One of Judge Methuen’s pet theories
is that the soul in the human body lies near the center
of gravity; this is, I believe, one of the tenets
of the Buddhist faith, and for a long time I eschewed
it as one might shun a vile thing, for I feared lest
I should become identified even remotely with any
faith or sect other than Congregationalism.
Yet I noticed that in moments of fear
or of joy or of the sense of any other emotion I invariably
experienced a feeling of goneness in the pit of my
stomach, as if, forsooth, the center of my physical
system were also the center of my nervous and intellectual
system, the point at which were focused all those
devious lines of communication by means of which sensation
is instantaneously transmitted from one part of the
body to another.
I mentioned this circumstance to Judge
Methuen, and it seemed to please him. “My
friend,” said he, “you have a particularly
sensitive soul; I beg of you to exercise the greatest
prudence in your treatment of it. It is the best
type of the bibliomaniac soul, for the quickness of
its apprehensions betokens that it is alert and keen
and capable of instantaneous impressions and enthusiasms.
What you have just told me convinces me that you
are by nature qualified for rare exploits in the science
and art of book-collecting. You will presently
become bald perhaps as bald as Thomas Hobbes
was for a vigilant and active soul invariably
compels baldness, so close are the relations between
the soul and the brain, and so destructive are the
growth and operations of the soul to those vestigial
features which humanity has inherited from those grosser
animals, our prehistoric ancestors.”
You see by this that Judge Methuen
recognized baldness as prima-facie evidence of intellectuality
and spirituality. He has collected much literature
upon the subject, and has promised the Academy of
Science to prepare and read for the instruction of
that learned body an essay demonstrating that absence
of hair from the cranium (particularly from the superior
regions of the frontal and parietal divisions) proves
a departure from the instincts and practices of brute
humanity, and indicates surely the growth of the understanding.
It occurred to the Judge long ago
to prepare a list of the names of the famous bald
men in the history of human society, and this list
has grown until it includes the names of thousands,
representing every profession and vocation.
Homer, Socrates, Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero,
Pliny, Maecenas, Julius Cæsar, Horace, Shakespeare,
Bacon, Napoleon Bonaparte, Dante, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith,
Wordsworth, Israel Putnam, John Quincy Adams, Patrick
Henry these geniuses all were bald.
But the baldest of all was the philosopher Hobbes,
of whom the revered John Aubrey has recorded that
“he was very bald, yet within dore he used
to study and sitt bare-headed, and said he never took
cold in his head, but that the greatest trouble was
to keepe off the flies from pitching on the baldness.”
In all the portraits and pictures
of Bonaparte which I have seen, a conspicuous feature
is that curl or lock of hair which depends upon the
emperor’s forehead, and gives to the face a pleasant
degree of picturesque distinction. Yet this
was a vanity, and really a laughable one; for early
in life Bonaparte began to get bald, and this so troubled
him that he sought to overcome the change it made in
his appearance by growing a long strand of hair upon
his occiput and bringing it forward a goodly distance
in such artful wise that it right ingeniously served
the purposes of that Hyperion curl which had been
the pride of his youth, but which had fallen early
before the ravages of time.
As for myself, I do not know that
I ever shared that derisive opinion in which the unthinking
are wont to hold baldness. Nay, on the contrary,
I have always had especial reverence for this mark
of intellectuality, and I agree with my friend Judge
Methuen that the tragic episode recorded in the second
chapter of II. Kings should serve the honorable
purpose of indicating to humanity that bald heads are
favored with the approval and the protection of Divinity.
In my own case I have imputed my early
baldness to growth in intellectuality and spirituality
induced by my fondness for and devotion to books.
Miss Susan, my sister, lays it to other causes, first
among which she declares to be my unnatural practice
of reading in bed, and the second my habit of eating
welsh-rarebits late of nights. Over my bed I
have a gas-jet so properly shaded that the rays of
light are concentrated and reflected downward upon
the volume which I am reading.
Miss Susan insists that much of this
light and its attendant heat falls upon my head, compelling
there a dryness of the scalp whereby the follicles
have been deprived of their natural nourishment and
have consequently died. She furthermore maintains
that the welsh-rarebits of which I partake invariably
at the eleventh hour every night breed poisonous vapors
and subtle megrims within my stomach, which humors,
rising by their natural courses to my brain, do therein
produce a fever that from within burneth up the fluids
necessary to a healthy condition of the capillary
growth upon the super-adjacent and exterior cranial
integument.
