Never but once did I enjoy the privilege of meeting the author of "Elsie
Venner"--Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was at a dinner given by Mr. Lowell,
and of conversation with Dr. Holmes I had very little. He struck me as
being wonderfully erect, active, and vivacious for his great age. He
spoke (perhaps I should not chronicle this impression)--he spoke much,
and freely, but rather as if he were wound up to speak, so to say--wound
up, I mean, by a sense of duty to himself and kindness to strangers, who
were naturally curious about so well-known a man. In his aspect there
was a certain dryness, and, altogether, his vivacity, his ceaselessness,
and a kind of equability of tone in his voice, reminded me of what Homer
says concerning the old men around Priam, above the gate of Troy, how
they "chirped like cicalas on a summer day." About the matter of his
talk I remember nothing, only the manner remains with me, and mine may
have been a false impression, or the manner may have been accidental, and
of the moment: or, again, a manner appropriate for conversation with
strangers, each coming up one after the other, to view respectfully so
great a lion. Among his friends and intimates he was probably a
different man, with a tone other and more reposeful.
He had a long, weary task before him, then, to talk his way, ever
courteous, alert, attentive, through part of a London season. Yet, when
it was all over, he seems to have enjoyed it, being a man who took
pleasure in most sorts of experience. He did not affect me, for that one
time, with such a sense of pleasure as Mr. Lowell did--Mr. Lowell, whom I
knew so much better, and who was so big, strong, humorous, kind, learned,
friendly, and delightfully natural.
Dr. Holmes, too, was a delightful companion, and I have merely tried to
make a sort of photographic "snap-shot" at him, in a single casual
moment, one of myriads of such moments. Turning to Dr. Holmes's popular,
as distinct from his professional writings, one is reminded, as one often
is, of the change which seems to come over some books as the reader grows
older. Many books are to one now what they always were; some, like the
Waverley novels and Shakespeare, grow better on every fresh reading.
There are books which filled me, in boyhood or in youth, with a sort of
admiring rapture, and a delighted wonder at their novelty, their
strangeness, freshness, greatness. Thus Homer, and the best novels of
Thackeray, and of Fielding, the plays of Moliere and Shakespeare, the
poems of--well, of all the real poets, moved this astonishment of
admiration, and being read again, they move it still. On a different
level, one may say as much about books so unlike each other, as those of
Poe and of Sir Thomas Browne, of Swift and of Charles Lamb.
There are, again, other books which caused this happy emotion of wonder,
when first perused, long since, but which do so no longer. I am not much
surprised to find Charles Kingsley's novels among them.
In the case of Dr. Holmes's books, I am very sensible of this
disenchanting effect of time and experience. "The Professor at the
Breakfast Table" and the novels came into my hands when I was very young,
in "green, unknowing youth." They seemed extraordinary, new, fantasies
of wisdom and wit; the reflections were such as surprised me by their
depth, the illustrations dazzled by their novelty and brilliance.
Probably they will still be as fortunate with young readers, and I am to
be pitied, I hope, rather than blamed, if I cannot, like the wise thrush--
"Recapture
The first fine careless rapture."
By this time, of course, one understands many of the constituents of Dr.
Holmes's genius, the social, historical, ancestral, and professional
elements thereof. Now, it is the business of criticism to search out and
illustrate these antecedents, and it seems a very odd and unlucky thing,
that the results of this knowledge when acquired, should sometimes be a
partial disenchantment. But we are not disenchanted at all by this kind
of science, when the author whom we are examining is a great natural
genius, like Shakespeare or Shelley, Keats or Scott. Such natures bring
to the world far more than they receive, as far as our means of knowing
what they receive are concerned. The wind of the spirit that is not of
this earth, nor limited by time and space, breathes through their words,
and thoughts, and deeds. They are not mere combinations, however deft
and subtle, of _known_ atoms. They must continually delight, and
continually surprise; custom cannot stale them; like the heaven-born Laws
in Sophocles, age can never lull them to sleep. Their works, when they
are authors, never lose hold on our fancy and our interest.
As far as my own feelings and admiration can inform me, Dr. Holmes,
though a most interesting and amiable and kindly man and writer, was not
of this class. As an essayist, a delineator of men and morals, an
unassuming philosopher, with a light, friendly wit, he certainly does not
hold one as, for example, Addison does. The old _Spectator_ makes me
smile, pleases, tickles, diverts me now, even more than when I lay on the
grass and read it by Tweedside, as a boy, when the trout were sluggish,
in the early afternoon. It is only a personal fact that Dr. Holmes, read
in the same old seasons, with so much pleasure and admiration and
surprise, no longer affects me in the old way. Carlyle, on the other
hand, in his "Frederick," which used to seem rather long, now entertains
me far more than ever. But I am well aware that this is a mere
subjective estimate; that Dr. Holmes may really be as great a genius as I
was wont to think him, for criticism is only a part of our impressions.
