MY BOOK.

Last night, as we circled round the fire in the little red room in Kildare Street, by courtesy called a boudoir, talking about everything, anything, and nothing at all, I happened to give out some odds and ends, that amused those who, truth to tell, are not among the least amusable; when somebody said, “Why do you not write down all this?” and here is a blank book placed before me for the express purpose. But I suspect there is no talking upon paper, as one talks “les pieds couchés sur les chenets.” I feel, at least at this moment, that there is all the difference in the world between sitting bolt upright, before a marble-covered, blue-lined, lank, ledger-looking, Threadneedle-street sort of a volume, for the purpose of opening a running account with one’s own current ideas, and the sinking into the downy depths of an easy chair, and “then and there, without let and molestation” (as the old Irish passport has it), giving a careless and unheeded existence to the infinite deal of nothings which lie latent in the memories of all such, as have seen and heard much, and have been “over the hills and far away.” “Thoughts that breathe” will not always write; “words that burn” are apt to cool down as they are traced; visions that “come like shadows,” will also “so depart;” and the brightest exhalations of the mind, which are drawn forth by the sunny influence of social confidence, like other exhalations, will dissipate by their own lightness, and (beyond the reach of fixture or condensation) “make themselves air, into which they vanish.”

I never, in my life, kept a common-place-book for preserving such “Cynthias of the minute.” I have even an antipathy to all albums and vade-mecums, and such charitable repositories for fugitive thoughts, and thoughtless effusions—reveries which were never rêvés—and impromptus laboured at leisure. I hardly think I can bring myself to open a regular saving bank for the odd cash of mind, the surplus of round sums placed at legal interest in the great public fund of professed authorship: “on renvoye tout cela à la pédantisme.”

Still, however, in the days of pure pedantry, the days of the Scaligers, Pasquiers, Balzacs, and Thuanuses, genius and simplicity, and high philosophy too, found frequent shelter in such daily ledgers of spontaneous thought, and feeling. “Each day of my life is a page in my book,” says the learned Menage, who scribbled his agreeable Ana, while Mesdames Sévigné and Deshoulières sat disputing in his chimney corner, on the merits of coffee, and of Racine, or the fashion of an hurlubrelu. It was such a book, lying temptingly open on the old oak table in the gothic library of the château Montaigne, that led the charming “Michel, gentilhomme Perigordin,” to note down, (in the pauses of more studied composition) those natural and amusing things, which, as he himself quaintly expresses it, come, “à saute et à gambade.”⁠[2] But then I am not Menage nor Montaigne.

The danger of a book like this, lies in the lure it holds out to egotism. There it is, always ready to receive the perilous confidences of self-love and self-complacency, like an old lady’s humble companion, or the confessor of a voluble devotee. “The reason,” says the always quotable Madame de Sévigné, “why devotees love their confessors, is the pleasure they have in talking of themselves, even when they have nothing good to tell: ‘on aime tant à parler de soi.’”⁠[3] Oh, the terrible truth!

There is something too not less dangerous in the way-laying of such a book for every passing impression. What little sensations, which the world should never know, may there find permanency! What opinions may there be recorded, which to broach, were proscription! What honest indignation may there find vent against the falseness of the professed friend, or the vileness of the successful enemy,—feelings which it is vain to express, and undignified to expose. What mere ebullitions of temperament may there assume the shape of habitual sentiment—though even in the writing, they dissipate with the breaking forth of a sun-beam, or lose their acrimony with the shifting of a north-east wind.

Had I not then better cast away this volume, “white and unwritten still,” ere it bear evidence against me; and leave to “some hand more calm and sage—the leaves to fill,” who haply may make it the nucleus of one of those annuals, never destined to be perennial, or the repertory for some souvenir, soon to be forgotten? Such a book may have its value. It may preserve a sort of proof impression of one’s self, taken at various sittings, and in various aspects; and thus give one portrait more to the gallery of human originals, to illustrate the great mystery of identity,—that volatile subject, which changes as we analyse it. For even the hand which traced the first line of this farrago, is not the same agent of the same volition, with that which will write the last; though the being, in which it resides, is still technically the same. To leave such an auto-transcript behind one, may assist the moral anatomist in his demonstrations, as the bequeathing what is called “our mortal remains” to the dissecting-knife promotes the science of the physiologist. In either case, there is much to pity, and much to wonder at; but what is most marvellous and admirable in both, is the inscrutable mystery by which the complicated machinery is set in motion, independently of the subject in which it works; constructed, perfected, moving, stopping!—the power unknown, the end unguessed! At this point, neither books nor bodies can be further of use. The anatomist drops his knife, the moralist his pen. At this point too I must drop mine: not that I am “weary of conjecture,” for I like the animating and enterprising excursion, even when it proves nothing; but,—I must dress for a ball!

Oh! what a refuge is folly against philosophy; what a shield is pleasure against persecution! How many have been burned at the stake, who never would have paid that terrible penalty had they learned to waltz! How many have been broken on the wheel, who would have escaped its tortures, had they been cut short in their unpardonable search after truth, by the necessity of dressing for a ball!