Around The Tea-Table Part 10

LITERARY ABSTINENCE.

It is as much an art not to read as to read. With what pains, and thumps, and whacks at school we first learned the way to put words together!

We did not mind so much being whipped by the schoolmaster for not knowing how to read our lesson, but to have to go out ourselves and cut the hickory switch with which the chastis.e.m.e.nt was to be inflicted seemed to us then, as it does now, a great injustice.

Notwithstanding all our hard work in learning to read we find it quite as hard now to learn how not to read. There are innumerable books and newspapers from which one had better abstain.

There are but very few newspapers which it is safe to read all through, though we know of one that it is best to peruse from beginning to end, but modesty forbids us stating which one that is. In this day readers need as never before to carry a sieve.

It requires some heroism to say you have not read such and such a book.

Your friend gives you a stare which implies your literary inferiority. Do not, in order to answer the question affirmatively, wade through indiscriminate slush.

We have to say that three-fourths of the novels of the day are a mental depletion to those who read them. The man who makes wholesale denunciation of notion pitches overboard "Pilgrim's Progress" and the parables of our Lord. But the fact is that some of the publishing houses that once were cautious about the moral tone of their books have become reckless about every thing but the number of copies sold. It is all the same to them whether the package they send out be corn starch, jujube paste or h.e.l.lebore. They wrap up fifty copies and mark them C.O.D. But if the expressman, according to that mark, should collect on delivery all the curses that shall come on the head of the publishing house which printed them, he would break down his wagon and kill his horses with the load. Let parents and guardians be especially watchful. Have a quarantine at your front door for all books and newspapers. Let the health doctor go abroad and see whether there is any sickness there before you let it come to wharf.a.ge.

Whether young or old, be cautious about what you read in the newspapers.

You cannot day after day go through three columns of murder trial without being a worse man than when you began. While you are trying to find out whether Stokes was lying in wait for Fisk, Satan is lying in wait for you.

Skip that half page of divorce case. Keep out of the mud. The Burdell and Sickles cases, through the unclean reading they afforded to millions of people long ago, led their thousands into abandoned lives and pitched them off the edge of a lost eternity. With so much healthful literature of all sorts, there is no excuse for bringing your minds in contact with evil. If there were a famine, there might be some reason for eating garbage, but the land is full of bread. When we may, with our families, sit around the clean warm fire-hearth of Christian knowledge, why go hunting in the ash barrels for cinders?

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

SHORT OR LONG PASTORATES.

The question is being discussed in many journals, "How long ought a minister to stay in one place?" Clergymen and laymen and editors are wagging tongue and pen on the subject--a most practical question and easy to answer. Let a minister stay in a place till he gets done--that is, when he has nothing more to say or do.

Some ministers are such ardent students of the Bible and of men, they are after a twenty-five years' residence in a parish so full of things that ought to be said, that their resignation would be a calamity. Others get through in three months and ought to go; but it takes an earthquake to get them away. They must be moved on by committees, and pelted with resolutions, stuck through with the needles of the ladies' sewing society, and advised by neighboring ministers, and hauled up before presbyteries and consociations; and after they have killed the church and killed themselves, the pastoral relation is dissolved.

We knew of a man who got a unanimous call. He wore the finest pair of gaiters that ever went into that pulpit; and when he took up the Psalm book to give out the song, it was the perfection of gracefulness. His tongue was dipped in "balm of a thousand flowers," and it was like the roll of one of Beethoven's symphonies to hear him read the hardest Bible names, Jechonias, Zerubbabel and Tiglath-pileser. It was worth all the salary paid him to see the way he lifted his pocket-handkerchief to his eyelids.

But that brother, without knowing it, got through in six weeks. He had sold out his entire stock of goods, and ought to have shut up shop.

Congregations enjoy flowers and well-folded pocket-handkerchiefs for occasional desserts, but do not like them for a regular meal. The most urbane elder was sent to the minister to intimate that the Lord was probably calling him to some other field, but the elder was baffled by the graciousness of his pastor, and unable to discharge his mission, and after he had for an hour hemmed and hawed, backed out.

Next, a woman with a very sharp tongue was sent to talk to the minister's wife. The war-cloud thickened, the pickets were driven in, and then a skirmish, and after a while all the batteries were opened, and each side said that the other side lied, and the minister dropped his pocket-handkerchief and showed his claws as long as those of Nebuchadnezzar after he had been three years eating gra.s.s like an ox. We admire long pastorates when it is agreeable to both parties, we know ministers who boast they have been thirty years in one place, though all the world knows they have been there twenty-nine years too long. Their congregations are patiently waiting their removal to a higher lat.i.tude. Meanwhile, those churches are like a man with chronic rheumatism, very quiet--not because they admire rheumatism, but because there is no use kicking with a swollen foot, since it would hurt them more than the object a.s.saulted.

If a pastorate can be maintained only through conflict or ecclesiastical tyranny, it might better be abandoned. There are many ministers who go away from their settlements before they ought, but we think there are quite as many who do not go soon enough. A husband might just as well try to keep his wife by choking her to death with a marriage ring as a minister to try to keep a church's love by ecclesiastical violence. Study the best time to quit.

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

AN EDITOR'S CHIP-BASKET.

On our way out the newspaper rooms we stumbled over the basket in which is deposited the literary material we cannot use. The basket upset and surprised us with its contents. On the top were some things that looked like fifteen or twenty poems. People outside have no idea of the amount of rhyme that comes to a printing office. The fact is that at some period in every one's life he writes "poetry." His existence depends upon it. We wrote ten or fifteen verses ourselves once. Had we not written them just then and there, we might not be here. They were in long metre, and "Old Hundred" would have fitted them grandly.

