The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858

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V.

"I consider that a good story," said the Consul, when he had
finished the narration out of which I have compounded the foregoing,--
"and, what is not always the case with a good story, it is a true one."

I cordially concurred with my honored friend in this opinion, and if
the reader should unfortunately differ from me on this point, I beg
him to believe that it is entirely my fault. As the Consul told it
to me, it was an excellent good story.

"Poor Mynheer Van Holland," he added, laughing, "never got over that
adventure. Not that the loss was material to him; he was too rich
for that; but the provocation of his fifty thousand dollars going to
a parcel of Mexican _ladrones_, after buying an opera-singer for a
Frenchman on its way, was enough to rouse even Dutch human-nature to
the swearing-point. He could not abide either Frenchmen or
opera-singers, all the rest of his life. And, by Jove, I don't
wonder at it!"

Nor I, neither, for the matter of that.

* * * * *

TWO RIVERS.

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain.

Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through passion, thought, through power and dream.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,
Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,
And where he winds is the day of day.

So forth and brighter fares my stream,--
Who drink it shall not thirst again;
No darkness stains its equal gleam,
And ages drop in it like rain.

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

[The "Atlantic" obeys the moon, and its LUNIVERSARY has come round
again. I have gathered up some hasty notes of my remarks made since
the last high tides, which I respectfully submit. Please to remember
this is _talk_; just as easy and just as formal as I choose to make
it.]

--I never saw an author in my life--saving, perhaps, one--that did
not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat, (_Felis Catus_,
LINN.,) on having his fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful hand.

But let me give you a caution. Be very careful how you tell an
author he is _droll_. Ten to one he will hate you; and if he does,
be sure he can do you a mischief, and very probably will. Say you
_cried_ over his romance or his verses, and he will love you and
send you a copy. You can laugh over that as much as you like--in
private.

--Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny?--
Why, there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The
clown knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but
with Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion
never laughs. The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a
procession.

If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more time to
tell it. There is a perfect consciousness in every form of wit--
using that term in its general sense--that its essence consists in a
partial and incomplete view of whatever it touches. It throws a
single ray, separated from the rest,--red, yellow, blue, or any
intermediate shade,--upon an object; never white light; that is the
province of wisdom. We get beautiful effects from wit,--all the
prismatic colors,--but never the object as it is in fair daylight. A
pun, which is a kind of wit, is a different and much shallower trick
in mental optics; throwing the _shadows_ of two objects so that one
overlies the other. Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects,
but always keeps its essential object in the purest white light of
truth.--Will you allow me to pursue this subject a little further?

[They didn't allow me at that time, for somebody happened to scrape
the floor with his chair just then; which accidental sound, as all
must have noticed, has the instantaneous effect that Proserpina's
cutting the yellow hair had upon infelix Dido. It broke the charm,
and that breakfast was over.]

--Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say
disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer
you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and
courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave
your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they are
ready enough to tell them. Good-breeding _never_ forgets that
_amour-propre_ is universal. When you read the story of the
Archbishop and Gil Blas, you may laugh, if you will, at the poor old
man's delusion; but don't forget that the youth was the greater fool
of the two, and that his master served such a booby rightly in
turning him out of doors.

--You need not get up a rebellion against what I say, if you find
everything in my sayings is not exactly new. You can't possibly
mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I
once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for
its latitude. On examination, I found all its erudition was taken
ready-made from D'Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should have
shown up the Professor, who had once belabored me in his feeble way,
but one can generally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough,
and they are not worth the trouble of putting them in the pillory. I
doubt the entire novelty of my remarks just made on telling
unpleasant truths, yet I am not conscious of any larceny.

Neither make too much of flaws and occasional overstatements. Some
persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly
stated propositions, is all that conversation admits. This is
precisely as if a musician should insist on having nothing but
perfect chords and simple melodies,--no diminished fifths, no flat
sevenths, no flourishes, on any account. Now it is fair to say, that,
just as music must have all these, so conversation must have its
partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths. It
is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits the ideal
element as much as pictures or statues. One man who is a little too
literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of _esprit_.--
"Yes," you say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's nonsense?
Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!"--Certainly, if a man
is too fond of paradox,--if he is flighty and empty,--if, instead
of striking those fifths and sevenths, those harmonious discords,
often so much better than the twinned octaves, in the music of
thought,--if, instead of striking these, he jangles the chords,
stick a fact into him like a stiletto. But remember that talking is
one of the fine arts,--the noblest, the most important, and the most
difficult,--and that its fluent harmonies may be spoiled by the
intrusion of a single harsh note. Therefore conversation which is
suggestive rather than argumentative, which lets out the most of
each talker's results of thought, is commonly the pleasantest and
the most profitable. It is not easy, at the best, for two persons
talking together to make the most of each other's thoughts, there
are so many of them.

