[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a banquet in his honor
given by the Suffolk Bar Association, Boston, March 7, 1900, upon his
elevation to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Judicial Court of
Massachusetts. Justice Holmes, upon rising to the toast of the
presiding officer, was received with cheers, the entire company
rising.]
GENTLEMEN OF THE SUFFOLK BAR:--The kindness of this reception
almost unmans me, and it shakes me the more when taken with a kind of
seriousness which the moment has for me. As with a drowning man, the
past is telescoped into a minute, and the stages are all here at once in
my mind. The day before yesterday I was at the law school, fresh from
the army, arguing cases in a little club with Goulding and Beaman and
Peter Olney, and laying the dust of pleading by certain sprinklings
which Huntington Jackson, another ex-soldier, and I managed to contrive
together. A little later in the day, in Bob Morse's, I saw a real writ,
acquired a practical conviction of the difference between assumpsit and
trover, and marvelled open-mouthed at the swift certainty with which a
master of his business turned it off.
Yesterday I was at the law school again, in the chair instead of on the
benches, when my dear partner, Shattuck, came out and told me that in
one hour the Governor would submit my name to the council for a
judgeship, if notified of my assent. It was a stroke of lightning which
changed the whole course of my life.
And the day before yesterday, gentlemen, was thirty-five years, and
yesterday was more than eighteen years, ago. I have gone on feeling
young, but I have noticed that I have met fewer of the old to whom to
show my deference, and recently I was startled by being told that ours
is an old bench. Well, I accept the fact, although I find it hard to
realize, and I ask myself, what is there to show for this half lifetime
that has passed? I look into my book in which I keep a docket of the
decisions of the full court which fall to me to write, and find about a
thousand cases. A thousand cases, many of them upon trifling or
transitory matters, to represent nearly half a lifetime! A thousand
cases, when one would have liked to study to the bottom and to say his
say on every question which the law ever has presented, and then to go
on and invent new problems which should be the test of doctrine, and
then to generalize it all and write it in continuous, logical,
philosophic exposition, setting forth the whole corpus with its roots in
history and its justifications of expedience, real or supposed!
Alas, gentlemen, that is life. I often imagine Shakespeare or Napoleon
summing himself up and thinking: "Yes, I have written five thousand
lines of solid gold, and a good deal of padding--I, who have covered the
milky way with words which outshine the stars!" "Yes, I beat the
Austrians in Italy and elsewhere; I made a few brilliant campaigns, and
I ended in middle life in a _cul-de-sac_--I who had dreamed of a world
monarchy and of Asiatic power!" We cannot live in our dreams. We are
lucky enough if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts
we can feel that it has been nobly done.
Some changes come about in the process: changes not necessarily so much
in the nature as in the emphasis of our interest. I do not mean in our
wish to make a living and to succeed--of course, we all want those
things--but I mean in our ulterior intellectual or spiritual interests,
in the ideal part, without which we are but snails or tigers.
One begins with a search for a general point of view. After a time he
finds one, and then for a while he is absorbed in testing it, in trying
to satisfy himself whether it is true. But after many experiments or
investigations, all have come out one way, and his theory is confirmed
and settled in his mind; he knows in advance that the next case will be
but another verification, and the stimulus of anxious curiosity is gone.
He realizes that his branch of knowledge only presents more
illustrations of the universal principle; he sees it all as another case
of the same old ennui, or the same sublime mystery--for it does not
matter what epithets you apply to the whole of things, they are merely
judgments of yourself. At this stage the pleasure is no less, perhaps,
but it is the pure pleasure of doing the work, irrespective of further
aims, and when you reach that stage you reach, as it seems to me, the
triune formula of the joy, the duty and the end of life.
It was of this that Malebranche was thinking when he said that, if God
held in one hand truth and in the other the pursuit of truth, he would
say: "Lord, the truth is for thee alone; give me the pursuit." The joy
of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless
way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this. The hell
of the old world's literature is to be taxed beyond one's powers. This
country has expressed in story--I suppose because it has experienced it
in life--a deeper abyss of intellectual asphyxia or vital ennui, when
powers conscious of themselves are denied their chance.
The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one. I confess that
altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal.
With all humility, I think "Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
thy might," infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love
one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing,
you must have all your will in a focus, you must not be thinking about
yourself, and, equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor;
you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird
on the wing.
The joy, the duty, and, I venture to add, the end of life. I speak only
of this world, of course, and of the teachings of this world. I do not
seek to trench upon the province of spiritual guides. But from the point
of view of the world the end of life is life. Life is action, the use of
one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it
is the one end that justifies itself. Until lately the best thing that I
was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind
acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the
artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But I think
that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is
a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are
too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the
chief work of civilization is just that it makes the means of living
more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual
efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd
may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because
more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer
life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only
question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of
it.
I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that
floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the
unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep,
sub-conscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers. In
the words of a touching negro song: "sometimes I's up, sometimes I's
down, sometimes I's almost to the groun'," but these thoughts have
carried me, as I hope they will carry the young men who hear me, through
long years of doubt, self-distrust and solitude. They do now, for,
although it might seem that the day of trial was over, in fact it is
renewed each day. The kindness which you have shown me makes me bold in
happy moments to believe that the long and passionate struggle has not
been quite in vain. [Applause.]