第9章

I REALLY believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too precious for conversation.What do you think an admiring friend said the other day to one that was talking good things, -good enough to print? "Why," said he, "you are wasting mechantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as Ican tell, of fifty dollars an hour." The talker took him to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.

"Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, "and a man driving a sprinkling-machine through it.""Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our THOUGHT-SPRINKLERS through them with the valves open, sometimes?

"Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget.It shapes our thoughts for us; - the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore.Let me modify the image a little.I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay.Spoken language is so plastic, - you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and stick on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is nothing like it for modelling.Out of it come the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such.Or, to use another illustration, writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it; - but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you can't help hitting it."The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, "Fust-rate." Iacknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression.

"Fust-rate," "prime," "a prime article," "a superior piece of goods," "a handsome garment," "a gent in a flowered vest," - all such expressions are final.They blast the lineage of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down.There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social STATUS, if it is not already: "That tells the whole story." It is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from them.It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous question in the General Court.Only it doesn't; simply because "that" does not usually tell the whole, nor one half of the whole story.

- It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a professional education.To become a doctor a man must study some three years and hear a thousand lectures, more or less.Just how much study it takes to make a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not more than this.Now most decent people hear one hundred lectures or sermons (discourses) on theology every year, - and this, twenty, thirty, fifty years together.They read a great many religious books besides.The clergy, however, rarely hear any sermons except what they preach themselves.A dull preacher might be conceived, therefore, to lapse into a state of QUASI heathenism, simply for want of religious instruction.And on the other hand, an attentive and intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers, might become actually better educated in theology than any one of them.We are all theological students, and more of us qualified as doctors of divinity than have received degrees at any of the universities.

It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed upon a sermon treating feebly a subject which they have thought vigorously about for years, and heard able men discuss scores of times.I have often noticed, however, that a hopelessly dull discourse acts INDUCTIVELY, as electricians would say, in developing strong mental currents.I am ashamed to think with what accompaniments and variations and FIORITURE I have sometimes followed the droning of a heavy speaker, - not willingly, - for my habit is reverential, - but as a necessary result of a slight continuous impression on the senses and the mind, which kept both in action without furnishing the food they required to work upon.

If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener.The bird in sable plumage flaps heavily along his straight-forward course, while the other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crow does, having cut a perfect labyrinth of loops and knots and spirals while the slow fowl was painfully working from one end of his straight line to the other.

[I think these remarks were received rather coolly.A temporary boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little "frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief and contours in basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported to have been very virulent about what I said.So I went to my good old minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could remember them, to him.He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was considerable truth in them.He thought he could tell when people's minds were wandering, by their looks.In the earlier years of his ministry he had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching; -very little of late years.Sometimes, when his colleague was preaching, he observed this kind of inattention; but after all, it was not so very unnatural.I will say, by the way, that it is a rule I have long followed, to tell my worst thoughts to my minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.]