OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

Evening Post, Volume LXVI, Issue 136, 5 December 1903, Page 10

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

[LecUire delivered by Dr. Findlay in the Nowtown Public Library as one qf the winter beries of lectures organised by tho Library Committee of tho City Council.] (Continued.) The charm of Holmes's writing is the extent to which it is interfused with lightness and humour. Quaint paradoxes —epigrammatic terms— all giving point to his topio, abound everywhere. It is this fact indeed which has led the world to think of Holmes chiefly, if not solely, as a wit. But he was in fact, as Mr. Morse says, a writer with very grave and Berioua purpose. " From a long lino of pious ancestry he inherited a conscience which was ever vigilant and almost tyrannically dominant. Nothing would have humiliated him more than to be regarded as a writer whose chief object, or at least principal achievement, had been merely the entertainment of his readers. Ho was v man profoundly in earnest, deeply conscientious. He wrote under an ever-present sense of responsibility. No temptation of fame, influence, or popularity would ever have induced him to state anything which be did not believe, or to withhold, exaggerate, or miscolour what he did believe."- His science and his, pity confirmed him in the belief that most of what we condemn as Bin and impute to moral culpability is due to mental and physical conditions for which the man is no more responsible than ho is for the colour of his hair. The frank and courageous expression of his convictions exposed him to much criticism — better styled abuse. But, while he could hit back gamely, he never showed, nor I believe felt, any anger. There was a sense of good humour in even his moot incisive answers. Let us take for example tho following — he is speaking of certain religious beliefs; — "Insanity is often the logic of on accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among thorn suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate forge enough to hurt itself ; stupidity often saves a man from, going mad. We frequently see persons in insane hospitals sent there- in consequence of what are called religious mental disturbances, I confess I think better of them than of many who hold tho same notions and keep their wits and- appear to enjoy life very well outside of the asylums. Any 'decent person ought to go mad if he really holds such or such opinions. It is very much to bin discredit in every point of view if he does not. What is the use of my saying what some of these opinions are? Perhaps more than oue*> of you hold such o» I should think ought to send you straight over to Somerville, if you have any fogio in your heads or any human feeling in your hearts. Anything that is brutal, cruel, heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind and perhaps for entire races—anything that assumes the necessity of the extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated— -no matter by what name you call it— no matter whether a fakir, or a monk, or a. deacon believes it —if received, ought to produce insanity in every well-regulated mind. That condition becomes a normal one, under the circumstances. I am very much ashamed of some people for retaining their reason, when thoy know perfectly well that if they were not the most stupid or the most selfish of human beings, they would become non-compotes at once." But, although Holmes was above all things a moral teacher with high purpose — although in some sense " a Liebig's extract " of the 'wisdom of ages — he was undoubtedly one of the wittiest of all American writers. His humour is not of the broad pantomimic kind of Max Adeler, or indeed of much of Mark Twain. It is quiet, subtle, tickling the intellect rathor than the diaphragm, and leaving its impress on the memory. He could, of course, be broadly humorous, as, for example, hv that delightful little illustration of the methods of American journalism in respect of foreign lands or foreign people of which the journalist knows nothing. We ourselves, I fancy, mjx a good deal ol scepticism with our perusal of reports "From our Foreign Correspondent." Hero is Holmes's character of the style and veracity of the American "Foreign Correspondent": — " OUR SUMATRA CORRESPONDENCE. "This island is now the property of the Stamford family, having been won, it in said, in a raffle by Sir • Stamford, during the stock-gambling mania of the South Sea scheme. Tho history of this gentleman may be found in an interesting series of questions (unfortunately not yet answered) contained in the ' Notes and Queries.' This island is entirely surrounded by the ocean, which here contains a large amount of saline substance, crystallising in cubes remarkable for their symmetry, and frequently displays on its surface during calm weather the rainbow tints of the celebrated South Sea Bubbles. „ " The principal vegetable productions of the island are the pepper tree and the broad-fruit tree. Pepper being very abundantly produced, a benevolent society was organised in London during the lasticeatuiy for supplying the natives with vinefar and oystors as an addition to that olightful condiment. It is said, howover, that as the oysters were of the kind called ' natives ' in England, the natives of Sumatra, in obedionce to a natural instinct, refuted to touch them, and confined themselves entirely to tho crew of the vessel in which they wore brought over. This information was received from ono of the oldest inhabitants, a native himself, and exceedingly food of missionaries. He is said also to be very skilful in the cuisine peculiar to the island. " During tho season of gathering the pepper, tho persons employed art subject to various incommodities, the chief of which is violent and long-continued sternutation, or sneezing. Such is the vehemence of these attacks that the unfortunate subjects of them are often driven backwards for great distances at immense speed on the well-known principle of the •eolipile. Not beta? able to see where they are going, these poor creatures dash themselves to pieces against the rocks or are precipitated over the cliffs, s-nd thus many valuable lives are lost annually. As during the whole popper harvest they feed exclusively on the stimulant, they become exceedingly irritable. The smallest injury is resented with ungovernable rage. A young man suffering from tho pepper fever, as it is called, cudgelled another most severely for appropriating a superannuated relative of trifling value, and was only pacified by having a present made him of a pis of that peculiar species of swine called the pocoavi by the Catholic Jowa, who, it is well known, abstain from swine's flesh in imitation of the Mahometan Buddhists. " The bread tree gro^s abundantly. Its branches are well known to Europe and America under the familiar name of macaroni. The smaller twigs are called vermicelli. They have a decided animal flavour, a» mtv be observed in the scups containin? tht*m. Macarom, being tabular, is tiNe favourite habitat of a very dangerous insect, whioh is rendered peculiarly ferocious by being boiled. The Government of tho *tslon<J, therefore, never allows a stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston with which its cavity may at any tirao be thoroughly swept out. The>e are commonly lost or

