No More Learning

Hence it will not do for the Landlord to possess too fine a nature. He
must have health above the common accidents of life, subject to no
modern fashionable diseases; but no taste, rather a vast relish or
appetite. His sentiments on all subjects will be delivered as freely
as the wind blows; there is nothing private or individual in them,
though still original, but they are public, and of the hue of the
heavens over his house,--a certain out-of-door obviousness and
transparency not to be disputed. What he does, his manners are not to
be complained of, though abstractly offensive, for it is what man
does, and in him the race is exhibited. When he eats, he is liver and
bowels and the whole digestive apparatus to the company, and so all
admit the thing is done. He must have no idiosyncrasies, no particular
bents or tendencies to this or that, but a general, uniform, and
healthy development, such as his portly person indicates, offering
himself equally on all sides to men. He is not one of your peaked and
inhospitable men of genius, with particular tastes, but, as we said
before, has one uniform relish, and taste which never aspires higher
than a tavern-sign, or the cut of a weather-cock. The man of genius,
like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a
patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs
out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all
possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone,--good-by,--farewell. But
the Landlord can afford to live without privacy. He entertains no
private thought, he cherishes no solitary hour, no Sabbath-day, but
thinks,--enough to assert the dignity of reason,--and talks, and reads
the newspaper. What he does not tell to one traveler he tells to
another. He never wants to be alone, but sleeps, wakes, eats, drinks,
sociably, still remembering his race. He walks abroad through the
thoughts of men, and the Iliad and Shakespeare are tame to him, who
hears the rude but homely incidents of the road from every traveler.
The mail might drive through his brain in the midst of his most lonely
soliloquy without disturbing his equanimity, provided it brought
plenty of news and passengers. There can be no _pro_fanity where there
is no fane behind, and the whole world may see quite round him.
Perchance his lines have fallen to him in dustier places, and he has
heroically sat down where two roads meet, or at the Four Corners or
the Five Points, and his life is sublimely trivial for the good of
men. The dust of travel blows ever in his eyes, and they preserve
their clear, complacent look. The hourlies and half-hourlies, the
dailies and weeklies, whirl on well-worn tracks, round and round his
house, as if it were the goal in the stadium, and still he sits within
in unruffled serenity, with no show of retreat. His neighbor dwells
timidly behind a screen of poplars and willows, and a fence with
sheaves of spears at regular intervals, or defended against the tender
palms of visitors by sharp spikes,--but the traveler's wheels rattle
over the door-step of the tavern, and he cracks his whip in the entry.
He is truly glad to see you, and sincere as the bull's-eye over his
door. The traveler seeks to find, wherever he goes, some one who will
stand in this broad and catholic relation to him, who will be an
inhabitant of the land to him a stranger, and represent its human
nature, as the rock stands for its inanimate nature; and this is he.
As his crib furnishes provender for the traveler's horse, and his
larder provisions for his appetite, so his conversation furnishes the
necessary aliment to his spirits. He knows very well what a man wants,
for he is a man himself, and as it were the farthest-traveled, though
he has never stirred from his door. He understands his needs and
destiny. He would be well fed and lodged, there can be no doubt, and
have the transient sympathy of a cheerful companion, and of a heart
which always prophesies fair weather. And after all the greatest men,
even, want much more the sympathy which every honest fellow can give,
than that which the great only can impart. If he is not the most
upright, let us allow him this praise, that he is the most downright
of men. He has a hand to shake and to be shaken, and takes a sturdy
and unquestionable interest in you, as if he had assumed the care of
you, but if you will break your neck, he will even give you the best
advice as to the method.

The great poets have not been ungrateful to their landlords. Mine host
of the Tabard Inn, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, was an
honor to his profession:--

"A semely man our Hoste was, with alle,
For to han been a marshal in an halle.
A large man he was, with eyen stepe;
A fairer burgeis was ther non in Chepe:
Bold of his speche, and wise, and well ytaught,
And of manhood him lacked righte naught.