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.


The Library was one of the chief centres of the fixed population, and
visited often by strangers. The old Librarian was a peculiar character,
as these officials are apt to be. They have a curious kind of knowledge,
sometimes immense in its way. They know the backs of books, their
title-pages, their popularity or want of it, the class of readers who
call for particular works, the value of different editions, and a good
deal besides. Their minds catch up hints from all manner of works on all
kinds of subjects. They will give a visitor a fact and a reference which
they are surprised to find they remember and which the visitor might have
hunted for a year. Every good librarian, every private book-owner, who
has grown into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every
bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book. These
nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do not
like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like to have
their naked eyes handled. They come to feel at last that the books of a
great collection are a part, not merely of their own property, though
they are only the agents for their distribution, but that they are, as it
were, outlying portions of their own organization. The old Librarian was
getting a miserly feeling about his books, as he called them.
Fortunately, he had a young lady for his assistant, who was never so
happy as when she could find the work any visitor wanted and put it in
his hands,--or her hands, for there were more readers among the wives
and--daughters, and especially among the aunts, than there were among
their male relatives. The old Librarian knew the books, but the books
seemed to know the young assistant; so it looked, at least, to the
impatient young people who wanted their services.

Maurice had a good many volumes of his own,--a great many, according to
Paolo's account; but Paolo's ideas were limited, and a few well-filled
shelves seemed a very large collection to him. His master frequently
sent him to the Public Library for books, which somewhat enlarged his
notions; still, the Signor was a very learned man, he was certain, and
some of his white books (bound in vellum and richly gilt) were more
splendid, according to Paolo, than anything in the Library.

There was no little curiosity to know what were the books that Maurice
was in the habit of taking out, and the Librarian's record was carefully
searched by some of the more inquisitive investigators. The list proved
to be a long and varied one. It would imply a considerable knowledge of
modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and
physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a
fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling
these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the
Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De
Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and
modern works relating to Spiritualism. With these were the titles of
novels and now and then of books of poems; but it may be taken for
granted that his own shelves held the works he was most frequently in the
habit of reading or consulting. Not much was to be made out of this
beyond the fact of wide scholarship,--more or less deep it might be, but
at any rate implying no small mental activity; for he appeared to read
very rapidly, at any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new
ones very frequently. To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters.
But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary
purpose in all probability. Why should not he be writing a novel? Not a
novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to report the
talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with. Novelists
and lawyers understand the art of "cramming" better than any other
persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working up the
picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for some
story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and hints borrowed from
science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and
miscellaneous selection of books furnished him? That might be, or
possibly he was only reading for amusement. Who could say?

The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the managers
to purchase many books out of the common range of reading. The two
learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor. These two
worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions, which grows
out of the fact that one studies nature from below upwards, and the other
from above downwards. The rector maintained that physicians contracted a
squint which turns their eyes inwardly, while the muscles which roll
their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor retorted that theological
students developed a third eyelid,--the nictitating membrane, which is so
well known in birds, and which serves to shut out, not all light, but all
the light they do not want. Their little skirmishes did not prevent
their being very good friends, who had a common interest in many things
and many persons. Both were on the committee which had the care of the
Library and attended to the purchase of books. Each was scholar enough
to know the wants of scholars, and disposed to trust the judgment of the
other as to what books should be purchased. Consequently, the clergyman
secured the addition to the Library of a good many old theological works
which the physician would have called brimstone divinity, and held to be
just the thing to kindle fires with,--good books still for those who know
how to use them, oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of
disorganization the whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous
belief has strangled the natural human instincts. The physician, in the
mean time, acquired for the collection some of those medical works where
one may find recorded various rare and almost incredible cases, which may
not have their like for a whole century, and then repeat themselves, so
as to give a new lease of credibility to stories which had come to be
looked upon as fables.

Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in the
young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the present,
perhaps for a long period. The rector would have been glad to see him at
church. He would have liked more especially to have had him hear his
sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society. The doctor, meanwhile, was
meditating on the duties of society to young men, and wishing that he
could gain the young man's confidence, so as to help him out of any false
habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject, if he had the
power of being useful to him.

Dr. Butts was the leading medical practitioner, not only of Arrowhead
Village, but of all the surrounding region. He was an excellent specimen
of the country doctor, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, working a great
deal harder for his living than most of those who call themselves the
laboring classes,--as if none but those whose hands were hardened by the
use of farming or mechanical implements had any work to do. He had that
sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance, and he had also a
fair share of that learning without which sagacity is like a traveller
with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the guideboards.
He was not a man to be taken in by names. He well knew that oftentimes
very innocent-sounding words mean very grave disorders; that all, degrees
of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term;
that "run down" may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a week
or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked patient, or an
advanced stage of a mortal illness; that "seedy" may signify the
morning's state of feeling, after an evening's over-indulgence, which
calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of coffee, or a dangerous
malady which will pack off the subject of it, at the shortest notice, to
the south of France. He knew too well that what is spoken lightly of as
a "nervous disturbance" may imply that the whole machinery of life is in
a deranged condition, and that every individual organ would groan aloud
if it had any other language than the terrible inarticulate one of pain
by which to communicate with the consciousness.

