The autocrat of the breakfast-table; every man his own Boswell

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NUMBER ei (TR

HOLMES'S Atitoc^r'cit of liie Breakfast-fable

Preface to the Riverside Edition xx

The Autocrat's Autobiography xxii

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Until a few years ago there stood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Austin Hall, the domicile of the Law School of Harvard College, an old wooden house which had a double historic interest, making it a companion to Craigie House, its neighbor, which had been Washington's headquarters during the siege of Boston, and the home for many years of the poet Longfellow. For, in the early days of the Revolution, when studies at Harvard College were suspended, this old gambrel-roofed house had been the headquarters of General Artemas Ward and of the Committee of Safety. Upon the steps of the house stood President Langdon of Harvard College, so tradition says, and prayed for the men, who, halting there a few moments, marched forward under Colonel Prescott's lead to throw up entrenchments on Bunker Hill on the night of June 16, 1775. And here, August 29, 1809, was born Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the great group of Americans who laid the foundations of American literature.

Dr. Holmes's father carried forward the traditions of the historic house, for he was the Rev. Dr. Abiel Holmes whose American A finals was the first care-

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fill record of American history written after the Revolution. He married the daughter of Judge Oliver Wendell, whose name thus descended to a grandson, and his connection with other New England worthies transmitted the blood and the memories of men and women of that sturdy New England stock which was the native aristocracy so proudly honored by the poet, as in his famous verses on Dorothy Q.

In his The Professor at the Breakfast- Table Hohnes has dwelt at length upon his memories of the Gambrel Roofed House in which he was born, and in many passages in his prose writings, notably in the paper entitled Cinders from the Ashes. He has recounted the experiences of a happy childhood, and has shown how closely he observed the characteristics and characters of his fellows and of the people whom he met. A part of his school life was spent in a neighboring school, where fellow pupils were Richard Henry Dana, to become famous very early in life by his Two Years before the Mast., and Margaret Fuller, the brilliancy of whose conversation made her the chosen companion of Emerson and his associates, and whose fame as an intellectual woman has not been eclipsed by the crowd of women in New England who since her day have written and spoken. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, and in his poem The School-Boy he has left a delightful reminiscence of his own experience, and characterization of his comrades.

He spent a year in special preparation for college, and then entered Harvard College with the class that was to graduate in 1829. In those days the classes at college were smaller than now% and as they all joined in common studies the members of a class

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came to know one another familiarly and to have such a sense of organic unity that long after college days, when the members were scattered and rarely came together, each still felt himself a member of his " class," as he might feel himself a citizen of some particular city. There were indeed members of the class of 1829 who were to become famous in aftei years, — Benjamin Peirce, the great mathematician, whose speech about his science was like a musical exercise ; Benjamin Robbins Curtis, the great lawyer ; Charles Sumner, the great publicist ; Wendell Phillips, the great orator, who was a cousin of Holmes ; and John Lothrop Motley, the great historian. But the class enjoyed a distinction not granted to other classes, for though another class a few years later had a great poet in James Russell Lowell, this alone had a poet who year after year, at the class meeting, sang for them a song of memory and affection. It was the same song sung in many keys, and some of the music could not be shut up within narrow limits, but has found universal acceptance in such lines as Bill and Joe,

Holmes began to write poetry when in college, and some of his best-known early pieces like Evening^ hy a Tailoi\ The Meeting of the Dryads^ The Spectre Pig^ were contributed to The Collegian^ an undergraduate journal, while he was studying law the year after his graduation. At the same time he wrote the well-known poem Old Ironsides^ a protest against the pro= posed breaking up of the frigate Constitution ; the poem was printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and its indignation and fervor carried it through the country and raised such a popular feeling that the ship was saved from an ignominious destruction. He viil BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

did not carry his study of law very far, but turned aside to the study of medicine, and to complete his preparation went to Europe, where he could gain the advantage of more scientific training in Paris and Edinburgh. He has recounted his experiences in those cities both in discourses before medical societies, in random passages in his prose writings, and in the preliminary chapter to Our Hundred Days in Europe ; and one curious souvenir of his early visit was a picture after Herring, of Plenipotentiary, the winner of the Derby race which he saw in 1834, a picture which hung on the wall of his study to the last. He himself has told in animated verse the tale of another race in Hoia the Old Horse won the Bet.

