He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had
in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in
due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come
to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked
to know that you felt his quality in every way. That first winter,
however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in
Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow’s, or when I
came in to dine at the Fieldses’, in Boston. It was at certain meetings
of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his
voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no
Italianate. He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this
side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying
hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was
not of the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout,
a spiritualist Longfellow’s brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he
was at the table too, it took all the poet’s delicate skill to keep him
and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy
upon the matter of manifestations. With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was
inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the
ghosts and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific; he
denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
convincing as the natural.
There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his
talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
error concerning him.
It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an
order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think
poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
his “medicated novels.” That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what
he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in
certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful
criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the
successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the
persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that
time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question, and
when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or
rejection. But he had to live many years yet before he reached this
state. When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do
not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved to
feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still, but with
nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all
times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of a
mental attitude that misled many. As I have said before, he was
universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself. I do
not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so
simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some
use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is
only concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point
in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from
singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was
any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
of the soul.