O. W. HOLMES’S RESIDENCE IN BEACON STREET, BOSTON.
I said that there was no greater nonsense than the talk of Emerson’s time, that he introduced German philosophy here, and I asked Holmes if he thought that Emerson had borrowed anything in the philosophical line from the German. He agreed with me that his philosophy was thoroughly home-bred, and wrought out in the experience of his own home-life. He said that he was disposed to believe that that would be true of Emerson which he knew was true of himself. He knew Emerson went over a great many books, but he did not really believe that he often really read a book through. I remember one of his phrases was, that he thought that Emerson “tasted books;” and he cited a bright lady from Philadelphia, whom he had met the day before, who had said that she thought men of genius did not rely much upon their reading, and had complimented him by asking if he did so. Holmes said:
“I told her—I had to tell her—that in reading my mind is always active. I do not follow the author steadily or implicitly, but my thought runs off to right and left. It runs off in every direction, and I find I am not so much taking his book as I am thinking my own thoughts upon his subject.”
I. I want to thank you for your contrast between Emerson and Carlyle: “The hatred of unreality was uppermost in Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine, with Emerson.” Is it not perhaps possible that Carlyle would not have been Carlyle but for Emerson? Emerson found him discouraged, and as he supposed alone, and at the very beginning led him out of his darkest places.
I think it was on this that Doctor Holmes spoke with a good deal of feeling about the value of appreciation. He was ready to go back to tell of the pleasure he had received from persons who had written to him, even though he did not know them, to say of how much use some particular line of his had been. Among others he said that Lothrop Motley had told him that, when he was all worn out in his work in a country where he had not many friends, and among stupid old manuscript archives, two lines of Holmes’s braced him up and helped him through:
“Stick to your aim: the mongrel’s hold will slip,
But only crowbars loose the bulldog’s grip.”
He was very funny about flattery. “That is the trouble of having so many 103 friends, everybody flatters you. I do not mean to let them hurt me if I can help it, and flattery is not necessarily untrue. But you have to be on your guard when everybody is as kind to you as everybody is to me.”