The Idiot

“ As Sammie's father once said to me: 'By Jove, Idiot,' he said, 'if men could only be what their children think them!'"
"Nevertheless they should be governed, curbed, brought up!" said the Bibliomaniac.
"They should, indeed," said the Idiot. "And in such a fashion that when they are governed, curbed, and brought up they do not realize that they have been governed, curbed, and brought up. The man who plays the tyrant with his children isn't the man for me. Give me the man who, like my father, is his son's intimate, personal friend, his confidant, his chum. ”

“ Pedagog.
"And rather uncomfortable—if it is a real idea," observed the Doctor. "An idea in the Idiot's mind must feel somewhat as a tall, stout Irish maid feels when she goes to her bedroom in one of those Harlem flat-houses."
"You men are losing a great opportunity," said the Idiot, with a scornful glance at the three professional gentlemen. "The idea of your following the professions of pedagogy, medicine, and literature, when the three of you combined could make a fortune as an incarnate comic paper. ”

“ With such discouragement at home, what hope have I for better fortune abroad?"
"It is dreadful to be an unappreciated genius!" said the Bibliomaniac, gruffly. "It's better to be a plain lunatic. A plain lunatic is at least free from the consciousness of failure."
"Nevertheless, I'd rather be myself than any one else at this board," rejoined the Idiot. "Unappreciated though I be, I am at least happy. Consciousness of failure need not necessarily destroy one's happiness. ”

“ Therefore, all things being sandwiches, life is a sandwich, Q. E. D."
"Is life a thing?" demanded Mr. Pedagog.
"Certainly," said the Idiot. "And a mighty good thing, too. If you don't believe it look the word thing up in the dictionary. All things are things."
"But," continued the Schoolmaster, his old spirit of antagonism rising up in his breast, "granted that life is a thing, what is it between so that it becomes a sandwich?"
"The past and the future," said the Idiot. "It is a slice of the immediate between a slice of past and one of future." ”

“ Idiot.
"The natural resting-place of the bad uncle," explained the Idiot. "Still, I maintain that it is every man's duty to keep an attic for the useless things, as Mrs. Pedagog calls them, which some day, when he least expects it, will carry his mind back to other days. The word itself, attic, carries the mind back to the splendors of Athens and other things that are out of date. When I was ill I found sincerest pleasure in rummaging. You can't rummage in a library if your library is properly looked after. You can't rummage in a bedroom in a well-kept house. ”

“ The Landlady laughed a long, loud, silvery laugh, with just a little touch of derision in it.
"O you men, you men!" she ejaculated. "You call yourselves the stronger sex, and plume yourselves on your superior physical endurance, and yet when it comes to a test, where are you?"
"Under the table, Madame, under the table," sighed the Idiot. "I for one frankly admit the soft impeachment." [Pg 52]
"Yes," said the Landlady, "but I'll warrant you never found a woman under the table. ”

“ Pedagog," returned the Idiot, mildly, "for the unhappy reason that as yet the formula for the Electrical Elixir has not been discovered; that it will be discovered before I die I hope and pray, because, unlike the man in the hymn, I would live always. I'd like to be an immortal."
"An immortal Idiot! Think of it!" said the Doctor.
"I didn't expect much sympathy from you, Dr. Capsule," said the Idiot. "The man with car-horses to sell does not dote upon the trolley-car." ”

“ Wherefore am I wedded only to my fancies, content that my days should not be subjected to the strain of trying to be all things to one woman, preferring as I do to remain one thing to all women instead—their devoted admirer and willing slave."
"Well, to come back to the Immortals," said the Doctor. "You don't really think, do you, that we have any women Immortals?"
"Of course, I do," replied the Idiot. "The world is full of them, and always has been." ”

“ The first idiot that attracted the attention of scientific men was looked upon as a savage man, and every treatise on the subject contains some allusion to the so-called savage of the Aveyron, who excited so much curiosity, speculation, and interest among the psychologists of Paris in the early part of the present century.
In old books on medical nomenclature idiocy was classed amongst the varieties of insanity, and the visitor to a lunatic asylum half a century ago, would find the idiot skulking in the corner of a courtyard chained to a staple, and lying on a litter of straw ”