[The company looked as if they wanted an explanation.]

When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it is
natural enough that among the six there should be more or less
confusion and misapprehension.

[Our landlady turned pale;--no doubt she thought there was a screw
loose in my intellects,--and that involved the probable loss of a
boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a
sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand
to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded,
with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of
the mouth, and somewhat rasping _voce di petto_, to Falstaff's nine
men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman
opposite was afraid I should seize the carving-knife; at any rate,
he slid it to one side, as it were carelessly.]

I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here, that
there are at least six personalities distinctly to be recognized as
taking part in that dialogue between John and Thomas.

{1. The real John; known only
{ to his Maker.
{
{2. John's ideal John; never the
Three Johns { real one, and often very unlike him.
{
{3. Thomas's ideal John; never
{ the real John, nor John's
{ John, but often very unlike
{ either.

{1. The real Thomas.
Three Thomases. {2. Thomas's ideal Thomas.
{3. John's ideal Thomas

Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a
platform-balance; but the other two are just as important in the
conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and
ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the
gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly
conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks
from the point of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes him to
be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he _is_, so far as
Thomas's attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful rogue,
though really simple and stupid. The same conditions apply to the
three Thomases. It follows, that, until a man can be found who knows
himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as others see him,
there must be at least six persons engaged in every dialogue between
two. Of these, the least important, philosophically speaking, is the
one that we have called the real person. No wonder two disputants
often get angry, when there are six of them talking and listening
all at the same time.

[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made by
a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at
table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known
to boarding-houses, was on its way to me _via_ this unlettered
Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket,
remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him
that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the
mean time he had eaten the peaches.]

--The opinions of relatives as to a man's powers are very commonly
of little value; not merely because they overrate their own flesh
and blood, as some may suppose; on the contrary, they are quite as
likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the habit of
considering like themselves. The advent of genius is like what
florists style the _breaking_ of a seedling tulip into what we may
call high-caste colors,--ten thousand dingy flowers, then one with
the divine streak; or, if you prefer it, like the coming up in old
Jacob's garden of that most gentlemanly little fruit, the seckel pear,
which I have sometimes seen in shop-windows. It is a surprise,--
there is nothing to account for it. All at once we find that twice
two make _five_. Nature is fond of what are called "gift-enterprises."
This little book of life which she has given into the hands of its
joint possessors is commonly one of the old story-books bound over
again. Only once in a great while there is a stately poem in it, or
its leaves are illuminated with the glories of art, or they enfold a
draft for untold values signed by the millionfold millionnaire old
mother herself. But strangers are commonly the first to find the
"gift" that came with the little book.

It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of its own
flavor. Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still
more eloquently silent animal that might be mentioned, is aware of
any personal peculiarity, may well be doubted. No man knows his
own voice; many men do not know their own profiles. Every one
remembers Carlyle's famous "Characteristics" article; allow for
exaggerations, and there is a great deal in his doctrine of the
self-unconsciousness of genius. It comes under the great law just
stated. This incapacity of knowing its own traits is often found in
the family as well as in the individual. So never mind what your
cousins, brothers, sister, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say about
the fine poem you have written, but send it (postage paid) to the
editors, if there are any, of the "Atlantic,"--which, by the way, is
not so called because it is a _notion_, as some dull wits wish they
had said, but are too late.

--Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled
with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute,
peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them
are apt to get a bullying habit of mind;--not of manners, perhaps;
they may be soft and smooth, but the smile they carry has a quiet
assertion in it, such as the Champion of the Heavy Weights, commonly
the best-natured, but not the most diffident of men, wears upon what
he very inelegantly calls his "mug." Take the man, for instance, who
deals in the mathematical sciences. There is no elasticity in a
mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it never yields a
hair's breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes in collision
with it. What the mathematician knows being absolute, unconditional,
incapable of suffering question, it should tend, in the nature of
things, to breed a despotic way of thinking. So of those who deal
with the palpable and often unmistakable facts of external nature;
only in a less degree. Every probability--and most of our common,
working beliefs are probabilities--is provided with _buffers_ at
both ends, which break the force of opposite opinions clashing
against it; but scientific certainty has no spring in it, no courtesy,
no possibility of yielding. All this must react on the minds that
handle these forms of truth.

