The Professor of the Breakfast Table PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.
by Oliver Wendell Holmes
The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
quarter of a century since these papers were written. Statements
which were true then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed
of the trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of
the year when the fastest time to that date was given must be very
considerably altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page
49 of the "Autocrat." No doubt many other statements and opinions
might be more or less modified if I were writing today instead of
having written before the war, when the world and I were both more
than a score of years younger.
These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat." They
had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected,
which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest.
Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are
enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his
arrow of the danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the
selfsame flight."
There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs
of itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and
tastes of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press
the flow betrays the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness
in the original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in
the method or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new
track, it will have lost much of its first effect when repeated.
Still, there have not been wanting readers who have preferred this
second series of papers to the first. The new papers were more
aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a
heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism
in others. It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they
called forth. Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as
if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It required
the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.
How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time
when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom
Jones," and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little
engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I
remember it, and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this
patiently." How many times, when, after rough usage from
ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering
in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and
so boil over, those words have calmed the small internal
effervescence! There is very little in them and very little of them;
and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by itself, but it
often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a
catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to
the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar
among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect.
All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from
the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were
written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow-
passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.
But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these
papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable
dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher
treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne,
and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first
written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and
denunciation.