The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) >> The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,--a
great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen
as any two mammals of the same species are like each other. Each
audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your
lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even
those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes
cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his
ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture
always. I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture
in the convent,--that he sometimes thought the living tenants were
the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,--I have
sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I
fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the
same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last
drowsy incantation!

--Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,--a thousand faces
that melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow
melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose
roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not
ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and
intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to
which the lecturer ministers. But when I set forth, leading a
string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch
in their strings of horses--Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who
sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if,
because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore
sold his sensibilities.--Family men get dreadfully homesick. In
the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
the logs in one's fireplace at home.


"There are his young barbarians all at play,"--


if he owns any youthful savages.--No, the world has a million
roosts for a man, but only one nest.

--It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always
made in all discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim
silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the
consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a
revolver gives the individual thus armed. When a person is really
full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation,
his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental
accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.

--What do I mean by the real talkers?--Why, the people with fresh
ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in.
Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts
about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger
on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity. I have
known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always
formidable,--and one of them was tyrannical.

--Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular
occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and
never made mistakes.--He? Veneers in first-rate style. The
mahogany scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the
cheap light stuff--I found--very fine in conversational
information, the other day when we were in company. The talk ran
upon mountains. He was wonderfully well acquainted with the
leading facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the Appalachians;
he had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and
various other mountains that were mentioned. By and by some
Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity
with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to
Major Andre. A point of Natural History being suggested, he gave
an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes. He was very
full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the
conversation when horticulture was introduced in the discussion.
So he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, but
did not pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal. There was
something so odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge,
that I suspected all at once what might be the meaning of it, and
waited till I got an opportunity.--Have you seen the "New American
Cyclopaedia?" said I.--I have, he replied; I received an early
copy.--How far does it go?--He turned red, and answered,--To
Araguay.--Oh, said I to myself,--not quite so far as Ararat;--that
is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he must have read all
the rest straight through, and, if he can remember what is in this
volume until he has read all those that are to come, he will know
more than I ever thought he would.

Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related
a similar story. I didn't borrow it, for all that.--I made a
comparison at table some time since, which has often been quoted
and received many compliments. It was that of the mind of a bigot
to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it
contracts. The simile is a very obvious, and, I suppose I may now
say, a happy one; for it has just been shown me that it occurs in a
Preface to certain Political Poems of Thomas Moore's published long
before my remark was repeated. When a person of fair character for
literary honesty uses an image, such as another has employed before
him, the presumption is, that he has struck upon it independently,
or unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his own.

It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a
comparison which suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a
recollection. I told you the other day that I never wrote a line
of verse that seemed to me comparatively good, but it appeared old
at once, and often as if it had been borrowed. But I confess I
never suspected the above comparison of being old, except from the
fact of its obviousness. It is proper, however, that I proceed by
a formal instrument to relinquish all claim to any property in an
idea given to the world at about the time when I had just joined
the class in which Master Thomas Moore was then a somewhat advanced
scholar.

I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing
the liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for
that reason feeling uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing
it, do hereby renounce all claim to being considered the FIRST
person who gave utterance to a certain simile or comparison
referred to in the accompanying documents, and relating to the
pupil of the eye on the one part and the mind of the bigot on the
other. I hereby relinquish all glory and profit, and especially
all claims to letters from autograph collectors, founded upon my
supposed property in the above comparison,--knowing well, that,
according to the laws of literature, they who speak first hold the
fee of the thing said. I do also agree that all Editors of
Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all Publishers of
Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein, shall be at
liberty to retract or qualify any opinion predicated on the
supposition that I was the sole and undisputed author of the above
comparison. But, inasmuch as I do affirm that the comparison
aforesaid was uttered by me in the firm belief that it was new and
wholly my own, and as I have good reason to think that I had never
seen or heard it when first expressed by me, and as it is well
known that different persons may independently utter the same
idea,--as is evinced by that familiar line from Donatus,--

"Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixerunt,"--

now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all
well-disposed persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I
am open to any accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison,
and, if they have so asserted or implied, that they will have the
manliness forthwith to retract the same assertion or insinuation.


