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When man puts his faculties
on the strut and the stretch, he builds pyramids, founds empires, wages
wars, circumnavigates the globe, writes epic poems, histories, and
dictionaries, and delivers speeches and lectures. In short, it is doubtless
by this stiffening of himself, this straining and striving, that he achieves
most of those things which get him what is called a name? But, very well as
all this may be in its way, it would make a weary world if we had nothing
else. Therefore, as Sancho Panza, in his honest natural horror at the idea
of constant movement and exertion, invoked blessings on the man who invented
sleep, we are grateful also for the existence of that pleasant middle region
which lies between the scene of public display and struggle and absolute
slumber-land. It is here we would stray at our ease in the present book.
This Book of Table-talk, we hope, will have little in it of what is trivial,
any more than of what is dull; but, admonished by the title we have just
written, and keeping in remembrance that a festive board is neither a
class-room nor a church, and that a talk is not, or at least ought not to
be, either a sermon or a lecture, we shall especially endeavour to avoid the
fatiguing and the long-winded.
This last word alone, indeed, gives us nearly a complete definition of all
that a book of table-talk should not be. There is scarcely anything capable
of being put into a book of which it may not contain a little. The acts, and
sayings, and fortunes of individuals; public events; the manners and customs
of different ages, and nations, and states of society; curious and
interesting facts in all the departments of natural knowledge; the wonders
of science and of art; all the turnings and windings of human opinion;
sagacious maxims for .the conduct of life; even ingenious thoughts in
speculative philosophy;—all things, in short, that have either wit or humour
in them, or a finer intellectual life and spirit of any other kind, may here
enter as ingredients, and be mixed up together in rich variety:
“Quicquid agunt homines, votum,
timor, ira, voluptas,
Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli.”
A book of table-talk, like
the actual conversation poured forth at a social meeting of accomplished and
well-furnished minds, should be a distillation of whatever is most ethereal
in all the wealth of life and of books.
Volume 1 | Volume 2 |
