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.


It is a source of genuine delight to me, who am of a kindly nature
enough, according to my own reckoning, to watch the good woman, and see
what looks of pride and affection she bestows upon her Benjamin, and how,
in spite of herself, the maternal feeling betrays its influence in her
dispensations of those delicacies which are the exceptional element in
our entertainments. I will not say that Benjamin's mess, like his
Scripture namesake's, is five times as large as that of any of the
others, for this would imply either an economical distribution to the
guests in general or heaping the poor young man's plate in a way that
would spoil the appetite of an Esquimau, but you may be sure he fares
well if anybody does; and I would have you understand that our Landlady
knows what is what as well as who is who.

I begin really to entertain very sanguine expectations of young Doctor
Benjamin Franklin. He has lately been treating a patient of whose
good-will may prove of great importance to him. The Capitalist hurt one
of his fingers somehow or other, and requested our young doctor to take a
look at it. The young doctor asked nothing better than to take charge of
the case, which proved more serious than might have been at first
expected, and kept him in attendance more than a week. There was one
very odd thing about it. The Capitalist seemed to have an idea that he
was like to be ruined in the matter of bandages,--small strips of worn
linen which any old woman could have spared him from her rag-bag, but
which, with that strange perversity which long habits of economy give to
a good many elderly people, he seemed to think were as precious as if
they had been turned into paper and stamped with promises to pay in
thousands, from the national treasury. It was impossible to get this
whim out of him, and the young doctor had tact enough to humor him in it.
All this did not look very promising for the state of mind in which the
patient was like to receive his bill for attendance when that should be
presented. Doctor Benjamin was man enough, however, to come up to the
mark, and sent him in such an account as it was becoming to send a man of
ample means who had been diligently and skilfully cared for. He looked
forward with some uncertainty as to how it would be received. Perhaps
his patient would try to beat him down, and Doctor Benjamin made up his
mind to have the whole or nothing. Perhaps he would pay the whole
amount, but with a look, and possibly a word, that would make every
dollar of it burn like a blister.

Doctor Benjamin's conjectures were not unnatural, but quite remote from
the actual fact. As soon as his patient had got entirely well, the young
physician sent in his bill. The Capitalist requested him to step into
his room with him, and paid the full charge in the handsomest and most
gratifying way, thanking him for his skill and attention, and assuring
him that he had had great satisfaction in submitting himself to such
competent hands, and should certainly apply to him again in case he
should have any occasion for a medical adviser. We must not be too
sagacious in judging people by the little excrescences of their
character. Ex pede Herculem may often prove safe enough, but ex verruca
Tullium is liable to mislead a hasty judge of his fellow-men.

