Part 38

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It is thus the dogmatist stands upon his self-confidence and presumption, his fancied superiority of knowledge and learning. He virtually ignores everybody else's right to think and to know. He flings denunciation at the man who dares contradict him. He is his own standard of wisdom, and erects himself as the standard for other people. "To the law and the testimony," as they are embodied in him; and if there is not conformity to these, it is because there is no light in you.

Sometimes the dogmatist seems to rule supreme in the company of which he forms a part. But his rule is not acquired by the force of logic or the convincing power of truth. It is assumed or usurped. It may be that some are too modest to contradict him, or others may not have sufficient intelligence, or others may not think it worth their while, or others may have wisdom to perceive his folly, and answer him accordingly. Hence he may imagine himself triumphant when no one disputes the field with him. He may think he reigns supreme in the circle, when, in fact, he reigns only over his own opinions, or rather is a slave to their despotic power.

The dogmatist is far from having influence with the wise and intelligent. Among the timid and ignorant he may rule in undisputed power; but to men of reason and thought he is repulsive. He is kept at arm's length as a piece of humanity whose "room is better than his person." In these days of free thought and free speech, who will submit to be hectored out of his right to think, and to speak as he thinks, by one who has nothing but his own dictatorial self-conceit to show as his authority, perhaps backed with a pretentious influence coming from a subordinate official position that he holds in Church or State?

Even when the dogmatist possesses that amount of intelligence and position which legitimately place him above most of the company into which he may go, he is seldom or ever welcomed as an acceptable conversationalist. But when he is a man below mediocre--a pedant--he is insupportable.

Were it required to state what are the causes of the fault of this talker, they might be summed up in two words--ignorance and pride. The man who assumes to himself authority over other people's thought and speech must indeed possess a large measure of these qualities. He must estimate his powers at the highest value, and set down those of others at the lowest. He is wise in his own conceit, and in others foolish. He occupies a position which has been usurped by the stretch of his self-importance, and from which he should be summarily deposed by the unanimous vote of pure wisdom and sound intelligence.

Cowper, in speaking of this talker, thus describes him:--

"Where men of judgment creep and feel their way, The positive pronounce without dismay; Their want of light and intellect supplied By sparks absurdity strikes out of pride. Without the means of knowing right from wrong, They always are decisive, clear, and strong; Where others toil with philosophic force, Their nimble nonsense takes a shorter course; Flings at your head conviction in the lump, And gains remote conclusions at a jump; Their own defect invisible to them, Seen in another, they at once condemn; And, though self-idolised in every case, Hate their own likeness in a brother's face. The cause is plain, and not to be denied, The proud are always most provoked by pride; Few competitions but engender spite, And those the most where neither has a right."

XXV.

THE ALTILOQUENT.

"With words of learned length and thundering sound." GOLDSMITH.

This is a talker not content to speak in words plain and simple, such as common sense teaches and requires. He talks as though learning and greatness in conversation consisted in fine words run together as beads on a string. You would infer on hearing him that he had ransacked Johnson to find out the finest and loftiest words in which to express his ideas, so far as he has any. The regions in which ordinary mortals move are too mundane for him; so he rises aloft in flights of winged verbiage, causing those who listen below to wonder whither he is going, until he has passed away into the clouds, beyond their peering ken. At other times he speaks in such grandiloquence of terms as make his hearers open their eyes and mouths in vacant and manifold interjections! "How sublime! How grand! How surpassingly eloquent! Was it not magnificent?"

I will give the reader a few illustrations of this talker, as gathered from a variety of sources.

"That was a masterly performance," said Mr. Balloon to his friend Mr. Gimblett, as they came out of church one Sunday morning, when the Rev. Mr. German had been preaching on the Relation of the Infinite to the Impossible.

"Yes," replied Mr. Gimblett, "I suppose it was very fine; but much beyond my depth. I confess to being one of the sheep who looked up and were not fed."

"That's because you haven't a metaphysical mind," said Mr. Balloon, regarding his friend with pity; "you have got a certain faculty of mind, but I suspect you have not got the logical grasp requisite for the comprehension of such a sermon as that."