Many people are seized with the poetic spasm when they are sick, and their lines are apt to begin with.

"O mortality! how frail art thou!"

Others on Sabbath afternoons write Sabbath-school hymns, adding to the batch of infinite nonsense that the children are compelled to swallow. For others a beautiful curl is a corkscrew pulling out canto after canto.

Nine-tenths of the rhyme that comes to a printing office cannot be used.

You hear a rough tear of paper, and you look around to see the managing editor adding to the responsibilities of his chip-basket. What a way that is to treat incipient Tennysons and Longfellows!

Next to the poetic effusions tumble out treatises on "const.i.tutional law"

heavy enough to break the basket. We have noticed that after a man has got so dull he can get no one willing to hear him he takes to profound exposition. Out from the same chip-basket rolls a great pile of announcements that people want put among the editorials, so as to save the expense of the advertising column. They tell us the article they wish recommended will have a highly beneficial effect upon the Church and world.

It is a religious churn, or a moral horse-rake, or a consecrated fly trap.

They almost get us crying over their new kind of grindstone, and we put the letter down on the table while we get out our pocket-handkerchief, when our a.s.sistant takes hold the doc.u.ment and gives it a ruthless rip, and pitches it into the chip-basket.

Next in the pile of torn and upset things is the speech of some one on the momentous occasion of the presentation of a gold-headed cane, or silver pitcher, or bra.s.s kettle for making preserves. It was "unexpected," a "surprise" and "undeserved," and would "long be cherished." "Great applause, and not a dry eye in the house," etc., etc. But there is not much room in a paper for speeches. In this country everybody speaks.

An American is in his normal condition when he is making a speech. He is born with "fellow-citizens" in his mouth, and closes his earthly life by saying, "One word more, and I have done." Speeches being so common, newspaper readers do not want a large supply, and so many of these utterances, intended to be immortal, drop into oblivion through that inexhaustible reservoir, the editorial chip-basket.

But there is a hovering of pathos over this wreck of matter. Some of these wasted things were written for bread by intelligent wives with drunken husbands trying to support their families with the pen. Over that mutilated ma.n.u.script some weary man toiled until daybreak. How we wish we could have printed what they wrote! Alas for the necessity that disappoints the literary struggle of so many women and men, when it is ten dollars for that article or children gone supperless to bed!

Let no one enter the field of literature for the purpose of "making a living" unless as a very last resort. There are thousands of persons to-day starving to death with a steel pen in their hand. The story of Grub street and poets living on thin soup is being repeated all over this land, although the modern cases are not so conspicuous. Poverty is no more agreeable because cla.s.sical and set in hexameters. The hungry author cannot breakfast on "odes to summer." On this, cold day how many of the literati are shivering! Martyrs have perished in the fire, but more persons have perished for lack of fire. Let no editor through hypercriticism of contributed articles add to this educated suffering.

What is that we hear in the next room? It is the roar of a big fire as it consumes unavailable literary material--epics, sonnets, homilies, tractates, compilations, circulars, dissertations. Some of them were obscure, and make a great deal of smoke. Some of them were merry, and crackle. All of them have ended their mission and gone down, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

THE MANHOOD OF SERVICE.

At the Crawford House, White Mountains, we noticed, one summer, unusual intelligence and courtesy on the part of those who served the tables. We found out that many of them were students from the colleges and seminaries--young men and women who had taken this mode of replenishing their purses and getting the benefit of mountain air. We felt like applauding them. We have admiration for those who can be independent of the oppressive conventionalities of society. May not all of us practically adopt the Christian theory that any work is honorable that is useful? The slaves of an ignominious pride, how many kill themselves earning a living!

We have tens of thousands of women in our cities, sitting in cold rooms, stabbing their life out with their needles, coughing their lungs into tubercles and suffering the horrors of the social inquisition, for whom there waits plenty of healthy, happy homes in the country, if they could only, like these sons and daughters of Dartmouth and Northampton, consent to serve. We wish some one would explain to us how a sewing machine is any more respectable than a churn, or a yard stick is better than a pitchfork.

We want a new Declaration of Independence, signed by all the laboring cla.s.ses. There is plenty of work for all kinds of people, if they were not too proud to do it. Though the country is covered with people who can find nothing to do, we would be willing to open a bureau to-morrow, warranting to give to all the unemployed of the land occupation, if they would only consent to do what might be a.s.signed them. We believe anything is more honorable than idleness.

During very hard times two Italian artists called at our country home, asking if we did not want some sketching done, and they unrolled some elegant pictures, showing their fine capacity. We told them we had no desire for sketches, but we had a cistern to clean, and would pay them well for doing it. Off went their coats, and in a few hours the work was done and their wages awarded. How much more honorable for them to do what they could get to do rather than to wait for more adapted employment!

Why did not the girls of Northampton spend their summers embroidering slippers or hemming handkerchiefs, and thus keep at work un.o.bserved and more popular? Because they were not fools. They said: "Let us go up and see Mount Adams, and the Profile, and Mount Washington. We shall have to work only five hours a day, and all the time we will be gathering health and inspiration." Young men, those are the girls to seek when you want a wife, rather than the wheezing victims of ruinous work chosen because it is more popular. About the last thing we would want to marry is a medicine-chest.

Why did not the students of Dartmouth, during their vacation, teach school?

First, because teaching is a science, and they did not want to do three months of damage to the children of the common school. Secondly, because they wanted freedom from books as man makes them, and opportunity to open the ponderous tome of boulder and strata as G.o.d printed them. Churches and scientific inst.i.tutions, these will be the men to call--brawny and independent, rather than the bilious, short-breathed, nerveless graduates who, too proud to take healthful recreation, tumble, at commencement day, into the lap of society so many Greek roots.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

BALKY PEOPLE.