Over the Teacups

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


The second of these two last stories must be told in prosaic detail to
show its whole value as a coincidence.

One evening while I was living in Charles Street, I received a call from
Dr. S., a well-known and highly respected Boston physician, a particular
friend of the late Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Southern
Confederacy. It was with reference to a work which Mr. Stephens was
about to publish that Dr. S. called upon me. After talking that matter
over we got conversing on other subjects, among the rest a family
relationship existing between us,--not a very near one, but one which I
think I had seen mentioned in genealogical accounts. Mary S. (the last
name being the same as that of my visitant), it appeared, was the
great-great-grandmother of Mrs. H. and myself. After cordially
recognizing our forgotten relationship, now for the first time called to
mind, we parted, my guest leaving me for his own home. We had been
sitting in my library on the lower floor. On going up-stairs where Mrs.
H. was sitting alone, just as I entered the room she pushed a paper
across the table towards me, saying that perhaps it might interest me.
It was one of a number of old family papers which she had brought from
the house of her mother, recently deceased.

I opened the paper, which was an old-looking document, and found that it
was a copy, perhaps made in this century, of the will of that same Mary
S. about whom we had been talking down-stairs.

If there is such a thing as a purely accidental coincidence this must be
considered an instance of it.

All one can say about it is that it seems very unlikely that such a
coincidence should occur, but it did.

I have not tried to keep my own personality out of these stories. But
after all, how little difference it makes whether or not a writer appears
with a mask on which everybody can take off,--whether he bolts his door
or not, when everybody can look in at his windows, and all his entrances
are at the mercy of the critic's skeleton key and the jimmy of any
ill-disposed assailant!

The company have been silent listeners for the most part; but the reader
will have a chance to become better acquainted with some cf them by and
by.




II

TO THE READER.

I know that it is a hazardous experiment to address myself again to a
public which in days long past has given me a generous welcome. But my
readers have been, and are, a very faithful constituency. I think there
are many among them who would rather listen to an old voice they are used
to than to a new one of better quality, even if the "childish treble"
should betray itself now and then in the tones of the overtired organ.
But there must be others,--I am afraid many others,--who will exclaim:
"He has had his day, and why can't he be content? We don't want literary
revenants, superfluous veterans, writers who have worn out their welcome
and still insist on being attended to. Give us something fresh,
something that belongs to our day and generation. Your morning draught
was well enough, but we don't care for your evening slip-slop. You are
not in relation with us, with our time, our ideas, our aims, our
aspirations."

Alas, alas! my friend,--my young friend, for your hair is not yet
whitened,--I am afraid you are too nearly right. No doubt,--no doubt.
Teacups are not coffee-cups. They do not hold so much. Their pallid
infusion is but a feeble stimulant compared with the black decoction
served at the morning board. And so, perhaps, if wisdom like yours were
compatible with years like mine, I should drop my pen and make no further
attempts upon your patience.

But suppose that a writer who has reached and passed the natural limit of
serviceable years feels that he has some things which he would like to
say, and which may have an interest for a limited class of readers,--is
he not right in trying his powers and calmly taking the risk of failure?
Does it not seem rather lazy and cowardly, because he cannot "beat his
record," or even come up to the level of what he has done in his prime,
to shrink from exerting his talent, such as it is, now that he has
outlived the period of his greatest vigor? A singer who is no longer
equal to the trials of opera on the stage may yet please at a chamber
concert or in the drawing-room. There is one gratification an old author
can afford a certain class of critics: that, namely, of comparing him as
he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its
superiors brought within range, so to speak; and if the ablest of them
will only live long enough, and keep on writing, there is no pop-gun that
cannot reach him. But I fear that this is an unamiable reflection, and I
am at this time in a very amiable mood.

