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.


Boston is just like other places of its size;--only perhaps,
considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department,
superior monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the
English language, it has some right to look down on the mob of
cities. I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the
real offence of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its
intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it would only send
away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no
offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always
proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which
the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in
this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of
their talent and wealth.--I have observed, by the way, that the
people who really live in two great cities are by no means so
jealous of each other, as are those of smaller cities situated
within the intellectual basin, or suction-range, of one large one,
of the pretensions of any other. Don't you see why? Because their
promising young author and rising lawyer and large capitalist have
been drained off to the neighboring big city,--their prettiest girl
has been exported to the same market; all their ambition points
there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there. I
hate little toad-eating cities.

--Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?--Oh,--an
example? Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn't
you like to see me put my foot into one? With sentiments of the
highest consideration I must beg leave to be excused.

Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an
old church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here
and there an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for
the convenience of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door
with their tomahawks,)--if they have, scattered about, those mighty
square houses built something more than half a century ago, and
standing like architectural boulders dropped by the former diluvium
of wealth, whose refluent wave has left them as its monument,--if
they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that push their branches
over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the side-walk,
--if they have a little grass in the side-streets, enough to betoken
quiet without proclaiming decay,--I think I could go to pieces,
after my life's work were done, in one of those tranquil places, as
sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in.
I visit such spots always with infinite delight. My friend, the
Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to the
imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man live in one of
these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which is
kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and,
as you hold it up, you may see the sun through it by day and the
stars by night.

--Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great
towns?--I don't believe there is much difference. You know how
they read Pope's line in the smallest town in our State of
Massachusetts?--Well, they read it


"All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!"


--Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by
which they may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some
keep it always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some,
bolted,--with a chain that will let you peep in, but not get in;
and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass its threshold. This
front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-room, and
this into the inferior apartments. The side-door opens at once
into the sacred chambers.

There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is
carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers,
sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have
duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas,
if none is given with it!

If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a
person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly
pronounce the words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,
--THE LORD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL! You will probably go mad within
a reasonable time,--or, if you are a man, run off and die with your
head on a curb-stone, in Melbourne or San Francisco,--or, if you
are a woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn into a pale,
jointed petrifaction that moves about as if it were alive, or play
some real life-tragedy or other.

Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the
side-door. The fact of possessing one renders those even who are
dear to you very terrible at times. You can keep the world out from
your front-door, or receive visitors only when you are ready for
them; but those of your own flesh and blood, or of certain grades of
intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they will, at any hour and
in any mood. Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous system,
and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semitones,
--touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his
instrument. I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this
nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of
performance. Married life is the school in which the most
accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman
is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of
sensibilities! From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on
the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste
are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other
instrument possesses. A few exercises on it daily at home fit a man
wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely as he
returns from them. No stranger can get a great many notes of torture
out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,--parent,
child, brother, sister, intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a
side-door key; too many have them already.

--You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed
a frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became
thawed? If we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better
that it should sting us and we should die than that its chill
should slowly steal into our hearts; warm it we never can! I have
seen faces of women that were fair to look upon, yet one could see
that the icicles were forming round these women's hearts. I knew
what freezing image lay on the white breasts beneath the laces!

A very simple INTELLECTUAL mechanism answers the necessities of
friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a
watch tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry
it about with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand and
is not a repeater, nor a musical watch,--though it is not enamelled
nor jewelled,--in short, though it has little beyond the wheels
required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a
pair of useful hands. The more wheels there are in a watch or a
brain, the more trouble they are to take care of. The movements of
exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very
nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises
which are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive
natures, is the best basis for love or friendship.--Observe, I am
talking about MINDS. I won't say, the more intellect, the less
capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding
and reason;--but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away
with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of
wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart
happy, I have no question.

If one's intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share
all one's intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.
Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books.
After all, if we think of it, most of the world's loves and
friendships have been between people that could not read nor spell.

But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs
all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of
smiles or the pressure of hand or lip,--this is the great martyrdom
of sensitive beings,--most of all in that perpetual auto da fe
where young womanhood is the sacrifice.

--You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and
friendships of illiterate persons,--that is, of the human race,
with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,--I was born
and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into
their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't think
I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors. But I
can't help remembering that the world's great men have not commonly
been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. The Hebrew
patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they represent
to our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I think,
if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next
Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.

What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in
which every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.

--I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,--said the
divinity-student,--who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any
time.