--Oh, you need not tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most
gracious, unassuming people in the world, and yet preeminent in the
ranges of science I am referring to. I know that as well as you. But
mark this which I am going to say once for all: If I had not force
enough to project a principle full in the face of the half dozen
most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think only
in single file from this day forward. A rash man, once visiting a
certain noted institution at South Boston, ventured to express the
sentiment, that man is a rational being. An old woman who was an
attendant in the Idiot School contradicted the statement, and
appealed to the facts before the speaker to disprove it. The rash
man stuck to his hasty generalization, notwithstanding.

[--It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am associated
in my daily relations. I not unfrequently practise the divine art of
music in company with our landlady's daughter, who, as I mentioned
before, is the owner of an accordion. Having myself a well-marked
barytone voice of more than half an octave in compass, I sometimes
add my vocal powers to her execution of:

"Thou, thou reign'st in this bosom,"--

not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is
present, to prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also taken a
good deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to,
sometimes called B.F. or more frequently Frank, in imitation of that
felicitous abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience, adopted
by some of his betters. My acquaintance with the French language is
very imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere but in Paris,
which is awkward, as B.F. devoted himself to it with the peculiar
advantage of an Alsacian teacher. The boy, I think, is doing well,
between us, notwithstanding. The following is an _uncorrected_ French
exercise, written by this young gentleman. His mother thinks it very
creditable to his abilities; though, being unacquainted with the
French language, her judgment cannot be considered final.

LE RAT DES SALONS A LECTURE.

Ce rat ci est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes de derriere
sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il fait
usage pour tenir les journaux. Cet animal a le peau noir pour le
plupart, et porte un cercle blanchatre autour de son cou. On le
trouve tous les jours aux dits salons, ou il demeure, digere, s'il y
a de quoi dans son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue, dort, et
ronfle quelquefois, ayant toujours le semblance de lire. On ne sait
pas s'il a une autre gite que cela. Il a l'air d'une bete tres
stupide, mais il est d'une sagacite et d'une vitesse extraordinaire
quand il s'agit de saisir un journal nouveau. On ne sait pas
pourquoi il lit, parcequ'il ne parait pas avoir des idees. Il
vocalise rarement, mais en revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux divers.
Il porte un crayon dans une de ses poches pectorales, avec lequel
il fait des marques sur les bords des journaux et des livres,
semblable aux suivans: !!!--Bah! Pooh! Il ne faut pas cependant les
prendre pour des signes d'intelligence. Il ne vole pas, ordinairement;
il fait rarement meme des echanges de parapluie, et jamais de chapeau,
parceque son chapeau a toujours un caractere specifique. On ne sait
pas au juste ce dont il se nourrit. Feu Cuvier etait d'avis que
c'etait de l'odeur du cuir des reliures; ce qu'on dit d'etre une
nourriture animale fort saine, et peu chere. Il vit bien longtems.
Enfin il meure, en laissant a ses heritiers une carte du Salon a
Lecture ou il avait existe pendant sa vie. On pretend qu'il revient
toutes les nuits, apres la mort, visiter le Salon. On peut le voir,
dit on, a minuit, dans sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir,
et ayant a sa main un crayon de charbon. Le lendemain on trouve des
caracteres inconnus sur les bords du journal. Ce qui prouve que le
spiritulisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professors de Cambridge
sont des imbeciles qui ne savent rien du tout, du tout.

I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed to be
touched in any way, is very creditable to B.F. You observe that he
is acquiring a knowledge of zooelogy at the same time that he is
learning French. Fathers of families who take this periodical will
find it profitable to their children, and an economical mode of
instruction, to set them to revising and amending this boy's exercise.
The passage was originally taken from the "Histoire Naturelle des
Betes Ruminans et Rougeurs, Bipedes et Autres," lately published in
Paris. This was translated into English and published in London. It
was republished at Great Pedlington, with notes and additions by the
American editor. The notes consist of an interrogation-mark on page
53d, and a reference (p. 127th) to another book "edited" by the
same hand. The additions consist of the editor's name on the
title-page and back, with a complete and authentic list of said
editor's honorary titles in the first of these localities. Our boy
translated the translation back into French. This may be compared
with the original, to be found on Shelf 13, Division X, of the
Public Library of this metropolis.]

--Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don't write a
story, or a novel, or something of that kind. Instead of answering
each one of you separately, I will thank you to step up into the
wholesale department for a few moments, where I deal in answers by
the piece and by the bale.

