The Poet at the Breakfast Table

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. >> The Poet at the Breakfast Table


The shore, solid, substantial, a great deal more than eighteen hundred
years old, is natural humanity. The beach which the ocean of
knowledge--you may call it science if you like--is flowing over, is
theological humanity. Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and the
teachings of Saint Augustine sin was made a transferable chattel. (I
leave the interval wide for others to make narrow.)

The doctrine of heritable guilt, with its mechanical consequences, has
done for our moral nature what the doctrine of demoniac possession has
done in barbarous times and still does among barbarous tribes for
disease. Out of that black cloud came the lightning which struck the
compass of humanity. Conscience, which from the dawn of moral being had
pointed to the poles of right and wrong only as the great current of will
flowed through the soul, was demagnetized, paralyzed, and knew henceforth
no fixed meridian, but stayed where the priest or the council placed it.
There is nothing to be done but to polarize the needle over again. And
for this purpose we must study the lines of direction of all the forces
which traverse our human nature.

We must study man as we have studied stars and rocks. We need not go, we
are told, to our sacred books for astronomy or geology or other
scientific knowledge. Do not stop there! Pull Canute's chair back fifty
rods at once, and do not wait until he is wet to the knees! Say now,
bravely, as you will sooner or later have to say, that we need not go to
any ancient records for our anthropology. Do we not all hold, at least,
that the doctrine of man's being a blighted abortion, a miserable
disappointment to his Creator, and hostile and hateful to him from his
birth, may give way to the belief that he is the latest terrestrial
manifestation of an ever upward-striving movement of divine power? If
there lives a man who does not want to disbelieve the popular notions
about the condition and destiny of the bulk of his race, I should like to
have him look me in the face and tell me so.

I am not writing for the basement story or the nursery, and I do not
pretend to be, but I say nothing in these pages which would not be said
without fear of offence in any intelligent circle, such as clergymen of
the higher castes are in the habit of frequenting. There are teachers in
type for our grandmothers and our grandchildren who vaccinate the two
childhoods with wholesome doctrine, transmitted harmlessly from one
infant to another. But we three men at our table have taken the disease
of thinking in the natural way. It is an epidemic in these times, and
those who are afraid of it must shut themselves up close or they will
catch it.

I hope none of us are wanting in reverence. One at least of us is a
regular church-goer, and believes a man may be devout and yet very free
in the expression of his opinions on the gravest subjects. There may be
some good people who think that our young friend who puts his thoughts in
verse is going sounding over perilous depths, and are frightened every
time he throws the lead. There is nothing to be frightened at. This is
a manly world we live in. Our reverence is good for nothing if it does
not begin with self-respect. Occidental manhood springs from that as its
basis; Oriental manhood finds the greatest satisfaction in
self-abasement. There is no use in trying to graft the tropical palm
upon the Northern pine. The same divine forces underlie the growth of
both, but leaf and flower and fruit must follow the law of race, of soil,
of climate. Whether the questions which assail my young friend have
risen in my reader's mind or not, he knows perfectly well that nobody can
keep such questions from springing up in every young mind of any force or
honesty. As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they
are taught, with never a scruple or a query, Protestant or Catholic, Jew
or Mormon, Mahometan or Buddhist, they signify nothing in the
intellectual life of the race. If the world had been wholly peopled with
such half-vitalized mental negatives, there never would have been a creed
like that of Christendom.

I entirely agree with the spirit of the verses I have looked over, in
this point at least, that a true man's allegiance is given to that which
is highest in his own nature. He reverences truth, he loves kindness, he
respects justice. The two first qualities he understands well enough.
But the last, justice, at least as between the Infinite and the finite,
has been so utterly dehumanized, disintegrated, decomposed, and
diabolized in passing through the minds of the half-civilized banditti
who have peopled and unpeopled the world for some scores of generations,
that it has become a mere algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever as
a human conception.