My young friend,--I replied,--the man who is never conscious of a
state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond
expression by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of
language. I can hardly believe there are any such men. Why, think
for a moment of the power of music. The nerves that make us alive
to it spread out (so the Professor tells me) in the most sensitive
region of the marrow just where it is widening to run upwards into
the hemispheres. It has its seat in the region of sense rather
than of thought. Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were,
logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how
different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the
reach of symbols!--Think of human passions as compared with all
phrases! Did you ever hear of a man's growing lean by the reading
of "Romeo and Juliet," or blowing his brains out because Desdemona
was maligned? There are a good many symbols, even, that are more
expressive than words. I remember a young wife who had to part
with her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem;
indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word
about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with
jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form of
rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,--namely, to waste away
and die. When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing.
When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold.--You talk
about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the
highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be
so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text
which lies before him. But think a moment. A child's reading of
Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of
him is another. The saturation-point of each mind differs from
that of every other. But I think it is as true for the small mind
which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up
much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always
to rise above--not the author, but the reader's mental version of
the author, whoever he may be.

I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown
into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then
they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought
without words. We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and
probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the
contrary. But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of
spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in
vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.

--I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
to you some time ago,--I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes
it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the
mind, before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have
thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, STRIKE
IN, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every
day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more
of births,--with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its
pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books
that were ever written, put together. I believe the flowers
growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was
ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

--Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or
elsewhere?--No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you
my rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind,
and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but
recently. Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they
are seasoned.

--Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned
a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the
mind. Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an
hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it.
When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when
acquired. It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,--become at
home,--entered into relations with your other thoughts, and
integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind.--Or take a
simple and familiar example; Dr. Carpenter has adduced it. You
forget a name, in conversation,--go on talking, without making any
effort to recall it,--and presently the mind evolves it by its own
involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another
train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the
mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

--I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know
something of his progress in the French language. I rather liked
that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I
should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a
remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their
portraits.

--Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. I don't know whether
the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as
Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his
description. At any rate, when I gave my translation to B. F. to
turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would
sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was
meant to have some local bearing or other,--which the author, of
course, didn't mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with
anything on this side of the water.

[The above remarks were addressed to the school-mistress, to whom
I handed the paper after looking it over. The divinity-student
came and read over her shoulder,--very curious, apparently, but his
eyes wandered, I thought. Fancying that her breathing was somewhat
hurried and high, or thoracic, as my friend, the Professor, calls
it, I watched her a little more closely.--It is none of my
business.--After all, it is the imponderables that move the world,
--heat, electricity, love. Habet?]

This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school
French, such as you see here; don't expect too much;--the mistakes
give a relish to it, I think.


LES SOCIETES POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.

Ces Societes la sont une Institution pour suppleer aux besoins
d'esprit et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survecu a leurs
emotions a l'egard du beau sexe, et qui n'ont pas la distraction de
l'habitude de boire.

Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Societes, on doit avoir le moins
de cheveux possible. S'il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux
depilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques
connaissances, n'importe dans quel genre. Des le moment qu'on
ouvre la porte de la Societe, on a un grand interet dans toutes les
choses dont on ne sait rien. Ainsi, un microscopiste demontre un
nouveau FLEXOR du TARSE d'un MELOLONTHA VULGARIS. Douze savans
improvises, portans des besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des
insectes, si ce n'est les morsures du CULEX, se precipitent sur
l'instrument, et voient--une grande bulle d'air, dont ils
s'emerveillent avec effusion. Ce qui est un spectacle plein
d'instruction--pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite Societe. Tous
les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec un air
d'intelligence parfaite pendant qu'ils prouvent dans un discours
d'une demiheure que O6 N3 H5 C6 etc. font quelque chose qui n'est
bonne a rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur tres desagreable,
selon l'habitude des produits chimiques. Apres cela vient un
mathematicien qui vous bourre avec des a+b et vous rapporte enfin
un x+y, dont vous n'avex pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos
relations avec la vie. Un naturaliste vous parle des formations
speciales des animaux excessivement inconnus, dont vous n'avez
jamais soupconne l'existence. Ainsi il vous decrit les FOLLICULES
de L'APPENDIX VERMIFORMIS d'un DZIGGUETAI. Vous ne savez pas ce
que c'est qu'un FOLLICULE. Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un
APPENDIX UERMIFORMIS. Vous n'avez jamais entendu parler du
DZIGGUETAI. Ainsi vous gagnez toutes ces connaisances a la fois,
qui s'attachent a votre esprit comme l'eau adhere aux plumes d'un
canard. On connait toutes les langues EX OFFICIO en devenant
membre d'une de ces Societes. Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai
sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout cela de suite, et
s'instruit enormement.

