Not many months since, in a land thousands of miles hence, I was stretched upon a bed of sickness. In pursuance of the humane duties of his calling, the minister of the Episcopal Church called upon me, and after a short conversation, proposed addressing the throne of grace. This he did in a few eloquent extemporaneous phrases, closing with the Lord's prayer. Now, from the outset, I felt an uncontrollable inclination to laugh; but for a time succeeded in restraining it. But when, in close succession upon the minister's words, there arose from the next room (separated from us by a thin board partition) a sepulchral echo in the voice of my room-mate, a grim and swarthy miner, who probably had not heard the prayer since he repeated it after his mother at her knee, and from the still potent though long dormant force of habit, now joined in its utterance, the incongruity of my surroundings overcame me, and I electrified the worthy priest by bursting into a guffaw. Looking back on the scene, I can see far more pathos than humor in it; but at the time, the scene was to me irresistibly ludicrous. And oh! the paltry excuse that I raked up. 'Nervousness,' I think. No matter, I had 'spoiled the whole party and broke up the ball!' 'Tis always the way.
—Somebody has said that to be a successful author, it is only necessary to feel what you write. This I deny, for many reasons which I might but will not cite, contenting myself with saying that to write what one feels, though much more gratifying and in a moral sense far more commendable than to conceal or falsify sentiments, is dangerous, and has been known to cause a writer to feel not only more than he wrote or could write, but more than he had any expectation or desire of feeling in such connection. Thus, whenever under an assumed but transparent title, I introduce my friend Scroggs into a little sketch of my production, I never express in that performance my actual estimate of Scroggs, physically or mentally. Nor in my glowing description of the incidents of a trip to Catskill Mountain House, do I confine myself to the expression of what I felt in viewing the many and varied scenes of rural beauty that presented themselves during the progress of that undertaking. Do you suppose that I would run the risk of conveying to Claribella, who was my only companion in that expedition, that I never was more bored in my life, and that my conversation was the result of operating with a constantly working though invisible pump at the well of common-places and platitudes, which a gentleman accumulates for such emergencies in the course of his social experience? Heaven preserve my hair, should I venture on such a step.
'But you digress,' some impatient reader suggests.
Digress! That is an impossibility in an article without a topic. But even if I plead guilty, my impatient critic; did you ever take a walk in the country, and if so, did you choose those broad roads that lead to churches and the village stores and the 'Academy,' or did you plunge, by some little modest path, into the recesses of a grove, careless whither your steps carried you, so content you were to yield to the enchanting guidance of accident? And what though, in following your bent, you were compelled to climb an occasional fence or cross a chance puddle, the satisfaction of coming suddenly upon some pleasant view, or unexpectedly entering an apparently previously unexplored nook, more than atoned for such trifling annoyances. Without digression in some degree, neither spoken nor written language can be made entertaining to the person addressed. Who is more discursive than the Autocrat, the Czar of table-talkers; and whose productions are more charming or wiser? We do not do our everyday thinking in strictly logical or consistent forms. It is sufficient to introduce hypotheses, premises, or syllogisms, when there are ends to be attained by such a course. Impulse is far more attractive than prim consistency in the character of those we love; and if this be true as to pet persons, why not in our favorite writings? So the most charming women I have met would be styled in Spanish las inconsecuentes. Therefore, when amusement is the aim of writing, let digression have full swing.
—I envy a good talker. There is no class of persons so generally underrated and vilified, yet this would be a dull world without them. And the faculty is not to be acquired. Really good talkers are born, not made. (And some, I hear a skeptic say, are not to be borne in certain contingencies.) Talk is like a river; it rushes onward, by expression of ideas, making room for thoughts to follow, and the dull elf, whose mouth is a mill-dam, finds his fancies and thoughts accumulate on his brain, till that organ is dull and sodden as is his facial aspect. Why is it that some can only be fluent from the point of a pen, while others can only address their fellows effectively by word of mouth? Of course there are conversational monsters as well as other violations of nature's creative processes. And the more thought that talk holds in solution, the more grateful the offering. But I have often listened attentively and pleasurably to an hour's flow from the lips of a pretty, graceful woman, or an interesting child, just saying enough myself to prove that sleep had not seized me. And at the subsidence of the tide, I could not for the life of me recall a single idea to which verbal embodiment had been given. Perhaps I had been carried away by the music of tone, or the charming, ever-changing curves of the opening and closing lips, or the dimples in the cheeks, as they budded, blossomed, and faded in the light of the now laughing, now languishing eyes, that never lost their hold of mine, yet never bore mine down by that most intolerable of all social manifestations—a stare.
