A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

A prevailing alertness of mind in Holmes’s generation offset the natural conservatism which belongs to an aristocracy. For a hundred years Harvard had been more liberal than Yale. The cleavage was already taking place between Unitarian and Trinitarian or Congregational believers. To be sure, the eyes of Abiel Holmes were focused on the past, and he sent his son to be schooled under the safe influences of Phillips Andover Academy, which were fostered by the orthodox theological seminary just across the road. But even here Wendell—as he was called—decided against entering the ministry because a certain clergyman “looked and talked so like an undertaker.” And when he entered college in his home town, while he faced the traditional required course of classical languages, history, mathematics, and moral philosophy, the wind from over the sea was blowing through it, and he breathed the atmosphere which was passing into the blood of Emerson and Thoreau and George Ripley and the other Transcendentalists-to-be.

In his college days he was a little cheerful student of average performance who refused then as always to take himself soberly, although he did not lack inner seriousness. He practised his gift for writing and was rewarded by the acceptance of some of his efforts in the fashionable Annuals of the day—repositories of politely sentimental tales, sketches, and poems in fancy bindings which ornamented the marble-topped tables in the “best rooms.” Under his apparently aimless amiability, however, there was an independence of judgment which twice recorded itself, in 1829 and ’30. The first time was on the occasion of an issue in his father’s church when the son was forced to agree with the liberal majority, who literally took the pastor’s pulpit from him, so that he had to reëstablish himself in North Cambridge. Few harder tests could be devised than one between loyalty to conviction and loyalty to family interests. The other sign of independence was his choice of a profession. A boy of his heritage was socially if not divinely predestined for some sort of intellectual life. If he went to college, assurance was made doubly sure that he would not become a business man. From the outset he rejected the ministry as his “calling.” He shrank from the formal complexities of the law as he did from the logic of the theologians. The thought of teaching did not seem to enter his mind. Literature could not afford him a livelihood. By elimination, then, only medicine was left to him, but in his day medicine did not occupy a position of dignity equal with the other professions. Medical science was still in earliest youth, and the practice of “physic” was jointly discredited by the barber, the veterinary, the midwife, the “yarb doctor,” and the miscellaneous quack. This young “Brahmin,” however, saw the chance for contributing to the progress of a budding science, and made his decision with quiet disregard of social prejudice.

Study in Paris, successful research work, practice in Boston, and a year’s teaching at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire led to an appointment on the medical faculty at Harvard which he held actively from 1847 to 1882 and as emeritus until his death. As a practitioner he was not remarkably successful. At the first his extremely youthful appearance and his jocosity of manner stood in the way. People could not be expected to flock to the office of a young man who was known to have said that “all small fevers would be gratefully received.” And later his interest in things literary was regarded with distrust by prospective patients. As a teacher, on the other hand, he was unusually effective because of the traits which made him a poor business-getter. He was vivacious and deft in his methods. He knew how to put his ideas in order, he was a master hand at expounding them, and he was ingenious in providing neat formulas for memorizing the myriad details of physiology and anatomy.

His profession supplied Holmes with a background of thought which was different from any of his contemporaries. It supplied him with titles and whole poems, such as “Nux Postcœnatica,” “The Stethoscope Song,” and “The Mysterious Illness,” h literary essays, such as “The Physiology of Versification,” and with a whole volume of medical essays. It furnished the motives for his three “medicated novels,”—prenatal influence in “Elsie Venner,” physical magnetism (by its opposite) in “A Mortal Antipathy,” and telepathy in “The Guardian Angel.” It was the basis for scores of passages and hundreds of allusions in the four volumes of the “Breakfast Table” series. And, furthermore, in the natural sympathy which it generated in him for every branch of progressive science it gave ground for the felicitous toast:[28] “The union of Science and Literature—a happy marriage, the fruits of which are nowhere seen to better advantage than in our American Holmes.” This is not to say that Holmes was alone in his consciousness of science. Thoreau was fully as aware of it in the field of plant and animal study; all things considered, Emerson and Whitman were more responsive to its deeper spiritual implications. It is rather that Holmes had his special avenue of approach through the lore of the physician.

