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Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table." They attracted little attention; the author frankly calls them "crude products of his uncombed literary boyhood", but he never forgot them; and when, in 1857, The Atlantic Monthly was started, he concluded to return to them and continue the series, thinking that "it would be a curious experiment to shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early windfalls." The experiment did not have to wait long for success. Holmes was nearly fifty years old, and was, in verity, able to offer to the public the " ripe fruit" of his mind. Discursive writing, or rambling talk, demands this quality of ripeness. When young writers have attempted to print dicta, ana, gossip, proverbs, pensées, or what you will in the department of literature which comes under the general head of Sayings, they have usually failed. This sort of work demands experience and reflection, neither of which is a common attribute of juvenility. No matter how light the manner or how jovial the spirit, a Montaigne, Sterne, or Lamb must be a man of wisdom and experience, in one way or another. It was well that Holmes' early series of Autocrat papers was postponed until his middle life. It was also lucky for the magazine which was in its early years the most important American monthly. that such genial wit and wisdom, such unfamiliar attractiveness of style, was to lead it to success after a general period of business depression.

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"The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was a

genuinely Yankee book-New Englandism at its best, interpreted so familiarly that running readers might comprehend its good points. Holmes is thoroughly Bostonian; an occasional trip to New York, a summer a few miles north of Boston, satisfy his desires for any outside world. He visits Europe at half-century intervals. His books have a similar local contentment. In practical sense, in alertness of thought, in neatness of phrase, in quaint mixture of earthly shrewdness and starry ideality, the words and ways of the breakfast-table of which the Autocrat is the head, represent the Massachusetts founded by the Puritans and Pilgrims, freed by Sam. Adams and his fellows, mitigated by Channing, and nationalized by Webster and Everett. If the Autocrat's wit is homely on one page, it is poetical on the next; the verse scattered throughout the book is its greatest charm. Here is a poem of mere fun, here one touched with pathos, and a little farther on a hymn of faith and trust. Holmes' Yankee shrewdness forgets the eternal verities no more than does Emerson's. Calvinism, in the eyes of its bitter and relentless opponent, Doctor Holmes, falls in a collapse as complete as that of the "One-Hoss Shay"; but his faith exclaims, in the last stanza of "The Chambered Nautilus":

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length are free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!"

Books of talk.

The underlying idea of the three Autocrat books is that of talk. That the art of conversation has not died out in this “materialistic age"; that its range is as broad, its possibilities as high, as ever; and that a chronicle of conversation in a mixed company can be made to teach and preach, yet constantly to entertain-this is the thing which the Autocrat series unconsciously proves. The merit of the three books does not, perhaps, have a rising scale; in the later volumes we do not find such poems as "The Chambered Nautilus" or "The OneHoss Shay," nor a proverb as this: "Boston StateHouse is the hub of the solar system. You could n't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar."* But if the Professor is unequal to the Autocrat, it may fairly be claimed that the Poet surpasses the Professor. The art of saying things wise and witty will never leave Doctor Holmes so long as he lives. It brightens his verse; it reappears in his essays; it adorns his novels; and it even plays through his biographies and scientific writings. But merely to say a thing well, without reference to the thing said, or its effect upon the reader, forms not the whole of the author's scheme. He is describing life, Yankee or universal, in many persons and in many phases. He is fighting for common-sense, as he understands it; for healthful existence, as he would have it; for liberality in still-conservative New England. "Oliver Wendell Holmes: his Say-so," might be the title of the three Breakfast-Table books, and of *"Autocrat," pp. 143-144.

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much else that the author has written. The frank and quaintly humorous motto of the first of them, Every Man his own Boswell," is more than a joke, and has more than a dramatic application to the leading character, for it goes back to the writer. And if this American humorist is wrong in making his wit and satire and pathos tell toward a beneficent and reformatory purpose, then he is wrong in the company of almost all Anglo-Saxon humorists from Chaucer down. Is there not a chemical trace of Chaucer in these Massachusetts men, Holmes and Lowell? Do they not, like the author of the Canterbury Tales," describe the men and women and ideas of their own time and land, so that bigotry and hypocrisy may be satirized, that humanity may be raised up, and that fresh nature may be brought before the eyes of men?

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The man behind the

books.

Holmes deems nothing human foreign to him; therefore he works in many fields. A subsequent volume of this History must, as has been said, consider his important work in poetry. A part of his prose and much of his poetry might be reviewed under the head of American humor. Yet he is an intense polemic. Against such errors in his conviction-as homœopathy and Calvinism he battles fiercely, and hits them strong blows at random, if he gets a chance. Upon American literature he has made his own mark, and the mark is deep and characteristic and readily recognizable, whether it be in prose or verse, in humor, satire, story, or essay. In whatever Holmes writes these qualities are recognizable: good sense, though the

reader may disagree with him; good humor, though the writer be terribly in earnest; and an alert mind. It is Holmes' misfortune, in one sense, that we instinctively apply to him the adjective clever; his quickness is of the character that is usually allied to talent rather than to genius. More particularly this is applicable to his prose; his novels (in which we might expect ideality), full as they are of dicta worthy of a philosopher, are not works of genius. In "Elsie Venner," "The Guardian Angel," and "A Mortal Antipathy," Holmes studies problems in psychology and heredity; he does not, like Hawthorne in "The Scarlet Letter," put a masterly result before the reader, and keep himself in the background. Therefore the essay, perhaps Spectatorlike, including a story, is his vantage-ground as a writer. The ideal element in him crops out here and there in all he writes; but he appears moved by genius only in his choicest poems.

A wholesome someness.

The prevailing impression left by this original nineteenth-century representative of Sterne on the one hand or Pope on the other, is one of whole"Our libraries," he has himself writer. said, "are crammed with books written by spiritual hypochondriacs, which should be transferred to studios of insanity." The row on the shelf devoted to Holmes' works is a place of sunlight and cheer. They are voluminous, garrulous, intolerant of the file or pruning-knife, irregular in merit. Says the master in "The Poet of the Breakfast-Table": "A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that be

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