第16章

The other elderly personage, the old man with iron-gray hair and large round spectacles, sits at my right at table.He is a retired college officer, a man of books and observation, and himself an author.Magister Artium is one of his titles on the College Catalogue, and I like best to speak of him as the Master, because he has a certain air of authority which none of us feel inclined to dispute.He has given me a copy of a work of his which seems to me not wanting in suggestiveness, and which I hope I shall be able to make some use of in my records by and by.I said the other day that he had good solid prejudices, which is true, and I like him none the worse for it; but he has also opinions more or less original, valuable, probable, fanciful; fantastic, or whimsical, perhaps, now and then; which he promulgates at table somewhat in the tone of imperial edicts.Another thing I like about him is, that he takes a certain intelligent interest in pretty much everything that interests other people.I asked him the other day what he thought most about in his wide range of studies.

--Sir,--said he,--I take stock in everything that concerns anybody.

Humani nihil,--you know the rest.But if you ask me what is my specialty, I should say, I applied myself more particularly to the contemplation of the Order of Things.

--A pretty wide subject,--I ventured to suggest.

--Not wide enough, sir,--not wide enough to satisfy the desire of a mind which wants to get at absolute truth, without reference to the empirical arrangements of our particular planet and its environments.

I want to subject the formal conditions of space and time to a new analysis, and project a possible universe outside of the Order of Things.But I have narrowed myself by studying the actual facts of being.By and by--by and by--perhaps--perhaps.I hope to do some sound thinking in heaven--if I ever get there,--he said seriously, and it seemed to me not irreverently.

--I rather like that,--I said.I think your telescopic people are, on the whole, more satisfactory than your microscopic ones.

--My left-hand neighbor fidgeted about a little in his chair as Isaid this.But the young man sitting not far from the Landlady, to whom my attention had been attracted by the expression of his eyes, which seemed as if they saw nothing before him, but looked beyond everything, smiled a sort of faint starlight smile, that touched me strangely; for until that moment he had appeared as if his thoughts were far away, and I had been questioning whether he had lost friends lately, or perhaps had never had them, he seemed so remote from our boarding-house life.I will inquire about him, for he interests me, and I thought he seemed interested as I went on talking.

--No,--I continued,--I don't want to have the territory of a man's mind fenced in.I don't want to shut out the mystery of the stars and the awful hollow that holds them.We have done with those hypaethral temples, that were open above to the heavens, but we can have attics and skylights to them.Minds with skylights,--yes,--stop, let us see if we can't get something out of that.

One-story intellects, two--story intellects, three story intellects with skylights.All fact--collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men.Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own.Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight.There are minds with large ground floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowledge; some librarians, for instance, who know enough of books to help other people, without being able to make much other use of their knowledge, have intellects of this class.Your great working lawyer has two spacious stories; his mind is clear, because his mental floors are large, and he has room to arrange his thoughts so that he can get at them,--facts below, principles above, and all in ordered series;poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture, in the attics.

--The old Master smiled.I think he suspects himself of a three-story intellect, and I don't feel sure that he is n't right.

--Is it dark meat or white meat you will be helped to?--said the Landlady, addressing the Master.

--Dark meat for me, always,--he answered.Then turning to me, he began one of those monologues of his, such as that which put the Member of the Haouse asleep the other day.

--It 's pretty much the same in men and women and in books and everything, that it is in turkeys and chickens.Why, take your poets, now, say Browning and Tennyson.Don't you think you can say which is the dark-meat and which is the white-meat poet? And so of the people you know; can't you pick out the full-flavored, coarse-fibred characters from the delicate, fine-fibred ones? And in the same person, don't you know the same two shades in different parts of the character that you find in the wing and thigh of a partridge? Isuppose you poets may like white meat best, very probably; you had rather have a wing than a drumstick, I dare say.

--Why, yes,--said I,--I suppose some of us do.Perhaps it is because a bird flies with his white-fleshed limbs and walks with the dark-fleshed ones.Besides, the wing-muscles are nearer the heart than the leg-muscles.

I thought that sounded mighty pretty, and paused a moment to pat myself on the back, as is my wont when I say something that I think of superior quality.So I lost my innings; for the Master is apt to strike in at the end of a bar, instead of waiting for a rest, if Imay borrow a musical phrase.No matter, just at this moment, what he said; but he talked the Member of the Haouse asleep again.