Holmes returned to Harvard in 1836, and took his degree in medicine. At the same time he delivered a poem, Poetry^ a Metriccd Essay, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of the college, and ever after the profession of medicine and the art of letters received his united care and affection. In 1838 he was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth College, but remained in that position only a twelvemonth, when he returnd to Boston, married a daughter of Judge Jackson, and settled down to the practice of medicine. In 1847 he was made Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical School of Harvard College, a position which he retained until the close of 1882, when he retired to devote himself more exclusively to literature.

The contributions which he made to the literature of medicine are preserved for the most part in the volume of his collected works which bears the title Medical Essays, 18Jf2-1882, but these garnerings of forty years bear but small proportion to the body of

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his writing and speaking on professional topics during an active devotion to his pursuit, for his work as professor might well have stood as the full and sufficient labor of a busy life. But, as we have intimated, his devotion to literary art ran parallel to his devotion to medical science. Like other men of his time he was in demand as a lyceum lecturer, where he was known as a witty and humorous writer with a turn for satire. He was known also as a student of letters, and gave one course at least, on The English Poets of the Nineteenth Century^ before the Lowell Institute in Boston, which created great enthusiasm. These lectures have never been published, but the reader of Dr. Holmes's poems will recall certain vignettes which were poetical postludes to these lectures.

He scattered his poems and occasional prose papers in such modest periodicals as Boston had when he was a young man ; he printed small volumes of verse, and in 1849 Ticknor and Fields issued a collected volume of his poems. He was known in a limited but choice circle as a brilliant talker, but the opportunity of his life came when in 1857 the publishing firm of Phillips and Sampson in Boston projected a magazine which should at once be the vehicle for the best writing of the best American authors, and should draw its moral inspiration from the anti-slavery spirit which was rising into a strong wind. The story of the founding of The Atlcmtlc Monthly has been told in a recent number of it,^ by Mr. John T. Trowbridge, who was an early contributor. Dr. Holmes gave it its name. James Russell Lowell was the choice of every one for its editor, and Lowell himself made it a condition that Dr. Holmes should be a constant contributor. The

1 January, 1895.

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editor knew the capabilities of his author, but it is not at all likely that either he or Dr. Holmes foresaw the great vogue which the magazine would have through the series bearing the happy title, Tha Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tahle^ which oj^ened in the first number of the new magazine. The Autocrat was followed by The Professor, and that by The Poet ; and in this the writer distinctly says, what the observant reader of the series will be pretty sure to discover for himself : —

" I have unburdened myself in this book, and in some other pages, of what I was born to say. Many things that I have said in my riper days have been aching in my soul since I was a mere child. I say aching, because they conflicted with many of my inherited beliefs, or rather traditions. I did not know then that two strains of blood were striving in me for the mastery — two ! twenty, perhaps — twenty thousand, for aught I know — but represented to me by two — paternal and maternal. But I do know this : I have struck a good many chords, first and last, in the consciousness of other people. I confess to a tender feeling for my little brood of thoughts. When they have been welcomed and praised, it has pleased me ; and if at any time they have been rudely handled and despitefully treated, it has cost me a little worry. I don't despise reputation, and I should like to be remembered as having said something worth lasting well enough to last."

This passage briefly presents three very noticeable characteristics of Dr. Holmes's prose as contained in the series of Atlantic papers and stories. They give the mature thought of the writer, held back through many years for want of an adequate occasion, and

