P. S. To avoid the necessity of the latter, I have written to her,
cordially recommending suicide as adapted to her case.
Surely there must have been something peculiarly exasperating about
this applicant for literary honors, because Dr. Holmes erred, if at
all, in the opposite direction. He was far more apt to write and to
behave as the following note recommends: "Will you read this young
lady's story, and let me know what you propose to do with it? A young
woman of tender feelings, I think, and to be treated very kindly."
Again: "Will it be too late for a few paragraphs about Forcey the
Willson? If not, in what paper? And can you tell me anything? Will
you do it yourself?"
The number of these notes is legion, bringing every variety of form
and subject and problem to his friend as editor or publisher, or for
private advice. In one of them he says, "Please give me your
grandpaternal council." But I have quoted enough upon this head to
give an idea of the kind and busy brain not too deeply immersed in its
own projects to have a tender regard for those of others. Meanwhile
his own work was continually progressing. Lowell had already made him
feel that he was the mainspring of the "Atlantic," which at the time
of the war attained the height of its popularity, and achieved a
position where it found no peer. The care which Dr. Holmes bestowed
upon the finish of his work, the endless labor over its details, are
almost inconceivable when we remember that "this power of taking
pains," which Carlyle calls one of the attributes of genius, was
combined with a gay, mercurial temperament ready to take fire at every
chance spark.
One Sunday afternoon in the sad spring of 1864, during the terrible
days of the war, he came in to correct a poem. "I am ashamed," he
said, "to be troubled by so slight a thing when battles are raging
about us; but I have written:--
Where Genoa's deckless caravels were blown.
Now Columbus sailed from Palos, and I must change the verse before it
is too late."
This habit of always doing his best is surely one of the fine lessons
of his life. It has given his prose a perfection which will carry it
far down the shores of time. The letter sent during the last summer of
his life to be read at the celebration of Bryant's birthday was a
model of simplicity in the expression of feeling. It was brief, and at
another time would have been written and revised in half a day; but in
his enfeebled condition it was with the utmost difficulty that he
could satisfy himself. He worked at it patiently day after day, until
his labor became a pain; nevertheless, he continued, and won what he
deserved--the applause of men practiced in his art who were there to
listen and appreciate.
Any record of Dr. Holmes's life would be imperfect which contained no
mention of the pride and pleasure he felt in the Saturday Club.
Throughout the forty years of its prime he was not only the most
brilliant talker of that distinguished company, but he was also the
most faithful attendant. He was seldom absent from the monthly dinners
either in summer or in winter, and he lived to find himself at the
head of the table where Agassiz, Longfellow, Emerson, and Lowell had
in turn preceded him. Could a shorthand writer have been secretly
present at those dinners, what a delightful book of wise talk and
witty sayings would now lie open before us! Fragments of the good
things were sometimes brought away, as loving parents bring sugar-
plums from a feast to the children at home; but they are only
fragments, and bear out but inefficiently the reputation which has run
before them. The following pathetic incident, related on one of those
occasions by Dr. Holmes, need not, however, be omitted:--
"Just forty years ago," he said one day, "I was whipped at school for
a slight offense--whipped with a ferule right across my hands, so that
I went home with a blue mark where the blood had settled, and for a
fortnight my hands were stiff and swollen from the blows. The other
day an old man called at my house and inquired for me. He was bent,
and could just creep along. When he came in he said: 'How do you do,
sir; do you recollect your old teacher Mr. ----?' I did, perfectly! He
sat and talked awhile about indifferent subjects, but I saw something
rising in his throat, and I knew it was that whipping. After a while
he said, 'I came to ask your forgiveness for whipping you once when I
was in anger; perhaps you have forgotten it, but I have not.' It had
weighed upon his mind all these years! He must be rid of it before
lying down to sleep peacefully."
Speaking of dining at Taft's, an excellent eating-house at Point
Shirley for fish and game, Dr. Holmes said: "The host himself is worth
seeing. He is the one good _un_cooked thing at his table."
He had been to Philadelphia with one of his lectures, but he did not
have a free chance at any conversation afterward. "I did go to
Philadelphia," he said, "with _one_ remark, but I brought it back
unspoken. It struck in."