As for power, we are outgrowing all superstition about that. We have not
the slightest respect for it as such, and it is just as well to remember
this in all our spiritual adjustments. We fear power when we cannot
master it; but just as far as we can master it, we make a slave and a
beast of burden of it without hesitation. We cannot change the ebb and
flow of the tides, or the course of the seasons, but we come as near it
as we can. We dam out the ocean, we make roses bloom in winter and water
freeze in summer. We have no more reverence for the sun than we have for
a fish-tail gas-burner; we stare into his face with telescopes as at a
ballet-dancer with opera-glasses; we pick his rays to pieces with prisms
as if they were so many skeins of colored yarn; we tell him we do not
want his company and shut him out like a troublesome vagrant. The gods
of the old heathen are the servants of to-day. Neptune, Vulcan, Aolus,
and the bearer of the thunderbolt himself have stepped down from their
pedestals and put on our livery. We cannot always master them, neither
can we always master our servant, the horse, but we have put a bridle on
the wildest natural agencies. The mob of elemental forces is as noisy
and turbulent as ever, but the standing army of civilization keeps it
well under, except for an occasional outbreak.

When I read the Lady's letter printed some time since, I could not help
honoring the feeling which prompted her in writing it. But while I
respect the innocent incapacity of tender age and the limitations of the
comparatively uninstructed classes, it is quite out of the question to
act as if matters of common intelligence and universal interest were the
private property of a secret society, only to be meddled with by those
who know the grip and the password.

We must get over the habit of transferring the limitations of the nervous
temperament and of hectic constitutions to the great Source of all the
mighty forces of nature, animate and inanimate. We may confidently trust
that we have over us a Being thoroughly robust and grandly magnanimous,
in distinction from the Infinite Invalid bred in the studies of sickly
monomaniacs, who corresponds to a very common human type, but makes us
blush for him when we contrast him with a truly noble man, such as most
of us have had the privilege of knowing both in public and in private
life.

I was not a little pleased to find that the Lady, in spite of her letter,
sat through the young man's reading of portions of his poem with a good
deal of complacency. I think I can guess what is in her mind. She
believes, as so many women do, in that great remedy for discontent, and
doubts about humanity, and questionings of Providence, and all sorts of
youthful vagaries,--I mean the love-cure. And she thinks, not without
some reason, that these astronomical lessons, and these readings of
poetry and daily proximity at the table, and the need of two young hearts
that have been long feeling lonely, and youth and nature and "all
impulses of soul and sense," as Coleridge has it, will bring these two
young people into closer relations than they perhaps have yet thought of;
and so that sweet lesson of loving the neighbor whom he has seen may lead
him into deeper and more trusting communion with the Friend and Father
whom he has not seen.

The Young Girl evidently did not intend that her accomplice should be a
loser by the summary act of the Member of the Haouse: I took occasion to
ask That Boy what had become of all the popguns. He gave me to
understand that popguns were played out, but that he had got a squirt and
a whip, and considered himself better off than before.

This great world is full of mysteries. I can comprehend the pleasure to
be got out of the hydraulic engine; but what can be the fascination of a
whip, when one has nothing to flagellate but the calves of his own legs,
I could never understand. Yet a small riding-whip is the most popular
article with the miscellaneous New-Englander at all great
gatherings,--cattle-shows and Fourth-of-July celebrations. If Democritus
and Heraclitus could walk arm in arm through one of these crowds, the
first would be in a broad laugh to see the multitude of young persons who
were rejoicing in the possession of one of these useless and worthless
little commodities; happy himself to see how easily others could purchase
happiness. But the second would weep bitter tears to think what a
rayless and barren life that must be which could extract enjoyment from
the miserable flimsy wand that has such magic attraction for sauntering
youths and simpering maidens. What a dynamometer of happiness are these
paltry toys, and what a rudimentary vertebrate must be the freckled
adolescent whose yearning for the infinite can be stayed even for a
single hour by so trifling a boon from the venal hands of the finite!

Pardon these polysyllabic reflections, Beloved, but I never contemplate
these dear fellow-creatures of ours without a delicious sense of
superiority to them and to all arrested embryos of intelligence, in which
I have no doubt you heartily sympathize with me. It is not merely when I
look at the vacuous countenances of the mastigophori, the whip-holders,
that I enjoy this luxury (though I would not miss that holiday spectacle
for a pretty sum of money, and advise you by all means to make sure of it
next Fourth of July, if you missed it this), but I get the same pleasure
from many similar manifestations.

