As we become less capable of supplying the magic for ourselves, we require it from our author. He must have the art—the less conscious the better—of placing us at his own point of view. He should, if possible, be something of a 'humourist,' in the old-fashioned sense of the word; not the man who compounds oddities, but the man who is an oddity; the slave, not the master, of his own eccentricities; one absolutely unconscious that the strange twist in his mental vision is not shared by mankind, and capable, therefore, of presenting the fancies dictated by his idiosyncrasy as if they corresponded to obvious and generally recognised realities; and of propounding some quaint and utterly preposterous theory, as though it were a plain deduction from undeniable truths. The modern humourist is the old humourist _plus_ a consciousness of his own eccentricity, and the old humourist is the modern humourist _minus_ that consciousness. The order of his ideas should not (as philosophers would have it) be identical with the order of things, but be determined by odd arbitrary freaks of purely personal association.
This is the kind of originality which we specially demand from an efficient guide to the country; for the country means a region where men have not been ground into the monotony by the friction of our social mill. The secret of his charm lies in the clearness with which he brings before us some quaint, old-fashioned type of existence. He must know and care as little for what passes in the great world of cities and parliaments as the family of Tullivers and Dodsons. His horizon should be limited by the nearest country town, and his politics confined to the disputes between the parson and the Dissenting minister. He should have thoroughly absorbed the characteristic prejudices of the little society in which he lives, till he is unaware that it could ever enter into any one's head to doubt their absolute truth. He should have a share of the peculiarity which is often so pathetic in children—the unhesitating conviction that some little family arrangement is a part of the eternal and immutable system of things—and be as much surprised at discovering an irreverent world outside as the child at the discovery that there are persons who do not consider his papa to be omniscient. That is the temper of mind which should characterise your genuine rustic. As a rule, of course, it condemns him to silence. He has no more reason for supposing that some quaint peculiarity of his little circle will be interesting to the outside world than a frog for imagining that a natural philosopher would be interested by the statement that he was once a tadpole. He takes it for granted that we have all been tadpoles. In the queer, outlying corners of the world where the father goes to bed and is nursed upon the birth of a child (a system which has its attractive side to some persons of that persuasion), the singular custom is so much a matter of course that a village historian would not think of mentioning it. The man is only induced to exhibit his humour to the world when, by some happy piece of fortune, he has started a hobby not sufficiently appreciated by his neighbours. Then it may be that he becomes a prophet, and in his anxiety to recommend his own pet fancy, unconsciously illustrates also the interesting social stratum in which it sprung to life. The hobby, indeed, is too often unattractive. When a self-taught philosopher airs some pet crotchet, and proves, for example, that the legitimate descendants of the lost tribes are to be found amongst the Ojibbeways, he doubtless throws a singular light upon the intellectual peculiarities of his district. But he illustrates chiefly the melancholy truth that a half-taught philosopher may be as dry and as barren as the one who has been smoke-dried according to all the rules of art in the most learned academy of Europe.