An Authors Mind | Page 6

is not all stomach, nor altogether
formed alone for feeding. Remember Æsop's parable, the belly and the
members; and, above them all, do not overlook the head.
What think you then of "a featherless biped?" gravely suggests a rusty
Plinyite. Absolute sir, and most obsolete Roman, doubtless you never
had the luck to set eyes upon a turkey at Christmas; the poor bare bipes
implumis, a forked creature, waiting to be forked supererogatively; ay,
and risibilis to boot, if ever all concomitants of the hearty old festival
were properly provocative of decent mirth. Thus then return we to our
muttons, and time enough, quotha: literary pundit, (whose is the
notable saying?) thy definition is bomb-proof, thy fancy unscaleable,
thy thought too deep for undermining; that notion is at the head of the
poll, a candidate approved of Truth's most open borough; for, in spite
of secretary-birds with pens stuck clerk-like behind their ears (as
useless an emblem of sinecure office as gold keys, silver, and
coronation armour)--in spite of whole flights of geese, capable enough
of saving capitols, but impotent to wield one of their own
all-conquering quills--in spite, also, (keen-eyed categorists, be to my
faults in ratiocination a little blind, for very cheerfulness,) in spite, I say,
of copying presses, manifold inditers, and automaton artists, MAN IS
A WRITING ANIMAL.

Wearily enough, you will think, have we disposed of this one definition:
but recollect, and take me for a son of leisure, an amateur tourist of
Parnassus, an idling gatherer of way-side flowers in the vale of
Thessaly, a careless, unbusied, "contemplative man," recreating himself
by gentle craft on the banks of much-poached Helicon; and if you, my
casual friend, be neither like-minded in fancy nor like-fitted in leisure,
courteously consider that we may not travel well together: at this
station let us stop, freely forgiving each other for mutual misliking; to
your books, to your business, to your fowling, to your feasting, to your
mummery, to your nunnery--go: my track lays away from the highroad,
in and out between yonder hills, among thickets, mossy rocks, green
hollows, high fern, and the tangled hair of hiding river-gods; I meet not
pedlers and bagsmen, but stumble upon fawns just dropped, and do not
scare their doting mothers; I quench not my noonday thirst with fiery
drams from a brazen tap, but, lying over the cold brook, drink to its
musical Naiades; I walk no dusty roads of a working-day world, but flit
upon the pleasant places of one made up of holidays.
A truce to this truancy, and method be my maxim: let us for a moment
link our reasonings, and solder one stray rivet; man being a writing
animal, there still remains the question, what is writing? Ah, there's the
rub: a very comfortable definition would it be, if every pen-holder and
pen-wiper could truly claim that kingship of the universe--that imagery
of his Maker--that mystical, marvellous, immortal, intellectual,
abstraction, manhood: but, what then is WRITING? Ye tons of invoices,
groaning shelves of incalculable legers, parchment abhorrences of rare
Charles Lamb, we think not now of you; dreary piles of
unhealthy-looking law-books, hypochondriacal heaps of medical
experiences, plodding folios of industrious polemics, slow elaborations
of learned dullness, we spare your native dust; letters unnumbered, in
all stages of cacography, both physical and metaphysical, alack! most
of you must slip through the meshes of our definition yet unwove; poor
deciduous leaves of the forest, that, at your best, serve only--it is yet a
good purpose--to dress the common soil of human kindness, without
attaining to the praise of wreaths and chaplets ever hanging in the
Muses' temple; flowers withered on the stalk, whose blooming beauty
no lover's hand has dropped upon the sacred waters of Siloa, like the

Hindoo's garland on her Ganges; prolix, vain, ephemeral letters
(especially enveloped penny-posters)--and sparing only some few
redolent of truth, wisdom, and affection--your bulky majority of
flippant trash, staid advices, dunnings, hoaxings, lyings, and
slanderings, degrade you to a lower rank than that we take on us to
designate as "writing."
And what, O what--"how poor is he that hath not patience!"--shall we
predicate of the average viscera of circulating libraries?--abominable
viscera!--isn't that the word, my young Hippocrates?--A parley--a
parley! and the terms of truce are these: If this present pastime of mine
(for pastime it is, so spurn not at its logic,) be mercifully looked on by
you, lady novelists and male dittoes--yet truly there are giants in your
ranks, as Scott, and Ward, and Hugo, and Le Sage, towering above ten
thousand pigmies--if I be spared your censures well-deserved,
interchangeably as toward your authorships will I exercise the
charitable wisdom of silence: a white flag or a white feather is my best
alternative in soothing or avoiding so terrible a host; and verily,