I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than
myself. If I had even suspected that the idea in question was
borrowed, I should have disclaimed originality, or mentioned the
coincidence, as I once did in a case where I had happened to hit on
an idea of Swift's.--But what shall I do about these verses I was
going to read you? I am afraid that half mankind would accuse me
of stealing their thoughts, if I printed them. I am convinced that
several of you, especially if you are getting a little on in life,
will recognize some of these sentiments as having passed through
your consciousness at some time. I can't help it,--it is too late
now. The verses are written, and you must have them. Listen,
then, and you shall hear


WHAT WE ALL THINK.

That age was older once than now,
In spite of locks untimely shed,
Or silvered on the youthful brow;
That babes make love and children wed.

That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
Which faded with those "good old days,"
When winters came with deeper snow,
And autumns with a softer haze.

That--mother, sister, wife, or child--
The "best of women" each has known.
Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
How young the grandpapas have grown,

That BUT FOR THIS our souls were free,
And BUT FOR THAT our lives were blest;
That in some season yet to be
Our cares will leave us time to rest.

Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,
Some common ailment of the race,--
Though doctors think the matter plain,--
That ours is "a peculiar case."

That when like babes with fingers burned
We count one bitter maxim more,
Our lesson all the world has learned,
And men are wiser than before.

That when we sob o'er fancied woes,
The angels hovering overhead
Count every pitying drop that flows
And love us for the tears we shed.

That when we stand with tearless eye
And turn the beggar from our door,
They still approve us when we sigh,
"Ah, had I but ONE THOUSAND MORE!"

That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
In half the slips our youth has known;
And whatsoe'er its blame has been,
That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.

Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
O'erhanging truth's eternal flow,
Their tablets bold with WHAT WE THINK,
Their echoes dumb to WHAT WE KNOW;

That one unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above,
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it: GOD IS LOVE!



CHAPTER VII



[This particular record is noteworthy principally for containing a
paper by my friend, the Professor, with a poem or two annexed or
intercalated. I would suggest to young persons that they should
pass over it for the present, and read, instead of it, that story
about the young man who was in love with the young lady, and in
great trouble for something like nine pages, but happily married on
the tenth page or thereabouts, which, I take it for granted, will
be contained in the periodical where this is found, unless it
differ from all other publications of the kind. Perhaps, if such
young people will lay the number aside, and take it up ten years,
or a little more, from the present time, they may find something in
it for their advantage. They can't possibly understand it all
now.]

My friend, the Professor, began talking with me one day in a dreary
sort of way. I couldn't get at the difficulty for a good while,
but at last it turned out that somebody had been calling him an old
man.--He didn't mind his students calling him THE old man, he said.
That was a technical expression, and he thought that he remembered
hearing it applied to himself when he was about twenty-five. It
may be considered as a familiar and sometimes endearing
appellation. An Irishwoman calls her husband "the old man," and he
returns the caressing expression by speaking of her as "the old
woman." But now, said he, just suppose a case like one of these.
A young stranger is overheard talking of you as a very nice old
gentleman. A friendly and genial critic speaks of your green old
age as illustrating the truth of some axiom you had uttered with
reference to that period of life. What _I_ call an old man is a
person with a smooth, shining crown and a fringe of scattered white
hairs, seen in the streets on sunshiny days, stooping as he walks,
bearing a cane, moving cautiously and slowly; telling old stories,
smiling at present follies, living in a narrow world of dry habits;
one that remains waking when others have dropped asleep, and keeps
a little night-lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if the
lamp is not upset, and there is only a careful hand held round it
to prevent the puffs of wind from blowing the flame out. That's
what I call an old man.

