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 took more of it than was good for me--as much as 85 degrees, I
should think,--and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was
suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a
theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation.
When I got better I labelled them all "Pie-crust," and laid them by
as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my
shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as
they have great names on their title-pages,--Doctors of Divinity,
some of them,--it wouldn't do.]

--My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or
twice, told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some
of the journals of his calling. I told him that I didn't doubt he
deserved it; that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse
occasionally, and would for a number of years to come; that nobody
could do anything to make his neighbors wiser or better without
being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to have
their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing
something of the kind.--The Professor smiled.--Now, said I, hear
what I am going to say. It will not take many years to bring you
to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing
and talking men, do nothing but praise. Men, like peaches and
pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay. I
don't know what it is,--whether a spontaneous change, mental or
bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness
of critical honesty,--but it is a fact, that most writers, except
sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the
time when they are beginning to grow old. As a general thing, I
would not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he
is himself an author, over fifty years of age. At thirty we are
all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this
tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up
our jack-knives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less
to hinder any, because nobody's elbows are in our way. So I am
glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in
a few years.

--Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me
very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just
now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you
know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the
harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are
gentle and placid as young children? I have heard it said, but I
cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain,
Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age. An
old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind,
used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to
him. One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years
describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I
remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became
remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of
his life.

And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their
way of coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human
Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon
over. Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn
kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit. And some, that,
like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the
rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after
the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards. Beware
of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may
be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath
the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate
Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old
Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were
swelling when he ripened.

--There is no power I envy so much--said the divinity-student--as
that of seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don't
understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling
thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each
other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you
wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair
of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.

[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of
the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and
training. I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,
--give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to
speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only
contains lifeless albumen.]

You call it MIRACULOUS,--I replied,--tossing the expression with my
facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear.--Two men are walking by
the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with
which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the
other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all,
--and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the ocean
that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than
that all things are in all things, and that just according to the
intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many
in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he
was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean,--the child and
the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a
pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its
compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had
grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all
the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by
invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A
body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the
entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne
of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the
rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

So,--to return to OUR walk by the ocean,--if all that poetry has
dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics
have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed
in the fancies of women,--if the dreams of colleges and convents
and boarding-schools,--if every human feeling that sighs, or
smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their
innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat,
--the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac,
would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and
analogies that rolls through the universe.

[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he
received this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he
reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried
it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at
his leisure.]

--Here is another remark made for his especial benefit.--There is a
natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together
in TRIADS, as I have heard them called,--thus: He was honorable,
courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous.
Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you
could separate a paper in the "Rambler" into three distinct essays.
Many of our writers show the same tendency,--my friend, the
Professor, especially. Some think it is in humble imitation of
Johnson,--some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only.
I don't think they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an
instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought
or image with the THREE DIMENSIONS that belong to every solid,--an
unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth, and
thickness. It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it,
and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it. But
mind this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the
range of the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind,
and morals, and the narrower the limits of the self-determining
conscious movement.

--I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such
strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted
to laugh at them. "Where did our friends pick up all these fine
ecstatic airs?" I would say to myself. Then I would remember My
Lady in "Marriage a la Mode," and amuse myself with thinking how
affectation was the same thing in Hogarth's time and in our own.
But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at
my window. By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe
his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and
waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing
side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I should
like to ask, WHO taught him all this?--and me, through him, that
the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side
and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was
passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made
of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its
shoulders?

--Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable
restrictions? A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may
see such a one in any mineralogical collection. One little fluid
particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!

--Weaken moral obligations?--No, not weaken, but define them. When
I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to lay
down some principles not fully recognized in some of your
text-books.

I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary. You
saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in
which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very
apt to be fools and cowards. But a great many of the clergyman's
patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.

[Immense sensation at the table.--Sudden retirement of the angular
female in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion--as they say in
the Chamber of Deputies--on the part of the young fellow they call
John. Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite's lower jaw
--(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him.) Our landlady
to Benjamin Franklin, briskly,--Go to school right off, there's a
good boy! Schoolmistress curious,--takes a quick glance at
divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly flushed draws his
shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood--or truth--had hit
him in the forehead. Myself calm.]

--I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having
pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit
should be disputed. Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin,
(for B. F. had NOT gone right off, of course,) and bring down a
small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?

[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed,
vellum-papered 32mo. "DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA. Amstelodami.
Typis Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650." Various names written on
title-page. Most conspicuous this: Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn.
Anim. 1725. Oxon.

--O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford,--then writing
as I now write,--now in the dust, where I shall lie,--is this line
all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is at
least once more spoken by living men;--is it a pleasure to thee?
Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality,--its
week, its month, its year,--whatever it may be,--and then we will
go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion's Uncatalogued
Library!]

--If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to
read something to you out of the book of this keen and witty
scholar,--the great Erasmus,--who "laid the egg of the Reformation
which Luther hatched." Oh, you never read his Naufragium, or
"Shipwreck," did you? Of course not; for, if you had, I don't
think you would have given me credit--or discredit--for entire
originality in that speech of mine. That men are cowards in the
contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the extraordinary
antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they are fools, by
their praying to the sea, and making promises to bits of wood from
the true cross, and all manner of similar nonsense; that they are
fools, cowards, and liars all at once, by this story: I will put
it into rough English for you.--"I couldn't help laughing to hear
one fellow bawling out, so that he might be sure to be heard, a
promise to Saint Christopher of Paris--the monstrous statue in the
great church there--that he would give him a wax taper as big as
himself. 'Mind what you promise!' said an acquaintance that stood
near him, poking him with his elbow; 'you couldn't pay for it, if
you sold all your things at auction.' 'Hold your tongue, you
donkey!' said the fellow,--but softly, so that Saint Christopher
should not hear him,--'do you think I'm in earnest? If I once get
my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him so much as a tallow
candle!'"

Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in
their talk about the great subject of which we were speaking have
not necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the
contrary, have very often been wanting in one or two or all of the
qualities these words imply, I should expect to find a good many
doctrines current in the schools which I should be obliged to call
foolish, cowardly, and false.

--So you would abuse other people's beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell
us your own creed!--said the divinity-student, coloring up with a
spirit for which I liked him all the better.

--I have a creed,--I replied;--none better, and none shorter. It
is told in two words,--the two first of the Paternoster. And when
I say these words I mean them. And when I compared the human will
to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to DEFINE moral
obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to
express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings
is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief
planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization,
education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the
will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale
mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to
nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but "Give me
neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good
reason. If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in
getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these
every-day working forces into account. The great theological
question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is
this:-

No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be
repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what
personal incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business
has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-
table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the
Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto
"Concilium Tridentinum." He has also heard many thousand
theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not
at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this
time to express an opinion on theological matters.

I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal
rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of
thought. Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two
letters a week, requesting him to. . . . ,--on the strength of some
youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the intelligent
constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a harlequin?

--Well, I can't be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like
to make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this:
if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible
nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he
had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head
of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels
of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the
other water-power; that is all. I have often heard the Professor
talk about hysterics as being Nature's cleverest illustration of
the reciprocal convertibility of the two states of which these acts
are the manifestations; But you may see it every day in children;
and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the
transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake
play JESSE RURAL.

It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love
for the ridiculous. People laugh WITH him just so long as he
amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have
their laugh, and so they laugh AT him. There is in addition,
however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear. Do
you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you
laugh, whether by making faces or verses? Are you aware that you
have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so
far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your
royal delight? Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a
dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is
exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right!--first-rate
performance!--and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at
once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and,
stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him,--ah, that
wasn't in the programme!

I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith--who, as
everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman,
every inch of him--ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of
Royalty. The "Quarterly," "so savage and tartarly," came down upon
him in the most contemptuous style, as "a joker of jokes," a
"diner-out of the first water," in one of his own phrases; sneering
at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking
behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a
man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even.--If I
were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three
facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit
in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more
solid qualities. And so to an actor: Hamlet first, and Bob Logic
afterwards, if you like; but don't think, as they say poor Liston
used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do
anything great with Macbeth's dagger after flourishing about with
Paul Pry's umbrella. Do you know, too, that the majority of men
look upon all who challenge their attention,--for a while, at
least,--as beggars, and nuisances? They always try to get off as
cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a
literary man--pardon the forlorn pleasantry!--is the FUNNY-bone.
That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and
makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.

--Oh, indeed, no!--I am not ashamed to make you laugh,
occasionally. I think I could read you something I have in my desk
which would probably make you smile. Perhaps I will read it one of
these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and
reflective; not just now. The ludicrous has its place in the
universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas,
illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long
before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we
always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and
encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of
those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call
BLESSED! There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be
preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look
forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all
joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street
not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who
gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look
of recognition,--something as if he were one of Heaven's assessors,
come down to "doom" every acquaintance he met,--that I have
sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a violent
cold, dating from that instant. I don't doubt he would cut his
kitten's tail off, if he caught her playing with it. Please tell
me, who taught her to play with it?

No, no!--give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and
you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about
entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my
serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies. I know nothing in
English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment
of Sir Thomas Browne "EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS
NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIMSELF."

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,
as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven,
we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,--but
we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one very
sad thing in old friendships, to every mind that is really moving
onward. It is this: that one cannot help using his early friends
as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress. Every now and
then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a string of
thought tied to him, and look--I am afraid with a kind of luxurious
and sanctimonious compassion--to see the rate at which the string
reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and down, poor fellow!
and we are dashing along with the white foam and bright sparkle at
our bows;--the ruffled bosom of prosperity and progress, with a
sprig of diamonds stuck in it! But this is only the sentimental
side of the matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow all that we
love.

Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you.
It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring
our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the
habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary,
we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy. We see
just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the
balance between that and whatever we may feel ourselves to be now.
No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken. If we change our last
simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet leaving the
harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can get
what we want out of it. There is one of our companions;--her
streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea,
then by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another,
the waves swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a
seeming wreck, as we flew under our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at
dawn she is still in sight,--it may be in advance of us. Some deep
ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent,--yes,
stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they are
swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim. And when at last the
black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the mist
sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes off
panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all
wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our pride,
may never come.

So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships,
because we cannot help instituting comparisons between our present
and former selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but
are not what we are. Nothing strikes one more, in the race of
life, than to see how many give out in the first half of the
course. "Commencement day" always reminds me of the start for the
"Derby," when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the season
are brought up for trial. That day is the start, and life is the
race. Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is just "graduating."
Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit;
step out here into the grass back of the church; ah! there it is:-


"HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT
SOCII MOERENTES."


But this is the start, and here they are,--coats bright as silk,
and manes as smooth as eau lustrale can make them. Some of the
best of the colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show
their paces. What is that old gentleman crying about? and the old
lady by him, and the three girls, what are they all covering their
eyes for? Oh, that is THEIR colt which has just been trotted up on
the stage. Do they really think those little thin legs can do
anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these
next forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that
comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered
rings of the arcus senilis!