Oral Righteousness
In days agone, if things tasted good we called them “toothsome.” We did not work the subject out according to the Herbert Spencer Law of Synthesis, but we dimly felt that teeth and taste were closely akin. And therein were we quite correct ❦ The widow who declined to marry the man, and on being discreetly pressed for a reason, abruptly declared with a Marie Corelli defiance that it was because he did not have the Dental-Floss Habit, was right in her instincts. She would rid her of the reek before she took it on as a life lease. For it is just such little things that make or mar, when we have sworn to love,honor and humor, and face the party over the coffee-urn every morning for ninety-nine years. The gentleman was not personally pleasant, and although he may have had a college degree, social position and spondulex, yet a breath that would stop a watch put him to the bad, and rightly so. ¶ To such a one she could never murmur soft and low the word “Mizpah!” Nor could he salvo his kismet magnum and get it back again according to the Aristotelian laws of action and reaction. For gentlemen who are not toothsome are never socially gladsome. If my years were not as those of the pterodactyl, and I wanted to win the love of a woman, I would look well to my molars. ¶ Brain, brawn, and the graceful two-step are as naught when toothsomeness is actively absent. Shakespeare had these two things in mind when he referred to a “barber’s breath,” and “the breath of an unfee’d attorney,” which items do not come to us as the breath of Spring. Abjure theweed and rice-paper, eliminate the elevated spheroid, and look you to your teeth, Cecil, to your teeth, I say. And the rest follows. We all have our opinions in matters of medicine, but no one knocks on the dentist. Is love then a matter of toothsomeness? ❦ I do not speak by the card, for my knowledge along this line is merely academic, yet a woman I know says, “Yes.” ¶ But seemingly, decayed teeth would give Cupid a pain in his wee tummy small. Decayed politics are bad; decayed literature is worse; and to love a person with decayed molars would be like loving a mummy with tainted morals. The increase in divorce, and the much marital woe of which we hear, are doubtless due to lack of toothsomeness ❦ The parties grin and bear it as long as they can—some declining to grin—and then strike for freedom, fresh air and the open road. ¶ Aside from the esthetics of bad teeth, there is the esoterics, and worse than that, is the hyperstheniawhich leads to language non-ethical, offensive, irrelevant and uncalled for. ¶ A very slight irritation in the teeth throws the soul on the horn of the saddle. To be sane and serene you have to be sound and salient. We do business on a mighty small spiritual bank-balance. To carry no reserve is like firing a boiler in which the gauges show no water. In fact, it means a very great danger of an explosion—and the grave necessity of being sent to the hospital and having the stub-end of your self-respect removed. An aching tooth or a tooth of which you are conscious draws mightily on your mental reserve. Morphine, or a dab of cotton soaked in chloroform, will help you forget it, but these things are drafts on the bank of futurity and the loan must be met with usurious interest. ¶ I once knew a playwright who started in to write a great historical drama; but he got a toothache, and decided to make it a farce-comedy; but all he produced was afizzle ❦ Seldom does a man with the toothache make good; and to have cavities in your teeth and not know it is worse than to have the toothache, since pain is Nature’s beneficent warning ❦ So, to have decayed teeth and never have a toothache would mean lack of sensibility, which is lack of life. Such a one hasn’t enough nerves to make him irritable, much less to give him artistic grouch ❦ And grouch is unused or misused energy—and have I not said that all energy is divine? You write your poem, your essay, your play—just as you paint your picture, carve your statue, or give your oration—out of your surplus, and never out of your capital ❦ Should you begin to draw on your capital you get nerv. pros. or fatty degeneration of the cerebrum, and are a candidate for Billy Muldoon’s. ¶ Is oratory a matter of toothsomeness? Most certainly, yes ❦ The greatest orator that New York ever produced was thrown from his artistic hobbyhorseonce and forever, when his store-teeth, in an impassioned moment, shot over the footlights and fell with a sickening thud into the orchestra. “Say, mister, are these your teeth?” asked a man in a front seat, as he solemnly arose and handed up the grinders. And that broke up the meeting ❦ I once saw a man, singing the part of Tannhauser, do a similar stunt. And we all declared that he could go down to Venusburg and stay there, for all of us—he ceased to be interesting. ¶ Get this down as an axiom: To speak well, or sing well, you must have good teeth ❦ The teeth are organs of speech—auxiliary organs at least. When your voice whistles through your teeth, and the tones come wheezy and with a sort of sad surprise, there are soon bubbles in your think-tank, and you travel home on your rim. It is then time to sing Tosti’sGood-by, and retire from the stage, thereafter warbling only to the gallery of your psychic self ❦