Born, at Cambridge, Mass., 29 Aug. 1809. At schools at Cambridge and Andover, 1819–25. To Harvard University, summer of 1825; B.A., 1829. First poems appeared in the Harvard “Collegian,” 1830. Studied medicine in Paris, 1833–35. M.D., Cambridge, Mass., 1836. Prof. of Anatomy and Physiology, Dartmouth Coll., 1838–40. Married Amelia Lee Jackson, 15 June 1840. Prof. of Anatomy, Harvard Univ., 1847–82; Professor Emeritus, 1882. Gave up medical practice, 1849. Contributor to “Atlantic Monthly” from 1857. Edited “The Atlantic Almanack” with D. G. Mitchell, 1867. Hon. LL.D., Harvard, 1886. Visit to Europe, 1886. Hon. LL.D., Cambridge, 1886; Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 1886; Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 1886. Died, in Boston, Mass., 7 Oct. 1894. Buried there. Works: “Poems,” 1836; “Boylston Prize Dissertations,” 1838; “Lectures on Homœopathy,” 1842; “Terpsichore,” 1843; “Urania,” 1846; “An Introductory Lecture,” 1847; “Astræa,” 1850; “The Benefactors of the Medical School of Harvard,” 1850; “Oration” [before New England Soc.], 1855; “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” 1858; “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” 1860; “Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science,” 1861; “Songs in Many Keys,” 1861; “Elsie Venner,” 1861; “Border Lines in some provinces of Medical Science,” 1862; “Oration” [on Independence Day], 1863; “Soundings from the ‘Atlantic,’” 1866; “The Guardian Angel,” 1867; “Wit and Humor,” 1867, “Mechanism in Thought and Morals,” 1870 (2nd edn., “with Notes and Afterthoughts,” same year); “The Poet at the Breakfast Table,” 1872; “The Claims of Dentistry,” 1872; “Songs of Many Seasons,” 1875; “The Story of Iris,” 1877; “John Lothrop Motley,” 1878; “The School-Boy,” 1879; “The Iron Gate,” 1881; “Pages from an Old Volume of Life,” 1883; “Medical Essays,” 1883; “Grandmother’s Story, and other poems,” 1883; “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” 1885; “A Mortal Antipathy,” 1885; “The Last Leaf,” 1886; “Our Hundred Days in Europe,” 1887; “Before the Curfew,” 1888; “Over the Teacups,” 1891 [1890]. Collected Works: in 13 vols., 1891. Life: by J. T. Morse, 1896.
Personal
His chirography is remarkably fine, and a quick fancy might easily detect, in its graceful yet picturesque quaintness, an analogy with the vivid, drollery of his style.
The Boston literati have come and gone. I sat beside Longfellow at dinner, and had some very pleasant conversation with him. But O. W. Holmes was the great talker, and kept asking questions constantly about Scotland, how Burns could come out of its Calvinistic atmosphere, &c.—a little dapper man, hard and brusque, and more inquisitive than pleasant, but very bright and intelligent, he and Longfellow more ignorant of Scotland and Scotch modes of thought than I had imagined possible.
Holmes has encountered no adverse fates, nor has he passed through those vicissitudes that try the souls of some men. Nature gave him a good outfit, and fortune has favored him at every step of his career. His has been an active life, devoted to earnest study and the pursuit of high ideals; it has been rewarded by ample contemporary honor, and, above all, blest with domestic happiness and with love of friends. Not until the silver cord is loosed, and the golden bowl is broken, can the curtain be lifted from the serene beauty of the poet’s home.
As a boy he had tendencies towards flutes and flageolets; he was the possessor of a gun, and a pistol, in the barrel of which he hid his surreptitious cigars. At this distance of time he might confess to being one of the “gunners” who shot “Deacon Peleg’s tame wild-goose.” Full of animal spirits and vivacity, he had little natural inclination for the ministry. Even if his home had not been visited by sad and wailing ministers, who twitted him with his blessings as a Christian child till he wished he was a Moor…. He loves horses—saw Plenipotentiary in 1834 and Ormonde in 1886 win the Derby—and prefers a racer to a trotter. A “proud pedestrian,” an oarsman, and, like Bernard Langdon, a boxer, familiar in his youth with the pets of the fancy and the heroes of the prize-ring, he despises the dandified languor of many of his countrymen. Aristocrat, athlete, conservative, insisting on the importance of neat dress and good manners, excelling in the patrician talent of “vers de société,” and preferring the straight-backed metre of Dryden and Pope to the nimbler measures of modern verse, he seems to belong rather to the Old than the New World.
Holmes’s devotion to the two Muses of science and letters was uniform and untiring, as it was also to the two literary forms of verse and prose. But although a man of letters, like the other eminent men of letters in New England he had no trace of the Bohemian.
On every page of the “Autocrat” the author stands out, and everywhere with a smile on his face and an outstretched hand. He was so sympathetic that the relation of author to reader became surprisingly intimate, and the wish to verify the impression was universal. It sometimes happens that there is a disappointment. In Holmes there was none. His readers found him more delightful than his books. Those who knew him only by hearsay used to declare that they must read what so charming a man had written, and some of them did. He was looked upon as a kind of social phenomenon; this youthful and cheerful activity in a man nearing the eighties. To a phenomenon of another kind, also nearing the eighties, London had long been used. But Mr. Gladstone impressed people by his commanding qualities and his tremendous energy, while Holmes enchanted them. It was the difference between the whirlwind and the vernal breeze, or between the torrent and the brook which sparkles and flows serenely on between smiling banks.
It is a significant fact that the great group of poets of which Oliver Wendell Holmes was the last were all Unitarians—Bryant, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, all Unitarians…. Two or three days before his death it is said that, anticipating the fact that he must go before long, and having in mind, as his son easily understood him, the funeral service in King’s Chapel, which has always been his ecclesiastical home, he said to his son, Judge Holmes, “Well, Wendell, what is it—King’s Chapel?” “Oh, yes, father,” said he. “All right; then I am satisfied. That is all I am going to say about it.” And that was all he did say, except what he has left on record for us all…. A student of science, a careful student of the human body, he lost his faith in the old, the cruel and the unjust as it seemed to him; but he did not, like many an anatomist, come to the conclusion that the flesh and the bones were all. Holmes never lost his faith in the Father, never lost his faith in the soul, never lost his burning belief in the future—a magnificent future for the poorest and the meanest of us all…. If you wish to find out his main religious ideas, read all of the poems called “Wind-clouds and Star-drifts.”
