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A Fool and a Knave once set up house together; which shows what a fool the Fool was. The Knave was delighted with the agreement; and the Fool thought himself most fortunate to have met with a companion who would supply his lack of mother-wit.
A problem in Euclid or a phrase in Pindar, a secret in astronomy or a knotty passage in the Fathers, were all riddles, with the solution of which application had nothing to do. One's mother-wit was a precious sort of necromancy, which could pierce every mystery at first sight; and all the gifts of knowledge, in his opinion, like reading and writing in that of the sage Dogberry, "came by nature."
There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge Gramatica parda tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred. We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like.
When Dominique was carrying His Imperial Majesty's mails to some remote stations southward, or had gone to an Arab fair to buy cattle, Napoleon catered for us and cooked for us, and did both admirably. Both master and servant spiced their dishes plentifully with that mother-wit, never seen in such perfection as in crude colonies where people without it would fare so ill.
"Senor," replied Sancho, "to retire is not to flee, and there is no wisdom in waiting when danger outweighs hope, and it is the part of wise men to preserve themselves to-day for to-morrow, and not risk all in one day; and let me tell you, though I am a clown and a boor, I have got some notion of what they call safe conduct; so repent not of having taken my advice, but mount Rocinante if you can, and if not I will help you; and follow me, for my mother-wit tells me we have more need of legs than hands just now."
It is not as high a type, of course, for it has not the strength either of sustained and earnest purpose nor of class loyalty; but still it makes for new species. The California field hand has mother-wit, independence, a certain reckless, you-be-damned courage, a wandering instinct. He quits work not because he wants to loaf, but because he wants to go somewhere else.
After a little hard thinking on this point Sir Patrick gave up the problem as beyond human solution. "It must be done," he concluded. "And my own mother-wit must help me to do it." In that resigned frame of mind he knocked at the door of Lady Lundie's boudoir. SIR PATRICK found his sister-in-law immersed in domestic business. "I am afraid I disturb you," said Sir Patrick.
It stands outside other things a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar.
A man, bankrupt of Mother-wit; who has Squandered any poor Mother-wit he had in the process of acquiring his sublime long-eared Omniscience; and has retained only depth of appetite, appetite for liquor among other things, as the consummation and bottomless cesspool of appetites: is not this a discovery we have made, in Boisterous-Jack's, your Majesty!
"Enlarged the former narrow bounds, And added length to solemn sounds, With nature's Mother-wit, and arts unknown before. Let old Timotheus yield the prize. Or both divide the crown: He raised a mortal to the skies She drew an angel down." Dryden was a great poet, and he dominated his own age and the age to come. But besides being a poet he was a great prose-writer.
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