Over the Teacups

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OVER THE TEACUPS

by Oliver W. Holmes




PREFACE.


The kind way in which this series of papers has been received has been a
pleasure greater than I dared to anticipate. I felt that I was a late
comer in the midst of a crowd of ardent and eager candidates for public
attention, that I had already had my day, and that if, like the
unfortunate Frenchman we used read about, I had "come again," I ought not
to surprised if I received the welcome of "Monsieur Tonson."

It has not proved so. My old readers have come forward in the
pleasantest possible way and assured me that they were glad to see me
again. There is no need, therefore, of apologies or explanations. I
thought I had something left to say and I have found listeners. In
writing these papers I have had occupation and kept myself in relation
with my fellow-beings. New sympathies, new sources of encouragement, if
not of inspiration, have opened themselves before me and cheated the
least promising season of life of much that seemed to render it dreary
and depressing. What particularly pleased me has been the freedom of
criticisms which I have seen from disadvantageous comparisons of my later
with my earlier writings.

I should like a little rest from literary work before the requiescat
ensures my repose from earthly labors, but I will not be rash enough to
promise that I will not even once again greet my old and new readers if
the impulse becomes irresistible to renew a companionship which has been
to me such a source of happiness.

BEVERLY FARM, Mass., August, 1891.

O. W. H.




OVER THE TEACUPS.



I




INTRODUCTION.

This series of papers was begun in March, 1888. A single number was
printed, when it was interrupted the course of events, and not resumed
until nearly years later, in January, 1890. The plan of the series was
not formed in my mind when I wrote the number. In returning to my task I
found that my original plan had shaped itself in the underground
laboratory of my thought so that some changes had to be made in what I
had written. As I proceeded, the slight story which formed a part of my
programme eloped itself without any need of much contrivance on my part.
Given certain characters in a writer's conception, if they are real to
him, as they ought to be they will act in such or such a way, according
to the law of their nature. It was pretty safe to assume that intimate
relations would spring up between some members of our mixed company; and
it was not rash conjecture that some of these intimacies might end in
such attachment as would furnish us hints, at least, of a love-story.

As to the course of the conversations which would take place, very little
could be guessed beforehand. Various subjects of interest would be
likely to present themselves, without definite order, oftentimes abruptly
and, as it would seem, capriciously. Conversation in such a mixed company
as that of "The Teacups" is likely to be suggestive rather than
exhaustive. Continuous discourse is better adapted to the lecture-room
than to the tea-table. There is quite enough of it, I fear too much,--in
these pages. But the reader must take the reports of our talks as they
were jotted down. A patchwork quilt is not like a piece of Gobelin
tapestry; but it has its place and its use.

Some will feel a temptation to compare these conversations with those
earlier ones, and remark unamiably upon their difference. This is hardly
fair, and is certainly not wise. They are produced under very different
conditions, and betray that fact in every line. It is better to take
them by themselves; and, if my reader finds anything to please or profit
from, I shall be contented, and he, I feel sure, will not be ungrateful.

The readers who take up this volume may recollect a series of
conversations held many years ago over the breakfast-table, and reported
for their more or less profitable entertainment. Those were not very
early breakfasts at which the talks took place, but at any rate the sun
was rising, and the guests had not as yet tired themselves with the
labors of the day. The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about
it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea
cannot be expected to reproduce. The toils of the forenoon, the heats of
midday, in the warm season, the slanting light of the descending sun, or
the sobered translucency of twilight have subdued the vivacity of the
early day. Yet under the influence of the benign stimulant many trains
of thought which will bear recalling, may suggest themselves to some of
our quiet circle and prove not uninteresting to a certain number of
readers.