His knowledge of anatomy was that of the scholar, rather than that of the practitioner. He delighted in the old anatomists, and cared little for the new. He maintained that human anatomy is much the same study that it was in the days of Vesalius and Fallopius. He actually button-holed book agents, little accustomed to be pressed to stay, in order to put them to shame by the superiority of the illustrations in his old anatomies. It pleased him to discuss whether we should say the Gasserian or the Casserian ganglion. His books were very dear to him. He had said more than once that a twig from one of his nerves ran to everyone of them. Literature was his career. That early attack of poisoning from type was fatal to his eminence in any other. Though I fear many will disagree with me, I venture to say, that while he would have been a great anatomist had he made it his life’s work, he could never have been a great teacher of anatomy. Successful teaching of concrete facts requires a smack of the drill-master, which was foreign to his gentle nature. The very methods which did so much to make his lectures popular and charming, at times irritated the more earnest students, hungry for knowledge.
With Dr. Holmes sunshine and gaiety came into the room. It was not a determination to be cheerful or witty or profound; but it was a natural expression, like that of a child, sometimes overclouded and sometimes purely gay, but always as open as a child to the influences around him, and ready for “a good time.” His power of self-excitement seemed inexhaustible. Given a dinner-table, with light and color, and somebody occasionally to throw the ball, his spirits would rise and coruscate astonishingly. He was not unaware if men whom he considered his superiors were present; he was sure to make them understand that he meant to sit at their feet and listen to them, even if his own excitement ran away with him. “I’ve talked too much,” he often said, with a feeling of sincere penitence, as he rose from the table. “I wanted to hear what our guest had to say.” But the wise guest, seizing the opportunity, usually led Dr. Holmes on until he forgot that he was not listening and replying.
Death drew near to Dr. Holmes with steps so slow, so gently graded, that the approach was hardly perceptible. Body and mind could be seen to be losing something in vigor, if one measured by intervals of months, but hardly by shorter periods. He was out of doors, taking his usual walks, a few days before the end came; he was up and about the house actually to the last day, and he died in his chair,—painlessly, as so humane a man well deserved to make his escape out of life,—on October 7, 1894. Two days later he was buried from King’s Chapel.
Doctor Holmes was decidedly the most brilliant converser whom I have ever met.
In this pleasant study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat as if the slovenly disarray of most authors’ desks were impossible to him. He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work, which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain-pen in any wise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy-chair at the other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the person who wished to talk when he could listen to Dr. Holmes was his own victim, and always the loser…. He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that made themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure…. If you met him in the street, you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the freshness of a newly kindled fire.
He was intensely proud of his Boston, and was yet to show by the literary uses to which he put it how the local might be extended into the universal. For himself, he declared in later life that he would rest upon having said, “Boston is the hub of the universe.” And this Boston which he knew came to know him well as a delightful wit and talker, a curious student of himself—so frank that he could write, “I have always considered my face a convenience rather than an ornament,”—a shrewd observer of men, and the local laureate of civic, social, and academic “occasions.” Nothing that he has left shows more clearly than the “Poems of the Class of ’29” the strength of the social instinct and the nature of his social gift.
He had no marked development of systematic memory, but his accumulation of odds and ends of knowledge was unsurpassed, and this is what a talker, or indeed a literary man as such, chiefly needs. His ready wit supplied the rest. It is to be noticed also that he had an arsenal of his own in a scientific direction from which he could draw weapons not accessible to others…. It might, doubtless, be said that Dr. Holmes was always conventional, though never in any sense a fop or an exquisite—to revert to the phrase of that day. With an unconcealed preference for what is called the best society, he yet had, in his early medical practice, the advantage enjoyed by all of that profession, in alternating between the houses of rich and poor, and learning that they are composed mentally, as physically, of much the same material…. Perhaps, indeed, Holmes’s talk was not to be seen at best advantage in his pet clubs where he sat as undisputed autocrat, while in the more familiar intercourse of common life his conversational fertility can hardly be exaggerated, and was, perhaps, never surpassed even by Sydney Smith. There was certainly no one in his day with whom it was so impossible to spend five minutes without bringing away something worth recalling.
He loved his Cambridge friends serenely, Lowell, Agassiz, and Wyman, I think, above others; but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other thing on earth. He was lifted above ennui and discontent by a most happy satisfaction with the rounded world of his own individuality and belongings. Of the three men whom I have personally known in the world who seemed most satisfied with what fate and fortune had made them,—viz., Gladstone, Professor Freeman, and Holmes,—I think Holmes enjoyed himself the most. There was a tinge of Dandyism in the doctor; not enough to be considered a weakness, but enough to show that he enjoyed his personal appearance and was content with what he had become, and this in so delightful a way that one accepted him at once at his own terms. The Doctor stood for Boston as Lowell for Cambridge, the archetype of the Hub. Nobody represented it as he did.
My week’s experience with Holmes would lead me to say that the charm of his wit was that it came from a man of seriousness, and of his seriousness that it came from a man of wit.
I never heard Holmes converse when he did not converse well…. With one of the kindest hearts, open to friends, and often sympathizingly helpful to strangers, he yet cherished a sort of Brahminical exclusiveness; something in the earlier Autocrat papers even made you feel that he was at times too complacently conscious of a superior caste and culture.
Poetry
Mr. Holmes does not write in this mezzotinto style; he reminds us more of the clear strong fines of the ancient engravers. His manner is entirely his own, manly and unaffected; generally easy and playful, and sinking at times into “a most humorous sadness.”
