REFERENCES:
W. Sloane Kennedy: Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1883.
J. T. Morse, Jr.: Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1896.
I
HIS LIFE
Holmes invented a phrase which became celebrated—‘the Brahmin caste of New England,’ that is to say, an aristocracy of culture. The inventor of the phrase belonged to the class. He was a son of the Reverend Abiel Holmes, minister of the First Church of Cambridge and author of that ‘painstaking and careful work,’ the American Annals.
Abiel Holmes (a great-grandson of John Holmes, one of the settlers of Woodstock, Connecticut) was twice married. His first wife was Mary Stiles, daughter of President Ezra Stiles of Yale College. Five years after her death he married Sarah Wendell of Boston, who became the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Through the Wendells, Holmes was related by one line of descent to Anne Bradstreet; by another to Evert Jansen Wendell of Albany.
The author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Harvard Commencement Day, August 29, 1809. After a preliminary training at the Cambridgeport Academy (where he had for schoolmates Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana) Holmes completed his college preparation at Phillips Academy, Andover, entered Harvard in the class of 1829, and in due time was graduated.
He had, or thought he had, an inclination to carry the ‘green bag,’ and to this end spent a year at the Dane (now Harvard) Law School, in Cambridge. He soon discovered a greater inclination towards medicine and entered the private medical school of Doctor James Jackson, in Boston. In 1833 he became a student at the École de Médecine in Paris, and during two busy winters heard the lectures of Broussais, Andral, Louis, and other teachers.
In 1836 he began the practice of medicine in Boston. During the two following years he competed for and won four of the Boylston Prizes. Enthusiastic in his profession, he found the life of a general practitioner not to his liking, and when, in 1838, the professorship of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth College was offered him, he was ‘mightily pleased.’ He held the position for two years (1839–40); residence at Hanover was required for three months of each year.
Some time before going to Hanover, Holmes was writing to his friend Phineas Barnes, congratulating him on having entered into ‘the beatific state of duality,’ and wishing himself in like case. ‘I have flirted and written poetry long enough,’ he said, ‘and I feel that I am growing domestic and tabby-ish.’ On June 15, 1840, he married Miss Amelia Jackson, a daughter of Judge Charles Jackson of Boston. She was a young woman of rare endowments. ‘Every estimable and attractive quality of mind and character seemed to be hers.’[45]
In 1847 Holmes was appointed Parkman professor of anatomy and physiology in the Harvard Medical School. The multifarious extra cares involved led him to say that in those early days he occupied not a chair in the college but a settee. He held the position for thirty-five consecutive years.
The reputation which Holmes began early to build up through his writings was partly literary, partly scientific, partly a compound of both. Lovers of well-turned and witty verse knew him through his Poems (1836) and his metrical essays, Urania (1846) and Astræa (1850). The public, always solicitous about its health, heard or read the two lectures on Homœopathy and its kindred Delusions (1842). Physicians made his acquaintance through the Boylston Prize Dissertations (1836–37), and the Essay on the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever (1843).
Fame came to Holmes in 1857 when he began printing in the newly founded ‘Atlantic Monthly’ a series of papers entitled The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Reprinted as a book, it at once took its proper place as an American classic, and now after forty-eight years its popularity seems in no degree lessened.
The following list contains the principal works upon which Holmes’s reputation as a man of letters rests. A full bibliography must be consulted if one would know the extent of his literary and scientific activity: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858; The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, 1860; Currents and Counter-Currents, with Other Addresses, 1861; Elsie Venner, 1861; Songs in Many Keys, 1862; Soundings from the Atlantic, 1864; The Guardian Angel, 1867; The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, 1872; Songs of Many Seasons, 1875; Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, 1879; The Iron Gate and Other Poems, 1880; Pages from an Old Volume of Life, 1883; A Mortal Antipathy, 1885; Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1885; Our Hundred Days in Europe, 1887; Before the Curfew and Other Poems, 1888; Over the Teacups, 1891.
