ORATIONS AND ESSAYS.
In _Pages from an old Volume of Life_, one of the latest books published
by Doctor Holmes, we have a collection of most delightful orations and
essays. Some of them we recognize as old, familiar friends. "Bread and
the Newspaper," for instance, recalls vividly those sad, terribly
earnest days when the civil war was rending not only our land but our
hearts. Something to eat, and the daily papers to read--these we must
have, no matter what else we had to give up!
War taught us, as nothing else could, what we really were. It exalted
our manhood and our womanhood, and showed us our substantial human
qualities for a long time kept out of sight, it may be, by the spirit of
commerce, the love of art, science, or literature. Those who had called
Doctor Holmes "an aristocrat," "a Tory," forgot all their bitter
feelings when he said, "We are finding out that not only 'patriotism is
eloquence,' but that heroism is gentility. All ranks are wonderfully
equalized under the fire of a masked battery. The plain artisan, or the
rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like a man, is the truest
representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy and Agincourt. And if
one of our fine gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by
the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as
honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his
hands were soiled with labor.
In _The Inevitable Trial_, an oration delivered on the 4th of July,
1863, before the City Authorities of Boston, Doctor Holmes who had been
falsely classed among the enemies of the Anti-slavery movement, spoke as
follows:--
"Long before the accents of our famous statesmen resounded in the halls
of the Capitol, long before the _Liberator_ opened its batteries, the
controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and
predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional
divisions, well knowing the line of clearage that ran through the
seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon
the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a
quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution
would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating
insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that
the Union was to be endangered by slavery not through its interests, but
through the change of character it was bringing about in the people of
the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than
half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of
the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself
in the sight of his descendants, that 'by an inevitable chain of causes
and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.'
"The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict
which he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming
woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the
very year when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.
"The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who
warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what
was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture.
The descendants of the men, 'daily exercised in tyranny,' the 'petty
tyrants,' as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at
length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while
they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet
where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous
emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become
changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness."
In this same grand oration occur also these eloquent words:--
"Whether we know it or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help
fighting against the system that has proved the source of all those
miseries which the author of the Declaration of Independence trembled to
anticipate. And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer
cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough
to die; wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ
from the hands of infidels. The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine!
He rose from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred years ago. He
is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he lies
buried wherever man, made in his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance
lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Master gave him! This
is our Holy War, and we must bring to it all the power with which he
fought against the Almighty before he was cast from heaven."
In his _Hunt after the Captain_, we realize how near the "dull dead
ghastliness of War" came to the fond father's heart as he sought his
wounded hero through those dreary hospital wards! He knew of what he
spake when appealing so eloquently to his fellow-patriots:--
"Sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the North, brothers
and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have among you the
scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood for your temporal
salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely through the fire and
smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies are starred with
bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as
belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the
soil which they defended. In every Northern graveyard slumber the
victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as
children amidst the clover blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under
nameless mounds with strange Southern wild flowers blooming over them.
By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by
the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children
yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated
sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the sake of men
everywhere, and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the
advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to
stand by her through good report and through evil report, in triumph and
in defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization,
Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's
emancipated peoples."
It will be remembered that this heart-stirring oration, _The Inevitable
Trial_, from which the above is quoted, was delivered at one of the most
discouraging periods of the war; when Lee was in Pennsylvania, and just
before the capture of Vicksburg.
Among the other essays and orations in _Pages from an old Volume of
Life_, we find the _Physiology of Walking_, which contains many
interesting facts concerning the human wheel, with its spokes and
felloes.
"Walking," says Doctor Holmes, "is a perpetual falling with a perpetual
self-recovery. It is a most complex, violent, and perilous operation,
which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a
very early period of life. We find how complex it is when we attempt to
analyze it, and we see that we never understood it thoroughly until the
time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is, when
we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous
it is when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or
dislocating our limbs, or overlook the last step of a flight of stairs,
and discover with what headlong violence we have been hurling ourselves
forward.
