THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.*

"I ass going to take it for granted now and henceforth," says the voice which has spoken so many delightful things to us in the The Poet at the Breatfast-Tabla By Oliver Wendell Holmes. London : nontledge and Bons. 1872

persons of the Autocrat and the Professor, now speaking in the person of the Poet, "that I have secured one, good, faithful, loving reader, who never finds fault, who never gets sleepy over my pages, whom no critic can bully out of a liking for me, and to whom I am always safe in addressing myself." We do not know enough of the Boston reading public to pre- dict certainly how many such readers Dr. Holmes will find amongst his own people, but if they do not prove to be considerably more than one, it will be time for the visible axis of the earth to think of sticking out somewhere else than at Boston. At all events, we can answer for a reasonable number being found in England, and we should like to claim to satisfy the description ourselves, but for the plural impersonality which hedges reviewers. It is certain that no critic can bully us out of liking the Poet's talk, for we have set ourselves to lead others into liking it, and we also bear the critic's pen ; it is certain, too, that- we have not fallen asleep over any page. And we suppose the Poet can address himself to us safely enough, for if we could have been angry with anything he said, we ought to have taken amiss certain wicked remarks about epizoic literature "becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from its ad infinitum progeny." It might offend us if some one should say that literature is infested with reviewers, which is but a milder suggestion of the same image. But from the Autocrat, Professor, or Poet—threefold faces half-veiling the one mind full of subtle and kindly wit—it comes very differently. Let who will be indignant for the sake of this epizoic order of things ; let the greater journals that feed upon books and the lesser journals that feed upon the greater find their champions ; we have no critical remark to make except that Dr. Holmes has a strange way of making a man see the ludicrous side of his own work, and keeping him in a good humour all the time.

In the Poet at the Breakfast-7 able we have the conclusion of the series which began several years ago with the Autocrat. The Table, which is the permanent centre of all these chapters of pleasant discourse, from which they wander into infinite varieties of digression, and come back with sudden turns when least ex- pected, is the table of a boarding-house at Boston. Three genera- tions of boarders have come and gone under the rule of the much- contriving and sometimes much-enduring landlady ; or rather they have come and not gone, having the privilege of perpetual youth which belongs to all creatures of fiction that once fairly succeed in living. Many of our readers will remember the com- panies which were gathered round the Autocrat and the Professor in the two former volumes. The meetings of this year, ruled over and reported by the Poet, are the last. The landlady has given up keeping boarders, and the Poet ends with a set farewell and an epilogue to the series ; a very quaint epilogue, in the author's most individual manner, showing how a book-hunter picks up the whole set at a cheap store for one dime, A.D. 1972. We know 111) living writer who could with a more unaffected !tumour take his readers into confidence on the question which must come into the mind of everyone who puts his heart into his work—What. will have become of me and my labours a century hence ?—or who. could more happily bring out with a few touches the thoughts the question calls up, half solemn, half ludicrous,—or rather, per- adventure, so solemn that we shrink from looking much or- directly at them, and betake ourselves for refuge to bravado or irony, as a coarser or a finer nature prompts.. And certainly if any one quality is to be assigned to explain the charm and subtle flavour of Dr. Holmea's writing, the choice may well fall upon his irony ; by this turn of his mind he chiefly excels. It is far from the blundering superficial semblance of the thing which often passes current ; nor is it much akin to. the grave and fatal Sophoclean irony which the Bishop of St. David's expounded long ago in his brilliant essay ; it rather calls to memory the ways of Plato in his lighter mood, when he over- flows with lovely or grotesque fancies, and shows himself—what only one or two of his editors have discovered him to be—one of the great hutnourists of the world. We say this knowing that Plato is unapproachable, and not wishing to raise any undue expectation of finding the splendours of the Platonic Symposium at the breakfast-table of Boston. But Platonism is as universal and as. unconfined by local limits as Pantagruelism, and notwithstanding the differences of scale, of language, and of circumstances, a true Platonic aroma is here.

