Pages From an Old Volume of Life

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. >> Pages From an Old Volume of Life

PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

By Oliver Wendell Holmes



CONTENTS:
BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER
MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN"
THE INEVITABLE TRIAL
CINDERS FROM ASHES
THE PULPIT AND THE PEW




BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.

(September, 1861.)

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace.
It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs. They must have something to
eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have something to eat, and
the papers to read.

Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our
carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to
Europe sine die. If we live in a small way, there are at least new
dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with.
If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform, its
respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a
caraway-umbel late in the season. He will cheerfully calm the perturbed
nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying a new one,
if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a
pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only bread and the
newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions,
as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his
fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would
have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely
repulsive.

All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have
experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later
betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many among
us. We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency with which
diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the terrible
emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. Laennec
tells the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director, where
all the nuns were subjected to the severest penances and schooled in the
most painful doctrines. They all became consumptive soon after their
entrance, so that, in the course of his ten years' attendance, all the
inmates died out two or three times, and were replaced by new ones. He
does not hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suffered to
those depressing moral influences to which they were subjected.

So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous
system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants. Take the
first trifling example which comes to our recollection. A sad disaster
to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of two
gentlemen and a lady. Both the gentlemen complained of a sudden feeling
at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit of the stomach, changed
color, and confessed to a slight tremor about the knees. The lady had a
"grande revolution," as French patients say,--went home, and kept her bed
for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile at the mention of
such trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures death itself
follows in some cases from no more serious cause. An old, gentleman fell
senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba.
One of our early friends, who recently died of the same complaint, was
thought to have had his attack mainly in consequence of the excitements
of the time.

We all know what the war fever is in our young men,--what a devouring
passion it becomes in those whom it assails. Patriotism is the fire of
it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of
adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of
participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal
distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we
often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most
ardent of our soldiers. But something of the same fever in a different
form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a
drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their families. Some
of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain
in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that
is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men
cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They stroll
up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We
confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his
work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as interesting
as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light
of the terrible present. Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he
confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time that we had
closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth century any more
than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony
and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen
into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over
and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as
if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not
often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?
Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the
noon extra,--he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he
wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great
capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in
our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go
tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that
make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round
through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a
track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.
This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of
April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto
operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we
once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the
leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already
turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not
wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from
peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we
cannot at first think what,--and then groping our way about through the
twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like
some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us
on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the
feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is,
after all, only a dream,--if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and
shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed
grief is unreal. This attempt to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact
always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in the
dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for their especial use.

Watch one of them. He does not feel quite well,--at least, he suspects
himself of indisposition. Nothing serious,--let us just rub our
fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us rubs his
hands, and all will be right. He rubs them with that peculiar twisting
movement of his, and pauses for the effect. No! all is not quite right
yet. Ah! it is our head that is not set on just as it ought to be. Let
us settle that where it should be, and then we shall certainly be in good
trim again. So he pulls his head about as an old lady adjusts her cap,
and passes his fore-paw over it like a kitten washing herself. Poor
fellow! It is not a fancy, but a fact, that he has to deal with. If he
could read the letters at the head of the sheet, he would see they were
Fly-Paper.--So with us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we
dream! Perhaps very young persons may not understand this; as we grow
older, our waking and dreaming life run more and more into each other.

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of
old habits. The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be
had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must
go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner
nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us in company, it will not stand
on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine
right of its telegraphic dispatches.

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of
Americans. Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers the
Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll,
which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that
time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from the
neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of which see the tower of
Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory means '76. As
for the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about that"; and everybody
knows that the Mexican business did not concern us much, except in its
political relations. No! war is a new thing to all of us who are not in
the last quarter of their century. We are learning many strange matters
from our fresh experience. And besides, there are new conditions of
existence which make war as it is with us very different from war as it
has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron nerves
which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns
and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body.
The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it were, move the
limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What was the
railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th of
April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts with a
clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous
action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a breathless
courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight of
for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know for
a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden with
truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always for the
last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements of our
armies. To-night the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under their
own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the
tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The war passion burned
like scattered coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times;
now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie. And
this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another
singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We
may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a
week afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would
have been in a whole season before our national nervous system was
organized.

"As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,
Thou only teachest all that man can be!"

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of
long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful
prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that Society.

Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind, we
have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,--especially when one
of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build and
keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop would give us a
new professor. Now we begin to think that there was some meaning in our
poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else could, what we can be
and are. It has exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and driven us all
back upon our substantial human qualities, for a long time more or less
kept out of sight by the spirit of commerce, the love of art, science, or
literature, or other qualities not belonging to all of us as men and
women.

It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social
distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than the
preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do. We are finding out
that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism is gentility.
All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery.
The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like
a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy
and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his
straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or
leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs
as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.

Even our poor "Brahmins,"--whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the
same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his supposed
antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the "bloated
aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized, shy,
sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an aptitude for
learning,--even these poor New England Brahmins of ours, subvirates of an
organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if their courage
is big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their slender
figures.

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our
windows. A few days afterwards a field piece was dragged to the water's
edge, and fired many times over the river. We asked a bystander, who
looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to "break the gall,"
he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface. A strange
physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is not our
present point. A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the
surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as when they roared
over Charleston harbor.

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable
grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with
the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and
unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of
fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed
by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not
unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary times
had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern people as
the English in the last centuries used to talk about the
French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be remembered, called one
Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English,
again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider
the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,--forgetting that
Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold, and
Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of forging
iron. These persons have learned better now. The bravery of our free
working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not drowned.
The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change
their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer
the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build
towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute
matter into every shape civilization can ask for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in new
shapes,--that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a man
in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our bones
and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Brave Winthrop,
marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a little startled to
find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the Eighth
Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to
do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed
over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think our own
soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment
of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-ninth, to show us that continental
provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of
Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen
chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief. When the
masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in his heart
that God takes better care of him than of his "Congregationalist"
Colonel? Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young
fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the
Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, and the Homoousians
translated from the battle-field to the abodes of everlasting woe? War
not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not
be. He must not be a bigot and a fool in the presence of that day of
judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls to battle, and where a man
should have but two thoughts: to do his duty, and trust his Maker. Let
our brave dead come back from the fields where they have fallen for law
and liberty, and if you will follow them to their graves, you will find
out what the Broad Church means; the narrow church is sparing of its
exclusive formulae over the coffins wrapped in the flag which the fallen
heroes had defended! Very little comparatively do we hear at such times
of the dogmas on which men differ; very much of the faith and trust in
which all sincere Christians can agree. It is a noble lesson, and
nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach it so that it shall
be heard over all the angry cries of theological disputants.

Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity of our friends, and to
get at their principles of judgment. Perhaps most, of us, will agree
that our faith in domestic prophets has been diminished by the experience
of the last six months. We had the notable predictions attributed to the
Secretary of State, which so unpleasantly refused to fulfil themselves.
We were infested at one time with a set of ominous-looking seers, who
shook their heads and muttered obscurely about some mighty preparations
that were making to substitute the rule of the minority for that of the
majority. Organizations were darkly hinted at; some thought our armories
would be seized; and there are not wanting ancient women in the
neighboring University town who consider that the country was saved by
the intrepid band of students who stood guard, night after night, over
the G. R. cannon and the pile of balls in the Cambridge Arsenal.

As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best prophecies are those
which the sages remember after the event prophesied of has come to pass,
and remind us that they have made long ago. Those who, are rash enough
to predict publicly beforehand commonly give us what they hope, or what
they fear, or some conclusion from an abstraction of their own, or some
guess founded on private information not half so good as what everybody
gets who reads the papers,--never by any possibility a word that we can
depend on, simply because there are cobwebs of contingency between every
to-day and to-morrow that no field-glass can penetrate when fifty of them
lie woven one over another. Prophesy as much as you like, but always
hedge. Say that you think the rebels are weaker than is commonly
supposed, but, on the other hand, that they may prove to be even stronger
than is anticipated. Say what you like,--only don't be too peremptory
and dogmatic; we know that wiser men than you have been notoriously
deceived in their predictions in this very matter.

Ibis et redibis nunquam in bello peribis.

Let that be your model; and remember, on peril of your reputation as a
prophet, not to put a stop before or after the nunquam.

There are two or three facts connected with time, besides that already
referred to, which strike us very forcibly in their relation to the great
events passing around us. We spoke of the long period seeming to have
elapsed since this war began. The buds were then swelling which held the
leaves that are still green. It seems as old as Time himself. We cannot
fail to observe how the mind brings together the scenes of to-day and
those of the old Revolution. We shut up eighty years into each other
like the joints of a pocket-telescope. When the young men from Middlesex
dropped in Baltimore the other day, it seemed to bring Lexington and the
other Nineteenth of April close to us. War has always been the mint in
which the world's history has been coined, and now every day or week or
month has a new medal for us. It was Warren that the first impression
bore in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face
hardly seems fresher than the old. All battle-fields are alike in their
main features. The young fellows who fell in our earlier struggle seemed
like old men to us until within these few months; now we remember they
were like these fiery youth we are cheering as they go to the fight; it
seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside was crimsoned but yesterday,
and the cannon-ball imbedded in the church-tower would feel warm, if we
laid our hand upon it.

Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from
earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled, are
but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon the
field of conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is always a right
against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour may go, a movement
onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to serve its
mighty ends. The very implements of our warfare change less than we
think. Our bullets and cannonballs have lengthened into bolts like those
which whistled out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with weapons,
such as are pictured on the walls of Theban tombs, wearing a newly
invented head-gear as old as the days of the Pyramids.

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we
trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our narrowness,
our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame. Better,
because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by the time, and
our people are rising to the standard the time calls for. For this is
the question the hour is putting to each of us: Are you ready, if need
be, to sacrifice all that you have and hope for in this world, that the
generations to follow you may inherit a whole country whose natural
condition shall be peace, and not a broken province which must live under
the perpetual threat, if not in the constant presence, of war and all
that war brings with it? If we are all ready for this sacrifice, battles
may be lost, but the campaign and its grand object must be won.

Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals. We are
not abruptly asked to give up all that we most care for, in view of the
momentous issues before us. Perhaps we shall never be asked to give up
all, but we have already been called upon to part with much that is dear
to us, and should be ready to yield the rest as it is called for. The
time may come when even the cheap public print shall be a burden our
means cannot support, and we can only listen in the square that was once
the marketplace to the voices of those who proclaim defeat or victory.
Then there will be only our daily food left. When we have nothing to
read and nothing to eat, it will be a favorable moment to offer a
compromise. At present we have all that nature absolutely demands,--we
can live on bread and the newspaper.




MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN."

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam,
my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud summons of a
telegraphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day with rumors of
battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with
throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might
bring.