Now, said the Professor, you don't mean to tell me that I have got
to that yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time
when--[I knew what was coming, and could hardly keep from laughing;
twenty years ago he used to quote it as one of those absurd
speeches men of genius will make, and now he is going to argue from
it]--several years short of the time when Balzac says that men are
--most--you know--dangerous to--the hearts of--in short, most to be
dreaded by duennas that have charge of susceptible females.--What
age is that? said I, statistically.--Fifty-two years, answered the
Professor.--Balzac ought to know, said I, if it is true that Goethe
said of him that each of his stories must have been dug out of a
woman's heart. But fifty-two is a high figure.

Stand in the light of the window, Professor, said I.---The
Professor took up the desired position.--You have white hairs, I
said.--Had 'em any time these twenty years, said the Professor.
--And the crow's-foot,--pes anserinus, rather.--The Professor smiled,
as I wanted him to, and the folds radiated like the ridges of a
half-opened fan, from the outer corner of the eyes to the temples.
--And the calipers said I.--What are the calipers? he asked,
curiously.--Why, the parenthesis, said I.--Parenthesis? said the
Professor; what's that?--Why, look in the glass when you are
disposed to laugh, and see if your mouth isn't framed in a couple
of crescent lines,--so, my boy ( ).--It's all nonsense, said the
Professor; just look at my BICEPS;--and he began pulling off his
coat to show me his arm. Be careful, said I; you can't bear
exposure to the air, at your time of life, as you could once.--I
will box with you, said the Professor, row with you, walk with you,
ride with you, swim with you, or sit at table with you, for fifty
dollars a side.--Pluck survives stamina, I answered.

The Professor went off a little out of humor. A few weeks
afterwards he came in, looking very good-natured, and brought me a
paper, which I have here, and from which I shall read you some
portions, if you don't object. He had been thinking the matter
over, he said,--had read Cicero "De Senectute," and made up his
mind to meet old age half way. These were some of his reflections
that he had written down; so here you have.


THE PROFESSOR'S PAPER.


There is no doubt when old age begins. The human body is a furnace
which keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less. It
burns about three hundred pounds of carbon a year, (besides other
fuel,) when in fair working order, according to a great chemist's
estimate. When the fire slackens, life declines; when it goes out,
we are dead.

It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the
amount of combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year,
remains stationary to about forty-five, and then diminishes. This
last is the point where old age starts from. The great fact of
physical life is the perpetual commerce with the elements, and the
fire is the measure of it.

About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live,--for
that, you know, regulates matrimony,--you may be expecting to find
yourself a grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic
felicity that gives one a cool shiver of delight to think of, as
among the not remotely possible events.

I don't mind much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale,
telling her about life's declining from THIRTY-FIVE; the furnace is
in full blast for ten years longer, as I have said. The Romans
came very near the mark; their age of enlistment reached from
seventeen to forty-six years.

What is the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or
the movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of
life that flows through us? We are old fellows from the moment the
fire begins to go out. Let us always behave like gentlemen when we
are introduced to new acquaintance.


Incipit Allegoria Senectutis.


Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age.

Old Age.--Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well. I have known you
for some time, though I think you did not know me. Shall we walk
down the street together?

Professor (drawing back a little).--We can talk more quietly,
perhaps, in my study. Will you tell me how it is you seem to be
acquainted with everybody you are introduced to, though he
evidently considers you an entire stranger?

Old Age.--I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person's
recognition until I have known him at least FIVE YEARS.

Professor.--Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as
that?

Old Age. I do. I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I
am afraid you never read it; yet I see you have it with you.

Professor.--Where?

Old Age.--There, between your eyebrows,--three straight lines
running up and down; all the probate courts know that token,--"Old
Age, his mark." Put your forefinger on the inner end of one
eyebrow, and your middle finger on the inner end of the other
eyebrow; now separate the fingers, and you will smooth out my
sign-manual; that's the way you used to look before I left my card
on you.

Professor.--What message do people generally send back when you
first call on them?

Old Age.--Not at home. Then I leave a card and go. Next year I
call; get the same answer; leave another card. So for five or
six,--sometimes ten years or more. At last, if they don't let me
in, I break in through the front door or the windows.

