The Professor at the Breakfast Table | Page 4

written. Statements which were true
then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed of the trotting horse
has been so much developed that the record of the year when the fastest
time to that date was given must be very considerably altered, as may
be seen by referring to a note on page 49 of the "Autocrat." No doubt
many other statements and opinions might be more or less modified if I
were writing today instead of having written before the war, when the

world and I were both more than a score of years younger.
These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat." They had
to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is a
formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise
Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough
to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the
danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the selfsame flight."
There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs of
itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and tastes of the
pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press the flow betrays
the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness in the original idea of the
work, if there is any individuality in the method or style of a new
author, or of an old author on a new track, it will have lost much of its
first effect when repeated. Still, there have not been wanting readers
who have preferred this second series of papers to the first. The new
papers were more aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason
found a heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper
antagonism in others. It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks
they called forth. Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as
if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It required the
exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.
How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man,
a line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help
one when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time
when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of
"Tom Jones," and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little
engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I
remember it, and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this
patiently." How many times, when, after rough usage from
ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering
in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil
over, those words have calmed the small internal effervescence! There
is very little in them and very little of them; and so there is not much in
a linchpin considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming
off and prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in
offering such papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their

heresies have become so familiar among intelligent people that they
have too commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks
of belief bear so differently from the way in which they presented
themselves when these papers were written that it is hard to recognize
that we and our fellow- passengers are still in the same old vessel
sailing the same unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen
harbor.
But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these papers
to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index Expurgatorius;
and if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas or
antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher treatments,
that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the
reader may nod over pages which, when they were first written, would
have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and denunciation.
November, 1882.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades, and
if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten years. The
first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps apologetic, in
the expectation of attacks from various quarters. If the book is in some
points in advance of public opinion, it is natural that the writer should
try to smooth the way to the reception of