—I have a friend, who declares that he has lost a smile. Not one from his sweetheart, for that would be either recoverable or replaceable with another. The smile he mourns is—his own. To speak plainly, he has lost, through neuralgia, the control over the risible muscles of his face, and they not only refuse to obey him in his desire and design to beam upon all peaceful comers, but occasionally put in motion another set of facial strings, which give him a depressed and lachrymose air when he would fain appear most jubilant. He says he never till now knew how much of his facial aspect was artificial. His present condition is only relieved when he is under the control of some powerful emotion. Then he can laugh as heartily and present the appearance of so doing as fully as ever. It is only the conventional smile, the bland, self-possessed smile of society, that is utterly gone from him. I elicited the confession by entering his room noiselessly one day, and detecting him in the act of making the gloomiest grimaces at a small boarding-house mirror on the wall. He was much confused, and at first denied any such employment; but ultimately admitted that he had been practicing facial gymnastics for the purpose of simulating the smile he had lost. Perhaps some of our fashionable dentists may be able to aid him by a suggestion. They certainly have more smiles at their command than any class of men that have come under my observation. How singular that the most ferocious quadrupeds and the blandest of men should evince their most contrasted characteristics—fierceness and amenity—by showing their teeth.
I sometimes think those are blessed who are endowed with a coarse organization. Sensitive people are chronic martyrs. Their nerves are so many toes, that their neighbors and friends are perpetually treading on. Not only are the pangs of such more acute, but the occasions of injury are infinitely multiplied by super-susceptibility. Talk of the happy hours of childhood! Ask nine persons out of ten, who are of susceptible organization, at what period in life their sufferings were most intense and unremitting, and if they be gifted with good memories, their reply will be, 'before adolescence.'[3] For susceptibility of nerve implies also high mental capability, acute intelligence, vivid imagination, all of which go to intensify sensation, and thus to aggravate the mischief. And our sympathy is due to one who by one of those strange contradictions in human nature finds herself, a highly nervous creature, the victim of an affection for one of the coarser organizations to which I have alluded. I say victim, for such attachments seldom result happily. The effect produced, in the first instance, by the magnetism of a strong over a weak nature gradually dies away. With it die the brilliant colors in which the beloved has been invested by the belover, and life is thenceforward only lit up by the lamps that heaven sets in the eyes of the little children that sometimes cheer the darkness of these ill-assorted unions.
—'Sir we are too poor to be economical.' These were the words which I once heard a woman use to a rich relative of her husband, who had followed up his refusal of assistance by allusions to many little short-comings which he had noted in the domestic details of the family. The phrase seems to involve a contradiction; but a little consideration will show even the most superficial thinker that it expresses a truth. Great is the power of ready money. Ready money can save by wholesale purchases. Ready money can save by choice of place of purchase. Ready money can save by choice of proper time for purchase. Ready money can save by discount obtained under threat of discontinuance of trade; a threat futile in the mouths of the poor. Ready money can save in furniture and wearing apparel, by being able to provide the best in fabric and construction, and therefore the most lasting. But it is needless to extend the catalogue of ready money's powers. None know them better than those who seldom are able to obtain their aid.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Quevedo has broadly satirized his faith in 'Childhood's happy hour'. In his Visions of Hell, where Satan, wearied by the continual grumbling of the condemned, requests them to leave, go back to life, be born again, and live it all over. On due reflection, they conclude that rather than suffer the whippings, schoolings, and scoldings incident to boy and girlhood, they—would prefer to stay where they were.—Note by Editor.