Holmes’s life was without marked incident. His work at the Medical School, his public lectures, social engagements, the normal and agreeable responsibilities of home and society, filled the measure of his days. The visit to England in 1886, when he was made a D. C. L. by Oxford, a Litt. D. by Cambridge, and an LL. D. by Edinburgh, was something like apotheosis, if the term be not too extravagant.
He endured the evils consequent on old age with philosophic composure, and it became at the last a matter of scientific curiosity with him to see how long he could maintain life. He was spared a tedious illness, and died an almost painless death on October 7, 1894.
II
THE MAN
Among the ‘Autocrat’s’ distinguishing traits was humanity. He has recorded the feeling of ‘awe-stricken sympathy’ at first sight of the white faces of the sick in the hospital wards. ‘The dreadful scenes in the operating theatre—for this was before the days of ether—were a great shock to my sensibilities.’ His nerves hardened in time, but he was always keenly alive to human suffering. There is a note of contempt in his reference to Lisfranc, the surgeon, who ‘regretted the splendid guardsmen of the Empire because they had such magnificent thighs to amputate.’
It was once said of Holmes that he was difficult to catch unless he were wanted for some kind act. He lost no opportunity to give happiness. In old age when flattery was tedious, and blindness imminent, and the autograph hunter had become a burden, he patiently wrote his name and transcribed stanzas of ‘Dorothy Q.’ or ‘The Last Leaf’ for admirers from all parts of the earth. This was the smallest tax on his good nature. For years he had been expected to act as counsel and sometimes as literary agent for all the minor poets of America. Many of these innocents conceived Holmes as automatically issuing certificates to the virtue of their work. He was always kind and invariably plain-spoken. To the author of an epic he wrote: ‘I cannot conscientiously advise you to print your poem; it will be an expense to you, and the gain to your reputation will not be an equivalent.’
Holmes believed in the humanizing influences of good blood, social position, and wealth. It was no small matter, he thought, to have a descent from men who had played their parts acceptably in the drama of life. He preferred the man with the ‘family portraits’ to the man with the ‘twenty-cent daguerreotype’ unless he had reason to believe that the latter was the better man of the two. His amusing poem, ‘Contentment,’ is not a jest, but a plain statement of his philosophy.
Open-minded in literary and scientific matters, he was delightfully conservative about places. He respected the country and loved the town. A city man, he was also a man of one city. He professed to have been the discoverer of Myrtle Street, the abode of ‘peace and beauty, and virtue, and serene old age.’ Thus it looked to him as he explored its ‘western extremity of sunny courts and passages.’ Holmes’s books contain many proofs of his cat-like attachment to city nooks and corners, his liking for odd streets, unexpected turns, and winding ways. ‘I have bored this ancient city through and through, until I know it as an old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese.’
Holmes enjoyed above all the sense of an undisturbed possession of things. He complained of the march of modern improvement only when he found himself improved out of one house and driven to take refuge in another. He thought that a wretched state of affairs whereby a man was compelled to move every twenty or thirty years.
With his sunny nature Holmes found it difficult to be a good hater. He had but two violent antipathies, Calvinism and homœopathy. On these he concentrated the little measure of asperity he possessed, together with a large measure of vigorous logic and frank contempt.
III
THE WRITER
In his characteristic prose style Holmes is easy, familiar, off-hand, in short, conversational. He may have spent hours over his paragraphs, but with their air of unpremeditation they give no sign of it. The manner of his prose is well-bred but nonchalant. Yet there is always a note of reserve. The Autocrat is less familiar than he seems.
The conversational style permits abrupt turns, sudden transitions, a pleasant negligence. It also has narrow limits; it cannot rise to eloquence, and fine writing is apt to seem out of place. Holmes knew pretty accurately the limits of his instrument.
Like other practised writers, he varied his style to fit his subject. And while a certain winsomeness is never wanting, it is less apparent in the novels than in the ‘Breakfast-Table’ books, and in the biographies than in the novels. Often he becomes business-like, extremely matter of fact, clearly determined to make his point or to solve his problem without waste of words or superfluous ornament.