stolen before the macaroni arrives among us. It, therefore, contains many of these insects, which however generally die of old age in the shops, so that accidents from this source are comparatively rare. " The fruit of the bread tree consists principally of hot rolls. The buttered muffin variety is supposed to be a hybrid with the coconut palm, the oream found on the milk of the coconut exuding from the hybrid in the shape of butter just as the ripe fruit is splitting so as to fit it for the tea-table, where it is commonly served up with cold " That of course, it will be remembered, is written in a spirit of rollicking banter. Here is a description with more wit and spirit in it. He puts it in the mouth of the Old Master in the "Poet." The Old Master was talking about a concert he had been.£o hear: — '" I don't like chopped musio any way. That woman — she hod more sense in her little finger than forty medical societies — Florence Nightingale—says that tho music you pour out is good for sick folks and the music you pound out isn't. Not that exactly, but something like It. I have been to hear some music-pounding. It was a young woman with as many white muslin flounces round her as the planet Saturn has rings that did it She gave the music-stool a twirl or two and fluffed down on to it like a whirl of soapsuds in a hand-basin. Then she pushed up her cuffs as if she was going .to fight for the champion's belt. Then she worked her wrists and her hands, to limber 'em I suppose, and spread out her fingers till they looked as though they would pretty much cover the key-board, from the growling end to the littfe squeaky ono. Then those two hands of hers made a jump at the keys as if they were a couple of tigers coming down on a- flock of black and white sheep, and the piano gave a great howl as if its tail had been trod on. Dead stop, so still you could hear your hair growing. Then another jump, and another howl, as if the piano had two tails, and you had trod on both of 'em at once, and then a grand clatter I and scramble and string of jumps, up and down, back and forward, one hand over the other, like a stampede of rats and | mice more than like anything I call music I like to hear a woman sing, but these noises they hammer out of their wood and ivory anvils— don't talk to me, I know tho difference between a bullfrog I and a wood thrush." j Above all things Holmes was in the highest senso a lover of women. His was a manhood fused with female grace and gentleness, and his book teems with references to women at once tender, true, and typical of the man. His standard was high. " I would have," he says, " a woman as true as death. At the first real lie that works from the heart outwards she should be tenderly chloroformed into a better world, where she might be made over again and have an. angel for a governess." I think it must be admitted that this treatment is somewhat severe, but then you and I must remember that the occasion for its application would probably never arise. At any rate, it emphasises I Holmes's high conception of a good woman's nature, and his belief in her natural truthfulness and sincerity. " Whether gifted," he cays, " with the accident of beauty or not, she should have been moulded in the rose-red clay of tore before the breath of life made a moving mortal of her. Love capacity is a congenital endowment, and one gets to know the warm hued natures it belongs to from the pretty pipeclay ' counterfeits of them. Proud she may b*e in the sense of respecting herself, but pride in the sens* of condemning others less gifted than herself deserves two of the lowest j oircles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the punishments are smallpox and bankruptcy. Better too few words from the woman we love than too many. While she is silent Nature is working for her. While she talks she is working herself. Love is sparingly soluble in the words ef men— therefore they speak much of it, but ono syllable 6f a woman's speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold." This was not the "sentimental gyneolatry of 'gallantry," which