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ripened in his mind during this enforced silence ; they ilkistrate the effect upon his thought of his professional studies, which predisposed him to treat of the natural history of man, and to import into his analysis of the invisible organism of life the terms and methods employed in the science of the visible anatomy and physiology ; and finally they are warm with a sympathy for men and women, and singularly felicitous in their expression of many of the indistinct and half-understood experiences of life. For their form it may be said that the impression produced upon the reader of the Autocrat series, which was finally gathered into a volume, is of a growth rather than of a premeditated artistic completeness. The first suggestion, as he points out in The Autoc7'afs Autobiography^ is found in the two papers under the title of The Autocrat of the Break- /'«s^-J'a6^e, published in The Neio England Magazine for November, 1831, and January, 1832. These were written by Dr. Holmes shortly after his graduation from college, and before he entered on his medical studies. They consist of brief epigrammatic observations upon various topics, the desultory talk of a person engrossing conversation at a table. The form is monologue, with scarcely more than a hint at interruptions, and no attempt at characterizing the speaker or his listeners. Twenty-five years later, when The Atlantic Monthly was founded, the author remembering the fancy resumed it, and under the same title began a series of papers which at once had great favor and grew, possibly, beyond the writer's original intention. Twenty-five years had not dulled the wit and gayety of the exuberant young author; rather they had ripened the early fruit, and imparted a richness of flavor which greatly increased the value. The maturity

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was seen not only in the wider reach and deeper tone of the talk, but in the humanizing of the scheme. Out of the talk at the breakfast-table one began to distinguish characters and faces in the persons about the board, and before the Autocrat was completed there had appeared a series of portraits, vivid and full of interest. Two characters meanwhile were hinted at by the author rather than described or very palpably introduced, — the Professor and the Poet. It is not difficult to see that these are thin disguises for the author himself, who, in the versatility of his nature, appeals to the reader now as a brilliant philosopher, now as a man of science, now as a seer and poet. The Professo7' at the Breakfast- Table followed, and there was a still stronger dramatic power disclosed; some of the former characters remained, and others of even more positive individuality were added ; a romance was inwoven and something like a plot sketched, so that, while the talk still went on and eddied about graver subjects than before, the book which grew out of the papers had more distinctly the form of a series of sketches from life. It was followed by two novels, Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel. The talks at the breakfast-table had often gravitated toward the deep themes of destiny and human freedom ; the novels wrought the same subjects in dramatic form, and action interpreted the thought, while still there flowed on the wonderful, apparently inexhaustible stream of wit, tenderness, passion, and human sympa-= thy. Once more, fourteen years after the appearance of the first of the series, came The Poet at the Breakfast-Tahle. A new group of characters, with slight reminders of former ones, occupied the pages ; again talk and romance blended ; and playfulness, satire,

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Xlll

sentiment, wise reflection, and sturdy indignation followed in quick succession.

The Breakfast-Table series forms a group independent of the intercalated novels, and, with its frequent poems, may be taken as an artistic whole. It is hardly too much to say that it makes a new contribution to the forms of literary art. The elasticity of the scheme rendered possible a comprehensiv^eness of material; the exuberance of the author's fancy and the fulness of his thought gave a richness to the fabric ; the poetic sense of fitness kept the whole within just boui\ds. Moreover, the personality of the author was vividly present in all parts. There are few examples of literature in the first person so successful as this.

It is illustrative of the native, personal character of this series, so stamped with his genius, that when in his old age he felt a desire to write again, deliberately and at length, he returned to the same form, and in Over the Teacups essayed the old happy blending of prose and verse, the vivification of characters supposed to carry on discussion about a social board, when in reality one dominant voice is heard throughout, — that of the inventor of the characters.

The Atlantic Monthly meanwhile afforded a convenient vehicle for Dr. Holmes's thought on many subjects, and he contributed many independent papers and poems. One of the most notable was the paper entitled My Hunt for the Captain^ and detailed his experience when going to the seat of war in the fall of 1862 on the occasion of the wounding of his son, who bears his father's name and is now a justice on the bench of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.

When John Lothrop Motley died, Dr. Holmes wrote a sketch of him for the Massachusetts Histori-

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cal Society, which was afterward expanded and published as a volume. He also wrote a volume on Kalph Waldo Emerson, which was published in The American Men of Letters series ; and a novel, A Mortal Antipathy^ first issued as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly.

