recorded the feeling of ‘awe-stricken sympathy’ at first sight of the
white faces of the sick in the hospital wards. ‘The dreadful scenes in
the operating theatre--for this was before the days of ether--were a
great shock to my sensibilities.’ His nerves hardened in time, but he
was always keenly alive to human suffering. There is a note of contempt
in his reference to Lisfranc, the surgeon, who ‘regretted the splendid
guardsmen of the Empire because they had such magnificent thighs to
amputate.’
It was once said of Holmes that he was difficult to catch unless
he were wanted for some kind act. He lost no opportunity to give
happiness. In old age when flattery was tedious, and blindness
imminent, and the autograph hunter had become a burden, he patiently
wrote his name and transcribed stanzas of ‘Dorothy Q.’ or ‘The Last
Leaf’ for admirers from all parts of the earth. This was the smallest
tax on his good nature. For years he had been expected to act as
counsel and sometimes as literary agent for all the minor poets of
America. Many of these innocents conceived Holmes as automatically
issuing certificates to the virtue of their work. He was always kind
and invariably plain-spoken. To the author of an epic he wrote: ‘I
cannot conscientiously advise you to print your poem; it will be
an expense to you, and the gain to your reputation will not be an
equivalent.’
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.
IV
_THE AUTOCRAT_ AND ITS COMPANIONS, _OVER THE TEACUPS_, _OUR HUNDRED
DAYS IN EUROPE_
The motto, ‘Every man his own Boswell,’ on the title-page of _The
Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_, is a key to the book. The conceit
has merits besides that of novelty. There is a world of humorous
suggestion in the idea of ‘doubling’ the parts of philosophic wit and
worshipping reporter.
The scene is a Boston boarding-house with its more or less commonplace
people, the landlady, her daughter, her son Benjamin Franklin, the
young fellow called John, the old gentleman who sits opposite, the
poor relation, the divinity student, the schoolmistress, and the
Autocrat himself. They talk, listen, jest, laugh. Little by little the
commonplace characters grow attractive. Pleasant and lovable traits
come to light. There is pathos, sentiment, a deal of mirth, but little
action. The Autocrat marries the schoolmistress towards the close of
the book. So much likeness is there to an old-fashioned love story, and
no more.
In general the characters interest less for what they say than for
what they prompt the Autocrat to say. He says many things, and all so
wise, so entertaining, so clever. When Holmes threw off these sparkling
paragraphs month by month, he could have had little idea what the index
would reveal. He glances from subject to subject, touching lightly
here and lightly there. Poetry, pugilism, horse-racing, theology, and
tree-lore are all equally interesting to him and to us. The reader is
not too long detained by any one thing. An infinite number of topics
are handled with effervescent gayety in a manner sometimes called
‘French.’ Holmes accused Emerson of want of logical sequence. That
was a master stroke. Open a volume of the Breakfast-Table series at
random and you chance on the oddest combinations of subjects, as
when a paragraph on insanity is followed by a paragraph on private
theatricals--perhaps a less illogical juxtaposition than at first sight
appears. Waywardness and inconsequence are among the principal charms
of _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_.
That a book so distinctively local in atmosphere and allusion should
have attained at once and kept to this day widespread popularity is a
little surprising. For local it is--provincial, as New Yorkers would
say. At all events, it is Bostonian to the last degree. The little
city, compact and picturesque, was not merely the background, the scene
of the breakfast-table episodes and conversations; the entire volume is
saturated with the atmosphere of Boston. To Holmes it was the one city
worth while, the city whose State House was Hub of the Solar System. By
his testimony (and who should know better?) you could not pry that out
of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out
for a crowbar.
The _Autocrat_ was followed by the _Professor_ and the _Poet_. The
critical history of sequels is well known. Seldom a complete failure,
they are rarely an unqualified success. Yet it is not easy to see
wherein _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table_ falls much below _The
Autocrat_. The book would be justified were it only for the pathetic
figure of Little Boston, to say nothing of Iris, the young Marylander,
the Model of all the Virtues, and the Koh-i-noor. It is something,
too, to have seen the landlady’s daughter appropriately wedded to an
undertaker, and the young fellow called John also married, and in
possession of ‘one of them little articles’ for which he had longed in
the days of bachelorhood, to wit, a boy of his own.
_The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, a storehouse of delightful
inventions, proved the least attractive of the three to the public.