"Two curious facts are easily proved. First, a man is shorter when he is
walking than when at rest. We have found a very simple way of showing
this by having a rod or stick placed horizontally, so as to touch the
top of the head forcibly, as we stand under it. In walking rapidly
beneath it, even if the eyes are shut, the top of the head will not even
graze the rod. The other fact is, that one side of a man always tends to
outwalk the other side, so that no person can walk far in a straight
line, if he is blindfolded. _The Seasons_, and _The Human Body and its
Management_, were originally published in the Atlantic Almanac. _Cinders
from the Ashes_ gives some exceedingly interesting reminiscences.
Richard Henry Dana, the schoolboy, is described by Doctor Holmes as
ruddy, sturdy, quiet and reserved; and of Margaret Fuller he says,
"Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the schoolgirls of
unlettered origin, by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary
and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age.
She came with the reputation of being 'smart,' as we should have called
it; clever, as we say nowadays. Her air to her schoolmates was marked by
a certain stateliness and distance; as if she had other thoughts than
theirs, and was not of them. She was a great student and a great reader
of what she used to call 'naw-vels;' I remember her so well as she
appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been
faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None
know her aspect who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember
her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a
watery, aquamarine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make
small, as one does who looks at the sunshine.
"A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and
undulating in strange, sinuous movements, which one who loved her would
compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not, to those of the
ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent,
magisterial, _de haut en bas_, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing
the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and
reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw
her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill treatment of a
relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton
calls the Viraginian aspect."
A composition of Margaret's was one day taken up by the boy Oliver.
"It is a trite remark," she began.
Alas! the embryo-poet did not know the meaning of the word trite.
"How could I ever judge Margaret fairly," he exclaims, "after such a
crushing discovery of her superiority?"
Of his instructors and schoolmates at Andover, Doctor Holmes has given
us numerous pen portraits. The old Academy building had a dreary look to
the homesick boy, but he soon recovered from his "slightly nostalgic"
state, and found not a few congenial spirits in his new surroundings.
One fine, rosy-faced boy with whom he had a school discussion upon Mary,
Queen of Scots, and for whom he has always cherished a lasting
friendship, is now the well-known Phinehas Barnes. Another little
fellow, with black hair and very black eyes, studying with head between
his hands, and eyes fastened to his book as if reading a will that made
him heir to a million, was the future professor, Greek scholar and Bible
Commentator, Horatio Balch Hackett. One of the masters was the late Rev.
Samuel Horatio Stearns, "an excellent and lovable man," says Doctor
Holmes, "who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a
sincere regard." Professor Moses Stuart he describes as "tall, lean,
with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin,
expressive lips, and great solemnity and impressiveness of voice and
manner. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare, like Cicero's, and
his toga,--that is, his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm,
whatever might have been the weather, with such a statue-like, rigid
grace that he might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked
noble by the side of the antiques of the Vatican." Then, there was
Doctor Porter, an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his
throat; and Doctor Woods, who looked his creed decidedly, and had the
firm fibre of a theological athlete. But none of the preceptors, it may
be presumed, was so closely watched as the one to whom a dream had come
that he should drop dead when praying. "More than one boy kept his eye
on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the
man had who followed Van Amburgh about, with the expectation, let us not
say hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later."
In _Mechanism in Thought and Morals_, we find a deal of psychology as
well as science.
"It is in the moral world," says Doctor Holmes, "that materialism has
worked the strangest confusion. In various forms, under imposing names
and aspects, it has thrust itself into the moral relations, until one
hardly knows where to look for any first principles without upsetting
everything in searching for them.
"The moral universe includes nothing but the exercise of choice: all
else is machinery. What we can help and what we cannot help are on two
sides of a line which separates the sphere of human responsibility from
that of the Being who has arranged and controls the order of things.
"The question of the freedom of the will has been an open one, from the
days of Milton's demons in conclave to the noteworthy essay of Mr.
Hazard, our Rhode Island neighbor. It still hangs suspended between the
seemingly exhaustive strongest motive argument and certain residual
convictions. The sense that we are, to a limited extent,
self-determining; the sense of effort in willing; the sense of
responsibility in view of the future, and the verdict of conscience in
review of the past,--all of these are open to the accusation of fallacy;
but they all leave a certain undischarged balance in most minds. We can
invoke the strong arm of the _Deus in machina_, as Mr. Hazard, and Kant
and others, before him have done. Our will may be a primary initiating
cause or force, as unexplainable, as unreducible, as indecomposable, as
impossible if you choose, but as real to our belief as the _oeternitas
a parte ante_. The divine foreknowledge is no more in the way of
delegated choice than the divine omnipotence is in the way of delegated
power. The Infinite can surely slip the cable of the finite if it choose
so to do."