As a poet he has won an enduring reputation. He possesses a rich vein of humor, with learning and originality, and great skill as an artist.
To write good comic verse is a different thing from writing good comic poetry. A jest or a sharp saying may be easily made to rhyme; but to blend ludicrous ideas with fancy and imagination, and display in their conception and expression the same poetic qualities usually exercised in serious composition, is a rare distinction. Among American poets, we know of no one who excels Holmes in this difficult branch of the art. Many of his pleasant lyrics seem not so much the offspring of wit, as of fancy and sentiment turned in a humorous direction. His manner of satirizing the foibles, follies, vanities, and affectations of conventional life is altogether peculiar and original…. Holmes is also a poet of sentiment and passion…. Those who know him only as a comic lyrist, as the libellous laureate of chirping folly and presumptuous egotism, would be surprised at the clear sweetness and skylark thrill of his serious and sentimental compositions.
Though he has published very little, he is one of the most popular of American poets, and the corollary from our theorem is, that he deserves all his reputation. Some may object, that much of his popularity is to be ascribed to the exuberance of his wit, in which he easily surpasses all his contemporaries excepting Hood…. “Urania”—a title which for some inexplicable reason he has chosen to annex to this later publication—has some striking faults; but it has also characteristic passages enough to support our high estimate of the writer’s powers. It is a mere medley of bright thoughts and laughing satire, with here and there a momentary expression of deep feeling, which betrays a spirit that may be touched to nobler issues. The poet glances about like a butterfly from one topic to another, hardly resting on any one long enough to obtain more than a sip of its honey. The versification is uniformly flowing and harmonious, and the lines are never bolstered out with feeble or unmeaning expressions.
| You went crazy last year over Bulwer’s New Timon: | |
| Why, if B., to the day of his dying, should rhyme on, | |
| Heaping verses on verses, and tomes upon tomes, | |
| He could ne’er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes. | |
| His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric | |
| Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satiric | |
| In so kindly a measure, that nobody knows | |
| What to do but e’en join in the laugh, friends and foes. |
Of all this flight of genuine poets, I hardly know any one so original as Dr. Holmes. For him we can find no living prototype; to track his footsteps, we must travel back as far as Pope or Dryden; and to my mind it would be well if some of our bards would take the same journey—provided always, it produced the same result. Lofty, poignant, graceful, grand, high of thought and clear of word, we could fancy ourselves reading some pungent page of “Absalom and Achitophel,” or of the “Moral Epistles,” if it were not for the pervading nationality, which, excepting Whittier, American poets have generally wanted, and for that true reflection of the manners and follies of the age, without which satire would fail alike of its purpose and its name…. He excels in singing his own charming songs, and speaks as well as he writes.
The most concise, apt, and effective poet of the school of Pope this country has produced is Oliver Wendell Holmes…. His best lines are a series of rhymed pictures, witticisms, or sentiments, let off with the precision and brilliancy of the scintillations that sometimes illuminate the northern horizon. The significant terms, the perfect construction, and acute choice of syllables and emphasis, render some passages of Holmes absolute models of versification, especially in the heroic measure. Besides these artistic merits, his poetry abounds with fine satire, beautiful delineations of nature, and amusing caricatures of manners. The long poems are metrical essays more pointed, musical, and judicious, as well as witty, than any that have appeared, of the same species, since the “Essay on Man” and the “Dunciad.”
His longest productions are occasional poems which have been recited before literary societies and received with very great favour. His style is brilliant, sparkling, and terse; and many of his heroic stanzas remind us of the point and condensation of Pope. In his shorter poems, he is sometimes grave and sometimes gay. When in the former mood, he charms us by his truth and manliness of feeling, and his sweetness of sentiment; when in the latter, he delights us with the glance and play of the wildest wit and the richest humour. Everything that he writes is carefully finished, and rests on a basis of sound sense and shrewd observation.
The poems of Holmes are not only of lasting weight and worth, they are also extensively known and enjoyed; they win general favor by their manly vigor, cultivated thoughtfulness, deep pathos, sparkling humor, graphic precision of language, and ringing melody of rhythm. Not to name other pieces of different sorts, his “Many-Chambered Nautilus” is as perfect a poem in its kind as exists in literature. Embalmed afresh in the delighted memory of successive generations, it will be oblivion proof.
| We learned in our childhood the charm of his page, | |
| And his verse does not show yet one sign of old age; | |
| Though our own heads may whiten, he makes us feel young | |
| With his songs, through all seasons so cheerily sung. |
| The dew of youth so fills his late-sprung flowers, | |
| And day-break glory haunts his evening’s hours. | |
| Ah, such a life prefigures its own moral: | |
| That first “Last Leaf” is now a leaf of laurel, | |
| Which—smiling not, but trembling at the touch— | |
| Youth gives back to the hand that gave so much. |
| When violets fade the roses blow; | |
| When laughter dies the passions wake: | |
| His royal song that slept below, | |
| Like Arthur’s sword beneath the lake, | |
| Long since has flashed its fiery glow | |
| O’er all we know. |
To criticise a complete collection of Dr. Holmes’s poetry at this late date would be a somewhat invidious duty, for the public has long since passed its own judgment. Many of his pieces, especially his sparkling vers de société, are literally “household words” to every reader and reciter of the English language. “The Last Leaf,” “My Aunt,” “The Comet,” “The Treadmill Song,” “The Stethoscope Song,” “The Mysterious Visitor,” and a long list of other pieces are as well known as the best of Hood’s humorous verse. Of course these are not Dr. Holmes’s best productions, but they are the most popular. Far better, and yet not nearly so widely known, because they only appeal to a more limited class, are those naïve and sweet lines entitled “The Last Reader.”… The chief drawback to Dr. Holmes’s poetry, not to his popularity, is the excessive number of pieces he has thrown off about events of temporary interest, in this respect his many years of labour being against him. The reader can relish one or two brightly worded “occasional” pieces on the anniversary of a national event, but the most catholic appetite is cloyed by an accumulation of fifty years’ industrious manufacture of odes, lyrics, and ballads on the reception of Grand Dukes and Banquets to Foreign Ambassadors. Still it must be confessed that all these fugitive pieces are so neatly rhymed, so appropriate to the events they commemorate, and so besprinkled with pretty conceits that were one called upon to exclude the less worthy, it would be difficult to know where to commence the work of excision…. The general reader, of course, admires Dr. Holmes for his humour and satire and not for his sentiment; and it must be confessed that in these popular forms of verse he is nearly unique. His satire is always tempered with kindness, is never personal nor spiteful, and probably never annoyed a single person—in that respect being almost unparalleled in the history of satiric verse.
