OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
In the roster of American men of letters it is hard to think of any
other who is so completely the product of a district and the spokesman
for it as Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894). His whole lifetime was
passed in two neighborhoods--that of Harvard College in old Cambridge
and that of Beacon Hill in oldest Boston. He was born in the college
town in 1809, the same year with Lincoln. His father, the Reverend
Abiel Holmes, was a fine exponent of the old orthodoxy and of the
old breeding and a historian of the American Revolution. He was an
inheritor of the blood of the Bradstreet, Phillips, Hancock, Quincy,
and Wendell families, a kind of youth whose "aspect is commonly
slender,--his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid,--his features are
regular and of a certain delicacy,--his eye is bright and quick,--his
lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers dance over
their music."[27] It was a type for whose aptitudes Holmes felt the
greatest respect. He thanked God for the republicanism of nature which
every now and then developed a "large, uncombed youth" who strode
awkwardly into intellectual leadership. He acknowledged a Lincoln when
he came to maturity, but he expected more of a Chauncey or an Ellery or
an Edwards because of his inheritance.
[27] "Elsie Venner," chap. i, "The Brahmin Caste of New England."
A prevailing alertness of mind in Holmes's generation offset the
natural conservatism which belongs to an aristocracy. For a hundred
years Harvard had been more liberal than Yale. The cleavage was already
taking place between Unitarian and Trinitarian or Congregational
believers. To be sure, the eyes of Abiel Holmes were focused on the
past, and he sent his son to be schooled under the safe influences
of Phillips Andover Academy, which were fostered by the orthodox
theological seminary just across the road. But even here Wendell--as
he was called--decided against entering the ministry because a certain
clergyman "looked and talked so like an undertaker." And when he
entered college in his home town, while he faced the traditional
required course of classical languages, history, mathematics, and moral
philosophy, the wind from over the sea was blowing through it, and he
breathed the atmosphere which was passing into the blood of Emerson and
Thoreau and George Ripley and the other Transcendentalists-to-be.
In his college days he was a little cheerful student of average
performance who refused then as always to take himself soberly,
although he did not lack inner seriousness. He practised his gift for
writing and was rewarded by the acceptance of some of his efforts
in the fashionable Annuals of the day--repositories of politely
sentimental tales, sketches, and poems in fancy bindings which
ornamented the marble-topped tables in the "best rooms." Under his
apparently aimless amiability, however, there was an independence of
judgment which twice recorded itself, in 1829 and '30. The first time
was on the occasion of an issue in his father's church when the son
was forced to agree with the liberal majority, who literally took the
pastor's pulpit from him, so that he had to reëstablish himself in
North Cambridge. Few harder tests could be devised than one between
loyalty to conviction and loyalty to family interests. The other sign
of independence was his choice of a profession. A boy of his heritage
was socially if not divinely predestined for some sort of intellectual
life. If he went to college, assurance was made doubly sure that he
would not become a business man. From the outset he rejected the
ministry as his "calling." He shrank from the formal complexities of
the law as he did from the logic of the theologians. The thought of
teaching did not seem to enter his mind. Literature could not afford
him a livelihood. By elimination, then, only medicine was left to him,
but in his day medicine did not occupy a position of dignity equal with
the other professions. Medical science was still in earliest youth,
and the practice of "physic" was jointly discredited by the barber,
the veterinary, the midwife, the "yarb doctor," and the miscellaneous
quack. This young "Brahmin," however, saw the chance for contributing
to the progress of a budding science, and made his decision with quiet
disregard of social prejudice.
Study in Paris, successful research work, practice in Boston, and
a year's teaching at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire led to an
appointment on the medical faculty at Harvard which he held actively
from 1847 to 1882 and as emeritus until his death. As a practitioner
he was not remarkably successful. At the first his extremely youthful
appearance and his jocosity of manner stood in the way. People could
not be expected to flock to the office of a young man who was known to
have said that "all small fevers would be gratefully received." And
later his interest in things literary was regarded with distrust by
prospective patients. As a teacher, on the other hand, he was unusually
effective because of the traits which made him a poor business-getter.