When, therefore, Dr. Butts heard the word antipatia he did not smile, and
say to himself that this was an idle whim, a foolish fancy, which the
young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to set down
everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that supposition
might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional, perhaps
anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what class of
objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as vital to the
subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece of electrical
machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the history of
antipathies as recorded in all the books and journals on which he could
lay his hands.

------------------------------

The holder of the Portfolio asks leave to close it for a brief interval.
He wishes to say a few words to his readers, before offering them some
verses which have no connection with the narrative now in progress.

If one could have before him a set of photographs taken annually,
representing the same person as he or she appeared for thirty or forty or
fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of
aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of
threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still, as
sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth looking
at as it passed through the curve of life,--the vital parabola, which
betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An inscription
is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or granite, or
marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a
countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by the aid of a
continuous series of photographs would not only be curious; it would
teach us much more about the laws of physiognomy than we could get from
casual and unconnected observations.

The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be found in
them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning in middle
life and continued to what many of my correspondents are pleased to
remind me--as if I required to have the fact brought to my knowledge--is
no longer youth. Here is the latest of a series of annual poems read
during the last thirty-four years. There seems to have been one
interruption, but there may have been other poems not recorded or
remembered. This, the latest poem of the series, was listened to by the
scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant circle of classmates and
friends when the first of the long series was read before them, then in
the flush of ardent manhood:--

THE OLD SONG.

The minstrel of the classic lay
Of love and wine who sings
Still found the fingers run astray
That touched the rebel strings.

Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,
Of Atreus and his line;
But all the jocund echoes rung
With songs of love and wine.

Ah, brothers! I would fair have caught
Some fresher fancy's gleam;
My truant accents find, unsought,
The old familiar theme.

Love, Love! but not the sportive child
With shaft and twanging bow,
Whose random arrows drove us wild
Some threescore years ago;

Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,
The urchin blind and bare,
But Love, with spectacles and staff,
And scanty, silvered hair.

Our heads with frosted locks are white,
Our roofs are thatched with snow,
But red, in chilling winter's spite,
Our hearts and hearthstones glow.

Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in,
And while the running sands
Their golden thread unheeded spin,
He warms his frozen hands.

Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet,
And waft this message o'er
To all we miss, from all we meet
On life's fast-crumbling shore:

Say that to old affection true
We hug the narrowing chain
That binds our hearts,--alas, how few
The links that yet remain!

The fatal touch awaits them all
That turns the rocks to dust;
From year to year they break and fall,
They break, but never rust.

Say if one note of happier strain
This worn-out harp afford,
--One throb that trembles, not in vain,
Their memory lent its chord.

Say that when Fancy closed her wings
And Passion quenched his fire,
Love, Love, still echoed from the strings
As from Anacreon's lyre!

January 8, 1885.




VII

A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES

In thinking the whole matter over, Dr. Butts felt convinced that, with
care and patience and watching his opportunity, he should get at the
secret, which so far bad yielded nothing but a single word. It might be
asked why he was so anxious to learn what, from all appearances, the
young stranger was unwilling to explain. He may have been to some extent
infected by the general curiosity of the persons around him, in which
good Mrs. Butts shared, and which she had helped to intensify by
revealing the word dropped by Paolo. But this was not really his chief
motive. He could not look upon this young man, living a life of
unwholesome solitude, without a natural desire to do all that his science
and his knowledge of human nature could help him to do towards bringing
him into healthy relations with the world about him. Still, he would not
intrude upon him in any way. He would only make certain general
investigations, which might prove serviceable in case circumstances
should give him the right to counsel the young man as to his course of
life. The first thing to be done was to study systematically the whole
subject of antipathies. Then, if any further occasion offered itself, he
would be ready to take advantage of it. The resources of the Public
Library of the place and his own private collection were put in
requisition to furnish him the singular and widely scattered facts of
which he was in search.

It is not every reader who will care to follow Dr. Butts in his study of
the natural history of antipathies. The stories told about them are,
however, very curious; and if some of them may be questioned, there is no
doubt that many of the strangest are true, and consequently take away
from the improbability of others which we are disposed to doubt.

But in the first place, what do we mean by an antipathy? It is an
aversion to some object, which may vary in degree from mere dislike to
mortal horror. What the cause of this aversion is we cannot say. It acts
sometimes through the senses, sometimes through the imagination,
sometimes through an unknown channel. The relations which exist between
the human being and all that surrounds him vary in consequence of some
adjustment peculiar to each individual. The brute fact is expressed in
the phrase "One man's meat is another man's poison."

