“If Black Sea, Red Sea, White Sea, ran
One tide of ink to Ispahan,
If all the geese in Lincoln fens
Produced spontaneous well-made pens,
If Holland old and Holland new
One wondrous sheet of paper grew,
And could I sing but half the grace
Of half a freckle in thy face,
Each syllable I wrote would reach
From Inverness to Bognor's beach,
Each hair-stroke be a river Rhine,
Each verse an equinoctial line!”
“The immediate dismissal of the 'little maid' was the consequence.”
I may as well say that our Delilah was not in the room when the last
sentence was read.
Readers must be either very good-natured or very careless. I have laid
myself open to criticism by more than one piece of negligence, which has
been passed over without invidious comment by the readers of my papers.
How could I, for instance, have written in my original “copy” for the
printer about the fisherman baiting his hook with a giant's tail instead
of a dragon's? It is the automatic fellow,--Me--Number-Two of our
dual personality,--who does these things, who forgets the message
Me--Number--One sends down to him from the cerebral convolutions, and
substitutes a wrong word for the right one. I suppose Me--Number--Two
will “sass back,” and swear that “giant's” was the message which came
down from headquarters. He is always doing the wrong thing and excusing
himself. Who blows out the gas instead of shutting it off? Who puts the
key in the desk and fastens it tight with the spring lock? Do you
mean to say that the upper Me, the Me of the true thinking-marrow, the
convolutions of the brain, does not know better? Of course he does, and
Me-Number-Two is a careless servant, who remembers some old direction,
and follows that instead of the one just given.
Number Seven demurred to this, and I am not sure that he is wrong in so
doing. He maintains that the automatic fellow always does just what he
is told to do. Number Five is disposed to agree with him. We will talk
over the question.
But come, now, why should not a giant have a tail as well as a dragon?
Linnaeus admitted the homo caudatus into his anthropological catalogue.
The human embryo has a very well marked caudal appendage; that is, the
vertebral column appears prolonged, just as it is in a young quadruped.
During the late session of the Medical Congress at Washington, my
friend Dr. Priestley, a distinguished London physician, of the highest
character and standing, showed me the photograph of a small boy, some
three or four years old, who had a very respectable little tail, which
would have passed muster on a pig, and would have made a frog or a toad
ashamed of himself. I have never heard what became of the little boy,
nor have I looked in the books or journals to find out if there are
similar cases on record, but I have no doubt that there are others. And
if boys may have this additional ornament to their vertebral columns,
why not men? And if men, why not giants? So I may not have made a very
bad blunder, after all, and my reader has learned something about the
homo caudatus as spoken of by Linnxus, and as shown me in photograph by
Dr. Priestley. This child is a candidate for the vacant place of Missing
Link.
In accounting for the blunders, and even gross blunders, which, sooner
or later, one who writes much is pretty sure to commit, I must not
forget the part played by the blind spot or idiotic area in the brain,
which I have already described.
The most knowing persons we meet with are sometimes at fault. Nova
onania possumus omnes is not a new nor profound axiom, but it is well to
remember it as a counterpoise to that other truly American saying of the
late Mr. Samuel Patch, “Some things can be done as well as others.” Yes,
some things, but not all things. We all know men and women who hate
to admit their ignorance of anything. Like Talkative in “Pilgrim's
Progress,” they are ready to converse of “things heavenly or things
earthly; things moral or things evangelical; things sacred or things
profane; things past or things to come; things foreign or things at
home; things more essential or things circumstantial.”
Talkative is apt to be a shallow fellow, and to say foolish things about
matters he only half understands, and yet he has his place in
society. The specialists would grow to be intolerable, were they not
counterpoised to some degree by the people of general intelligence. The
man who knows too much about one particular subject is liable to become
a terrible social infliction. Some of the worst bores (to use plain
language) we ever meet with are recognized as experts of high grade in
their respective departments. Beware of making so much as a pinhole in
the dam that holds back their knowledge. They ride their hobbies without
bit or bridle. A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly
more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.
