So I culled from many a little drawer the cards appertaining to divers printed products of morbid cerebration, and gathered them into a class of Insane Literature; and under this rubric such sections as Circle-Squaring, Perpetual Motion, Great Pyramid, Earth not a Globe, etc., were evidently in their proper place. The name of the class was duly inscribed on the outside of its drawer, and the matter seemed happily disposed of.
The way of the reformer, however, is beset with difficulties, and it is seldom that his first efforts are crowned with entire success. Not many days had elapsed since this emendation of the catalogue, when one of my assistants brought me the card of a book on the Apocalypse, by a certain Mr. Smallwit, and called my attention to the fact that it was classified as Insane Literature.
"Very well," I said, "so it is."
"I don't doubt it, sir," said she; "but the author lives over in Chelsea, and I saw him this morning in one of the alcoves. Perhaps, if he were to look in the catalogue and see how his book is classified, he mightn't altogether like it. Then, as I looked a little further along the cards, I came upon this pamphlet by Herr Dummkopf, of Breslau, upsetting the law of gravitation; and—do you know?—Herr Dummkopf is spending the winter here in Cambridge!"
"To be sure," said I, "it was very stupid of me not to foresee such cases. Of course we can't call a man a fool to his face. In a catalogue which marshals the quick along with the dead some heed must be paid to the amenities of life. Pray get and bring me all those cards."
By the time they arrived a satisfactory solution of the difficulty had suggested itself. I told the assistant simply to scratch out "Insane," and put "Eccentric" instead. For while the harsh Latin epithet would of course infuriate Messrs. Dummkopf, Smallwit & Co., it might be doubted if their feelings would be hurt by the milder Greek word. Some people of their stripe, to whom notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils, would consider it a mark of distinction to be called eccentric. At all events, the harshness would be delicately veiled under a penumbra of ambiguity.
Thus the class Eccentric Literature was established in our catalogue, and there it has remained, while the books in the library have increased from a hundred thousand to half a million. Once or twice, I am told, has some disgusted author uttered a protest, but the quiet of Gore Hall has not been disturbed thereby. Care is needed in treating such a subject, and my rule was that no amount of mere absurdity, no extremity of dissent from generally received opinions, should consign a book to the class of Eccentric Literature, unless it showed unmistakable symptoms of crankery, or the buzzing of a bee in the author's bonnet. This rule has been strictly followed. One lot of books—the Bacon-Shakespeare stuff—which I intended to put in this class, but forgot to do so because of sore stress of work, still remain absurdly grouped along with the books on Shakespeare written by men in their senses. With this exception, the class offers us a fairly comprehensive view of the literature of cranks.
Just where the line should be drawn between sanity and crankery is not always easy to determine, and must usually be left to soundness of judgment in each particular case, as with so many other questions of all grades, from the supreme court down to the kitchen. One of the most frequent traits of your crank is his megalomania, or self-magnification. His intellectual equipment is so slender that he cannot see wherein he is inferior to Descartes or Newton. Without enough knowledge to place him in the sixth form of a grammar school, he will assail the conclusions of the greatest minds the world has seen. His mood is belligerent; since people will not take him at his own valuation, he is apt to regard society as engaged in a conspiracy to ignore and belittle him. Of humour he is pretty sure to be destitute; an abounding sense of the ludicrous is one of the best safeguards of mental health, and even a slight endowment will usually nip and stunt the fungus growth of crankery.
The slightest glimmering sense of humour would have restrained that inveterate circle-squarer, James Smith, from publishing (in 1865) his pamphlet entitled "The British Association in Jeopardy, and Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, in the Stocks without Hope of Escape." His case, with those of many other ingenious lunatics, was racily set forth by the late Professor De Morgan in his "Budget of Paradoxes" (London, 1872), a bulky book dealing with the author's personal experiences with cranks and their crotchets. It was De Morgan's lot as an eminent mathematician to be outrageously bored by circle-squarers and their kin, and it was a happy thought to put on record the queer things that happened. His friends asked him again and again why he took the trouble to mention and expose such absurdities. He replied that, when your crank publishes a book "full of figures which few readers can criticise, a great many people are staggered to this extent, that they imagine there must be the indefinite something in the mysterious all this. They are brought to the point of suspicion that the mathematicians ought not to treat all this with such undisguised contempt, at least. Now I have no fear for π; but I do think it possible that general opinion might in time demand that the crowd of circle-squarers, etc., should be admitted to the honours of opposition; and this would be a time-tax of five per cent. one man with another, upon those who are better employed." At any rate, continues De Morgan, with a twinkle in the corner of his eye, whether in chastising cranks he has any motive but public good "must be referred to those who can decide whether a missionary chooses his pursuit solely to convert the heathen." He confesses that perhaps he may have a little of the spirit of Colonel Quagg, whose principle of action was thus succinctly expressed: "I licks ye because I kin, and because I like, and because ye's critters that licks is good for!"
Among the creatures whose malady seemed to call for such drastic treatment was Captain Forman, R. N., who in 1833 wrote against the law of gravitation, and got not a word of notice. Then he wrote to Sir John Herschel and Lord Brougham, asking them to get his book reviewed in some of the quarterlies. Receiving no answer from these gentlemen, he addressed in one of the newspapers a card to Lord John Russell, inveighing against their "dishonest" behaviour. Still getting no satisfaction, the valorous captain wrote to the Royal Astronomical Society with a challenge to controversy. To this letter came a polite but brief answer, advising him to study the rudiments of mechanics. It was not in the paradoxer's nature to submit tamely to such treatment; and he replied in a printed pamphlet, wherein he called that learned society "craven dunghill cocks," and bestrewed them, with other choice flowers of rhetoric, much to the relief of his feelings.