I delight in Regalia, so called, of the kind not worn by kings, nor
obtaining their diamonds from the mines of Golconda. I have a passion
for those resplendent titles which are not conferred by a sovereign and
would not be the open sesame to the courts of royalty, yet which are as
opulent in impressive adjectives as any Knight of the Garter's list of
dignities. When I have recognized in the every-day name of His Very
Worthy High Eminence of some cabalistic association, the inconspicuous
individual whose trifling indebtedness to me for value received remains
in a quiescent state and is likely long to continue so, I confess to
having experienced a thrill of pleasure. I have smiled to think how
grand his magnificent titular appendages sounded in his own ears and what
a feeble tintinnabulation they made in mine. The crimson sash, the broad
diagonal belt of the mounted marshal of a great procession, so cheap in
themselves, yet so entirely satisfactory to the wearer, tickle my heart's
root.

Perhaps I should have enjoyed all these weaknesses of my infantile
fellow-creatures without an afterthought, except that on a certain
literary anniversary when I tie the narrow blue and pink ribbons in my
button-hole and show my decorated bosom to the admiring public, I am
conscious of a certain sense of distinction and superiority in virtue of
that trifling addition to my personal adornments which reminds me that I
too have some embryonic fibres in my tolerably well-matured organism.

I hope I have not hurt your feelings, if you happen to be a High and
Mighty Grand Functionary in any illustrious Fraternity. When I tell you
that a bit of ribbon in my button-hole sets my vanity prancing, I think
you cannot be grievously offended that I smile at the resonant titles
which make you something more than human in your own eyes. I would not
for the world be mistaken for one of those literary roughs whose brass
knuckles leave their mark on the foreheads of so many inoffensive people.

There is a human sub-species characterized by the coarseness of its fibre
and the acrid nature of its intellectual secretions. It is to a certain
extent penetrative, as all creatures are which are provided with stings.
It has an instinct which guides it to the vulnerable parts of the victim
on which it fastens. These two qualities give it a certain degree of
power which is not to be despised. It might perhaps be less mischievous,
but for the fact that the wound where it leaves its poison opens the
fountain from which it draws its nourishment.

Beings of this kind can be useful if they will only find their
appropriate sphere, which is not literature, but that circle of
rough-and-tumble political life where the fine-fibred men are at a
discount, where epithets find their subjects poison-proof, and the sting
which would be fatal to a literary debutant only wakes the eloquence of
the pachydermatous ward-room politician to a fiercer shriek of
declamation.

The Master got talking the other day about the difference between races
and families. I am reminded of what he said by what I have just been
saying myself about coarse-fibred and fine-fibred people.

--We talk about a Yankee, a New-Englander,---he said,-as if all of 'em
were just the same kind of animal. "There is knowledge and knowledge,"
said John Bunyan. There are Yankees and Yankees. Do you know two native
trees called pitch pine and white pine respectively? Of course you know
'em. Well, there are pitch-pine Yankees and white-pine Yankees. We
don't talk about the inherited differences of men quite as freely,
perhaps, as they do in the Old World, but republicanism doesn't alter the
laws of physiology. We have a native aristocracy, a superior race, just
as plainly marked by nature as of a higher and finer grade than the
common run of people as the white pine is marked in its form, its
stature, its bark, its delicate foliage, as belonging to the nobility of
the forest; and the pitch pine, stubbed, rough, coarse-haired, as of the
plebeian order. Only the strange thing is to see in what a capricious
way our natural nobility is distributed. The last born nobleman I have
seen, I saw this morning; he was pulling a rope that was fastened to a
Maine schooner loaded with lumber. I should say he was about twenty
years old, as fine a figure of a young man as you would ask to see, and
with a regular Greek outline of countenance, waving hair, that fell as if
a sculptor had massed it to copy, and a complexion as rich as a red
sunset. I have a notion that the State of Maine breeds the natural
nobility in a larger proportion than some other States, but they spring
up in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. The young fellow I saw this
morning had on an old flannel shirt, a pair of trowsers that meant hard
work, and a cheap cloth cap pushed back on his head so as to let the
large waves of hair straggle out over his forehead; he was tugging at his
rope with the other sailors, but upon my word I don't think I have seen a
young English nobleman of all those whom I have looked upon that answered
to the notion of "blood" so well as this young fellow did. I suppose if
I made such a levelling confession as this in public, people would think
I was looking towards being the labor-reform candidate for President.
But I should go on and spoil my prospects by saying that I don't think
the white-pine Yankee is the more generally prevailing growth, but rather
the pitch-pine Yankee.