How early many of my old breakfast companions went off to bed! I am
thinking not merely of those who sat round our table, but of that larger
company of friends who listened to our conversations as reported. Dear
girl with the silken ringlets, dear boy with the down-shadowed cheek,
your grandfather, your grandmother, turned over the freshly printed
leaves that told the story of those earlier meetings around the plain
board where so many things were said and sung, not all of which have
quite faded from memory of this overburdened and forgetful time. Your
father, your mother, found the scattered leaves gathered in a volume, and
smiled upon them as not uncompanionable acquaintances. My tea-table
makes no promises. There is no programme of exercises to studied
beforehand. What if I should content myself with a single report of what
was said and done over our teacups? Perhaps my young reader would be
glad to let me off, for there are talkers enough who have not yet left
their breakfast-tables; and nobody can blame the young people for
preferring the thoughts and the language of their own generation, with
all its future before it, to those of their grandfathers contemporaries.

My reader, young or old, will please to observe that I have left myself
entire freedom as to the sources of what may be said over the teacups. I
have not told how many cups are commonly on the board, but by using the
plural I have implied that there is at least one other talker or listener
beside myself, and for all that appears there may be a dozen. There will
be no regulation length to my reports,--no attempt to make out a certain
number of pages. I have no contract to fill so many columns, no pledge
to contribute so many numbers. I can stop on this first page if I do not
care to say anything more, and let this article stand by itself if so
minded. What a sense of freedom it gives not to write by the yard or the
column!

When one writes for an English review or magazine at so many guineas a
sheet, the temptation is very great to make one's contribution cover as
many sheets as possible. We all know the metallic taste of articles
written under this powerful stimulus. If Bacon's Essays had been
furnished by a modern hand to the "Quarterly Review" at fifty guineas a
sheet, what a great book it would have taken to hold them!

The first thing which suggests itself to me, as I contemplate my slight
project, is the liability of repeating in the evening what I may have
said in the morning in one form or another, and printed in these or other
pages. When it suddenly flashes into the consciousness of a writer who
had been long before the public, "Why, I have said all that once or
oftener in my books or essays, and here it is again; the same old
thought, the same old image, the same old story!" it irritates him, and
is likely to stir up the monosyllables of his unsanctified vocabulary.
He sees in imagination a thousand readers, smiling or yawning as they say
to themselves, "We have had all that before," and turn to another
writer's performance for something not quite so stale and superfluous.
This is what the writer says to himself about the reader.

The idiot! Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read all
he has written? Does he really believe that everybody remembers all of
his, writer's, words he may happen to have read? At one of those famous
dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter was ever
admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is said and done,
Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted these lines from
the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of them, which he applied to
the Oration just delivered by Mr. Emerson:

Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.

His nephew, the ingenious, inventive, and inexhaustible. Edward Everett
Hale, tells the story of this quotation, and of the various uses to which
it might plied in after-dinner speeches. How often he ventured to repeat
it at the Phi Beta Kappa dinners I am not sure; but as he reproduced it
with his lively embellishments and fresh versions and artful
circumlocutions, not one person in ten remembered that he had listened to
those same words in those same accents only a twelvemonth ago. The poor
deluded creatures who take it for granted that all the world remembers
what they have said, and laugh at them when they say it over again, may
profit by this recollection. But what if one does say the same
things,--of course in a little different form each time,--over her? If
he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.
Whether he ought to or not, it is very certain that this is what all who
write much or speak much necessarily must and will do. Think of the
clergyman who preaches fifty or a hundred or more sermons every year for
fifty years! Think of the stump speaker who shouts before a hundred
audiences during the same political campaign, always using the same
arguments, illustrations, and catchwords! Think of the editor, as
Carlyle has pictured him, threshing the same straw every morning, until
we know what is coming when we see the first line, as we do when we read
the large capitals at the head of a thrilling story, which ends in an
advertisement of an all-cleansing soap or an all-curing remedy!