h at best but skin-deep. It stated his honest convictions. He believed that love was essential to a woman's life, and her existence without it was not only sapless and rayless, but amounted to a living martyrdom. It requires both intelligence and sympathy to appreciate the callousness ot moat ol our current forelorn jokes about' old maids. These mainly proceed not from want of heart, but from lack of an intelligent perception of the silent, loveless misery so often endured by lonely unmated women. Surely our human hearts respond to every word of the following passage : — "The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there is hardly anything quite bo painful to think of us that of putting an animal under the bell of an airpump and exhausting the air from it. (I never saw the accursed trick performed, Laus'Deo 1) There comes a time when the souls of human beings — women, perhaps, more even than men-— begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is that society places its transparent bellglass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one. of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls — her bosom is Heaving, but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the 'Book of Martyrs.' The ' dry-pan and the gradual fire ' were the image* that frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as j slow a torment in the walls of that larger I Inquisition which we call Civilisation! ''Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain, overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organised, self-saturated young person, whoever you may be, now reading this — little thinking you ore what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you ore destined to the lingering asphixia of soul which is the lot of such multitudes worthier than yourself. But it is only my surfaoe-thought which laughs. For that great procession of the Unloved, who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the locks of brown or gray, under the snowy cap, under the chilling turban — hide it ever from themselves — perhaps never know they wear it, though it kills them— there is no depth of tenderness in my nature that pity has no sounded. Somewhere, somewhere— hive is in store for them — the Universe must not be allowed to fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in the small half-unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek to recommend themselves to the favour of those towards whom our dear sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their God-given insrtinots. " Read what the singing-women— one to ten thousand of the suffering women—tell ns, and think of tho griefs that die unspoken. Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman, nnd there are women enough lying in the next churchyard with very commonplace blue-slate stones at their head and feet for whom it was just as true that 'All sounds of life assumed one tone of love* as for Letitia Landon, of whom Elisabeth Browning said it, but she could givo words to her grief, and they could not. Will you hear a few stanzas of mine? "THE VOICELESS. " We count the broken lyres that rest Where the sweot wailing singers slurp ber, — But o'er their silent sisters' breast:

The wild flowers who wifl stoop to 1 number? A few can touch the magic string. And noisy Fame is proud to vm^f them — — • Alaa for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them. " Nay, grieve not for the dead alone Who*© song has told their hearts' sad story — Weep for the voiceless, who have known The cross without the crown of glory. Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, But where the. glistening night-dews weep On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow. •* '" 0, hearts that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses, Till death pours out his cordial wins, Slow-dropped /rom Misery's crushing presses — If singing breath or echoing, chord « To every hidden pang were given, What endless melodies were poured, As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven t" (To be Continued.)