"I am afraid I have not," said Mr. Gimblett.

"I tell you what it is," continued Mr. Balloon, "Mr. German has a head. He's an intellectual giant, I hardly know whether he is greater as a subjective preacher, or in the luminous objectivity of his argumentum ad hominem. As an instructive reasoner, too, he is perfectly great. With what synthetical power he refuted the Homoiousian theory. I tell you Homoiousianism will be nowhere after that."

"To tell the truth," said Mr. Gimblett, "I went to sleep at that long word, and did not awake until he was on Theodicy."

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Balloon, "that was a splendid manifestation of ratiocinative word-painting. I was completely carried away when, in his magnificent, sublime, and marrowy style he took an analogical view of the anthropological." But at this point Mr. Balloon soared away into the air, and left Mr. Gimblett standing with wondering vision as to whither he had gone.

At the time the Atlantic telegraph was first laid a certain preacher thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between heaven and earth, thus: "When the sulphuric acid of genuine attrition corrodes the contaminating zinc of innate degeneracy and actual sinfulness, and the fervent electrical force of prayerful eternity ascends up to the residence of the Eternal Supreme One, you may calculate on unfailing and immediate despatch with all magnetical rapidity."

A certain American altiloquent was once talking of liberty, when he said, "White-robed liberty sits upon her rosy clouds above us; the Genius of our country, standing on her throne of mountains, bids her eagle standard-bearer wind his spiral course full in the sun's proud eye; while the Genius of Christianity, surrounded by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim, moves the panorama of the milky clouds above us, and floats in immortal fragrance--the very aroma of Eden through all the atmosphere."

An altiloquent was one day about taking a journey into the country. He was rather of a nervous tendency, having met with two or three accidents in travelling. Before getting into the hired conveyance he asked the driver, "Can you, my friend, conduct this quadruped along the highway without destroying the equilibrium of the vehicle?" The journey having been made without the "equilibrium of the vehicle" being destroyed, when he reached the inn where the horse was to lodge for the night, he said to the ostler, "Boy, extricate this quadruped from the vehicle, stabulate him, devote him an adequate supply of nutritious aliment, and when the aurora of morn shall again illumine the oriental horizon I will reward you with pecuniary compensation for your amiable hospitality."

On a certain occasion one of this class of talkers was dining in a country farm-house, when, among other vegetables on the table, cabbage was one. After despatching the first supply, he was asked by the hostess if he would take a little more, when he said, "By no means, madam. Gastronomical satiety admonishes me that I have arrived at the ultimate of culinary deglutition consistent with the code of Esculapius."

A photographer once, describing his mode of taking pictures, said, "Then we replace the slide in the shield, draw this out of the camera, and carry it back into the shadowy realm where Cocytus flows in black nitrate of silver, and Acheron stagnates in the pool of hyposulphite, and invisible ghosts, trooping down from the world of day, cross a Styx of dissolved sulphate of iron, and appear before Rhadamanthus of that lurid Hades."

A certain doctor once, conversing about the romantic scenery of Westmoreland, said, "In that magnificent county you see an apotheosis of nature, and an apodeikneusis of the theopratic Omnipotence."

Mr. Paxton Hood tells of a minister who described a tear "as that small particle of aqueous fluid, trickling from the visual organ over the lineaments of the countenance, betokening grief." Of another, who spoke of "the deep intuitive glance of the soul, penetrating beyond the surface of the superficial phenomenal to the remote recesses of absolute entity or being; thus adumbrating its immortality on its precognitive perceptions." Of another, an eminent man, head of a college for ministers, when repeating a well-known passage of Scripture, "'He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his'"--here he paused, and at last said, "Well, out of his ventriculum shall flow 'living water!'"

One altiloquent rendered "Give us this day our daily bread" as follows: "Confer upon us during this mundane sphere's axillary revolution our diurnal subsistence." And another, instead of saying, "Jesus wept," said, "And Jesus the Saviour of the world burst into a flood of tears;" upon hearing which Dr. Johnson is said to have exclaimed in disgust, "Puppy, puppy!"