--The Member of the Haouse seemed to have been getting a dim idea that
all this was not exactly flattering to the huckleberry districts. His
features betrayed the growth of this suspicion so clearly that the Master
replied to his look as if it had been a remark. [I need hardly say that
this particular member of the General Court was a pitch-pine Yankee of
the most thoroughly characterized aspect and flavor.]

--Yes, Sir,--the Master continued,--Sir being anybody that listened,
--there is neither flattery nor offence in the views which a
physiological observer takes of the forms of life around him. It won't
do to draw individual portraits, but the differences of natural groups of
human beings are as proper subjects of remark as those of different
breeds of horses, and if horses were Houyhnhnms I don't think they would
quarrel with us because we made a distinction between a "Morgan" and a
"Messenger." The truth is, Sir, the lean sandy soil and the droughts and
the long winters and the east-winds and the cold storms, and all sorts of
unknown local influences that we can't make out quite so plainly as
these, have a tendency to roughen the human organization and make it
coarse, something as it is with the tree I mentioned. Some spots and
some strains of blood fight against these influences, but if I should say
right out what I think, it would be that the finest human fruit, on the
whole; and especially the finest women that we get in New England are
raised under glass.

--Good gracious!--exclaimed the Landlady, under glass!

--Give me cowcumbers raised in the open air, said the Capitalist, who was
a little hard of hearing.

--Perhaps,--I remarked,--it might be as well if you would explain this
last expression of yours. Raising human beings under glass I take to be
a metaphorical rather than a literal statement of your meaning.

--No, Sir!--replied the Master, with energy,--I mean just what I say,
Sir. Under glass, and with a south exposure. During the hard season, of
course,--for in the heats of summer the tenderest hot-house plants are
not afraid of the open air. Protection is what the transplanted Aryan
requires in this New England climate. Keep him, and especially keep her,
in a wide street of a well-built city eight months of the year; good
solid brick walls behind her, good sheets of plate-glass, with the sun
shining warm through them, in front of her, and you have put her in the
condition of the pine-apple, from the land of which, and not from that of
the other kind of pine, her race started on its travels. People don't
know what a gain there is to health by living in cities, the best parts
of them of course, for we know too well what the worst parts are. In the
first place you get rid of the noxious emanations which poison so many
country localities with typhoid fever and dysentery, not wholly rid of
them, of course, but to a surprising degree. Let me tell you a doctor's
story. I was visiting a Western city a good many years ago; it was in
the autumn, the time when all sorts of malarious diseases are about. The
doctor I was speaking of took me to see the cemetery just outside the
town, I don't know how much he had done to fill it, for he didn't tell
me, but I'll tell you what he did say.

"Look round," said the doctor. "There isn't a house in all the ten-mile
circuit of country you can see over, where there isn't one person, at
least, shaking with fever and ague. And yet you need n't be afraid of
carrying it away with you, for as long as your home is on a paved street
you are safe."

--I think it likely--the Master went on to say--that my friend the doctor
put it pretty strongly, but there is no doubt at all that while all the
country round was suffering from intermittent fever, the paved part of
the city was comparatively exempted. What do you do when you build a
house on a damp soil, and there are damp soils pretty much everywhere?
Why you floor the cellar with cement, don't you? Well, the soil of a
city is cemented all over, one may say, with certain qualifications of
course. A first-rate city house is a regular sanatorium. The only
trouble is, that the little good-for-nothings that come of utterly
used-up and worn-out stock, and ought to die, can't die, to save their
lives. So they grow up to dilute the vigor of the race with skim-milk
vitality. They would have died, like good children, in most average
country places; but eight months of shelter in a regulated temperature,
in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good sidewalks to
go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream of summer and
the fresh milk of Jersey cows, make the little sham organizations--the
worm-eaten wind-falls, for that 's what they look like--hang on to the
boughs of life like "froze-n-thaws"; regular struldbrugs they come to be,
a good many of 'em.

