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.


--I see some of the London journals have been attacking some of
their literary people for lecturing, on the ground of its being a
public exhibition of themselves for money. A popular author can
print his lecture; if he deliver it, it is a case of quaestum
corpore, or making profit of his person. None but "snobs" do that.
Ergo, etc. To this I reply,--Negatur minor. Her Most Gracious
Majesty, the Queen, exhibits herself to the public as a part of the
service for which she is paid. We do not consider it low-bred in
her to pronounce her own speech, and should prefer it so to hearing
it from any other person, or reading it. His Grace and his
Lordship exhibit themselves very often for popularity, and their
houses every day for money.--No, if a man shows himself other than
he is, if he belittles himself before an audience for hire, then he
acts unworthily. But a true word, fresh from the lips of a true
man, is worth paying for, at the rate of eight dollars a day, or
even of fifty dollars a lecture. The taunt must be an outbreak of
jealousy against the renowned authors who have the audacity to be
also orators. The sub-lieutenants (of the press) stick a too
popular writer and speaker with an epithet in England, instead of
with a rapier, as in France.--Poh! All England is one great
menagerie, and, all at once, the jackal, who admires the gilded
cage of the royal beast, must protest against the vulgarity of the
talking-bird's and the nightingale's being willing to become a part
of the exhibition!


THE LONG PATH.
(Last of the Parentheses.)


Yes, that was my last walk with the SCHOOLMISTRESS. It happened to
be the end of a term; and before the next began, a very nice young
woman, who had been her assistant, was announced as her successor,
and she was provided for elsewhere. So it was no longer the
schoolmistress that I walked with, but--Let us not be in unseemly
haste. I shall call her the schoolmistress still; some of you love
her under that name.

When it became known among the boarders that two of their number
had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side,
there was, as you may suppose, no small sensation. I confess I
pitied our landlady. It took her all of a suddin,--she said. Had
not known that we was keepin company, and never mistrusted anything
particular. Ma'am was right to better herself. Didn't look very
rugged to take care of a femily, but could get hired haalp, she
calc'lated.--The great maternal instinct came crowding up in her
soul just then, and her eyes wandered until they settled on her
daughter.

--No, poor, dear woman,--that could not have been. But I am
dropping one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile
on my face all the time.

The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out
of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of
oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific
cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as
that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump
and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick
performed. Laus Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of human
beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the
atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is
that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman
who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The
element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her
crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls;--her
bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle,
compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book of
Martyrs." The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that
frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as
slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we
call Civilization!

Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain,
overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young
person, whoever you may be, now reading this,--little thinking you
are what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you are
destined to the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such
multitudes worthier than yourself. But it is only my surface-
thought which laughs. For that great procession of the UNLOVED,
who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the
locks of brown or gray,--under the snowy cap, under the chilling
turban,--hide it even from themselves,--perhaps never know they
wear it, though it kills them,--there is no depth of tenderness in
my nature that Pity has not sounded. Somewhere,--somewhere,--love
is in store for them,--the universe must not be allowed to
fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in the small,
half-unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek
to recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear
sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their God-given
instincts!

Read what the singing-women--one to ten thousand of the suffering
women--tell us, and think of the griefs that die unspoken! Nature
is in earnest when she makes a woman; and there are women enough
lying in the next churchyard with very commonplace blue
slate-stones at their head and feet, for whom it was just as true
that "all sounds of life assumed one tone of love," as for Letitia
Landon, of whom Elizabeth Browning said it; but she could give words
to her grief, and they could not.--Will you hear a few stanzas of
mine?


THE VOICELESS.

We count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,--
But o'er their silent sister's breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;--
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
Whose song has told their hearts' sad story,--
Weep for the voiceless, who have known
The cross without the crown of glory!
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,
But where the glistening night-dews weep
On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break and give no sign
Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
Till Death pours out his cordial wine
Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses,--
If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!


I hope that our landlady's daughter is not so badly off, after all.
That young man from another city who made the remark which you
remember about Boston State-house and Boston folks, has appeared at
our table repeatedly of late, and has seemed to me rather attentive
to this young lady. Only last evening I saw him leaning over her
while she was playing the accordion,--indeed, I undertook to join
them in a song, and got as far as "Come rest in this boo-oo," when,
my voice getting tremulous, I turned off, as one steps out of a
procession, and left the basso and soprano to finish it. I see no
reason why this young woman should not be a very proper match for a
man that laughs about Boston State-house. He can't be very
particular.