With outspoken braveness Doctor Holmes rejects "the mechanical doctrine
which makes me," he says, "the slave of outside influences, whether it
work with the logic of Edwards, or the averages of Buckle; whether it
come in the shape of the Greek's destiny, or the Mahometan's fatalism."
But he claims, too, the right to eliminate all mechanical ideas which
have crowded into the sphere of intelligent choice between right and
wrong. "The pound of flesh," he declares, "I will grant to Nemesis; but
in the name of human nature, not one drop of blood,--not one drop."
And this leads us to speak of Doctor Holmes' religious views. He
attended King's Chapel, and is classed among the most liberal-minded of
the Unitarian creed.
When chairman of the Boston Unitarian Festival, in 1877, he gave the
following list of certain theological beliefs that he has always
delighted to combat.
"May I," he begins, "without committing any one but myself, enumerate a
few of the stumbling blocks which still stand in the way of some who
have many sympathies with what is called the liberal school of thinkers?
"The notion of sin as a transferable object. As philanthropy has ridded
us of chattel slavery, so philosophy must rid us of chattel sin and all
its logical consequences.
"The notion that what we call sin is anything else than inevitable,
unless the Deity had seen fit to give every human being a perfect
nature, and develop it by a perfect education.
"The oversight of the fact that all moral relations between man and his
Maker are reciprocal, and must meet the approval of man's enlightened
conscience before he can render true and heartfelt homage to the power
that called him into being, and is not the greatest obligation to all
eternity on the side of the greatest wisdom and the greatest power?
"The notion that the Father of mankind is subject to the absolute
control of a certain malignant entity known under the false name of
justice, or subject to any law such as would have made the father of the
prodigal son meet him with an account-book and pack him off to jail,
instead of welcoming him back and treating him to the fatted calf.
"The notion that useless suffering is in any sense a satisfaction for
sin, and not simply an evil added to a previous one."
In reviewing the life and the writings of Jonathan Edwards, Doctor
Holmes with his usual fairness and kindly spirit toward all mankind,
declares that the spiritual nature seems to be a natural endowment, like
a musical ear.
"Those who have no ear for music must be very careful how they speak
about that mysterious world of thrilling vibrations which are idle
noises to them. And so the true saint can be appreciated only by saintly
natures. Yet the least spiritual man can hardly read the remarkable
'Resolutions' of Edwards without a reverence akin to awe for his purity
and elevation. His beliefs and his conduct we need not hesitate to
handle freely. The spiritual nature is no safeguard against error of
doctrine or practice; indeed it may be doubted whether a majority of all
the spiritual natures in the world would be found in Christian
countries. Edwards' system seems, in the light of to-day, to the last
degree barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pessimistic. If he had lived
a hundred years later, and breathed the air of freedom, he could not
have written with such old-world barbarism as we find in his volcanic
sermons....
"There is no sufficient reason for attacking the motives of a man so
saintly in life, so holy in aspirations, so patient, so meek, so
laborious, so thoroughly in earnest in the work to which his life was
given. But after long smothering in the sulphurous atmosphere of his
thought, one cannot help asking, is this,--or anything like this,--the
accepted belief of any considerable part of Protestantism? If so, we
must say with Bacon, 'It were better to have no opinion of God than such
an opinion as is unworthy of him.'"
In speaking of the old reproach against physicians, that where there
were three of them together there were two atheists, Doctor Holmes
pertinently remarks: "There is, undoubtedly, a strong tendency in the
pursuits of the medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment
of tradition and diseased human imagination which has been installed in
the seat of divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is
impossible, or, at least, very difficult, for a physician who has seen
the perpetual efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads
oftenest--to heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be
done under the given conditions,--it is very difficult for him to
believe in a world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a
respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of
suffering, where the art of torture is the only faculty which remains to
the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The
Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no
doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity.
"On the other hand, the physician has often been renounced for piety as
well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity, led upward by
what he sees the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his own
eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that song of praise which
the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if this
heathen could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not be
surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the crowd
of medical 'atheists.'"