One of the best offices which women perform for men is that of tasting
books for them. They may or may not be profound students,--some of
them are; but we do not expect to meet women like Mrs. Somerville, or
Caroline Herschel, or Maria Mitchell at every dinner-table or afternoon
tea. But give your elect lady a pile of books to look over for you, and
she will tell you what they have for her and for you in less time than
you would have wasted in stupefying yourself over a single volume.
One of the encouraging signs of the times is the condensed and
abbreviated form in which knowledge is presented to the general reader.
The short biographies of historic personages, of which within the past
few years many have been published, have been a great relief to the
large class of readers who want to know something, but not too much,
about them.
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling
that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only
long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred? Many readers remember
what old Rogers, the poet, said:
“When I hear a new book talked about or have it pressed upon me, I read
an old one.”
Happy the man who finds his rest in the pages of some favorite classic!
I know no reader more to be envied than that friend of mine who for many
years has given his days and nights to the loving study of Horace. After
a certain period in life, it is always with an effort that we admit
a new author into the inner circle of our intimates. The Parisian
omnibuses, as I remember them half a century ago,--they may still keep
to the same habit, for aught that I know,--used to put up the sign
“Complet” as soon as they were full. Our public conveyances are never
full until the natural atmospheric pressure of sixteen pounds to the
square inch is doubled, in the close packing of the human sardines that
fill the all-accommodating vehicles. A new-comer, however well mannered
and well dressed, is not very welcome under these circumstances. In the
same way, our tables are full of books half-read and books we feel that
we must read. And here come in two thick volumes, with uncut leaves, in
small type, with many pages, and many lines to a page,--a book that must
be read and ought to be read at once. What a relief to hand it over to
the lovely keeper of your literary conscience, who will tell you all
that you will most care to know about it, and leave you free to plunge
into your beloved volume, in which you are ever finding new beauties,
and from which you rise refreshed, as if you had just come from the cool
waters of Hippocrene! The stream of modern literature represented by
the books and periodicals on the crowded counters is a turbulent and
clamorous torrent, dashing along among the rocks of criticism, over
the pebbles of the world's daily events; trying to make itself seen and
heard amidst the hoarse cries of the politicians and the rumbling wheels
of traffic. The classic is a still lakelet, a mountain tarn, fed by
springs that never fail, its surface never ruffled by storms,--always
the same, always smiling a welcome to its visitor. Such is Horace to
my friend. To his eye “Lydia, dic per omnes” is as familiar as “Pater
noster qui es in caelis” to that of a pious Catholic. “Integer vitae,”
which he has put into manly English, his Horace opens to as Watt's
hymn-book opens to “From all that dwell below the skies.” The more he
reads, the more he studies his author, the richer are the treasures he
finds. And what Horace is to him, Homer, or Virgil, or Dante is to many
a quiet reader, sick to death of the unending train of bookmakers.
I have some curious books in my library, a few of which I should like to
say something about to The Teacups, when they have no more immediately
pressing subjects before them. A library of a few thousand volumes ought
always to have some books in it which the owner almost never opens, yet
with whose backs he is so well acquainted that he feels as if he knew
something of their contents. They are like those persons whom we meet in
our daily walks, with whose faces and figures, whose summer and winter
garments, whose walking-sticks and umbrellas even, we feel acquainted,
and yet whose names, whose business, whose residences, we know nothing
about. Some of these books are so formidable in their dimensions, so
rusty and crabbed in their aspect, that it takes a considerable amount
of courage to attack them.
I will ask Delilah to bring down from my library a very thick, stout
volume, bound in parchment, and standing on the lower shelf, next the
fireplace. The pretty handmaid knows my books almost as if she were my
librarian, and I don't doubt she would have found it if I had given only
the name on the back.
Delilah returned presently, with the heavy quarto in her arms. It was a
pleasing sight,--the old book in the embrace of the fresh young damsel.
I felt, on looking at them, as I did when I followed the slip of a girl
who conducted us in the Temple, that ancient building in the heart of
London. The long-enduring monuments of the dead do so mock the fleeting
presence of the living!