The young fellow whom I have so often mentioned was a little free
in his remarks, but very good-natured.--Sorry to have you go,--he
said.--School-ma'am made a mistake not to wait for me. Haven't
taken anything but mournin' fruit at breakfast since I heard of
it.--MOURNING fruit,--said I,--what's that?--Huckleberries and
blackberries,--said he;--couldn't eat in colors, raspberries,
currants, and such, after a solemn thing like this happening.--The
conceit seemed to please the young fellow. If you will believe it,
when we came down to breakfast the next morning, he had carried it
out as follows. You know those odious little "saas-plates" that
figure so largely at boarding-houses, and especially at taverns,
into which a strenuous attendant female trowels little dabs, sombre
of tint and heterogeneous of composition, which it makes you feel
homesick to look at, and into which you poke the elastic coppery
tea-spoon with the air of a cat dipping her foot into a wash-tub,
--(not that I mean to say anything against them, for, when they are
of tinted porcelain or starry many-faceted crystal, and hold clean
bright berries, or pale virgin honey, or "lucent syrups tinct
with cinnamon," and the teaspoon is of white silver, with the
Tower-stamp, solid, but not brutally heavy,--as people in the green
stage of millionism will have them,--I can dally with their amber
semi-fluids or glossy spherules without a shiver,)--you know these
small, deep dishes, I say. When we came down the next morning, each
of these (two only excepted) was covered with a broad leaf. On
lifting this, each boarder found a small heap of solemn black
huckleberries. But one of those plates held red currants, and was
covered with a red rose; the other held white currants, and was
covered with a white rose. There was a laugh at this at first, and
then a short silence, and I noticed that her lip trembled, and the
old gentleman opposite was in trouble to get at his bandanna
handkerchief

--"What was the use in waiting? We should be too late for
Switzerland, that season, if we waited much longer."--The hand I
held trembled in mine, and the eyes fell meekly, as Esther bowed
herself before the feet of Ahasuerus.--She had been reading that
chapter, for she looked up,--if there was a film of moisture over
her eyes there was also the faintest shadow of a distant smile
skirting her lips, but not enough to accent the dimples,--and said,
in her pretty, still way,--"If it please the king, and if I have
found favor in his sight, and the thing seem right before the king,
and I be pleasing in his eyes"--

I don't remember what King Ahasuerus did or said when Esther got
just to that point of her soft, humble words,--but I know what I
did. That quotation from Scripture was cut short, anyhow. We came
to a compromise on the great question, and the time was settled for
the last day of summer.

In the mean time, I talked on with our boarders, much as usual, as
you may see by what I have reported. I must say, I was pleased
with a certain tenderness they all showed toward us, after the
first excitement of the news was over. It came out in trivial
matters,--but each one, in his or her way, manifested kindness.
Our landlady, for instance, when we had chickens, sent the LIVER
instead of the GIZZARD, with the wing, for the schoolmistress.
This was not an accident; the two are never mistaken, though some
landladies APPEAR as if they did not know the difference. The
whole of the company were even more respectfully attentive to my
remarks than usual. There was no idle punning, and very little
winking on the part of that lively young gentleman who, as the
reader may remember, occasionally interposed some playful question
or remark, which could hardly be considered relevant,--except when
the least allusion was made to matrimony, when he would look at the
landlady's daughter, and wink with both sides of his face, until
she would ask what he was pokin' his fun at her for, and if he
wasn't ashamed of himself. In fact, they all behaved very
handsomely, so that I really felt sorry at the thought of leaving
my boarding-house.

I suppose you think, that, because I lived at a plain widow-woman's
plain table, I was of course more or less infirm in point of
worldly fortune. You may not be sorry to learn, that, though not
what GREAT MERCHANTS call very rich, I was comfortable,
--comfortable,--so that most of those moderate luxuries I described
in my verses on CONTENTMENT--MOST of them, I say--were within our
reach, if we chose to have them. But I found out that the
schoolmistress had a vein of charity about her, which had hitherto
been worked on a small silver and copper basis, which made her
think less, perhaps, of luxuries than even I did,--modestly as I
have expressed my wishes.

