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.