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.

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,” h 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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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.