In days agone, if things tasted good we called them “toothsome.” We
did not work the subject out according to the Herbert Spencer Law of
Synthesis, but we dimly felt that teeth and taste were closely akin.
And therein were we quite correct ❦ The widow who declined to marry the
man, and on being discreetly pressed for a reason, abruptly declared
with a Marie Corelli defiance that it was because he did not have the
Dental-Floss Habit, was right in her instincts. She would rid her of the
reek before she took it on as a life lease. For it is just such little
things that make or mar, when we have sworn to love, honor and humor,
and face the party over the coffee-urn every morning for ninety-nine
years. The gentleman was not personally pleasant, and although he may
have had a college degree, social position and spondulex, yet a breath
that would stop a watch put him to the bad, and rightly so. ¶ To such
a one she could never murmur soft and low the word “Mizpah!” Nor could
he salvo his kismet magnum and get it back again according to the
Aristotelian laws of action and reaction. For gentlemen who are not
toothsome are never socially gladsome. If my years were not as those
of the pterodactyl, and I wanted to win the love of a woman, I would
look well to my molars. ¶ Brain, brawn, and the graceful two-step are
as naught when toothsomeness is actively absent. Shakespeare had these
two things in mind when he referred to a “barber’s breath,” and “the
breath of an unfee’d attorney,” which items do not come to us as the
breath of Spring. Abjure the weed and rice-paper, eliminate the elevated
spheroid, and look you to your teeth, Cecil, to your teeth, I say. And
the rest follows. We all have our opinions in matters of medicine, but
no one knocks on the dentist. Is love then a matter of toothsomeness? ❦
I do not speak by the card, for my knowledge along this line is merely
academic, yet a woman I know says, “Yes.” ¶ But seemingly, decayed teeth
would give Cupid a pain in his wee tummy small. Decayed politics are
bad; decayed literature is worse; and to love a person with decayed
molars would be like loving a mummy with tainted morals. The increase
in divorce, and the much marital woe of which we hear, are doubtless
due to lack of toothsomeness ❦ The parties grin and bear it as long as
they can—some declining to grin—and then strike for freedom, fresh air
and the open road. ¶ Aside from the esthetics of bad teeth, there is
the esoterics, and worse than that, is the hypersthenia which leads to
language non-ethical, offensive, irrelevant and uncalled for. ¶ A very
slight irritation in the teeth throws the soul on the horn of the saddle.
To be sane and serene you have to be sound and salient. We do business on
a mighty small spiritual bank-balance. To carry no reserve is like firing
a boiler in which the gauges show no water. In fact, it means a very
great danger of an explosion—and the grave necessity of being sent to the
hospital and having the stub-end of your self-respect removed. An aching
tooth or a tooth of which you are conscious draws mightily on your mental
reserve. Morphine, or a dab of cotton soaked in chloroform, will help you
forget it, but these things are drafts on the bank of futurity and the
loan must be met with usurious interest. ¶ I once knew a playwright who
started in to write a great historical drama; but he got a toothache,
and decided to make it a farce-comedy; but all he produced was a fizzle
❦ Seldom does a man with the toothache make good; and to have cavities
in your teeth and not know it is worse than to have the toothache, since
pain is Nature’s beneficent warning ❦ So, to have decayed teeth and never
have a toothache would mean lack of sensibility, which is lack of life.
Such a one hasn’t enough nerves to make him irritable, much less to give
him artistic grouch ❦ And grouch is unused or misused energy—and have
I not said that all energy is divine? You write your poem, your essay,
your play—just as you paint your picture, carve your statue, or give your
oration—out of your surplus, and never out of your capital ❦ Should you
begin to draw on your capital you get nerv. pros. or fatty degeneration
of the cerebrum, and are a candidate for Billy Muldoon’s. ¶ Is oratory
a matter of toothsomeness? Most certainly, yes ❦ The greatest orator
that New York ever produced was thrown from his artistic hobbyhorse
once and forever, when his store-teeth, in an impassioned moment, shot
over the footlights and fell with a sickening thud into the orchestra.
“Say, mister, are these your teeth?” asked a man in a front seat, as he
solemnly arose and handed up the grinders. And that broke up the meeting
❦ I once saw a man, singing the part of Tannhauser, do a similar stunt.
And we all declared that he could go down to Venusburg and stay there,
for all of us—he ceased to be interesting. ¶ Get this down as an axiom:
To speak well, or sing well, you must have good teeth ❦ The teeth are
organs of speech—auxiliary organs at least. When your voice whistles
through your teeth, and the tones come wheezy and with a sort of sad
surprise, there are soon bubbles in your think-tank, and you travel home
on your rim. It is then time to sing Tosti’s _Good-by_, and retire from
the stage, thereafter warbling only to the gallery of your psychic self ❦
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