It is a rather pleasant thing to tell a poor young woman, whom one
has contrived to win without showing his rent-roll, that she has
found what the world values so highly, in following the lead of her
affections. That was an enjoyment I was now ready for.

I began abruptly:--Do you know that you are a rich young person?

I know that I am very rich,--she said.--Heaven has given me more
than I ever asked; for I had not thought love was ever meant for
me.

It was a woman's confession, and her voice fell to a whisper as it
threaded the last words.

I don't mean that,--I said,--you blessed little saint and seraph!
--if there's an angel missing in the New Jerusalem, inquire for her
at this boarding house!--I don't mean that! I mean that I--that
is, you--am--are--confound it!--I mean that you'll be what most
people call a lady of fortune. And I looked full in her eyes for
the effect of the announcement.

There wasn't any. She said she was thankful that I had what would
save me from drudgery, and that some other time I should tell her
about it.--I never made a greater failure in an attempt to produce
a sensation.

So the last day of summer came. It was our choice to go to the
church, but we had a kind of reception at the boarding-house. The
presents were all arranged, and among them none gave more pleasure
than the modest tributes of our fellow-boarders,--for there was not
one, I believe, who did not send something. The landlady would
insist on making an elegant bride-cake, with her own hands; to
which Master Benjamin Franklin wished to add certain embellishments
out of his private funds,--namely, a Cupid in a mouse-trap, done in
white sugar, and two miniature flags with the stars and stripes,
which had a very pleasing effect, I assure you. The landlady's
daughter sent a richly bound copy of Tupper's Poems. On a blank
leaf was the following, written in a very delicate and careful
hand:-


Presented to . . . by . . .
On the eve ere her union in holy matrimony.
May sunshine ever beam o'er her!


Even the poor relative thought she must do something, and sent a
copy of "The Whole Duty of Man," bound in very attractive
variegated sheepskin, the edges nicely marbled. From the
divinity-student came the loveliest English edition of "Keble's
Christian Year." I opened it, when it came, to the FOURTH SUNDAY
IN LENT, and read that angelic poem, sweeter than anything I can
remember since Xavier's "My God, I love thee."--I am not a
Churchman,--I don't believe in planting oaks in flower-pots,--but
such a poem as "The Rosebud" makes one's heart a proselyte to the
culture it grows from. Talk about it as much as you like,--one's
breeding shows itself nowhere more than in his religion. A man
should be a gentleman in his hymns and prayers; the fondness for
"scenes," among vulgar saints, contrasts so meanly with that--


"God only and good angels look
Behind the blissful scene,"-


and that other,--


"He could not trust his melting soul
But in his Maker's sight,"--


that I hope some of them will see this, and read the poem, and
profit by it.

My laughing and winking young friend undertook to procure and
arrange the flowers for the table, and did it with immense zeal. I
never saw him look happier than when he came in, his hat saucily on
one side, and a cheroot in his mouth, with a huge bunch of
tea-roses, which he said were for "Madam."

One of the last things that came was an old square box, smelling of
camphor, tied and sealed. It bore, in faded ink, the marks,
"Calcutta, 1805." On opening it, we found a white Cashmere shawl
with a very brief note from the dear old gentleman opposite, saying
that he had kept this some years, thinking he might want it, and
many more, not knowing what to do with it,--that he had never seen
it unfolded since he was a young supercargo,--and now, if she would
spread it on her shoulders, it would make him feel young to look at
it.

Poor Bridget, or Biddy, our red-armed maid of all work! What must
she do but buy a small copper breast-pin and put it under
"Schoolma'am's" plate that morning, at breakfast? And Schoolma'am
would wear it,--though I made her cover it, as well as I could,
with a tea-rose.

It was my last breakfast as a boarder, and I could not leave them
in utter silence.

Good-by,--I said,--my dear friends, one and all of you! I have
been long with you, and I find it hard parting. I have to thank
you for a thousand courtesies, and above all for the patience and
indulgence with which you have listened to me when I have tried to
instruct or amuse you. My friend the Professor (who, as well as my
friend the Poet, is unavoidably absent on this interesting
occasion) has given me reason to suppose that he would occupy my
empty chair about the first of January next. If he comes among
you, be kind to him, as you have been to me. May the Lord bless
you all!--And we shook hands all round the table.

