OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

[Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 29, 1809, and died in Boston, Oct. 7, 1894. He was educated at Phillips Andover Academy, and at Harvard, where he belonged to the class of 1829. There he came under Unitarian influence, and belonged to a rather gay club of students. So strong was his reaction from earlier religious influences that even in the Pilgrim's Progress, much as he felt its literary power, he was violently repelled by the religious system it contains. During his early education, as later, he was a skipping reader, tasting many books, taking few entire. He showed his tendency toward literary expression by his connection with a college periodical, and by the conscious literary form of his early letters. He liked especially the English classics, Pope's Homer, and the Encyclopædia. After graduation he went for a year to the Dane Law School. Disliking the study, he began immediately to study medicine in Boston. After graduation he went to Europe, in the spring of 1833, studying medicine for a year at Paris, travelling a little, and returning in the autumn of 1835. The next year he began practice and published later some medical essays which stood well and contained discoveries of some importance. In 1847 he became Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the medical school of Harvard University, a post which he held for thirty-five years. A considerable part of his time was devoted to lecture tours about the country. His connection with the Atlantic Monthly began in 1857, through the influence of James Russell Lowell. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table appeared in that periodical in 1857-58, The Professor at the Breakfast Table in 1859, The Poet at the Breakfast Table in 1872, and Over the Teacups in 1891. Besides this series he published three novels, Elsie Venner (1861), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885), and two biographies, a Life of John Lothrop Motley (1879) and a Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1885). Pages from an Old Volume of Life contains essays written from 1857 to 1881. His time went more and more to literary pursuits and less to medicine as his life advanced.]

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES has left several of the most popular volumes of prose in American literature. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, and, to a less extent, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, are among the small number of essays which have a large American public. Although

they are essays, the freedom of their form—in turn narrative, dramatic, and expository matches the variety of their subjects, so that their unity is in the personality of the writer.

It is mainly wit that makes these books live, but the wit is composed largely of wisdom, and is carried along in an easy, flowing, and limber style, at once familiar and finished, - a style which expresses not only the man, but the time and place. New England has given to literature names which are greater, but none which springs more unmistakably from her soil. Distinct thought about life, expressed with wit and elegance, must have much that is common to civilization, but the breakfast-table series is as deeply saturated with New England as it is with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston was the universe to Holmes. Concentration of life and thought in one atmosphere gave to his writings their flavor rather than their substance, and it is largely their flavor which has recommended them to his countrymen.

Thoroughly as Holmes belongs to New England, he is part of no group. The larger tendencies of his time, which found their expression in the transcendental movement, left the Autocrat untouched. Democracy never whispered its vaguer poetry in his ear. His part of New England life was not its aspiration, but its Yankee shrewdness, youthful, independent, wide-awake, matter of fact, even in the statement of truths tinged with imagination. Vagueness, color, a reaching out after something not yet seen, is the characteristic of the bulk of New England's greatest literature. Clearness, precision, confidence, are the elements of Holmes's Yankee mind. In the Autocrat this concrete and witty intellect is at its gayest. The Professor has less dash, and more ripeness and mild breadth. Naturally, therefore, the earlier book is still the more popular, and its successor the favorite of the most cultivated fraction of readers. It is not less witty. It is only less epigrammatic and more leisurely. As these books, begun when the author's powers were at their height, took from his mind its brightest crystals, the world has put the two later instalments of the series on a lower shelf. Of the novels, the first two were popular in their time, and Elsie Venner is still much read, but they have never been treated as important contributions. Holmes's mind was not constructive, but discursive. He could create characters and tell

stories, but it was in the manner of conversation. The best things in his fiction are digressions. The psychological interest dominates, and most of the formal development seems an effort of the will. “A Romance of Destiny," the sub-title of Elsie Venner, suggests his attitude toward his "medicated novels," as an old lady called them. Every one of his volumes contains brilliant passages, from the medical essays to Over the Teacups, but if posterity shall seek the author in the Autocrat, the Professor, and the Poet, it will find the whole of him. In his happiest passages he is all those persons: an autocrat, revelling in his own personality; a professor, with information, and interest in the larger psychology; and a poet, who loved Pope and would have been the same had Wordsworth never lived. "This series of papers," he tells us, was not the result of an express premeditation, but was, as I may say, dipped from the running stream of my thoughts." In it he has left such an intimate picture of himself as daily conversation would have given.