I shall never be able to regard Holmes as first and foremost a Poet, although a vein of poetry and admirable sentiment runs through all his prose. I shall say he is first Essayist, and Poet afterwards; and this because he is never “rapt,” never quite caught up into Heavens inaccessible to ordinary fancy and baffling to common intelligence. He is, indeed, full of intuition, but far too reflective ever to be quite inspired. The “Metrical Essay” and “Astræa” resound with high strains, and his longer poems contain bright bursts of patriotism and noble religious utterances, as well as those sudden transitions to satire and almost low comedy.
These occasional poems, like the lyrics destined for longer life, are eminently free from imitativeness. The emancipation of American letters from foreign fashions—not necessarily from foreign thought—owes much to Doctor Holmes’ sturdy and successful, because natural, display of independent genius. The “cleverness” of this characteristic writer, not less than his deeper pathos and humor, has played its part in the intellectual movement of his time; it has made it easier for everybody to follow his own bent and say his own say. Holmes’ occasional poems have simply amused hundreds of delighted hearers, most of whom have hardly stopped, at the moment, to think of any higher result; but sooner or later they reflect that here is more than an individual neatness, here are an alertness and daring felicity that have in them something national.
| Climbing the path that leads back never more | |
| We heard behind his footsteps and his cheer; | |
| Now, face to face, we greet him standing here | |
| Upon the lonely summit of Fourscore! | |
| Welcome to us, o’er whom the lengthened day | |
| Is closing and the shadows colder grow, | |
| His genial presence, like an afterglow, | |
| Following the one just vanishing away. | |
| Long be it ere the table shall be set | |
| For the last breakfast of the Autocrat, | |
| And love repeat with smiles and tears thereat | |
| His own sweet songs that time shall not forget. | |
| Waiting with him the call to come up higher, | |
| Life is not less, the heavens are only nigher. |
It is retrospective and contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general impression is that of bright, elastic, confident power. It was by no means, however, a first work, nor was the poet unknown in his own home. But the “Metrical Essay” introduced him to a larger public, while the fugitive pieces already known were the assurance that the more important poem was not a happy chance, but the development of a quality already proved.
As a poet—and in the final settlement the poet will outweigh the writer of prose—Holmes preserved for us the spirit of the classical age at a time when romanticism was in full cry…. We have no other so expert in personal and occasional verse, no other who could so distill the very quintessence of Yankee humor, or of the other and finer qualities of the New England intellect, into the most limpid of song. And when he was entirely serious, how exquisite was his touch, how pure his pathos, how clear his ethical sense! Let “The Voiceless,” “Under the Violets,” and “The Chambered Nautilus” bear witness.
His first appearance by himself in book form and the first book to have his name on the title page was the “Poems” of 1836, issued while he was trying half-heartedly, and not very successfully, to build up a medical practice in Boston. In this volume, the stirring lyric, “Old Ironsides” was incorporated in “Poetry, a Metrical Essay.” “Old Ironsides” originally appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and was afterwards printed as a handbill and distributed in the streets of Washington. No copy of this separate issue seems to have survived. This poem has been the most widely read of his early productions, and was, perhaps, the real means of preventing the demolition of the U. S. frigate “Constitution.”
In one field Dr. Holmes was chief without a second among American poets—the poetry of festival and compliment. Who could so graciously welcome a coming, speed a parting guest? Who hide so tenderly with laurel the whitening temples of his friends? For poetry of this kind he had a wonderful facility, and what was so largely impromptu might well lack something of abiding charm. It was enough that it touched some memorable occasion with a momentary gleam of tenderness and beauty. It was at the annual meetings of his college class that he exercised this gift with the most daring playfulness.
Breakfast Table Series
The “Autocrat” is as genial and gentle, and, withal, as philosophical, an essayist as any of modern times. Hazlitt, saturnine and cynical, would yet have loved this writer. Charles Lamb would have opened his heart to one who resembles him so much in many excellent points. Leigh Hunt, we dare say, has been much delighted with him. Thomas Hood, the great humanitarian, would have relished his fine catholic spirit. Dickens, no doubt, has read him more than once, admiring his command of our common language,—the “well of English undented,”—and, above all, the pervading tone of practical philosophy. The “Autocrat,” however, is somewhat more than an essayist: he is contemplative, discursive, poetical, thoughtful, philosophical, amusing, imaginative, tender,—never didactic. This is the secret of his marked success: he interests variously-constituted minds and various moods of mind. It needed not the introduction of lyrical pieces (which we are glad to have) to show that the “Autocrat” is essentially a poet. Of all who would have most enjoyed him we may foremost name Professor Wilson, who would have welcomed him to a seat “above the salt” at the far-famed “Noctes Ambrosianæ,” placing him next to William Maginn, the wayward “O’Doherty” of Blackwood’s Magazine.
I value the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” more highly than all the writings of Shelley put together.
I would not say that the “Autocrat” is as well worth re-reading as the “Essays” of Emerson; but I do not hesitate to say to the hard-working average American, whether a toiler with hands or brains, that for healthful relaxation of spirit, for getting the kinks and stiffness out of the brain, there is nothing better than the pages of Holmes. While one is amused, one is also all the while coming across passages full of food for reflection worthy of Bacon, advice that would be the making of a man if followed, tender lessons in charity, deep openings into human nature and everywhere a profound sense of law and its operation…. “The Autocrat,” “The Professor” and “Elsie Venner” are a series of clinics. The patient is not often in bed, but he is undergoing pathological examination; and a good part of the interest in these books lies in the fact that whatever is seen and said comes from a keen-eyed physician.