Soon after Dr. Holmes's removal to Charles Street began a long series
of early morning breakfasts at his publisher's house--feasts of the
simplest kind. Many strangers came to Boston in those days, on
literary or historical errands--men of tastes which brought them
sooner or later to the "Old Corner" where the "Atlantic Monthly" was
already a power. Of course one of the first pleasures sought for was
an interview with Dr. Holmes, the fame of whose wit ripened early--
even before the days of the "Autocrat." It came about quite naturally,
therefore, that they should gladly respond to any call which gave them
the opportunity to listen to his conversation; and the eight-o'clock
breakfast hour was chosen as being the only time the busy guests and
host could readily call their own. Occasionally these breakfasts would
take place as frequently as two or three times a week. The light of
memory has a wondrous gift of heightening most of the pleasures of
this life, but the conversation of those early hours was far more
stimulating and inspiring than any memory of it can ever be. There
were few men, except Poe, famous in American or English literature of
that era who did not appear once at least. The unexpectedness of the
company was a great charm; for a brief period Boston enjoyed a sense
of cosmopolitanism, and found it possible, as it is really possible
only in London, to bring together busy guests with full and eager
brains who are not too familiar with one another's thought to make
conversation an excitement and a source of development.
Of Dr. Holmes's talk on these occasions it is impossible to give any
satisfactory record. The simple conditions of his surroundings gave
him a sense of perfect ease, and he spoke with the freedom which
marked his nature. It was one of the charms by which he drew men to
himself that he not only wore a holiday air of finding life full and
interesting, but that he believed in freedom of speech for himself,
and therefore wished to find it in others. This emancipation in
expression did not extend altogether into the practical working of his
life. Conventionalities had a strong hold upon him. He loved to avoid
the great world when it was inconvenient, and to get a certain freedom
outside of it; but once in the current, the manners of the Romans were
his own. He reminded one sometimes of Hawthorne's saying that "in
these days men are born in their clothes," although Dr. Holmes's
conventions were more easily shuffled off than a casual observer would
believe. Nothing could be farther from the ordinary idea of the
romantic "man of genius" than was his well-trimmed little figure, and
nothing more surprising and delightful than the way in which his
childlikeness of nature would break out and assert itself. He declared
one morning that he had discovered the happiest animal in creation--
"next to a poet, of course, if we may call him an animal; it is the
acheron, the parasite of the honey-bee. And why? Because he attaches
himself to the wing of the bee, is carried without exertion to the
sweetest flowers, where the bee gathers the honey while the acheron
eats it; and all the while the music of the bee attends him as he is
borne through the air."
He met Hawthorne for the first time, I think, in this informal way.
Holmes had been speaking of Renan, whose books interested him.
"A long while ago," he began, "I said Rome or Reason; now I am half
inclined to put it, Rome or Renan." Then suddenly turning to
Hawthorne, he said, "By the way, I would write a new novel if you were
not in the field, Mr. Hawthorne." "I am not," said Hawthorne; "and I
wish you would do it." There was a moment's silence. Holmes said
quickly, "I wish you would come to the club oftener." "I should like
to," said Hawthorne, "but I can't drink." "Neither can I." "Well, but
I can't eat." "Nevertheless, we should like to see you." "But I can't
talk, either." After which there was a shout of laughter. Then said
Holmes, "You can listen, though; and I wish you would come."
On another occasion, when Lowell was present, he was talking of
changes in physical conditions. Dr. Holmes said, now, at the age of
fifty-four, he could eat almost anything set before him, which he
could by no means do formerly. Lowell found opportunity somehow at
this point to laugh at Holmes for having lately said in print that
"Beecher was a man whose thinking marrow was not corrugated by drink
or embrowned by meerschaum." Lowell said _he_ had no "thinking
marrow," and objected to such anatomical terms applied to the best
part of a man.
By and by Lowell came out of his critical mood, and said pleasantly,
after some talk upon lyric poetry in general, "I like your lyrics, you
know, Holmes." "Well," said Holmes, pleased, but speaking earnestly
and with a childlike honesty, "but there is something too hopping
about them. To tell the truth, nothing has injured my reputation so
much as the too great praise which has been bestowed upon my
'windfalls.' After all, the value of a poet to the world is not so
much his reputation as a writer of this or that poem, as the fact that
the poet is known to be one who is rapt out of himself at times, and
carried away into the region of the divine; it is known that the
spirit has descended upon him, and taught him what he should speak."
Holmes's admiration of Dickens's genius was very sincere. "He is the
greatest of all of them," he loved to say. "Such fertility, such
Shakespearean breadth,--there is enough of him; you feel as you do
when you see the ocean."