I confess that there is something agreeable to me in renewing my
relations with the reading public. Were it but a single appearance, it
would give me a pleasant glimpse of the time when I was known as a
frequent literary visitor. Many of my readers--if I can lure any from
the pages of younger writers will prove to be the children, or the
grandchildren, of those whose acquaintance I made something more than a
whole generation ago. I could depend on a kind welcome from my
contemporaries,--my coevals. But where are those contemporaries? Ay de
mi! as Carlyle used to exclaim,--Ah, dear me! as our old women say,--I
look round for them, and see only their vacant places. The old vine
cannot unwind its tendrils. The branch falls with the decay of its
support, and must cling to the new growths around it, if it would not lie
helpless in the dust. This paper is a new tendril, feeling its way, as
it best may, to whatever it can wind around. The thought of finding here
and there an old friend, and making, it may be, once in a while a new
one, is very grateful to me. The chief drawback to the pleasure is the
feeling that I am submitting to that inevitable exposure which is the
penalty of authorship in every form. A writer must make up his mind to
the possible rough treatment of the critics, who swarm like bacteria
whenever there is any literary material on which they can feed. I have
had as little to complain of as most writers, yet I think it is always
with reluctance that one encounters the promiscuous handling which the
products of the mind have to put up with, as much as the fruit and
provisions in the market-stalls. I had rather be criticised, however,
than criticise; that is, express my opinions in the public prints of
other writers' work, if they are living, and can suffer, as I should
often have to make them. There are enough, thank Heaven, without me. We
are literary cannibals, and our writers live on each other and each
other's productions to a fearful extent. What the mulberry leaf is to
the silk-worm, the author's book, treatise, essay, poem, is to the
critical larva; that feed upon it. It furnishes them with food and
clothing. The process may not be agreeable to the mulberry leaf or to
the printed page; but without it the leaf would not have become the silk
that covers the empress's shoulders, and but for the critic the author's
book might never have reached the scholar's table. Scribblers will feed
on each other, and if we insist on being scribblers we must consent to be
fed on. We must try to endure philosophically what we cannot help, and
ought not, I suppose, to wish to help.

It is the custom at our table to vary the usual talk, by the reading of
short papers, in prose or verse, by one or more of The Teacups, as we are
in the habit of calling those who make up our company. Thirty years ago,
one of our present circle--"Teacup Number Two," The Professor,--read a
paper on Old Age, at a certain Breakfast-table, where he was in the habit
of appearing. That paper was published at the time, and has since seen
the light in other forms. He did not know so much about old age then as
he does now, and would doubtless write somewhat differently if he took
the subject up again. But I found that it was the general wish that
another of our company should let us hear what he had to say about it. I
received a polite note, requesting me to discourse about old age,
inasmuch as I was particularly well qualified by my experience to write
in an authoritative way concerning it. The fact is that I,--for it is
myself who am speaking,--have recently arrived at the age of threescore
years and twenty,--fourscore years we may otherwise call it. In the
arrangement of our table, I am Teacup Number One, and I may as well say
that I am often spoken of as The Dictator. There is nothing invidious in
this, as I am the oldest of the company, and no claim is less likely to
excite jealousy than that of priority of birth.

I received congratulations on reaching my eightieth birthday, not only
from our circle of Teacups, but from friends, near and distant, in large
numbers. I tried to acknowledge these kindly missives with the aid of a
most intelligent secretary; but I fear that there were gifts not thanked
for, and tokens of good-will not recognized. Let any neglected
correspondent be assured that it was not intentionally that he or she was
slighted. I was grateful for every such mark of esteem; even for the
telegram from an unknown friend in a distant land, for which I cheerfully
paid the considerable charge which the sender doubtless knew it would
give me pleasure to disburse for such an expression of friendly feeling.

I will not detain the reader any longer from the essay I have promised.

This is the paper read to The Teacups.

