The autocrat of the breakfast-table

Introduction

The particular work of a writer may be called his finest for several reasons. It has — whether justly or no — come to be regarded as most expressive of his essential gift ; or it is the most successful accomplishment in a form of art more important and difficult than he elsewhere attempted with a like result ; or, again, it is most clearly stamped with the impress of his time and country — and hence is a work truly national. Doubtless such a question can never be settled : criticism is not yet, it may be questioned if it ever will be, an exact science, and its methods will always take on a tinge of impressionism.

Nevertheless, to one familiar with Dr. Holmes 1 s genius, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table must seem not only a typical work but, on the whole, that which contains in happiest union his fundamental characteristics as an author. The incidents connected with the writing of this masterpiece of American letters may be recited here. In 1831, when the future Autocrat was unautocratically fresh from Harvard, whence ho had been graduated two years before, and altogether innocent of the prefix Doctor which was to become an integral part of the name whereby his generation affectionately invoked him, he wrote for the New England Magazine, of Boston, a

IV INTRODUCTION.

couple of essays under the title which was made so familiar in subsequent years. They appeared respectively in the issues for November, 1831, and February, 1832. Then, as Dr. Holmes has himself explained it to us, a silence of a quarter-century intervened ; for it was in the Atlantic Monthly of November, 1857, that the series as we know it began. The author took the hint offered by himself when a green stripling ; how often in literature, as in life, maturity is but the more or less laborious working out of what comes in youth by way of inspiration, in a happy flash ! It is a true instinct in a writer which dictates the return. " So long," says Amiel, " as a man is capable of selfrenewal he is a living being. 1 ' Dr. Holmes, then, took the suggestion, but not the form, of his early work, having gained, in the meantime, the firm hand and the wide experience necessary to make it a worthy performance. The situation in 1857, comparing it with that of 1831, was vastly changed. Then he was unknown to letters, untried in medicine, simply a clever young Cambridge man with the inevitable interrogation mark after his name ; at the later date, he had won distinction as scientist, wit, and poet. This mid-century date may be regarded as the point moving forward from which he was to do his solidest prose work, — the Breakfast Table Trilogy, the novels, the biographies, and the delightful final chats embodied in such a book as Over the Tea-cups.

It is no disparagement to his sprightly and graceful accomplishment in verse, to say that Holmes was, first and foremost, an essayist, past master in a rare and

INTROD UCTION. V

difficult kind of literature. A recent critic has held that the characteristic contribution of the United States to literature has been in prose. Without stopping to argue the question, it may be asserted roundly that no prose form counts more distinguished names — names fit, though few — than this of the essay. How may we define it? What are its definitive traits ? The essay, as it has been handed on from its great French master, Montaigne, to Bacon, and moulded by the deft manipulations of successive writers like Addison and Steele, Johnson and Goldsmith, Leigh Hunt, Lamb, and Hazlitt, and in our own day further illuminated by Stevenson and one or two others, has, with whatever personal variations, persisted in remaining primarily a vehicle for the conveyance of a personality. This, rather than the communication of knowledge, has been its purpose and result. It has taken a desultory form, tending to the whimsical in manner, and the conversational in tone : " dispersed meditations," as Bacon called the notes which became his famous series of essays. This subjective quality, the disavowal of a serious aim, the confidential relation between w r riter and reader, has, I say, ever marked the true essay. The essayist to the manner born throws his wit and wisdom into a causerie ; his work is the inspired chat of literature. It follows naturally that he is, in the flesh, a good talker ; as everybody knows, Dr. Holmes was marvellous in this respect. One's sense of this idea of the essay is much obscured by the giving of the name loosely to the imposing, formal treatise, — its object to impart information, its

Vi INTRODUCTION.

manner impersonal and heavy. This is a very worthy creature, no doubt : but different. The essayists we remember and love to remember are of the other sort. Dr. Holmes, surely, belongs to the essayists, who derive from this true line of succession. His is the personal touch, the tone of good society ; his, too, the display of wisdom, tempered by wit and so conveyed that there is neither heaviness nor slow motion. It is uniquely true of the essay that it demands and is adorned by the thought and expression of an author's prime of power. Holmes was nearly fifty years of age when the Autocrat was taken up and done at full length. Great lyric poetry can be, and perhaps most often is, produced in the twenties or early thirties ; witness Keats and Shelley, or the French Musset. But with the essay, there is an appreciable advantage in more of years. Montaigne, at thirty-seven, retired to his country estate to write the rambling, inimitable causeries which are the sole basis of his fame. Lamb was forty-five when the Elia Papers in the London Magazine gave the world present and to come of his best — and what a best ! While a later example, that of Stevenson, bears the same testimony, since the finest of his essays were the work of a man neighboring forty, — an age limit sometimes referred to as a sort of dead line for imaginative production in literature. In 1857, Dr. Holmes's natural sprightliness and creative energy were in no wise abated ; and to these qualities the five and twenty years hereinbefore mentioned, had but ripened and enriched his thought, so that art and intellect could enter into

INTRODUCTION. vil

one of those chemical unions which mean great things for letters.

