetings are held, and what are the names of the persons
designated by numbers, or spoken of under the titles of the Professor,
the Tutor, and so forth. It is enough that you are aware who I am, and
that I am known at the tea-table as The Dictator. Theatrical “asides”
are apt to be whispered in a pretty loud voice, and the persons who
ought not to have any idea of what is said are expected to be reasonably
hard of bearing. If I named all The Teacups, some of them might be
offended. If any of my readers happen to be able to identify any one
Teacup by some accidental circumstance,--say, for instance, Number Five,
by the incident of her burning the diamond,--I hope they will keep quiet
about it. Number Five does n't want to be pointed out in the street as
the extravagant person who makes use of such expensive fuel, for the
story would soon grow to a statement that she always uses diamonds,
instead of cheaper forms of carbon, to heat her coffee with. So with
other members of the circle. The “Cracked Teacup,” Number Seven, would
not, perhaps, be pleased to recognize himself under that title. I repeat
it, therefore, Do not try to identify the individual Teacups. You will
not get them right; or, if you do, you may too probably make trouble.
How is it possible that I can keep up my freedom of intercourse with you
all if you insist on bellowing my “asides” through a speaking-trumpet?
Besides, you cannot have failed to see that there are strong symptoms
of the springing up of delicate relations between some of our number. I
told you how it would be. It did not require a prophet to foresee that
the saucy intruder who, as Mr. Willis wrote, and the dear dead girls
used to sing, in our young days,
“Taketh every form of air,
And every shape of earth,
And comes unbidden everywhere,
Like thought's mysterious birth,”
would pop his little curly head up between one or more pairs of Teacups.
If you will stop these questions, then, I will go on with my reports of
what was said and done at our meetings over the teacups.
Of all things beautiful in this fair world, there is nothing so
enchanting to look upon, to dream about, as the first opening of the
flower of young love. How closely the calyx has hidden the glowing
leaves in its quiet green mantle! Side by side, two buds have been
tossing jauntily in the breeze, often brought very near to each
other, sometimes touching for a moment, with a secret thrill in their
close-folded heart-leaves, it may be, but still the cool green sepals
shutting tight over the burning secret within. All at once a morning ray
touches one of the two buds, and the point of a blushing petal betrays
the imprisoned and swelling blossom.
--Oh, no, I did not promise a love-story. There may be a little
sentiment now and then, but these papers are devoted chiefly to the
opinions, prejudices, fancies, whims, of myself, The Dictator, and
others of The Teacups who have talked or written for the general benefit
of the company.
Here are some of the remarks I made the other evening on the subject of
Intellectual Over-Feeding and its consequence, Mental Dyspepsia. There
is something positively appalling in the amount of printed matter
yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, secreted by that great gland of the
civilized organism, the press. I need not dilate upon this point, for it
is brought home to every one of you who ever looks into a bookstore or a
public library. So large is the variety of literary products continually
coming forward, forced upon the attention of the reader by stimulating
and suggestive titles, commended to his notice by famous names,
recasting old subjects and developing and illustrating new ones, that
the mind is liable to be urged into a kind of unnatural hunger, leading
to a repletion which is often followed by disgust and disturbed nervous
conditions as its natural consequence.
It has long been a favorite rule with me, a rule which I have never lost
sight of, however imperfectly I have carried it out: Try to know enough
of a wide range of subjects to profit by the conversation of intelligent
persons of different callings and various intellectual gifts and
acquisitions. The cynic will paraphrase this into a shorter formula: Get
a smattering in every sort of knowledge. I must therefore add a second
piece of advice: Learn to hold as of small account the comments of
the cynic. He is often amusing, sometimes really witty, occasionally,
without meaning it, instructive; but his talk is to profitable
conversation what the stone is to the pulp of the peach, what the cob
is to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn. Once more: Do not be bullied
out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant,
with all his knowledge and valuable qualities, and will “cavil on the
ninth part of a hair,” if it will give him a chance to show off his idle
erudition.
I saw attributed to me, the other day, the saying, “Know something about
everything, and everything about something.” I am afraid it does not
belong to me, but I will treat it as I used to treat a stray boat which
came through my meadow, floating down the Housatonic,--get hold of it
and draw it ashore, and hold on to it until the owner turns up. If this
precept is used discreetly, it is very serviceable; but it is as well
to recognize the fact that you cannot know something about everything
in days like these of intellectual activity, of literary and scientific
production. We all feel this. It makes us nervous to see the shelves of
new books, many of which we feel as if we ought to read, and some among
them to study. We must adopt some principle of selection among the books
outside of any particular branch which we may have selected for study.
I have often been asked what books I would recommend for a course of
reading. I have always answered that I had a great deal rather take
advice than give it. Fortunately, a number of scholars have furnished
lists of books to which the inquirer may be directed. But the worst of
it is that each student is in need of a little library specially adapted
to his wants. Here is a young man writing to me from a Western college,
and wants me to send him a list of the books which I think would be most
useful to him. He does not send me his intellectual measurements, and he
might as well have sent to a Boston tailor for a coat, without any hint
of his dimensions in length, breadth, and thickness.
