Over the Teacups | Page 5

that larger
company of friends who listened to our conversations as reported. Dear
girl with the silken ringlets, dear boy with the down-shadowed cheek,
your grandfather, your grandmother, turned over the freshly printed
leaves that told the story of those earlier meetings around the plain
board where so many things were said and sung, not all of which have
quite faded from memory of this overburdened and forgetful time. Your
father, your mother, found the scattered leaves gathered in a volume,
and smiled upon them as not uncompanionable acquaintances. My
tea-table makes no promises. There is no programme of 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