It [“Poet at the Breakfast Table”] was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an achievement which had become classic. It is of the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” that people think, when they think of the peculiar species of dramatic essays which the author invented, and they think also of the “Professor at the Breakfast Table,” because he followed so soon; but the “Poet at the Breakfast Table” came so long after, that his advent alienated rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet had come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest that Dr. Holmes ever wrote. I mean “Homesick in Heaven,” which seems to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most profoundly pathetic in the language. Indeed, I do not know any other that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.
The “Autocrat” might suggest a series of riddles or problems for some future examiner in English literature. Why is controversy like the Hydrostatic Paradox? Why is a poem like a meerschaum? What is the very obvious resemblance between the pupil of the eye and the mind of a bigot? In what respects may truths be properly compared to dice and lies to marbles? Why should a trustworthy friend be like a cheap watch? How does the proper treatment for Guinea-worm illustrate the best mode of treating habitual drunkards? The answers to these and many equally ingenious parallels illustrate Holmes’s power of procuring analogies; and show, too, how his talent had been polished in the conversational arena…. The instrument upon which Holmes had performed, the circle of congenial friends, was, of course, far more responsive.
Novels
I was in some anxiety before I began [“Elsie Venner”] because I knew that you had never written a novel before, and I felt somehow as if you had announced yourself to come out as Hamlet, or to walk over Niagara on a tight rope, or to do, in short, some of those things by which men achieve fame, but to which they are apt to have apprenticed themselves in their tender epochs…. You have been perfectly successful: I assure you that the interest is undying throughout the book—that the characters are sharply and vigorously drawn and colored—that the scenery is fresh, picturesque, and poetical, and the dialogue, particularly when it is earnest and thoughtful, is suggestive, imaginative, and stimulating in the highest degree. As to the mother-thought of the book, it is to me original, poetical, and striking.
It follows almost necessarily from the choice of his subject [“Elsie Venner”], that Mr. Holmes is carried into a world of stage effects, with “striking” scenes and out-of-the-way characters; though, to do him justice, he has done his utmost, by artistic treatment, to subdue the melodramatic element in them. Who, indeed, would care for a rattlesnake that didn’t bite? Who would care for a quasi-rattlesnake who could not act out her savagery? In what familiar association could she be exhibited but with persons having some kind of affinity to herself?… I do not quarrel with Mr. Holmes for his choice of subject; still, notwithstanding the delicacy of hand with which he has treated it, one cannot but regret that he should have chosen one which cannot be fully canvassed in general society. Nor has he lessened the regret by his choice of scenery. There is something repulsive to the English mind in the picture of the relation between a young and handsome male teacher and a number of nearly full-grown schoolgirls. However skilfully handled, such a picture is always sensuous, must often border almost on the prurient. As a warning to ourselves, indeed, against the encouragement of the practice from which it is taken, the picture may be a wholesome one. If such be the effect of it, with a pure and high-minded “young Brahmin” like Bernard Langdon for central figure, what would be the reality, with a coarser but weaker type of man in his place?
Dr. Holmes’s three novels, “Elsie Venner,” “The Guardian Angel,” and “A Mortal Antipathy” (his latest production), are not only delightful reading, but afford palpable evidence of what their author might have, yet has not, done. It is indeed surprising that a writer capable of weaving tales thus brimful of human interest, and of portraying with such consummate skill the most idiosyncratic aspects of American life, should have been content, as it were, to sample the rich mine lying open at his feet, instead of exploring it fully—impossible, after reading “Elsie Venner,” to doubt that Dr. Holmes could have been (had he but wished it) the American novelist of the century. Hawthorne, unsurpassed as an artist and psychologist, was hardly the man to treat that every-day existence from which his dreamy soul recoiled. Mr. Howells, at the present day, is somewhat lacking in vigour and in breadth. But Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes possesses in the highest degree the power of depicting character; this is, among his various literary gifts, the most genuine and the foremost.
The novel of “Elsie Venner” is a strong and interesting book. The story holds us fast, and the study of a strange and morbid state of mind has the fascination given to the snakes themselves. Such a book would have made the fame and fortune of a lesser man. But as lasting literature in the highest sense, it falls behind the “Autocrat.”
The critics—the trained professional ones I mean—have dealt severely with the book. They admit that it abounds in brilliant passages, and that it is generously impregnated with New Englandism; they can hardly deny that local color was never shed upon paper with more truth and skill than in the description of the party at “the elegant residence of our distinguished fellow-citizen, Colonel Sprowle.” But having said these things, some go on to say that the book has too much monologue by the author—though in this Holmes sinned in the good company of Thackeray; and so good a critic as George William Curtis wrote “This colloquial habit is very winning, when governed by natural delicacy and an exquisite literary instinct.” Others think that the characters are not real and lifelike, and that the incidents are but indifferent inventions. The crowning objection, taken by all alike, is, that it is that hybrid creation condemned by the inexorable canons of literature, a novel with a purpose. Whether these canons are dogmas of truths, it is probable that a novel written for a purpose will rarely survive the elimination of the purpose from popular interest, either by its achievement or defeat. Certain it is, however, that whether Elsie Venner was or was not justly entitled to popularity, she enjoyed it, and for many years was widely read, and eagerly discussed, nor is it yet time to be composing an epitaph for her tombstone.
His novels all belonged to an order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his “medicated novels.”
That provoking book, “Elsie Venner.” I call it “provoking” merely because it will not square nicely with any orthodox canons of criticism. In the first place it has an air of being didactic, or is a book with a tendency, or, in the old-fashioned phrase, is a novel with a purpose…. Holmes, it must be remarked, did not suppose that he was proving anything in “Elsie Venner;” he recognised the truth of the axiom propounded in the “Rose and the Ring” that blank verse is not argument; and the imaginary behaviour of an impossible being cannot possibly lead to any conclusion. When we meet a woman who is half a woman and half snake it will be time to settle the moral code for judging her. Holmes, in fact, says in his preface that he only took an imaginary case in order to call attention to the same difficulty in the common course of things. To that I can see no objection.