Is n't this book enough to scare any of you? I said, as Delilah dumped
it down upon the table. The teacups jumped from their saucers as it
thumped on the board. Danielis Georgii Morhofii Polyhistor, Literarius,
Philosophicus et Poeticus. Lubecae MDCCXXXIII. Perhaps I should not have
ventured to ask you to look at this old volume, if it had not been for
the fact that Dr. Johnson mentions Morohof as the author to whom he was
specially indebted.--more, I think, than to any other. It is a grand
old encyclopaedic summary of all the author knew about pretty nearly
everything, full of curious interest, but so strangely mediaeval, so
utterly antiquated in most departments of knowledge, that it is hard
to believe the volume came from the press at a time when persons whom I
well remember were living. Is it possible that the books which have been
for me what Morhof was for Dr. Johnson can look like that to the student
of the year 1990?
Morhof was a believer in magic and the transmutation of metals. There
was always something fascinating to me in the old books of alchemy. I
have felt that the poetry of science lost its wings when the last powder
of projection had been cast into the crucible, and the fire of the last
transmutation furnace went out. Perhaps I am wrong in implying that
alchemy is an extinct folly. It existed in New England's early days, as
we learn from the Winthrop papers, and I see no reason why gold-making
should not have its votaries as well as other popular delusions.
Among the essays of Morhof is one on the “Paradoxes of the Senses.”
That title brought to mind the recollection of another work I have
been meaning to say something about, at some time when you were in
the listening mood. The book I refer to is “A Budget of Paradoxes,” by
Augustus De Morgan. De Morgan is well remembered as a very distinguished
mathematician, whose works have kept his name in high honor to the
present time. The book I am speaking of was published by his widow,
and is largely made up of letters received by him and his comments upon
them. Few persons ever read it through. Few intelligent readers ever
took it up and laid it down without taking a long draught of its
singular and interesting contents. The letters are mostly from that
class of persons whom we call “cranks,” in our familiar language.
At this point Number Seven interrupted me by calling out, “Give us some
of those cranks' letters. A crank is a man who does his own thinking. I
had a relation who was called a crank. I believe I have been spoken of
as one myself. That is what you have to expect if you invent anything
that puts an old machine out of fashion, or solve a problem that has
puzzled all the world up to your time. There never was a religion
founded but its Messiah was called a crank. There never was an idea
started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its
originator was spoken of as a crank. Do you want to know why that name
is given to the men who do most for the world's progress? I will tell
you. It is because cranks make all the wheels in all the machinery of
the world go round. What would a steam-engine be without a crank? I
suppose the first fool that looked on the first crank that was ever
made asked what that crooked, queer-looking thing was good for. When the
wheels got moving he found out. Tell us something about that book which
has so much to say concerning cranks.”
Hereupon I requested Delilah to carry back Morhof, and replace him in
the wide gap he had left in the bookshelf. She was then to find and
bring down the volume I had been speaking of.
Delilah took the wisdom of the seventeenth century in her arms, and
departed on her errand. The book she brought down was given me some
years ago by a gentleman who had sagaciously foreseen that it was just
one of those works which I might hesitate about buying, but should be
well pleased to own. He guessed well; the book has been a great source
of instruction and entertainment to me. I wonder that so much time and
cost should have been expended upon a work which might have borne
a title like the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus; and yet it is such a
wonderful museum of the productions of the squinting brains belonging to
the class of persons commonly known as cranks that we could hardly spare
one of its five hundred octavo pages.
Those of us who are in the habit of receiving letters from all sorts
of would-be-literary people--letters of inquiry, many of them with
reference to matters we are supposed to understand--can readily see how
it was that Mr. De Morgan, never too busy to be good-natured with the
people who pestered--or amused-him with their queer fancies, received
such a number of letters from persons who thought they had made great
discoveries, from those who felt that they and their inventions and
contrivances had been overlooked, and who sought in his large charity
of disposition and great receptiveness a balm for their wounded feelings
and a ray of hope for their darkened prospects.
