I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too
precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the
other day to one that was talking good things,—good enough to print?
“Why,” said he, “you are wasting mechantable literature, a cash article,
at the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour.” The
talker took him to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he
saw.

“Nothing but a very dusty street,” he said, “and a man driving a
sprinkling-machine through it.”

“Why don’t you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the
state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our
thought-sprinklers through them with the valves open, sometimes?

“Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget.
It shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the
surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little.
I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken
language is so plastic,—you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and
rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily when you work that soft
material, that there is nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come
the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books,
if you happen to write such. Or, to use another illustration, writing or
printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader’s mind,
or miss it;—but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an
engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can’t help
hitting it.”

The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior
excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, “Fust-rate.” I acknowledged
the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression. “Fust-rate,” “prime,”
“a prime article,” “a superior piece of goods,” “a handsome garment,” “a
gent in a flowered vest,”—all such expressions are final. They blast the
lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down.
There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man’s
social status, if it is not already: “That tells the whole story.” It
is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect,
and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from them. It is
intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General
Court. Only it doesn’t; simply because “that” does not usually tell the
whole, nor one half of the whole story.

—It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a professional
education. To become a doctor a man must study some three years and hear
a thousand lectures, more or less. Just how much study it takes to make
a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not more than this. Now most decent
people hear one hundred lectures or sermons (discourses) on theology
every year,—and this, twenty, thirty, fifty years together. They read a
great many religious books besides. The clergy, however, rarely hear any
sermons except what they preach themselves. A dull preacher might be
conceived, therefore, to lapse into a state of quasi heathenism, simply
for want of religious instruction. And on the other hand, an attentive
and intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers, might
become actually better educated in theology than any one of them. We are
all theological students, and more of us qualified as doctors of divinity
than have received degrees at any of the universities.

It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often find it
difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed upon a sermon
treating feebly a subject which they have thought vigorously about for
years, and heard able men discuss scores of times. I have often noticed,
however, that a hopelessly dull discourse acts inductively, as
electricians would say, in developing strong mental currents. I am
ashamed to think with what accompaniments and variations and fioriture
I have sometimes followed the droning of a heavy speaker,—not
willingly,—for my habit is reverential,—but as a necessary result of a
slight continuous impression on the senses and the mind, which kept both
in action without furnishing the food they required to work upon. If you
ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a
dull speaker and a lively listener. The bird in sable plumage flaps
heavily along his straight-forward course, while the other sails round
him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks out a
black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of him, and
finally reaches the crow’s perch at the same time the crow does, having
cut a perfect labyrinth of loops and knots and spirals while the slow
fowl was painfully working from one end of his straight line to the
other.

[I think these remarks were received rather coolly. A temporary boarder
from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than middle-aged female,
with a parchment forehead and a dry little “frisette” shingling it, a
sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, a black dress too rusty for
recent grief and contours in basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely,
and was reported to have been very virulent about what I said. So I went
to my good old minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could
remember them, to him. He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was
considerable truth in them. He thought he could tell when people’s minds
were wandering, by their looks. In the earlier years of his ministry he
had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching;—very little of late
years. Sometimes, when his colleague was preaching, he observed this
kind of inattention; but after all, it was not so very unnatural. I will
say, by the way, that it is a rule I have long followed, to tell my worst
thoughts to my minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk
with.]

—I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody has
made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes,
because I have read some of them at this table. (The company
assented,—two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought,
as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going to read
half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)—I continued. Of course I
write some lines or passages which are better than others; some which,
compared with the others, might be called relatively excellent. It is in
the nature of things that I should consider these relatively excellent
lines or passages as absolutely good. So much must be pardoned to
humanity. Now I never wrote a “good” line in my life, but the moment
after it was written it seemed a hundred years old. Very commonly I had
a sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly I may have
sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but I do not remember that I ever once
detected any historical truth in these sudden convictions of the
antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I have learned utterly to
distrust them, and never allow them to bully me out of a thought or line.

This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the company was
diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula which suddenly emerges
in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is
virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized
growths of our intellect. Any crystalline group of musical words has had
a long and still period to form in. Here is one theory.

[Picture: The schoolmistress]

But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts. It is
this. The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories is in a
direct ratio to the squares of their importance. Their apparent age runs
up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as they increase in
magnitude. A great calamity, for instance, is as old as the trilobites
an hour after it has happened. It stains backward through all the leaves
we have turned over in the book of life, before its blot of tears or of
blood is dry on the page we are turning. For this we seem to have lived;
it was foreshadowed in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of
terror; in the “dissolving views” of dark day-visions; all omens pointed
to it; all paths led to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the
first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as a
surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again,—old as eternity.

[I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known
better. The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was looking at
me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression. All at once the blood
dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops from a broken
barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat like an image of snow;
a slung-shot could not have brought her down better. God forgive me!