There is a fine touch in this manner in the last chapter of the book. The Old Master, the Poet, and the Astronomer, who have in the course of the volume become so intimate as to form a sort of speculative club, meet to hear the master read out some of his reflections. Hb announces his intention of reading the page that bolda the quintessence of his vital experiences. The Poet is naturally curious:—

" What was he going to tell us? The Young Astronomer looked -upon him with an eye as clear and steady and brilliant as the evening star, but I could see that he, too, was a little nervous, wonder-

ing what would come neat The Old Master adjusted his large, round spectacles, and began It has cost me fifty years to find my place in

the Order of Things It was on the morning of my fiftieth birth- day that the solution of the great problem I had sought so long came to me as a simple formula, with a few grand but obvious inferences. I will repeat the substance of this final intuition. The one central fact in the Order of Things which solves all questions is'—At this moment we were interrupted by a knock at the Master's door."

It was the landlady, who announced her abdication come the -end of December. And the Old Master would not be induced to complete the disclosure of his formula. It is curious that as the Poet ends, the Professor begins with an interrupted aphorism. in the Professor's case the sentence does get finished after a page or two, but it only states the problem of the great end of being, whereof the solution remains written in red ink on the interleaved page of the Old Master's book which the Poet did not hear.

And who is the Old Muter? It was a question to be expected, but we had come to believe so completely in the reality of the Poet and all his friends that we had forgotten the necessity of explanation. The Master is a very important person, and the first we meet in the book. He talks through five pages before we find it is not the Poet himself, and he continues to talk afterwards with much more authority than was allowed to any but the chief speaker in the days of the Auto- crat and the Professor. Sometimes he seems to represent the writer's real thought more than the Poet himself, so that this work has a dual character, which we conjecture to mean an in- -creased differentiation of the intellectual and decisive from the 'vague and fanciful element in Dr. Holmes's own mind. But how- ever that may be, the Master's discourse is exceeding good. Almost his first word is one of those trenchant sayings whose truth does not the less go to the root of the matter for making itself felt at once:—

" You can't keep a dead-level long, if you burn everything down at to make it. Why, bless your soul! if all the cities of the world were reduced to ashes, you'd have a new set of millionaires in a couple of years or so, out of the trade in potash."

Here is another of his incisive judgments:— " Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, -or throw themselves down before ; they always did, they always will ; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words, which are just as much used for idols as promissory notes are used for values."

As the days go on, the Poet and the Master become fast friends, and hold many colloquies apart from the rest. We are introduced to the Master's library, an ideal library, with a charming mixture -of method and oddity, one notable feature being a place reserved for foundling books that have seen better days, adopted out of the pure magnanimity of a book-lover. It is found that the best way -of conversing with the Master is "to wind him up with a question, and let him run down all of himself." And at last his con- tinuous manner of talk passes by a natural transition into read- ing out his written thoughts. He has something to say of Darwinism and the scientific study of man, in a tone in no way less human than the Poet's or the Professor's accustomed thoughtful moods, but more firm and assured :—

" To study nature without fear is possible, but without reproach, impossible. The man who worships in the temple of knowledge must -carry his arms with him, as our Puritan fathers had to do when they gathered in their first rude meeting-houses. It is a fearful thing to meddle with the ark which holds the mysteries of creation. I remem- ber that when I was a child the tradition was whispered round among us little folks that if we tried to count the stars we should drop down dead. Nevertheless, the stars have been counted, and the astronomer has sur- vived [He goes on to speak of the duty of reverence for the spirit of reverence wherever we find it. But after two paragraphs more the Poet shows by catching at a word with a senseless question that he is not awake. The Master only stares, and shuts up his book.] Sat ,prata bithsrunt, he said. A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop. You'll think of some of these things you've been getting half asleep over by and by."

The Master has his outbreaks of downright fun too. One of the most amusing pieces in the book is his description of some 4‘ music-pounding" at a concert by "a young woman with as -many white muslin flounces round her as the planet Saturn has rings," who "gave the music-stool a twirl or two, and fluffed -down on to it like a whirl of soapsuds in a hand-basin." We will not spoil the reader's pleasure in the account of the perform- ance following this promise.