He was vivacious and deft in his methods. He knew how to put his ideas
in order, he was a master hand at expounding them, and he was ingenious
in providing neat formulas for memorizing the myriad details of
physiology and anatomy.
His profession supplied Holmes with a background of thought which was
different from any of his contemporaries. It supplied him with titles
and whole poems, such as "Nux Postcoenatica," "The Stethoscope
Song," and "The Mysterious Illness," with literary essays, such
as "The Physiology of Versification," and with a whole volume of
medical essays. It furnished the motives for his three "medicated
novels,"--prenatal influence in "Elsie Venner," physical magnetism
(by its opposite) in "A Mortal Antipathy," and telepathy in "The
Guardian Angel." It was the basis for scores of passages and hundreds
of allusions in the four volumes of the "Breakfast Table" series. And,
furthermore, in the natural sympathy which it generated in him for
every branch of progressive science it gave ground for the felicitous
toast:[28] "The union of Science and Literature--a happy marriage,
the fruits of which are nowhere seen to better advantage than in our
American Holmes." This is not to say that Holmes was alone in his
consciousness of science. Thoreau was fully as aware of it in the field
of plant and animal study; all things considered, Emerson and Whitman
were more responsive to its deeper spiritual implications. It is rather
that Holmes had his special avenue of approach through the lore of the
physician.
[28] Meeting of the American Medical Association, May, 1853. The
response was a poem.
The Boston to which Holmes removed when he began his professional
career was all-sufficing to him for the rest of his life. On Beacon
Hill, the stronghold of the old social order, there was an eager,
outreaching intellectual life. On its slope was the Boston Athenæum;
just below were the Old Corner Book Store and the little shop
maintained by Elizabeth Peabody. The theaters were rising at its
foot. Music was being fostered under the wise persistence of James S.
Dwight, Washington Allston was doing the best of his painting, and
the traditions of good statesmanship were being maintained by men
like Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. To cap all, good-fellowship
reigned and many a quiet dinner became a feast of reason and a flow
of soul. "Nature and art combined to charm the senses; the equatorial
zone of the system was soothed by well-studied artifices; the faculties
were off duty, and fell into their natural attitudes; you saw wisdom
in slippers and science in a short jacket." Although Holmes discounted
it in the moment of utterance, he was not unfriendly to the dictum:
"Boston State-house is the Hub of the Solar System. You couldn't
pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation
straightened out for a crowbar."
Moreover, as the half century of his Boston residence progressed
there was no waning in the intellectual life. The obvious leaders,
whose names are known to everyone, were surrounded by a large circle
of thinking men and women. At the corner of the Common, just across
from the Statehouse, was the mansion of George Ticknor, then retired
from his Harvard professorship but hospitable in the offer of his rich
library to the new generation of scholars. William Ticknor founded a
publishing business into which he soon took young James T. Fields,
a house which under various firm names has had a distinguished and
unbroken career. Elizabeth Peabody was a radioactive center of all
sorts of enterprises and enthusiasms--the Pestalozzian Temple School,
the "conversations" on history, the book shop, and the temporary
publishing of the _Dial_. Francis H. Underwood was the untiring
champion of the idea which with perfect unselfishness he handed over to
the abler founders of the _Atlantic Monthly_. And scores of others with
less definite fruits of no less definite interest in life talked well
and listened well and wrote well for the passing reader of the day.
In this community Holmes early took his place as the accepted humorist,
and for the first twenty-five years he wrote almost entirely in verse.
