Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Title:     Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Author: Alice Meynell [More Titles by Meynell]

It is good to go, now and again--let the American phrase be permitted--'back of' some of our contemporaries. We never desired them as coevals. We never wished to share an age with them; we share nothing else with them. And we deliver ourselves from them by passing, in literature, into the company of an author who wrote before their time, and yet is familiarly modern. To read Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then, is to go behind the New Humorist--into a time before he was, or his Humour. Obviously we go in like manner behind many another, but the funny writer of the magazines is suggested because in reference to him our act has a special significance. We connect him with Dr. Holmes by a reluctant ancestry, by an impertinent descent. It may be objected that such a connection is but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuous incident, to a man of letters. So it is. But the triviality has wide allusions. It is often a question which of several significant trivialities a critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who does not insist that all the grave things shall be told him. And, by the way, are we ever sufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the last few years have given to us, or to whom we have been given by the last few years? A trivial connexion has remote and negative issues. To go to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid of many things; to go to himself is especially to get rid of the New Humour, yet to stand at its unprophetic source. And we love such authors as Dickens and this American for their own sake, refusing to be aware of their corrupt following. We would make haste to ignore their posterity, and to assure them that we absolve them from any fault of theirs in the bastardy.

Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must explain why the little humour in _Elsie Venner_ and the _Breakfast Table_ series is not only the first thing the critic touches but the thing whereby he relates this author to his following and to the world. The young man John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social entertainment,' the Landlady and her daughter, and the Poor Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic personages, and fifty per cent. of the things they say--no more--are good enough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off. But that half is excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that temperance--the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities--the humour of it has set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth. Like Mr. Lowell's it was humour in dialect--not Irish dialect nor negro, but American; and it made New England aware of her comedy. Until then she had felt within herself that there was nothing to laugh at. 'Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman,' says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Rather, she takes herself seriously when she makes the average spiritual woman: as seriously as that woman takes herself when she makes a novel. And in a like mood Nature made New England and endowed her with purpose, with mortuary frivolities, with long views, with energetic provincialism.

If we remember best _The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay_, we do so in spite of the religious and pathetic motive of the greater part of Dr. Holmes's work, and of his fancy, which should be at least as conspicuous as his humour. It is fancy rather than imagination; but it is more perfect, more definite, more fit, than the larger art of imagery, which is apt to be vague, because it is intellectual and adult. No grown man makes quite so definite mental images as does a child; when the mind ages it thinks stronger thoughts in vaguer pictures. The young mind of Dr. Holmes has less intellectual imagination than intelligent fancy. For example: 'If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. The bird in sable plumage flaps heavily along his straightforward course, while the other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crow does;' but the comparison goes on after this at needless length, with explanations. Again: 'That blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them: that glorious licence which, having shut the door and driven the reporter from the keyhole, calls upon Truth, majestic Virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic _poses_.' And this, of the Landlady: 'She told me her story once; it was as if a grain that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualise itself by a special narrative.' 'The riotous tumult of a laugh, which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features.' 'Think of the Old World--that part of it which is the seat of ancient civilisation! . . . A man cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession.' 'Young folk look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation.' And that exquisitely sensitive passage on the nervous outward movement and the inward tranquillity of the woods. Such things are the best this good author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be bare thoughts shapely with their own truth.

Part of the charm of Dr. Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance. He has unpreoccupied and alert eyes. Strangely enough, by the way, this watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be the slovenly observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse's gallop, 'skimming along within a yard of the ground.' Who shall trust a man's nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him? Not an inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk. But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his studies of New England inland life. Much careful literature besides has been spent, after the example of _Elsie Venner_ and the _Autocrat_, upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comforts achieved by a distressing household industry, the shrillness, the unrest, the best-parlour emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the country-side and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by demonstrativeness--their kindness by reticence, and their religion by candour.

As for the question of heredity and of individual responsibility which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in _Elsie Venner_, it is strange that a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should present it--not in its own insolubility but--in caricature. As though the secrets of the inherited body and soul needed to be heightened by a bit of burlesque physiology! It is in spite of our protest against the invention of Elsie's horrible plight--a conception and invention which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes should feel to be essentially frivolous--that the serpent- maiden moves us deeply by her last 'Good night,' and by the gentle phrase that tells us 'Elsie wept.' But now, if Dr. Holmes shall succeed in proposing the question of separate responsibility so as to convince every civilised mind of his doubts, there will be curiously little change wrought thereby in the discipline of the world. For Dr. Holmes incidentally lets us know that he cherishes and values the instinct of intolerance and destructiveness in presence of the cruel, the self-loving, and the false. Negation of separate moral responsibility, when that negation is tempered by a working instinct of intolerance and destructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in the manner achieved by the present prevalent judicialness, unscientific though it may be. And to say this is to confess that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has worked, through a number of books, to futile purpose. His books are justified by something quite apart from his purpose.

[The end]
Alice Meynell's essay: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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