XIII OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES WHEN the spirit of Renaissance had finally conquered Boston, and people who had clung to Calvinism there found themselves hopelessly out of fashion, the man whom they believed most conspicuously to embody those pomps and vanities of the wicked world for which account shall be demanded in a better, is said to have been Oliver Wendell Holmes. To the Calvinistic mind, indeed, his career was probably the most irritating in all New England record. He was born, in 1809, at Cambridge, where his father, a Connecticut man and a graduate of Yale, had for some years been the Orthodox minister of the First Church. Though Harvard College had already lapsed into Unitarian heresy, this had not yet achieved the social conquest of the region. During Dr. Holmes's boyhood and youth, however, the struggle grew fierce; and at about the time of his graduation, his father, whose devotion to the old creed never wavered, was formally deposed from the pulpit which, after nearly forty years of occupancy, he stoutly refused to open to Unitarian doctrine. The old man, than whom none was ever more faithfully courageous, was supported by a majority of the communicants of the Cambridge church. A majority of the parish, however, preferred the liberal side. This latter body retained the old church building, the slender endowment of the parish, and the communion-plate. Abiel Holmes, with his saving remnant of church-members, was forced to establish a new place of worship; and the question as to which of the two is the more direct descendant of the old Puritan society from which both have sprung was long disputed by people who delight in such dispute. Now Dr. Holmes, in the matter of faithful courage, was his father's counterpart. So, in comparatively early life, finding himself unable to accept the Calvinistic teachings of his youth, he became what he remained all his life, a sound Unitarian. This of itself might have been enough to arouse bitter disapproval among the Calvinists. So, almost by itself, might have been the pleasantly prosperous circumstances of his personal life. His maternal grandfather was a judge, and a Fellow of Harvard College. Holmes, then, hereditarily allied with both pulpit and bar, was doubly what he used to call a New England Brahmin. Like any good orthodox boy, he was sent to school at Andover; and thence, like any good Cambridge boy, he was sent to Harvard too. There he took his degree in 1829, a year remembered in college tradition as that which produced the most distinguished group of Bachelors of Arts in Harvard history. In obedience to the traditions of his mother's family, he began the study of law; but finding this not congenial, he soon turned to medicine. In pursuance of this study he went abroad for two or three years, finally receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1836. After a year or two of practice, he became in 1839 Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College. A year later he returned to Boston, where he remained for the rest of his life; and from 1847 to 1882 he was Parkman Professor of Anatomy in the Harvard Medical School. In the fact that a man of Dr. Holmes's temper and position lived for fifty years in Boston as a Unitarian physician, there is something characteristic of the city which he knew and loved so well. Not long ago there appeared in some English review an article on the social position of American men of letters, wherein the writer based on the facts that Dr. Holmes practised medicine and went to Unitarian meeting the conclusion that Holmes was socially insignificant. In England such an inference would have been at least probable. There Unitarianism has often been held an almost blasphemous dissenting creed, abhorrent to seriously conservative temper; and only within the last few years has radicalism been socially tolerated in the mother country. In England, too, until very lately, the profession of medicine has been held in comparative social disesteem. In Boston, on the other hand, the isolated capital of isolated New England, which has stoutly developed and maintained traditions of its own, Unitarianism, in Dr. Holmes's time, enjoyed a social security similar to that of the Established Church across the water; and while the three learned professions were nominally of equal dignity, that of medicine had probably attracted, between 1800 and 1850, rather more men who combined breeding with culture than had either bar or pulpit. The very circumstances which made English prejudice assume Holmes to have been socially inconspicuous and temperamentally radical, then, were those which would soonest lead any one who knew the Boston of his time to assume him to have been precisely the reverse. This extreme localism of professional character and social position is characteristic of Holmes's whole life. After 1840, when he finally settled in Boston, he rarely passed a consecutive month outside of Massachusetts. Among Boston lives. the only other of eminence which was so uninterruptedly local is that of Cotton Mather. The intolerant Calvinistic minister typifies seventeenth-century Boston; the Unitarian physician typifies the Boston of the century just past. To both alike, Beacon Hill instinctively presented itself, in the phrase which Holmes has made so familiar, as the Hub of the Solar System. Though throughout Holmes's fifty years of Boston residence he was a man of local eminence, his eminence was not quite of a professional kind. His practice, in which he took no excessive interest, gradually faded away; and long before he gave up his lectures on Anatomy, they were held oldfashioned. He neither neglected nor disliked his profession, but it did not absorb him; and as his life proceeded, he probably grew less and less patient of that overwhelming mass of newly discovered detail which modern physicians must constantly master. Another reason why his medical career became less and less important is that from the beginning he had a keen interest in literature, and was widely known as a poet. Now, a man eminent in a learned profession may certainly be eminent in letters too, but public opinion hates to have him so; and any youth who would succeed in law or medicine can hear no sounder advice than that which Dr. Holmes is said often to have given in his later years, namely, that you should never let people suppose you seriously interested in anything but your regular work. In the very year when Holmes had returned from Europe to begin practice, he published a volume of poems; and at least three subsequent collections appeared before, with the beginning of the " Atlantic Monthly," he became known as a remarkable writer of prose. His writings, then, steadily distracted attention from his profession. Nor is this the whole story. Holmes's local eminence was perhaps chiefly due to his social gifts. Early in life he acquired the reputation of being the best talker ever heard in Boston; and this he maintained unbroken to the very end. It has lately been observed of Boston society that the city is still so fixed in its traditions that everybody who becomes widely known there is assumed to possess distinct characteristics which it becomes his social business to maintain. In the beginning he chooses his part; then the unspoken force of local opinion compels him to play it straight through. Some such experience probably happened to Dr. Holmes. Years did their consequent work. In his later life his conversation and his wit alike, always spontaneous and often of a quality which would have been excellent anywhere, are said sometimes to have been overwhelming. His talk tended to monologue, and his wit to phrases so final that nobody could think of anything to say in return. There was humorous and characteristic good-nature in that title, the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Tabie," which he gave, so early as 1831, to a couple of articles written for a now forgotten periodical called the "New England Magazine." Fully twenty-five years elapsed before he published anything else of the kind. Then, when in 1857 he began those papers under the same title which have become permanent in our literature, his opening phrase is whimsically characteristic: "I was going to say, when I was interrupted." Whereupon, after twenty-five years of interruption, he proceeds with the autocratic utterances now familiar all over the world. The contagious good-humour of this title, like the whimsicality of that little reference to the lapse of a quarter of a century, indicates the quality which made Holmes popular, despite his habit of keeping the floor and of saying admirably unanswerable things. His friends were heartily attached to him. They recognised in him a social autocrat, but one to whom they were glad to listen; they fervently believed that nobody had ever been like him, and that in all probability nobody ever would be. Up to middle life Dr. Holmes's literary reputation was that of a poet, whose work was chiefly social. Almost his first publication, to be sure, “ Old Ironsides," was was "an impromptu outburst of feeling," caused by a notice in a newspaper that the old frigate "Constitution" was to be destroyed. His fervent verses not only achieved their purpose of saving from destruction that historical craft, whose hulk still lies at the Charlestown Navy Yard, but have retained popularity. Few lines are more familiar to American school-boys than the opening one: "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!" Most of Holmes's early verse, however, may be typified by the first stanza of My Aunt : "My aunt! my dear unmarried aunt! Long years have o'er her flown; |