--The Scarabee's ear was caught by that queer word of Swift's, and he
asked very innocently what kind of bugs he was speaking of, whereupon
That Boy shouted out, Straddlebugs! to his own immense amusement and the
great bewilderment of the Scarabee, who only saw that there was one of
those unintelligible breaks in the conversation which made other people
laugh, and drew back his antennae as usual, perplexed, but not amused.

I do not believe the Master had said all he was going to say on this
subject, and of course all these statements of his are more or less
one-sided. But that some invalids do much better in cities than in the
country is indisputable, and that the frightful dysenteries and fevers
which have raged like pestilences in many of our country towns are almost
unknown in the better built sections of some of our large cities is
getting to be more generally understood since our well-to-do people have
annually emigrated in such numbers from the cemented surface of the city
to the steaming soil of some of the dangerous rural districts. If one
should contrast the healthiest country residences with the worst city
ones the result would be all the other way, of course, so that there are
two sides to the question, which we must let the doctors pound in their
great mortar, infuse and strain, hoping that they will present us with
the clear solution when they have got through these processes. One of
our chief wants is a complete sanitary map of every State in the Union.

The balance of our table, as the reader has no doubt observed, has been
deranged by the withdrawal of the Man of Letters, so called, and only the
side of the deficiency changed by the removal of the Young Astronomer
into our neighborhood. The fact that there was a vacant chair on the
side opposite us had by no means escaped the notice of That Boy. He had
taken advantage of his opportunity and invited in a schoolmate whom he
evidently looked upon as a great personage. This boy or youth was a good
deal older than himself and stood to him apparently in the light of a
patron and instructor in the ways of life. A very jaunty, knowing young
gentleman he was, good-looking, smartly dressed, smooth-checked as yet,
curly-haired, with a roguish eye, a sagacious wink, a ready tongue, as I
soon found out; and as I learned could catch a ball on the fly with any
boy of his age; not quarrelsome, but, if he had to strike, hit from the
shoulder; the pride of his father (who was a man of property and a civic
dignitary), and answering to the name of Johnny.

I was a little surprised at the liberty That Boy had taken in introducing
an extra peptic element at our table, reflecting as I did that a certain
number of avoirdupois ounces of nutriment which the visitor would dispose
of corresponded to a very appreciable pecuniary amount, so that he was
levying a contribution upon our Landlady which she might be inclined to
complain of. For the Caput mortuum (or deadhead, in vulgar phrase) is
apt to be furnished with a Venter vivus, or, as we may say, a lively
appetite. But the Landlady welcomed the new-comer very heartily.

--Why! how--do--you--do Johnny?! with the notes of interrogation and of
admiration both together, as here represented.

Johnny signified that he was doing about as well as could be expected
under the circumstances, having just had a little difference with a young
person whom he spoke of as "Pewter-jaw" (I suppose he had worn a
dentist's tooth-straightening contrivance during his second dentition),
which youth he had finished off, as he said, in good shape, but at the
expense of a slight epistaxis, we will translate his vernacular
expression.

--The three ladies all looked sympathetic, but there did not seem to be
any great occasion for it, as the boy had come out all right, and seemed
to be in the best of spirits.

--And how is your father and your mother? asked the Landlady.

--Oh, the Governor and the Head Centre? A 1, both of 'em. Prime order
for shipping,--warranted to stand any climate. The Governor says he
weighs a hunderd and seventy-five pounds. Got a chin-tuft just like
Ed'in Forrest. D'd y' ever see Ed'in Forrest play Metamora? Bully, I
tell you! My old gentleman means to be Mayor or Governor or President or
something or other before he goes off the handle, you'd better b'lieve.
He's smart,--and I've heard folks say I take after him.