The types of New England character which are sketched dramatically and sharply in these papers did as much to give them their immediate success as the humorous philosophy of the principal speaker. They range from the broadly comic to the pathetic, although humor and pathos are never far apart. The landlady and her daughter, the schoolmistress, Little Boston, and as many others, have become familiar persons, but perhaps the most brilliantly executed, next to the autographical character, is "the young man whom they call John." In him American humor, independence, and crudity take their most distinctive and most entertaining form. He is what the Autocrat would have been without culture, — the observant wit in its primitive state. Next to him come the series of loquacious and unreasonable women, universal personages, talking not about the details of the life about them, so much as about the things which people everywhere discuss, yet proving their nationality in the turn of every phrase. The characters which are less comic, especially those which are supposed to have a touch of aristocratic distinction, are not so firmly drawn. The single passages which stand out for individual brilliancy are usually those in which the Autocrat moralizes in his own person, covering important subjects with his special genial comment. He felt, kindly

and sympathetically, the general tragedies of life, but his mode of putting even tragic truths was a playful one. For instance, nothing impressed him more constantly than the battle between the weak and the strong, and this is one way of stating it: "Each generation strangles and drowns its predecessor. The young Feejeean carries a cord in his girdle for his father's neck; the young American, a string of propositions or syllogisms in his brain to finish the same relative; the old man says, 'My son, I have swallowed and digested the wisdom of the past.' The young man says, 'Sire, I proceed to swallow and digest thee with all thou knowest.'

Not unrelated to Holmes's humorous attitude toward every part of life, and to his dislike of the vague and his content with what truth can be put clearly in a sentence, was his entire absence from the great political movements which reached their climax while he was quietly smiling in his study. His readers would hardly know that there had been an abolition movement or a war, except from occasional not altogether sympathetic passages. He was sceptical about everything new except science. On that firm ground alone he felt at home, and probably at least nine tenths of his metaphors have a more or less distinctly scientific origin. The great, indistinct, ethical enthusiasm of the nation, which gradually carried along the cautious Emerson, and brought such a noble response from Lowell, was not to the taste of Holmes. He was the nice gentleman, full of delicacy, who did not like to see the proprieties disturbed. The sword and the trumpet were unpleasant objects. He suggested, as his doctor's sign, "the smallest fever gratefully received," and such was the tone in which he liked best to handle other things as serious as fevers. The American nature has its enthusiastic, idealistic side, but even more obvious and pervading is its fatalistic, good-humored jocosity, which could hardly be represented more vividly than it was in the mind and character of Dr. Holmes. The Autocrat has given pleasure to thousands, but he has had little more influence on life or letters than the shirt-sleeved philosopher in a Yankee post-office who lazily retails quaint witticisms about his neighbors. Holmes is without successors, as he was without predecessors. The world amused him, he amused it, and each left the other in statu quo.

Although he lacked sympathy with change, everything simple and unchanging, however ludicrous, had his friendly appreciation. When he speaks of his "recollection of the two women, drifting upon their vocabularies as upon a shoreless ocean," surely the geniality and the kindliness are as visible as the fun. Better too few words from the woman we love than too many; while she is silent nature is working for her; while she talks she is working for herself." That again is his dominant note, a smiling hospitality for the fixed truths, not the less genuine that it was always adorned with friendly satire. To his detached observation the world was fragmentary and capricious, and much of its conversation, which buzzed loudly about his ears, signified nothing. He notices in entering a railway station that the cars are travelling by their own momentum, the engine having noiselessly left them some time ago. "Indeed, you would not have suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact if you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side track." So it is with women, their words are detached from their thoughts, but run on so rapidly that we never know the difference. 'Well, they govern the world,these sweet-lipped women, because beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom. .

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Wisdom is the abstract of the past,

but beauty is the promise of the future." It is always the same, this half-tender sentiment for the every-day important facts of life, mixed with an irrepressible amusement at the absurdity of their expression.

A man of a rambling, genial wisdom, without a system, whimsical and charming, reflecting in his style the quality of the air he breathed, but showing no more definite influence than that of Sterne, and forming none, is not easy to place in a literary hierarchy. Some of the books of Holmes are likely to be a permanent part of our literature, because of their finish, conciseness, humor, and national atmosphere, and because there are no others like them. They promise to outlive many which have had a deeper influence. The man with a message is frequently laid in the ground when his message is accepted, while the man who has put into artistic form the old universal things which are ever young, and speaks in a tone that is suggestive and cheering, has always the same reason for existence.

NORMAN HAPGOOD