The book before us is made up from papers published in “The Athenaeum,”
with additions by the author. Soon after opening it we come to names
with which we are familiar, the first of these, that of Cornelius
Agrippa, being connected with the occult and mystic doctrines dealt
with by many of De Morgan's correspondents. But the name most likely to
arrest us is that of Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic,
and martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great
horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De
Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: “Giordano Bruno
was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes,
an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be
easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about
1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the
maintenance and defence of the Holy Church, and the rights and liberties
of the same.”
Number Seven could not contain himself when the reading had reached this
point. He rose from his chair, and tinkled his spoon against the side of
his teacup. It may have been a fancy, but I thought it returned a sound
which Mr. Richard Briggs would have recognized as implying an organic
defect. But Number Seven did not seem to notice it, or, if he did, to
mind it.
“Why did n't we all have a chance to help erect that statue?” he cried.
“A murdered heretic at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a hero
of knowledge in the nineteenth,--I drink to the memory of the roasted
crank, Giordano Bruno!”
Number Seven lifted his teacup to his lips, and most of us followed his
example.
After this outburst of emotion and eloquence had subsided, and the
teaspoons lay quietly in their saucers, I went on with my extract from
the book I had in hand.
I think, I said, that the passage which follows will be new and
instructive to most of the company. De Morgan's interpretation of the
cabalistic sentence, made up as you will find it, is about as ingenious
a piece of fanciful exposition as you will be likely to meet with
anywhere in any book, new or old. I am the more willing to mention it
as it suggests a puzzle which some of the company may like to work upon.
Observe the character and position of the two distinguished philosophers
who did not think their time thrown away in laboring at this seemingly
puerile task.
“There is a kind of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of
the numerals in words would do well to take up; it is the formation of
sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only
once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you
and I can do it. Dr. Whewell and I amused ourselves some years ago with
attempts. He could not make sense, though he joined words he gave me
Phiz, styx, wrong, buck, flame, quiz.
“I gave him the following, which he agreed was 'admirable sense,'--I
certainly think the words would never have come together except in this
way: I quartz pyx who fling muck beds. I long thought that no human
being could say this under any circumstances. At last I happened to
be reading a religious writer,--as he thought himself,--who threw
aspersions on his opponents thick and threefold. Heyday came into my
head; this fellow flings muck beds; he must be a quartz pyx. And then I
remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone,
as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser. So that the line is the
motto of the ferocious sectarian who turns his religious vessels into
mud-holders, for the benefit of those who will not see what he sees.”
“There are several other sentences given, in which all the letters
(except v and j as consonants) are employed, of which the following
is the best: Get nymph; quiz sad brow; fix luck,--which in more sober
English would be, Marry; be cheerful; watch your business. There is more
edification, more religion, in this than in all the 666 interpretations
put together.”
There is something very pleasant in the thought of these two sages
playing at jackstraws with the letters of the alphabet. The task which
De Morgan and Dr. Whewell, “the omniscient,” set themselves would not be
unworthy of our own ingenious scholars, and it might be worth while
for some one of our popular periodicals to offer a prize for the best
sentence using up the whole alphabet, under the same conditions as those
submitted to by our two philosophers.
This whole book of De Morgan's seems to me full of instruction. There is
too much of it, no doubt; yet one can put up with the redundancy for the
sake of the multiplicity of shades of credulity and self-deception it
displays in broad daylight. I suspect many of us are conscious of
a second personality in our complex nature, which has many traits
resembling those found in the writers of the letters addressed to Mr. De
Horgan.
I have not ventured very often nor very deeply into the field of
metaphysics, but if I were disposed to make any claim in that direction,
it would be the recognition of the squinting brain, the introduction of
the term “cerebricity” corresponding to electricity, the idiotic area in
the brain or thinking-marrow, and my studies of the second member in the
partnership of I-My-Self & Co. I add the Co. with especial reference to
a very interesting article in a late Scribner, by my friend Mr. William
James. In this article the reader will find a full exposition of the
doctrine of plural personality illustrated by striking cases. I have
long ago noticed and referred to the fact of the stratification of
the currents of thought in three layers, one over the other. I have
recognized that where there are two individuals talking together there
are really six personalities engaged in the conversation. But the
distinct, separable, independent individualities, taking up conscious
life one after the other, are brought out by Mr. James and the
authorities to which he refers as I have not elsewhere seen them
developed.