“ Brief, as he read them off, “you can’t go back on any of ’em, can you?”
“No,” said the Bibliomaniac; “that’s the great trouble with the Idiot. Even with all his idiocy he is not always a perfect idiot.” ”

“ Great confusion exists in the public mind as to the nature of idiocy. What is an idiot? Dr. Séguin, a celebrated writer on this subject, has described idiocy as a "specific infirmity of the cerebro-spinal centre," a definition which I need not say applies to a variety of infirmities to which flesh is heir, and such a definition only serves as a cloak for ignorance. Shakespeare, that wonderfully accurate observer of human nature, in several of his dramas has given a very good description of the acts of the idiot, who, he says, is "one who holds his bauble for his God;" ”

“ Idiot.
"And you hate to see him make a—ah—a—well, you know—of himself in the pulpit; and I quite agree with you. I rather like Preachly myself. It is too bad to see a well-meaning man like that batting his brains out against the rock of Gibraltar, whether suicide is sin or not. What has put him in this despondent mood? Do you suppose he has heard?"
"Heard what?" demanded Mrs. Idiot.
"About the slippers," said the Idiot.
"What slippers?" asked his wife.
"Oh, the same old slippers," said the Idiot. "You know the ones I mean—the ones he's going to get from Santa Claus. ”

“ Brief, angrily.
"That's what I thought," said the Idiot. "That's the reason why you always do me such great injustice. You lawyers always have to be doing something, even if it is only holding down a chair so that it won't blow out of your office window. If you haven't any justice to mete out, you take another tack and dispense injustice with lavish hand. However, I'll forgive you if you'll tell me one thing. What's libel, Mr. Brief?" ”

“ Has your horseless cauliflower bloomed as yet?"
"Horseless cauliflower is good, but tautological," said the Idiot. "The cauliflower is an automobile in itself, without the intervention of man. Who told you I was inventing instead of broking these days?"
"Mr. Pedagog said something about it the last time I met him," said the Poet. "He's a mighty good friend of yours. He says you are the most perfect Idiot he ever met." ”

“ The Doctor might have a lozengy shield with a suitable tincture, while my genial friend who occasionally imbibes could have a barry shield surmounted by a small effigy of Gambrinus."
"You appear to know something of heraldry," said the poet, with a look of surprise.
"I know something of everything," said the Idiot, complacently.
"It's a pity you don't know everything about something," sneered the Doctor.
"I would suggest," said the School-Master, dryly, "that a little rampant jackass would make a good crest for your cakes."
"That's a very good idea," said the Idiot. ”

“ Suffice it to say that as the cause is always antecedent to any personal history of the child, idiocy is never dependent on the idiot himself, who has never become so through any vices of his own; he being in many instances the feeble expression of parental defects, and sometimes of parental vices, and is therefore more an object for commiseration than certain lunatics, who, in many instances, have become so through faults of their own. ”

“ Here the Idiot appropriated the roll of his neighbor.
"That depends largely upon the case," replied the Doctor, nervously. "Some are born absent-minded, some achieve absent-mindedness, and some have absent-mindedness thrust upon them."
"'READING WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY'"
"As illustrations of which we might take, for instance, I suppose," said the Idiot, "the born idiot, the borrower, and the man who [Pg 19] is knocked silly by the pole of a truck on Broadway." ”

“ I was as flat as a joke of Caesar's after its four thousandth semiannual appearance in London Punch, and in respect to thickness I was pressed so thin that you could have rolled me around your umbrella, and still been able to get the cover on."
"You never were very deep, anyhow," suggested the Bibliomaniac.
"Whence the wonder of it grows," said the Idiot. "Normally I am fathomless compared to the thin, waferlike quality of my improfundity as I flickered to the floor after that dreadful pressure was removed."
"How about women getting crushed?" demanded the Landlady defiantly. ”

“ Before quitting the question of the cause of idiocy, I should like to say a word or two about what is technically called its histology and its pathological anatomy. What is there in the brain that makes one man a senior wrangler and another an idiot? What is it that unfits one person for the discharge of the ordinary duties of domestic and social life, and endows another with capacities adapted for a statesman, a mathematician, or a philosopher? ”

