IV.—HARMONICS.
Ah! but the card? you ask. Yes, here it is.
Naphtali Rink,
51 Early Avenue.
(At the Hygienic Institute.)
Of course, this is only in miniature, and represents every way but a very small part of the document, the address being but a drop in the superscriptive surge,—a rivulet of text meandering through a meadow of marginalia. Inasmuch as Dūspeptos courted the widest publicity for these stomachic scraps, no scruples of delicacy forbid me to jot down here some few of them. He thought them fitted for the race,—the more readers the better: perhaps it may be, the more the merrier. If called upon to classify them, I should put them all under the genus Gastric Scholia. The different species and varieties it is hardly worth while to enter upon here. There were intuitions, recollections, and glosses, apparently set down in a fragmentary way from time to time, in a most minute and distinct text. Very probably they were hints of thoughts designed to be worked up in a more formal way. Whether the quotations were taken at first or second hand I cannot say; but internal evidence would seem to indicate that many of them might have been clippings from the columns of "The Old Lancaster Day-Book." It is, perhaps, worthy of note that Mr. Rink was, in fact, a man of rather more thought and general information than one might suppose, if judging him merely by his uncouth grammar, and the clipped coin of his jangling speech:—
"His voice was nasal with the twang
That spoiled the hymns when Cromwell's army sang."
Now, then, O reader, returning from this feast of fat things, I lay before you the scraps.
"Character is Digestion."
"There's been a good deal of high-fangled nonsense written about genius. One man says it's in the head; another, that it comes from the heart, etc., etc. The fact is, they're all wrong. Genius lies in the stomach. Who ever knew a fat genius? Now there's De Quincey,—he says, in his outlandish way, that genius is the synthesis of the intellect with the moral nature. No such thing; and a man who sinned day and night against his stomach, and swilled opium as he did, couldn't be expected to know. If there's any synthesis at all about it, it's the synthesis of the stomach with the liver."
"What a complete knowledge of human nature Sam Slick shows, when he says, 'A bilious cheek and a sour temper are like the Siamese twins: there's a nateral cord of union atween them. The one is a sign with the name of the firm written on it in long letters.'"
"The French are a mighty cute people. They know a thing or two about as well as the next man. There's a heap of truth and poetry in these maxims of one of their writers: 'Indigestion is the remorse of a guilty stomach'; 'Happiness consists in a hard heart and a good digestion.'"
"The old tempter—the original Jacobs—was called in Hebrew a nachash, so I'm told. But folks don't seem to understand exactly what this nachash was. Some say it was a rattlesnake, some a straddle-bug. Old Dr. Adam Clarke, I've heard, vowed it was a monkey. They're all out of their reckoning. It's as plain as a pikestaff that it was nothing but Fried Fat cooked up to order, and it's been a-tempting weak sisters ever since. That's what's the matter."
"Let me make the bran-bread of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
"It makes me master-sick to hear all these fellows who've just made out to scrape together a few postage-stamps laying down their three-cent notions about the way to get on in the world, the rules for success, and all that. Just as if a couple of greenbacks could make a blind man see clean through a millstone! They're like these old nursing grannies: No. 1 thinks catnip is the only thing; No. 2 believes there's nothing like sage-tea and mustard-poultice; No. 3 swears by burdock. The truth is,—and men might as well own up to it first as last,—success depends on bile."
"Shakspeare was a man who was pretty well posted in human nature all round,—knew the kitchen about as well as the parlor. He knocks on the head the sin of stuffing, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' where he speaks of the man that 'dies with feeding his own stomach.' In 'Timon of Athens' there's a chap who 'greases his pure mind,' probably with fried sausages, gravy, and such like trash. The fellow in 'Macbeth' who has 'eaten of the insane root' was meant, I calculate, as a hard rap on tobacco-chewers (and smokers too); he called it root, instead of leaf, just to cover up his tracks. What a splendid thought that is in 'Love's Labor's Lost': 'Fat paunches have lean pates'! Everybody knows how Julius Cæsar turned up his nose at fat men. The poet never could stand frying; he calls it, in 'Macbeth,' 'the young fry of treachery.' Probably he'd had more taste of the traitor than was good for him. Has a good slap somewhere on the critter that 'devours up all the fry it finds.' I reckon that Shakspeare always set a proper valuation on human digestion; 'cause when he speaks of a man with a good stomach,—an excellent stomach,—he always has a good word for him, and kind of strokes down his fur the right way of the grain; but he comes down dreadful strong on the lout that has no stomach, as he calls it. In 'Henry IV.,' he says, 'the cook helps to make the gluttony.' I estimate that that one sentence alone, if he'd never writ another word, would have made him immortal. If I had my way, I'd have it printed in gold letters a foot long, and sot up before every cook-stove in the land. But just see what a man he was! This very same play that tells the disease prescribes the cure, that is, 'the remainder-biscuit,'—a knock-down proof to any man with a knowledge-box that Graham-bread was known and appreciated in those days, and that Shakspeare himself had cut his own eye-teeth on it."
"A broken heart is only another name for an everlasting indigestion."
"History is merely a record of indigestions,—a calendar of the foremost stomachs of the age. The destinies of nations hang on the bowels of princes. Internal wars come from intestine rebellion. The rising within is father to the insurrection without. The fountain of a national crisis is always found under the waistcoat of one man. There's Napoleon I.,—what settled him for good was just that greasy mutton-chop stewed up in onions, which he took for his grub at Leipsic. If he'd only ordered a couple of slices of dry Graham-toast, with a cup of weak black tea, he'd have saved his stomach, and whipped 'em, sure; and matters and things in Europe would have had a different look all round ever since."
"Emerson is a man who once in a while gets a little inkling of the truth. I see he says that the creed lies in the biliary duct. That's good orthodox doctrine, I don't care who says it."
"Buckwheat-cakes are now leading us back to barbarism faster than the printing-press ever carried us forward towards civilization."
"Temperament means nothing more nor less than just quantity and quality of bile. That old sawbones, Hippocrates, came mighty near hitting the nail square on the head more 'n two thousand year ago, but he felt kind of uncertain, and didn't exactly know what he was driving at. The old heathen made out just four humors, as he called 'em,—the sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. If he'd only made one step more on to the other side of the fence, he'd have cracked the nut, and picked the kernel, certain. Those four different humors are only four different ways of modifying bile with fat."
"Every man is dyspeptic. Tell me his dyspepsy, and I'll tell you what he is."
"In sick-headache, a heaping tablespoonful each of salt and common mustard, stirred into a pint of hot water, and drank without breathing, will generally produce an immediate effect. (Mem. But Graham-biscuit is better in the long run.)"
"Society is the meeting of a gang of incurables, who come together to talk over their dyspepsies. And everybody takes his turn in furnishing fodder to keep the thing going hot-foot."
"Professor Bache says sea-sickness comes from the head, 'cause a man gets dizzy in trying to get used to the teetering of the ship. All nonsense. The Professor may be posted in the survey of the coast, but he don't know the lay of the land in the interior. Sea-sickness comes from the stomach: just offer a man a mouthful of fried salt pork."
"It's stated that some old bookworm of a Dutchman, with a jaw-breaking name that I can't recollect, has an idea, that, 'if we could penetrate into the secret foundations of human events, we should frequently find the misfortunes of one man caused by the intestines of another.' There's not the least doubt of it,—true of one man or a million."
"Fate is Fat: Fat is Fate."