Over the Teacups

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. >> Over the Teacups


No one of the poems which have been placed in the urn,--that is, in the
silver sugar-bowl,--has had any name attached to it; but you could guess
pretty nearly who was the author of some of them, certainly of the one
just, referred to. Number Five was attracted to the Tutor from the first
time he spoke to her. She dreamed about him that night, and nothing
idealizes and renders fascinating one in whom we have already an interest
like dreaming of him or of her. Many a calm suitor has been made
passionate by a dream; many a passionate lover has been made wild and
half beside himself by a dream; and now and then an infatuated but
hapless lover, waking from a dream of bliss to a cold reality of
wretchedness, has helped himself to eternity before he was summoned to
the table.

Since Number Five had dreamed about the Tutor, he had been more in her
waking thoughts than she was willing to acknowledge. These thoughts were
vague, it is true,--emotions, perhaps, rather than worded trains of
ideas; but she was conscious of a pleasing excitement as his name or his
image floated across her consciousness; she sometimes sighed as she
looked over the last passage they had read from the same book, and
sometimes when they were together they were silent too long,--too long!
What were they thinking of?

And so it was all as plain sailing for Number Five and the young Tutor as
it had been for Delilah and the young Doctor, was it? Do you think so?
Then you do not understand Number Five. Many a woman has as many
atmospheric rings about her as the planet Saturn. Three are easily to be
recognized. First, there is the wide ring of attraction which draws into
itself all that once cross its outer border. These revolve about her
without ever coming any nearer. Next is the inner ring of attraction.
Those who come within its irresistible influence are drawn so close that
it seems as if they must become one with her sooner or later. But within
this ring is another,--an atmospheric girdle, one of repulsion, which
love, no matter how enterprising, no matter how prevailing or how
insinuating, has never passed, and, if we judge of what is to be by what
has been, never will. Perhaps Nature loved Number Five so well that she
grudged her to any mortal man, and gave her this inner girdle of
repulsion to guard her from all who would know her too nearly and love
her too well. Sometimes two vessels at sea keep each other company for a
long distance, it may be daring a whole voyage. Very pleasant it is to
each to have a companion to exchange signals with from time to time; to
came near enough, when the winds are light, to hold converse in ordinary
tones from deck to deck; to know that, in case of need, there's help at
hand. It is good for them to be near each other, but not good to be too
near. Woe is to them if they touch! The wreck of one or both is likely
to be the consequence. And so two well-equipped and heavily freighted
natures may be the best of companions to each other, and yet must never
attempt to come into closer union. Is this the condition of affairs
between Number Five and the Tutor? I hope not, for I want them to be
joined together in that dearest of intimacies, which, if founded in true
affinity, is the nearest approach to happiness to be looked for in our
mortal, experience. We mast wait. The Teacups will meet once more
before the circle is broken, and we may, perhaps, find the solution of
the question we have raised.

In the mean time, our young Doctor is playing truant oftener than ever.
He has brought Avis,--if we must call her so, and not Delilah,--several
times to take tea with us. It means something, in these days, to
graduate from one of our first-class academies or collegiate schools. I
shall never forget my first visit to one of these institutions. How much
its pupils know, I said, which I was never taught, and have never
learned! I was fairly frightened to see what a teaching apparatus was
provided for them. I should think the first thing to be done with most
of the husbands, they are likely to get would be to put them through a
course of instruction. The young wives must find their lords wofully
ignorant, in a large proportion of cases. When the wife has educated the
husband to such a point that she can invite him to work out a problem in
the higher mathematics or to perform a difficult chemical analysis with
her as his collaborator, as less instructed dames ask their husbands to
play a game of checkers or backgammon, they can have delightful and
instructive evenings together. I hope our young Doctor will take kindly
to his wife's (that is to be) teachings.

When the following verses were taken out of the urn, the Mistress asked
me to hand the manuscript to the young Doctor to read. I noticed that he
did not keep his eyes very closely fixed on the paper. It seemed as if
he could have recited the lines without referring to the manuscript at
all.

AT THE TURN OF THE ROAD.

