A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

Expects great doings in the button line,— For mirth’s concussions rip the outward case, And plant the stitches in a tenderer place, I know my audience,—these shall have their due; A smile awaits them ere my song is through!

But, he went on to say, he knew himself, too, and he proposed no more to be the buffoon than to be the savage satirist. Beneath his smiles there was a kindly seriousness. A dozen years later, in the fifth of the “Autocrat” papers, he put the case in a little allegory, the end of which is worth quoting in full:

The stone is ancient error. The grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its color by it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings which thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native hues in the sunshine. Then shall God’s minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty—Divinity taking outlines and color—light upon the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.

By these stages, then, Holmes concluded that he was an essayist and developed into one. The “Poetry” of 1836 was entitled “A Metrical Essay,” and it was, without intending to be, distinctly prosaic. “Urania,” of 1846, was self-described as “A Rhymed Lesson” and affected to be nothing more. At last “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table”—adopting the title and the form of an unsuccessful beginning in the New England Magazine of 1831–1832—resorted frankly to prose and achieved a wider reputation for Holmes than all the foregoing verse had done.[29] The young person trained through the reading of Pope, Goldsmith, and Campbell was in the end fitted to do his best work after the manner of Addison, Goldsmith, and Lamb. From the appearance of “The Autocrat” Holmes’s verse was subordinated in bulk and importance to his prose.

With his assumption of the Atlantic editorship, Lowell had set the prime condition that Holmes should become a regular contributor, and it is evident from the motto on the title page, “Every man his own Boswell,” that Holmes’s conversation had furnished the suggestion for the series. The vehicle was perfectly adapted to the load it was devised to carry. The introduction of a chief spokesman in a loosely organized group made way for the casual drift from topic to topic. The accident of a boarding-house selection justified the domination by one speaker which would have been unnatural in any social group. The continuity of the group gave a chance for characterization and for the spinning of a slight narrative thread comparable to those on which the Citizen of the World and the “De Coverley Papers” were strung. And the chief speaker, autocrat that he was, could give vent to his thoughts on the universe without let or hindrance, and when the whim seized him could impose his latest poems upon his always tolerant and usually deferential fellow-boarders. From the publication of the first number Lowell’s judgment was vindicated, with the result not only that the Autocrat spoke through twelve issues, but that the thread of his discourse was continued with “The Professor at the Breakfast-Table,” in 1859, was resumed with “The Poet at the Breakfast-Table,” in 1871, and was not concluded until the conversations “Over the Teacups,” in 1890.

The range of topics cannot be better shown than by reference to the index—and the original edition was extraordinary in its day for having one. The “A’s,” for example, include abuse of all good attempts, affinities, and antipathies, age, animal under air-pump, the American a reënforced Englishman, the effect of looking at the Alps, the power of seeing analogies, why anniversaries are dreaded by the professor, the arguments which spoil conversation, the forming American aristocracy, the use of stimulants by artists, the effect of meeting one of heaven’s assessors, and so on. The order in which they fall is hardly more casual than in the index. Witness the eleventh paper: puns, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” slang, dandies, aristocracy, intellectual green fruit, Latinized diction (with the verses “Æstivation”), seashore and mountains, summer residences, space, the Alps, moderate wishes (with the verses “Contentment”), faithfulness in love, picturesque spots in Boston, natural beauties in a city, dusting a library, experiencing life, a proposal of marriage. The difference between their structure and that of the formal essay is simply that they meander like a stream instead of following a predetermined course like a canal.

In the later members of the series, and particularly in the third and fourth, there is an evident response to the current of nineteenth-century thinking. By nature Holmes was a liberal but not a reformer. He took no active part in “movements,” though he sympathized with many of them and with the intentions of their wiser promoters. At the same time he preferred for his own part to induce and persuade people into new paths rather than to shock and offend them while they were still treading the old ones. There is a note of considerate caution in his espousal of new ideas. He was the type of man who will always be unsatisfactory to extremists,—a dangerous person to the hidebound conservative and a tentative trifler to the ultraradical. His open-mindedness is charmingly demonstrated in the book of his old age, “Over the Teacups.” Few men of eighty succeed in keeping their eyes off the past and their voices from decrying the present, but Holmes in his latest years was as interested in the developments of the day as he had been in the prime of life.

The issues of the Civil War—to return from the tea table to the breakfast room—showed that Holmes had not lost the spark for righteous indignation in the thirty years since the writing of “Old Ironsides.” “The Statesman’s Secret” was not as effective a protest at Webster’s “Seventh of March Speech” (1850) as Whittier’s “Ichabod,” but it was quite as sincerely outspoken. “Non-Resistance” and “The Moral Bully” prove that Holmes was as little of a peace-at-any-price man as Lowell. “Brother Jonathan’s Lament for Sister Caroline” was written in deep sorrow that the war had been precipitated, but “To Canaan” was militant to the highest degree. Two other poems, written in the years of the Autocrat and the Poet, both in lofty seriousness, came from “flowering moments of the mind” which lost fewest petals as they were recorded in verse. These were “The Chambered Nautilus” and “A Sun-Day Hymn.”

In all Holmes’s writing, whatever the mood or the form, the prevailing method is cumulative. He is likely to start with an idea, proceed to a simple analysis of it, and expound it by a single analogy elaborated at length or a whole series of them more briefly presented. In the sixth “Autocrat” paper he says, with some show of self-restraint, “There are some curious observations I should like to make ... but I think we are getting rather didactic.” Yet as a matter of fact Holmes’s method was seldom anything but didactic, and his content was frequently such. He evidently saw at a flash how to communicate the idea, but, as he must have done hundreds of times in the classroom, he developed it with what was at once spontaneous and painstaking detail. His most famous satires, “My Aunt,” “Contentment,” and “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” are all illustrations of this method. Thus in his “Farewell to Agassiz,” before the naturalist left for South America, Holmes mentioned that the mountains were awaiting his approval, as were also five other natural objects. He wished the traveler safety from the tropical sun and twenty-two other dangers and that he might succeed in finding fossils and seven other things of interest. “Bill and Joe” contains sixty lines built up by the enumerative method on the truth that worldly distinctions disappear for a moment in the light of college friendships. “Dorothy Q” devotes thirty-two lines to the quaint fancy “What would I be if one of my eight great, great grandmothers had married another man?” and “The Broomstick Train” a hundred and forty-six lines to the conceit “The Salem Witches furnish the power for the trolley cars.” In prose, as a final illustration, his well-known discussion of the typical lecture audience in the sixth “Autocrat” is about eight hundred words long: Audiences help formulate lectures. The average is not high. They are awful in their uniformity—like communities of ants or bees—whether in New York, Ohio, or New England—unless some special principle of selection interferes. They include fixed elements—in age (four)—and in intelligence (the dull elaborated)—making up a compound vertebrate (biological analogy). Kindly elements conceded, but on the whole depressing.

Holmes gave the final epithet to his novels when he referred to them as “medicated.” For the other and more eminent American physician, Weir Mitchell, fiction was a resort to another world, but the author of “Elsie Venner” (1861), “The Guardian Angel” (1867), and “The Mortal Antipathy” (1885) was the essayist-physician extending the narrative process a little farther than in the conversational series. The plots were supplied by Dr. Holmes and developed by the Autocrat-Professor-Poet. Several chapters of medical lore were interpolated in each book, and several more of genial exposition. These latter are like the work of Mrs. Stowe except that their relation to story development is tenuous or imperceptible, and in characterization his successes, like Mrs. Stowe’s, are with the homelier New England types.