In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I
visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin
the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found
time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my place on
the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment with him
he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the ‘Nation’
claiming the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I knew who
wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself, when
with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my position.
To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good reasons for it,
and I certainly could urge none that would stand against his. I could
only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was claimed
mainly if not wholly for New York in the future. He was willing to leave
me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this out of
politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a
sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
book, and not liked him. “I understood, of course,” he said, “that he
was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian,” and I could truthfully answer that
this was by all means my own understanding too.
His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return
from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
came in for the doctor’s help as a physician, though he looked so very
well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. “And
if you don’t know where Washington Street is,” he said, with a gay burst
at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man’s face, “you
don’t know anything.”
We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had
to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the
small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the
intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I
could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
two cents’ worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
barbarism.
The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that
most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember
the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, “Holmes, you are
intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.” “I am, I am,” said the
doctor. “From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I’m alive,
I’m alive!” Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he
had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with you a moment without
shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and
he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind. His gaiety of heart
could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish
always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked. He
gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies
left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up
for these with careful circumspection. He wished to know the character
of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a
nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his
fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and
wholesome humanity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of
Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent
of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard. I recall his
telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called
upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five
the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a
metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.