The glory has passed from the goldenrod's plume,
The purple-hued asters still linger in bloom;
The birch is bright yellow, the sumachs are red,
The maples like torches aflame overhead.

But what if the joy of the summer is past,
And winter's wild herald is blowing his blast?
For me dull November is sweeter than May,
For my love is its sunshine,--she meets me to-day!

Will she come? Will the ring-dove return to her nest?
Will the needle swing back from the east or the west?
At the stroke of the hour she will be at her gate;
A friend may prove laggard,--love never comes late.

Do I see her afar in the distance? Not yet.
Too early! Too early! She could not forget!
When I cross the old bridge where the brook overflowed,
She will flash full in sight at the turn of the road.

I pass the low wall where the ivy entwines;
I tread the brown pathway that leads through the pines;
I haste by the boulder that lies in the field,
Where her promise at parting was lovingly sealed.

Will she come by the hillside or round through the wood?
Will she wear her brown dress or her mantle and hood?
The minute draws near,--but her watch may go wrong;
My heart will be asking, What keeps her so long?

Why doubt for a moment? More shame if I do!
Why question? Why tremble? Are angels more true?
She would come to the lover who calls her his own
Though she trod in the track of a whirling cyclone!

--I crossed the old bridge ere the minute had passed.
I looked: lo! my Love stood before me at last.
Her eyes, how they sparkled, her cheeks, how they glowed,
As we met, face to face, at the turn of the road!




XII

There was a great tinkling of teaspoons the other evening, when I took my
seat at the table, where all The Teacups were gathered before my
entrance. The whole company arose, and the Mistress, speaking for them,
expressed the usual sentiment appropriate to such occasions. "Many happy
returns" is the customary formula. No matter if the object of this kind
wish is a centenarian, it is quite safe to assume that he is ready and
very willing to accept as many more years as the disposing powers may see
fit to allow him.

The meaning of it all was that this was my birthday. My friends, near
and distant, had seen fit to remember it, and to let me know in various
pleasant ways that they had not forgotten it. The tables were adorned
with flowers. Gifts of pretty and pleasing objects were displayed on a
side table. A great green wreath, which must have cost the parent oak a
large fraction of its foliage, was an object of special admiration.
Baskets of flowers which had half unpeopled greenhouses, large bouquets
of roses, fragrant bunches of pinks, and many beautiful blossoms I am not
botanist enough to name had been coming in upon me all day long. Many of
these offerings were brought by the givers in person; many came with
notes as fragrant with good wishes as the flowers they accompanied with
their natural perfumes.

How old was I, The Dictator, once known by another equally audacious
title,--I, the recipient of all these favors and honors? I had cleared
the eight-barred gate, which few come in sight of, and fewer, far fewer,
go over, a year before. I was a trespasser on the domain belonging to
another generation. The children of my coevals were fast getting gray
and bald, and their children beginning to look upon the world as
belonging to them, and not to their sires and grandsires. After that
leap over the tall barrier, it looks like a kind of impropriety to keep
on as if one were still of a reasonable age. Sometimes it seems to me
almost of the nature of a misdemeanor to be wandering about in the
preserve which the fleshless gamekeeper guards so jealously. But, on the
other hand, I remember that men of science have maintained that the
natural life of man is nearer fivescore than threescore years and ten. I
always think of a familiar experience which I bring from the French
cafes, well known to me in my early manhood. One of the illustrated
papers of my Parisian days tells it pleasantly enough.

A guest of the establishment is sitting at his little table. He has just
had his coffee, and the waiter is serving him with his petit verre. Most
of my readers know very well what a petit verre is, but there may be here
and there a virtuous abstainer from alcoholic fluids, living among the
bayberries and the sweet ferns, who is not aware that the words, as
commonly used, signify a small glass--a very small glass--of spirit,
commonly brandy, taken as a chasse-cafe, or coffee-chaser. This drinking
of brandy, "neat," I may remark by the way, is not quite so bad as it
looks. Whiskey or rum taken unmixed from a tumbler is a knock-down blow
to temperance, but the little thimbleful of brandy, or Chartreuse, or
Maraschino, is only, as it were, tweaking the nose of teetotalism.