In 1886 Dr. Hohnes and his daughter made a jour= ney to Europe. Most of the time was passed in England, where the journey was. like a Royal Progress. " The travellers," says the London Daily News., " had barely arrived when the invitations came pouring in upon them. They received their ' baptism of fire,' in that Ions: conflict which lasts throug-h the London season, on the first evening of their arrival in town. It consisted of a dinner, where twenty guests, celebrities and agreeable persons, were assembled to meet them. The dinner was followed by a grand reception. Then began a perpetual round of social engagements. Breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, teas, receptions, two, three, and four deep of the evening, was the order of the waking hours. Society was charmed with the genial philosopher and poet. His courteous manner, his ready wit, the fascinating mobility of his countenance, made up a charming personality. There was something magnetic in the glance of his blue grey eye, in the hearty grasp of his hand. Dr. Holmes went to the Derby, impelled by the wish to live again the impressions of fifty years ago. But this time he went down in company with the Prince of Wales, and witnessed the race from the grand stand. The animation with which the old man describes Ormonde, the beautiful bay of the Duke of Westminster, flashing past ridden by Archer, belongs to spirits as buoyant as were those that stirred the blood of the youth half a cen-

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tury before." The record of the journey is preserved m Dr. ITohiies's Our Hundred Days in Europe.

The zest with which Dr. Holmes entered into Eng^- lish life witnessed to his inheritance in the ancestral memories, but his long life in the city which he made his home bears witness still more surely to the commanding trait of his character. He had the passion of local patriotism.

No one need be told who has read his stirring lyrics, his Bread and the Newspaper., his oration on The Inevitable Trial., and his sketch of Motley's life, how generous was his affection for the nation : but a great crisis brought these expressions to pass ; his familiar habit of mind was cordially local. His affection fastened upon his college, and in his college on his class ; he had a worthy pride in the race from which he had sprung, and the noble clannishness which is one of the safeguards of social morality ; he loved the city of his life, not with the merely curious regard of the antiquary, but with the passion of the man who can be at home only in one place ; and he held to New England as to a substantial entity, not a geographical section of some greater whole.

He did not travel, because Boston and Nahant and Berkshire contented him. His laboratory was at hand ; human nature was under his observation from the vantage-ground of home. With the instinct of a man of science, he took for analysis that which was most familiar to him, assured that in the bit of the world where he was born, and out of which he had got his nourishment, he had all he needed for the exercise of his wit.

There is no more pathetic yet kindly figure in our literature than Little Boston. With poetic instinct. Dr. Holmes made him deformed, but not uoly. He

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put into him a fiery soul of local patriotism, and transfigured him thus. Under the guise of a bit of nature's mockery he was enabled to give vent to a flood of feeling without arousing laughter or contempt. All Little Boston's vehemence of civic pride is a memorial inscription, and whatever may be the fortune of the city, however august may be its presence, there lies imbedded in this figure of Little Boston a perpetual witness to an imperishable civic form.

This concentration of his power and his affection has had its effect on Dr. Holmes's literary fame. He is another witness, if one were needed, to the truth that identification with a locality is a surer passport to immortality than cosmopolitanism. The local is a good starting-point from which to essay the universal. Thoreau j)erhaj)s affected a scorn of the world outside of Concord, but he helped make the little village a temple, and his statue is in one of the niches. Holmes, staying in Boston, brought the world to his door, and a society which is already historic will preserve him in its amber.

He had a mellow evening of life. As one after another of his comrades left the world, he bade them good-by with a song. Thus in his old age he sang after Whittier and Parkman and Lowell ; at last his own voice was silent and there was no one left in his generation to sing his farewell, for he it was who brought up the rear of the procession of American writers of the great period, as one by one passed into the firmament of fame.

He died in his home in Boston suddenly, while talking with his son, at half past one, Sunday afternoon, October 7, 1894.

TO THE READERS OF THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

Twenty-five years more have passed since the silence of the preceding twenty-five years was broken by the first words of the self-recording personage who lends his title to these pages, in the "Atlantic Monthly " for November, 1857. The children of those who first read these papers as they appeared are still reading them as kindly as their fathers and mothers read them a quarter of a century ago. And now, for the first time for many years I have read them myself, thinking that they might be improved by various corrections and changes.