“Elsie Venner,” achieved a permanent fame both as a picture of New England life and as a scientific study.
General
We have always contended that in the satirical, humorous and burlesque, Holmes has hardly a superior among the highest of his fellow-bards in America. And we quite agree with him, in his argument for the hyperbolical, that a tendency of the mind which has been shown in all ages and forms, and has its foundation in nature, cannot justly be condemned by any reasonable critic, and least of all by the same judges who would write treatises upon the sculptured satyrs and painted arabesques of antiquity, which are only hyperbole in stone and colors…. What we especially admire in the writings of Holmes is the picturesqueness of his descriptions, and his inimitable ease and grace of rhythm. In this he is facile princeps.
His sense of the ludicrous is not keener than his sense of the beautiful; his wit and humor are but the sportive exercise of a fancy and imagination which he has abundantly exercised on serious topics; and the extensive learning and acute logic of the man of science are none the less solid in substance because in expression they are accompanied by a throng of images and illustrations which endow erudition with life, and give a charm to the most closely linked chain of reasoning. The first thing which strikes a reader of Holmes is the vigor and elasticity of his nature. He is incapable of weakness. He is fresh and manly even when he securely treads the scarcely marked line which separates sentiment from sentimentality. This prevailing vigor proceeds from a strength of individuality which is often pushed to dogmatic self-assertion. It is felt as much in his airy, fleering mockeries of folly and pretension, as in his almost Juvenalian invectives against baseness and fraud—in the pleasant way in which he stretches a coxcomb on the rack of wit, as in the energy with which he grapples an opponent in the tussle of argumentation. He never seems to imagine that he can be inferior to the thinker whose position he assails, any more than to the noodle whose nonsense he jeers at.
| Sweet Horace of our modern land and tongue, | |
| Who paintest mankind’s thoughts as they arise, | |
| With kindly pencil dipped in rainbow dyes; | |
| Whose genial verse this glad conclusion shows: | |
| The sum of human joys outweighs the woes! |
It is no easy task to characterize with nice discrimination a writer so versatile, and in some respects so nearly unique. If he exhibits some single intellectual traits which in themselves are rare, it is likewise true that the combination which he exhibits is very rare indeed. First of all, he thinks clearly. One finds nowhere in his volumes crude and half-formed thoughts. He writes as clearly as he thinks. His sentences come from his pen clean-cut. The language of his prose is pure, classical English; affluent, in the sense that it apparently never fails to come spontaneously at need, and in the fittest form; but not exuberant, to the obscuring of the thought. His style is simple, direct, forcible; not ambitiously elaborate nor fastidiously finished to excess. In his professional and literary addresses there is a compactness and polished vigor in his sentences, an effectiveness and point, which remind one of the pungency of Junius. To these characteristics Dr. Holmes adds a wonderful wit and humor in rare conjunction.
| Master alike in speech and song | |
| Of fame’s great antiseptic—Style, | |
| You with the classic few belong | |
| Who tempered wisdom with a smile. | |
| Outlive us all! Who else like you | |
| Could sift the seedcorn from our chaff, | |
| And make us with the pen we knew | |
| Deathless at least in epitaph? |
If it seems wonderful that living almost exclusively in one locality Dr. Holmes should have succeeded as few have succeeded in dealing with the mysteries of universal human nature, still more wonderful is it, perhaps, that dealing very largely with the foibles and follies of human nature, nothing that he has ever written has given offence. True, this is partly owing to his intense unwillingness to hurt the feelings of any human being. No fame for saying brilliant things that came to this gentlest of Autocrats and most genial of gentlemen, tinged with a possibility that any one had winced under his pen, would seem to him of any value, or give him any pleasure. But, as a matter of fact, no bore ever read anything Dr. Holmes has cleverly written about bores with the painful consciousness, “Alas I was that bore!” We may take to ourselves a good deal that he says, but never with a sense of shame or humiliation. On the contrary, we laugh the most sincerely of any one, and say “Of course! that is exactly it! Why, I have done that thing myself a thousand times!” And so the genial, keen-eyed master of human nature writes with impunity how difficult he finds it to love his neighbor properly till he gets away from him, and tells us how he hates to have his best friend hunt him up in the cars and sit down beside him, and explains that, though a radical, he finds he enjoys the society of those who believe more than he does better than that of those who believe less; and neighbor and best friend, radical and conservative, laugh alike and alike enjoy the joke, each only remembering how he finds it hard to love his neighbor and how he hates to talk in the cars.
As a poet his equipment is greater than his achievement…. Had he not been the Scherzerade of American feasts he might have written more poetry as immortal as the “Chambered Nautilus,” or more ballads having the ring of—
| Come hither, God-be-glorified. |
At once so quaint and so excellent, from whom the most exigent must no longer demand rivalries of past achievement.
The indexes to the several volumes of his collected works are in themselves a curious monument of the very wide range of his fun and of his speculation. I suppose this is, perhaps, the feature of these essays which has given them the most popularity. Take such a series of nine successive entries as this:
| “Agassiz, | |
| “Age, softening effects of, | |
| “A good time coming, | |
| “Air-pump, animal under, | |
| “Alps, effect of looking at, | |
| “American, the Englishman re-enforced, | |
| “Analogies, power of seeing, | |
| “Anatomist’s hymn, | |
| “Anglo-Saxons die out in America, Dr. Knox thinks.” |
His fame, of course, was won as a man of letters, not as a man of science, and it is as a man of letters that the world at large looks upon him…. Dr. Holmes is perhaps most often thought of as the poet of occasion, and certainly no one has ever surpassed him in this field…. Dr. Holmes had one personal quality which ought not to be passed over without mention anywhere or at any time. He was a thorough American and always a patriot, always national and independent, and never colonial or subservient to foreign opinion. In the war of the rebellion no one was a stronger upholder of the national cause than he. In his earliest verse we catch constantly the flutter of the flag, and in his war poems we feel the rush and life of the great uprising which saved the nation. He was in the best sense a citizen of the world, of broad and catholic sympathies. But he was first and before that an American and a citizen of the United States, and this fact is at once proof and reason that he was able to do work which has carried delight to many people of many tongues, and which has won him a high and lasting place in the great literature of the English-speaking people.