Il y a deux especes d'individus qu'on trouve toujours a ces
Societes: 1 (degree) Le membre a questions; 2 (degree) Le membre a
"Bylaws."

La QUESTION est une specialite. Celui qui en fait metier ne fait
jamais des reponses. La question est une maniere tres commode de
dire les choses suivantes: "Me voila! Je ne suis pas fossil,
moi,--je respire encore! J'ai des idees,--voyez mon intelligence!
Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de
cela! Ah, nous avons un peu de sagacite, voyez vous! Nous ne
sommes nullement la bete qu'on pense!"--LE FAISEUR DE QUESTIONS
DONNE PEU D'ATTENTION AUX REPONSES QU'ON FAIT; CE N'EST PAS LA DANS
SA SPECIALITE.

Le membre a "Bylaws" est le bouchon de toutes les emotions
mousseuses et genereuses qui se montrent dans la Societe. C'est un
empereur manque,--un tyran a la troiseme trituration. C'est un
esprit dur, borne, exact, grand dans les petitesses, petit dans les
grandeurs, selon le mot du grand Jefferson. On ne l'aime pas dans
la Societe, mais on le respecte et on le craint. Il n'y a qu'un
mot pour ce membre audessus de "Bylaws." Ce mot est pour lui ce
que l'Om est aux Hundous. C'est sa religion; il n'y a rien audela.
Ce mot la c'est la CONSTITUTION!

Lesdites Societes publient des feuilletons de tems en tems. On les
trouve abandonnes a sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveaunes,
faute de membrane cutanee, ou meme papyracee. Si on aime la
botanique, on y trouve une memoire sur les coquilles; si on fait
des etudes zoologiques, on square trouve un grand tas de q' [square
root of minus one], ce qui doit etre infiniment plus commode que
les encyclopedies. Ainsi il est clair comme la metaphysique qu'on
doit devenir membre d'une Societe telle que nous decrivons.

Recette pour le Depilatoire Physiophilosophique
Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj.
Depilez avec. Polissez ensuite.


I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to
him; and some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the
piece that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as
well as I could, on the spot.

The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that a
depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific
accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she
might send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't
think he'd have to do anything to the outside of his head to get
into any of the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he
played a part in a tabullo.

No,--said I,--I shouldn't think of printing that in English. I'll
tell you why. As soon as you get a few thousand people together in
a town, there is somebody that every sharp thing you say is sure to
hit. What if a thing was written in Paris or in Pekin?--that makes
no difference. Everybody in those cities, or almost everybody, has
his counterpart here, and in all large places.--You never studied
AVERAGES as I have had occasion to.

I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages. There was
one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the
week, through most of the lecturing period. I soon found, as most
speakers do, that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to
keep several in hand.

--Don't you get sick to death of one lecture?--said the landlady's
daughter,--who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for
conversation.

I was going to talk about averages,--I said,--but I have no
objection to telling you about lectures, to begin with.

A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its
delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his
mind. After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then
disgusted with its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the
disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or a
hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or
hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience. But this is
on one condition,--that he never lays the lecture down and lets it
cool. If he does, there comes on a loathing for it which is
intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad
as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a
while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to
touch it. By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no
longer any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the
calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the
novelty and get the blisters.--The story is often quoted of
Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had
been preached forty times. A lecture doesn't begin to be old until
it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have
doubled, if not quadrupled, that number. These old lectures are a
man's best, commonly; they improve by age, also,--like the pipes,
fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day. One learns to make
the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones,
--to take out the really good things which don't tell on the
audience, and put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades
him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery.
A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five
hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

--No, indeed,--I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful
of audiences. I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may
occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell you the AVERAGE
intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very
high. It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not
very rapid or profound. A lecture ought to be something which all
can understand, about something which interests everybody. I
think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a different
account from this, it will probably be one of those eloquent or
forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of their
manner, whatever they talk about,--even when they don't talk very
well.

But an AVERAGE, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of
the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study. It is
awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action. Two
communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions,
so far as we can see. Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each,
are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in
many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place
and time by which one can tell the "remarkably intelligent
audience" of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England
town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has
come in, as in those special associations of young men which are
common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage.
But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows
pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes
in. Front seats: a few old folk,--shiny-headed,--slant up best
ear towards the speaker,--drop off asleep after a while, when the
air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright
women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but
toward the front--(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that.)
Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen
pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs
of young people,--happy, but not always very attentive. Boys, in
the background, more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there,--in
how many places! I don't say dull PEOPLE, but faces without a ray
of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the
lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony
lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;--that is the
chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.
They render LATENT any amount of vital caloric; they act on our
minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on
our hearts.