“ Whitechoker. "But I did not know that I sighed."
"There you are," said the Idiot. "It is the Philosophy of the Unconscious again. If you are not conscious of so actual a thing as a sigh, how much the more unconscious must you be of something so subtle as motive?"
"And your waffle-deck?" said the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally imbibes. "How will that solve the problem? It seems to me to complicate the problem. As it is, we have about thirty waffles, each one of which is a germ of irritation in the breast of the man who doesn't eat it. ”

“ The term “Reverie,” then, will imply the varied conditions of that faculty, which phrenology terms concentrativeness; the extremes of which mark the idiot and the sage.
Idiocy is the most abject and imperfect condition of the waking mind, resembling closely the first disposition to slumber, the sensation of doziness. The creature will commit the most absurd acts, and utter the most ridiculous or profane expressions, without the redeeming apology of being engaged in abstract thought or abstruse calculation. ”

“ GOOD-MORNING, gentlemen,” said the Idiot, cheerily, as he entered the breakfast-room. “This is a fine Sunday morning in spite of the gloom into which the approaching death of the campaign should plunge us all.”
“You think that, do you?” observed the Bibliomaniac. “Well, I don’t agree with you. I for one am sick and tired of politics, and it will be a great relief to me when it is all over.”
“Dear me, what a blasé old customer you are, Mr. Bib,” returned the Idiot. “Do you mean to say that a Presidential campaign does not keep your nerve-centres in a constant state of pleasurable titillation? ”

“ Much additional matter has been added, especially in reference to Consanguine Marriages, Parental Intemperance, Overpressure in Education, and other factors in the causation of Idiocy.
I have tried to show how the study of the Idiot is calculated to throw light upon the abstruse question of the connection between Matter and Mind, and that it is a subject fraught with interest not only to the Philanthropist, but to the Theologian, and to the Political Economist. ”

“ I'm not going to be one thing for myself, and build up a fictitious Idiot for the world. The world calls you men of pretence conceited, whereas, by pretending to be something that you are not, you give to the world what I should call convincing evidence that you are not at all conceited, but rather somewhat ashamed of what you know yourselves to be. ”

“ Pedagog put in at this point, "that some of the good old customs of the New Year have gone out."
"As to which, Mrs. Pedagog?" asked the Idiot.
"Well, New-Year's calling particularly," explained the lady. "It is no longer the thing for people to make New-Year's calls, and I must confess I regret it. It used to be a great pleasure to me in the old days to receive the gentlemen—my old friends, and relatives, and boarders."
"Why distinguish between your old friends and your boarders, Mrs. Pedagog?" interrupted the Idiot. "They are synonymous terms." ”

“ Pedagog.
"By something far more subtle and delicately suggestive," rejoined the Idiot. "Hired men do not mind barbed-wire fences. They rather like them when they annoy other people. When they annoy themselves they know how to treat them. My own man Mike, for instance, minds them not at all. Indeed, he has taken my pruning-shears and clipped all the barbs off the small stretch of it we had at the rear end of our lot to keep him from climbing over for a short cut home." ”

“ Don't talk Columbus to me unless you want to prove that luck is the greatest factor of success."
"DIDN'T KNOW ENOUGH TO CHOOSE HIS OWN FACE"
"Ill-luck is sometimes a factor of success," said Mr. Pedagog. "You are a success as an Idiot, which appears to me to be extremely unfortunate."
"I don't know about that," said the Idiot. "I adapt myself to my company, and of course—"
"Then you are a school-master among school-masters, a lawyer among lawyers, and so forth?" queried the Bibliomaniac. ”

“ Pedagog, enthusiastically.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "At ten cents a function it would beat University Extension out of sight, and, further, it would preserve society. If we lose society we lose caste, and, worse than all, our funny men would have to go out of business, for there would be no fads or Willieboys left to ridicule."
VII
A Beggar's Hand-book
"Mr. Idiot," said the Poet one morning, as the waffles were served, "you are an inventive genius. Why don't you invent an easy way to make a fortune? The trouble with most methods of making money is that they involve too much labor." ”