But it is dangerous to tamper in cold blood and in after life with what was written in the glow of an earlier period. Its very defects are a part of its organic individuality. It would spoil any character these records may have to attempt to adjust them to the present age of the world or of the author. We have all of us, writer and readers, drifted away from many of our former habits, tastes, and perhaps beliefs. The world could spare every human being who was living when the first sentence of these papers was written ; its destinies would be safe in the hands of the men and women of twenty-five years and under.

XVlll TO THE READERS OF THE AUTOCRAT.

This book was written for a generation which knew nothing or next to nothing of war, and hardly dreamed of it ; which felt as if invention must have exhausted itself in the miracles it had already wrought. To-day, in a small sea-side village of a few hundred inhabitants, I see the graveyard fluttering with little flags that mark the soldiers' graves ; we read, by the light the rocks of Pennsylvania have furnished for 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 since 1857, and how much more than these changes in our every-day conditions ! I can say without offence to-day that which called out the most angry feelings and the hardest language twenty-five years ago. I may doubt everything to-day if I will only do it civilly.

I cannot make over again the book and those which followed it, and I will not try to mend old garments with new cloth. Let the sensible reader take it for granted that the author would agree with him in changing whatever he would alter, in leaving out whatever he would omit, if it seemed worth while to tamper with what was finished long ago. The notes which have been added will not interrupt the cui'rent of the conversational narrative.

I can never be too grateful for the tokens of regard which these papers and those which followed them have brought me. The kindness of my far-off friends has sometimes over-taxed my power of replying to

TO THE READERS OF THE AUTOCRAT. XIX

them, but they may be assured that their pleasant words were always welcome, however insufficiently acknowledged.

I have experienced the friendship of my readers so long that I cannot help anticipating some measure of its continuance. If I should feel the burden of correspondence too heavily in the coming years, I desire to record in advance my gratitude to those whom I may not be able to thank so fully and so cordially as I could desire.

Bevekly Farms, Mass., August 29, 1882.

Preface To The Riverside Edition

Another decade has nearly closed since the above Preface was written. The Autocrat still finds readers, among the young as well as among the old. The children of my early readers were writing to me about my books, especially The Autocrat, as I mentioned in that other Preface. Now it is the grandchildren who are stiU turnii^g to these pages, which I might well have thought would be voted old-fashioned, outworn, an unvalued bequest to posterity with Oblivion as residuary legatee. I have nothing of importance to add in the way of prefatory remarks. I can only repeat my grateful acknowledgments to the reading public at home and abroad for the hospitable manner in which my thoughts have been received. The expressions of personal regard, esteem, confidence, sympathetic affinity, may I not add affection, which this book has brought to me have become an habitual experience and an untiring source of satisfaction. I have thanked hundreds, yes, thousands, and many thousands of these kind correspondents, until my eyes have grown dim and I can no longer read many of their letters except through younger eyes. If my hand does not refuse to hold the pen or to guide it in the form of presentable characters, an occasional cramp of a little muscle which knows its importance and insists

Preface To The Riverside Edition. XXI

on having it recognized by striking^ after its own fashion, is a hint that I must at length do what I have long said I ought to do, content myself with an encyclical of thanks and write no more letters except to a few relatives and intimates.

A single fact strikes me as worth mentioning. Ten years ago I said that there had been a feeling at the time when this book was written as if mechanical invention had exhausted itself. I referred in the Preface of 1882 to the new miracles of the telephone and of electric illumination. Since then a new wonder has been sprung upon us in the shape of the electric motor, which has already familiarized itself among us as a common carrier. It is not safe to speculate on what the last decade of the century may yet bring us, but it looks as if the wasted energies of the winds and the waters were to be converted into heat, light, and mechanical movement, in that mysterious form which we call electricity, so as to change the material conditions of life to an extent to which we can hardly dare to set limits. As to what social and other changes may accompany the altered conditions of human life in the coming era, it is safer to leave the question open to exercise the ingenuity of some as yet youthful, perhaps unborn Autocrat.

Beverly Farms, Mass. , July 28, 1891.

THE AUTOCRAT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

The interruption referred to in the first sentence of tlie 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 woidd find it harder. They will not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor, as I hope, anywhere.

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But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproduemg, 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." —

— " 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." —