Well,--to go back behind our brackets,--the guest is calling to the
waiter, "Garcon! et le bain de pieds!" Waiter! and the foot-bath!--The
little glass stands in a small tin saucer or shallow dish, and the custom
is to more than fill the glass, so that some extra brandy rung over into
this tin saucer or cup-plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer.

Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of spirit. At seventy
years it used to be said that the little glass was full. We should be
more apt to put it at eighty in our day, while Gladstone and Tennyson and
our own Whittier are breathing, moving, thinking, writing, speaking, in
the green preserve belonging to their children and grandchildren, and
Bancroft is keeping watch of the gamekeeper in the distance. But,
returning resolutely to the petit verre, I am willing to concede that all
after fourscore is the bain de pieds,--the slopping over, so to speak, of
the full measure of life. I remember that one who was very near and dear
to me, and who lived to a great age, so that the ten-barred gate of the
century did not look very far off, would sometimes apologize in a very
sweet, natural way for lingering so long to be a care and perhaps a
burden to her children, themselves getting well into years. It is not
hard to understand the feeling, never less called for than it was in the
case of that beloved nonagenarian. I have known few persons, young or
old, more sincerely and justly regretted than the gentle lady whose
memory comes up before me as I write.

Oh, if we could all go out of flower as gracefully, as pleasingly, as we
come into blossom! I always think of the morning-glory as the loveliest
example of a graceful yielding to the inevitable. It is beautiful before
its twisted corolla opens; it is comely as it folds its petals inward,
when its brief hours of perfection are over. Women find it easier than
men to grow old in a becoming way. A very old lady who has kept
something, it may be a great deal, of her youthful feelings, who is
daintily cared for, who is grateful for the attentions bestowed upon her,
and enters into the spirit of the young lives that surround her, is as
precious to those who love her as a gem in an antique setting, the
fashion of which has long gone by, but which leaves the jewel the color
and brightness which are its inalienable qualities. With old men it is
too often different. They do not belong so much indoors as women do.
They have no pretty little manual occupations. The old lady knits or
stitches so long as her eyes and fingers will let her. The old man
smokes his pipe, but does not know what to do with his fingers, unless he
plays upon some instrument, or has a mechanical turn which finds business
for them.

But the old writer, I said to The Teacups, as I say to you, my readers,
labors under one special difficulty, which I am thinking of and
exemplifying at this moment. He is constantly tending to reflect upon
and discourse about his own particular stage of life. He feels that he
must apologize for his intrusion upon the time and thoughts of a
generation which he naturally supposes must be tired of him, if they ever
had any considerable regard for him. Now, if the world of readers hates
anything it sees in print, it is apology. If what one has to say is
worth saying, he need not beg pardon fur saying it. If it is not worth
saying I will not finish the sentence. But it is so hard to resist the
temptation, notwithstanding that the terrible line beginning "Superfluous
lags the veteran" is always repeating itself in his dull ear!

What kind of audience or reading parish is a man who secured his
constituency in middle life, or before that period, to expect when he has
reached the age of threescore and twenty? His coevals have dropped away
by scores and tens, and he sees only a few units scattered about here and
there, like the few beads above the water after a ship has gone to
pieces. Does he write and publish for those of his own time of life? He
need not print a large edition. Does he hope to secure a hearing from
those who have come into the reading world since his coevals? They have
found fresher fields and greener pastures. Their interests are in the
out-door, active world. Some of them are circumnavigating the planet
while he is hitching his rocking chair about his hearth-rug. Some are
gazing upon the pyramids while he is staring at his andirons. Some are
settling the tariff and fixing the laws of suffrage and taxation while he
is dozing over the weather bulletin, and going to sleep over the
obituaries in his morning or evening paper.

