Autocrat of the Breakfast Table Part 10

3. Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to listen to a stranger is invariably declared to be a "remarkably intelligent audience."

4. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to longevity.

5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the world.

(One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember, sent short pieces to the "Pactolian" some time since, which were "respectfully declined.")

Boston is just like other places of its size;-only perhaps, considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department, superior monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the English language, it has some right to look down on the mob of cities. I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of their talent and wealth.-I have observed, by the way, that the people who really live in two great cities are by no means so jealous of each other, as are those of smaller cities situated within the intellectual basin, or _suction-range_, of one large one, of the pretensions of any other.

Don't you see why? Because their promising young author and rising lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the neighboring big city,-their prettiest girl has been exported to the same market; all their ambition points there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there. I hate little toad-eating cities.

-Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?-Oh,-an example?

Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn't you like to see me put my foot into one? With sentiments of the highest consideration I must beg leave to be excused.

Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for the convenience of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their tomahawks,)-if they have, scattered about, those mighty square houses built something more than half a century ago, and standing like architectural boulders dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left them as its monument,-if they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that push their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the side-walk,-if they have a little gra.s.s in the side-streets, enough to betoken quiet without proclaiming decay,-I think I could go to pieces, after my life's work were done, in one of those tranquil places, as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in. I visit such spots always with infinite delight. My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man live in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and, as you hold it up, you may see the sun through it by day and the stars by night.

-Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great towns?-I don't believe there is much difference. You know how they read Pope's line in the smallest town in our State of Ma.s.sachusetts?-Well, they read it

"All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!"

-Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some keep it always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some, bolted,-with a chain that will let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up, so that nothing can pa.s.s its threshold. This front-door leads into a pa.s.sage which opens into an ante-room, and this into the inferior apartments.

The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers.

There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none is given with it!

If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly p.r.o.nounce the words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,-_The Lord have mercy on your soul_! You will probably go mad within a reasonable time,-or, if you are a man, run off and die with your head on a curb-stone, in Melbourne or San Francisco,-or, if you are a woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn into a pale, jointed petrifaction that moves about as if it were alive, or play some real life-tragedy or other.

Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door.

The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very terrible at times. You can keep the world out from your front-door, or receive visitors only when you are ready for them; but those of your own flesh and blood, or of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semitones,-touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance. Married life is the school in which the most accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compa.s.s of sensibilities!

From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are struck with a cras.h.i.+ng sweep, is a range which no other instrument possesses. A few exercises on it daily at home fit a man wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely as he returns from them. No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,-parent, child, brother, sister, intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a side-door key; too many have them already.

-You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed a frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became thawed? If we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better that it should sting us and we should die than that its chill should slowly steal into our hearts; warm it we never can! I have seen faces of women that were fair to look upon, yet one could see that the icicles were forming round these women's hearts. I knew what freezing image lay on the white b.r.e.a.s.t.s beneath the laces!

A very simple _intellectual_ mechanism answers the necessities of friends.h.i.+p, and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a watch tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry it about with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand and is not a repeater, nor a musical watch,-though it is not enamelled nor jewelled,-in short, though it has little beyond the wheels required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a pair of useful hands.

The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, the more trouble they are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises which are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friends.h.i.+p.-Observe, I am talking about _minds_. I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;-but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I have no question.

If one's intimate in love or friends.h.i.+p cannot or does not share all one's intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.

Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books. After all, if we think of it, most of the world's loves and friends.h.i.+ps have been between people that could not read nor spell.

But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the suns.h.i.+ne of smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,-this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,-most of all in that perpetual _auto da fe_ where young womanhood is the sacrifice.

-You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and friends.h.i.+ps of illiterate persons,-that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,-I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't think I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors. But I can't help remembering that the world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

The Hebrew patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they represent to our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I think, if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next Sat.u.r.day, we should feel honored by his company.

What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in which every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.

-I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,-said the divinity-student,-who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.

My young friend,-I replied,-the man who is never conscious of a state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of language. I can hardly believe there are any such men. Why, think for a moment of the power of music.

The nerves that make us alive to it spread out (so the Professor tells me) in the most sensitive region of the marrow just where it is widening to run upwards into the hemispheres. It has its seat in the region of sense rather than of thought. Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were, logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the reach of symbols!-Think of human pa.s.sions as compared with all phrases! Did you ever hear of a man's growing lean by the reading of "Romeo and Juliet,"

or blowing his brains out because Desdemona was maligned? There are a good many symbols, even, that are more expressive than words. I remember a young wife who had to part with her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,-namely, to waste away and die. When a man can _read_, his paroxysm of feeling is pa.s.sing. When he can _read_, his thought has slackened its hold.-You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text which lies before him. But think a moment. A child's reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of him is another. The saturation-point of each mind differs from that of every other. But I think it is as true for the small mind which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always to rise above-not the author, but the reader's mental version of the author, whoever he may be.

I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then they may drop the book, to pa.s.s at once into the region of thought without words.

We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compa.s.s of earthly intelligences.

-I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned to you some time ago,-I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind, before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, _strike in_, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births,-with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

-Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or elsewhere?-No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you my rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned.

-Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind. Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it. When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired. It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,-become at home,-entered into relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind.-Or take a simple and familiar example; Dr. Carpenter has adduced it. You forget a name, in conversation,-go on talking, without making any effort to recall it,-and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.

[Picture: Our Benj. Franklin]

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

-I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know something of his progress in the French language. I rather liked that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their portraits.

-Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. I don't know whether the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description. At any rate, when I gave my translation to B. F. to turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was meant to have some local bearing or other,-which the author, of course, didn't mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with anything on this side of the water.

[The above remarks were addressed to the school-mistress, to whom I handed the paper after looking it over. The divinity-student came and read over her shoulder,-very curious, apparently, but his eyes wandered, I thought. Fancying that her breathing was somewhat hurried and high, or _thoracic_, as my friend, the Professor, calls it, I watched her a little more closely.-It is none of my business.-After all, it is the imponderables that move the world,-heat, electricity, love. _Habet_?]

This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school French, such as you see here; don't expect too much;-the mistakes give a relish to it, I think.

LES SOCIeTeS POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.

Ces Societes la sont une Inst.i.tution pour suppleer aux besoins d'esprit et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survecu a leurs emotions a l'egard du beau s.e.xe, et qui n'ont pas la distraction de l'habitude de boire.

Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Societes, on doit avoir le moins de cheveux possible. S'il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux depilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques connaissances, n'importe dans quel genre. Des le moment qu'on ouvre la porte de la Societe, on a un grand interet dans toutes les choses dont on ne sait rien. Ainsi, un microscopiste demontre un nouveau _flexor_ du _ta.r.s.e_ d'un _melolontha vulgaris_. Douze savans improvises, portans des besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des insectes, si ce n'est les morsures du _culex_, se precipitent sur l'instrument, et voient-une grande bulle d'air, dont ils s'emerveillent avec effusion. Ce qui est un spectacle plein d'instruction-pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite Societe. Tous les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec un air d'intelligence parfaite pendant qu'ils prouvent dans un discours d'une demiheure que O6 N3 H5 C6 etc. font quelque chose qui n'est bonne a rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur tres desagreable, selon l'habitude des produits chimiques. Apres cela vient un mathematicien qui vous bourre avec des a+b et vous rapporte enfin un x+y, dont vous n'avex pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos relations avec la vie. Un naturaliste vous parle des formations speciales des animaux excessivement inconnus, dont vous n'avez jamais soupconne l'existence. Ainsi il vous decrit les _follicules_ de _l'appendix vermiformis_ d'un _dzigguetai_. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un _follicule_. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un _appendix uermiformis_. Vous n'avez jamais entendu parler du _dzigguetai_. Ainsi vous gagnez toutes ces connaisances a la fois, qui s'attachent a votre esprit comme l'eau adhere aux plumes d'un canard. On connait toutes les langues _ex officio_ en devenant membre d'une de ces Societes. Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout cela de suite, et s'instruit enormement.

Il y a deux especes d'individus qu'on trouve toujours a ces Societes: 1 Le membre a questions; 2 Le membre a "Bylaws."

La _question_ est une specialite. Celui qui en fait metier ne fait jamais des reponses. La question est une maniere tres commode de dire les choses suivantes: "Me voila! Je ne suis pas fossil, moi,-je respire encore! J'ai des idees,-voyez mon intelligence! Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de cela! Ah, nous avons un peu de sagacite, voyez vous! Nous ne sommes nullement la bete qu'on pense!"-_Le faiseur de questions donne peu d'attention aux reponses qu'on fait_; _ce n'est pas la dans sa specialite_.

Le membre a "Bylaws" est le bouchon de toutes les emotions mousseuses et genereuses qui se montrent dans la Societe. C'est un empereur manque,-un tyran a la troiseme trituration. C'est un esprit dur, borne, exact, grand dans les pet.i.tesses, pet.i.t dans les grandeurs, selon le mot du grand Jefferson. On ne l'aime pas dans la Societe, mais on le respecte et on le craint. Il n'y a qu'un mot pour ce membre audessus de "Bylaws." Ce mot est pour lui ce que l'Om est aux Hundous. C'est sa religion; il n'y a rien audela. Ce mot la c'est la CONSt.i.tUTION!

Lesdites Societes publient des feuilletons de tems en tems. On les trouve abandonnes a sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveaunes, faute de membrane cutanee, ou meme papyracee. Si on aime la botanique, on y trouve une memoire sur les coquilles; si on fait des etudes zoologiques, on square trouve un grand tas de q' v-1, ce qui doit etre infiniment plus commode que les encyclopedies. Ainsi il est clair comme la metaphysique qu'on doit devenir membre d'une Societe telle que nous decrivons.

_Recette pour le Depilatoire Physiophilosophique_

Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj.

Depilez avec. Polissez ensuite.

I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to him; and some of the company wis.h.i.+ng to hear what there was in the piece that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as well as I could, on the spot.

The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that a depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she might send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't think he'd have to do anything to the outside of his head to get into any of the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he played a part in a tabullo.

No,-said I,-I shouldn't think of printing that in English. I'll tell you why. As soon as you get a few thousand people together in a town, there is somebody that every sharp thing you say is sure to hit. What if a thing was written in Paris or in Pekin?-that makes no difference.