I have studied the people called misers and thought a good deal about
them. In former years I used to keep a little gold by me in order to
ascertain for myself exactly the amount of pleasure to be got out of
handling it; this being the traditional delight of the old-fashioned
miser. It is by no means to be despised. Three or four hundred dollars
in double-eagles will do very well to experiment on. There is something
very agreeable in the yellow gleam, very musical in the metallic clink,
very satisfying in the singular weight, and very stimulating in the
feeling that all the world over these same yellow disks are the
master-keys that let one in wherever he wants to go, the servants that
bring him pretty nearly everything he wants, except virtue,--and a good
deal of what passes for that. I confess, then, to an honest liking for
the splendors and the specific gravity and the manifold potentiality of
the royal metal, and I understand, after a certain imperfect fashion, the
delight that an old ragged wretch, starving himself in a crazy hovel,
takes in stuffing guineas into old stockings and filling earthen pots
with sovereigns, and every now and then visiting his hoards and fingering
the fat pieces, and thinking ever all that they represent of earthly and
angelic and diabolic energy. A miser pouring out his guineas into his
palm and bathing his shrivelled and trembling hands in the yellow heaps
before him, is not the prosaic being we are in the habit of thinking him.
He is a dreamer, almost a poet. You and I read a novel or a poem to help
our imaginations to build up palaces, and transport us into the emotional
states and the felicitous conditions of the ideal characters pictured in
the book we are reading. But think of him and the significance of the
symbols he is handling as compared with the empty syllables and words we
are using to build our aerial edifices with! In this hand he holds the
smile of beauty and in that the dagger of revenge. The contents of that
old glove will buy him the willing service of many an adroit sinner, and
with what that coarse sack contains he can purchase the prayers of holy
men for all succeeding time. In this chest is a castle in Spain, a real
one, and not only in Spain, but anywhere he will choose to have it. If
he would know what is the liberality of judgment of any of the straiter
sects, he has only to hand over that box of rouleaux to the trustees of
one of its educational institutions for the endowment of two or three
professorships. If he would dream of being remembered by coming
generations, what monument so enduring as a college building that shall
bear his name, and even when its solid masonry shall crumble give place
to another still charged with the same sacred duty of perpetuating his
remembrance. Who was Sir Matthew Holworthy, that his name is a household
word on the lips of thousands of scholars, and will be centuries hence,
as that of Walter de Merton, dead six hundred years ago, is to-day at
Oxford? Who was Mistress Holden, that she should be blessed among women
by having her name spoken gratefully and the little edifice she caused to
be erected preserved as her monument from generation to generation? All
these possibilities, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, the
pride of life; the tears of grateful orphans by the gallon; the prayers
of Westminster Assembly's Catechism divines by the thousand; the masses
of priests by the century;--all these things, and more if more there be
that the imagination of a lover of gold is likely to range over, the
miser hears and sees and feels and hugs and enjoys as he paddles with his
lean hands among the sliding, shining, ringing, innocent-looking bits of
yellow metal, toying with them as the lion-tamer handles the great
carnivorous monster, whose might and whose terrors are child's play to
the latent forces and power of harm-doing of the glittering counters
played with in the great game between angels and devils.

I have seen a good deal of misers, and I think I understand them as well
as most persons do. But the Capitalist's economy in rags and his
liberality to the young doctor are very oddly contrasted with each other.
I should not be surprised at any time to hear that he had endowed a
scholarship or professorship or built a college dormitory, in spite of
his curious parsimony in old linen.

I do not know where our Young Astronomer got the notions that he
expresses so freely in the lines that follow. I think the statement is
true, however, which I see in one of the most popular Cyclopaedias, that
"the non-clerical mind in all ages is disposed to look favorably upon the
doctrine of the universal restoration to holiness and happiness of all
fallen intelligences, whether human or angelic." Certainly, most of the
poets who have reached the heart of men, since Burns dropped the tear for
poor "auld Nickie-ben" that softened the stony-hearted theology of
Scotland, have had "non-clerical" minds, and I suppose our young friend
is in his humble way an optimist like them. What he says in verse is
very much the same thing as what is said in prose in all companies, and
thought by a great many who are thankful to anybody that will say it for
them,--not a few clerical as wall as "non-clerical" persons among them.

WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

V

What am I but the creature Thou hast made?
What have I save the blessings Thou hast lent?
What hope I but Thy mercy and Thy love?
Who but myself shall cloud my soul with fear?
Whose hand protect me from myself but Thine?

I claim the rights of weakness, I, the babe,
Call on my sire to shield me from the ills
That still beset my path, not trying me
With snares beyond my wisdom or my strength,
He knowing I shall use them to my harm,
And find a tenfold misery in the sense
That in my childlike folly I have sprung
The trap upon myself as vermin use
Drawn by the cunning bait to certain doom.
Who wrought the wondrous charm that leads us on
To sweet perdition, but the self-same power
That set the fearful engine to destroy
His wretched offspring (as the Rabbis tell),
And hid its yawning jaws and treacherous springs
In such a show of innocent sweet flowers
It lured the sinless angels and they fell?