With respect to his verse we have been told that Holmes was a ‘consummate master of all that is harmonious, graceful, and pleasing in rhythm and in language.’ Had the eulogist been speaking of Tennyson, or Swinburne, or Shelley, he could have said little more. Holmes’s verse is neat, precise, felicitous, often graceful, unmistakably clever, abounding in pointed phrase and happy rhyme, but taken as a whole it must be adjudged the poetry of a cultivated gentleman and a wit rather than the poetry of a poet.
Much of it has a distinctly old-fashioned air, contrasting oddly with the freshness and ‘modernity’ of the poet’s prose. In his own phrase Holmes ‘was trained after the schools of classical English verse as represented by Pope, Goldsmith, and Campbell.’ The metrical essays (Poetry, Astræa, Urania) show how strong was the Eighteenth-century influence. The choice of metre cannot be questioned. If audiences will have poetic dissertations, they probably suffer least under the heroic couplet. It is easy to comprehend, and not difficult to write; and the form of the verse tempts to cleverness.
IV
THE AUTOCRAT AND ITS COMPANIONS, OVER THE TEACUPS, OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE
The motto, ‘Every man his own Boswell,’ on the title-page of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, is a key to the book. The conceit has merits besides that of novelty. There is a world of humorous suggestion in the idea of ‘doubling’ the parts of philosophic wit and worshipping reporter.
The scene is a Boston boarding-house with its more or less commonplace people, the landlady, her daughter, her son Benjamin Franklin, the young fellow called John, the old gentleman who sits opposite, the poor relation, the divinity student, the schoolmistress, and the Autocrat himself. They talk, listen, jest, laugh. Little by little the commonplace characters grow attractive. Pleasant and lovable traits come to light. There is pathos, sentiment, a deal of mirth, but little action. The Autocrat marries the schoolmistress towards the close of the book. So much likeness is there to an old-fashioned love story, and no more.
In general the characters interest less for what they say than for what they prompt the Autocrat to say. He says many things, and all so wise, so entertaining, so clever. When Holmes threw off these sparkling paragraphs month by month, he could have had little idea what the index would reveal. He glances from subject to subject, touching lightly here and lightly there. Poetry, pugilism, horse-racing, theology, and tree-lore are all equally interesting to him and to us. The reader is not too long detained by any one thing. An infinite number of topics are handled with effervescent gayety in a manner sometimes called ‘French.’ Holmes accused Emerson of want of logical sequence. That was a master stroke. Open a volume of the Breakfast-Table series at random and you chance on the oddest combinations of subjects, as when a paragraph on insanity is followed by a paragraph on private theatricals—perhaps a less illogical juxtaposition than at first sight appears. Waywardness and inconsequence are among the principal charms of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.
That a book so distinctively local in atmosphere and allusion should have attained at once and kept to this day widespread popularity is a little surprising. For local it is—provincial, as New Yorkers would say. At all events, it is Bostonian to the last degree. The little city, compact and picturesque, was not merely the background, the scene of the breakfast-table episodes and conversations; the entire volume is saturated with the atmosphere of Boston. To Holmes it was the one city worth while, the city whose State House was Hub of the Solar System. By his testimony (and who should know better?) you could not pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.
The Autocrat was followed by the Professor and the Poet. The critical history of sequels is well known. Seldom a complete failure, they are rarely an unqualified success. Yet it is not easy to see wherein The Professor at the Breakfast-Table falls much below The Autocrat. The book would be justified were it only for the pathetic figure of Little Boston, to say nothing of Iris, the young Marylander, the Model of all the Virtues, and the Koh-i-noor. It is something, too, to have seen the landlady’s daughter appropriately wedded to an undertaker, and the young fellow called John also married, and in possession of ‘one of them little articles’ for which he had longed in the days of bachelorhood, to wit, a boy of his own.
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, a storehouse of delightful inventions, proved the least attractive of the three to the public. But all of Holmes’s old-time skill returned when he wrote Over the Teacups, his last book. The framework is simple but attractive, the characters have genuine vitality and pique the reader by suggesting that they must have been drawn from life. The Dictator is an old friend. Number Five, the Tutor, the Counsellor, the two Annexes, Number Seven, the Mistress and Delilah are agreeable acquaintances, and the misfortune is ours if we do not know them as well as the figures of The Autocrat.
