[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 if 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 the cutting of the yellow hair
by Iris 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 little
great man, 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.

Three Johns.

1. The real John; known only to his Maker.

2. John’s ideal John; never the 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.

Three Thomas.

1. The real Thomas.

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 viâ 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.]

[Picture: The Young Fellow called John]

—The opinions of relatives as to a man’s powers are very commonly of
little value; not merely because they sometimes 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 million-fold
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, sisters, uncles, aunts, and the
rest, say about that 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 which handle
these forms of truth.

—Oh, you need net tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most gracious,
unassuming people in the world, and yet preëminent 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.
devotes 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 À LECTURE.

CE rat çi est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes de derrière
sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il fait usage
pour tenir les journaux. Cet animal a la peau noire pour le plupart,
et porte un cerele blanchâtre autour de son cou. On le trouve tous
les jours aux dits salons, on il demeure, digere, s’il y a do quoi
dans son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue, dort, et renfle
quelquefois, ayant toujours le semblant de lire. On ne sait pas s’il
a une autre gite que çelà. Il a l’air d’une bête très stupide, mais
il est d’une sagacité 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 idées. 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 même
des echanges de parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau
a toujours un caractère specifique. On ne sait pas au juste ce dont
il se nourrit. Feu Cuvier était d’avis que c’etait de l’odeur du
cuir des reliures; ce qu’on dit d’être une nourriture animale fort
saine, et peu chère. Il vit bien longtems. Enfin il meure, en
laissant à ses héritiers une carte du Salon à Lecture on il avait
existé pendant sa vie. On pretend qu’il revient toutes