The Boston to which Holmes removed when he began his professional career was all-sufficing to him for the rest of his life. On Beacon Hill, the stronghold of the old social order, there was an eager, outreaching intellectual life. On its slope was the Boston Athenæum; just below were the Old Corner Book Store and the little shop maintained by Elizabeth Peabody. The theaters were rising at its foot. Music was being fostered under the wise persistence of James S. Dwight, Washington Allston was doing the best of his painting, and the traditions of good statesmanship were being maintained by men like Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. To cap all, good-fellowship reigned and many a quiet dinner became a feast of reason and a flow of soul. “Nature and art combined to charm the senses; the equatorial zone of the system was soothed by well-studied artifices; the faculties were off duty, and fell into their natural attitudes; you saw wisdom in slippers and science in a short jacket.” Although Holmes discounted it in the moment of utterance, he was not unfriendly to the dictum: “Boston State-house is the Hub of the Solar System. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.”

Moreover, as the half century of his Boston residence progressed there was no waning in the intellectual life. The obvious leaders, whose names are known to everyone, were surrounded by a large circle of thinking men and women. At the corner of the Common, just across from the Statehouse, was the mansion of George Ticknor, then retired from his Harvard professorship but hospitable in the offer of his rich library to the new generation of scholars. William Ticknor founded a publishing business into which he soon took young James T. Fields, a house which under various firm names has had a distinguished and unbroken career. Elizabeth Peabody was a radioactive center of all sorts of enterprises and enthusiasms—the Pestalozzian Temple School, the “conversations” on history, the book shop, and the temporary publishing of the Dial. Francis H. Underwood was the untiring champion of the idea which with perfect unselfishness he handed over to the abler founders of the Atlantic Monthly. And scores of others with less definite fruits of no less definite interest in life talked well and listened well and wrote well for the passing reader of the day.

In this community Holmes early took his place as the accepted humorist, and for the first twenty-five years he wrote almost entirely in verse. The fact that two of his earliest and most famous poems were anything but funny reënforces the point rather than gainsays it. For the humorist, in contrast to the joker, is a serious man with a special method which he employs usually but not always. If Holmes had not been capable of blazing with the indignation of “Old Ironsides” or glowing with the sympathy of “The Last Leaf,” he would have been a clever dispenser of jollities but not a commentator on life. Much of his youthful composition was of the lighter variety—pleasant extravagances on the level of the “Croaker Papers,” not quite up to Salmagundi (see pp. 116, 134). “The Music Grinders,” “The Comet,” “Daily Trials,” and “The Stethoscope Song” belong in this class. More humorous and less jocose are the verse with a definite satirical turn. “The Ballad of the Oysterman” was a gibe at the sentimental lays to be found in all the Annuals. “My Aunt” hit off the Apollinean Institute type of Young Lady Finishing School to which he returned in a chapter of “Elsie Venner”; the sort of subject to which he returned too in his shafts at the Latter-Day Adventists, in “Latter-Day Warnings,” and at the decline of Calvinism, in “The Deacon’s Masterpiece.”

At the same time Holmes won a place as the local laureate,—for his class of 1829, for Harvard, and for every kind of occasion, grave and gay, on which some appropriate verse could point a moral and adorn the program. This is an easy accomplishment for those who have the gift, but both difficult and dull in the hands of many a poet who is capable of higher things. It demands fluency of pen, ready inventiveness, informality, and a confident good humor in its oral delivery. These all belonged to Holmes, and not least of them a gracious social manner. It is far easier to depreciate this kind of verse than it is to be consistently effective in it.

Twice in his early maturity he wrote in verse on the theory of poetry. The first, in 1836, when he was entering the medical profession, was his Phi Beta Kappa poem “Poetry”; the second was “Urania,” in 1846, shortly before he accepted his Harvard professorship. The object of “Poetry,” he wrote in a preface for its publication, was “to express some general truths on the sources and the machinery of poetry; to sketch some changes which may be said to have taken place in its history, constituting four grand eras; and to point out some less obvious manifestations of the poetic principle.” In old age he looked back on this ambitious early effort with kindly indulgence, and allowed it to stand as a matter of biographical interest, although it was so evidently the product “of a young person trained after the schools of classical English verse as represented by Pope, Goldsmith, and Campbell, with whose lines his memory was early stocked.” When, however, he wrote “Urania, a Rhymed Lesson” he wore a friendly smile and did his teaching in a less didactic way. He knew his audience, he said, and he knew that they all expected to be amused.

I know a tailor, once a friend of mine,