Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  Two hedgehogs having conceived a dislike to a hare, conspired for his extinction. It was agreed between them that the lighter and more agile of the two should beat him up, surround him, run him into a ditch, and drive him upon the thorns of the more gouty and unwieldy conspirator. It was not a very hopeful scheme, but it was the best they could devise. There was a chance of success if the hare should prove willing, and, gambler-like, they decided to take that chance, instead of trusting to the remote certainty of their victim’s death from natural cause. The doomed animal performed his part as well as could be reasonably expected of him: every time the enemy’s flying detachment pressed him hard, he fled playfully toward the main body, and lightly vaulted over, about eight feet above the spines. And this prickly blockhead had not the practical sagacity to get upon a wall seven feet and six inches high!

  This fable is designed to show that the most desperate chances are comparatively safe.

  CXXXI.

  A young eel inhabiting the mouth of a river in India, determined to travel. Being a fresh-water eel, he was somewhat restricted in his choice of a route, but he set out with a cheerful heart and very little luggage. Before he had proceeded very far up-stream he found the current too strong to be overcome without a ruinous consumption of coals. He decided to anchor his tail where it then was, and grow up. For the first hundred miles it was tolerably tedious work, but when he had learned to tame his impatience, he found this method of progress rather pleasant than otherwise. But when he began to be caught at widely separate points by the fishermen of eight or ten different nations, he did not think it so fine.

  This fable teaches that when you extend your residence you multiply your experiences. A local eel can know but little of angling.

  CXXXII.

  Some of the lower animals held a convention to settle for ever the unspeakably important question, What is Life?

  “Life,” squeaked the poet, blinking and folding his filmy wings, “is — .” His kind having been already very numerously heard from upon the subject, he was choked off.

  “Life,” said the scientist, in a voice smothered by the earth he was throwing up into small hills, “is the harmonious action of heterogeneous but related faculties, operating in accordance with certain natural laws.”

  “Ah!” chattered the lover, “but that thawt of thing is vewy gweat blith in the thothiety of one’th thweetheart.” And curling his tail about a branch, he swung himself heavenward and had a spasm.

  “It is vita!” grunted the sententious scholar, pausing in his mastication of a Chaldaic root.

  “It is a thistle,” brayed the warrior: “very nice thing to take!”

  “Life, my friends,” croaked the philosopher from his hollow tree, dropping the lids over his cattish eyes, “is a disease. We are all symptoms.”

  “Pooh!” ejaculated the physician, uncoiling and springing his rattle. “How then does it happen that when we remove the symptoms, the disease is gone?”

  “I would give something to know that,” replied the philosopher, musingly; “but I suspect that in most cases the inflammation remains, and is intensified.”

  Draw your own moral inference, “in your own jugs.”

  CXXXIII.

  A heedless boy having flung a pebble in the direction of a basking lizard, that reptile’s tail disengaged itself, and flew some distance away. One of the properties of a lizard’s camp-follower is to leave the main body at the slightest intimation of danger.

  “There goes that vexatious narrative again,” exclaimed the lizard, pettishly; “I never had such a tail in my life! Its restless tendency to divorce upon insufficient grounds is enough to harrow the reptilian soul! Now,” he continued, backing up to the fugitive part, “perhaps you will be good enough to resume your connection with the parent establishment.”

  No sooner was the splice effected, than an astronomer passing that way casually remarked to a friend that he had just sighted a comet. Supposing itself menaced, the timorous member again sprang away, coming down plump before the horny nose of a sparrow. Here its career terminated.

  We sometimes escape from an imaginary danger, only to find some real persecutor has a little bill against us.

  CXXXIV.

  A jackal who had pursued a deer all day with unflagging industry, was about to seize him, when an earthquake, which was doing a little civil engineering in that part of the country, opened a broad chasm between him and his prey.

  “Now, here,” said he, “is a distinct interference with the laws of nature. But if we are to tolerate miracles, there is an end of all progress.”

  So speaking, he endeavoured to cross the abyss at two jumps. His fate would serve the purpose of an impressive warning if it might be clearly ascertained; but the earth having immediately pinched together again, the research of the moral investigator is baffled.

  CXXXV.

  “Ah!” sighed a three-legged stool, “if I had only been a quadruped, I should have been happy as the day is long — which, on the twenty-first of June, would be considerable felicity for a stool.”

  “Ha! look at me!” said a toadstool; “consider my superior privation, and be content with your comparatively happy lot.”

  “I don’t discern,” replied the first, “how the contemplation of unipedal misery tends to alleviate tripedal wretchedness.”

  “You don’t, eh!” sneered the toadstool. “You mean, do you, to fly in the face of all the moral and social philosophers?”

  “Not unless some benefactor of his race shall impel me.”

  “H’m! I think Zambri the Parsee is the man for that kindly office, my dear.”

  This final fable teaches that he is.

  BRIEF SEASONS OF INTELLECTUAL DISSIPATION.

  I.

  FOOL. — I have a question for you.

  PHILOSOPHER. — I have a number of them for myself. Do you happen to have heard that a fool can ask more questions in a breath than a philosopher can answer in a life?