But all of Holmes’s old-time skill returned when he wrote _Over the
Teacups_, his last book. The framework is simple but attractive, the
characters have genuine vitality and pique the reader by suggesting
that they must have been drawn from life. The Dictator is an old
friend. Number Five, the Tutor, the Counsellor, the two Annexes, Number
Seven, the Mistress and Delilah are agreeable acquaintances, and the
misfortune is ours if we do not know them as well as the figures of
_The Autocrat_.
All these books are personal, known as such, and deriving half their
charm from the reader’s ability to recognize Holmes himself under
various disguises. In _Our Hundred Days in Europe_ the author speaks
_in propria persona_, and the volume may be described as a big printed
letter addressed to the writer’s friends, who, loving him as they do,
will rejoice in his happiness and his triumphs.
V
THE POET
The Autocrat’s poetical works contain a generous measure of what
elderly bards call their ‘juvenilia.’ We all understand the term. It
means verses which the bards in question would gladly have left in the
solitude of old magazines, and which admirers insist on dragging into
light,--poems that help to stock the school readers and speakers, and
which, because the copyright has expired by the unjust law of the land,
compilers of anthologies seize on and parade as representative.
That Holmes suffers but little by the persistence of his ‘juvenilia’
and ‘early verses’ is due to their frankly comic and grotesque
character. The reader is spared faded sentiment, and he is heartily
amused by the ingenuity of the conceits, the sparkle of the rhymes, the
satire, the epigrammatic wit. There is mirth still in that brilliant
essay in verbal gymnastics ‘The Comet’ (a dyspeptic’s dream), in ‘The
September Gale’ (a boy’s lament for his Sunday breeches, blown from
the line one fatal wash-day and never recovered), in ‘The Spectre Pig’
(a parody on Dana’s ‘Buccaneer’), in ‘The Height of the Ridiculous,’
‘Daily Trials,’ ‘The Treadmill Song,’ ‘The Dorchester Giant,’ ‘The
Music-Grinders,’ and the heartlessly funny poem entitled ‘My Aunt.’
Holmes was the readiest and the happiest of ‘occasional’ poets. No one
was so apt as he in meeting the needs of the moment, in brightening
with rhymed felicities the banquet, the class reunion, or in greeting
the distinguished stranger. He had rare skill in fitting the word
to the audience; it was impossible for him to be dull, and being
good-humored, it was difficult for him to say ‘No’ when committees were
importunate. Of his three hundred and twenty-seven poems, nearly one
half are poems of occasion. He wrote the greeting to Charles Dickens,
to the Prince Imperial, a poem for the Moore celebration, for the
dedication of the Stratford Fountain, for the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the founding of Harvard College. His poems for the Class
of 1829, forty-four in number, reflect the history of the times as
well as the mood of the writer. The most famous of them is ‘The Boys’
(1859). Its motive, that boy-nature never quite dies in the man, and
its defiant optimism were calculated to have rejuvenating effect on a
group of classmates then thirty years out of college.
This art requires a quality of mind akin to that of the improvisatore.
Holmes was Boston’s poet laureate. His power to put an idea into
self-singing measure saved the battle-ship ‘Constitution,’ and did much
to save the ‘Old South’ Church.
In his finer work there is a delicious blending of thoughtfulness and
humorous fancy. Only Holmes could have given the lines on ‘Dorothy Q.’
their most original touch,--asking what would have been the result for
_him_ had prospective great-grandmother said ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’:--
Should I be I, or would it be
One tenth another to nine tenths me?
Half the pathos in that fragile and beautiful piece of workmanship,
‘The Last Leaf,’ derives from the humor, from the blending of laughter
and tears. Even in the exquisite piece, attributed to Iris, ‘Under the
Violets,’ a description of a young girl’s burial-place, the lighter
touch is not wholly wanting:--
When, turning round their dial-track,
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
Her little mourners, clad in black,
The crickets, sliding through the grass,
Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
His highest flights are represented by ‘The Chambered Nautilus’ and
‘Musa,’ by the quaint and fanciful ‘Homesick in Heaven,’ and by the
simple and pathetic little lament entitled ‘Martha.’ His claim to the
name of poet must rest on these, on his fine setting of the romance of
Agnes Surriage, and on his tributes to Bryant and to Everett.