But instead of laying down rules for reading, and furnishing lists
of the books which should be read in order, I will undertake the much
humbler task of giving a little quasi-medical advice to persons, young
or old, suffering from book-hunger, book-surfeit, book-nervousness,
book-indigestion, book-nausea, and all other maladies which, directly or
indirectly, may be traced to books, and to which I could give Greek or
Latin names if I thought it worth while.
I have a picture hanging in my library, a lithograph, of which many
of my readers may have seen copies. It represents a gray-haired old
book-lover at the top of a long flight of steps. He finds himself in
clover, so to speak, among rare old editions, books he has longed
to look upon and never seen before, rarities, precious old volumes,
incunabula, cradle-books, printed while the art was in its infancy,--its
glorious infancy, for it was born a giant. The old bookworm is so
intoxicated with the sight and handling of the priceless treasures that
he cannot bear to put one of the volumes back after he has taken it from
the shelf. So there he stands,--one book open in his hands, a volume
under each arm, and one or more between his legs,--loaded with as many
as he can possibly hold at the same time.
Now, that is just the way in which the extreme form of book-hunger shows
itself in the reader whose appetite has become over-developed. He
wants to read so many books that he over-crams himself with the crude
materials of knowledge, which become knowledge only when the mental
digestion has time to assimilate them. I never can go into that famous
“Corner Bookstore” and look over the new books in the row before me, as
I enter the door, without seeing half a dozen which I want to read,
or at least to know something about. I cannot empty my purse of its
contents, and crowd my bookshelves with all those volumes. The titles
of many of them interest me. I look into one or two, perhaps. I have
sometimes picked up a line or a sentence, in these momentary glances
between the uncut leaves of a new book, which I have never forgotten. As
a trivial but bona fide example, one day I opened a book on duelling. I
remember only these words: “Conservons-la, cette noble institution.” I
had never before seen duelling called a noble institution, and I wish
I had taken the name of the book. Book-tasting is not necessarily
profitless, but it is very stimulating, and makes one hungry for more
than he needs for the nourishment of his thinking-marrow. To feed this
insatiable hunger, the abstracts, the reviews, do their best. But these,
again, have grown so numerous and so crowded with matter that it is hard
to find time to master their contents. We are accustomed, therefore,
to look for analyses of these periodicals, and at last we have placed
before us a formidable-looking monthly, “The Review of Reviews.” After
the analyses comes the newspaper notice; and there is still room for the
epigram, which sometimes makes short work with all that has gone before
on the same subject.
It is just as well to recognize the fact that if one should read day and
night, confining himself to his own language, he could not pretend to
keep up with the press. He might as well try to race with a locomotive.
The first discipline, therefore, is that of despair. If you could stick
to your reading day and night for fifty years, what a learned idiot you
would become long before the half-century was over! Well, then, there
is no use in gorging one's self with knowledge, and no need of
self-reproach because one is content to remain more or less ignorant of
many things which interest his fellow-creatures. We gain a good deal of
knowledge through the atmosphere; we learn a great deal by accidental
hearsay, provided we have the mordant in our own consciousness which
makes the wise remark, the significant fact, the instructive incident,
take hold upon it. After the stage of despair comes the period of
consolation. We soon find that we are not so much worse off than most of
our neighbors as we supposed. The fractional value of the wisest shows a
small numerator divided by an infinite denominator of knowledge.
I made some explanations to The Teacups, the other evening, which they
received very intelligently and graciously, as I have no doubt the
readers of these reports of mine will receive them. If the reader will
turn back to the end of the fourth number of these papers, he will find
certain lines entitled, “Cacoethes Scribendi.” They were said to have
been taken from the usual receptacle of the verses which are contributed
by The Teacups, and, though the fact was not mentioned, were of my own
composition. I found them in manuscript in my drawer, and as my subject
had naturally suggested the train of thought they carried out into
extravagance, I printed them. At the same time they sounded very
natural, as we say, and I felt as if I had published them somewhere or
other before; but I could find no evidence of it, and so I ventured to
have them put in type.
And here I wish to take breath for a short, separate paragraph. I have
often felt, after writing a line which pleased me more than common, that
it was not new, and perhaps was not my own. I have very rarely, however,
found such a coincidence in ideas or expression as would be enough to
justify an accusation of unconscious plagiarism,--conscious plagiarism
is not my particular failing. I therefore say my say, set down my
thought, print my line, and do not heed the suspicion that I may not
be as original as I supposed, in the passage I have been writing. My
experience may be worth something to a modest young writer, and so
I have interrupted what I was about to say by intercalating this
paragraph.
In this instance my telltale suspicion had not been at fault. I had
printed those same lines, years ago, in “The Contributors' Club,” to
which I have rarely sent any of my prose or verse. Nobody but the
editor has noticed the fact, so far as I know. This is consoling, or
mortifying, I hardly know which. I suppose one has a right to plagiarize
from himself, but he does not want to present his work as fresh from the
workshop when it has been long standing in his neighbor's shop-window.
But I have just received a letter from a brother of the late Henry
Howard Brownell, the poet of the Bay Fight and the River Fight, in
which he quotes a passage from an old book, “A Heroine, Adventures of
Cherubina,” which might well have suggested my own lines, if I had
ever seen it. I have not the slightest recollection of the book or the
passage. I think its liveliness and “local color” will make it
please the reader, as it pleases me, more than my own more prosaic
extravagances: