The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

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Remember well, good critic, (for verily bad there be,) my purposes in
this odd volume--this queer, unsophisticate, uncultivated book: to empty
my mind, to clear my brain of cobwebs, to lift off my head a porters's
load of fancy articles; and as in a bottle of bad champaign, the first
glass, leaping out hurryskurry, at a railroad pace boiling a gallop,
carries off with it bits of cork and morsels of rosin, even such is the
first ebullition of my thoughts: take them for what they are worth, and
blame no one but your discontented self that they are no better. Do you
suppose, keen sir, that I am not quite self-conscious of their
shallowness, utter contempt of subordination and selection, their empty
reasoning and pellucid vanity?--There I have saved you the labour of a
sentence, and present you with a killing verdict for myself. After a
little, perhaps, your patience may find me otherwise; of clearer flow,
but flatter flavour: these desultorinesses must first of all be
immolated, for in their Ariel state they vex me, but I bind them down
like slaving Calibans, by the magic of a pen; and glad shall I be to
victimize my monsters, eager to dissipate my musquito-like tormentors;
yea, I would "take up arms against a sea"--["Arms against a sea?"
dearest Shakspeare, would that Theobald, or Johnson's stock-butt, "the
Oxford Editor," had indeed interpolated that unconscionable image! It
has been sapiently remarked by some hornet of criticism, that
"Shakspeare was a clever man;" but cleverer far must that champion
stand forth who wars with any prospect of success upon seas; perhaps
Xerxes might have thought of it--or your Astley's brigand, who
rushes sword in hand on an ocean of green baize. Who shall cure me of
parentheses?]--well, "a sea of troubles, [thoughts trouble us more than
things--I sin again; close it;] and by opposing, end them;" that is, by
setting forth these troublous thoughts opposite, in stately black and
white, I clip their wings, and make them peck among my poultry, and not
swarm about my heaven. But soon must I be more continuous; turn over to
my future title-pages, and spare your objurgation; a little more of this
medley while the fit lasts, and afterward a staid course of better
accustomed messes; a few further variations on this lawless theme of
authorship, and then to try simpler tunes; briefly, and yet to be
grandiloquent, as a last round of this giddy climax, after noisy
clashing Chaos there shall roll out, "perfect, smooth, and round," green
young worldlets, moving in quiet harmony, and moulded with systematic
skill.

As an author, meanwhile, let man be most specifically characterized: a
real author, voluntary in his motives, but involuntary as regards his
acts authorial; full of matter, prolific of images and arguments,
teeming, bursting, with something, much, too much, to say, and well
witting how to say it: none of your poor devils compulsory from
poverty--Plutus help them!--whose penury of pocket is (pardon me) too
often equitably balanced by their emptiness of head; and far less one of
the lady's-maid school, who will glory in describing a dish of cutlets
at Calais, or an ill-trimmed bonnet, or the contents of an old maid's
reticule, or of a young gentleman's portmanteau, or those rare occasions
for sentimentality, moonlight, twilight, arbours, and cascades, in the
moderate space of an hour by Shrewsbury clock: but a man who has it
weightily upon his mind to explain himself and others, to insist,
refute, enjoin: a man--frown not, fair helpmates; the controversial pen,
as the controversial sword, be ours; we will leave your flower-beds and
sweeter human nurseries, despotism over cooks and Penelobean penance
upon carpet-work; nay, a trip to Margate prettily described, easy
lessons and gentle hymns in behalf of those dear prattlers, and for the
more coerulean sort, "lyrics to the Lost one," or stanzas on a sickly
geranium, miserably perishing in the mephitic atmosphere of routs--these
we masculine tyrants, we Dionysii of literature, ill-naturedly have
accounted your prerogatives of authorship. But who then are Sevigne and
Somerville, Edgeworth and De Stael, Barbauld and Benger, and Aikin, and
Jameson, Hemans, Landon, and a thousand more, not less learned, less
accomplished, nor less useful? Forgive, great names, my half-repeated
slander: riding with the self-conceited _cortege_ of male critics, my
boasted loyalty was well-nigh guilty of _leze majeste_: but I repudiate
the thought; my verdict shall have no reproach in it, as my championship
no fear: how much has man to learn from woman! teach us still to look on
humanity in love, on nature in thankfulness, on death without fear, on
heaven without presumption; fairest, forgive those foolish and ungallant
calumnies of my ruder sex, who boast themselves your teachers--making
yet this wise use of the slander: never be so bold in authorship, as to
hazard the loss of your sweet, retiring, modest, amiable, natural
dependence: never stand out as champions on the arena of strife, but if
you will, strew it with posies for the king of the tournament; it ill
becomes you to be wrestlers, though a Lycurgus allowed it, and Atalanta,
another Eve, was tripped up by an apple in the foot-race. So digressing,
return we to our author; to wit, a man, _homo_--a human, as they say in
the west--with news of actual value to communicate, and powers of pen
competent to do so graphically, honestly, kindly, boldly.

Much as we may emulate Homer's wordy braggadocios in boasting ourselves
far better than our fathers, still, great was the wisdom of our
ancestors: and that time-tried wisdom has given us three things that
make a man; he must build a house, have a child, write a book: and of
this triad of needfuls, who perceives not the superior and innate
majesty of the last requisite?--"Build a house?" I humbly conceive, and
steal my notion from the same ancestral source, that, in nine cases out
of ten, fools build houses for wise men to live in; besides, if houses
be made a test of supreme manhood, your modern wholesale runner-up of
lath and plaster tenements, warranted to stand seven years--provided
quadrilles be excluded, and no larger flock of guests _than six_ be
permitted to settle on one spot--such a jackal for surgeons, such a
reprobate provider for accident-wards as this, would be among our
heroes, a prize-man, the flower of the species. "Children" too?--very
happy, beautiful, heart-gladdening creations--God bless them all, and
scatter those who love them not!--but still for a proof of more than
average humanity, somewhat common, somewhat overwhelming: rabbits beat
us here, with all our fecundity, so offensive to Martineau and Malthus.
But as to "books"--common enough, too, smirks gentle reader: pardon,
courteous sir, most rare--at least in my sense; I speak not of flat
current shillings, but the bold medallions of ancient Syracuse; I heed
not the dull thousands of minted gold and silver, but the choice
coin-sculptures of Larissa and Tarentum. There do indeed flow hourly,
from an ever-welling press, rivers of words; there are indeed shoaling
us up on all sides a throng of well-bound volumes--novels, histories,
poems, plays, memoirs, and so forth--to all appearance, books: but if by
"books" be intended originality of matter, independent arguments, water
turned wine, by the miracle of right-thinking, and not a mere
re-decantering of dregs from other vessels--these many masqueraded
forms, these multiplied images of little-varied likenesses, these
Protean herds, will not stay to be counted, nor abide judgment, nor
brook scrutiny, but will merge and melt by thousands into the one, or
the two, real, original, sterling books. We live in a monopolylogue of
authorship: an idea goes forth to the world's market-place well dressed
from the wardrobe of some master-mind; it greets the public with a
captivating air, and straightway becomes the rage; it seems epidemical;
it comes out simultaneously as a piece of political economy, a
cookery-book, a tragedy, a farce, a novel, a religious experience, an
abstract _ism_, or a concrete _ology_; till the poor worn-out,
dissipated shadow of a thought looks so feeble, thin, fashionably
affected and fashionably infected, that its honest, bluff old father,
for very shame, disowns it. Thus has it come to pass, that one or two
minds, in this golden age of scribbling, have, to speak radically, been
the true originators of a million volumes, which haply shall have sprung
from the seed of some singular book, or of books counted in the dual.

Indignant authors, be not merciless on my candour: I confess too much
whereof I hold you guilty; I am one of yourselves, and I question not
that few of you can beat me in a certain sort of--I will say,
unintended, plagiarism; you are thieves--patience--I thieve from
thieves; Diogenes cannot see me any more than you; you copy phrases, I
am perpetually and unconsciously filching thoughts; my entomological
netted-scissors, wherewith I catch those small fowl on the wing, are
always within reach; you will never find me without well-tenanted
pill-boxes in my pocket, and perhaps a buzzing captive or two stuck in
spinning thraldom on my castor; you are petty larceners, I profess the
like _metier_ of intellectual abstractor; you pilfer among a crowd of
volumes, manuscripts, rare editions, conflicting commentators, and your
success depends upon reusage of the old materials; whereas I sit alone
and bookless in my dining-parlour, thinking over bygone fancies,
reconsidering exploded notions, appropriating all I find of lumber in
the warehouse of my memory, and, if need be, without scruple, quietly
digesting, as my special provender, the thoughts of others, originated
ages ago.

Is it necessary to remind you--dropping this lightsome vein for a
precious moment--that I am penning away my "crudites," off-hand, at the
top of my speed? that my set intention is, if possible, to jot down
instanter my heavy brainful, and feel for once light headed?--I stick to
my title, '_An Author's Mind_,' and that with a laudable scorn of
concealment, and an honest purpose not to pretend it better or wiser
than it is; then let no one blame me on the score of my fashion of
speech, or my sarcasms mingled with charity; for consistency with me
were inconsistent.

Neither let me, poor innocent, be accused of giving license to what a
palled public and dyspeptical reviewers will call for the thousandth
time a _cacoethes_; word of cabalistic look, unknown to Dr. Dilworth.
Truly, my masters, though disciple I be of venerable Martinus the
Scribbler; though, for aught I know, himself in progress of
transmigration; still, I submit, my cornucopia is not crammed with
leaves and chopped straw; and if, in utter carelessness, the fruit is
poured out pell-mell after this desultory fashion, yet, I wot, it _is_
fruit, though whether ripe or crude, or rotten, my husbandry takes
little thought: the mixture serves for my cider-press, and, fermentation
over, the product will be clarified. Judge me too, am I not consecutive?
I've shown man to be a writing animal; and writing, what it is and is
not; and meanwhile have been routing recreatively at pen's point whims,
and fancies, and ideas, and images, pulled in manfully by head and
shoulders: and now--after an episode, quite relevant and quite
Herodotean, concerning the consequences of a bit of successful
authorship on a man's scheme of life, to illustrate yet more the
"author's mind"--I shall proceed to tell all men how many books I might,
could, should, or would have written, but for reiterated and legitimated
_buts_, and how near of kin I must esteem myself to the illustrious J.
of nursery rhymes, being, as he is or was, "Mister Joe Jenkins, who
played on the fiddle, and began twenty tunes, but left off in the
middle." Moreover, no one can be ignorant of the close consanguinity
recognised in every age and every dictionary between I and J. But now
for the episode:

If ever a toy were symbolical of life, that toy was a kaleidoscope: the
showy bits of tinsel, coloured glass, silk, beads, and feathers, with
here and there perchance a stray piece of iridescent ore or a pin, each,
in its turn of ideal multiplication, filling successively the field of
vision; the trifling touch that will disenchant the fairest patterns;
the slightest change, as in chemical arithmetic, that will make the
whole mixture a poison or a cordial. A man is vexed, the nerve of his
equanimity thrillingly touched at the tender elbow, and forthwith his
whole wholesome body writhes in pain; while, to speak morally, those
useful reminders of life's frailty, the habitual side-thorns--spurs of
diligence, incentives to better things--are exaggerated into sixfold
spears, and terribly stop the way, like long-lanced Achaeans: a careless
fit succeeds to one of spleen, and vanity well spangled, pretty baubles,
stars and trinkets and trifles, fill their cycle, to magnetize with
folly that rolling world the brain: another twist, and love is lord
paramount, a paltry bit of glass, casually rose-coloured, shedding its
warm blush over all the reflective powers: suddenly an overcast, for
that marplot, Disappointment, has obtruded a most vexatiously reiterated
morsel of lamp-black: again Hope's little bit of blue paint makes azure
rainbows all about the firmament of man's own inner world; and at last
an atom of gold-dust specks all the glasses with its lurid yellow, and
haply leaves the old miser to his master-passion. So, ever changing day
by day, every man's life is but a kaleidoscope. Stay; this simile is
somewhat of the longest, but the whim is upon me, and I must have my
way; the fit possesses me to try a sonnet, and I shall look far for a
fairer thesis; he that hates verse--and the Muses now-a-days are too
old-maidish to look many lovers--may skip it, and no harm done; but one
or two may like this stave on

LIFE.

I saw a child with a kaleidoscope,
Turning at will the tesselated field;
And straight my mental eye became unseal'd,
I learnt of life, and read its horoscope:
Behold, how fitfully the patterns change!
The scene is azure now with hues of Hope;
Now sobered gray by Disappointment strange;
With Love's own roses blushing, warm and bright;
Black with Hate's heat, or white with Envy's cold;
Made glorious by Religion's purple light;
Or sicklied o'er with yellow lust of Gold;
So, good or evil coming, peace or strife,
Zeal when in youth, and Avarice when old,
In changeful, chanceful phases passeth life.

It is well I was not stopped before my lawful fourteenth rhyme by yonder
prosaic gentleman, humbly listening in front, who asks, with somewhat of
malicious triumph, whereto does all this lead?--Categorically, sir,
[there is no argument in the world equal to a word of six syllables,]
categorically, sir, to this: of all life's turns and twists, few things
produce more change to the daring _debutant_ than successful authorship;
it is as if, applying our simile, a fragment of printed bookishness
among those kaleidoscopic morsels, having worked its way into the field
of vision, had there got stereotyped by a photogenic process: in fact,
it fixes on it a predestinated "author's mind."

An author's mind! what a subject for the lights and shadows of
metaphysical portraiture! what a panorama of images! what a whirling
scene of ever-changing incidents! what a store-house for thoughts! what
a land of marvels! what untrodden heights, what unexplored depths of an
ever-undiscovered country! That strange world hath a structure and a
furniture all its own; its chalcedonic rocks are painted with rare
creatures floating in their liquid-seeming hardness; forms of other
spheres lie buried in its lias cliffs; seeds of unknown plants, relics
of unlimned reptiles, fragments of an old creation, the ruins of a
fanciful cosmogony, lie hid until the day of their requiral beneath its
fertile soil: and then its lawless botany; flowers of glorious hue hung
upon the trees of its forests; luscious fruits flung liberally among the
mosses of its banks; air-plants sailing in its atmosphere; unanchored
water-lilies dancing in its bright cascades; and this, too, a world, an
inner secret world, peopled with unthought images, specimens of a
peculiar creation; outlandish forms are started from its thickets, the
dragon and the cherub are numbered with its winged inhabitants, and
herds of uncouth shape pasture on its meadows. Who can sound its seas,
deep calling unto deep? who can stand upon the hill-tops, height
beckoning unto height? who can track its labyrinths? who can map its
caverns? A limitless essence, an unfailing spring, an evergreen
fruit-tree, a riddle unsolved, a quaint museum, a hot-bed of inventions,
an over-mantling tankard, a whimsical motley, a bursting volcano, a
full, independent, generous--a poor, fettered, jealous, Anomaly,
such--bear witness--is an author's mind. O, theme of many topics! chaos
of ill-sorted fancies! Let us come now to the jealousies, the real or
imaginary wrongs of authorship: hereafter treat we this at lengthier;
"for the time present"--I quote the facetious Lord Coke, when writing on
that highly exhilerating topic, the common-law--"hereof let this little
taste suffice." Is it not a wrong to be taken for a mere book-merchant,
a mercenary purveyor of learning and invention, of religion and
philosophy, of instruction, or even of amusements, for the sole
consideration of value received, as one would use a stalking-horse for
getting near a stag? this, too, when ten to one some cormorant on the
tree of knowledge, some staid-looking publisher in decent mourning, is
complacently pocketing the profits, and modestly charging you with loss?
and this, moreover and more poignantly, when the flame of responsibility
on some high subject is blazing at your heart, and the young Elihu, even
if he would, cannot keep silence? Is it not a wrong to find pearls
unprized, because many a modern, like his Celtic progenitors, (for I
must not say like swine,) would sooner crush an acorn? to know your
estimation among men ebbs and flows according to the accident of
success, rather than the quality of merit? to be despised as an animal
who must necessarily be living on his wits in some purlieu, answering to
that antiquated reproach, a Grub-street attic; or suspected among
gentler company in this most mercantile age for a pickpocket, a pauper,
a _chevalier d'industrie_? And then those hounds upon the bleeding
flanks of many a hunted author, those open-mouthed inexorable critics,
(I allude to the Pariah class, not to the higher caste brethren,) how
suddenly they rend one, and fear not! Only for others do I speak, and in
no degree on account of having felt their fangs, as many have done, my
betters; gentle and kind, as domesticated spaniels, have reviewers in
general been to your humble confessor, and for such courtesies is he
their debtor. But who can be ignorant how frequently some hapless writer
is impaled alive on the stake of ridicule, that a flagging magazine may
be served up with _sauce piquante_, and pander to the world for its
waning popularity by the malice of a pungent article? who, while as a
rule he may honour the bench of critics for patience, talent, and
impartiality, is not conusant of those exceptions, not seldom of
occurence, where obvious rancour has caused the unkindly condemnation;
where personal inveteracy aims from behind the Ajax shield of anonymous
reviewing, and shoots, like a cowardly Teucer, the foe fair-exposed
whom he dares not fight with?--But, as will be seen hereafter, I
trespass on a title-page, and here will add no more than this: Is it not
a wrong of double edge, that while the world makes no excuse for the
writhing writer, on the reasonable ground that after all he may be
innocent of what his critics blame him for, the same good-natured world,
on almost every occasion of magazine applause, believes either that the
author has written for himself the favourable notice, or that pecuniary
bribes have made the honest editor his tool? Verily, my public, thou art
not generous here; ay, and thou art grievously deceived, as well as
sordid: for by careless praise, causeless censure, credit given for
corrupt bribery, and no allowance made for unamiable criticisms, poor
maltreated authors speak to many wrongs: and of them more anon.