The latch-key which opens into the inner chambers of my consciousness
fits, as I have sufficient reason to believe, the private apartments of a
good many other people's thoughts. The longer we live, the more we find
we are like other persons. When I meet with any facts in my own mental
experience, I feel almost sure that I shall find them repeated or
anticipated in the writings or the conversation of others. This feeling
gives one a freedom in telling his own personal history he could not have
enjoyed without it. My story belongs to you as much as to me. De te
fabula narratur. Change the personal pronoun,--that is all. It gives
many readers a singular pleasure to find a writer telling them something
they have long known or felt, but which they have never before found any
one to put in words for them. An author does not always know when he is
doing the service of the angel who stirred the waters of the pool of
Bethesda. Many a reader is delighted to find his solitary thought has a
companion, and is grateful to the benefactor who has strengthened him.
This is the advantage of the humble reader over the ambitious and
self-worshipping writer. It is not with him pereant illi, but beati sunt
illi qui pro nobis nostra dixerunt,-Blessed are those who have said our
good things for us.

What I have been saying of repetitions leads me into a train of
reflections like which I think many readers will find something in their
own mental history. The area of consciousness is covered by layers of
habitual thoughts, as a sea-beach is covered with wave-worn, rounded
pebbles, shaped, smoothed, and polished by long attrition against each
other. These thoughts remain very much the same from day to day, from
week to week; and as we grow older, from month to month, and from year to
year. The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon them daily as we
unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement and murmur of
ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in slumber. When
we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only listening to
sound of attrition between these inert elements of intelligence. They
shift their places a little, they change their relations to each other,
they roll over and turn up new surfaces. Now and then a new fragment is
cast in among them, to be worn and rounded and takes its place with the
others, but the pebbled floor of consciousness is almost as stationary as
the pavement of a city thoroughfare.

It so happens that at this particular tine I have something to tell which
I am quite sure is not one of rolled pebbles which my reader has seen
before in any of my pages, or, as I feel confident, in those of any other
writer.

If my reader asks why I do not send the statement I am going to make to
some one of the special periodicals that deal with such subjects, my
answer is, that I like to tell my own stories at my own time, in own
chosen columns, where they will be read by a class of readers with whom I
like to talk.

All men of letters or of science, all writers well known to the public,
are constantly tampered with, in these days, by a class of predaceous and
hungry fellow-laborers who may be collectively spoken of as the
brain-tappers. They want an author's ideas on the subjects which
interest them, the inquirers, from the gravest religious and moral
questions to the most trivial matters of his habits and his whims and
fancies. Some of their questions he cannot answer; some he does not
choose to answer; some he is not yet ready to answer, and when he is
ready he prefers to select his own organ of publication. I do not find
fault with all the brain-tappers. Some of them are doing excellent
service by accumulating facts which could not otherwise be attained. Rut
one gets tired of the strings of questions sent him, to which he is
expected to return an answer, plucked, ripe or unripe, from his private
tree of knowledge. The brain-tappers are like the owner of the goose that
laid the golden eggs. They would have the embryos and germs of one's
thoughts out of the mental oviducts, and cannot wait for their
spontaneous evolution and extrusion.

The story I have promised is, on the whole, the most remarkable of a
series which I may have told in part at some previous date, but which, if
I have not told, may be worth recalling at a future time.

Some few of my readers may remember that in a former paper I suggested
the possibility of the existence of an idiotic area in the human mind,
corresponding to the blind spot in the human retina. I trust that I
shall not be thought to have let my wits go wandering in that region of
my own intellectual domain, when I relate a singular coincidence which
very lately occurred in my experience, and add a few remarks made by one
of our company on the delicate and difficult but fascinating subject
which it forces upon our attention. I will first copy the memorandum
made at the time:

"Remarkable coincidence. On Monday, April 18th, being at table from 6.30
P. M. to 7.30, with ________and ________ the two ladies of my
household, I told them of the case of 'trial by battel' offered by
Abraham Thornton in 1817. I mentioned his throwing down his glove, which
was not taken up by the brother of his victim, and so he had to be let
off, for the old law was still in force. I mentioned that Abraham
Thornton was said to have come to this country, 'and [I added] he may be
living near us, for aught that I know." I rose from the table, and found
an English letter waiting for me, left while I sat at dinner. A copy the
first portion of this letter:

'20 ALFRED PLACE, West (near Museum) South Kensington, LONDON, S. W.
April 7, 1887.
DR. O. W. HOLMES:

DEAR SIR,--In travelling, the other day, I met with a reprint of the very
interesting case of Thornton for murder, 1817. The prisoner pleaded
successfully the old Wager of Battel. I thought you would like to read
the account, and send it with this....

