Modern Eloquence Volume Ii Part 16

BROTHERS, BY THE SIDE OF HER WHO IS MOTHER OF US ALL, AND FRIENDS, WHOM SHE WELCOMES AS HER OWN CHILDREN:--The older sons of our common parent who should have greeted you from this chair of office, being for different reasons absent, it has become my duty to half fill the place of these honored, but truant, children to the best of my ability--a most grateful office, so far as the expression of kind feeling is concerned; an undesired duty, if I look to the comparisons you must draw between the government of the a.s.sociation existing _de jure_, and its government _de facto_. Your President [Robert C.

Winthrop] so graces every a.s.sembly which he visits, by his presence, his dignity, his suavity, his art of ruling, whether it be the council of a nation, the legislature of a State, or the lively democracy of a dinner-table, that when he enters a meeting like this, it seems as if the chairs stood back of their own will to let him pa.s.s to the head of the board, and the table itself, that most intelligent of quadrupeds, the half reasoning mahogany, tipped him a spontaneous welcome to its highest seat, and of itself rapped the a.s.sembly to order. [Applause.]

Your first Vice-President [Charles Francis Adams], whose name and growing fame you know so much better than his bodily presentment, has not been able to gratify your eyes and ears by showing you the lineaments and stirring you with the tones inherited from men who made their country or shaped its destinies. [Applause.] You and I have no choice therefore, and I must submit to stand in this place of eminence as a speaker, instead of sitting a happy listener with my friends and cla.s.smates on the broader platform beneath. Through my lips must flow the gracious welcome of this auspicious day, which brings us all together in this family temple under the benignant smile of our household divinities, around the ancient altar fragrant with the incense of our grateful memories.

This festival is always a joyous occasion. It resembles a scattered family without making any distinction except that which age establishes, an aristocracy of silver hairs which all inherit in their turn, and none is too eager to antic.i.p.ate. In the great world outside there are and must be differences of lot and position; one has been fortunate, another, toiling as n.o.bly perhaps, has fallen in with adverse currents; one has become famous, his name stares in great letters from the hand-bills of the drama of his generation; another lurks in small type among the supernumeraries. But here we stand in one unbroken row of brotherhood. No symbol establishes a hierarchy that divides one from another; every name which has pa.s.sed into our golden book, the triennial catalogue, is illuminated and emblazoned in our remembrance and affection with the purple and sunshine of our common Mother's hallowed past and hopeful future.

We have at this time a twofold reason for welcoming the return of our day of festive meeting. The old chair of office, against whose uneasy k.n.o.bs have rested so many well-compacted spines, whose uncushioned arms have embraced so many stately forms, over whose inheritance of cares and toils have ached so many ample brows, is filled once more with a goodly armful of scholarship, experience and fidelity. The President never dies. Our precious Mother must not be left too long a widow, for the most urgent of reasons. We talk so much about her maternity that we are apt to overlook the fact that a responsible _Father_ is as necessary to the good name of a well-ordered college as to that of a well-regulated household. As children of the College, our thoughts naturally centre on the fact that she has this day put off the weeds of her nominal widowhood, and stands before us radiant in the adornment of her new espousals. You will not murmur, that, without debating questions of precedence, we turn our eyes upon the new head of the family, to whom our younger brothers are to look as their guide and counsellor as we hope and trust through many long and prosperous years.

Brothers of the a.s.sociation of the Alumini! Our own existence as a society is so bound up with that of the College whose seal is upon our foreheads, that every blessing we invoke on our parent's head returns like the dew from Heaven upon our own. So closely is the welfare of our beloved Mother knitted to that of her chief counsellor and official consort, that in honoring him we honor her under whose roof we are gathered, at whose breast we have been nurtured, whose fair fame is our glory, whose prosperity is our success, whose lease of long life is the charter of our own perpetuity.

I propose the health of the President of Harvard University: We greet our brother as the happy father of a long line of future alumni.

DOROTHY Q.

[Speech of Oliver Wendell Holmes at the banquet of the Boston Merchants' a.s.sociation at Boston, Ma.s.s., May 23, 1884, in honor of the Hon. John Lowell.]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--It was my intention, when I accepted the public invitation to be with you this evening, to excuse myself from saying a word. I am a professor emeritus, which means pretty nearly the same thing as a tired-out or a worn-out instructor. And I do seriously desire that, having during the last fifty years done my share of work at public entertainments, I may hereafter be permitted, as a post-prandial emeritus, to look on and listen in silence at the festivals to which I may have the honor of being invited--unless, indeed, I may happen to wish to be heard. [Applause.] In that case I trust I may be indulged, as an unspoken speech and an unread poem are apt to "strike in," as some complaints are said to, and cause inward commotions. [Applause.] Judge Lowell's eulogy will be on every one's lips this evening. His soundness, his fairness, his learning, his devotion to duty, his urbanity,--these are the qualities which have commended him to universal esteem and honor. [Applause.] I will not say more of the living; I wish to speak of the dead.

In respectfully proposing the memory of his great-great-grandmother [laughter], I am speaking of one whom few if any of you can remember.