The opinion of mature experience, as a rule, ought to be sounder than
that of youth; in this case I cannot but think that it is sounder.
Dr. Holmes was a New Englander, and born in what he calls "the Brahmin
caste," the class which, in England, before the sailing of the _May
Flower_, and ever since, had always been literary and highly educated. "I
like books; I was born and bred among them," he says, "and have the easy
feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among
horses." He is fond of books, and, above all, of old books--strange, old
medical works, for example--full of portents and prodigies, such as those
of Wierus.
New England, owing to its famous college, Harvard, and its steady
maintenance of the literary and learned tradition among the clergy, was,
naturally, the home of the earliest great American school of writers.
These men--Longfellow, Lowell, Ticknor, Prescott, Hawthorne, and so many
others--had all received the same sort of education as Europeans of
letters used to receive. They had not started as printers' devils, or
newspaper reporters, or playwrights for the stage, but were academic. It
does not matter much how a genius begins--as a rural butcher, or an
apothecary, or a clerk of a Writer to the Signet. Still, the New
Englanders were academic and classical. New England has, by this time,
established a tradition of its literary origin and character. Her
children are sons of the Puritans, with their independence, their
narrowness, their appreciation of comfort, their hardiness in doing
without it, their singular scruples of conscience, their sense of the
awfulness of sin, their accessibility to superstition. We can read of
the later New Englanders in the making, among the works of Cotton Mather,
his father Increase Mather, and the witch-burning, periwig-hating,
doctrinal Judge Sewall, who so manfully confessed and atoned for his
mistake about the Salem witches. These men, or many of them, were deeply-
learned Calvinists, according to the standard of their day, a day lasting
from, say, the Restoration to 1730. Cotton Mather, in particular, is
erudite, literary--nay, full of literary vanity--mystical, visionary,
credulous to an amusing degree.
But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish correspondent and
counterpart, Wodrow. The sons or grandsons of these men gained the War
of Independence. Of this they are naturally proud, and the circumstance
is not infrequently mentioned in Dr. Holmes's works. Their democracy is
not roaring modern democracy, but that of the cultivated middle classes.
Their stern Calvinism slackened into many "isms," but left a kind of
religiosity behind it. One of Dr. Holmes's mouthpieces sums up his whole
creed in the two words _Pater Noster_. All these hereditary influences
are consciously made conspicuous in Dr. Holmes's writings, as in
Hawthorne's. In Hawthorne you see the old horror of sin, the old terror
of conscience, the old dread of witchcraft, the old concern about
conduct, converted into aesthetic sources of literary pleasure, of
literary effects.
As a physician and a man of science, Dr. Holmes added abundant knowledge
of the new sort; and apt, unexpected bits of science made popular,
analogies and illustrations afforded by science are frequent in his
works. Thus, in "Elsie Venner," and in "The Guardian Angel," "heredity"
is his theme. He is always brooding over the thought that each of us is
so much made up of earlier people, our ancestors, who bequeath to us so
many disagreeable things--vice, madness, disease, emotions, tricks of
gesture. No doubt these things are bequeathed, but all in such new
proportions and relations, that each of us is himself and nobody else,
and therefore had better make up his mind to _be_ himself, and for
himself responsible.
All this doctrine of heredity, still so dimly understood, Dr. Holmes
derives from science. But, in passing through his mind, that of a New
Englander conscious of New England's past, science takes a stain of
romance and superstition. Elsie Venner, through an experience of her
mother's, inherits the nature of the serpent, so the novel is as far from
common life as the tale of "Melusine," or any other echidna. The fantasy
has its setting in a commonplace New England environment, and thus
recalls a Hawthorne less subtle and concentrated, but much more humorous.
The heroine of the "Guardian Angel," again, exposes a character in
layers, as it were, each stratum of consciousness being inherited from a
different ancestor--among others, a red Indian. She has many
personalities, like the queer women we read about in French treatises on
hysterics and nervous diseases. These stories are "fairy tales of
science," by a man of science, who is also a humourist, and has a touch
of the poet, and of the old fathers who were afraid of witches. The
"blend" is singular enough, and not without its originality of
fascination.
Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently took an imaginative
pleasure in all shapes of superstition that he could muster. I must
quote a passage from "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," as
peculiarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half accepting the
abnormally romantic--accepting just enough for pleasure, like Sir Walter
Scott. Connected with the extract is a curious anecdote.