Yours faithfully,
FRED. RATHBONE.'

Mr. Rathbone is a well-known dealer in old Wedgwood and
eighteenth-century art. As a friend of my hospitable entertainer, Mr.
Willett, he had shown me many attentions in England, but I was not
expecting any communication from him; and when, fresh from my
conversation, I found this letter just arrived by mail, and left while I
was at table, and on breaking the seal read what I had a few moments
before been; telling, I was greatly surprised, and immediately made a
note of the occurrence, as given above.

I had long been familiar with all the details of this celebrated case,
but had not referred to it, so far as I can remember, for months or
years. I know of no train of thought which led me to speak of it on that
particular day. I had never alluded to it before in that company, nor
had I ever spoken of it with Mr. Rathbone.

I told this story over our teacups. Among the company at the table is a
young English girl. She seemed to be amused by the story. "Fancy!" she
said,--"how very very odd!" "It was a striking and curious coincidence,"
said the professor who was with us at the table. "As remarkable as two
teaspoons in one saucer," was the comment of a college youth who happened
to be one of the company. But the member of our circle whom the reader
will hereafter know as Number Seven, began stirring his tea in a nervous
sort of way, and I knew that he was getting ready to say something about
the case. An ingenious man he is, with a brain like a tinder-box, its
contents catching at any spark that is flying about. I always like to
hear what he says when his tinder brain has a spark fall into it. It
does not follow that because he is often wrong he may not sometimes be
right, for he is no fool. He treated my narrative very seriously.

The reader need not be startled at the new terms he introduces. Indeed, I
am not quite sure that some thinking people will not adopt his view of
the matter, which seems to have a degree of plausibility as he states and
illustrates it.

"The impulse which led you to tell that story passed directly from the
letter, which came charged from the cells of the cerebral battery of your
correspondent. The distance at which the action took place [the letter
was left on a shelf twenty-four feet from the place where I was sitting]
shows this charge to have been of notable intensity.

"Brain action through space without material symbolism, such as speech,
expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction. Charge the prime
conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf electrometer, far off
from it, will at once be disturbed. Electricity, as we all know, can be
stored and transported as if it were a measurable fluid.

"Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a source
containing stored cerebricity. I use this word, not to be found in my
dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power corresponding to
electricity. Think how long it was before we had attained any real
conception of the laws that govern the wonderful agent, which now works
in harness with the other trained and subdued forces! It is natural that
cerebricity should be the last of the unweighable agencies to be
understood. The human eye had seen heaven and earth and all that in them
is before it saw itself as our instruments enable us to see it. This
fact of yours, which seems so strange to you, belongs to a great series
of similar facts familiarly known now to many persons, and before long to
be recognized as generally as those relating to the electric telegraph
and the slaving `dynamo.'

"What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening itself on
a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was shuffling about
in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up in railroad cars?
And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang round a note or a dress for
a lifetime. Do you not remember what Professor Silliman says, in that
pleasant journal of his, about the little ebony cabinet which Mary, Queen
of Scots, brought with her from France,--how 'its drawers still exhale
the sweetest perfumes'? If they could hold their sweetness for more than
two hundred years, why should not a written page retain for a week or a
month the equally mysterious effluence poured over it from the thinking
marrow, and diffuse its vibrations to another excitable nervous centre?"

