72. CHAPTER LXXII.
BABBALANJA STARTS TO HIS FEET.
For twenty-four hours, seated stiff, and motionless, Babbalanja
spoke not a word; then, almost without moving
a muscle, muttered thus:—“At banquets surfeit not, but
fill; partake, and retire; and eat not again till you crave.
Thereby you give nature time to work her magic transformings;
turning all solids to meat, and wine into blood.
After a banquet you incline to repose:—do so: digestion
commands. All this follow those, who feast at the tables
of Wisdom; and all such are they, who partake of the fare
of old Bardianna.”
“Art resuscitated, then, Babbalanja?” said Media.
“Ay, my lord, I am just risen from the dead.”
“And did Azzageddi conduct you to their realms?”
“Fangs off! fangs off! depart, thou fiend!—unhand me!
or by Oro, I will die and spite thee!”
“Quick, quick, Mohi! let us change places,” cried
Yoomy.
“How now, Babbalanja?” said Media.
“Oh my lord man—not you my lord Media!—high and
mighty Puissance! great King of Creation!—thou art but
the biggest of braggarts! In every age, thou boastest of thy
valorous advances:—flat fools, old dotards, and numskulls,
our sires! All the Past, wasted time! the Present knows
all! right lucky, fellow-beings, we live now! every man an
author! books plenty as men! strike a light in a minute!
teeth sold by the pound! all the elements fetching and carrying!
lightning running on errands! rivers made to order!
the ocean a puddle!—But ages back they boasted like us;
and ages to come, forever and ever, they'll boast. Ages
back they black-balled the past, thought the last day was
come; so wise they were grown. Mardi could not stand
long; have to annex one of the planets; invade the great
sun; colonize the moon;—conquerors sighed for new Mardis;
and sages for heaven—having by heart all the primers here
below. Like us, ages back they groaned under their books;
made bonfires of libraries, leaving ashes behind, mid which
we reverentially grope for charred pages, forgetting we are
so much wiser than they.—But amazing times! astounding
revelations; preternatural divulgings!—How now?—more
wonderful than all our discoveries is this: that they never
were discovered before. So simple, no doubt our ancestors
overlooked them; intent on deeper things—the deep things
of the soul. All we discover has been with us since the
sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the
discovering. We are children, climbing trees after birds'
nests, and making a great shout, whether we find eggs in
them or no. But where are our wings, which our forefathers
surely had not? Tell us, ye sages! something
worth an archangel's learning; discover, ye discoverers, something
new. Fools, fools! Mardi's not changed: the sun
yet rises in its old place in the East; all things go on in the
same old way; we cut our eye-teeth just as late as they did,
three thousand years ago.”'
“Your pardon,” said Mohi, “for beshrew me, they are
not yet all cut. At threescore and ten, here have I a new
tooth coming now.”
“Old man! it but clears the way for another. The
teeth sown by the alphabet-founder were eye-teeth, not yet
all sprung from the soil. Like spring-wheat, blade by blade,
they break ground late; like spring-wheat, many seeds have
perished in the hard winter glebe. Oh, my lord! though
we galvanize corpses into St. Vitus' dances, we raise not the
dead from their graves! Though we have discovered the
circulation of the blood, men die as of yore; oxen graze,
sheep bleat, babies bawl, asses bray—loud and lusty as the
day before the flood. Men fight and make up; repent and
go at it; feast and starve; laugh and weep; pray and curse;
cheat, chaffer, trick, truckle, cozen, defraud, fib, lie, beg,
borrow, steal, hang, drown—as in the laughing and weeping,
tricking and truckling, hanging and drowning times that have
been. Nothing changes, though much be new-fashioned:
new fashions but revivals of things previous. In the books
of the past we learn naught but of the present; in those
of the present, the past. All Mardi's history—beginning
middle, and finis—was written out in capitals in the first
page penned. The whole story is told in a title-page. An
exclamation point is entire Mardi's autobiography.”
“Who speaks now?” said Media, “Bardianna, Azzageddi,
or Babbalanja?”
“All three: is it not a pleasant concert?”
“Very fine: very fine.—Go on; and tell us something
of the future.”
“I have never departed this life yet, my lord.”
“But just now you said you were risen from the dead.”
“From the buried dead within me; not from myself, my
lord.”
“If you, then, know nothing of the future—did Bardianna?”
“If he did, naught did he reveal. I have ever observed,
my lord, that even in their deepest lucubrations, the profoundest,
frankest, ponderers always reserve a vast deal of
precious thought for their own private behoof. They think,
perhaps, that 'tis too good, or too bad; too wise, or too
foolish, for the multitude. And this unpleasant vibration is
ever consequent upon striking a new vein of ideas in the
soul. As with buried treasures, the ground over them
sounds strange and hollow. At any rate, the profoundest
ponderer seldom tells us all he thinks; seldom reveals to us
the ultimate, and the innermost; seldom makes us open our
eyes under water; seldom throws open the totus-in-toto; and
never carries us with him, to the unconsubsistent, the ideaimmanens,
the super-essential, and the One.”
“Confusion! Remember the Quadammodatatives!”
“Ah!” said Braid-Beard, “that's the crack in his
calabash, which all the Dicibles of Doxdox will not mend.”
“And from that crazy calabash he gives us to drink, old
Mohi.”
“But never heed his leaky gourd nor its contents, my
lord. Let these philosophers muddle themselves as they
will, we wise ones refuse to partake.”
“And fools like me drink till they reel,” said Babbalanja.
“But in these matters one's calabash must needs go round
to keep afloat. Fogle-orum!”
