第84章

--This, you understand, Beloved, is only a conventional imitation of the Doctor's style of talking.He wrote in grand balanced phrases, but his conversation was good, lusty, off-hand familiar talk.He used very often to have it all his own way.If he came back to us we must remember that to treat him fairly we must suppose him on a level with the knowledge of our own time.But that knowledge is more specialized, a great deal, than knowledge was in his day.Men cannot talk about things they have seen from the outside with the same magisterial authority the talking dynasty pretended to.The sturdy old moralist felt grand enough, no doubt, when he said, "He that is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war or peace."Benjamin Franklin was one of these idlers who were electrifying bottles, but he also found time to engage in the trifling prattle about war and peace going on in those times.The talking Doctor hits him very hard in "Taxation no Tyranny": "Those who wrote the Address (of the American Congress in 1775), though they have shown no great extent or profundity of mind, are yet probably wiser than to believe it: but they have been taught by some master of mischief how to put in motion the engine of political electricity; to attract by the sounds of Liberty and Property, to repel by those of Popery and Slavery; and to give the great stroke by the name of Boston."The talking dynasty has always been hard upon us Americans.King Samuel II.says: "It is, I believe, a fact verified beyond doubt, that some years ago it was impossible to obtain a copy of the Newgate Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the Americans, whether to suppress the blazon of their forefathers or to assist in their genealogical researches I could never learn satisfactorily."As for King Thomas, the last of the monological succession, he made such a piece of work with his prophecies and his sarcasms about our little trouble with some of the Southern States, that we came rather to pity him for his whims and crotchets than to get angry with him for calling us bores and other unamiable names.

I do not think we believe things because considerable people say them, on personal authority, that is, as intelligent listeners very commonly did a century ago.The newspapers have lied that belief out of us.Any man who has a pretty gift of talk may hold his company a little while when there is nothing better stirring.Every now and then a man who may be dull enough prevailingly has a passion of talk come over him which makes him eloquent and silences the rest.I have a great respect for these divine paroxysms, these half-inspired moments of influx when they seize one whom we had not counted among the luminaries of the social sphere.But the man who can--give us a fresh experience on anything that interests us overrides everybody else.A great peril escaped makes a great story-teller of a common person enough.I remember when a certain vessel was wrecked long ago, that one of the survivors told the story as well as Defoe could have told it.Never a word from him before; never a word from him since.But when it comes to talking one's common thoughts,--those that come and go as the breath does; those that tread the mental areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall, an interminable procession of every hue and garb,--there are few, indeed, that can dare to lift the curtain which hangs before the window in the breast and throw open the window, and let us look and listen.We are all loyal enough to our sovereign when he shows himself, but sovereigns are scarce.I never saw the absolute homage of listeners but once, that I remember, to a man's common talk, and that was to the conversation of an old man, illustrious by his lineage and the exalted honors he had won, whose experience had lessons for the wisest, and whose eloquence had made the boldest tremble.

All this because I told you to look out for yourselves and not take for absolute truth everything the old Master of our table, or anybody else at it sees fit to utter.At the same time I do not think that he, or any of us whose conversation I think worth reporting, says anything for the mere sake of saying it and without thinking that it holds some truth, even if it is not unqualifiedly true.

I suppose a certain number of my readers wish very heartily that the Young Astronomer whose poetical speculations I am recording would stop trying by searching to find out the Almighty, and sign the thirty-nine articles, or the Westminster Confession of Faith, at any rate slip his neck into some collar or other, and pull quietly in the harness, whether it galled him or not.I say, rather, let him have his talk out; if nobody else asks the questions he asks, some will be glad to hear them, but if you, the reader, find the same questions in your own mind, you need not be afraid to see how they shape themselves in another's intelligence.Do you recognize the fact that we are living in a new time? Knowledge--it excites prejudices to call it science--is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.The courtiers of King Canute (I am not afraid of the old comparison), represented by the adherents of the traditional beliefs of the period, move his chair back an inch at a time, but not until his feet are pretty damp, not to say wet.The rock on which he sat securely awhile ago is completely under water.And now people are walking up and down the beach and judging for themselves how far inland the chair of King Canute is like to be moved while they and their children are looking on, at the rate in which it is edging backward.And it is quite too late to go into hysterics about it.