It should be said, moreover, that while the easy tone of good society (which in a sense has no locality) is struck by the Autocrat, no work is more essentially of New England. It is sound criticism to say that every piece of genuine literature should savor of the soil whence it springs. The Americanism here is unobtrusive but deep, to be felt on every page : and thinking of the middle nineteenth century, it does not taste of the parochial to remark that, for literature, Americanism and New Englandism were practically identical. Our representative efforts in prose and poetry were of this origin. Holmes's was enlightened New Englandism, the sort that made Boston of the old days to be in vital connection with the great thought-currents of the civilized world. Open the pages of the Autocrat almost at random and the statement is justified. The often homely idiom bespeaks the environment ; no less the thought, homely too, perhaps, but sound and sweet. The canny mother-sense, the shy ideality, the sensitiveness to the humorous, the underlying moral sturdiness, — these traits all are recognizable as of the warp and woof wherefrom our first typical literary goods were wrought. One is tempted to say, more particularly, that the combination of humor and sublimated good sense — the wisdom offered with a shrewdly smiling face — stands for the prime quality of this chef d^oeuvre of essay writing. This is not to overlook the charming description, the moments of lovely lyric

Vlll INTRODUCTION.

utterance embedded in the work. One can never forget that, in grave or gay, the now so familiar temperance poem, a homely masterpiece like The One- Hoss Shay, and such a little classic as The Chambered Nautilus, first got into print here. Yet the conviction remains that it is for these twin qualities of wit and wisdom in happy conjunction — for these and the urbane French manner of presentation — that the Autocrat will be longest cherished.

The humor, too, is all pervasive and individual. How different it is from the fun of Lowell in the Biglow Papers I And yet in its way it is as distinctive and enjoyable. It is removed as far as possible from horse-play and the bluster of farce. Much has been made of American humor by critics (generally transatlantic) who seem to feel that the grotesquerie of Artemus Ward or Bill Nye runs the whole diapason of a characteristic for which our literature is justly conspicuous. But the conclusion is hasty. The humor of Lowell and of Holmes, of Warner and of Curtis, of Chandler Harris and of Stockton — yes, and of Mark Twain at his best, is of another sort. Dr. Holmes is both witty and humorous ; but always there is breeding in his fun. He illustrates the idea that one can smile, even laugh, and be not only a villain, but a gentleman : that the grin and the guffaw are not of necessity national. His humor is atmospheric, as pure, wholesome humor ever should be ; there speaks in it a kindly and innocent soul. But his wit is a thing of thrust and parry, after the manner of your true intellectual duello : and then ?

INTR OD UCTION. IX

Woe worth the day to all shams, and fads, and basenesses ! Holmes's epigrams have a nobler use than mere mind-tickling. And how naturally, how easily the humor shades into sentiment, — another sure test of the former. The sentiment is infallibly safe from sentimentality by this saving grace of humor, always in the background; even verbal play — a rock that shatters reputations not a few — seems legitimate in his hands : he is one of those people who know how to use it as a sauce piquante to the feast.

The dramatic framework he chose for the AutocraVs monologues — the typical group of New England boarding-house folk gathered about the morning table — is one that amply allows for the display of the essay qualities I have already glanced at : the rapid shift of subject, the touch-and-go method by which the mind alights upon a thought, sets it vibrating, and leaves it for another, as a bird flits from bough to bough. The speaker, veiling his own mind under the guise of the idiosyncrasy of others, is thereby enabled to see around a topic of conversation as he might not do if doomed continually to speak in proper person. It being of the genius of the essayist to approximate in manner the easy vernacular of the conversazione, he can in this dramatized form take on its very accent. Such a use of the essay as Dr. Holmes gives us in the Autocrat, is interesting in the evolution of this form, for it stands as a halfway stage of which the full development is seen in the character sketch of fiction. Carelessly viewed, the Autocrat might be so called : yet not properly, for the reason that the interest is not

X INTR OD UCTION.

primarily the interest of narrative, of invention, and action ; not even in the main that of character ; but that of thought and manner — and especially manner — the way in which the thing is said. This distinction is quite sufficient to justify one in declaring that the work affords a delicious example of the free use of the essay mood.

And where manner is so much, how well the demands are met ! The diction of the Autocrat is a perfect vehicle to carry the intention. It is flexible, harmonious, unobtrusively elegant ; is never slangy, forced, or precious. It is, nevertheless, idiomatic to the point of daring. The fresh in language was rarely more circumspect. The author knows just when to admit the colloquial, when to exclude it and adopt the more formal tone (stopping short of stiffness) of good society. Such a style is a rebuke to the linguistic gymnastics which pass for " original writing," and an incentive to the philologically pure in heart.