Now, this very declaration of Miss
Susan’s gives me a potent argument in defence
of my practices, for, being bald, would not a neglect
of those means whereby warmth is engendered where
it is needed result in colds, quinsies, asthmas, and
a thousand other banes? The same benignant Providence
which, according to Laurence Sterne, tempereth the
wind to the shorn lamb provideth defence and protection
for the bald. Had I not loved books, the soul
in my midriff had not done away with those capillary
vestiges of my simian ancestry which originally flourished
upon my scalp; had I not become bald, the delights
and profits of reading in bed might never have fallen
to my lot.
And indeed baldness has its compensations;
when I look about me and see the time, the energy,
and the money that are continually expended upon the
nurture and tending of the hair, I am thankful that
my lot is what it is. For now my money is applied
to the buying of books, and my time and energy are
devoted to the reading of them.
To thy vain employments, thou becurled
and pomaded Absalom! Sweeter than thy unguents
and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is the smell of
those old books of mine, which from the years and from
the ship’s hold and from constant companionship
with sages and philosophers have acquired a fragrance
that exalteth the soul and quickeneth the intellectuals!
Let me paraphrase my dear Chaucer and tell thee, thou
waster of substances, that
For me was lever
han at my beddes hed
A twenty bokes,
clothed in black and red
Of Aristotle and
his philosophie,
Than robes rich,
or fidel, or sautrie;
But all be that
I ben a philosopher
Yet have I but
litel gold in cofre!
Books, books, books give
me ever more books, for they are the caskets wherein
we find the immortal expressions of humanity words,
the only things that live forever! I bow reverently
to the bust in yonder corner whenever I recall what
Sir John Herschel (God rest his dear soul!) said
and wrote: “Were I to pay for a taste that
should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances
and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me
during life, and a shield against its ills, however
things might go amiss and the world frown upon me,
it would be a taste for reading. Give a man
this taste and a means of gratifying it, and you can
hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed,
you put into his hands a most perverse selection of
books. You place him in contact with the best
society in every period of history with
the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest,
and the purest characters who have adorned humanity.
You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary
of all ages. The world has been created for
him.”
For one phrase particularly do all
good men, methinks, bless burly, bearish, phrase-making
old Tom Carlyle. “Of all things,”
quoth he, “which men do or make here below by
far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are
the things we call books.” And Judge Methuen’s
favorite quotation is from Babington Macaulay to
this effect: “I would rather be a poor
man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who
did not love reading.”
Kings, indeed! What a sorry
lot are they! Said George III. to Nicol, his
bookseller: “I would give this right hand
if the same attention had been paid to my education
which I pay to that of the prince.” Louis
XIV. was as illiterate as the lowliest hedger and ditcher.
He could hardly write his name; at first, as Samuel
Pegge tells us, he formed it out of six straight strokes
and a line of beauty, thus:
which he afterward perfected
as best he could, and the result was Louis.
Still I find it hard to inveigh against
kings when I recall the goodness of Alexander to Aristotle,
for without Alexander we should hardly have known
of Aristotle. His royal patron provided the
philosopher with every advantage for the acquisition
of learning, dispatching couriers to all parts of
the earth to gather books and manuscripts and every
variety of curious thing likely to swell the store
of Aristotle’s knowledge.
Yet set them up in a line and survey
them these wearers of crowns and these
wielders of scepters and how pitiable are
they in the paucity and vanity of their accomplishments!
What knew they of the true happiness of human life?
They and their courtiers are dust and forgotten.
Judge Methuen and I shall in due time
pass away, but our courtiers they who have
ever contributed to our delight and solace our
Horace, our Cervantes, our Shakespeare, and the rest
of the innumerable train these shall never
die. And inspired and sustained by this immortal
companionship we blithely walk the pathway illumined
by its glory, and we sing, in season and out, the song
ever dear to us and ever dear to thee, I hope, O gentle
reader:
Oh, for a booke and a shady nooke,
Eyther in doore
or out,
With the greene leaves whispering overhead,
Or the streete
cryes all about;
Where I maie reade all at my ease
Both of the newe
and old,
For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke
Is better to me
than golde!