It is in A Song of Moses that we find the words, made very familiar to us
by the Episcopal Burial Service, which place the natural limit on life at
threescore years and ten, with an extra ten years for some of a stronger
constitution than the average. Yet we are told that Moses himself lived
to be a hundred and twenty years old, and that his eye was not dim nor
his natural strength abated. This is hard to accept literally, but we
need not doubt that he was very old, and in remarkably good condition for
a man of his age. Among his followers was a stout old captain, Caleb,
the son of Jephunneh. This ancient warrior speaks of himself in these
brave terms: "Lo, I am this day fourscore and five years old. As yet, I
am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me; as my
strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out
and to come in." It is not likely that anybody believed his brag about
his being as good a man for active service at eighty-five as he was at
forty, when Moses sent him out to spy the land of Canaan. But he was, no
doubt, lusty and vigorous for his years, and ready to smite the
Canaanites hip and thigh, and drive them out, and take possession of
their land, as he did forthwith, when Moses gave him leave.

Grand old men there were, three thousand years ago! But not all
octogenarians were like Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. Listen to poor old
Barzillai, and hear him piping: "I am this day fourscore years old; and
can I discern between good and evil? Can thy servant taste what I eat or
what I drink? Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing
women? Wherefore, then, should thy servant be yet a burden unto my lord
the king?" And poor King David was worse off than this, as you all
remember, at the early age of seventy.

Thirty centuries do not seem to have made any very great difference in
the extreme limits of life. Without pretending to rival the alleged
cases of life prolonged beyond the middle of its second century, such as
those of Henry Jenkins and Thomas Parr, we can make a good showing of
centenarians and nonagenarians. I myself remember Dr. Holyoke, of Salem,
son of a president of Harvard College, who answered a toast proposed in
his honor at a dinner given to him on his hundredth birthday.

"Father Cleveland," our venerated city missionary, was born June 21,
1772, and died June 5, 1872, within a little more than a fortnight of his
hundredth birthday. Colonel Perkins, of Connecticut, died recently after
celebrating his centennial anniversary.

Among nonagenarians, three whose names are well known to Bostonians, Lord
Lyndhurst, Josiah Quincy, and Sidney Bartlett, were remarkable for
retaining their faculties in their extreme age. That patriarch of our
American literature, the illustrious historian of his country, is still
with us, his birth dating in 1800.

Ranke, the great German historian, died at the age of ninety-one, and
Chevreul, the eminent chemist, at that of a hundred and two.

Some English sporting characters have furnished striking examples of
robust longevity. In Gilpin's "Forest Scenery" there is the story of one
of these horseback heroes. Henry Hastings was the name of this old
gentleman, who lived in the time of Charles the First. It would be hard
to find a better portrait of a hunting squire than that which the Earl of
Shaftesbury has the credit of having drawn of this very peculiar
personage. His description ends by saying, "He lived to be an hundred,
and never lost his eyesight nor used spectacles. He got on horseback
without help, and rode to the death of the stag till he was past
fourscore."

Everything depends on habit. Old people can do, of course, more or less
well, what they have been doing all their lives; but try to teach them
any new tricks, and the truth of the old adage will very soon show
itself. Mr. Henry Hastings had done nothing but hunt all his days, and
his record would seem to have been a good deal like that of Philippus
Zaehdarm in that untranslatable epitaph which may be found in "Sartor
Resartus." Judged by its products, it was a very short life of a hundred
useless twelve months.

It is something to have climbed the white summit, the Mont Blanc of
fourscore. A small number only of mankind ever see their eightieth
anniversary. I might go to the statistical tables of the annuity and
life insurance offices for extended and exact information, but I prefer
to take the facts which have impressed themselves upon me in my own
career.

The class of 1829 at Harvard College, of which I am a member, graduated,
according to the triennial, fifty-nine in number. It is sixty years,
then, since that time; and as they were, on an average, about twenty
years old, those who survive must have reached fourscore years. Of the
fifty-nine graduates ten only are living, or were at the last accounts;
one in six, very nearly. In the first ten years after graduation, our
third decade, when we were between twenty and thirty years old, we lost
three members,--about one in twenty; between the ages of thirty and
forty, eight died,--one in seven of those the decade began with; from
forty to fifty, only two,--or one in twenty-four; from fifty to sixty,
eight,--or one in six; from sixty to seventy, fifteen,--or two out of
every five; from seventy to eighty, twelve,--or one in two. The greatly
increased mortality which began with our seventh decade went on steadily
increasing. At sixty we come "within range of the rifle-pits," to borrow
an expression from my friend Weir Mitchell.

Our eminent classmate, the late Professor Benjamin Peirce, showed by
numerical comparison that the men of superior ability outlasted the
average of their fellow-graduates. He himself lived a little beyond his
threescore and ten years. James Freeman Clarke almost reached the age of
eighty. The eighth decade brought the fatal year for Benjamin Robbins
Curtis, the great lawyer, who was one of the judges of the Supreme Court
of the United States; for the very able chief justice of Massachusetts,
George Tyler Bigelow; and for that famous wit and electric centre of
social life, George T. Davis. At the last annual dinner every effort was
made to bring all the survivors of the class together. Six of the ten
living members were there, six old men in the place of the thirty or
forty classmates who surrounded the long, oval table in 1859, when I
asked, "Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?"--11 boys whose
tongues were as the vibrating leaves of the forest; whose talk was like
the voice of many waters; whose laugh was as the breaking of mighty waves
upon the seashore. Among the six at our late dinner was our first
scholar, the thorough-bred and accomplished engineer who held the city of
Lawrence in his brain before it spread itself out along the banks of the
Merrimac. There, too, was the poet whose National Hymn, "My Country, 't
is of thee," is known to more millions, and dearer to many of them, than
all the other songs written since the Psalms of David. Four of our six
were clergymen; the engineer and the present writer completed the list.
Were we melancholy? Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs? No,--we
remembered our dead tenderly, serenely, feeling deeply what we had lost
in those who but a little while ago were with us. How could we forget
James Freeman Clarke, that man of noble thought and vigorous action, who
pervaded this community with his spirit, and was felt through all its
channels as are the light and the strength that radiate through the wires
which stretch above us? It was a pride and a happiness to have such
classmates as he was to remember. We were not the moping, complaining
graybeards that many might suppose we must have been. We had been
favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen the drama well into
its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful and
life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful
equanimity, which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished to
do it. Nature's kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with
every year. Our old doctors used to give an opiate which they called
"the black drop." It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a
dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug
in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,--the
later stages of life. She commonly begins administering it at about the
time of the "grand climacteric," the ninth septennial period, the
sixty-third year. More and more freely she gives it, as the years go on,
to her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough, every
faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under its
benign influence.

Do you say that old age is unfeeling? It has not vital energy enough to
supply the waste of the more exhausting emotions. Old Men's Tears, which
furnished the mournful title to Joshua Scottow's Lamentations, do not
suggest the deepest grief conceivable. A little breath of wind brings
down the raindrops which have gathered on the leaves of the tremulous
poplars. A very slight suggestion brings the tears from Marlborough's
eyes, but they are soon over, and he is smiling again as an allusion
carries him back to the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet. Envy not the
old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it
sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him
with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he
stuns and stupefies. One's fellow-mortals can afford to be as considerate
and tender with him as Time and Nature.

There was not much boasting among us of our present or our past, as we
sat together in the little room at the great hotel. A certain amount of
self-deception is quite possible at threescore years and ten, but at
three score years and twenty Nature has shown most of those who live to
that age that she is earnest, and means to dismantle and have done with
them in a very little while. As for boasting of our past, the laudator
temporis acti makes but a poor figure in our time. Old people used to
talk of their youth as if there were giants in those days. We knew some
tall men when we were young, but we can see a man taller than any one
among them at the nearest dime museum. We had handsome women among us,
of high local reputation, but nowadays we have professional beauties who
challenge the world to criticise them as boldly as Phryne ever challenged
her Athenian admirers. We had fast horses,--did not "Old Blue" trot a
mile in three minutes? True, but there is a three-year-old colt just put
on the track who has done it in a little more than two thirds of that
time. It seems as if the material world had been made over again since
we were boys. It is but a short time since we were counting up the
miracles we had lived to witness. The list is familiar enough: the
railroad, the ocean steamer, photography, the spectroscope, the
telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthetics, electric
illumination,--with such lesser wonders as the friction match, the sewing
machine, and the bicycle. And now, we said, we must have come to the end
of these unparalleled developments of the forces of nature. We must rest
on our achievements. The nineteenth century is not likely to add to
them; we must wait for the twentieth century. Many of us, perhaps most
of us, felt in that way. We had seen our planet furnished by the art of
man with a complete nervous system: a spinal cord beneath the ocean,
secondary centres,--ganglions,--in all the chief places where men are
gathered together, and ramifications extending throughout civilization.
All at once, by the side of this talking and light-giving apparatus, we
see another wire stretched over our heads, carrying force to a vast
metallic muscular system,--a slender cord conveying the strength of a
hundred men, of a score of horses, of a team of elephants. The lightning
is tamed and harnessed, the thunderbolt has become a common carrier. No
more surprises in this century! A voice whispers, What next?

It will not do for us to boast about our young days and what they had to
show. It is a great deal better to boast of what they could not show,
and, strange as it may seem, there is a certain satisfaction in it. In
these days of electric lighting, when you have only to touch a button and
your parlor or bedroom is instantly flooded with light, it is a pleasure
to revert to the era of the tinder-box, the flint and steel, and the
brimstone match. It gives me an almost proud satisfaction to tell how we
used, when those implements were not at hand or not employed, to light
our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live coal held against the wick, often
swelling our cheeks and reddening our faces until we were on the verge of
apoplexy. I love to tell of our stage-coach experiences, of our
sailing-packet voyages, of the semi-barbarous destitution of all modern
comforts and conveniences through which we bravely lived and came out the
estimable personages you find us.

Think of it! All my boyish shooting was done with a flint-lock gun; the
percussion lock came to me as one of those new-fangled notions people had
just got hold of. We ancients can make a grand display of minus
quantities in our reminiscences, and the figures look almost as well as
if they had the plus sign before them.

I am afraid that old people found life rather a dull business in the time
of King David and his rich old subject and friend, Barzillai, who, poor
man, could not have read a wicked novel, nor enjoyed a symphony concert,
if they had had those luxuries in his day. There were no pleasant
firesides, for there were no chimneys. There were no daily newspapers
for the old man to read, and he could not read them if there were, with
his dimmed eyes, nor hear them read, very probably, with his dulled ears.
There was no tobacco, a soothing drug, which in its various forms is a
great solace to many old men and to some old women, Carlyle and his
mother used to smoke their pipes together, you remember.

Old age is infinitely more cheerful, for intelligent people at least,
than it was two or three thousand years ago. It is our duty, so far as
we can, to keep it so. There will always be enough about it that is
solemn, and more than enough, alas! that is saddening. But how much
there is in our times to lighten its burdens! If they that look out at
the windows be darkened, the optician is happy to supply them with
eye-glasses for use before the public, and spectacles for their hours of
privacy. If the grinders cease because they are few, they can be made
many again by a third dentition, which brings no toothache in its train.
By temperance and good Habits of life, proper clothing, well-warmed,
well-drained, and well-ventilated dwellings, and sufficient, not too much
exercise, the old man of our time may keep his muscular strength in very
good condition. I doubt if Mr. Gladstone, who is fast nearing his
eightieth birthday, would boast, in the style of Caleb, that he was as
good a man with his axe as he was when he was forty, but I would back
him,--if the match were possible, for a hundred shekels, against that
over-confident old Israelite, to cut down and chop up a cedar of Lebanon.
I know a most excellent clergyman, not far from my own time of life, whom
I would pit against any old Hebrew rabbi or Greek philosopher of his
years and weight, if they could return to the flesh, to run a quarter of
a mile on a good, level track.