The Poet at the Breakfast Table | Page 6

about the kind of talk, as the papers had it; I don't
wonder it scared the old women.
--The Member was wide awake by this time.
--I don't seem to remember of them partickler phrases, he said.
--Dear me, no; only levelling everything smack, and trampling us under
foot, as the reporters made it out. That means FIRE, I take it, and
knocking you down and stamping on you, whichever side of your
person happens to be uppermost. Sounded like a threat; meant, of
course, for a warning. But I don't believe it was in the piece as they

spoke it,--could n't have been. Then, again, Paris wasn't to blame,--as
much as to say--so the old women thought--that New York or Boston
would n't be to blame if it did the same thing. I've heard of political
gatherings where they barbecued an ox, but I can't think there 's a party
in this country that wants to barbecue a city. But it is n't quite fair to
frighten the old women. I don't doubt there are a great many people
wiser than I am that would n't be hurt by a hint I am going to give them.
It's no matter what you say when you talk to yourself, but when you
talk to other people, your business is to use words with reference to the
way in which those other people are like to understand them. These
pretended inflammatory speeches, so reported as to seem full of
combustibles, even if they were as threatening as they have been
represented, would do no harm if read or declaimed in a man's study to
his books, or by the sea-shore to the waves. But they are not so
wholesome moral entertainment for the dangerous classes. Boys must
not touch off their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine.
This kind of speech does n't help on the millennium much.
--It ain't jest the thing to grease your ex with ile o' vitrul, said the
Member.
--No, the wheel of progress will soon stick fast if you do. You can't
keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat to make it.
Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world were reduced ashes,
you'd have a new set of millionnaires in a couple of years or so, out of
the trade in potash. In the mean time, what is the use of setting the man
with the silver watch against the man with the gold watch, and the man
without any watch against them both?
--You can't go agin human natur', said the Member
--You speak truly. Here we are travelling through desert together like
the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more quails
than others and ought to help their hungry neighbors more than they do;
that will always be so until we come back to primitive Christianity, the
road to which does not seem to be via Paris, just now; but we don't
want the incendiary's pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by
night to lead us in the march to civilization, and we don't want a Moses

who will smite rock, not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum
to burn us all up with.
--It is n't quite fair to run an opposition to the other funny speaker, Rev.
Petroleum V. What 's-his-name,--spoke up an anonymous boarder.
--You may have been thinking, perhaps, that it was I,--I, the Poet, who
was the chief talker in the one-sided dialogue to which you have been
listening. If so, you were mistaken. It was the old man in the spectacles
with large round glasses and the iron-gray hair. He does a good deal of
the talking at our table, and, to tell the truth, I rather like to hear him.
He stirs me up, and finds me occupation in various ways, and
especially, because he has good solid prejudices, that one can rub
against, and so get up and let off a superficial intellectual irritation, just
as the cattle rub their backs against a rail (you remember Sydney
Smith's contrivance in his pasture) or their sides against an apple-tree (I
don't know why they take to these so particularly, but you will often
find the trunk of an appletree as brown and smooth as an old saddle at
the height of a cow's ribs). I think they begin rubbing in cold blood, and
then, you know, l'appetit vient en mangeant, the more they rub the
more they want to. That is the way to use your friend's prejudices. This
is a sturdylooking personage of a good deal more than middle age, his
face
marked with strong manly furrows, records of hard thinking and
square stand-up fights with life