The Professor at the Breakfast-TableHolmes, Oliver Wendell
General
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
American fiction -- 19th century; Conversation -- Fiction; Poetry
You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful incomprehensibleness
of my description of the expression in a young girl's face. You forget
what a miserable surface-matter this language is in which we try to
reproduce our interior state of being. Articulation is a shallow trick.
From the light Poh! which we toss off from our lips as we fling a
nameless scribbler's impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest
utterances which comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need,
is only a space of some three or four inches. Words, which are a set of
clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared to
tones and expression of the features. I give it up; I thought I could
shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this young
girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use. No doubt
your head aches, trying to make something of my description. If there
is here and there one that can make anything intelligible out of my talk
about the Great Secret, and who has spelt out a syllable or two of it on
some woman's face, dead or living, that is all I can expect. One should
see the person with whom he converses about such matters. There
are dreamy-eyed people to whom I should say all these things with a
certainty of being understood;--
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me
To him my tale I teach.
--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar for
this August number, so that they will never see it.
--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious attempt,
which may go for nothing, and you can have your money refunded, if you
will make the change.
This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
breakfast-table. The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she again
seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him. That
slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each
other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side,
is a physical fact I have often noticed. Then there is a tendency in all
the men's eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if
all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely
placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to
look.
That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some
mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She gave a
sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another
by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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