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The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes >> The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table



Transcribed from the 1873 James R. Osgood and Company edition by
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE




THE AUTOCRAT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY



The interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of
these papers was just a quarter of a century in duration.

Two articles entitled "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" will be
found in the "New England Magazine," formerly published in Boston
by J. T. and E. Buckingham. The date of the first of these
articles is November 1831, and that of the second February 1832.
When "The Atlantic Monthly" was begun, twenty-five years
afterwards, and the author was asked to write for it, the
recollection of these crude products of his uncombed literary
boyhood suggested the thought that it would be a curious experiment
to shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit were
better or worse than the early windfalls.

So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those
earlier attempts to my own notice and that of some few friends who
were idle enough to read them at the time of their publication.
The man is father to the boy that was, and I am my own son, as it
seems to me, in those papers of the New England Magazine. If I
find it hard to pardon the boy's faults, others would find it
harder. They will not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor as I
hope, anywhere.

But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing, and
with these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind being still
breathes, will be contented.


- "It is a capital plan to carry a tablet with you, and, when you
find yourself felicitous, take notes of your own conversation." -

- "When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary.
The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences.
The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and
luftre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the
fineft fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I
will fhow you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more
accurate, and a more eloquent analogy." -

- "Once on a time, a notion was ftarted, that if all the people in
the world would fhout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So
the projectors agreed it fhould be done in juft ten years. Some
thousand fhip-loads of chronometers were diftributed to the
selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations. For
a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful
noise that was to be made on the great occafion. When the time
came, everybody had their ears so wide open, to hear the universal
ejaculation of BOO,--the word agreed upon,--that nobody spoke
except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in
Pekin, so that the world was never so ftill fince the creation." -


There was nothing better than these things and there was not a
little that was much worse. A young fellow of two or three and
twenty has as good a right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in
learning how to write, as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his
hat-full of eyes in learning how to operate for cataract, or an
ELEGANT like Brummel to point to an armful of failures in the
attempt to achieve a perfect tie. This son of mine, whom I have
not seen for these twenty-five years, generously counted, was a
self-willed youth, always too ready to utter his unchastised
fancies. He, like too many American young people, got the spur
when he should have had the rein. He therefore helped to fill the
market with that unripe fruit which his father says in one of these
papers abounds in the marts of his native country. All these by-
gone shortcomings he would hope are forgiven, did he not feel sure
that very few of his readers know anything about them. In taking
the old name for the new papers, he felt bound to say that he had
uttered unwise things under that title, and if it shall appear that
his unwisdom has not diminished by at least half while his years
have doubled, he promises not to repeat the experiment if he should
live to double them again and become his own grandfather.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
BOSTON. Nov. 1st 1858.



CHAPTER I



I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the
many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical
and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is
an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula:
2+2=4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general
character of the expression a+b=c. We are mere operatives,
empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead
of figures.

They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us
to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to
take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or
pertinent questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this
occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same
observation.--No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he said a mighty
good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it, and
you found it, NOT IN THE ORIGINAL, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid.
I will tell the company what he did say, one of these days.

- If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration?--I blush to say
that I do not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was
the first association to which I ever heard the term applied; a
body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired
their teacher, and to some extent each other. Many of them
deserved it; they have become famous since. It amuses me to hear
the talk of one of those beings described by Thackeray -


"Letters four do form his name" -


about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage
of civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors,
philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of
Mutual Admiration. A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is
not debarred from admiring the same quality in another, nor the
other from returning his admiration. They may even associate
together and continue to think highly of each other. And so of a
dozen such men, if any one place is fortunate enough to hold so
many. The being referred to above assumes several false premises.
First, that men of talent necessarily hate each other. Secondly,
that intimate knowledge or habitual association destroys our
admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance.
Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine
and have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to
glorify themselves and to put down him and the fraction of the
human race not belonging to their number. Fourthly, that it is an
outrage that he is not asked to join them.

Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who
sits opposite said, "That's it! that's it!"

