I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many
ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and
algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an
extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula: 2+2=4.
Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the
expression a+b=c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists,
until we learn to think in letters instead of figures.

They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to
whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a
certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent
questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion by
presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation.—No, sir, I
replied, he has not. But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics,
that sounds something like it, and you found it, not in the original,
but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will tell the company what he did say,
one of these days.

—If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration?—I blush to say that I do
not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was the first
association to which I ever heard the term applied; a body of scientific
young men in a great foreign city who admired their teacher, and to some
extent each other. Many of them deserved it; they have become famous
since. It amuses me to hear the talk of one of those beings described by
Thackeray—

“Letters four do form his name”—

about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage of
civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors,
philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of Mutual
Admiration. A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred
from admiring the same quality in another, nor the other from returning
his admiration. They may even associate together and continue to think
highly of each other. And so of a dozen such men, if any one place is
fortunate enough to hold so many. The being referred to above assumes
several false premises. First, that men of talent necessarily hate each
other. Secondly, that intimate knowledge or habitual association
destroys our admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance.
Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine and
have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to glorify
themselves and to put down him and the fraction of the human race not
belonging to their number. Fourthly, that it is an outrage that he is
not asked to join them.

[Picture: The Old Gentleman Opposite]

Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who sits
opposite said, “That’s it! that’s it!”

I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever people’s hating
each other, I think a little extra talent does sometimes make people
jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts and failures, and
it hurts their tempers and dispositions. Unpretending mediocrity is
good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an
essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality
of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wineglass
spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of,
who always belongs to this class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is
puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working
and playing together in harmony. He and his fellows are always fighting.
With them familiarity naturally breeds contempt. If they ever praise
each other’s bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined verses,
nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply a contract
between themselves and a publisher or dealer.

If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that alters
the question. But if they are men with noble powers and qualities, let
me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family affections, there is
no human sentiment better than that which unites the Societies of Mutual
Admiration. And what would literature or art be without such
associations? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society
of which Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were
members? Or to that of which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and
which gave us the Spectator? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith,
and Burke, and Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among
all admirers, met together? Was there any great harm in the fact that
the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable cabal in
the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and as many more as
they chose to associate with them?

The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he abuses
this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries through the
knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a medium for his
popgun. Such a society is the crown of a literary metropolis; if a town
has not material for it, and spirit and good feeling enough to organize
it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a man of genius to lodge in, but
not to live in. Foolish people hate and dread and envy such an
association of men of varied powers and influence, because it is lofty,
serene, impregnable, and, by the necessity of the case, exclusive. Wise
ones are prouder of the title M. S. M. A. than of all their other honors
put together.

—All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.”
They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know
fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which they lead
after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them
slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or
pleasant fancy? I allow no “facts” at this table. What! Because bread
is good and wholesome and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a
crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine
represent a hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract
of ten thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off
my speech?

[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar mind.
The reader will of course understand the precise amount of seasoning
which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of his
life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse in
incompetent hands.]

This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There are men
that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day’s fasting would
do. Mark this that I am going to say, for it is as good as a working
professional man’s advice, and costs you nothing: It is better to lose a
pint of blood from your veins than to have a nerve tapped. Nobody
measures your nervous force as it runs away, nor bandages your brain and
marrow after the operation.

There are men of esprit who are excessively exhausting to some people.
They are the talkers who have what may be called jerky minds. Their
thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence. They say bright
things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death.
After a jolting half-hour with one of these jerky companions, talking
with a dull friend affords great relief. It is like taking the cat in
your lap after holding a squirrel.

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A
ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our
dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.

“Do not dull people bore you?” said one of the lady-boarders,—the same
that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a few
original stanzas, not remembering that “The Pactolian” pays me five
dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.

“Madam,” said I, (she and the century were in their teens together,) “all
men are bores, except when we want them. There never was but one man
whom I would trust with my latch-key.”

“Who might that favored person be?”