All these books are personal, known as such, and deriving half their charm from the reader’s ability to recognize Holmes himself under various disguises. In Our Hundred Days in Europe the author speaks in propria persona, and the volume may be described as a big printed letter addressed to the writer’s friends, who, loving him as they do, will rejoice in his happiness and his triumphs.
V
THE POET
The Autocrat’s poetical works contain a generous measure of what elderly bards call their ‘juvenilia.’ We all understand the term. It means verses which the bards in question would gladly have left in the solitude of old magazines, and which admirers insist on dragging into light,—poems that help to stock the school readers and speakers, and which, because the copyright has expired by the unjust law of the land, compilers of anthologies seize on and parade as representative.
That Holmes suffers but little by the persistence of his ‘juvenilia’ and ‘early verses’ is due to their frankly comic and grotesque character. The reader is spared faded sentiment, and he is heartily amused by the ingenuity of the conceits, the sparkle of the rhymes, the satire, the epigrammatic wit. There is mirth still in that brilliant essay in verbal gymnastics ‘The Comet’ (a dyspeptic’s dream), in ‘The September Gale’ (a boy’s lament for his Sunday breeches, blown from the line one fatal wash-day and never recovered), in ‘The Spectre Pig’ (a parody on Dana’s ‘Buccaneer’), in ‘The Height of the Ridiculous,’ ‘Daily Trials,’ ‘The Treadmill Song,’ ‘The Dorchester Giant,’ ‘The Music-Grinders,’ and the heartlessly funny poem entitled ‘My Aunt.’
Holmes was the readiest and the happiest of ‘occasional’ poets. No one was so apt as he in meeting the needs of the moment, in brightening with rhymed felicities the banquet, the class reunion, or in greeting the distinguished stranger. He had rare skill in fitting the word to the audience; it was impossible for him to be dull, and being good-humored, it was difficult for him to say ‘No’ when committees were importunate. Of his three hundred and twenty-seven poems, nearly one half are poems of occasion. He wrote the greeting to Charles Dickens, to the Prince Imperial, a poem for the Moore celebration, for the dedication of the Stratford Fountain, for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College. His poems for the Class of 1829, forty-four in number, reflect the history of the times as well as the mood of the writer. The most famous of them is ‘The Boys’ (1859). Its motive, that boy-nature never quite dies in the man, and its defiant optimism were calculated to have rejuvenating effect on a group of classmates then thirty years out of college.
This art requires a quality of mind akin to that of the improvisatore. Holmes was Boston’s poet laureate. His power to put an idea into self-singing measure saved the battle-ship ‘Constitution,’ and did much to save the ‘Old South’ Church.
In his finer work there is a delicious blending of thoughtfulness and humorous fancy. Only Holmes could have given the lines on ‘Dorothy Q.’ their most original touch,—asking what would have been the result for him had prospective great-grandmother said ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’:—
Should I be I, or would it be
One tenth another to nine tenths me?
Half the pathos in that fragile and beautiful piece of workmanship, ‘The Last Leaf,’ derives from the humor, from the blending of laughter and tears. Even in the exquisite piece, attributed to Iris, ‘Under the Violets,’ a description of a young girl’s burial-place, the lighter touch is not wholly wanting:—
When, turning round their dial-track,
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
Her little mourners, clad in black,
The crickets, sliding through the grass,
Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
His highest flights are represented by ‘The Chambered Nautilus’ and ‘Musa,’ by the quaint and fanciful ‘Homesick in Heaven,’ and by the simple and pathetic little lament entitled ‘Martha.’ His claim to the name of poet must rest on these, on his fine setting of the romance of Agnes Surriage, and on his tributes to Bryant and to Everett.