I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever people's
hating each other, I think a LITTLE extra talent does sometimes
make people jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts
and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions.
Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak
flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It
spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the
rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water.
No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this
class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is puzzled and vexed by
the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working and playing
together in harmony. He and his fellows are always fighting. With
them familiarity naturally breeds contempt. If they ever praise
each other's bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined
verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply
a contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer.

If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that
alters the question. But if they are men with noble powers and
qualities, let me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family
affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which
unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration. And what would
literature or art be without such associations? Who can tell what
we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare, and
Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members? Or to that of
which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the
Spectator? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and
Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all
admirers, met together? Was there any great harm in the fact that
the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable
cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and
as many more as they chose to associate with them?

The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he
abuses this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries
through the knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a
medium for his popgun. Such a society is the crown of a literary
metropolis; if a town has not material for it, and spirit and good
feeling enough to organize it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a
man of genius to lodge in, but not to live in. Foolish people hate
and dread and envy such an association of men of varied powers and
influence, because it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the
necessity of the case, exclusive. Wise ones are prouder of the
title M. S. M. A. than of all their other honors put together.

- All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called
"facts." They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact
or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many
bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or
convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no "facts"
at this table. What! Because bread is good and wholesome and
necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe
while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine represent a
hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract of ten
thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off my
speech?

[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar
mind. The reader will of course understand the precise amount of
seasoning which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of
the axioms of his life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility
for its abuse in incompetent hands.]

This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There are
men that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day's
fasting would do. Mark this that I am going to say, for it is as
good as a working professional man's advice, and costs you nothing:
It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than to have a
nerve tapped. Nobody measures your nervous force as it runs away,
nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation.

There are men of esprit who are excessively exhausting to some
people. They are the talkers who have what may be called JERKY
minds. Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence.
They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags
rack you to death. After a jolting half-hour with one of these
jerky companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief.
It is like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times!
A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to
our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.

"Do not dull people bore you?" said one of the lady-boarders,--the
same that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a
few original stanzas, not remembering that "The Pactolian" pays me
five dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.

"Madam," said I, (she and the century were in their teens
together,) "all men are bores, except when we want them. There
never was but one man whom I would trust with my latch-key."

"Who might that favored person be?"

"Zimmermann."

- The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the
cobra-di-capello. You remember what they tell of William Pinkney,
the great pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his
neck would swell and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he
seemed on the verge of apoplexy. The hydraulic arrangements for
supplying the brain with blood are only second in importance to its
own organization. The bulbous-headed fellows that steam well when
they are at work are the men that draw big audiences and give us
marrowy books and pictures. It is a good sign to have one's feet
grow cold when he is writing. A great writer and speaker once told
me that he often wrote with his feet in hot water; but for this,
ALL his blood would have run into his head, as the mercury
sometimes withdraws into the ball of a thermometer.

- You don't suppose that my remarks made at this table are like so
many postage-stamps, do you,--each to be only once uttered? If you
do, you are mistaken. He must be a poor creature that does not
often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent piece of
advice, "Know thyself," never alluding to that sentiment again
during the course of a protracted existence! Why, the truths a man
carries about with him are his tools; and do you think a carpenter
is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty board
with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail?
I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall
use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same
stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered
it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new
and express train of associations.

Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech
twice over, and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer,
after performing in an inland city, where dwells a Litteratrice of
note, was invited to meet her and others over the social teacup.
She pleasantly referred to his many wanderings in his new
occupation. "Yes," he replied, "I am like the Huma, the bird that
never lights, being always in the cars, as he is always on the
wing."--Years elapsed. The lecturer visited the same place once
more for the same purpose. Another social cup after the lecture,
and a second meeting with the distinguished lady. "You are
constantly going from place to place," she said.--"Yes," he
answered, "I am like the Huma,"--and finished the sentence as
before.

