Goose-Quill Papers — A Reader’s Guide

Hercules was its captor. The renascent marbles of the Greeks are dug out of earth,--"Praxitelean shapes!"--with its rounded beauty yet in their outstretched hands. What a superb mythologic pedigree! What noble mention (each worth an immortality) from old poets, romancers, historians! All heterodoxy lauded thee, apple of mine eye. It was reserved for true-church traditions to belie thee.

Thou who art full of virtue, what is this rumor of thy defection in Eden, thy remote causing of all contemporaneous woe? Thou who art fair without as a cherub's cheek, how couldst thou be abettor to the treacherous spirit? Shall the fault of our frail ancestress rest upon thy rosy head? "That the forbidden fruit of Paradise was an apple," saith a grave and learned author, "is commonly believed, confirmed by tradition, perpetuated by writings, verses, pictures; and some are so bad prosodians as thence to derive the Latin word _malum_, because that fruit was the first occasion of evil: wherein, notwithstanding determinations are presumptuous, many, I perceive, are of another belief." Let the personal argument stand, in default of a bolder plea. Mephisto, who hath had no chance of reformation, and who may be supposed to keep his early leanings, is in modern times no frequenter of orchards. Not by farmer, nor wayside knight, nor loitering sweethearts at dusk, hath he ever been detected prowling about an innocent apple-tree.

It hath, on the other hand, been affirmed by an ingenious clerk, that apple-eating is a masculine passion, and that no woman hath a dominating natural relish for this hearty fruit; which, proven, would seem to indicate (as a burnt child dreads the fire, according to the proverb) that Eve's mindful daughters shun by instinct the immemorial enemy. If, indeed, it needs must be demonstrated by some unborn logician, that our primal happiness was forfeited by nought else, beyond the serpent's wiles, than a Gilliflower or a Greening, hanging on the representative tree, and criterion of obedience,--then there exist myriads of her descendants with the ancestral weakness, who shall look on our abused common mother with new and tender consideration, such as her disastrous connection with a plum, or a currant, or a quince, could never have evoked.

The apple is the only fruit which deserveth the name of genial. A peach is but a Capuan dish; the lime approacheth with cold infrequency; the amiable pear hath too little character; the grape is chiefly suggestive, anticipatory of its hereafter, as the larva of the gorgeous butterfly. But Apple standeth on her own merits. Tart, jelly, fritters, dumpling, enter not into the imagination of her possessor. Nay, nor even cider, that fretful disempurpled wine,--wine, as it were, with the bar sinister. Apple hath not the flippant gayety of the cherry; her glad humor is somewhat dashed with cynicism: she warmeth the heart, and trippeth up the tongue, and is, in the accepted phrase of artists, "a good fellow;" foe to unrighteous melancholy, as Laurentius writ, and frankly compassionate. She should have had Horace for her court-poet. One can conceive of poor, manly Fielding loving her at the modest ratio of three dozen a day; and of little Mr. Pope brushing her aside with fastidious petulance.

The friends of Apple, your sworn familiars, who offend not her sun-mottled exterior with barbaric divisions of the knife, may be known by their ready wit and their bright glances. Hath not the wholesome autumn light, which filtered into the fruit they affect, permeated their moral temperament? They must needs be sound, consolatory, humane, and fit to wrestle with every wind that blows. "Man is that he eats," we read among the bewilderments of German speculation. But of her chaste and subtle cup, rimmed with gold or crimson, as Nature willed, the elect drink invigoration.

"Encompass me about with apples," saith the Canticle, "for I am sick with love;" which, driven to its bare and literal sense, implies that apples are antidotes to languor and over-fondness. Apple, be it said, is a Platonist.