Over the Teacups | Page 5

exercises to studied beforehand. What if I should content myself with a single report of what was said and done over our teacups? Perhaps my young reader would be glad to let me off, for there are talkers enough who have not yet left their breakfast-tables; and nobody can blame the young people for preferring the thoughts and the language of their own generation, with all its future before it, to those of their grandfathers contemporaries.
My reader, young or old, will please to observe that I have left myself entire freedom as to the sources of what may be said over the teacups. I have not told how many cups are commonly on the board, but by using the plural I have implied that there is at least one other talker or listener beside myself, and for all that appears there may be a dozen. There will be no regulation length to my reports,--no attempt to make out a certain number of pages. I have no contract to fill so many columns, no pledge to contribute so many numbers. I can stop on this first page if I do not care to say anything more, and let this article stand by itself if so minded. What a sense of freedom it gives not to write by the yard or the column!
When one writes for an English review or magazine at so many guineas a sheet, the temptation is very great to make one's contribution cover as many sheets as possible. We all know the metallic taste of articles written under this powerful stimulus. If Bacon's Essays had been furnished by a modern hand to the "Quarterly Review" at fifty guineas a sheet, what a great book it would have taken to hold them!
The first thing which suggests itself to me, as I contemplate my slight project, is the liability of repeating in the evening what I may have said in the morning in one form or another, and printed in these or other pages. When it suddenly flashes into the consciousness of a writer who had been long before the public, "Why, I have said all that once or oftener in my books or essays, and here it is again; the same old thought, the same old image, the same old story!" it irritates him, and is likely to stir up the monosyllables of his unsanctified vocabulary. He sees in imagination a thousand readers, smiling or yawning as they say to themselves, "We have had all that before," and turn to another writer's performance for something not quite so stale and superfluous. This is what the writer says to himself about the reader.
The idiot! Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read all he has written? Does he really believe that everybody remembers all of his, writer's, words he may happen to have read? At one of those famous dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter was ever admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is said and done, Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted these lines from the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of them, which he applied to the Oration just delivered by Mr. Emerson:
Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.
His nephew, the ingenious, inventive, and inexhaustible. Edward Everett Hale, tells the story of this quotation, and of the various uses to which it might plied in after-dinner speeches. How often he ventured to repeat it at the Phi Beta Kappa dinners I am not sure; but as he reproduced it with his lively embellishments and fresh versions and artful circumlocutions, not one person in ten remembered that he had listened to those same words in those same accents only a twelvemonth ago. The poor deluded creatures who take it for granted that all the world remembers what they have said, and laugh at them when they say it over again, may profit by this recollection. But what if one does say the same things,--of course in a little different form each time,--over her? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what be ought to do. Whether he ought to or not, it is very certain that this is what all who write much or speak much necessarily must and will do. Think of the clergyman who preaches fifty or a hundred or more sermons every year for fifty years! Think of the stump speaker who shouts before a hundred audiences during the same political campaign, always using the same arguments, illustrations, and catchwords! Think of the editor, as Carlyle has pictured him, threshing the same straw every morning, until we know what is coming when we see the first line, as we do when we read the