We talked together in this way some time. Then Old Age said
again,--Come, let us walk down the street together,--and offered me
a cane, an eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes.--No, much
obliged to you, said I. I don't want those things, and I had a
little rather talk with you here, privately, in my study. So I
dressed myself up in a jaunty way and walked out alone;--got a
fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a lumbago, and had time to
think over this whole matter.


Explicit Allegoria Senectutis.


We have settled when old age begins. Like all Nature's processes,
it is gentle and gradual in its approaches, strewed with illusions,
and all its little griefs soothed by natural sedatives. But the
iron hand is not less irresistible because it wears the velvet
glove. The button-wood throws off its bark in large flakes, which
one may find lying at its foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off,
by that tranquil movement from beneath, which is too slow to be
seen, but too powerful to be arrested. One finds them always, but
one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth drops from us,
--scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and
immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively, the
changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and
indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne
has called "the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature."


My lady's cheek can boast no more
The cranberry white and pink it wore;
And where her shining locks divide,
The parting line is all too wide--


No, no,--this will never do. Talk about men, if you will, but
spare the poor women.

We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably
good observer. It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it,
yet I have been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural
analysis into no less than fifteen distinct periods. Taking the
five primary divisions, infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old
age, each of these has its own three periods of immaturity,
complete development, and decline. I recognize on OLD baby at
once,--with its "pipe and mug," (a stick of candy and a
porringer,)--so does everybody; and an old child shedding its
milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his
permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it
were, of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his
late suppers now. So you will see that you have to make fifteen
stages at any rate, and that it would not be hard to make
twenty-five; five primary, each with five secondary divisions.

The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same
ingenuous simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as
the first stage of the earlier periods of life shows. The great
delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and
exceptional which is universal and according to law. A person is
always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man
for the first time.

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on
board of vessels,--in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into
maturity reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we have
drifted far away from port before we awake out of our illusions.
But to carry us out of maturity into old age, without our knowing
where we are going, she drugs us with strong opiates, and so we
stagger along with wide open eyes that see nothing until snow
enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our comatose brains out of
their stupid trances.

There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the
physical ones;--I mean the formation of Habits. An old man who
shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as
much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were
governed by clock-work. The ANIMAL functions, as the physiologists
call them, in distinction from the ORGANIC, tend, in the process of
deterioration to which age and neglect united gradually lead them,
to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of movement. Every
man's HEART (this organ belongs, you know, to the organic system)
has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men whose
BRAINS, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their
brains, have a systole and diastole as regular as that of the heart
itself. Habit is the approximation of the animal system to the
organic. It is a confession of failure in the highest function of
being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view
of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an action in
present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a vis
a tergo for the evolution of living force.

When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a
year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he
must economize force somewhere. Now habit is a labor-saving
invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,--that is
all; for fuel is force, you know, just as much in the page I am
writing for you as in the locomotive or the legs that carry it to
you. Carbon is the same thing, whether you call it wood, or coal,
or bread and cheese. A reverend gentleman demurred to this
statement,--as if, because combustion is asserted to be the sine
qua non of thought, therefore thought is alleged to be a purely
chemical process. Facts of chemistry are one thing, I told him,
and facts of consciousness another. It can be proved to him, by a
very simple analysis of some of his spare elements, that every
Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more
phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days. But
then he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it,
and save his phosphorus and other combustibles.

It follows from all this that THE FORMATION OF HABITS ought
naturally to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age. As
for the muscular powers, they pass their maximum long before the
time when the true decline of life begins, if we may judge by the
experience of the ring. A man is "stale," I think, in their
language, soon after thirty,--often, no doubt, much earlier, as
gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are exceedingly apt to keep
their vital fire burning WITH THE BLOWER UP.

--So far without Tully. But in the mean time I have been reading
the treatise, "De Senectute." It is not long, but a leisurely
performance. The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when
he addressed it to his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person
of distinction, some two or three years older. We read it when we
are schoolboys, forget all about it for thirty years, and then take
it up again by a natural instinct,--provided always that we read
Latin as we drink water, without stopping to taste it, as all of us
who ever learned it at school or college ought to do.