Brander Matthews

“ Holmes is not only a man of science and a man of the world, he is also a humorist and a wit,—a wit who has no antipathy even to the humble but useful pun,—a humorist abounding in whimsy. And as a result of this fourfold equipment his talk is excellent merely as talk. It has the flavour of the spoken word; it is absolutely unacademic and totally devoid of pedantry. Therefore it is not only delightful but stimulating; it continually makes the reader think for himself and turn back upon himself. ”

“ In reading the Breakfast-Table series in swift succession the reader cannot help remarking the frequency with which Holmes draws on his professional experience; he sees men and women through the clear spectacles of the family physician;—and perhaps one reason why he arrogates to himself the major part of the conversation is in revenge for the silence imposed on the practitioner by the tedious and interminable talk of his patients about themselves to which the family physician has perforce to submit. ”

“ The real novelty of the Autocrat was in its content, that is to say, in Holmes himself, the master talker of the Breakfast-Table, in the skill with which the accent of conversation is caught. The other characters are responsible for an occasional remark not without individuality and point; but the Autocrat himself tends to be a monopolist and to intermit his discourse only that his adversary in the verbal combat may lay himself open to a series of sharp thrusts in retort. ”

“ But no author could paint a vital portrait of a personality which left him indifferent; to his biographer at least a man must be a hero; and no valet has yet written an acceptable account of his master’s life. But love needs to be controlled by judgment; and Holmes, at the time he composed his memoir, felt too keenly the injustice from which Motley had suffered to be able to survey the career and to estimate the character of the eminent historian with the detachment necessary to the painting of a portrait for posterity. ”

“ The qualities which give charm to Holmes’s prose are those which please us also in his verse. He has left a dozen or a score of lyrics secure in the anthologies of the future. But he wrote too easily and he wrote too much to maintain a high average in the three hundred double-columned pages in which his complete poems are collected. No poet or prose man can take down to posterity a baggage wagon of his works, and he is lucky if he can save enough to fill a saddle-bag. ”

“ In prose and in verse he disclosed an unfailing Yankee cleverness, whittling his rhymes and sharpening his phrases with an innate dexterity.
“The secret of a man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested,” William Dean Howells has told us; “and this was above all the secret of the charm Doctor Holmes had for every one.” There is zest and gusto in all that he wrote, and the reader can share the writer’s own enjoyment. Especially was the writer interested in himself, as the true essayist must be. ”

“ It is in a half dozen of the ineffably graceful lyrics of the Greek anthology and in a like number of the more personal songs of Horace that we may find the earliest analogue of English familiar verse, better and more abundant than the French vers de société, even though the native English form has been compelled to borrow a French name for itself. The Greek anthology has the freedom of the fields and of the solitary hillside, and therefore it lacks a little of the social tone which is the dominating quality of familiar verse. ”

“ There are a few of Holmes’s loftier poems in which we feel that the inspiration is equal to the aspiration; but there are only a few of them, with The Chambered Nautilus at the head, accompanied by Homesick in Heaven,—not overpraised by Howells when he called it one of the “most profoundly pathetic of the language.” And Stedman was right also when he suggested that Holmes’s serious poetry had scarcely been the serious work of his life. Even at its best this serious poetry is the result of his intelligence rather than of his imagination. It lacks depth of feeling and largeness of vision. ”

“ It has a French felicity of fancy, a French dexterity of craftsmanship, a French point and polish; and also a French inadequacy of emotion. “Assuredly we love poetry in France,” said Anatole France when he was discussing the verse of Sainte-Beuve; “but we love it in our own fashion; we insist that it shall be eloquent, and we willingly excuse it from being poetic.” Old Ironsides, fiery as its lines ring out, is eloquent rather than truly poetic.
Here again Holmes declares himself as a survival from the eighteenth century, when English literature conformed to French principles. ”

“ In a letter to Lowell, Holmes declared, speaking of Bostonians in particular and yet perhaps also of Americans in general, that “we Boston people are so bright and wide-awake ... that we have been in danger of thinking our local scale was the absolute one of excellence—forgetting that 212 Fahrenheit is but 100 centigrade.” There is one department of poetry in which Holmes can withstand without any danger of shrinking the application of the centigrade scale; this is the department of vers de société, so called, although it is never merely society verse. ”