Half an hour afterwards the breakfast things and the cloth were
gone. I looked up and down the length of the bare boards over
which I had so often uttered my sentiments and experiences--and
--Yes, I am a man, like another.

All sadness vanished, as, in the midst of these old friends of
mine, whom you know, and others a little more up in the world,
perhaps, to whom I have not introduced you, I took the
schoolmistress before the altar from the hands of the old gentleman
who used to sit opposite, and who would insist on giving her away.

And now we two are walking the long path in peace together. The
"schoolmistress" finds her skill in teaching called for again,
without going abroad to seek little scholars. Those visions of
mine have all come true.

I hope you all love me none the less for anything I have told you.
Farewell!






THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.

The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
quarter of a century since these papers were written. Statements which
were true then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed of the
trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of the year
when the fastest time to that date was given must be very considerably
altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page 49 of the
"Autocrat." No doubt many other statements and opinions might be more or
less modified if I were writing today instead of having written before
the war, when the world and I were both more than a score of years
younger.

These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat." They had
to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is a
formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise
Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough to
warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the
danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the selfsame flight."

There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs of
itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and tastes of
the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press the flow betrays
the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness in the original idea
of the work, if there is any individuality in the method or style of a
new author, or of an old author on a new track, it will have lost much of
its first effect when repeated. Still, there have not been wanting
readers who have preferred this second series of papers to the first.
The new papers were more aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that
reason found a heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper
antagonism in others. It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks
they called forth. Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as if
they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It required the
exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.

How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time when
I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom Jones,"
and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little engravings
opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I remember it,
and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this patiently." How many
times, when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my own
vocabulary of vituperation was simmering in such a lively way that it
threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil over, those words have
calmed the small internal effervescence! There is very little in them
and very little of them; and so there is not much in a linchpin
considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and
prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such
papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their heresies have
become so familiar among intelligent people that they have too
commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear
so differently from the way in which they presented themselves when these
papers were written that it is hard to recognize that we and our
fellow-passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.

But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these papers
to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index Expurgatorius; and
if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas or antidogmas, the
public has become used to so much rougher treatments, that what was once
an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the reader may nod over pages
which, when they were first written, would have waked him into a paroxysm
of protest and denunciation.

November, 1882.




PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades, and
if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten years. The
first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps apologetic, in
the expectation of attacks from various quarters. If the book is in some
points in advance of public opinion, it is natural that the writer should
try to smooth the way to the reception of his more or less aggressive
ideas. He wishes to convince, not to offend,--to obtain a hearing for
his thought, not to stir up angry opposition in those who do not accept
it. There is commonly an anxious look about a first Preface. The author
thinks he shall be misapprehended about this or that matter, that his
well-meant expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those
whom he looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the conservatives
and reproached for his timidity by the noisier radicals. The first
Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest part of a work containing
the thoughts of an honest writer.

After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still read,
and that he must write a new Preface. He comes smiling to his task. How
many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty or thirty
years since he came before his untried public in those almost plaintive
paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his readers,--for the
Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he may prove, comes on
to the stage with his shield on his right arm and his sword in his left
hand.

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the "Atlantic Monthly"
and introduced itself without any formal Preface. A quarter of a century
later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had laid before him,
was written. There is no mark of worry, I think, in that. Old opponents
had come up and shaken hands with the author they had attacked or
denounced. Newspapers which had warned their subscribers against him
were glad to get him as a contributor to their columns. A great change
had come over the community with reference to their beliefs. Christian
believers were united as never before in the feeling that, after all,
their common object was to elevate the moral and religious standard of
humanity. But within the special compartments of the great Christian
fold the marks of division have pronounced themselves in the most
unmistakable manner. As an example we may take the lines of cleavage
which have shown themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational
and the Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in
the transplanted Anglican church of this country. Recent circumstances
have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic communities
which has been going on silently but surely. The licensing of a
missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one department to another,
the election of a Bishop,--each of these movements furnishes evidence
that there is no such thing as an air-tight reservoir of doctrinal
finalities.