- There is in the fact that Dr. Holmes found a natural vent of expression in a form so eminently social in its kind, something revelatory of the man. Though, as we have seen, so essentially of New England, his literary genius had affiliations with the French. The literature of that great people is, above that of all other peoples, social and urbane : it is a literature that looks to and considers man in his relations to his fellow-men, and that does this with the manners of the grand world. It throws light upon the crisscross of the world's crowded ways. This enlightening gift shines in Dr. Holmes : the French word iclair-

INTR OD UCTION. XI

cissement comes instinctively to the lips in thinking of his effect. He is a torch-bearer dressed a la mode. The Autocrat, as he beams upon his friends about the board, and gallantly rallies his landlady upon her buxom appearance, is happy in his feeling of the solidarity not only of the boarding-house circle, but of the human race. No other American author has had just this talent for social expression, if I may so phrase it ; possibly Dr. Holmes's acceptability abroad may be accounted for in part by a reference to this quality. Nor did this social instinct, which might seem to suggest a certain cosmopolitanism, for a moment interfere with that genuinely New England character of thought and expression already touched upon and which makes the Autocrat so dear, so understood by his fellow Americans. His setting affords him the opportunity for sparkling, apposite, and suggestive thought absolutely unrestricted as to range : and he made the most of it. There is genius in the conception as well as in the execution ; vividness and variety are gained by his use of characters.

The modernness of the Autocrat's talk is noticeable ; that cheery, quick-witted professor is an courant with everything intellectual. He is universally interested ; he has an effect of knowing everything. The author when he came in 1882 to write a preface to a new edition of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, debated in his own mind, he tells us, the advisability of revision, — "thinking that his pages might be improved by various corrections and changes. 1 ' But, very wisely, he concluded that " it is dangerous to

Xll INTR OD UCTION.

tamper in cold blood and in after life with what was written in the glow of an earlier period." It may be added that had he yielded to this momentary suggestion and sought to bring those inimitable table-talks up to date — horrid idiom to match horrid thought — they would have been not a jot more contemporaneous than they are in the original form. To be sure, as Dr. Holmes remarks himself, in the meanwhile " we read by the light the rocks of Pennsylvania have furnished us, all that is most important in the morning papers of the civilized world : the lightning so swift to run our errands, stands shining over us, white and steady as the moonbeams, burning, but unconsumed ; we talk with people in the neighboring cities as if they were at our elbow, and as our equipages flash along the highway, the silent bicycle glides by us and disappears in the distance. All these changes since 1857." And in a still later preface, dated 1891, he calls attention to that other discovery of science, the electric motor, as a common carrier. But, we repeat, the Autocrat of 1857 has no accent of the past ; he is preeminently modern because Holmes, ever on the mental qui vive with his day, has an attitude which is timeless : the attitude of one who assimilates the best in all kinds of current knowledge, — the ardent seeker after truth in all its manifestations. He possessed to a marked degree the curious mind of the scientific investigator. The true humanist is denoted, not by the facts he knows (since that is an accident dependent upon the age he lives in), but by this questing spirit in respect of knowledge. It is a question of proper

INTRODUCTION. Xlll

orientation. To say that a man has a sprightly habit of mind points suspiciously to a qualification on the side of breadth and robustness ; not so here : this sprightliness was Dr. Holmes's to such a degree that it is a salient feature of his work ; yet with no such reservation.

In but one quality, it seems to me, does The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table perhaps strike the reader of to-day, who takes it up nearly a half-century after it was penned, as belonging to an elder day. What might be called the author's sense of moral responsibility is likely to appear old-fashioned. And I may add that nothing stamps it as more characteristic of the literature made by our great earlier writers. The essayist of the present period may assume the mood intimate with his reader, granted : in fact, that sort of confidential impressionism is distinctly fashionable now. But he is not inclined to state his feeling of duty to that imaginary auditor (nor indeed to have it) as does Dr. Holmes in good set terms when it conies to farewell. " I hope," he says, " you all love me none the less for anything I have told you.*" It could not be more winningly put ; and the implication is clear. The desire is for a friendship deserved because a trust has not been violated. Noblesse oblige is the motto of American literature before the war. Now, the maker of poem, story, or essay, if he accept the current teaching (which, luckily for us, he does not invariably do) tries to make of himself an impersonal force, with no duties to his readers, nor even to the creations of his fancy. Holmes touches

XIV INTR OD UCTIOJV.

the close of his charming chronicle with a pensive but wholesome sadness: yet lights it up with a beautiful love as he leads the schoolmistress to the altar. We have changed all that : our sadness must be bitter, hopeless, our marriages come tardy off. The Autocrat, in tone and teaching, I say, offers an instructive contrast to present-day methods. It is the frank acceptance of this underlying moral obligation of the author to his public which gives backbone to such a work, which is then clothed upon and decorated with all the charms and graces of literary art. Any suspicion of didacticism is removed by the delightful ease of the manner and the unfailing, bubbling flow of good spirits. Thus, sound in ethics, as it is flawless in art, the work to-day holds the allegiance of admirers whose name is legion — and deserves to hold it. Any piece of literature that is good in this double sense may be relied upon to last.