The fact that two of his earliest and most famous poems were anything
but funny reënforces the point rather than gainsays it. For the
humorist, in contrast to the joker, is a serious man with a special
method which he employs usually but not always. If Holmes had not been
capable of blazing with the indignation of "Old Ironsides" or glowing
with the sympathy of "The Last Leaf," he would have been a clever
dispenser of jollities but not a commentator on life. Much of his
youthful composition was of the lighter variety--pleasant extravagances
on the level of the "Croaker Papers," not quite up to _Salmagundi_ (see
pp. 116, 134). "The Music Grinders," "The Comet," "Daily Trials," and
"The Stethoscope Song" belong in this class. More humorous and less
jocose are the verse with a definite satirical turn. "The Ballad of the
Oysterman" was a gibe at the sentimental lays to be found in all the
Annuals. "My Aunt" hit off the Apollinean Institute type of Young Lady
Finishing School to which he returned in a chapter of "Elsie Venner";
the sort of subject to which he returned too in his shafts at the
Latter-Day Adventists, in "Latter-Day Warnings," and at the decline of
Calvinism, in "The Deacon's Masterpiece."
At the same time Holmes won a place as the local laureate,--for his
class of 1829, for Harvard, and for every kind of occasion, grave and
gay, on which some appropriate verse could point a moral and adorn the
program. This is an easy accomplishment for those who have the gift,
but both difficult and dull in the hands of many a poet who is capable
of higher things. It demands fluency of pen, ready inventiveness,
informality, and a confident good humor in its oral delivery. These all
belonged to Holmes, and not least of them a gracious social manner.
It is far easier to depreciate this kind of verse than it is to be
consistently effective in it.
Twice in his early maturity he wrote in verse on the theory of poetry.
The first, in 1836, when he was entering the medical profession, was
his Phi Beta Kappa poem "Poetry"; the second was "Urania," in 1846,
shortly before he accepted his Harvard professorship. The object of
"Poetry," he wrote in a preface for its publication, was "to express
some general truths on the sources and the machinery of poetry; to
sketch some changes which may be said to have taken place in its
history, constituting four grand eras; and to point out some less
obvious manifestations of the poetic principle." In old age he looked
back on this ambitious early effort with kindly indulgence, and
allowed it to stand as a matter of biographical interest, although
it was so evidently the product "of a young person trained after the
schools of classical English verse as represented by Pope, Goldsmith,
and Campbell, with whose lines his memory was early stocked." When,
however, he wrote "Urania, a Rhymed Lesson" he wore a friendly smile
and did his teaching in a less didactic way. He knew his audience, he
said, and he knew that they all expected to be amused.
I know a tailor, once a friend of mine,
Expects great doings in the button line,--
For mirth's concussions rip the outward case,
And plant the stitches in a tenderer place,
I know my audience,--these shall have their due;
A smile awaits them ere my song is through!
But, he went on to say, he knew himself, too, and he proposed no more
to be the buffoon than to be the savage satirist. Beneath his smiles
there was a kindly seriousness. A dozen years later, in the fifth of
the "Autocrat" papers, he put the case in a little allegory, the end of
which is worth quoting in full:
The stone is ancient error. The grass is human nature borne down
and bleached of all its color by it. The shapes which are found
beneath are the crafty beings which thrive in darkness, and the
weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is
whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter
whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year
stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain
blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native hues in the
sunshine. Then shall God's minstrels build their nests in the hearts
of a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty--Divinity taking outlines
and color--light upon the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the
beatified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held
a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone
been lifted.
By these stages, then, Holmes concluded that he was an essayist and
developed into one. The "Poetry" of 1836 was entitled "A Metrical
Essay," and it was, without intending to be, distinctly prosaic.
"Urania," of 1846, was self-described as "A Rhymed Lesson" and
affected to be nothing more. At last "The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table"--adopting the title and the form of an unsuccessful beginning
in the _New England Magazine_ of 1831-1832--resorted frankly to prose
and achieved a wider reputation for Holmes than all the foregoing verse
had done.[29] The young person trained through the reading of Pope,
Goldsmith, and Campbell was in the end fitted to do his best work after
the manner of Addison, Goldsmith, and Lamb. From the appearance of "The
Autocrat" Holmes's verse was subordinated in bulk and importance to his
prose.