In coming back again as a regular contributor to the magazine which
Doctor Holmes was so prominently identified with a quarter of a century
ago, he indulges in a few entertaining reflections. "When I sat down to
write the first paper I sent to the _Atlantic Monthly_," he says, "I
felt somewhat as a maiden of more than mature effloresence may be
supposed to feel as she passes down the broad aisle in her bridal veil
and wealth of orange blossoms. I had written little of late years. I was
at that time older than Goldsmith was when he died, and Goldsmith, as
Doctor Johnson says, was a plant that flowered late. A new generation
had grown up since I had written the verses by which, if remembered at
all, I was best known. I honestly feared that I might prove the
superfluous veteran who has no business behind the footlights. I can as
honestly say that it turned out otherwise. I was most kindly welcomed,
and now I am looking back on that far-off time as the period--I will not
say of youth--for I was close upon the five-barred gate of the
_cinquantaine_, though I had not yet taken the leap--but of marrowy and
vigorous manhood. Those were the days of unaided vision, of acute
hearing, of alert movements, of feelings almost boyish in their
vivacity. It is a long cry from the end of a second quarter of a century
in a man's life to the end of the third quarter. His companions have
fallen all around him, and he finds himself in a newly peopled world.
His mental furnishing looks old-fashioned and faded to the generation
which is crowding about him with its new patterns and fresh colors.
Shall he throw open his apartments to visitors, or is it not wiser to
live on his memories in a decorous privacy, and not risk himself before
the keen young eyes and relentless judgment of the new-comers, who have
grown up in strength and self-reliance while he has been losing force
and confidence. If that feeling came over me a quarter of a century ago,
it is not strange that it comes back upon me now. Having laid down the
burden, which for more than thirty-five years I have carried cheerfully,
I might naturally seek the quiet of my chimney corner, and purr away the
twilight of my life, unheard beyond the circle of my own fireplace. But
when I see what my living contemporaries are doing, I am shamed out of
absolute inertness and silence. The men of my birth year are so
painfully industrious at this very time that one of the same date hardly
dares to be idle. I look across the Atlantic and see Mr. Gladstone,
only four months younger than myself, and standing erect with patriots'
grievances on one shoulder, and Pharaoh's pyramids on the other--an
Atlas whose intervals of repose are paroxysms of learned labor; I listen
to Tennyson, another birth of the same year, filling the air with melody
long after the singing months of life are over; I come nearer home, and
here is my very dear friend and college classmate, so certain to be in
every good movement with voice or pen, or both, that, where two or three
are gathered together for useful ends, if James Freeman Clarke is not
with them, it is because he is busy with a book or a discourse meant for
a larger audience; I glance at the placards on the blank walls that I am
passing, and there I see the colossal head of Barnum, the untiring,
inexhaustible, insuperable, ever-triumphant and jubilant Barnum, who
came to his atmospheric life less than a year before I began to breathe
the fatal mixture, and still wages his Titanic battle with his own past
superlatives. How can one dare to sit down inactive with such examples
before him? One must do something, were it nothing more profitable than
the work of that dear old Penelope, of almost ninety years, whom I so
well remember hemming over and over again the same piece of linen, her
attendant scissors removing each day's work at evening; herself meantime
being kindly nursed in the illusion that she was still the useful martyr
of the household."
An author, in Doctor Holmes' opinion, should know that the very
characteristics which make him the object of admiration to many, and
endear him to some among them, will render him an object of dislike to a
certain number of individuals of equal, it may be of superior,
intelligence. The converse of all this is very true.
"There will be individuals--they may be few, they may be many--who will
so instantly recognize, so eagerly accept, so warmly adopt, even so
devoutly idolize, the writer in question, that self-love itself, dulled
as its palate is by the hot spices of praise, draws back overcome by the
burning stimulants of adoration. I was told, not long since, by one of
our most justly admired authoresses, that a correspondent wrote to her
that she had read one of her stories fourteen times in succession."
There is a deep meaning in these elective affinities. Each personality
is more or less completely the complement of some other. Doctor Holmes
thinks it should never be forgotten by the critic that "every grade of
mental development demands a literature of its own; a little above its
level, that it may be lifted to a higher grade, but not too much above
it, so that it requires too long a stride--a stairway, not a steep wall
to climb. The true critic is not the sharp _captator verborum_; not the
brisk epigrammatist, showing off his own cleverness, always trying to
outflank the author against whom he has arrayed his wits and his
learning. He is a man who knows the real wants of the reading world, and
can prize at their just value the writings which meet those wants."