"I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was
a boy, that diabolised my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
neighbourhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks
called the 'Devil's footsteps.' These were patches of sand in the
pastures, where no grass grew, where even the low-bush blackberry, the
'dewberry,' as our Southern neighbours call it, in prettier and more
Shakespearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers, where even
the pale, dry, sadly-sweet 'everlasting' could not grow, but all was bare
and blasted. The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near
my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor. I do
not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,--little
having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very
desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the north-
west corner, and on the level of the third or fourth storey, there are
signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be
mistaken. A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried
away, from within outward. It was an unpleasant affair, and I do not
care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in the
chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the
building there could be no question; and the zigzag line, where the
mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible.
"The queer burnt spots, called the 'Devil's footsteps,' had never
attracted attention before this time, though there is no evidence that
they had not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a
'Goody,' so called, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange
horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know
something . . . I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of
impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with
untenanted locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret,--with
'Devil's footsteps' in the fields behind the house, and in front of it
the patched dormitory, where the unexplained occurrence had taken place
which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one
of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a
dreadful season of mental conflict, took to religion, and became renowned
for his ascetic sanctity."
It is a pity that Dr. Holmes does not give the whole story, instead of
hinting at it, for a similar tale is told at Brazenose College, and
elsewhere. Now take, along with Dr. Holmes's confession to a grain of
superstition, this remark on, and explanation of, the curious
coincidences which thrust themselves on the notice of most people.
"Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commonstable. Young fellows
being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the
evening meal, it was a trick of some of the boys to impale a slice of
meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork, holding it, beneath
the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that
guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and
kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one, if
it was not in its place. Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so
many years to hear of this College trick, I should hear it mentioned a
_second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a College youth of the
present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and
to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these
twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
"I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as
an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of
subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our
attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts
and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
"Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all I have been
saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then. The
number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the
incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts
accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in
the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the
world of outward events."
Now for the anecdote--one of Mark Twain's.
Some years ago, Mark Twain published in _Harper's Magazine_ an article on
"Mental Telegraphy." He illustrated his meaning by a story of how he
once wrote a long letter on a complicated subject, which had popped into
his head between asleep and awake, to a friend on the other side of
America. He did not send the letter, but, by return of post, received
one from his friend. "Now, I'll tell you what he is going to say," said
Mark Twain, read his own unsent epistle aloud, and then, opening his
friend's despatch, proved that they were essentially identical. This is
what he calls "Mental Telegraphy"; others call it "Telepathy," and the
term is merely descriptive.
Now, on his own showing, in our second extract, Dr. Holmes should have
explained coincidences like this as purely the work of chance, and I
rather incline to think that he would have been right. But Mark Twain,
in his article on "Mental Telegraphy," cites Dr. Holmes for a story of
how he once, after dinner, as his letters came in, felt constrained to
tell, _a propos des bottes_, the story of the last challenge to judicial
combat in England (1817). He then opened a newspaper directed to him
from England, the _Sporting Times_, and therein his eyes lighted on an
account of this very affair--Abraham Thornton's challenge to battle when
he was accused of murder, in 1817. According to Mark Twain, Dr. Holmes
was disposed to accept "Mental Telegraphy" rather than mere chance as the
cause of this coincidence. Yet the anecdote of the challenge seems to
have been a favourite of his. It occurs in, "The Professor," in the
fifth section. Perhaps he told it pretty frequently; probably that is
why the printed version was sent to him; still, he was a little staggered
by the coincidence. There was enough of Cotton Mather in the man of
science to give him pause.
The form of Dr. Holmes's best known books, the set concerned with the
breakfast-table and "Over the Teacups," is not very fortunate. Much
conversation at breakfast is a weariness of the flesh. We want to eat
what is necessary, and then to go about our work or play. If American
citizens in a boarding-house could endure these long palavers, they must
have been very unlike the hasty feeders caricatured in "Martin
Chuzzlewit." Macaulay may have monologuised thus at his breakfast
parties in the Albany; but breakfast parties are obsolete--an
unregrettable parcel of things lost. The monologues, or dialogues, were
published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_, but they have had a
vitality and a vogue far beyond those of the magazine _causerie_. Some
of their popularity they may owe to the description of the other
boarders, and to the kind of novel which connects the fortunes of these
personages. But it is impossible for an Englishman to know whether these
American types are exactly drawn or not. Their fortunes do not strongly
interest one, though the "Sculpin"--the patriotic, deformed Bostonian,
with his great-great-grandmother's ring (she was hanged for a witch)--is
a very original and singular creation. The real interest lies in the
wit, wisdom, and learning. The wit, now and then, seems to-day rather in
the nature of a "goak." One might give examples, but to do so seems ill-
natured and ungrateful.