[Laughter.] Yet her face is as familiar to me as that of any member of my household. She looks upon me as I sit at my writing-table; she does not smile, she does not speak; even the green parrot on her hand has never opened his beak; but there she is, calm, unchanging, in her immortal youth, as when the untutored artist fixed her features on the canvas. To think that one little word from the lips of Dorothy Quincy, your great-great-grandmother, my great-grandmother, decided the question whether you and I should be here to-night [laughter], in fact whether we should be anywhere [laughter] at all, or remain two bodiless dreams of nature! But it was Dorothy Quincy's "Yes" or "No" to Edward Jackson which was to settle that important matter--important to both of us, certainly--yes, Your Honor; and I can say truly, as I look at you and remember your career, important to this and the whole American community. [Applause.]

The picture I referred to is but a rude one, and yet I was not ashamed of it when I wrote a copy of verses about it, three or four of which this audience will listen to for the sake of Dorothy's great-grandson. I must alter the p.r.o.nouns a little, for this occasion only:--

Look not on her with eyes of scorn-- Dorothy Q. was a lady born; Ay! since the galloping Normans came England's annals have known her name; And still to the three-hilled rebel town Dear is that ancient name's renown, For many a civic wreath they won, The youthful sire and the gray-haired son.

O damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.!

Strange is the gift (we) owe to you!

Such a gift as never a king Save to daughter or son might bring-- All (our) tenure of heart and hand, All (our) t.i.tle to house and land; Mother and sister and child and wife And joy and sorrow and death and life!

What if a hundred years ago Those close-shut lips had answered "No!"

When forth the tremulous question came That cost the maiden her Norman name, And under the folds that look so still The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill-- Should (we) be (we), or could it be One-tenth (two others) and nine-tenths (we)?

Soft is the breath of a maiden's Yes: Not the light gossamer stirs with less; But never a cable that holds so fast Through all the battles of wave and blast, And never an echo of speech or song That lives in the babbling air so long!

There were tones in the voice that whispered then You may hear to-day in a hundred men.

O lady and lover, now faint and far Your images hover--and here we are, Solid and stirring in flesh and bone-- Edwards and Dorothys--all their own-- A goodly record for time to show Of a syllable whispered so long ago.

[Applause prolonged.]

I give you: "The memory of Dorothy Jackson, born Dorothy Quincy, to whose choice of the right monosyllable we owe the presence of our honored guest and all that his life has achieved for the welfare of the community." [Great applause and cheers.]

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

SONS OF HARVARD WHO FELL IN BATTLE

[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the "Autocrat," at the Harvard Alumni Dinner, at Cambridge, June 25, 1884.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ALUMNI:--Another day than this has been consecrated to the memories of the war. On that day we think not of the children of the university or the city, hardly, even, of the children whom the State has lost, but of a mighty brotherhood whose parent was our common country. To-day the college is the centre of all our feeling, and if we refer to the war it is in connection with the college, and not for its own sake that we do so. What then did the college do to justify our speaking of the war now? She sent a few gentlemen into the field, who died there becomingly. I know of nothing more. The great forces which ensured the North success would have been at work even if those men had been absent. Our means of raising money and troops would not have been less, I dare say. The great qualities of the race, too, would still have been there. The greatest qualities, after all, are those of a man, not those of a gentleman, and neither North nor South needed colleges to learn them.

And yet--and yet I think we all feel that, to us, at least, the war would seem less beautiful and inspiring, if those few gentlemen had not died as they did. Look at yonder portrait[7] and yonder bust[8] and tell me if stories such as they commemorate do not add a glory to the bare fact that the strongest legions prevailed. So it has been since wars began. After history has done its best to fix men's thoughts upon strategy and finance, their eyes have turned and rested on some single romantic figure--some Sidney, some Falkland, some Wolfe, some Montcalm, some Shaw. This is that little touch of the superfluous which is necessary. Necessary as art is necessary, and knowledge which serves no mechanical end. Superfluous only as glory is superfluous, or a bit of red ribbon that a man would die to win.

It has been one merit of Harvard College that it has never quite sunk to believing that its only function was to carry a body of specialists through the first stage of their preparation. About these halls there has always been an aroma of high feeling not to be found or lost in science or Greek--not to be fixed, yet all-pervading. And the warrant of Harvard College for writing the names of its dead graduates upon its tablets is not in the mathematics, the chemistry, the political economy which it taught them, but that, in ways not to be discovered, by traditions not to be written down, it helped men of lofty natures to make good their faculties. I hope and I believe that it will long give such help to its children. I hope and I believe that long after our tears for the dead have been forgotten, this monument to their memory will still give such help to generations to whom it is only a symbol--a symbol of man's destiny and power for duty, but a symbol also of that something more by which duty is swallowed up in generosity, that something more which led men like Shaw to toss life and hope like a flower before the feet of their country and their cause. [Cheers.]

THE JOY OF LIFE

[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a banquet in his honor given by the Suffolk Bar a.s.sociation, Boston, March 7, 1900, upon his elevation to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Judicial Court of Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 a.s.sumpsit 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 a.s.sent. 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 pa.s.sed? 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 n.o.bly 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sionate struggle has not been quite in vain. [Applause.]

LORD HOUGHTON