Ah! He who prayed the prayer of all mankind
Summed in those few brief words the mightiest plea
For erring souls before the courts of heaven,
Save us from being tempted,--lest we fall!
If we are only as the potter's clay
Made to be fashioned as the artist wills,
And broken into shards if we offend
The eye of Him who made us, it is well;
Such love as the insensate lump of clay
That spins upon the swift-revolving wheel
Bears to the hand that shapes its growing form,
--Such love, no more, will be our hearts' return
To the great Master-workman for his care,
Or would be, save that this, our breathing clay,
Is intertwined with fine innumerous threads
That make it conscious in its framer's hand;
And this He must remember who has filled
These vessels with the deadly draught of life,
Life, that means death to all it claims. Our love
Must kindle in the ray that streams from heaven,
A faint reflection of the light divine;
The sun must warm the earth before the rose
Can show her inmost heart-leaves to the sun.

He yields some fraction of the Maker's right
Who gives the quivering nerve its sense of pain;
Is there not something in the pleading eye
Of the poor brute that suffers, which arraigns
The law that bids it suffer? Has it not
A claim for some remembrance in the book
That fills its pages with the idle words
Spoken of men? Or is it only clay,
Bleeding and aching in the potter's hand,
Yet all his own to treat it as he will
And when he will to cast it at his feet,
Shattered, dishonored, lost forevermore?
My dog loves me, but could he look beyond
His earthly master, would his love extend
To Him who--Hush! I will not doubt that He
Is better than our fears, and will not wrong
The least, the meanest of created things!

He would not trust me with the smallest orb
That circles through the sky; he would not give
A meteor to my guidance; would not leave
The coloring of a cloudlet to my hand;
He locks my beating heart beneath its bars
And keeps the key himself; he measures out
The draughts of vital breath that warm my blood,
Winds up the springs of instinct which uncoil,
Each in its season; ties me to my home,
My race, my time, my nation, and my creed
So closely that if I but slip my wrist
Out of the band that cuts it to the bone,
Men say, "He hath a devil"; he has lent
All that I hold in trust, as unto one
By reason of his weakness and his years
Not fit to hold the smallest shred in fee
Of those most common things he calls his own
And yet--my Rabbi tells me--he has left
The care of that to which a million worlds.
Filled with unconscious life were less than naught,
Has left that mighty universe, the Soul,
To the weak guidance of our baby hands,
Turned us adrift with our immortal charge,
Let the foul fiends have access at their will,
Taking the shape of angels, to our hearts,
Our hearts already poisoned through and through
With the fierce virus of ancestral sin.
If what my Rabbi tells me is the truth,
Why did the choir of angels sing for joy?
Heaven must be compassed in a narrow space,
And offer more than room enough for all
That pass its portals; but the underworld,
The godless realm, the place where demons forge
Their fiery darts and adamantine chains,
Must swarm with ghosts that for a little while
Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs
Of all the dulness of their stolid sires,
And all the erring instincts of their tribe,
Nature's own teaching, rudiments of "sin,"
Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail
To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay
And cursed with sense enough to lose their souls!

Brother, thy heart is troubled at my word;
Sister, I see the cloud is on thy brow.
He will not blame me, He who sends not peace,
But sends a sword, and bids us strike amain
At Error's gilded crest, where in the van
Of earth's great army, mingling with the best
And bravest of its leaders, shouting loud
The battle-cries that yesterday have led
The host of Truth to victory, but to-day
Are watchwords of the laggard and the slave,
He leads his dazzled cohorts. God has made
This world a strife of atoms and of spheres;
With every breath I sigh myself away
And take my tribute from the wandering wind
To fan the flame of life's consuming fire;
So, while my thought has life, it needs must burn,
And burning, set the stubble-fields ablaze,
Where all the harvest long ago was reaped
And safely garnered in the ancient barns,
But still the gleaners, groping for their food,
Go blindly feeling through the close-shorn straw,
While the young reapers flash their glittering steel
Where later suns have ripened nobler grain!

We listened to these lines in silence. They were evidently written
honestly, and with feeling, and no doubt meant to be reverential. I
thought, however, the Lady looked rather serious as he finished reading.
The Young Girl's cheeks were flushed, but she was not in the mood for
criticism.

