IX

I often wish that our Number Seven could have known and corresponded with the author of “The Budget of Paradoxes.”  I think Mr. De Morgan would have found some of his vagaries and fancies not undeserving of a place in his wonderful collection of eccentricities, absurdities, ingenuities,—­mental freaks of all sorts.  But I think he would have now and then recognized a sound idea, a just comparison, a suggestive hint, a practical notion, which redeemed a page of extravagances and crotchety whims.  I confess that I am often pleased with fancies of his, and should be willing to adopt them as my own.  I think he has, in the midst of his erratic and tangled conceptions, some perfectly clear and consistent trains of thought.

So when Number Seven spoke of sending us a paper, I welcomed the suggestion.  I asked him whether he had any objection to my looking it over before he read it.  My proposal rather pleased him, I thought, for, as was observed on a former occasion, he has in connection with a belief in himself another side,—­a curious self-distrust.  I have no question that he has an obscure sense of some mental deficiency.  Thus you may expect from him first a dogma, and presently a doubt.  If you fight his dogma, he will do battle for it stoutly; if you let him alone, he will very probably explain its extravagances, if it has any, and tame it into reasonable limits.  Sometimes he is in one mood, sometimes in another.

The first portion of what we listened to shows him at his best; in the latter part I am afraid you will think he gets a little wild.

I proceed to lay before you the paper which Number Seven read to The Teacups.  There was something very pleasing in the deference which was shown him.  We all feel that there is a crack in the teacup, and are disposed to handle it carefully.  I have left out a few things which he said, feeling that they might give offence to some of the company.  There were sentences so involved and obscure that I was sure they would not be understood, if indeed he understood them himself.  But there are other passages so entirely sane, and as it seems to me so just, that if any reader attributes them to me I shall not think myself wronged by the supposition.  You must remember that Number Seven has had a fair education, that he has been a wide reader in many directions, and that he belongs to a family of remarkable intellectual gifts.  So it was not surprising that he said some things which pleased the company, as in fact they did.  The reader will not be startled to see a certain abruptness in the transition from one subject to another,—­it is a characteristic of the squinting brain wherever you find it.  Another curious mark rarely wanting in the subjects of mental strabismus is an irregular and often sprawling and deformed handwriting.  Many and many a time I have said, after glancing at the back of a letter, “This comes from an insane asylum, or from an eccentric who might well be a candidate for such an institution.”  Number Seven’s manuscript, which showed marks of my corrections here and there, furnished good examples of the chirography of persons with ill-mated cerebral hemispheres.  But the earlier portions of the manuscript are of perfectly normal appearance.