That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for
one novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a
cherished belief. It has been maintained, on the other hand, that
many persons cannot write more than one novel,--that all after that
are likely to be failures.--Life is so much more tremendous a thing
in its heights and depths than any transcript of it can be, that all
records of human experience are as so many bound _herbaria_ to the
innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing, fragrance-laden,
poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling leaves and flowers of
the forest and the prairies. All we can do with books of human
experience is to make them alive again with something borrowed from
our own lives. We can make a book alive for us just in proportion to
its resemblance in essence or in form to our own experience. Now an
author's first novel is naturally drawn, to a great extent, from his
personal experiences; that is, is a literal copy of nature under
various slight disguises. But the moment the author gets out of his
personality, he must have the creative power, as well as the
narrative art and the sentiment, in order to tell a living story;
and this is rare.

Besides, there is great danger that a man's first life-story shall
clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts. Most lives, though
their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial waste, drop
a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along. Oftentimes a
single _cradling_ gets them all, and after that the poor man's labor
is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles. All which proves that I,
as an individual of the human family, could write one novel or story
at any rate, if I would.

--Why don't I, then?--Well, there are several reasons against it. In
the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that
verse is the proper medium for such revelations. Rhythm and rhyme
and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the fire of
imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness of a
heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in the
luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure. A beauty
shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by the glitter of her
diamonds, with such a broad snowdrift of white arms and shoulders
laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in plain calico, she would
be unendurable--in the opinion of the ladies.

Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends. I
should like to know if all story-tellers do not do this? Now I am
afraid all my friends would not bear showing up very well; for they
have an average share of the common weakness of humanity, which I am
pretty certain would come out. Of all that have told stories among us
there is hardly one I can recall that has not drawn too faithfully
some living portrait that might better have been spared.

Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be too dull
to write such a story as I should wish to write.

And finally, I think it very likely I _shall_ write a story one of
these days. Don't be surprised at anytime, if you see me coming out
with "The Schoolmistress," or "The Old Gentleman Opposite."

[_Our_ schoolmistress and _our_ old gentleman that sits opposite
had left the table before I said this.] I want my glory for writing
the same discounted now, on the spot, if you please. I will write
when I get ready. How many people live on the reputation of the
reputation they might have made!

----I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my being
too dull to write a good story. I don't pretend to know what you
meant by it, but I take occasion to make a remark that may hereafter
prove of value to some among you.--When one of us who has been led
by native vanity or senseless flattery to think himself or herself
possessed of talent arrives at the full and final conclusion that he
or she is really dull, it is one of the most tranquillizing and
blessed convictions that can enter a mortal's mind. All our failures,
our short-comings, our strange disappointments in the effect of our
efforts are lifted from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like
Christian's pack, at the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit
to deny us the pleasant gift of high intelligence, with which one
look may overflow us in some wider sphere of being.

----How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, "I hate
books!" A gentleman,--singularly free from affectations,--not learned,
of course, but of perfect breeding, which is often so much better
than learning,--by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge of the
world and society, but certainly not clever either in the arts or
sciences,--his company is pleasing to all who know him. I did not
recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so distinctly as
I did simplicity of character and fearless acknowledgment of his
inaptitude for scholarship. In fact, I think there are a great many
gentlemen and others, who read with a mark to keep their place, that
really "hate books," but never had the wit to find it out, or the
manliness to own it.

[_Entre nous_, I always read with a mark.]

We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an "intellectual man"
was, as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or thereabouts,
of book-learning, and one-tenth himself. But even if he is actually
so compounded, he need not read much. Society is a strong solution
of books. It draws the virtue out of what is best worth reading, as
hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves. If I were a prince, I
would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in which I would steep
all the leaves of new books that promised well. The infusion would do
for me without the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I would have
a person whose sole business should be to read day and night, and
talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would have: a
quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any
rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he can use handily,
and the same of all useful arts and sciences; knows all the common
plots of plays and novels, and the stock company of characters that
are continually coming on in new costume; can give you a criticism
of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and you can depend on it;
cares for nobody except for the virtue there is in what he says;
delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the
disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as
tender and reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,--that is;
of a new influx of truth or beauty,--as a nun over her missal. In
short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to
make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal
compartment on life's chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn,
in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of
course take--to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide.
In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase,
"put him through" all the material part of life; see him sheltered,
warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on
his talk when I liked,--with the privilege of shutting it off at will.

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