In studying the history of antipathies the doctor began with those
referable to the sense of taste, which are among the most common. In any
collection of a hundred persons there will be found those who cannot make
use of certain articles of food generally acceptable. This may be from
the disgust they occasion or the effects they have been found to produce.
Every one knows individuals who cannot venture on honey, or cheese, or
veal, with impunity. Carlyle, for example, complains of having veal set
before him,--a meat he could not endure. There is a whole family
connection in New England, and that a very famous one, to many of whose
members, in different generations, all the products of the dairy are the
subjects of a congenital antipathy. Montaigne says there are persons who
dread the smell of apples more than they would dread being exposed to a
fire of musketry. The readers of the charming story "A Week in a French
Country-House" will remember poor Monsieur Jacque's piteous cry in the
night: "Ursula, art thou asleep? Oh, Ursula, thou sleepest, but I cannot
close my eyes. Dearest Ursula, there is such a dreadful smell! Oh,
Ursula, it is such a smell! I do so wish thou couldst smell it!
Good-night, my angel!----Dearest! I have found them! They are apples!"
The smell of roses, of peonies, of lilies, has been known to cause
faintness. The sight of various objects has had singular effects on some
persons. A boar's head was a favorite dish at the table of great people
in Marshal d'Albret's time; yet he used to faint at the sight of one. It
is not uncommon to meet with persons who faint at the sight of blood.
One of the most inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts's college-mates
confessed that he had this infirmity. Stranger and far more awkward than
this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection, where the subject of
the antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of a red color. There
are sounds, also, which have strange effects on some individuals. Among
the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk stuffs, the sound of
sweeping, the croaking of frogs. The effects in different cases have
been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse sweating,--all showing a
profound disturbance of the nervous system.

All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense,
seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres. But there is
another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part in
the phenomena. Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two
very distinguished personages.

Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge
into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy
and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a
bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in
spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story
told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter.
As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his
horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness
and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on
the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the
terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall
over.

What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to
shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The
old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one, that
it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she entered the
holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the
sacred symbols, "cried with a loud voice, and came out of" her. A very
singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and which the reader may
accept as authentic, is the following: At the head of the doctor's front
stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of early date and stately
presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it as he entered the front
door, remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that
clock. He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a
profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo. This very singular
idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms
of his nurse.

She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which
supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came
crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been
produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered.
Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock may
be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of "The
Ancient Mariner:"

"I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy hermit raised his eyes
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars; the pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro."

This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description
from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases
where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.

More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person,
a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to death, literally.
Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being
intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life
depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like
these, such an impression might of course be followed by consequences
less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature. If here and
there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden startling sight
or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is
produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,--a shock which falls
short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a
lasting effect upon the subject of it.

This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that, as
a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human
being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change
of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause may
not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to
himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced
by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some
spring in this young man's nature, or so changed its mode of action as to
account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life. But how could
any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man
aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him? He did not hate the
human race; that was clear enough. He treated Paolo with great kindness,
and the Italian was evidently much attached to him. He had talked
naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his
dangerous situation when his boat was upset. Dr. Butts heard that he had
once made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the
University. It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary.
What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case? Nothing that
the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of which
acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who could not
look at anything red without fainting. Suppose this were a case of the
same antipathy. How very careful it would make the subject of it as to
where he went and with whom he consorted! Time and patience would be
pretty sure to bring out new developments, and physicians, of all men in
the world, know how to wait as well as how to labor.

Such were some of the crude facts as Dr. Butts found them in books or
gathered them from his own experience. He soon discovered that the story
had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim of an
"antipathy," whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of the
people of the place. If he suspected the channel through which it had
reached the little community, and, spreading from that centre, the
country round, he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a
domestic casus belli. Paolo might have mentioned it to others as well as
to himself. Maurice might have told some friend, who had divulged it.
But to accuse Mrs. Butts, good Mrs. Butts, of petit treason in telling
one of her husband's professional secrets was too serious a matter to be
thought of. He would be a little more careful, he promised himself, the
next time, at any rate; for he had to concede, in spite of every wish to
be charitable in his judgment, that it was among the possibilities that
the worthy lady had forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put
their tongues out, and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.




VIII

THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

The Secretary of this association was getting somewhat tired of the
office, and the office was getting somewhat tired of him. It occurred to
the members of the Society that a little fresh blood infused into it
might stir up the general vitality of the organization. The woman
suffragists saw no reason why the place of Secretary need as a matter of
course be filled by a person of the male sex. They agitated, they made
domiciliary visits, they wrote notes to influential citizens, and finally
announced as their candidate the young lady who had won and worn the
school name of "The Terror," who was elected. She was just the person
for the place: wide awake, with all her wits about her, full of every
kind of knowledge, and, above all, strong on points of order and details
of management, so that she could prompt the presiding officer, to do
which is often the most essential duty of a Secretary. The President,
the worthy rector, was good at plain sailing in the track of the common
moralities and proprieties, but was liable to get muddled if anything
came up requiring swift decision and off-hand speech. The Terror had
schooled herself in the debating societies of the Institute, and would
set up the President, when he was floored by an awkward question, as
easily as if he were a ninepin which had been bowled over.