It is good to go, now and again--let the American phrase be
permitted--'back of' some of our contemporaries. We never desired them
as coevals. We never wished to share an age with them; we share nothing
else with them. And we deliver ourselves from them by passing, in
literature, into the company of an author who wrote before their time,
and yet is familiarly modern. To read Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then,
is to go behind the New Humorist--into a time before he was, or his
Humour. Obviously we go in like manner behind many another, but the
funny writer of the magazines is suggested because in reference to him
our act has a special significance. We connect him with Dr. Holmes by a
reluctant ancestry, by an impertinent descent. It may be objected that
such a connection is but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuous
incident, to a man of letters. So it is. But the triviality has wide
allusions. It is often a question which of several significant
trivialities a critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who
does not insist that all the grave things shall be told him. And, by the
way, are we ever sufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the last few
years have given to us, or to whom we have been given by the last few
years? A trivial connexion has remote and negative issues. To go to Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid of many things; to go to
himself is especially to get rid of the New Humour, yet to stand at its
unprophetic source. And we love such authors as Dickens and this
American for their own sake, refusing to be aware of their corrupt
following. We would make haste to ignore their posterity, and to assure
them that we absolve them from any fault of theirs in the bastardy.
Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must explain why
the little humour in _Elsie Venner_ and the _Breakfast Table_ series
is not only the first thing the critic touches but the thing whereby he
relates this author to his following and to the world. The young man
John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social entertainment,' the Landlady and
her daughter, and the Poor Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic
personages, and fifty per cent. of the things they say--no more--are good
enough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off. But
that half is excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that
temperance--the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities--the humour
of it has set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth. Like
Mr. Lowell's it was humour in dialect--not Irish dialect nor negro, but
American; and it made New England aware of her comedy. Until then she
had felt within herself that there was nothing to laugh at. 'Nature is
in earnest when she makes a woman,' says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Rather, she takes herself seriously when she makes the average spiritual
woman: as seriously as that woman takes herself when she makes a novel.
And in a like mood Nature made New England and endowed her with purpose,
with mortuary frivolities, with long views, with energetic provincialism.
If we remember best _The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay_, we do so in
spite of the religious and pathetic motive of the greater part of Dr.
Holmes's work, and of his fancy, which should be at least as conspicuous
as his humour. It is fancy rather than imagination; but it is more
perfect, more definite, more fit, than the larger art of imagery, which
is apt to be vague, because it is intellectual and adult. No grown man
makes quite so definite mental images as does a child; when the mind ages
it thinks stronger thoughts in vaguer pictures. The young mind of Dr.
Holmes has less intellectual imagination than intelligent fancy. For
example: 'If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get
an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. The bird in sable
plumage flaps heavily along his straightforward course, while the other
sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again,
tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of
him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crow
does;' but the comparison goes on after this at needless length, with
explanations. Again: 'That blessed clairvoyance which sees into things
without opening them: that glorious licence which, having shut the door
and driven the reporter from the keyhole, calls upon Truth, majestic
Virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic _poses_.' And
this, of the Landlady: 'She told me her story once; it was as if a grain
that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualise itself by a
special narrative.' 'The riotous tumult of a laugh, which, I take it, is
the mob-law of the features.' 'Think of the Old World--that part of it
which is the seat of ancient civilisation! . . . A man cannot help
marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession.' 'Young
folk look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given
little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation.' And that
exquisitely sensitive passage on the nervous outward movement and the
inward tranquillity of the woods. Such things are the best this good
author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be bare thoughts
shapely with their own truth.
Part of the charm of Dr. Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase
wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance. He has
unpreoccupied and alert eyes. Strangely enough, by the way, this
watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be the slovenly
observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse's gallop,
'skimming along within a yard of the ground.' Who shall trust a man's
nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him? Not an
inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk.
But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his
studies of New England inland life. Much careful literature besides has
been spent, after the example of _Elsie Venner_ and the _Autocrat_,
upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comforts
achieved by a distressing household industry, the shrillness, the unrest,
the best-parlour emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the
country-side and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by
undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by
demonstrativeness--their kindness by reticence, and their religion by
candour.
As for the question of heredity and of individual responsibility which
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in _Elsie Venner_, it is strange
that a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should present it--not in its
own insolubility but--in caricature. As though the secrets of the
inherited body and soul needed to be heightened by a bit of burlesque
physiology! It is in spite of our protest against the invention of
Elsie's horrible plight--a conception and invention which Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes should feel to be essentially frivolous--that the serpent-
maiden moves us deeply by her last 'Good night,' and by the gentle phrase
that tells us 'Elsie wept.' But now, if Dr. Holmes shall succeed in
proposing the question of separate responsibility so as to convince every
civilised mind of his doubts, there will be curiously little change
wrought thereby in the discipline of the world. For Dr. Holmes
incidentally lets us know that he cherishes and values the instinct of
intolerance and destructiveness in presence of the cruel, the
self-loving, and the false. Negation of separate moral responsibility,
when that negation is tempered by a working instinct of intolerance and
destructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in the
manner achieved by the present prevalent judicialness, unscientific
though it may be. And to say this is to confess that Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes has worked, through a number of books, to futile purpose. His
books are justified by something quite apart from his purpose.