There are some very perishable puns. The learning is not so _recherche_
as it appeared when we knew nothing of Cotton Mather and Robert Calef,
the author of a book against the persecution of witches. Calef, of
course, was in the right, but I cannot forgive him for refusing to see a
lady, known to Mr. Mather, who floated about in the air. That she did so
was no good reason for hanging or burning a number of parishioners; but,
did she float, and, if so, how? Mr. Calef said it would be a miracle, so
he declined to view the performance. His logic was thin, though of a
familiar description. Of all old things, at all events, Dr. Holmes was
fond. He found America scarcely aired, new and raw, devoid of history
and of associations. "The Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to
the piers of the Pons AElius, even more full of meaning than my
well-beloved Charles, eddying round the piles of West Boston Bridge." No
doubt this is a common sentiment among Americans.
Occasionally, like Hawthorne, they sigh for an historical atmosphere, and
then, when they come to Europe and get it, they do not like it, and think
Schenectady, New York, "a better place." It is not easy to understand
what ailed Hawthorne with Europe; he was extremely caustic in his
writings about that continent, and discontented. Our matrons were so
stout and placid that they irritated him. Indeed, they are a little
heavy in hand, still there are examples of agreeable slimness, even in
this poor old country. Fond as he was of the historical past, Mr. Holmes
remained loyal to the historical present. He was not one of those
Americans who are always censuring England, and always hankering after
her. He had none of that irritable feeling, which made a great
contemporary of his angrily declare that _he_ could endure to hear "Ye
Mariners of England" sung, because of his own country's successes, some
time ago. They were gallant and conspicuous victories of the American
frigates; we do not grudge them. A fair fight should leave no rancour,
above all in the victors, and Dr. Holmes's withers would have been
unwrung by Campbell's ditty.
He visited England in youth, and fifty years later. On the anniversary
of the American defeat at Bunker's Hill (June 17), Dr. Holmes got his
degree in the _old_ Cambridge. He received degrees at Edinburgh and at
Oxford, in his "Hundred Days in Europe" he says very little about these
historic cities. The men at Oxford asked, "Did he come in the 'One Hoss
Shay'?" the name of his most familiar poem in the lighter vein. The
whole visit to England pleased and wearied him. He likened it to the
_shass caffy_ of Mr. Henry Foker--the fillip at the end of the long
banquet of life. He went to see the Derby, for he was fond of horses, of
racing, and, in a sportsmanlike way, of boxing. He had the great
boldness once, _audax juventa_, to write a song in praise of that
comfortable creature--wine. The prudery of many Americans about the
juice of the grape is a thing very astonishing to a temperate Briton. An
admirable author, who wrote an account of the old convivial days of an
American city, found that reputable magazines could not accept such a
degrading historical record. There was no nonsense about Dr. Holmes. His
poems were mainly "occasional" verses for friendly meetings; or humorous,
like the celebrated "One Horse Shay." Of his serious verses, the
"Nautilus" is probably too familiar to need quotation; a noble fancy is
nobly and tunefully "moralised." Pleasing, cultivated, and so forth, are
adjectives not dear to poets. To say "sublime," or "magical," or
"strenuous," of Dr. Holmes's muse, would be to exaggerate. How far he
maintained his scholarship, I am not certain; but it is odd that, in his
preface to "The Guardian Angel," he should quote from "Jonathan Edwards
the younger," a story for which he might have cited Aristotle.
Were I to choose one character out of Dr. Holmes's creations as my
favourite, it would be "a frequent correspondent of his," and of mine--the
immortal Gifted Hopkins. Never was minor poet more kindly and genially
portrayed. And if one had to pick out three of his books, as the best
worth reading, they would be "The Professor," "Elsie Venner," and "The
Guardian Angel." They have not the impeccable art and distinction of
"The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Scarlet Letter," but they
combine fantasy with living human interest, and with humour. With Sir
Thomas Browne, and Dr. John Brown, and--may we not add Dr. Weir
Mitchell?--Dr. Holmes excellently represents the physician in humane
letters. He has left a blameless and most amiable memory, unspotted by
the world. His works are full of the savour of his native soil,
naturally, without straining after "Americanism;" and they are national,
not local or provincial. He crossed the great gulf of years, between the
central age of American literary production--the time of Hawthorne and
Poe--to our own time, and, like Nestor, he reigned among the third
generation. As far as the world knows, the shadow of a literary quarrel
never fell on him; he was without envy or jealousy, incurious of his own
place, never vain, petulant, or severe. He was even too good-humoured,
and the worst thing I have heard of him is that he could never say "no"
to an autograph hunter.