  F. — I happen to have heard that in such a case the one is as great a fool as the other.

  PH. — Then there is no distinction between folly and philosophy?

  F. — Don’t lay the flattering unction to your soul. The province of folly is to ask unanswerable questions. It is the function of philosophy to answer them.

  PH. — Admirable fool!

  F. — Am I? Pray tell me the meaning of “a fool.”

  PH. — Commonly he has none.

  F. — I mean —

  PH. — Then in this case he has one.

  F. — I lick thy boots! But what does Solomon indicate by the word fool? That is what I mean.

  PH. — Let us then congratulate Solomon upon the agreement between the views of you two. However, I twig your intent: he means a wicked sinner; and of all forms of folly there is none so great as wicked sinning. For goodness is, in the end, more conducive to personal happiness — which is the sole aim of man.

  F. — Hath virtue no better excuse than this?

  PH. — Possibly; philosophy is not omniscience.

  F. — Instructed I sit at thy feet!

  PH. — Unwilling to instruct, I stand on my head.

  FOOL. — You say personal happiness is the sole aim of man.

  PHILOSOPHER. — Then it is.

  F. — But this is much disputed.

  PH. — There is much personal happiness in disputation.

  F. — Socrates —

  PH. — Hold! I detest foreigners.

  F. — Wisdom, they say, is of no country.

  PH. — Of none that I have seen.

  FOOL. — Let us return to our subject — the sole aim of mankind. Crack me these nuts. (1) The man, never weary of well-doing, who endures a life of privation for the good of his fellow-creatures?

  PHILOSOPHER. — Does he feel remorse in so doing? or does the rascal rather like it?

  F. — (2) He, then, who, famishing himself, parts his loaf with a beggar?

  PH. — There are people who prefer benev
olence to bread.

  F. — Ah! De gustibus —

  PH. — Shut up!

  F. — Well, (3) how of him who goes joyfully to martyrdom?

  PH. — He goes joyfully.

  F. — And yet —

  PH. — Did you ever converse with a good man going to the stake?

  F. — I never saw a good man going to the stake.

  PH. — Unhappy pupil! you were born some centuries too early.

  FOOL. — You say you detest foreigners. Why?

  PHILOSOPHER. — Because I am human.

  F. — But so are they.

  PH. — Excellent fool! I thank thee for the better reason.

  PHILOSOPHER. — I have been thinking of the pocopo.

  FOOL. — Is it open to the public?

  PH. — The pocopo is a small animal of North America, chiefly remarkable for singularity of diet. It subsists solely upon a single article of food.

  F. — What is that?

  PH. — Other pocopos. Unable to obtain this, their natural sustenance, a great number of pocopos die annually of starvation. Their death leaves fewer mouths to feed, and by consequence their race is rapidly multiplying.

  F. — From whom had you this?

  PH. — A professor of political economy.

  F. — I bend in reverence! What made you think of the pocopo?

  PH. — Speaking of man.

  F. — If you did not wish to think of the pocopo, and speaking of man would make you think of it, you would not speak of man, would you?

  PH. — Certainly not.

  F. — Why not?

  PH. — I do not know.

  F. — Excellent philosopher!

  FOOL. — I have attentively considered your teachings. They may be full of wisdom; they are certainly out of taste.

  PHILOSOPHER. — Whose taste?

  F. — Why, that of people of culture.

  PH. — Do any of these people chance to have a taste for intoxication, tobacco, hard hats, false hair, the nude ballet, and over-feeding?

  F. — Possibly; but in intellectual matters you must confess their taste is correct.

  PH. — Why must I?

  F. — They say so themselves.

  PHILOSOPHER. — I have been thinking why a dolt is called a donkey.

  FOOL. — I had thought philosophy concerned itself with a less personal class of questions; but why is it?

  PH. — The essential quality of a dolt is stupidity.

  F. — Mine ears are drunken!

  PH. — The essential quality of an ass is asininity.

  F. — Divine philosophy!

  PH. — As commonly employed, “stupidity” and “asininity” are convertible terms.

  F. — That I, unworthy, should have lived to see this day!

  II.

  FOOL. — If I were a doctor —

  DOCTOR. — I should endeavour to be a fool.

  F. — You would fail; folly is not easily achieved.

  D. — True; man is overworked.

  F. — Let him take a pill.

  D. — If he like. I would not.

  F. — You are too frank: take a fool’s advice.

  D. — Thank thee for the nastier prescription.

  FOOL. — I have a friend who —

  DOCTOR. — Stands in great need of my assistance. Absence of excitement, gentle restraint, a hard bed, simple diet — that will straighten him out.

  F. — I’ll give thee sixpence to let me touch the hem of thy garment!

  D. — What of your friend?

  F. — He is a gentleman.

  D. — Then he is dead!

  F. — Just so: he is “straightened out” — he took your prescription.

  D. — All but the “simple diet.”

  F. — He is himself the diet.

  D. — How simple!

  FOOL. — Believe you a man retains his intellect after decapitation?

  DOCTOR. — It is possible that he acquires it?