As we came away the Master said to me--The stubble-fields are mighty slow
to take fire. These young fellows catch up with the world's ideas one
after another,--they have been tamed a long while, but they find them
running loose in their minds, and think they are ferae naturae. They
remind me of young sportsmen who fire at the first feathers they see, and
bring down a barnyard fowl. But the chicken may be worth bagging for all
that, he said, good-humoredly.




X

Caveat Lector. Let the reader look out for himself. The old Master,
whose words I have so frequently quoted and shall quote more of, is a
dogmatist who lays down the law, ex cathedra, from the chair of his own
personality. I do not deny that he has the ambition of knowing something
about a greater number of subjects than any one man ought to meddle with,
except in a very humble and modest way. And that is not his way. There
was no doubt something of, humorous bravado in his saying that the actual
"order of things" did not offer a field sufficiently ample for his
intelligence. But if I found fault with him, which would be easy enough,
I should say that he holds and expresses definite opinions about matters
that he could afford to leave open questions, or ask the judgment of
others about. But I do not want to find fault with him. If he does not
settle all the points he speaks of so authoritatively, he sets me
thinking about them, and I like a man as a companion who is not afraid of
a half-truth. I know he says some things peremptorily that he may
inwardly debate with himself. There are two ways of dealing with
assertions of this kind. One may attack them on the false side and
perhaps gain a conversational victory. But I like better to take them up
on the true side and see how much can be made of that aspect of the
dogmatic assertion. It is the only comfortable way of dealing with
persons like the old Master.

There have been three famous talkers in Great Britain, either of whom
would illustrate what I say about dogmatists well enough for my purpose.
You cannot doubt to what three I refer: Samuel the First, Samuel the
Second, and Thomas, last of the Dynasty. (I mean the living Thomas and
not Thomas B.)

I say the last of the Dynasty, for the conversational dogmatist on the
imperial scale becomes every year more and more an impossibility. If he
is in intelligent company he will be almost sure to find some one who
knows more about some of the subjects he generalizes upon than any
wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo is like to know. I
find myself, at certain intervals, in the society of a number of experts
in science, literature, and art, who cover a pretty wide range, taking
them all together, of human knowledge. I have not the least doubt that
if the great Dr. Samuel Johnson should come in and sit with this company
at one of their Saturday dinners, he would be listened to, as he always
was, with respect and attention. But there are subjects upon which the
great talker could speak magisterially in his time and at his club, upon
which so wise a man would express himself guardedly at the meeting where
I have supposed him a guest. We have a scientific man or two among us,
for instance, who would be entitled to smile at the good Doctor's
estimate of their labors, as I give it here:

"Of those that spin out life in trifles and die without a memorial, many
flatter themselves with high opinion of their own importance and imagine
that they are every day adding some improvement to human life."--"Some
turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone, and
find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day. Some
register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind
is changeable.

"There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colorless
liquors may produce a color by union, and that two cold bodies will grow
hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce the effect
expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again."

I cannot transcribe this extract without an intense inward delight in its
wit and a full recognition of its thorough half-truthfulness. Yet if
while the great moralist is indulging in these vivacities, he can be
imagined as receiving a message from Mr. Boswell or Mrs. Thrale flashed
through the depths of the ocean, we can suppose he might be tempted to
indulge in another oracular utterance, something like this:----A wise
man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but he bows to the
authority of a particular fact. He who would bound the possibilities of
human knowledge by the limitations of present acquirements would take the
dimensions of the infant in ordering the habiliments of the adult. It is
the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to
listen. Will the Professor have the kindness to inform me by what steps
of gradual development the ring and the loadstone, which were but
yesterday the toys of children and idlers, have become the means of
approximating the intelligences of remote continents, and wafting
emotions unchilled through the abysses of the no longer unfathomable
deep?

