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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
[This truly intellectual banquet] … calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to get down from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a festive garland and the vacant place on the medius lectus, – that carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms bowled over the mahogany like bombshells from professional mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored fire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons pelting everybody that shows himself.
Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-TableSome persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly stated propositions, is all that conversation admits … [But] conversation must have its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths … One man who is a little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit.
Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-TableReports of the Doctor's social talk, then, keep returning to this basic mystery: finally, we wonder, with Emerson, how did Holmes achieve this special balance? How was he able to draw people out into explosions that illuminate – without also sparking more destructive fires?
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