[29] For a direct statement on the resumption of the old attempt,
see "The Autocrat's Autobiography" printed as a foreword to
the volume. For an indirect account, see the passages on Byles
Gridley and his "Thoughts on the Universe" in Holmes's "The
Guardian Angel."
With his assumption of the _Atlantic_ editorship, Lowell had set the
prime condition that Holmes should become a regular contributor, and
it is evident from the motto on the title page, "Every man his own
Boswell," that Holmes's conversation had furnished the suggestion
for the series. The vehicle was perfectly adapted to the load it was
devised to carry. The introduction of a chief spokesman in a loosely
organized group made way for the casual drift from topic to topic.
The accident of a boarding-house selection justified the domination
by one speaker which would have been unnatural in any social group.
The continuity of the group gave a chance for characterization and for
the spinning of a slight narrative thread comparable to those on which
the _Citizen of the World_ and the "De Coverley Papers" were strung.
And the chief speaker, autocrat that he was, could give vent to his
thoughts on the universe without let or hindrance, and when the whim
seized him could impose his latest poems upon his always tolerant and
usually deferential fellow-boarders. From the publication of the first
number Lowell's judgment was vindicated, with the result not only that
the Autocrat spoke through twelve issues, but that the thread of his
discourse was continued with "The Professor at the Breakfast-Table," in
1859, was resumed with "The Poet at the Breakfast-Table," in 1871, and
was not concluded until the conversations "Over the Teacups," in 1890.
The range of topics cannot be better shown than by reference to the
index--and the original edition was extraordinary in its day for having
one. The "A's," for example, include abuse of all good attempts,
affinities, and antipathies, age, animal under air-pump, the American a
reënforced Englishman, the effect of looking at the Alps, the power of
seeing analogies, why anniversaries are dreaded by the professor, the
arguments which spoil conversation, the forming American aristocracy,
the use of stimulants by artists, the effect of meeting one of heaven's
assessors, and so on. The order in which they fall is hardly more
casual than in the index. Witness the eleventh paper: puns, "The
Deacon's Masterpiece," slang, dandies, aristocracy, intellectual green
fruit, Latinized diction (with the verses "Æstivation"), seashore and
mountains, summer residences, space, the Alps, moderate wishes (with
the verses "Contentment"), faithfulness in love, picturesque spots in
Boston, natural beauties in a city, dusting a library, experiencing
life, a proposal of marriage. The difference between their structure
and that of the formal essay is simply that they meander like a stream
instead of following a predetermined course like a canal.
In the later members of the series, and particularly in the
third and fourth, there is an evident response to the current of
nineteenth-century thinking. By nature Holmes was a liberal but not a
reformer. He took no active part in "movements," though he sympathized
with many of them and with the intentions of their wiser promoters.
At the same time he preferred for his own part to induce and persuade
people into new paths rather than to shock and offend them while they
were still treading the old ones. There is a note of considerate
caution in his espousal of new ideas. He was the type of man who will
always be unsatisfactory to extremists,--a dangerous person to the
hidebound conservative and a tentative trifler to the ultraradical.
His open-mindedness is charmingly demonstrated in the book of his old
age, "Over the Teacups." Few men of eighty succeed in keeping their
eyes off the past and their voices from decrying the present, but
Holmes in his latest years was as interested in the developments of the
day as he had been in the prime of life.
The issues of the Civil War--to return from the tea table to the
breakfast room--showed that Holmes had not lost the spark for righteous
indignation in the thirty years since the writing of "Old Ironsides."
"The Statesman's Secret" was not as effective a protest at Webster's
"Seventh of March Speech" (1850) as Whittier's "Ichabod," but it was
quite as sincerely outspoken. "Non-Resistance" and "The Moral Bully"
prove that Holmes was as little of a peace-at-any-price man as Lowell.
