This series of papers was begun in March, 1888. A single number was
printed, when it was interrupted the course of events, and not resumed
until nearly years later, in January, 1890. The plan of the series was
not formed in my mind when I wrote the number. In returning to my task
I found that my original plan had shaped itself in the underground
laboratory of my thought so that some changes had to be made in what I
had written. As I proceeded, the slight story which formed a part of my
programme eloped itself without any need of much contrivance on my part.
Given certain characters in a writer's conception, if they are real to
him, as they ought to be they will act in such or such a way, according
to the law of their nature. It was pretty safe to assume that intimate
relations would spring up between some members of our mixed company; and
it was not rash conjecture that some of these intimacies might end in
such attachment as would furnish us hints, at least, of a love-story.
As to the course of the conversations which would take place, very
little could be guessed beforehand. Various subjects of interest would
be likely to present themselves, without definite order, oftentimes
abruptly and, as it would seem, capriciously. Conversation in such a
mixed company as that of “The Teacups” is likely to be suggestive
rather than exhaustive. Continuous discourse is better adapted to the
lecture-room than to the tea-table. There is quite enough of it, I fear
too much,--in these pages. But the reader must take the reports of our
talks as they were jotted down. A patchwork quilt is not like a piece of
Gobelin tapestry; but it has its place and its use.
Some will feel a temptation to compare these conversations with those
earlier ones, and remark unamiably upon their difference. This is hardly
fair, and is certainly not wise. They are produced under very different
conditions, and betray that fact in every line. It is better to take
them by themselves; and, if my reader finds anything to please or profit
from, I shall be contented, and he, I feel sure, will not be ungrateful.
The readers who take up this volume may recollect a series of
conversations held many years ago over the breakfast-table, and reported
for their more or less profitable entertainment. Those were not very
early breakfasts at which the talks took place, but at any rate the
sun was rising, and the guests had not as yet tired themselves with the
labors of the day. The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about
it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea
cannot be expected to reproduce. The toils of the forenoon, the heats of
midday, in the warm season, the slanting light of the descending sun,
or the sobered translucency of twilight have subdued the vivacity of the
early day. Yet under the influence of the benign stimulant many trains
of thought which will bear recalling, may suggest themselves to some
of our quiet circle and prove not uninteresting to a certain number of
readers.
How early many of my old breakfast companions went off to bed! I am
thinking not merely of those who sat round our table, but of that larger
company of friends who listened to our conversations as reported. Dear
girl with the silken ringlets, dear boy with the down-shadowed cheek,
your grandfather, your grandmother, turned over the freshly printed
leaves that told the story of those earlier meetings around the plain
board where so many things were said and sung, not all of which have
quite faded from memory of this overburdened and forgetful time. Your
father, your mother, found the scattered leaves gathered in a volume,
and smiled upon them as not uncompanionable acquaintances. My tea-table
makes no promises. There is no programme of exercises to studied
beforehand. What if I should content myself with a single report of what
was said and done over our teacups? Perhaps my young reader would be
glad to let me off, for there are talkers enough who have not yet
left their breakfast-tables; and nobody can blame the young people for
preferring the thoughts and the language of their own generation, with
all its future before it, to those of their grandfathers contemporaries.
My reader, young or old, will please to observe that I have left myself
entire freedom as to the sources of what may be said over the teacups. I
have not told how many cups are commonly on the board, but by using
the plural I have implied that there is at least one other talker or
listener beside myself, and for all that appears there may be a dozen.
There will be no regulation length to my reports,--no attempt to make
out a certain number of pages. I have no contract to fill so many
columns, no pledge to contribute so many numbers. I can stop on this
first page if I do not care to say anything more, and let this article
stand by itself if so minded. What a sense of freedom it gives not to
write by the yard or the column!
When one writes for an English review or magazine at so many guineas a
sheet, the temptation is very great to make one's contribution cover
as many sheets as possible. We all know the metallic taste of articles
written under this powerful stimulus. If Bacon's Essays had been
furnished by a modern hand to the “Quarterly Review” at fifty guineas a
sheet, what a great book it would have taken to hold them!
The first thing which suggests itself to me, as I contemplate my slight
project, is the liability of repeating in the evening what I may have
said in the morning in one form or another, and printed in these or
other pages. When it suddenly flashes into the consciousness of a writer
who had been long before the public, “Why, I have said all that once
or oftener in my books or essays, and here it is again; the same old
thought, the same old image, the same old story!” it irritates him, and
is likely to stir up the monosyllables of his unsanctified vocabulary.
He sees in imagination a thousand readers, smiling or yawning as they
say to themselves, “We have had all that before,” and turn to another
writer's performance for something not quite so stale and superfluous.
This is what the writer says to himself about the reader.
The idiot! Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read all
he has written? Does he really believe that everybody remembers all of
his, writer's, words he may happen to have read? At one of those famous
dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter was ever
admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is said and done,
Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted these lines from
the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of them, which he applied
to the Oration just delivered by Mr. Emerson:
Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.