After this little episode, I continued, to some few that remained
balancing teaspoons on the edges of cups, twirling knives, or tilting
upon the hind legs of their chairs until their heads reached the wall,
where they left gratuitous advertisements of various popular cosmetics.]

When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new position of trial,
he finds the place fits him as if he had been measured for it. He has
committed a great crime, for instance, and is sent to the State Prison.
The traditions, prescriptions, limitations, privileges, all the sharp
conditions of his new life, stamp themselves upon his consciousness as
the signet on soft wax;—a single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen
the image a little. Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and
velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides
backward and forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out
of a ring. The engine lays one of its fingers calmly, but firmly, upon
a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and tell
a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over with twenty
centuries. So it is that a great silent-moving misery puts a new stamp
on us in an hour or a moment,—as sharp an impression as if it had taken
half a lifetime to engrave it.

It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional dealers in
misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a moment, and you
pass out of the individual life you were living into the rhythmical
movements of their horrible machinery. Do the worst thing you can, or
suffer the worst that can be thought of, you find yourself in a category
of humanity that stretches back as far as Cain, and with an expert at
your elbow who has studied your case all out beforehand, and is waiting
for you with his implements of hemp or mahogany. I believe, if a man
were to be burned in any of our cities tomorrow for heresy, there would
be found a master of ceremonies that knew just how many fagots were
necessary, and the best way of arranging the whole matter.

—So we have not won the Goodwood cup; au contraire, we were a “bad
fifth,” if not worse than that; and trying it again, and the third time,
has not yet bettered the matter. Now I am as patriotic as any of my
fellow-citizens,—too patriotic in fact, for I have got into hot water by
loving too much of my country; in short, if any man, whose fighting
weight is not more than eight stone four pounds, disputes it, I am ready
to discuss the point with him. I should have gloried to see the stars
and stripes in front at the finish. I love my country, and I love
horses. Stubbs’s old mezzotint of Eclipse hangs over my desk, and
Herring’s portrait of Plenipotentiary,—whom I saw run at Epsom,—over my
fireplace. Did I not elope from school to see Revenge, and Prospect, and
Little John, and Peacemaker run over the race-course where now yon
suburban village flourishes, in the year eighteen hundred and
ever-so-few? Though I never owned a horse, have I not been the
proprietor of six equine females, of which one was the prettiest little
“Morgin” that ever stepped? Listen, then, to an opinion I have often
expressed long before this venture of ours in England. Horse-racing is
not a republican institution; horse-trotting is. Only very rich
persons can keep race-horses, and everybody knows they are kept mainly as
gambling implements. All that matter about blood and speed we won’t
discuss; we understand all that; useful, very,—of course,—great
obligations to the Godolphin “Arabian,” and the rest. I say racing
horses are essentially gambling implements, as much as roulette tables.
Now I am not preaching at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons
some other morning; but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is
not republican. It belongs to two phases of society,—a cankered
over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the reckless
life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a
civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real Republicanism is
stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of government, but in the
omnipotence of public opinion which grows out of it. This public opinion
cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, but it can and does compel
it to keep comparatively quiet. But horse-racing is the most public way
of gambling, and with all its immense attractions to the sense and the
feelings,—to which I plead very susceptible,—the disguise is too thin
that covers it, and everybody knows what it means. Its supporters are
the Southern gentry,—fine fellows, no doubt, but not republicans exactly,
as we understand the term,—a few Northern millionnaires more or less
thoroughly millioned, who do not represent the real people, and the mob
of sporting men, the best of whom are commonly idlers, and the worst very
bad neighbors to have near one in a crowd, or to meet in a dark alley.
In England, on the other hand, with its aristocratic institutions, racing
is a natural growth enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through
all classes, from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a
shelled corn-cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could
raise the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit
down on his office-stool the next day without wincing.

Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment. The racer is
incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet upon, as much as
the thimble-rigger’s “little joker.” The trotter is essentially and
daily useful, and only incidentally a tool for sporting men.

What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is most
cultivated and reaches his greatest perfection in England, and that the
trotting horses of America beat the world? And why should we have
expected that the pick—if it was the pick—of our few and far-between
racing stables should beat the pick of England and France? Throw over
the fallacious time-test, and there was nothing to show for it but a
natural kind of patriotic feeling, which we all have, with a thoroughly
provincial conceit, which some of us must plead guilty to.

We may beat yet. As an American, I hope we shall. As a moralist and
occasional sermonizer, I am not so anxious about it. Wherever the
trotting horse goes, he carries in his train brisk omnibuses, lively
bakers’ carts, and therefore hot rolls, the jolly butcher’s wagon, the
cheerful gig, the wholesome afternoon drive with wife and child,—all the
forms of moral excellence, except truth, which does not agree with any
kind of horse-flesh. The racer brings with him gambling, cursing,
swearing, drinking, the eating of oysters, and a distaste for mob-caps
and the middle-aged virtues.

And by the way, let me beg you not to call a trotting match a race,
and not to speak of a “thoroughbred” as a “blooded” horse, unless he
has been recently phlebotomized. I consent to your saying “blood horse