There is also another side of the picture. Doctor Holmes does not forget
the trials of authorship. The writer who attains a certain measure of
popularity "will be startled to find himself the object of an
embarrassing devotion, and almost appropriation, by some of his parish
of readers. He will blush at his lonely desk, as he reads the
extravagances of expression which pour over him like the oil which ran
down upon the beard of Aaron, and even down to the skirts of his
garments--an extreme unction which seems hardly desirable. We ought to
have his photograph as he reads one of those frequent missives, oftenest
traced, we may guess, in the delicate, slanting hand which betrays the
slender fingers of the sympathetic sisterhood.
"A slight sense of the ridiculous at being made so much of qualifies the
placid tolerance with which the rhymester or the essayist sees himself
preferred to the great masters in prose and verse, and reads his name
glowing in a halo of epithets which might belong to Bacon or Milton. We
need not grudge him such pleasure as he may derive from the illusion of
a momentary revery, in which he dreams of himself as clad in royal robes
and exalted among the immortals. The next post will probably bring him
some slip from a newspaper or critical journal, which will strip him of
his regalia, as Thackeray, in one of his illustrations, has disrobed and
denuded the grand monarque. He saw himself but a moment ago a colossal
figure in a drapery of rhetorical purple, ample enough for an Emperor,
as Bernini would clothe him. The image breaker has passed by, belittling
him by comparison, jostling him off his pedestal, levelling his most
prominent feature, or even breaking a whole ink bottle against him as
the indignant moralist did on the figure in the vestibule of the opera
house--the shortest and most effective satire that ever came from that
fountain of approval and commendation. Such are some of the varied
experiences of authorship."
Out of his literary career as a successful writer, Doctor Holmes was
able to formulate many rules for the self-protection of authors, which
were adopted unanimously at an authors' association which was held in
Washington last September, and the remainder of his "talk" is devoted to
extracts from their proceedings. Appended are a few of them:
Of visits of strangers to authors. These are not always distinguishable
from each other, and may justly be considered together. The stranger
should send up his card if he has one; if he has none, he should, if
admitted, at once announce himself and his object, without
circumlocution, as thus; "My name is M. or N., from X. or Y. I wish to
see and take the hand of a writer whom I have long admired for his,"
etc., etc. Here the author should extend his hand, and reply in
substance as follows: "I am pleased to see you, my dear sir, and very
glad that anything I have written has been a source of pleasure or
profit to you." The visitor has now had what he says he came for, and,
after making a brief polite acknowledgment, should retire, unless, for
special reasons, he is urged to stay longer.
Of autograph-seekers. The increase in the number of applicants for
autographs is so great that it has become necessary to adopt positive
regulations to protect the author from the exorbitant claims of this
class of virtuosos. The following propositions were adopted without
discussion:
No author is under any obligation to answer any letter from an unknown
person applying for his autograph. If he sees fit to do so, it is a
gratuitous concession on his part.
No stranger should ask for more than one autograph.
No stranger should request an author to copy a poem, or even a verse. He
should remember that he is one of many thousands; that one thousand
fleas are worse than one hornet, and that a mob of mosquitoes will draw
more blood than a single horse leech.
Every correspondent applying for an autograph should send a card or
blank paper, in a stamped envelope, directed to himself (or herself). If
he will not take the trouble to attend to all this, which he can just as
well as to make the author do it, he must not expect the author to make
good his deficiencies. [Accepted by acclamation].
Sending a stamp does not constitute a claim on an author for answer.
[Received with loud applause]. The stamp may be retained by the author,
or, what is better, devoted to the use of some appropriate charity, as
for instance, the asylum for idiots and feeble-minded persons.
Albums. An album of decent external aspect may, without impropriety, be
offered to an author, with the request that he will write his name
therein. It is not proper, as a general rule, to ask for anything more
than the name. The author may, of course, add a quotation from his
writings, or a sentiment, if so disposed; but this must be considered as
a work of supererogation, and an exceptional manifestation of courtesy.