  F. — Much good it does him.

  D. — Why not — as compensation? He is at some disadvantage in other respects.

  F. — For example?

  D. — He is in a false position.

  FOOL. — What is the most satisfactory disease?

  DOCTOR. — Paralysis of the thoracic duct.

  F. — I am not familiar with it.

  D. — It does not encourage familiarity. Paralysis of the thoracic duct enables the patient to accept as many invitations to dinner as he can secure, without danger of spoiling his appetite.

  F. — But how long does his appetite last?

  D. — That depends. Always a trifle longer than he does.

  F. — The portion that survives him — ?

  D. — Goes to swell the Mighty Gastric Passion which lurks darkly Outside, yawning to swallow up material creation!

  F. — Pitch it a biscuit.

  FOOL. — You attend a patient. He gets well. Good! How do you tell whether his recovery is because of your treatment or in spite of it?

  DOCTOR. — I never do tell.

  F. — I mean how do you know?

  D. — I take the opinion of a person interested in the question: I ask a fool.

  F. — How does the patient know?

  D. — The fool asks me.

  F. — Amiable instructor! How shall I reward thee?

  D. — Eat a cucumber cut up in shilling claret.

  DOCTOR. — The relation between a patient and his disease is the same as that which obtains between the two wooden weather-prophets of a Dutch clock. When the disease goes off, the patient goes on; when the disease goes on, the patient goes off.

  FOOL. — A pauper conceit. Their relations, then, are not of the most cordial character.

  D. — One’s relations — except the poorer sort — seldom are.

  F. — My tympanum is smitten with pleasant peltings of wisdom! I ‘ll lay you ten to one you cannot tell me the present condition of your last patient.

  D. — Done!

  F. — You have won the wager.

  FOOL. — I once read the report of an actual conversation upon a scientific subject between a fool and a physician.

  DOCTOR. — Indeed! That sort of conversation commonly takes place between fools only.

  F. — The reporter had chosen to confound orthography: he spelt fool “phool,” and physician “fysician.” What the fool said was, therefore, preceded by “PH;” the remarks of the physician were indicated by the letter “F.”

  D. — This must have been very confusing.

  F. — It was. But no one discovered that any liberties had been taken with orthography.

  D. — You tumour!

  FOOL. — Suppose you had amongst your menials an ailing oyster?

  DOCTOR. — Oysters do not ail.

  F. — I have heard that the pearl is the result of a disease.

  D. — Whether a functional derangement producing a valuable gem can be properly termed, or treated as, a disease, is open to honest doubt.

  F. — Then in the case supposed you would not favour excision of the abnormal part?

  D. — Yes; I would remove the oyster.

  F. — But if the pearl were growing very rapidly this operation would not be immediately advisable.

  D. — That would depend upon the symptomatic diagnosis.

  F. — Beast! Give me air!

  DOCTOR. — I have been thinking —

  FOOL. — (Liar!)

  D. — That you “come out” rather well for a fool.

  Can it be that I have been entertaining an angel unawares?

  F. — Dismiss the apprehension: I am as great a fool as yourself. But there is a way by which in future you may resolve a similar doubt.

  D. — Explain.

  F. — Speak to your guest of symptomatic diagnosis. If he is an angel, he will not resent it.

  III.

  SOLDIER (reading from “Napier”).—”Who would not rather be buried by an army upon the field of battle than by a sexton in a church-
yard!”

  FOOL. — I give it up.

  S. — I am not aware that any one has asked you for an opinion.

  F. — I am not aware that I have given one: there is a happiness yet in store for you.

  S. — I will revel in anticipation.

  F. — You must revel somehow; without revelry there would be no soldiering.

  S. — Idiot.

  F. — I beg your pardon: I had thought your profession had at least taught you to call people by their proper titles. In the service of mankind I hold the rank of Fool.

  S. — What, ho! without there! Let the trumpets sound!

  F. — I beg you will not.

  S. — True; you beg: I will not.

  F. — But why rob when stealing is more honourable?

  S. — Consider the competition.

  FOOL. — Sir Cut-throat, how many orphans have you made to-day?

  SOLDIER. — The devil an orphan! Have you a family?

  F. — Put up your iron; I am the last of my race.

  S. — How? No more fools?

  F. — Not one, so help me! They have all gone to the wars.

  S. — And why, pray, have you not enlisted?

  F. — I should be no fool if I knew.

  FOOL. — You are somewhat indebted to me.

  SOLDIER. — I do not acknowledge your claim. Let us submit the matter to arbitration.

  F. — The only arbiter whose decision you respect is on your own side.

  S. — You allude to my sword, the most impartial of weapons: it cuts both ways.

  F. — And each way is peculiarly objectionable to your opponent.

  S. — But for what am I indebted to you?

  F. — For existence: the prevalence of me has made you possible.

  S. — The benefit is not conspicuous; were it not for your quarrels, I should enjoy a quantity of elegant leisure.

  F. — As a clodhopper.

  S. — I should at least hop my clods in a humble and Christian spirit; and if some other fellow did did not so hop his — ! I say no more.

  F. — You have said enough; there would be war.