VI
FICTION AND BIOGRAPHY
Holmes wrote three novels. Although readable, original, based on a
thorough comprehension of the scenes described, the life, antecedents,
prejudices, habits, and manners of the people portrayed, nevertheless
they strike one as being experiments in fiction rather than true
novels. They may be classed with similar attempts by J. G. Holland and
Bayard Taylor. Each of these writers was a practised craftsman. The
trained man of letters can write a volume which he, his friends, his
publishers, the public, and many fair-minded critics agree in calling
a novel. But the book in question does not become a novel from having
been cast in the orthodox form. It resembles a novel more nearly than
it resembles anything else, nevertheless it is not a veritable novel.
Any reader can feel it, though he may not be able to say just where
the difference lies, or how there happens to be a difference. Many
a writer, it would seem, has only to continue his efforts to arrive
finally at the making of a true novel. He falls short because his mind
is working in an unwonted medium rather than because he lacks inventive
ability.
If _Elsie Venner_ and _The Guardian Angel_ fail of being true novels,
they are at least highly successful studies in fiction and have given
and will continue to give a world of pleasure. If _A Mortal Antipathy_
falls short of the excellence attained by the other two, it has at
least the virtue of having been written by a man who could not be
uninteresting, no matter what was his age or his humor.
_Elsie Venner_ is a study in prenatal influences. The motive is
gruesome enough. A young woman, bitten by a snake, transmits certain
tendencies thus derived to her child. The subject was better adapted
to Hawthorne’s pen than to the Autocrat’s. A man of science knows
too much. Imagination is hampered. ‘What is’ and ‘What might be’ are
in perpetual conflict. A poet (such as Hawthorne essentially was)
throws science to the winds. Holmes goes at the problem in a brisk,
business-like way. Hawthorne would have treated it as a mystery, not
dragging it into broad light.
_Elsie Venner_ was dramatized and staged. Holmes went to see it. What
he thought of the play at the time is not recorded, but in after years
he pronounced it ‘bad, very bad.’
_The Guardian Angel_ also deals with the question of heredity. The
problem of how many of our ancestors come out in us, and just how they
make themselves felt, was always fascinating to Holmes. There are no
snakes in this story to account for Myrtle Hazard’s peculiarities, but
something quite as enigmatical, namely, an Indian. One character in
_The Guardian Angel_ has come near to achieving immortality--Gifted
Hopkins, the minor poet, whose name was an inspiration. He represents
a harmless and much-abused race. The successful in his own craft
are even more impatient with him than the mockers among the laity,
probably because Gifted, in the innocence of his heart, desires to have
his verses read, and sends them to eminent poets under the mistaken
impression that they will be welcome. Holmes confessed that he had been
hard on Gifted Hopkins.
The memoir of _John Lothrop Motley_, in addition to being a formal
record of personal history and literary achievement, is a spirited
defence of a proud, a gifted, and (in the biographer’s opinion) an
ill-used man, a man who, after years of successful public service, was
needlessly and wantonly humbled and mortified. Hence the note of fine
indignation which vibrates through the narrative.
The life of _Emerson_ contributed by Holmes to the series of
‘American Men of Letters’ was a surprise to the public. To call for
judgment on the most transcendental of New England authors by the
least transcendental, to invite the poet of ‘The One-Hoss Shay’ to
pronounce on the poet of ‘The Sphinx,’ seems an odd if not a humorous
performance. Whoever suggested it did a wise thing, and the result of
the suggestion was a useful and agreeable piece of biographical writing.
The work is thoroughly done, even to an analysis of the individual
essays. Who will, may view Emerson through the Autocrat’s eyes. They
had a close bond in their liking for the tangible facts of life. ‘Too
much,’ says Holmes, ‘has been made of Emerson’s mysticism. He was an
intellectual rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious
one. He never let go the string of his balloon.’
* * * * *
That we read Holmes on Emerson less for the sake of Emerson than for
the sake of Holmes suggests the possibility that we read all the
Autocrat’s books in the same spirit. Without question his work is of
value in the degree in which it reveals its author. He could not be
impersonal, he could not be dramatic. But he was fortunate in that he
could always be himself. He was one of the most delightful of men. And
being likewise one of the friendliest of writers he is most successful
when the form of his books, like _The Autocrat_ and _Over the Teacups_,
permits him, as it were, to bring his easy chair into the centre of
the room while we gather about him anxious to have him begin to talk,
hoping that he will be in no haste to leave off.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] J. T. Morse, Jr.
XIII
_John Lothrop Motley_
REFERENCES:
=O. W. Holmes=: _John Lothrop Motley, a Memoir_, 1879.