“ The more of himself he revealed, the more he won the hearts of his fellow men, who relished the gentleness and the firmness of the character so openly disclosed, its kindliness, its urbanity and amenity, its lack of all acerbity or acridity, its total freedom from the rennet of meanness which curdles the milk of human kindness. ”

“ In other words, Elsie Venner is a novel-with-a-purpose; it is a fiction devised by a nineteenth-century physician to attack eighteenth-century Calvinism. Perhaps a born story-teller could have so constructed his narrative as to fascinate the reader in spite of the argument it was intended to carry, but Holmes was not a born story-teller. ”

“ Indeed, Lowell is Holmes’s only chief rival among American poets in the limited field of familiar verse, but he is less meticulous in finish and polish and more likely to charge his lines with a meaning too large for the lyric which aims above all else at lightness and brightness. ”

“ He is superior also in technical dexterity, in variety of rhythm, and in fertility of rhyme. His feeling is more spontaneous, his sentiment more abundant and finer in feeling. He can when he chooses hint at the tear which trembles above the lips that seem to smile. ”

“ There is warrant for the wide popularity of his Little Boy Blue, in which the pathos is pure and tender, without any taint of mawkish sentimentality. Only a little narrower in its appeal is Old Times, Old Friends, Old Loves. Field’s command of sentiment is so certain that he can impart true feeling even to stanzas as frolicsome and as rollicking as those which delight us in Apple Pie and Cheese.
§ 17. Bunner. The youngest of these three younger practitioners of familiar verse, Henry Cuyler Bunner, could also be broadly comic; he had an ample outlook on literature and on life ”

“ Steele was probably influenced by the English character-writers, perhaps also by the lighter satires of Horace, and quite possibly by the comedies of Molière,—notably by the Précieuses Ridicules and the Femmes Savantes. The outline Steele sketched the less original Addison filled with a richer colour. As Holmes had begun when a child by imitating the verse of Pope and Goldsmith, so as a man when he wrote prose he followed the pattern set by Steele and Addison. Although he was not born until the ninth year of the nineteenth century, he was really a survivor from the eighteenth century ”

“ The young man born in this selected group is commonly slender, with a smooth face and with features regular and of a certain delicacy. “His eye is bright and quick,—his lips play over the thought much as a pianist’s fingers dance over their music,—and his whole air, though it may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish.” Teachers discover that he “will take to his books as a pointer or setter to his field work.” He may be intended for the bar while his father was a minister and his grandfather a physician ”

“ Yet in so far as the Autocrat has a model, this is plainly enough the eighteenth-century essay, invented by Steele, improved by Addison, clumsily attempted by Johnson, and lightly varied by Goldsmith. Steele is the originator of the form, since the earlier essay of Montaigne and of Bacon makes no use of dialogue; it has only one interlocutor, the essayist himself, recording only his own feelings, his own opinions, and his own judgments. ”

“ Those were the fertile years of the Lyceum System, and Holmes went the rounds of the lecture-halls like many others of the New England authors who were his contemporaries; but even as a lecturer he preferred rhyming verse to the customary colloquial prose. Then quite unexpectedly, when he was forty-eight, an age when most men shrink from any new departure disconcerting to their indurated habits, he revealed himself in an entirely new aspect. The Atlantic Monthly was started in 1857 with Lowell as its editor; and to its early numbers Holmes contributed The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. ”

“ Novels. Such also is the interest of his three novels; they appeal to those who relish the flavour of Holmes’s personality rather than to those who expect a work of fiction to be first of all a story, and secondly a story peopled with accusable characters. In one of the prefaces to Elsie Venner Holmes cited the remark of a dear old lady who spoke of the tale as “a medicated novel”; and he declared that he was “always pleased with her discriminating criticism.” It is not unfair to say that all three novels were conceived by a physician and composed by an essayist. ”

“ He was the constant exponent of good manners and of right feeling, at a period in the evolution of American society when the need for this was even more evident than it is now.
§ 5. Biographies of Motley and Emerson. It was in a score of his poems and in the successive volumes of the Breakfast-Table series that Holmes most completely disclosed himself. His two biographies and his three novels are far less important,—in fact, these other prose writings are important chiefly because they are the work of the “Autocrat” ”