What moreover shall we say of chilling friendships, near estrangements,
heartless lovers loitering behind, shy acquaintance dropping off?
Verily, there is a mighty sifting: you have dared to stand alone, have
expounded your mind in imperishable print, have manifested wit enough to
outface folly, sufficient moral courage to condemn vice, and more than
is needful of good wisdom to shame the oracles of worldliness: and so
some dread you, some hate, and many shun: the little selfish asterisks
in that small sky fly from your constellatory glories: you are
independent, a satellite of none: you have dared to think, write, print,
in all ways contrary to many; and if wise men and good be loud in their
applause, you arrive at the dignity of manifold hatreds; but if those
and their inferiors condemn, you sink into the bathos of multiplied
contempts. Of other wrongs somewhen and where, hereafter; meanwhile, a
better prospect glows on the kaleidoscopic field--a flattering accession
of new and ardent friends: "Sir," said an old priest to a young author,
"you have made a soft pillow for your head when it comes to be as white
as mine is;" a pretty saying of sweet charity, and such sink deep: as
for the younger and the warmer, being mostly of the softer sex, some
will profess admiring sensations that border not a little on idolatries;
others, gayer, will appear in the dress of careless, unskillful
admiration; not a few, both men and women, go indeed weakly along with
the current stream of popularity, but, to say truth, look happiest when
they find some stinging notice that may mortify the new bold candidate
for glory; while, last and best, a fewer, a very much fewer, do
handsomely the liberal part of friends, commending where they can,
objecting where they must, sincere in sorrow for a fault, rejoicing
without envy for a virtue.

Many like phenomena has authorship: a certain class of otherwise
humanized and well-intentioned people begin to regard your scribe as a
monster--not a so-called "lion" to be sought, but some strange creature
to be dreaded: Perdition! what if he should be cogitating a novel or a
play, and means to make free with our characters? what if that libellous
coepartnership of Saunders and Ottley is permitted to display our faults
and foibles, flimsily disguised, before a mocking world? Disappointed
maidens that hover on the verge of forty, and can sympathize with
Jephtha's daughter in her lonely mournings, causelessly begin to fear
that a mischievous author may appropriate their portraits; venerable
bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the
diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling
in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque;
table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff
intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling
stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose
very trail robs them of light, or as paling glow-worms hide away before
some prying lantern; and all who have in one way or another prided
themselves on some harmless peculiarity, avoid his penetrating glance as
the eye of a basilisk. Then, again, those casual encounters of witlings
in the world authorial, so anticipated by a hostess, so
looked-forward-to by guests! In most cases, how forlorn they be! how
dull; constrained, suspicious! like rival traders, with pockets
instinctively buttoned up, and glaring each upon the other with most
uncommunicative aspects; not brothers at a banquet, but combatants and
wrestlers, watching for solecisms in the other's talk, or toiling to
drag in some laboured witticism of their own, after the classical
precedent of Hercules and Cerberus: those feasts of reason, how vapid!
those flows of soul, how icily congealing! those Attic nights, how dim
and dismal! Once more; and, remember me, I speak in a personated
character of the general, and not experimentally; so, flinging self
aside, let me speak what I have seen: grant that the world-without crown
a man with bays, and lead him to his Theban home with tokens of
rejoicing; is the victor there set on high, chapleted, and honoured as
Nemean heroes should be or does he not rather droop instantly again into
the obscure unit among a level mass, only the less welcome for having
stood up, a Saul or a Musaeus, with his head above his fellows? Verily,
no man is a proph--Enough, enough! for ours is a prerogative, a glorious
calling, and the crown of barren leaves is costlier than his of Rabbah;
enough, enough! sing we the praises, count we well the pleasures of
fervent, overflowing authorship. There, in perfect shape before the
eyes--there, well born in beauty--there perpetually (so your fondness
hopes) to live--slumbers in her best white robe the mind's own fairest
daughter; the Minerva has sprung in panoply from that parental aching
head, and stands in her immortal independence; an Eve, his own heart's
fruit, welcomes delighted Adam. You have made something, some good work,
bodily; your communion has commenced with those of times to come; your
mind has produced a witness to its individuality; there is a tablet
sacred to its memory standing among men for ever.