VI
FICTION AND BIOGRAPHY
Holmes wrote three novels. Although readable, original, based on a thorough comprehension of the scenes described, the life, antecedents, prejudices, habits, and manners of the people portrayed, nevertheless they strike one as being experiments in fiction rather than true novels. They may be classed with similar attempts by J. G. Holland and Bayard Taylor. Each of these writers was a practised craftsman. The trained man of letters can write a volume which he, his friends, his publishers, the public, and many fair-minded critics agree in calling a novel. But the book in question does not become a novel from having been cast in the orthodox form. It resembles a novel more nearly than it resembles anything else, nevertheless it is not a veritable novel. Any reader can feel it, though he may not be able to say just where the difference lies, or how there happens to be a difference. Many a writer, it would seem, has only to continue his efforts to arrive finally at the making of a true novel. He falls short because his mind is working in an unwonted medium rather than because he lacks inventive ability.
If Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel fail of being true novels, they are at least highly successful studies in fiction and have given and will continue to give a world of pleasure. If A Mortal Antipathy falls short of the excellence attained by the other two, it has at least the virtue of having been written by a man who could not be uninteresting, no matter what was his age or his humor.
Elsie Venner is a study in prenatal influences. The motive is gruesome enough. A young woman, bitten by a snake, transmits certain tendencies thus derived to her child. The subject was better adapted to Hawthorne’s pen than to the Autocrat’s. A man of science knows too much. Imagination is hampered. ‘What is’ and ‘What might be’ are in perpetual conflict. A poet (such as Hawthorne essentially was) throws science to the winds. Holmes goes at the problem in a brisk, business-like way. Hawthorne would have treated it as a mystery, not dragging it into broad light.
Elsie Venner was dramatized and staged. Holmes went to see it. What he thought of the play at the time is not recorded, but in after years he pronounced it ‘bad, very bad.’
The Guardian Angel also deals with the question of heredity. The problem of how many of our ancestors come out in us, and just how they make themselves felt, was always fascinating to Holmes. There are no snakes in this story to account for Myrtle Hazard’s peculiarities, but something quite as enigmatical, namely, an Indian. One character in The Guardian Angel has come near to achieving immortality—Gifted Hopkins, the minor poet, whose name was an inspiration. He represents a harmless and much-abused race. The successful in his own craft are even more impatient with him than the mockers among the laity, probably because Gifted, in the innocence of his heart, desires to have his verses read, and sends them to eminent poets under the mistaken impression that they will be welcome. Holmes confessed that he had been hard on Gifted Hopkins.
The memoir of John Lothrop Motley, in addition to being a formal record of personal history and literary achievement, is a spirited defence of a proud, a gifted, and (in the biographer’s opinion) an ill-used man, a man who, after years of successful public service, was needlessly and wantonly humbled and mortified. Hence the note of fine indignation which vibrates through the narrative.
The life of Emerson contributed by Holmes to the series of ‘American Men of Letters’ was a surprise to the public. To call for judgment on the most transcendental of New England authors by the least transcendental, to invite the poet of ‘The One-Hoss Shay’ to pronounce on the poet of ‘The Sphinx,’ seems an odd if not a humorous performance. Whoever suggested it did a wise thing, and the result of the suggestion was a useful and agreeable piece of biographical writing.
The work is thoroughly done, even to an analysis of the individual essays. Who will, may view Emerson through the Autocrat’s eyes. They had a close bond in their liking for the tangible facts of life. ‘Too much,’ says Holmes, ‘has been made of Emerson’s mysticism. He was an intellectual rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let go the string of his balloon.’
* * * * *
That we read Holmes on Emerson less for the sake of Emerson than for the sake of Holmes suggests the possibility that we read all the Autocrat’s books in the same spirit. Without question his work is of value in the degree in which it reveals its author. He could not be impersonal, he could not be dramatic. But he was fortunate in that he could always be himself. He was one of the most delightful of men. And being likewise one of the friendliest of writers he is most successful when the form of his books, like The Autocrat and Over the Teacups, permits him, as it were, to bring his easy chair into the centre of the room while we gather about him anxious to have him begin to talk, hoping that he will be in no haste to leave off.