--This, you understand, Beloved, is only a conventional imitation of the
Doctor's style of talking. He wrote in grand balanced phrases, but his
conversation was good, lusty, off-hand familiar talk. He used very often
to have it all his own way. If he came back to us we must remember that
to treat him fairly we must suppose him on a level with the knowledge of
our own time. But that knowledge is more specialized, a great deal, than
knowledge was in his day. Men cannot talk about things they have seen
from the outside with the same magisterial authority the talking dynasty
pretended to. The sturdy old moralist felt grand enough, no doubt, when
he said, "He that is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle
wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war or
peace." Benjamin Franklin was one of these idlers who were electrifying
bottles, but he also found time to engage in the trifling prattle about
war and peace going on in those times. The talking Doctor hits him very
hard in "Taxation no Tyranny": "Those who wrote the Address (of the
American Congress in 1775), though they have shown no great extent or
profundity of mind, are yet probably wiser than to believe it: but they
have been taught by some master of mischief how to put in motion the
engine of political electricity; to attract by the sounds of Liberty and
Property, to repel by those of Popery and Slavery; and to give the great
stroke by the name of Boston." The talking dynasty has always been hard
upon us Americans. King Samuel II. says: "It is, I believe, a fact
verified beyond doubt, that some years ago it was impossible to obtain a
copy of the Newgate Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the
Americans, whether to suppress the blazon of their forefathers or to
assist in their genealogical researches I could never learn
satisfactorily." As for King Thomas, the last of the monological
succession, he made such a piece of work with his prophecies and his
sarcasms about our little trouble with some of the Southern States, that
we came rather to pity him for his whims and crotchets than to get angry
with him for calling us bores and other unamiable names.

I do not think we believe things because considerable people say them, on
personal authority, that is, as intelligent listeners very commonly did a
century ago. The newspapers have lied that belief out of us. Any man
who has a pretty gift of talk may hold his company a little while when
there is nothing better stirring. Every now and then a man who may be
dull enough prevailingly has a passion of talk come over him which makes
him eloquent and silences the rest. I have a great respect for these
divine paroxysms, these half-inspired moments of influx when they seize
one whom we had not counted among the luminaries of the social sphere.
But the man who can--give us a fresh experience on anything that
interests us overrides everybody else. A great peril escaped makes a
great story-teller of a common person enough. I remember when a certain
vessel was wrecked long ago, that one of the survivors told the story as
well as Defoe could have told it. Never a word from him before; never a
word from him since. But when it comes to talking one's common
thoughts,--those that come and go as the breath does; those that tread
the mental areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall, an
interminable procession of every hue and garb,--there are few, indeed,
that can dare to lift the curtain which hangs before the window in the
breast and throw open the window, and let us look and listen. We are all
loyal enough to our sovereign when he shows himself, but sovereigns are
scarce. I never saw the absolute homage of listeners but once, that I
remember, to a man's common talk, and that was to the conversation of an
old man, illustrious by his lineage and the exalted honors he had won,
whose experience had lessons for the wisest, and whose eloquence had made
the boldest tremble.

All this because I told you to look out for yourselves and not take for
absolute truth everything the old Master of our table, or anybody else at
it sees fit to utter. At the same time I do not think that he, or any of
us whose conversation I think worth reporting, says anything for the mere
sake of saying it and without thinking that it holds some truth, even if
it is not unqualifiedly true.

I suppose a certain number of my readers wish very heartily that the
Young Astronomer whose poetical speculations I am recording would stop
trying by searching to find out the Almighty, and sign the thirty-nine
articles, or the Westminster Confession of Faith, at any rate slip his
neck into some collar or other, and pull quietly in the harness, whether
it galled him or not. I say, rather, let him have his talk out; if
nobody else asks the questions he asks, some will be glad to hear them,
but if you, the reader, find the same questions in your own mind, you
need not be afraid to see how they shape themselves in another's
intelligence. Do you recognize the fact that we are living in a new
time? Knowledge--it excites prejudices to call it science--is advancing
as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in
upon the shore. The courtiers of King Canute (I am not afraid of the old
comparison), represented by the adherents of the traditional beliefs of
the period, move his chair back an inch at a time, but not until his feet
are pretty damp, not to say wet. The rock on which he sat securely
awhile ago is completely under water. And now people are walking up and
down the beach and judging for themselves how far inland the chair of
King Canute is like to be moved while they and their children are looking
on, at the rate in which it is edging backward. And it is quite too late
to go into hysterics about it.