=G. W. Curtis= (edited): _The Correspondence of John Lothrop
Motley, D. C. L._, 1889.
I
HIS LIFE
Motley was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1814. His
great-grandfather, John Motley, came from Belfast, Ireland, early in
the Eighteenth Century, and settled at Falmouth, now Portland, Maine.
His father, Thomas Motley, a prosperous merchant of Boston, married
Anna Lothrop, daughter of the Reverend John Lothrop. The historian, the
second-born of their eight children, was named in honor of his maternal
grandfather.
After a course of study under Cogswell and Bancroft at the Round Hill
School, Motley entered Harvard College and was graduated in 1831. He
was noted both at Northampton and Cambridge for intellectual brilliancy
rather than studiousness, for a regal manner which did not tend to make
him universally popular, and for rare personal beauty as was becoming
in a youth whose parents were reputed in their younger days ‘the
handsomest pair the town of Boston could show.’ He was a wit. ‘Give
me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessaries,’
is one of his best-known sayings. His passions were literary, he
admired Shelley and enjoyed the cleverness of Praed. Although fond of
versifying, he seems to have printed little or nothing.
After graduation Motley spent two years (1832–33) at German
universities. He went first to Göttingen, where he made the
acquaintance of Bismarck. They were fellow-students the next year
at Berlin. ‘We lived in closest intimacy, sharing meals and outdoor
exercise,’ said Bismarck in a letter to Holmes.
His period of foreign study having come to an end, Motley read law
in Boston and was admitted to the bar. In 1837 he married Miss Mary
Benjamin, a young woman noted for her beauty, cleverness, and an
open-hearted sincerity which ‘made her seem like a sister to those
who could help becoming her lovers.’[46] Two years after his marriage
Motley made his literary beginning by publishing a novel, _Morton’s
Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial_, and in 1849 he published yet
another, _Merry-Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony_. Neither
was successful. Perhaps the second failure was required to emphasize
the lesson taught by the first, that the author’s gifts were not for
imaginative work.[47] He was more fortunate with a group of three
essays printed in the ‘North American Review,’ one on ‘Peter the
Great’ (1845), one on ‘Balzac’ (1847), the third on ‘The Polity of the
Puritans’ (1849).
The first subject was suggested to Motley during a residence of
several months in St. Petersburg as Secretary to the American Legation
(1841–42). This taste of diplomatic life seems not to have been wholly
relished. Motley’s wife could not accompany him, and homesickness and a
Russian winter conspired to drive him back to America. He gained some
knowledge of practical politics by serving a term in the Massachusetts
legislature (1849). Neither law, nor diplomacy, nor yet politics,
seemed at that time to offer a field in which he could work to best
advantage. More and more he was tending towards literature. So absorbed
had he become in the history of Holland that he felt it ‘necessary to
write a book on the subject, even if it were destined to fall dead
from the press.’ He had made some progress when he heard of Prescott’s
projected history of Philip the Second. Thinking it ‘disloyal’ not to
declare his ambition of invading a part of Prescott’s own domain, he
went to lay his plan before the elder historian. Prescott immediately
offered the use of books from his library and was in all ways cordial
and enthusiastic.
It soon became evident that a history of Holland could not be written
in America. In 1851 Motley took his family and went abroad, and for
the next five years toiled unweariedly among the archives of Dresden,
The Hague, Brussels, and Paris. His energy and plodding patience
surprised the friends who remembered Motley for a brilliant young man
who heretofore had played industriously at work rather than actually
worked. ‘He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation,’ said
his daughter, Lady Harcourt, in after years.
The three volumes of _The Rise of the Dutch Republic_ were at length
ready for the press. Motley was forced to publish at his own expense.
Notwithstanding hostile criticisms, the success was undeniable. The
book was immediately translated into French, German, and Dutch. Of
two French versions the one published in Paris was edited, with an
introduction, by Guizot.
The historical series as we have it comprises nine volumes. The works
appeared in the following order: _The Rise of the Dutch Republic_,
1856; _History of the United Netherlands_, 1860–68; _The Life and
Death of John of Barneveld_, 1874. Motley’s plan included a history
of the Thirty Years’ War. But he was not to be granted length of days
sufficient for the writing of this ‘last act of a great drama.’
Among many scholastic honors which in the nature of things fell
to Motley’s share may be mentioned the conferring of the degree
of D. C. L. by Oxford, and the election to full membership in the
Institute of France.