An attempt—not particularly happy—has been made to “place” Dr. Holmes by linking his genius with that of Charles Lamb. The resemblance between them, if any, is quite superficial, but their difference is marked. As Mr. George William Curtis said of Dr. Holmes’s early poems, so we might say of Lamb’s most characteristic work: “The high spirits of a frolicsome fancy effervesce and sparkle;” but, while Lamb was essentially whimsical and often capricious, Dr. Holmes, even in his most daring moods, was wary. He was exceedingly sensitive on the subject of his good breeding, and felt he could not afford to forget his manners. If bold, he was not too bold; judicious always, without being false. He was much bound by social usage—a Boston man, having the fear of eminently respectable Boston always before his eyes—and it would have horrified him to have been responsible for those little outrages on the conventionalities in which Lamb took an exquisite delight. Moreover, Lamb’s taste was more literary than that of Dr. Holmes, and not in the least scientific; and his touch, like Irving’s, was more delicate. It is, in truth, difficult to classify Dr. Holmes at all. He was somewhat of a man apart. He followed no model, and has had no successful imitators.
From the day when I read the first page of Dr. Holmes’s work until now, he has seemed to me to carry to every mind and mood a sense of his benevolent presence like nothing else so much as the call of a kind physician to the bedside of a child. In the constellation of American literary masters his light is the kindliest of all. It shone and must shine on through the generations as it shone from the first, with the soft, unvarying glow of a perfect human affection. We might reasonably fancy him beginning the utterances of a life beyond this in those words in which, with such sweet and playful pretense of austerity so many years ago, he began the “Autocrat”—“I was just going to say when I was interrupted.”
His work was the sunlight of American literature.
He was to me the prince of our humorists, the gentlest of our satirists, the gladdest of our singers. It is only the clay that has returned to its own. He lives with us and our children and children’s children so long as time shall last.
Oliver Wendell Holmes loved all the world, and all the world loved him. I am sure that I voice the sentiment of the South in saying that he appealed to its people with a personality more vivid than any other writer of New England.
The essayist rises higher than the poet—witty, tender; wise in human frailty, but never bitter.
As a writer of verse, he is scarcely entitled to a place among the immortals. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes, the genial Autocrat, the novelist, the fanciful and versatile poet, the wit, the wag, the royal companion, i. e., in the totality of what he was, he seems to be safe from oblivion for some centuries to come.
This concentration of his power and his affection has had its effect on Dr. Holmes’s literary fame. He is another witness, if one were needed, to the truth that identification with a locality is a surer passport to immortality than cosmopolitism. The local is a good starting-point from which to essay the universal. Thoreau perhaps affected a scorn of the world outside of Concord, but he helped make the little village a temple, and his statue is in one of the niches. Holmes, staying in Boston, has brought the world to his door, and a society which is already historic will preserve him in its amber. It is the power to transmute the near and tangible into something of value the world over which is the mark of genius, and Holmes had his philosopher’s stone.
His writings are really, if we judge them by a rigid standard, what the Abbé Coyot calls “bagatelles morales”—delicious fancies, full of intelligence and grace, neatly turned, always well-bred, instinct with vitality, reasonable, moderate, harmonious. That the author of “The Chambered Nautilus” should come to be named with Emerson, the novelist of “Elsie Venner” with Hawthorne, the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” with the author of “My Study Windows”—and in the history of literature Holmes will stand as an equal among these men—is another proof of that fact which in early youth we are so unwilling to learn, that more goes to a great reputation as a writer than merely writing pre-eminently well. Character, attitude, physical health, the condition of the times in Boston, all combined with the genuine art and indisputable talent of Dr. Holmes to make him the illustrious figure that he is and will remain. Few men under the age of fifty can possess a clear recollection of what Dr. Holmes was at the height of his powers. Perhaps no man of modern times has given his contemporaries a more extraordinary impression of wit in conversation.
No one in America has done so much as he to cheer us with sweet, guileless laughter…. Whittier did much more than Holmes to soften the Puritan theology, but Holmes did vastly more than Whittier to soften the Puritan temper of the community. And here was his most characteristic work. He was neither stoic nor ascetic; neither indifferent to life’s sweet and pleasant things, nor, while hankering for their possession, did he repress his noble rage and freeze the genial currents of his soul.
While the personality of Dr. Holmes is full of interest, and while he is an author worthy of high commemoration, we cannot separate him from the group whose writings almost constituted the literature of America. Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes…. The last of the group is Holmes, not so great as those named, but worthy to be classed with them…. It is not simply as a writer of verse that he is to be considered, but also as a novelist, an essayist, a biographer, a lecturer and a man of science. I shall not attempt any analysis of his works or of his genius. There is nothing hidden about him to be brought out; there is no subtlety that requires explication; there are scarcely two opinions as to the place to be assigned him as a writer or as a man. He was the most open and undisguised of men. Every sentence is full of self-revelation. He prattles on in his pages like a child, taking for granted that what the reader wants is to hear him talk; and in fact the reader wants nothing else, for it is as delightful talk as was ever put on paper. He wrote for more than sixty years, but at eighty he was as young as at twenty…. It is not probable that Holmes will ever be ranked among the great men of the world, but he has this rare distinction: he was a man of science and also a man of sentiment; the law of science and the law of poetry were both imprinted on him, and he wrote under their combined influence. Hence, there is a certain authoritative character in whatever he says; his sentiment is backed up by science, and his wisdom rests on facts. It is this that makes his opinions so valuable. As a poet simply, a long immortality cannot be expected for him—except for the fact that the writer of a good hymn stands the best chance for remembrance of all who ever speak in this world;—but it is probable that he will grow in critical estimate as a thoughtful observer of men and things, his genius embalming his wisdom.