Bed-quilt autographs. It should be a source of gratification to an
author to contribute to the soundness of his reader's slumbers, if he
cannot keep him awake by his writings. He should therefore cheerfully
inscribe his name on the scrap of satin or other stuff (provided always
that it be sent him in a stamped and directed envelope), that it may
take its place in the patchwork mosaic for which it is intended.
Letters of admiration. These may be accepted as genuine, unless they
contain specimens of the writer's own composition, upon which a critical
opinion is requested, in which case they are to be regarded in the same
light as medicated sweetmeats, namely, as meaning more than their looks
imply. Genuine letters of admiration, being usually considered by the
recipient as proofs of good taste and sound judgment on the part of his
unknown correspondent, may be safely left to his decision as to whether
they shall be answered or not.
The author of _Elsie Venner_ thus excuses himself for opening the budget
of the grievances of authors. "In obtaining and giving to the public
this abstract of the proceedings of the association, I have been
impelled by the same feelings of humanity which led me to join the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, believing that the
sufferings of authors are as much entitled to sympathy and relief as
those of the brute creation."
The birthday of the Emperor of Japan is the principal holiday of the
year among his subjects, and as Saturday, November 3d, 1883, was the
thirty-third anniversary of the birthday of Mutsuhito Tenno, the
reigning Emperor, it was appropriately celebrated by the Japanese
gentlemen in Boston. The Japanese department at the Foreign Exhibition
was closed, and in the evening a banquet was given at the Parker House,
about sixty gentlemen assembling in response to the invitation of Mr.
S.R. Takahashi, chief of the imperial Japanese commission to the Boston
Foreign Exhibition. The entrance to the banquet rooms was decorated with
the Japanese and American colors, and at the head of the hall were
portraits of the Emperor and Empress of Japan, with the colors of that
country between them. The occasion was a very enjoyable one, and was
especially interesting as it was a departure from the custom at ordinary
dinners here, several gentlemen dividing with the presiding officer the
duty of proposing the toasts. One of the most delightful orations of the
evening given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was as follows:
"I have heard of 'English' as she is spoke," being taught in ten
lessons, but I never heard that a nation's literature could have justice
done to it in ten minutes. An ancestress of mine--one of my thirty-two
great-great-great-great-grandmothers--a noted poetess in her day, thus
addressed her little brood of children:
Alas! my birds, you wisdom want
Of perils you are ignorant;
Ofttimes in grass, on trees, in flight,
Sore accidents on you may light;
Oh, to your safety have an eye,
So happy may you live and die.
"In accepting your kind invitation, I confess that I was ignorant of my
perils. I did not follow the counsel of my grandmamma with the four g's
in having an eye to my own safety. For I fear that if I had dreamed of
being called on to answer for American literature, one of those
'previous engagements,' which crop out so opportunely, would have stood
between me and my present trying position. I had meant, if called upon,
to say a few words about a Japanese youth who studied law in Boston, a
very cultivated and singularly charming young person, who died not very
long after his return to his native country. Some of you may remember
young Enouie--I am not sure that I spell it rightly, and I know that I
cannot pronounce it properly; for from his own lips it was as soft as an
angel's whisper. His intelligence, his delicate breeding, the loveliness
of his character, captivated all who knew him. We loved him, and we
mourned for him as if he had been a child of our own soil. But of him I
must say no more.
"In speaking of American literature we naturally think first of our
historical efforts. We see that books hold but a small part of American
history. The axe and the ploughshare are the two pens with which our New
World annals have been principally written, with schoolhouses as notes
of interrogation, and steeples as exclamation points of pious adoration
and gratitude. Within half a century the railroad has ruled our broad
page all over, and rewritten the story, with States for new chapters and
cities for paragraphs. This is the kind of history which he who runs may
read, and he must run fast and far if he means to read any considerable
part of it.
"But we must not forget our political history, perishable in great
measure as to its form, long enduring in its results. This literature is
the index of our progress--in both directions--forward and the contrary.
From the days of Washington and Franklin to the times still fresh in our
memory, from the Declaration of Independence to the proclamation which
enfranchised the colored race, our political literature, with all its
terrible blunders and short-comings, has been, after all, the fairest
expression the world has yet seen of what a free people and a free press
have to say and to show for themselves.
