OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894)

Had Holmes written an autobiography at forty-eight, an age when most men have taken their final place in the world, he would have said little about literary achievements. It would have been the record of a man of science, of a physician in the front rank of his profession, of the occupant of the chair of anatomy in two prominent institutions, of a specialist who had published such works as Homœopathy and its Kindred Delusions. He had sprung from a literary environment he had been born under the shadow of Harvard, into a home where authorship was no uncommon thing, and he had entered the college at sixteen as a matter of course to be graduated with what was to be the famous class of '29. Perplexed as to the profession he was best fitted to enter upon, he had, like Longfellow, at first considered the law, even spending a year in the law school, but had given it up to enter upon the study of medicine. Two years at Harvard and two more at Paris, where he seems to have been impressed only by his medical opportunities, a short period at Edinburgh, and he was back again in Boston equipped for his new work. He built up for himself a practice in Boston, he became lecturer on anatomy at Dartmouth and in 1847 was given the chair of anatomy at Harvard. For twenty-five years literature was to him a pleasing diversion not to be taken at all seriously.

For one brief period he had taken it seriously. In college he had had a poetic period during which he had contributed freely to the Collegian and to other journals such poems as 'The Height of the Ridiculous,' 'The Comet,' 'My Aunt,' 'The Last Leaf,' 'Old Ironsides,'— remarkable work indeed, but as he had become more and more interested in his profession. he had gathered it up as Poems in 1836,- a book to be republished at intervals and had considered it in reality a closed chapter,- an 'old portfolio' containing the relics of his vanished boyhood. The emergence of Holmes, the man of letters who was destined to dominate completely the specialist and professor, came in 1857 with the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly. Lowell, whether by editorial intuition, or critical discernment, or by a crafty desire to make his companion share the responsibility for the new magazine of which the group had made him editor, had insisted that his Harvard colleague should contribute a serial to the first volume. Thus challenged, Holmes produced The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which not only put the magazine upon its feet but gave its author at a bound a permanent place in American literature. Encouraged by his success, he contributed other series of Autocrat papers: The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1860, The Professor's Story, afterwards published as Elsie Venner, 1861, The Guardian Angel, 1867, and The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872.

His resignation of the chair at Harvard in 1882 marks the beginning of the last period of his literary life. He would devote himself now entirely to authorship, and the result was Pages from an Old Volume of Life, and Medical Essays, 1883, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1884, A Mortal Antipathy. 1885. Our Hundred Days in Europe, 1887, Before the Curfew (final poems). 1888, and Over the Tea-Cups, 1890. He lingered until 1894, until he was indeed the last leaf on the tree,' the last prominent member of the remarkable group that we call to-day The New England School.

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 5 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. 10 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. Sec15 ondly, 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 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.

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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, 25 empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead of figures.

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They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like the 30 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 will tell the company what he did say, one of these days.

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 won

der 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 brokenwinded novels, or spavined verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply a contract between themselves or 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,

[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar mind. The reader will of course understand the precise amount of seasoning which must be 5 added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of his life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse in incompetent hands.]

This business of conversation is a very o serious matter. There are men that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day's fasting would do. Mark this that I am going to say, for it is as good as a working professional man's advice, and costs you nothing: It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than to have a nerve tapped. Nobody measures your nervous force as it runs away, nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation.