The Poet at the Breakfast Table

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THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes



PREFACE.

In this, the third series of Breakfast-Table conversations, a slight
dramatic background shows off a few talkers and writers, aided by certain
silent supernumeraries. The machinery is much like that of the two
preceding series. Some of the characters must seem like old
acquaintances to those who have read the former papers. As I read these
over for the first time for a number of years, I notice one character;
presenting a class of beings who have greatly multiplied during the
interval which separates the earlier and later Breakfast-Table papers,--I
mean the scientific specialists. The entomologist, who confines himself
rigidly to the study of the coleoptera, is intended to typify this class.
The subdivision of labor, which, as we used to be told, required fourteen
different workmen to make a single pin, has reached all branches of
knowledge. We find new terms in all the Professions, implying that
special provinces have been marked off, each having its own school of
students. In theology we have many curious subdivisions; among the rest
eschatology, that is to say, the geography, geology, etc., of the
"undiscovered country;" in medicine, if the surgeon who deals with
dislocations of the right shoulder declines to meddle with a displacement
on the other side, we are not surprised, but ring the bell of the
practitioner who devotes himself to injuries of the left shoulder.

On the other hand, we have had or have the encyclopaedic intelligences
like Cuvier, Buckle, and more emphatically Herbert Spencer, who take all
knowledge, or large fields of it, to be their province. The author of
"Thoughts on the Universe" has something in common with these, but he
appears also to have a good deal about him of what we call the humorist;
that is, an individual with a somewhat heterogeneous personality, in
which various distinctly human elements are mixed together, so as to form
a kind of coherent and sometimes pleasing whole, which is to a
symmetrical character as a breccia is to a mosaic.

As for the Young Astronomer, his rhythmical discourse may be taken as
expressing the reaction of what some would call "the natural man" against
the unnatural beliefs which he found in that lower world to which he
descended by day from his midnight home in the firmament.

I have endeavored to give fair play to the protest of gentle and
reverential conservatism in the letter of the Lady, which was not copied
from, but suggested by, one which I received long ago from a lady bearing
an honored name, and which I read thoughtfully and with profound respect.

December, 1882.




PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

It is now nearly twenty years since this book was published. Being the
third of the Breakfast-Table series, it could hardly be expected to
attract so much attention as the earlier volumes. Still, I had no reason
to be disappointed with its reception. It took its place with the
others, and was in some points a clearer exposition of my views and
feelings than either of the other books, its predecessors. The poems
"Homesick in Heaven" and the longer group of passages coming from the
midnight reveries of the Young Astronomer have thoughts in them not so
fully expressed elsewhere in my writings.

The first of these two poems is at war with our common modes of thought.
In looking forward to rejoining in a future state those whom we have
loved on earth,--as most of us hope and many of us believe we shall,--we
are apt to forget that the same individuality is remembered by one
relative as a babe, by another as an adult in the strength of maturity,
and by a third as a wreck with little left except its infirmities and its
affections. The main thought of this poem is a painful one to some
persons. They have so closely associated life with its accidents that
they expect to see their departed friends in the costume of the time in
which they best remember them, and feel as if they should meet the spirit
of their grandfather with his wig and cane, as they habitually recall him
to memory.

The process of scientific specialization referred to and illustrated in
this record has been going on more actively than ever during these last
twenty years. We have only to look over the lists of the Faculties and
teachers of our Universities to see the subdivision of labor carried out
as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it
exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction,
with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of
partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is
idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian."
We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme
authority on anything is a satisfaction to self-love next door to the
precious delusions of dementia. I have never pictured a character more
contented with himself than the "Scarabee" of this story.

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 1, 1891.
O. W. H.

THE POET

AT THE

BREAKFAST-TABLE.
I

The idea of a man's "interviewing" himself is rather odd, to be sure. But
then that is what we are all of us doing every day. I talk half the time
to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out
to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal
property he had forgotten in his inventory.

--You don't know what your thoughts are going to be beforehand? said the
"Member of the Haouse," as he calls himself.

--Why, of course I don't. Bless your honest legislative soul, I suppose
I have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and another in my
head as you have in your Representatives' library up there at the State
House. I have to tumble them over and over, and open them in a hundred
places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and there, to find what I think
about this and that. And a good many people who flatter themselves they
are talking wisdom to me, are only helping me to get at the shelf and the
book and the page where I shall find my own opinion about the matter in
question.

--The Member's eyes began to look heavy.

--It 's a very queer place, that receptacle a man fetches his talk out
of. The library comparison does n't exactly hit it. You stow away some
idea and don't want it, say for ten years. When it turns up at last it
has got so jammed and crushed out of shape by the other ideas packed with
it, that it is no more like what it was than a raisin is like a grape on
the vine, or a fig from a drum like one hanging on the tree. Then,
again, some kinds of thoughts breed in the dark of one's mind like the
blind fishes in the Mammoth Cave. We can't see them and they can't see
us; but sooner or later the daylight gets in and we find that some cold,
fishy little negative has been spawning all over our beliefs, and the
brood of blind questions it has given birth to are burrowing round and
under and butting their blunt noses against the pillars of faith we
thought the whole world might lean on. And then, again, some of our old
beliefs are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat,
or get poisoned as the case may be. And so, you see, you can't tell what
the thoughts are that you have got salted down, as one may say, till you
run a streak of talk through them, as the market people run a butterscoop
through a firkin.

Don't talk, thinking you are going to find out your neighbor, for you
won't do it, but talk to find out yourself. There is more of you--and
less of you, in spots, very likely--than you know.

--The Member gave a slight but unequivocal start just here. It does seem
as if perpetual somnolence was the price of listening to other people's
wisdom. This was one of those transient nightmares that one may have in
a doze of twenty seconds. He thought a certain imaginary Committee of
Safety of a certain imaginary Legislature was proceeding to burn down his
haystack, in accordance with an Act, entitled an Act to make the Poor
Richer by making the Rich Poorer. And the chairman of the committee was
instituting a forcible exchange of hats with him, to his manifest
disadvantage, for he had just bought him a new beaver. He told this
dream afterwards to one of the boarders.

There was nothing very surprising, therefore, in his asking a question
not very closely related to what had gone before.

--Do you think they mean business?

--I beg your pardon, but it would be of material assistance to me in
answering your question if I knew who "they" might happen to be.

--Why, those chaps that are setting folks on to burn us all up in our
beds. Political firebugs we call 'em up our way. Want to substitoot the
match-box for the ballot-box. Scare all our old women half to death.

--Oh--ah--yes--to be sure. I don't believe they say what the papers put
in their mouths any more than that a friend of mine wrote the letter
about Worcester's and Webster's Dictionaries, that he had to disown the
other day. These newspaper fellows are half asleep when they make up
their reports at two or three o'clock in the morning, and fill out the
speeches to suit themselves. I do remember some things that sounded
pretty bad,--about as bad as nitro-glycerine, for that matter. But I
don't believe they ever said 'em, when they spoke their pieces, or if
they said 'em I know they did n't mean 'em. Something like this, wasn't
it? If the majority didn't do something the minority wanted 'em to, then
the people were to burn up our cities, and knock us down and jump on our
stomachs. That was about the kind of talk, as the papers had it; I don't
wonder it scared the old women.

--The Member was wide awake by this time.

--I don't seem to remember of them partickler phrases, he said.

--Dear me, no; only levelling everything smack, and trampling us under
foot, as the reporters made it out. That means FIRE, I take it, and
knocking you down and stamping on you, whichever side of your person
happens to be uppermost. Sounded like a threat; meant, of course, for a
warning. But I don't believe it was in the piece as they spoke
it,--could n't have been. Then, again, Paris wasn't to blame,--as much
as to say--so the old women thought--that New York or Boston would n't be
to blame if it did the same thing. I've heard of political gatherings
where they barbecued an ox, but I can't think there 's a party in this
country that wants to barbecue a city. But it is n't quite fair to
frighten the old women. I don't doubt there are a great many people
wiser than I am that would n't be hurt by a hint I am going to give them.
It's no matter what you say when you talk to yourself, but when you talk
to other people, your business is to use words with reference to the way
in which those other people are like to understand them. These pretended
inflammatory speeches, so reported as to seem full of combustibles, even
if they were as threatening as they have been represented, would do no
harm if read or declaimed in a man's study to his books, or by the
sea-shore to the waves. But they are not so wholesome moral
entertainment for the dangerous classes. Boys must not touch off their
squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine. This kind of speech
does n't help on the millennium much.

--It ain't jest the thing to grease your ex with ile o' vitrul, said the
Member.

--No, the wheel of progress will soon stick fast if you do. You can't
keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat to make it.
Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world were reduced ashes,
you'd have a new set of millionnaires in a couple of years or so, out of
the trade in potash. In the mean time, what is the use of setting the
man with the silver watch against the man with the gold watch, and the
man without any watch against them both?

--You can't go agin human natur', said the Member

--You speak truly. Here we are travelling through desert together like
the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more quails
than others and ought to help their hungry neighbors more than they do;
that will always be so until we come back to primitive Christianity, the
road to which does not seem to be via Paris, just now; but we don't want
the incendiary's pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night
to lead us in the march to civilization, and we don't want a Moses who
will smite rock, not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to
burn us all up with.

--It is n't quite fair to run an opposition to the other funny speaker,
Rev. Petroleum V. What 's-his-name,--spoke up an anonymous boarder.

--You may have been thinking, perhaps, that it was I,--I, the Poet, who
was the chief talker in the one-sided dialogue to which you have been
listening. If so, you were mistaken. It was the old man in the
spectacles with large round glasses and the iron-gray hair. He does a
good deal of the talking at our table, and, to tell the truth, I rather
like to hear him. He stirs me up, and finds me occupation in various
ways, and especially, because he has good solid prejudices, that one can
rub against, and so get up and let off a superficial intellectual
irritation, just as the cattle rub their backs against a rail (you
remember Sydney Smith's contrivance in his pasture) or their sides
against an apple-tree (I don't know why they take to these so
particularly, but you will often find the trunk of an apple-tree as brown
and smooth as an old saddle at the height of a cow's ribs). I think they
begin rubbing in cold blood, and then, you know, l'appetit vient en
mangeant, the more they rub the more they want to. That is the way to use
your friend's prejudices. This is a sturdy-looking personage of a good
deal more than middle age, his face marked with strong manly furrows,
records of hard thinking and square stand-up fights with life and all its
devils. There is a slight touch of satire in his discourse now and then,
and an odd way of answering one that makes it hard to guess how much more
or less he means than he seems to say. But he is honest, and always has
a twinkle in his eye to put you on your guard when he does not mean to be
taken quite literally. I think old Ben Franklin had just that look. I
know his great-grandson (in pace!) had it, and I don't doubt he took it
in the straight line of descent, as he did his grand intellect.

The Member of the Haouse evidently comes from one of the lesser inland
centres of civilization, where the flora is rich in checkerberries and
similar bounties of nature, and the fauna lively with squirrels,
wood-chucks, and the like; where the leading sportsmen snare patridges,
as they are called, and "hunt" foxes with guns; where rabbits are
entrapped in "figgery fours," and trout captured with the unpretentious
earth-worm, instead of the gorgeous fly; where they bet prizes for butter
and cheese, and rag-carpets executed by ladies more than seventy years of
age; where whey wear dress-coats before dinner, and cock their hats on
one side when they feel conspicuous and distinshed; where they say--Sir
to you in their common talk and have other Arcadian and bucolic ways
which are highly unobjectionable, but are not so much admired in cities,
where the people are said to be not half so virtuous.

There is with us a boy of modest dimensions, not otherwise especially
entitled to the epithet, who ought be six or seven years old, to judge by
the gap left by his front milk teeth, these having resigned in favor of
their successors, who have not yet presented their credentials. He is
rather old for an enfant terrible, and quite too young to have grown into
the bashfulness of adolescence; but he has some of the qualities of both
these engaging periods of development, The member of the Haouse calls him
"Bub," invariably, such term I take to be an abbreviation of "Beelzeb,"
as "bus" is the short form of "omnibus." Many eminently genteel persons,
whose manners make them at home anywhere, being evidently unaware of true
derivation of this word, are in the habit of addressing all unknown
children by one of the two terms, "bub" and "sis," which they consider
endears them greatly to the young people, and recommends them to the
acquaintance of their honored parents, if these happen to accompany them.
The other boarders commonly call our diminutive companion That Boy. He
is a sort of expletive at the table, serving to stop gaps, taking the
same place a washer does that makes a loose screw fit, and contriving to
get driven in like a wedge between any two chairs where there is a
crevice. I shall not call that boy by the monosyllable referred to,
because, though he has many impish traits at present, he may become
civilized and humanized by being in good company. Besides, it is a term
which I understand is considered vulgar by the nobility and gentry of the
Mother Country, and it is not to be found in Mr. Worcester's Dictionary,
on which, as is well known, the literary men of this metropolis are by
special statute allowed to be sworn in place of the Bible. I know one,
certainly, who never takes his oath on any other dictionary, any
advertising fiction to the contrary, notwithstanding.

I wanted to write out my account of some of the other boarders, but a
domestic occurrence--a somewhat prolonged visit from the landlady, who is
rather too anxious that I should be comfortable broke in upon the
continuity of my thoughts, and occasioned--in short, I gave up writing
for that day.

--"I wonder if anything like this ever happened. Author writing, jacks?"

"To be, or not to be: that is the question
Whether 't is nobl--"

--"William, shall we have pudding to-day, or flapjacks?"

--"Flapjacks, an' it please thee, Anne, or a pudding, for that matter; or
what thou wilt, good woman, so thou come not betwixt me and my thought."

--Exit Mistress Anne, with strongly accented closing of the door and
murmurs to the effect: "Ay, marry, 't is well for thee to talk as if thou
hadst no stomach to fill. We poor wives must swink for our masters,
while they sit in their arm-chairs growing as great in the girth through
laziness as that ill-mannered fat man William hath writ of in his books
of players' stuff. One had as well meddle with a porkpen, which hath
thorns all over him, as try to deal with William when his eyes be rolling
in that mad way."

William--writing once more--after an exclamation in strong English of the
older pattern,--

"Whether 't is nobler--nobler--nobler--"

To do what? O these women! these women! to have puddings or flapjacks!
Oh!--

"Whether 't is nobler--in the mind--to suffer
The slings--and arrows--of--"

Oh! Oh! these women! I will e'en step over to the parson's and have a
cup of sack with His Reverence for methinks Master Hamlet hath forgot
that which was just now on his lips to speak.

So I shall have to put off making my friends acquainted with the other
boarders, some of whom seem to me worth studying and describing. I have
something else of a graver character for my readers. I am talking, you
know, as a poet; I do not say I deserve the name, but I have taken it,
and if you consider me at all it must be in that aspect. You will,
therefore, be willing to run your eyes over a few pages read, of course
by request, to a select party of the boarders.

THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK.

A PANORAMA, WITH SIDE-SHOWS.

My birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later boyhood,
has within a few months passed out of the ownership of my family into the
hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have renewed her youth,
and has certainly repainted her dormitories. In truth, when I last
revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the flammantia mania of the
old halls, "Massachusetts" with the dummy clock-dial, "Harvard" with the
garrulous belfry, little "Holden" with the sculptured unpunishable cherub
over its portal, and the rest of my early brick-and-mortar acquaintances,
I could not help saying to myself that I had lived to see the peaceable
establishment of the Red Republic of Letters.

Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a
fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often
read my own prose works. But when a man dies a great deal is said of him
which has often been said in other forms, and now this dear old house is
dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my recollections and
wind a string of narrative round them, tying them up like a nosegay for
the last tribute: the same blossoms in it I have often laid on its
threshold while it was still living for me.

We Americans are all cuckoos,--we make our homes in the nests of other
birds. I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man who
carted off the body of William Rufus, with Walter Tyrrel's arrow sticking
in it, have driven a cart (not absolutely the same one, I suppose) in the
New Forest, from that day to this. I don't quite understand Mr. Ruskin's
saying (if he said it) that he couldn't get along in a country where
there were no castles, but I do think we lose a great deal in living
where there are so few permanent homes. You will see how much I parted
with which was not reckoned in the price paid for the old homestead.

I shall say many things which an uncharitable reader might find fault
with as personal. I should not dare to call myself a poet if I did not;
for if there is anything that gives one a title to that name, it is that
his inner nature is naked and is not ashamed. But there are many such
things I shall put in words, not because they are personal, but because
they are human, and are born of just such experiences as those who hear
or read what I say are like to have had in greater or less measure. I
find myself so much like other people that I often wonder at the
coincidence. It was only the other day that I sent out a copy of verses
about my great-grandmother's picture, and I was surprised to find how
many other people had portraits of their great-grandmothers or other
progenitors, about which they felt as I did about mine, and for whom I
had spoken, thinking I was speaking for myself only. And so I am not
afraid to talk very freely with you, my precious reader or listener. You
too, Beloved, were born somewhere and remember your birthplace or your
early home; for you some house is haunted by recollections; to some roof
you have bid farewell. Your hand is upon mine, then, as I guide my pen.
Your heart frames the responses to the litany of my remembrance. For
myself it is a tribute of affection I am rendering, and I should put it
on record for my own satisfaction, were there none to read or to listen.

I hope you will not say that I have built a pillared portico of
introduction to a humble structure of narrative. For when you look at
the old gambrel-roofed house, you will see an unpretending mansion, such
as very possibly you were born in yourself, or at any rate such a place
of residence as your minister or some of your well-to-do country cousins
find good enough, but not at all too grand for them. We have stately old
Colonial palaces in our ancient village, now a city, and a thriving
one,--square-fronted edifices that stand back from the vulgar highway,
with folded arms, as it were; social fortresses of the time when the
twilight lustre of the throne reached as far as our half-cleared
settlement, with a glacis before them in the shape of a long broad
gravel-walk, so that in King George's time they looked as formidably to
any but the silk-stocking gentry as Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein to a
visitor without the password. We forget all this in the kindly welcome
they give us to-day; for some of them are still standing and doubly
famous, as we all know. But the gambrel-roofed house, though stately
enough for college dignitaries and scholarly clergymen, was not one of
those old Tory, Episcopal-church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors
opens directly upon the green, always called the Common; the other,
facing the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk, on the
other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and
syringas. The honest mansion makes no pretensions. Accessible,
companionable, holding its hand out to all, comfortable, respectable, and
even in its way dignified, but not imposing, not a house for his
Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had not
where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it
has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like
the leaves of the forest. I passed some pleasant hours, a few years
since, in the Registry of Deeds and the Town Records, looking up the
history of the old house. How those dear friends of mine, the
antiquarians, for whose grave councils I compose my features on the too
rare Thursdays when I am at liberty to meet them, in whose human
herbarium the leaves and blossoms of past generations are so carefully
spread out and pressed and laid away, would listen to an expansion of the
following brief details into an Historical Memoir!