"Brother Jonathan's Lament for Sister Caroline" was written in deep
sorrow that the war had been precipitated, but "To Canaan" was militant
to the highest degree. Two other poems, written in the years of the
Autocrat and the Poet, both in lofty seriousness, came from "flowering
moments of the mind" which lost fewest petals as they were recorded in
verse. These were "The Chambered Nautilus" and "A Sun-Day Hymn."
In all Holmes's writing, whatever the mood or the form, the prevailing
method is cumulative. He is likely to start with an idea, proceed to a
simple analysis of it, and expound it by a single analogy elaborated at
length or a whole series of them more briefly presented. In the sixth
"Autocrat" paper he says, with some show of self-restraint, "There are
some curious observations I should like to make ... but I think we are
getting rather didactic." Yet as a matter of fact Holmes's method was
seldom anything but didactic, and his content was frequently such. He
evidently saw at a flash how to communicate the idea, but, as he must
have done hundreds of times in the classroom, he developed it with
what was at once spontaneous and painstaking detail. His most famous
satires, "My Aunt," "Contentment," and "The Deacon's Masterpiece," are
all illustrations of this method. Thus in his "Farewell to Agassiz,"
before the naturalist left for South America, Holmes mentioned that
the mountains were awaiting his approval, as were also five other
natural objects. He wished the traveler safety from the tropical sun
and twenty-two other dangers and that he might succeed in finding
fossils and seven other things of interest. "Bill and Joe" contains
sixty lines built up by the enumerative method on the truth that
worldly distinctions disappear for a moment in the light of college
friendships. "Dorothy Q" devotes thirty-two lines to the quaint
fancy "What would I be if one of my eight great, great grandmothers
had married another man?" and "The Broomstick Train" a hundred and
forty-six lines to the conceit "The Salem Witches furnish the power for
the trolley cars." In prose, as a final illustration, his well-known
discussion of the typical lecture audience in the sixth "Autocrat" is
about eight hundred words long: Audiences help formulate lectures.
The average is not high. They are awful in their uniformity--like
communities of ants or bees--whether in New York, Ohio, or New
England--unless some special principle of selection interferes. They
include fixed elements--in age (four)--and in intelligence (the dull
elaborated)--making up a compound vertebrate (biological analogy).
Kindly elements conceded, but on the whole depressing.
Holmes gave the final epithet to his novels when he referred to them
as "medicated." For the other and more eminent American physician,
Weir Mitchell, fiction was a resort to another world, but the
author of "Elsie Venner" (1861), "The Guardian Angel" (1867), and
"The Mortal Antipathy" (1885) was the essayist-physician extending
the narrative process a little farther than in the conversational
series. The plots were supplied by Dr. Holmes and developed by the
Autocrat-Professor-Poet. Several chapters of medical lore were
interpolated in each book, and several more of genial exposition.
These latter are like the work of Mrs. Stowe except that their
relation to story development is tenuous or imperceptible, and in
characterization his successes, like Mrs. Stowe's, are with the
homelier New England types.