RICHARD BURTON.

April 14, 1900.

THE AUTOCRAT'S AUTOBIOG- RAPHY.

The interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of these papers was just a quarter of a century in duration.

Two articles entitled " The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table " will be found in the " New England Magazine," formerly published in Boston by J. T. and E. Buckingham. The date of the first of these articles is November 1831, and that of the second February 1832. When "The Atlantic Monthly" was begun, twenty-five years afterwards, and the author was asked to write for it, the recollection of these crude products of his uncombed literary boyhood suggested the thought 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.

So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those earlier attempts to my own notice and that of some few friends who were idle enough to read them at the time of their publication. The man is father to the boy that was, and I am my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the New England Magazine. If I find it hard to pardon the boy's faults, others would find it harder. They will not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor as I hope, anywhere.

XVI THE AUTOCRAT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing, and with these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind being still breathes, will be contented.

— "It is a capital plan to carry a tablet with you, and, when you find yourself felicitous, take notes of your own conversation.' 1 —

— " When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more eloquent analogy." —

— " Once on a time, a notion was started, that if all the people in the world would shout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it should be done in just ten years. Some thousand shiploads of chronometers were distributed to the selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the great occasion. When the time came, everybody had their ears so wide open, to hear the universal ejaculation of Boo, — the word agreed upon, — that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation." —

There was nothing better than these things and there was not a little that was much worse. A young fellow of two or three and twenty has as good a right

THE AUTOCRAT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, xvii

to spoil a magazine-full of essays in learning how to write, as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his hatfull of eyes in learning how to operate for cataract, or an elegant like Brummel to point to an armful of failures in the attempt to achieve a perfect tie. This son of mine, whom I have not seen for these twenty-five years, generously counted, was a self-willed youth, always too ready to utter his unchastised fancies. He, like too many American young people, got the spur when he should have had the rein. He therefore helped to fill the market with that unripe fruit which his father says in one of these papers abounds in the marts of his native country. All these by-gone short-comings he would hope are forgiven, did he not feel sure that very few of his readers know anything about them. In taking the old name for the new papers, he felt bound to say that he had uttered unwise things under that title, and if it shall appear that his unwisdom has not diminished by at least half while his years have doubled, he promises not to repeat the experiment if he should live to double them again and become his own grandfather.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Boston, Nov. ist, 1858.

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

L

I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula : 2 + 2 = 4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression a + b — c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead of figures.

They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation. — No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it, and you found it, not in the original, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I 1 will tell the company what he did say, one of these days.

— If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration ? — I blush to say that I do not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was the first association to which I ever heard the term applied ; a body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired their teacher, and to some extent each other. Many of them deserved it ; they have become famous since. It amuses me to hear the talk of one of those beings described by Thackeray —

" Letters four do form his name " —

about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage of civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors, philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of Mutual Admiration. A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred from admiring the same quality in another, nor the other from returning his admiration. They may even associate together and continue to think highly of each other. And so of a dozen such men, if any one place is fortunate enough to hold so many. The being referred to above assumes several false premises. First, that men of talent necessarily hate each other. Secondly, that intimate knowledge or habitual association destroys our admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance. Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine and have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to glorify themselves and to put down him and the fraction of the human race not belonging to their number. Fourthly, that it is an outrage that he is not asked to join them.

Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who sits opposite said, "That's it! that's it !"

I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever people's hating each other, I think a little extra talent does sometimes make people jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions. Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious ; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working and playing together in harmony. He and his fellows are always fighting. With them familiarity naturally breeds contempt. If they ever praise each other's bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration ; it was simply a contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer.

If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that alters the question. But if they are men with noble powers and qualities, let me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration. And what would literature or art be without such associations ? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members? Or to that of which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the Spectator ? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all admirers, met together? Was there any great harm in the fact that the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company ? or any unpardonable cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and as many more as they chose to associate with them ?

The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he abuses this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries through the knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a medium for his popgun. Such a society is the crown of a literary metropolis ; if a town has not material for it, and spirit and good feeling enough to organize it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a man of genius to lodge in, but not to live in. Foolish people hate and dread and envy such an association of men of varied powers and influence, because it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the necessity of the case, exclusive. Wise ones are prouder of the title M. S. M. A. than of all their other honors put together.