"But besides 'Congressional Documents' and the like, the terror of
librarians and the delight of paper-makers, we do a good deal of other
printing. We make some books, a good many books, a great many books, so
many that the hyperbole at the end of St. John's gospel would hardly be
an extravagance in speaking of them. And among these are a number of
histories which hold an honorable place on the shelves of all the great
libraries of Christendom. Why should I enumerate them? For history is a
Boston specialty. From the days of Prescott and Ticknor to those of
Motley and Parkman, we have always had an historian or two on hand, as
they used always to have a lion or two in the Tower of London.
"Next to the historians naturally come the story-tellers and romancers.
The essential difference is--I would not apply the rough side of the
remark to historians like the best of our own, but it is very often the
fact--that history tells lies about real persons and fiction tells truth
through the mouths of unreal ones. England threw open the side doors of
its library to Irving. The continent flung wide its folding doors to
Cooper. Laplace was once asked who was the greatest mathematician of
Germany. 'Pfaff is the greatest,' he answered. 'I thought Gauss was,'
the questioner said. 'You asked me,' rejoined Laplace, 'who was the
greatest mathematician of Germany. Gauss was the greatest mathematician
of Europe.' So, I suppose we might say _The Pilot_ is or was the most
popular book ever written in America, but _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is the
most popular story ever published in the world. And if _The Heart of Mid
Lothian_ added a new glory of romance to the traditions of Auld Reekie,
_The Scarlet Letter_ did as much for the memories of our own New
England. I need not speak of the living writers, some of whom are among
us, who have changed the old scornful question into 'Who _does not_ read
an American book?'
"As to poetical literature, I must confess that, except a line or two of
Philip Freneau's, I know little worthy of special remembrance before the
beginning of this century, always excepting, as in duty bound, the
verses of my manifold grandmother. The conditions of the country were
unfavorable to the poetical habit of mind. The voice that broke the
silence was that of Bryant, a clear and smooth baritone, if I may borrow
a musical term, with a gamut of a few notes of a grave and manly
quality. Then came Longfellow, the poet of the fireside, of the library,
of all gentle souls and cultivated tastes, whose Muse breathed a soft
contralto that was melody itself, and Emerson, with notes that reached
an octave higher than any American poet--a singer whose
Voice fell like a falling star.
Like that of the bird addressed by Wordsworth--
At once far off and near,
it was a
Cry
Which made [us] look a thousand ways,
In bush and tree and sky;
for whether it soared from the earth or dropped from heaven, it was next
to impossible to divine.
"I will not speak of the living poets of the old or the new generation.
It belongs to the young to give the heartiest welcome to the new brood
of singers. Samuel Rogers said that when he heard a new book praised, he
read an old one. Mr. Emerson, in one of his later essays, advises us
never to read a book that is not a year old. This I will say, that every
month shows us in the magazines, and even in the newspapers, verse that
would have made a reputation in the early days of the _North American
Review_, but which attracts little more notice than a breaking bubble.
"A great improvement is noticeable in the character of criticism, which
is leaving the hands of the 'general utility' writers and passing into
the hands of experts. The true critic is the last product of literary
civilization. It costs as great an effort to humanize the being known by
that name as it does to make a good church-member of a scalping savage.
Criticism is a noble function, but only so in noble hands. We have just
welcomed Mr. Arnold as its worthy English representative; we could not
secure our creditors more handsomely than we have done by leaving Mr.
Lowell in pledge for our visitor's safe return.
"One more hopeful mark of literary progress is seen in our cyclopaedias,
our periodicals, our newspapers, and I may add our indexes. I would
commend to the attention of our enlightened friends such works as Mr.
Pool's great _Index to Periodical Literature_, Mr. Alibone's _Dictionary
of Authors_, and the _Index Medicus_, now publishing at Washington--a
wonderful achievement of organized industry, still carried on under the
superintendence of Doctor Billings, and well deserving examination by
all scholars, whatever their calling.
"We have learned so much from our Japanese friends, that we should be
thankful to pay them back something in return. With art such as they
have, they must also have a literature showing the same originality,
grace, facility and simple effectiveness. Let us hope they will carry
away something of our intellectual products, as well as those good
wishes which follow them wherever they show their beautiful works of art
and their pleasant and always welcome faces."