In the best sense of the word Holmes was a provincial New Englander. He
was proud of the traditions of his district, devoted to its welfare,
certain of its capacity for improvement, but sure of its contribution
to the integrity of American character. Although he did not share the
deeper enthusiasms of Emerson or even fully understand them, he had
much more of the milk of human kindness in him. His "message" and his
manner of delivering it were popular with the reading public. He was
not a leader, but he kept up to the times, and he explained the drift
of them to many who might not otherwise have perceived what was going
on in the world or in themselves. In the tributes which came from every
quarter after his death his geniality was the highest common factor--a
wholesome and homely trait which will always be sure of affectionate
regard in American literature.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. Riverside Edition. 13 vols. Prose, Vols. I-X;
Poetry, XI-XIII. 1891. Standard Library Edition, 1892; Autocrat
Edition, 1904; both 15 vols. (uniform with Riverside Edition,
with added life by J. T. Morse as Vols. XIV and XV). The best
single volume of poems is the Cambridge Edition, 1895. His work
appeared in book form originally as follows: Poems, 1836; Boylston
Prize Dissertations, 1838; Homeopathy, and its Kindred Delusions,
1842; Urania, 1846; Poems, 1849; Astræa, 1850; The Autocrat of
the Breakfast-Table, 1858; The Professor at the Breakfast-Table,
1860; Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science, 1861;
Elsie Venner, 1861; Songs in Many Keys, 1862; Soundings from the
Atlantic, 1864; Humorous Poems, 1865; The Guardian Angel, 1867;
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, 1872; Songs of Many Seasons,
1875; John Lothrop Motley, 1879; The Iron Gate, 1880; Medical
Essays, 1883; Pages from an Old Volume of Life, 1883; Ralph Waldo
Emerson, 1885; A Mortal Antipathy, 1885; Our Hundred Days in
Europe, 1887; Before the Curfew, and Other Poems, 1888; Over the
Teacups, 1891.
=Bibliography=
A volume compiled by George B. Ives. 1907. Cambridge History of
American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 540-543.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by John T. Morse. 1896. 2 vols.
COLLINS, CHURTON. The Poetry and Poets of America.
COOKE, G. W. Dr. Holmes at Fourscore. _New England Magazine_,
October, 1889.
CURTIS, G. W. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in _Literary and Social
Essays_. 1895.
DWIGHT, THOMAS. Reminiscences of Dr. Holmes as Professor of
Anatomy. _Scribner's_, January, 1895.
FIELDS, ANNIE. Personal Recollections and Unpublished Letters,
in _Authors and Friends_. 1896.
GILDER, JEANNETTE L. A Book and its Story, in _The Genial
"Autocrat." Critic_, May 9, 1896.
HALE, E. E. An Afternoon with Dr. Holmes in _Human Documents_.
1895.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Cheerful Yesterdays. 1898.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Contemporaries. 1899.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Old Cambridge. 1900.
HOWELLS, W. D. Oliver Wendell Holmes. _Harper's_, December, 1896.
HOWELLS, W. D. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in _Literary Friends and
Acquaintances_. 1900.
KENNEDY, W. S. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Poet, Litterateur,
Scientist. 1883.
LANG, ANDREW. Adventures among Books. 1905.
LODGE, H. C. Certain Accepted Heroes and Other Essays. 1897.
LOWELL, J. R. A Fable for Critics. 1848.
MATTHEWS, BRANDER. Cambridge History of American Literature.
Vol. II, Bk. II, in chap. xxiii.
MEYNELL, ALICE. The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays. 1897.
RICHARDSON, C. F. American Literature, Bk. II, chap. vi. 1889.
STEDMAN, E. C. Poets of America. 1885.
VINCENT, L. H. American Literary Masters. 1906.
WOODBERRY, G. E. _Nation_, October 11, 1894.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read any one of Holmes's "Breakfast-Table" Series or any one of his
novels for evidences of his prevailing belief in the virtues of an
intellectual aristocracy.
Do the same thing with any of these seven books for the recurrence of
illustrations, allusions, or whole passages which only a physician
would have been likely to write.
Note in any of these books or in any selected group of his poems
evidences of his respect for the broad contributions of science and
scientific thought.
Read poems and passages of broadest jocosity and see if you find any
wisdom intermixed with their ingenuity and their good nature.
Compare the "society verse" of Holmes with that of Austin Dobson or
Brander Matthews.
Read at least a half-dozen poems of Holmes written in satire on
contemporary men or movements and generalize on them as you can.
Read "Poetry," "Urania," and "To my Readers" for Holmes's theory of
the content and the purpose of poetry. Compare with the theory of some
other American or English poet.
Read "Elsie Venner," "The Guardian Angel," or "The Mortal Antipathy"
and criticize it for its virtues and defects as a novel.
Read "The Guardian Angel" for the autobiographical material
discoverable in the character of Byles Gridley.