What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine
speech, word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the
lady might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished
his conversation with the Huma daily during that whole interval of
years. On the contrary, he had never once thought of the odious
fowl until the recurrence of precisely the same circumstances
brought up precisely the same idea. He ought to have been proud of
the accuracy of his mental adjustments. Given certain factors, and
a sound brain should always evolve the same fixed product with the
certainty of Babbage's calculating machine.

- What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere
mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and
without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results
like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it
grind a thousand bushels of them!

I have an immense respect for a man of talents PLUS "the
mathematics." But the calculating power alone should seem to be
the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount of
reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three
or four calculators, and better than any one of them. Sometimes I
have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension
of the relations of numbers. But the triumph of the ciphering
hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I can hear the wheels
clicking in a calculator's brain. The power of dealing with
numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement, which may be put
into a mighty poor watch--I suppose it is about as common as the
power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare
endowment.

- Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized
knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about.
Nature is very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many
small talents and little accomplishments would be neglected! Talk
about conceit as much as you like, it is to human character what
salt is to the ocean; it keeps it sweet, and renders it endurable.
Say rather it is like the natural unguent of the sea-fowl's
plumage, which enables him to shed the rain that falls on him and
the wave in which he dips. When one has had ALL his conceit taken
out of him, when he has lost ALL his illusions, his feathers will
soon soak through, and he will fly no more.

"So you admire conceited people, do you?" said the young lady who
has come to the city to be finished off for--the duties of life.

I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. It
does not follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a
salt-water plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is just as natural
a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-
minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five
minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine
their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect
does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the
third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest
thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not
obviously imply any individual centre.

Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing.
What resplendent beauty that must have been which could have
authorized Phryne to "peel" in the way she did! What fine speeches
are those two: "Non omnis mortar," and "I have taken all knowledge
to be my province"! Even in common people, conceit has the virtue
of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his
house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is
almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be
tedious at times.

- What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want
of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you
think. I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found
spoil more good talks than anything else;--long arguments on
special points between people who differ on the fundamental
principles upon which these points depend. No men can have
satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on
certain ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary
conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the
secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their
source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to
the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary
condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is like
playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the
strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out
their music.

- Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in
your minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and
language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide--that is,
violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate
meaning, which is its life--are alike forbidden. Manslaughter,
which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter,
which is the end of the other. A pun is prima facie an insult to
the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to
or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I
speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the
subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by
talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, but
cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological
convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark;
also, whether the Deluge was not a deal huger than any modern
inundation.

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow
were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be
judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter
were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable
homicide. Thus, in a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe
presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of
suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a
top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence.
Roe then said, "When it begins to hum." Doe then--and not till
then--struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of
the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification
ensued, with a fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of
the law to his brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest
so." The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being
punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted,
and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound volume
was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.

People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the
railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but
their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for
the sake of a battered witticism.

I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will
mark the places on this slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may
say that this boy, our land-lady's youngest, is called BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN, after the celebrated philosopher of that name. A highly
merited compliment.)

I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to
listen. The great moralist says: "To trifle with the vocabulary
which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the
currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the
sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the
paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn
without an indigestion."

And, once more, listen to the historian. "The Puritans hated puns.
The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal
carried them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its
Royal quibble. 'Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen
Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord
of Leicester.' The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent
their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared
himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip
Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought
him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man. A courtier,
who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the
blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. 'Thou hast reason,' replied
a great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a two-
legged animal WITH feathers.' The fatal habit became universal.
The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national
conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal
double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the
Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was
levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in
the age of the Stuarts."

Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the
Macaulay-flowers of literature?--There was a dead silence.--I said
calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a
hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If _I_
have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show
up a drunken helot. We have done with them.

- If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic?--I
should say that its most frequent work was to build a pons asinorum
over chasms which shrewd people can bestride without such a
structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove
anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show
that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was
ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide span, which
couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other.
Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these
are the true explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary
relations with truth, as I understand truth,--not for any secondary
artifice in handling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in
argument are notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust
the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that of a good chess-
player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not necessarily
because he wrangles or plays well.

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