“Zimmermann.”

—The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the
cobra-di-capello. You remember what they tell of William Pinkney, the
great pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his neck would
swell and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he seemed on the
verge of apoplexy. The hydraulic arrangements for supplying the brain
with blood are only second in importance to its own organization. The
bulbous-headed fellows that steam well when they are at work are the men
that draw big audiences and give us marrowy books and pictures. It is a
good sign to have one’s feet grow cold when he is writing. A great
writer and speaker once told me that he often wrote with his feet in hot
water; but for this, all his blood would have run into his head, as the
mercury sometimes withdraws into the ball of a thermometer.

—You don’t suppose that my remarks made at this table are like so many
postage-stamps, do you,—each to be only once uttered? If you do, you are
mistaken. He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself.
Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, “Know thyself,”
never alluding to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted
existence! Why, the truths a man carries about with him are his tools;
and do you think a carpenter is bound to use the same plane but once to
smooth a knotty board with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven
its first nail? I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often.
I shall use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same
stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a
hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express
train of associations.

Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech twice
over, and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer, after
performing in an inland city, where dwells a Littératrice of note, was
invited to meet her and others over the social teacup. She pleasantly
referred to his many wanderings in his new occupation. “Yes,” he
replied, “I am like the Huma, the bird that never lights, being always in
the cars, as he is always on the wing.”—Years elapsed. The lecturer
visited the same place once more for the same purpose. Another social
cup after the lecture, and a second meeting with the distinguished lady.
“You are constantly going from place to place,” she said.—“Yes,” he
answered, “I am like the Huma,”—and finished the sentence as before.

What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine speech,
word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the lady might
perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished his conversation
with the Huma daily during that whole interval of years. On the
contrary, he had never once thought of the odious fowl until the
recurrence of precisely the same circumstances brought up precisely the
same idea. He ought to have been proud of the accuracy of his mental
adjustments. Given certain factors, and a sound brain should always
evolve the same fixed product with the certainty of Babbage’s calculating
machine.

—What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere mathematician! A
Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too
stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and
never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of
them!

I have an immense respect for a man of talents plus “the mathematics.”
But the calculating power alone should seem to be the least human of
qualities, and to have the smallest amount of reason in it; since a
machine can be made to do the work of three or four calculators, and
better than any one of them. Sometimes I have been troubled that I had
not a deeper intuitive apprehension of the relations of numbers. But the
triumph of the ciphering hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I
can hear the wheels clicking in a calculator’s brain. The power of
dealing with numbers is a kind of “detached lever” arrangement, which may
be put into a mighty poor watch—I suppose it is about as common as the
power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare
endowment.

—Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized
knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about. Nature is
very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many small talents and
little accomplishments would be neglected! Talk about conceit as much as
you like, it is to human character what salt is to the ocean; it keeps it
sweet, and renders it endurable. Say rather it is like the natural
unguent of the sea-fowl’s plumage, which enables him to shed the rain
that falls on him and the wave in which he dips. When one has had all
his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his
feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.

“So you admire conceited people, do you?” said the young lady who has
come to the city to be finished off for—the duties of life.

I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. It does not
follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a salt-water
plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human
minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people’s thoughts
move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an
arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement
of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even
if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it.
The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does
not obviously imply any individual centre.

Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing. What
resplendent beauty that must have been which could have authorized Phryne
to “peel” in the way she did! What fine speeches are those two: “Non
omnis mortar,” and “I have taken all knowledge to be my province”! Even
in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man
who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself
severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though
liable to be tedious at times.

—What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of
words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I
don’t doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good
talks than anything else;—long arguments on special points between people
who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these points depend.
No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have
agreed on certain ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary
conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary
questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In
short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best social
order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable
talk between two persons. Talking is like playing on the harp; there is
as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in
twanging them to bring out their music.

—Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your
minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and language are
alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide—that is, violent treatment of a
word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are
alike forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the
same as man’s laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is primâ
facie an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter
indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no