The next most interesting person is the Astronomer. We first know him as a lonely student, something dissatisfied with himself and the world, whose cares and doubts are poured out in a series of poems, always curious, very beautiful at times, and very differ- ent from any other of Mr. Holmes's works we know, called "Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts." Then there is a young girl in the boarding-house, also alone in the world, who struggles to make a living by writing stories for magazines. It comes to pass one evening that the whole party visits the Astronomer's observatory : the Poet forecasts from this meeting in a new way a chance for the elective affinities :-

"What tremendous forces they are, if two subjects of them come within range! There lies a bit of iron. All the dynamic agencies of the universe are pledged to hold it just in that position, and there it will lie until it becomes a heap of red-brown rust. But see, I hold a magnet to it,—it looks to you just such a bit of iron as the other,—and lo! it leaves them all,—the tugging of the mighty earth ; of the ghostly moon that walks in white, trailing the snaky waves of the ocean after her; of the awful sun, twice as large as a sphere that the whole orbit of the moon would but just girdle,—it leaves the wrestling of all their forces which are at a dead-lock with each other, all fighting for it, and springs straight to the magnet. What a lucky thing it is for well-con- ducted persons that the maddening elective affinities don't come into play in full force very often!"

In fact, the Astronomer and the girl look at a double star together, and it is prophetic of their fate. The last lesson in astronomy— the last of a course merely hinted at—glides in the most natural way from the constellations into one of those love-passages in which.

Dr. Holmes knows how to tell the eternally old and new story with an ever new freshness and grace.

Another figure we must not forget is the Scarabee, a dry little entomologist, who thinks himself not fit to be called an entomo- logist, seeing that beetles alone are enough for the work of one man's life. Of him the master says :—

"These specialists are the coral-insects that build up a reef. By and by it will be an island, and for aught we know, may grow into a con- tinent. But I don't want to be a coral-insect myself."

He looks at the world and all that therein is only in relation to the Coleoptera.

He asks to look at a copy of Paradise Lost the Master has been reading from :— ", Dermestes lardarius,' he said, pointing to a place where the edge of one side of the outer cover had been slightly tasted by some insect. Very fond of leather while they're in the larva state.'—' Damage the goods as had as mice,' said the salesman.—' Eat half the binding off Folio 67,' said the Register of Deeds.—' Something did, anyhow, and it wasn't mice. Found the shelf covered with little hairy cases belong- ing to something or other that had no business there.'—' Skins of the Dermestes lardarius,' said the Scarabee, you can always tell them by those brown hairy coats. That's the name to give them.'—' What good does it do to give 'em a name after they've eat tho binding off my folios?' asked the Register of Deeds." [Register for Registrar is a startling American innovation, unless it is a revival.]

His last and most sociable performance is a wedding present of a diamond beetle to the Astronomer and his bride—accompanied by a suggestion that the larvw may like some day to look at it, and by the Scarabee's only observed smile. And we part from the Coleopterist with a feeling that he, too, is human.

The book may be said to challenge comparison with its pre- decessors in some sense, but they are companions without being rivals. They differ as the same man differs from himself at one age and another. If in this volume the dashing versatility of the Auto- crat has somewhat abated—and certainly we are far from saying it is lost—there is a gain, on the other hand, in depth of feeling and maturity of thought. There is every temptation to linger at the feast spread for us at the Breakfast-Table, but we have delayed our readers long enough from seeking and enjoying it at first hand. And in case they should think such easy and graceful writing must come by nature and so think lightly of the art that has brought it to perfection, we commend to them the landlady's remark on literary pursuits in general :—" There ain't much differ- ence, for that matter, between sewing on shirts and writing on stories,—one way you work with your foot, and the other way you work with your fingers, but I rather guess there's more head- ache in the stories than there is in the stitches."