Whether we shall ever find the exact position of the idiotic centre or
area in the brain (if such a spot exists) is uncertain. We know exactly
where the blind spot of the eye is situated, and can demonstrate it
anatomically and physiologically. But we have only analogy to lead us to
infer the possible or even probable existence of an insensible spot in
the thinking-centre. If there is a focal point where consciousness is at
its highest development, it would not be strange if near by there should
prove to be an anaesthetic district or limited space where no report
from the senses was intelligently interpreted. But all this is mere
hypothesis.
Notwithstanding the fact that I am nominally the head personage of the
circle of Teacups, I do not pretend or wish to deny that we all look to
Number Five as our chief adviser in all the literary questions that come
before us. She reads more and better than any of us. She is always
ready to welcome the first sign of genius, or of talent which approaches
genius. She makes short work with all the pretenders whose only excuse
for appealing to the public is that they “want to be famous.” She is one
of the very few persons to whom I am willing to read any one of my own
productions while it is yet in manuscript, unpublished. I know she is
disposed to make more of it than it deserves; but, on the other hand,
there are degrees in her scale of judgment, and I can distinguish very
easily what delights her from what pleases only, or is, except for her
kindly feeling to the writer, indifferent, or open to severe comment.
What is curious is that she seems to have no literary aspirations, no
desire to be known as a writer. Yet Number Five has more esprit, more
sparkle, more sense in her talk, than many a famous authoress from whom
we should expect brilliant conversation.
There are mysteries about Number Five. I am not going to describe her
personally. Whether she belongs naturally among the bright young people,
or in the company of the maturer persons, who have had a good deal
of experience of the world, and have reached the wisdom of the riper
decades without losing the graces of the earlier ones, it would be hard
to say. The men and women, young and old, who throng about her forget
their own ages. “There is no such thing as time in her presence,” said
the Professor, the other day, in speaking of her. Whether the Professor
is in love with her or not is more than I can say, but I am sure that he
goes to her for literary sympathy and counsel, just as I do. The reader
may remember what Number Five said about the possibility of her getting
a sprained ankle, and her asking the young Doctor whether he felt equal
to taking charge of her if she did. I would not for the world insinuate
that he wishes she would slip and twist her foot a little,--just a
little, you know, but so that it would have to be laid on a pillow in
a chair, and inspected, and bandaged, and delicately manipulated. There
was a banana-skin which she might naturally have trodden on, in her way
to the tea-table. Nobody can suppose that it was there except by the
most innocent of accidents. There are people who will suspect everybody.
The idea of the Doctor's putting that banana-skin there! People love to
talk in that silly way about doctors.
Number Five had promised to read us a narrative which she thought would
interest some of the company. Who wrote it she did not tell us, but I
inferred from various circumstances that she had known the writer. She
read the story most effectively in her rich, musical voice. I noticed
that when it came to the sounds of the striking clock, the ringing of
the notes was so like that which reaches us from some far-off cathedral
tower that we wanted to bow our heads, as if we had just heard a summons
to the Angelus. This was the short story that Number Five read to The
Teacups:--
I have somewhere read this anecdote. Louis the Fourteenth was looking
out, one day, from, a window of his palace of Saint-Germain. It was
a beautiful landscape which spread out before him, and the monarch,
exulting in health, strength, and the splendors of his exalted position,
felt his bosom swell with emotions of pride and happiness: Presently
he noticed the towers of a church in the distance, above the treetops.
“What building is that?” he asked. “May it please your Majesty, that is
the Church of St. Denis, where your royal ancestors have been buried for
many generations.” The answer did not “please his Royal Majesty.” There,
then, was the place where he too was to lie and moulder in the dust.
He turned, sick at heart, from the window, and was uneasy until he had
built him another palace, from which he could never be appalled by that
fatal prospect.
Something like the experience of Louis the Fourteenth was that of the
owner of