I have said that although our imaginative friend is given to wild
speculations, he is not always necessarily wrong. We know too little
about the laws of brain-force to be dogmatic with reference to it. I am,
myself, therefore, fully in sympathy with the psychological
investigators. When it comes to the various pretended sciences by which
men and women make large profits, attempts at investigation are very apt
to be used as lucrative advertisements for the charlatans. But a series
of investigations of the significance of certain popular beliefs and
superstitions, a careful study of the relations of certain facts to each
other,--whether that of cause and effect, or merely of coincidence,--is a
task not unworthy of sober-minded and well-trained students of nature.
Such a series of investigations has been recently instituted, and was
reported at a late meeting held in the rooms of the Boston Natural
History Society. The results were, mostly negative, and in one sense a
disappointment. A single case, related by Professor Royce, attracted a
good deal of attention. It was reported in the next morning's
newspapers, and will be given at full length, doubtless, in the next
number of the Psychological Journal. The leading facts were, briefly,
these: A lady in Hamburg, Germany, wrote, on the 22d of June last, that
she had what she supposed to be nightmare on the night of the 17th, five
days before. "It seemed," she wrote, "to belong to you; to be a horrid
pain in your head, as if it were being forcibly jammed into an iron
casque, or some such pleasant instrument of torture." It proved that on
that same 17th of June her sister was undergoing a painful operation at
the hands of a dentist. "No single case," adds Professor Royce, "proves,
or even makes probable, the existence of telepathic toothaches; but if
there are any more cases of this sort, we want to hear of them, and that
all the more because no folk-lore and no supernatural horrors have as yet
mingled with the natural and well-known impressions that people associate
with the dentist's chair."

The case I have given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every
source of error. I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had communicated
with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe a year ago last
Christmas. The account I received from him was cut out of "The Sporting
Times" of March 5, 1887. My own knowledge of the case came from "Kirby's
Wonderful Museum," a work presented to me at least thirty years ago. I
had not looked at the account, spoken of it, nor thought of it for a long
time, when it came to me by a kind of spontaneous generation, as it
seemed, having no connection with any previous train of thought that I
was aware of. I consider the evidence of entire independence, apart from
possible "telepathic" causation, completely water-proof, airtight,
incombustible, and unassailable.

I referred, when first reporting this curious case of coincidence, with
suggestive circumstances, to two others, one of which I said was the most
picturesque and the other the most unlikely, as it would seem, to happen.
This is the first of those two cases:--

Grenville Tudor Phillips was a younger brother of George Phillips, my
college classmate, and of Wendell Phillips, the great orator. He lived
in Europe a large part of his life, but at last returned, and, in the
year 1863, died at the house of his brother George. I read his death in
the paper; but, having seen and heard very little of him during his life,
should not have been much impressed by the fact, but for the following
occurrence: between the time of Grenville Phillips's death and his
burial, I was looking in upon my brother, then living in the house in
which we were both born. Some books which had been my father's were
stored in shelves in the room I used to occupy when at Cambridge.
Passing my eye over them, an old dark quarto attracted my attention. It
must be a Bible, I said to myself, perhaps a rare one,--the "Breeches"
Bible or some other interesting specimen. I took it from the shelves,
and, as I did so, an old slip of paper fell out and fluttered to the
floor. On lifting it I read these words:

The name is Grenville Tudor.

What was the meaning of this slip of paper coming to light at this time,
after reposing undisturbed so long? There was only one way of explaining
its presence in my father's old Bible;--a copy of the Scriptures which I
did not remember ever having handled or looked into before. In
christening a child the minister is liable to forget the name, just at
the moment when he ought to remember it. My father preached occasionally
at the Brattle Street Church. I take this for granted, for I remember
going with him on one occasion when he did so. Nothing was more likely
than that he should be asked to officiate at the baptism of the younger
son of his wife's first cousin, Judge Phillips. This slip was handed him
to remind him of the name: He brought it home, put it in that old Bible,
and there it lay quietly for nearly half a century, when, as if it had
just heard of Mr. Phillips's decease, it flew from its hiding-place and
startled the eyes of those who had just read his name in the daily column
of deaths. It would be hard to find anything more than a mere
coincidence here; but it seems curious enough to be worth telling.