Speaking of the difficulty of being a good listener, he said that it
was a terrible responsibility for him to listen to a story. He could
never be rid of the feeling that he must remember accurately, or all
would be lost. There was one story in particular, told by a friend
remarkable as a raconteur, which tried him more than anything he knew
in the world,--of the kind. He felt like one of the old Greek chorus
with strophe and antistrophe, and it was a weight upon his mind lest
he should not laugh properly at the end. I recall one day, when the
subject of Walt Whitman's poetry was introduced, Dr. Holmes said he
abhorred playing the critic, partly because he was not a good reader,
--had read too cursorily and carelessly; but he thought the right
thing had not been said about Walt Whitman. "His books sell largely,
and there is a large audience of friends in Washington who praise and
listen. Emerson believes in him; Lowell not at all; Longfellow finds
some good in his 'yaup;' but the truth is, he is in an amorphous
condition."
Longfellow was once speaking of an address he had heard which he
considered quite a perfect performance. "Yes--yes," said Dr. Holmes;
"I don't doubt it was very good; but the speaker is such an unpleasant
person! He is just one of those fungi that always grow upon
universities."
The following extract is from a brief diary:
"Charles Sumner, Longfellow, Greene, Dr. Holmes, came to dine. The
latter sparkled and coruscated as I have seldom heard him before. We
are more than ever convinced that no one since Sydney Smith was ever
so brilliant, so witty, spontaneous, naïf, and unfailing as he."
In speaking of his own class in college he said: "There never was such
vigor in any class before, it seems to me. Almost every member turns
out sooner or later distinguished for something. We have had every
grade of moral status from a criminal to a chief justice, and we never
let any one of them drop. We keep hold of their hands year after year,
and lift up the weak and failing ones till they are at last redeemed.
Ah, there was one exception! Years ago we voted to cast a man out who
had been a defaulter or who had committed some offense of that nature.
The poor fellow sank down, and before the next year, when we repented
of this decision, he had gone too far down and presently died. But we
have kept all the rest!
"Every fourth man in our class is a poet. Sam. Smith belongs to our
class, who wrote 'My Country 't is of Thee.' Sam. Smith will live when
Longfellow, Whittier, and all the rest of us have gone into
oblivion....
"Queer man, ----. Looked ten years older than he was, like Caliban.
Calibans look always ten years older than they are. A perfect potato
of a man. If five hundred pieces of a man had been flung together from
different points and stuck, they could not have been more awkwardly
concocted than he was.
"James Freeman Clarke was in our class. Ever read his history of the
'Ten Great Religions?' Very good book. Nobody knows how much Clarke is
until he reads that book. How he surprises us from time to time. Came
out well about 'bolting,' with regard to Butler the other day. Writes
good verses, too,--not as good as mine, but good verses." ... Holmes
was abstemious and never ceased talking. "Most men write too much. I
would rather risk my future fame upon one lyric than upon ten volumes.
But I have said 'Boston is the hub of the Universe;' I will rest upon
that."
He spoke also with great feeling of the women who came to him for
literary advice and assistance. ----, he says, is his daughter in
letters. He has only seen her once, but he has been a faithful
correspondent and assistant to her.
Sumner said some one had called ---- "an impediment in the path of
science." What did he mean? "It means just this," said Holmes: "----
is no longer young, and I was reading the other day in a book on the
Sandwich Islands of an old Fejee man who had been carried away among
strangers, but who prayed that he might be carried home and his brains
beaten out in peace by his son, according to the custom of those
lands. It flashed over me then that our sons beat out our brains in
the same way. They do not walk in our ruts of thought or begin exactly
where we leave off, but they have a new standpoint of their own."
The talk went on for about four hours, when the company broke up.
One evening the doctor came in after the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at
Cambridge. "I can't stop," he said. "I only came to read you my verses
which I gave at the dinner to-day: they made such a queer impression!
I didn't mean to go, but James Lowell was to preside, and sent me word
that I really must be there, so I just wrote these off, and here they
are. I don't know that I should have brought them in to read to you,
but Hoar declares they are the best I have ever done." After some
delay, and in the fading light of sunset reflected from the river, he
read the well-known verses "Bill and Joe." He must have been still
warm with the excitement of the first reading, for I can never forget
the tenderness with which he recited the lines. They are still
pleasant on the printed page, but to those who heard him they are
divested of the passion of affection with which they were written and
read.
Late in life he said to a friend who was speaking of the warm
friendships embalmed in his poetry, and which would help to make it
endure: "I don't know how that may be; but the writing of these poems
has been a passionate joy."
The following amusing note gives a picture of Dr. Holmes in his most
natural and social mood:--