His nephew, the ingenious, inventive, and inexhaustible. Edward Everett
Hale, tells the story of this quotation, and of the various uses to
which it might plied in after-dinner speeches. How often he ventured
to repeat it at the Phi Beta Kappa dinners I am not sure; but as he
reproduced it with his lively embellishments and fresh versions and
artful circumlocutions, not one person in ten remembered that he had
listened to those same words in those same accents only a twelvemonth
ago. The poor deluded creatures who take it for granted that all the
world remembers what they have said, and laugh at them when they say it
over again, may profit by this recollection. But what if one does say
the same things,--of course in a little different form each time,--over
her? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought
to do. Whether he ought to or not, it is very certain that this is what
all who write much or speak much necessarily must and will do. Think of
the clergyman who preaches fifty or a hundred or more sermons every year
for fifty years! Think of the stump speaker who shouts before a hundred
audiences during the same political campaign, always using the same
arguments, illustrations, and catchwords! Think of the editor, as
Carlyle has pictured him, threshing the same straw every morning, until
we know what is coming when we see the first line, as we do when we read
the large capitals at the head of a thrilling story, which ends in an
advertisement of an all-cleansing soap or an all-curing remedy!
The latch-key which opens into the inner chambers of my consciousness
fits, as I have sufficient reason to believe, the private apartments
of a good many other people's thoughts. The longer we live, the more
we find we are like other persons. When I meet with any facts in my own
mental experience, I feel almost sure that I shall find them repeated or
anticipated in the writings or the conversation of others. This feeling
gives one a freedom in telling his own personal history he could not
have enjoyed without it. My story belongs to you as much as to me. De
te fabula narratur. Change the personal pronoun,--that is all. It gives
many readers a singular pleasure to find a writer telling them something
they have long known or felt, but which they have never before found any
one to put in words for them. An author does not always know when he
is doing the service of the angel who stirred the waters of the pool of
Bethesda. Many a reader is delighted to find his solitary thought has a
companion, and is grateful to the benefactor who has strengthened
him. This is the advantage of the humble reader over the ambitious and
self-worshipping writer. It is not with him pereant illi, but beati sunt
illi qui pro nobis nostra dixerunt,-Blessed are those who have said our
good things for us.
What I have been saying of repetitions leads me into a train of
reflections like which I think many readers will find something in their
own mental history. The area of consciousness is covered by layers of
habitual thoughts, as a sea-beach is covered with wave-worn, rounded
pebbles, shaped, smoothed, and polished by long attrition against each
other. These thoughts remain very much the same from day to day, from
week to week; and as we grow older, from month to month, and from year
to year. The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon them daily as
we unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement and murmur of
ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in slumber. When
we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only listening to
sound of attrition between these inert elements of intelligence. They
shift their places a little, they change their relations to each other,
they roll over and turn up new surfaces. Now and then a new fragment is
cast in among them, to be worn and rounded and takes its place with the
others, but the pebbled floor of consciousness is almost as stationary
as the pavement of a city thoroughfare.
It so happens that at this particular tine I have something to tell
which I am quite sure is not one of rolled pebbles which my reader has
seen before in any of my pages, or, as I feel confident, in those of any
other writer.
If my reader asks why I do not send the statement I am going to make
to some one of the special periodicals that deal with such subjects,
my answer is, that I like to tell my own stories at my own time, in own
chosen columns, where they will be read by a class of readers with whom
I like to talk.
All men of letters or of science, all writers well known to the public,
are constantly tampered with, in these days, by a class of predaceous
and hungry fellow-laborers who may be collectively spoken of as the
brain-tappers. They want an author's ideas on the subjects which
interest them, the inquirers, from the gravest religious and moral
questions to the most trivial matters of his habits and his whims and
fancies. Some of their questions he cannot answer; some he does not
choose to answer; some he is not yet ready to answer, and when he is
ready he prefers to select his own organ of publication. I do not find
fault with all the brain-tappers. Some of them are doing excellent
service by accumulating facts which could not otherwise be attained.
Rut one gets tired of the strings of questions sent him, to which he is
expected to return an answer, plucked, ripe or unripe, from his private
tree of knowledge. The brain-tappers are like the owner of the goose
that laid the golden eggs. They would have the embryos and germs of
one's thoughts out of the mental oviducts, and cannot wait for their
spontaneous evolution and extrusion.
The story I have promised is, on the whole, the most remarkable of a
series which I may have told in part at some previous date, but which,
if I have not told, may be worth recalling at a future time.
Some few of my readers may remember that in a former paper I suggested
the possibility of the existence of an idiotic area in the human mind,
corresponding to the blind spot in the human retina. I trust that I
shall not be thought to have let my wits go wandering in that region of
my own intellectual domain, when I relate a singular coincidence which
very lately occurred in my experience, and add a few remarks made by
one of our company on the delicate and difficult but fascinating subject
which it forces upon our attention. I will first copy the memorandum
made at the time:
“Remarkable coincidence. On Monday, April 18th, being at table from 6.30
P. M. to 7.30, with ________and ________ the two ladies of my household,
I told them of the case of 'trial by battel' offered by Abraham Thornton
in 1817. I mentioned his throwing down his glove, which was not taken up
by the brother of his victim, and so he had to be let off, for the old
law was still in force. I mentioned that Abraham Thornton was said to
have come to this country, 'and [I added] he may be living near us, for
aught that I know.” I rose from the table, and found an English letter
waiting for me, left while I sat at dinner. A copy the first portion of
this letter:
'20 ALFRED PLACE, West (near Museum) South Kensington, LONDON, S. W.
April 7, 1887. DR. O. W. HOLMES:
DEAR SIR,--In travelling, the other day, I met with a reprint of the
very interesting case of Thornton for murder, 1817. The prisoner pleaded
successfully the old Wager of Battel. I thought you would like to read
the account, and send it with this....