Nature is wiser than we give her credit for being; never wiser than in
her dealings with the old. She has no idea of mortifying them by sudden
and wholly unexpected failure of the chief servants of consciousness.
The sight, for instance, begins to lose something of its perfection long
before its deficiency calls the owner's special attention to it. Very
probably, the first hint we have of the change is that a friend makes the
pleasing remark that we are "playing the trombone," as he calls it; that
is, moving a book we are holding backward and forward, to get the right
focal distance. Or it may be we find fault with the lamp or the
gas-burner for not giving so much light as it used to. At last,
somewhere between forty and fifty, we begin to dangle a jaunty pair of
eye-glasses, half plaything and half necessity. In due time a pair of
sober, business-like spectacles bestrides the nose. Old age leaps upon
it as his saddle, and rides triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness
comes which no glasses can penetrate. Nature is pitiless in carrying out
the universal sentence, but very pitiful in her mode of dealing with the
condemned on his way to the final scene. The man who is to be hanged
always has a good breakfast provided for him.

Do not think that the old look upon themselves as the helpless, hopeless,
forlorn creatures which they seem to young people. Do these young folks
suppose that all vanity dies out of the natures of old men and old women?
A dentist of olden time told me that a good-looking young man once said
to him, "Keep that incisor presentable, if you can, till I am fifty, and
then I sha'n't care how I look." I venture to say that that gentleman
was as particular about his personal appearance and as proud of his good
looks at fifty, and many years after fifty, as he was in the twenties,
when he made that speech to the dentist.

My dear friends around the teacups, and at that wider board where I am
now entertaining, or trying to entertain, my company, is it not as plain
to you as it is to me that I had better leave such tasks as that which I
am just finishing to those who live in a more interesting period of life
than one which, in the order of nature, is next door to decrepitude?
Ought I not to regret having undertaken to report the doings and sayings
of the members of the circle which you have known as The Teacups?

Dear, faithful reader, whose patient eyes have followed my reports
through these long months, you and I are about parting company. Perhaps
you are one of those who have known me under another name, in those
far-off days separated from these by the red sea of the great national
conflict. When you first heard the tinkle of the teaspoons, as the table
was being made ready for its guests, you trembled for me, in the kindness
of your hearts. I do not wonder that you did,--I trembled for myself.
But I remembered the story of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who was seen all of
a tremor just as he was going into action. "How is this?" said a brother
officer to him. "Surely you are not afraid?" "No," he answered, "but my
flesh trembles at the thought of the dangers into which my intrepid
spirit will carry me." I knew the risk of undertaking to carry through a
series of connected papers. And yet I thought it was better to run that
risk, more manly, more sensible, than to give way to the fears which made
my flesh tremble as did Sir Cloudesley Shovel's. For myself the labor
has been a distraction, and one which came at a time when it was needed.
Sometimes, as in one of those poems recently published,--the reader will
easily guess which,--the youthful spirit has come over me with such a
rush that it made me feel just as I did when I wrote the history of the
"One-hoss Shay" thirty years ago. To repeat one of my comparisons, it
was as if an early fruit had ripened on a graft upon an old, steady-going
tree, to the astonishment of all its later-maturing products. I should
hardly dare to say so much as this if I had not heard a similar opinion
expressed by others.

Once committed to my undertaking, there was no turning back. It is true
that I had said I might stop at any moment, but after one or two numbers
it seemed as if there were an informal pledge to carry the series on, as
in former cases, until I had completed my dozen instalments.

Writers and speakers have their idiosyncrasies, their habits, their
tricks, if you had rather call them so, as to their ways of writing and
speaking. There is a very old and familiar story, accompanied by a
feeble jest, which most of my readers may probably enough have met with
in Joe Miller or elsewhere. It is that of a lawyer who could never make
an argument without having a piece of thread to work upon with his
fingers while he was pleading. Some one stole it from him one day, and
he could not get on at all with his speech,--he had lost the thread of
his discourse, as the story had it. Now this is what I myself once saw.
It was at a meeting where certain grave matters were debated in an
assembly of professional men. A speaker, whom I never heard before or
since, got up and made a long and forcible argument. I do not think he
was a lawyer, but he spoke as if he had been trained to talk to juries.
He held a long string in one hand, which he drew through the other band
incessantly, as he spoke, just as a shoe maker performs the motion of
waxing his thread. He appeared to be dependent on this motion. The
physiological significance of the fact I suppose to be that the flow of
what we call the nervous current from the thinking centre to the organs
of speech was rendered freer and easier by the establishment of a
simultaneous collateral nervous current to the set of muscles concerned
in the action I have described.

I do not use a string to help me write or speak, but I must have its
equivalent. I must have my paper and pen or pencil before me to set my
thoughts flowing in such form that they can be written continuously.
There have been lawyers who could think out their whole argument in
connected order without a single note. There are authors,--and I think
there are many,--who can compose and finish off a poem or a story without
writing a word of it until, when the proper time comes, they copy what
they carry in their heads. I have been told that Sir Edwin Arnold
thought out his beautiful "Light of Asia" in this way.

I find the great charm of writing consists in its surprises. When one is
in the receptive attitude of mind, the thoughts which are sprung upon
him, the images which flash through his--consciousness, are a delight and
an excitement. I am impatient of every hindrance in setting down my
thoughts,--of a pen that will not write, of ink that will not flow, of
paper that will not receive the ink. And here let me pay the tribute
which I owe to one of the humblest but most serviceable of my assistants,
especially in poetical composition. Nothing seems more prosaic than the
stylographic pen. It deprives the handwriting of its beauty, and to some
extent of its individual character. The brutal communism of the letters
it forms covers the page it fills with the most uniformly uninteresting
characters. But, abuse it as much as you choose, there is nothing like
it for the poet, for the imaginative writer. Many a fine flow of thought
has been checked, perhaps arrested, by the ill behavior of a goose-quill.
Many an idea has escaped while the author was dipping his pen in the
inkstand. But with the stylographic pen, in the hands of one who knows
how to care for it and how to use it, unbroken rhythms and harmonious
cadences are the natural products of the unimpeded flow of the fluid
which is the vehicle of the author's thoughts and fancies. So much for my
debt of gratitude to the humble stylographic pen. It does not furnish
the proper medium for the correspondence of intimates, who wish to see as
much of their friends' personality as their handwriting can hold,--still
less for the impassioned interchange of sentiments between lovers; but in
writing for the press its use is open to no objection. Its movement over
the paper is like the flight of a swallow, while the quill pen and the
steel pen and the gold pen are all taking short, laborious journeys, and
stopping to drink every few minutes.

A chief pleasure which the author of novels and stories experiences is
that of becoming acquainted with the characters be draws. It is
perfectly true that his characters must, in the nature of things, have
more or less of himself in their composition. If I should seek an
exemplification of this in the person of any of my Teacups, I should find
it most readily in the one whom I have called Number Seven, the one with
the squinting brain. I think that not only I, the writer, but many of my
readers, recognize in our own mental constitution an occasional obliquity
of perception, not always detected at the time, but plain enough when
looked back upon. What extravagant fancies you and I have seriously
entertained at one time or another! What superstitious notions have got
into our heads and taken possession of its empty chambers,--or, in the
language of science, seized on the groups of nerve-cells in some of the
idle cerebral convolutions!

The writer, I say, becomes acquainted with his characters as he goes on.
They are at first mere embryos, outlines of distinct personalities. By
and by, if they have any organic cohesion, they begin to assert
themselves. They can say and do such and such things; such and such
other things they cannot and must not say or do. The story-writer's and
play-writer's danger is that they will get their characters mixed, and
make A say what B ought to have said. The stronger his imaginative
faculty, the less liable will the writer be to this fault; but not even
Shakespeare's power of throwing himself into his characters prevents many
of his different personages from talking philosophy in the same strain
and in a style common to them all.

You will often observe that authors fall in love with the imaginary
persons they describe, and that they bestow affectionate epithets upon
them which it may happen the reader does not consider in any way called
for. This is a pleasure to which they have a right. Every author of a
story is surrounded by a little family of ideal children, as dear to him,
it may be, as are flesh-and-blood children to their parents. You may
forget all about the circle of Teacups to which I have introduced
you,--on the supposition that you have followed me with some degree of
interest; but do you suppose that Number Five does not continue as a
presence with me, and that my pretty Delilah has left me forever because
she is going to be married?