His works are not voluminous; and, though he had published some of his best verses before he was thirty, he was nearly fifty before he began the series of essays which really made him famous. Few popular authors have had a narrower escape from obscurity. He would, in any case, have been remembered in his own circle as a brilliant talker, and there would have been some curiosity as to the writer of the “Last Leaf” and two or three other poems. But had it not been for the judicious impulse given by his friend Lowell which induced him to make his appearance as the “autocrat,” his reputation would have resembled that of Wolfe, of “not a drum was beat” celebrity. Who, it would have been asked, was the author of the few lines which we all know by heart? and we should have turned up the article devoted to him in a biographical dictionary. But he would not have revealed himself with that curious completeness upon which all his critics have remarked…. But I need not try to expound what every one perceives who has read his poems, such especially as the famous “Last Leaf” and “Dorothy Q.” and the “Chambered Nautilus.” The last of these, I humbly confess, does not quite touch me as it should, because it seems too ingenious…. He is one of the writers who is destined to live long—longer, it may be, than some of greater intellectual force and higher imagination, because he succeeds so admirably in flavouring the milk of human kindness with an element which is not acid and yet gets rid of the mawkishness which sometimes makes good morality terribly insipid.
As a writer Dr. Holmes always reminded me of certain of our bird songsters, like the brown thrasher or the cat-bird, whose performance always seems to imply a spectator and to challenge his admiration. The vivacious doctor always seemed to write with his eye upon his reader, and to calculate in advance upon his surprise and pleasure. If the world finally neglects his work, it will probably be because it lacks the deep seriousness of the enduring productions.
The open secret in Boston that Dr. Holmes was its author soon became open everywhere; and particularly when the second series, “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” dealing somewhat more freely with religious beliefs, began to appear, the name of Holmes associated itself in many minds with everything that was dangerous and iconoclastic. The mildness to modern ears of many of the passages that seemed most shocking forty years ago is more eloquent than any words could be about general tempering of religious beliefs in which Dr. Holmes was undoubtedly one of the strongest influences.
Like Molière, Holmes took his own property, no matter in whose hands he found it, even if in the possession of writers so diverse as Jonathan Swift and John Quincy Adams. They were his own materials that he found, and he made right royal use of them. He was the social, as Emerson was the intellectual reactionist against the puritan asceticism of their forefathers. He delighted in warmth and light and geniality. He believed in throwing open the windows of the soul and making the spiritual “living temple” radiant with the rays of truth and beauty. His songs were, therefore, of the sunshine—of the sunshine and sometimes scorched, as when he satirized “The Moral Bully”—but oftener inspired cheer, hope, and good-will. If it be true that “a good wit will make use of anything; it will turn diseases to a commodity,” the wit of Dr. Holmes is among the best. For if it has not turned moral and physical diseases to a “commodity” it has at least done a great deal toward counteracting their effects. “Be cheerful” is one of his prescriptions for inducing longevity. This cheerful nature of his poetry and philosophy has lulled to serenity many a careworn spirit and made easier and lighter many of the burdens of life.
Dr. Holmes never affiliated at all with the Transcendentalists. He had ridiculed Emerson’s “Sphinx” in unmistakable fashion, in verse. He shrank from radical reform, feeling the full force of that tradition, convention, social usage, to which Emerson was so calmly indifferent. He was as little an idealist as any true poet can be. Instead of solitude and contemplation, he loved above all things congenial society, discussion, conversation. Of course, such a man’s view of Emerson was an outside one after all, yet it is accurate, vivid, even sympathetic in tone.
After all that may be said, criticism remains a matter largely of individual opinion. That opinion may not necessarily be founded in prejudice, neither for nor against the work in hand; but it very commonly results from an individual notion of what literature is or ought to be. Even with the highest order of minds, we often see what this means when we find well-endowed men who acknowledge an indifference to writers on whom time has set its fixed seal. This was curiously illustrated many years ago, when Oliver Wendell Holmes undertook to write a life of Emerson. Dr. Holmes was probably the least fitted of his contemporaries to write about Emerson. His intellectual obtuseness with respect to Emerson produced painful results.
No study of American humor can omit his name. His fun was that of the fine gentleman and appealed equally to the head and the heart. He had wit, that intellectual quality which sees incongruities and expresses them in such apt terms of language that a keen, mental delight follows; but quite as truly, he had that atmospheric quality of humor which rests upon kindliness, exhibits temperament, and is so close akin to pathos that often the two blend, as does an April day of sun and shower. In the second book of the Autocrat series, wherein the Professor is the speaker, the Story of Iris, embedded like a precious stone in the lighter satire of the book, is a tenderly pathetic love-romance and a fine example of the underlying emotional seriousness of the author, as many of his passages which grapple with some serious topic of the day are of his equally serious intellectual position. Dr. Holmes’s greatest ambition was to be a poet. Yet his achievements in prose, on the whole, outweigh what he did in verse, familiar and well loved as are certain of his lyrics. He will be longest remembered as an essayist.
He enriched our literature with a new form of essay as distinctly individual as Montaigne’s or Charles Lamb’s. In metrical composition his work is voluminous and varied, much of it ephemeral, but all of it lucid and musical; and he has left a few lyrics that take high rank—one of them almost the highest—as pure poetry. A characteristic note is a certain playful tenderness; and I think his Muse charms us most when she appears, like the bride in the ballad,—
| “With a smile on her lips and a tear in her eye,”— |
| “Of sweet singers the most sane, | |
| Of keen wits the most humane.” |
His constant urbanity, his rarely flagging humour, his unfailing felicity as the spokesman of a friendly gathering, have not been questioned, and his supremacy as conductor of imaginary table talk is generally allowed; but the infrequency of his rises to “higher moods,” the monotony of his measures and to a certain extent of his subjects, the fact that popular taste in the matter of humour is liable to undergo rapid changes, the further fact that much of his work is so local as to be provincial in the extreme, have suggested to his more critical admirers doubts with regard to the permanence of a very large part of his poetry and prose.
