The

We have said that the tale has a point of superiority even over the poem. In fact, while the rhythm of this latter is an essential aid in the development of the poem's highest idea the idea of the Beautiful the artificialities of this rhythm are an inseparable bar to the development of all points of thought or expression which have their basis in Truth. But Truth is often, and in a very great degree, the aim of the tale. Some of the finest tales are tales of ratiocination. Thus the field of this species of composition, if not in so elevated a region on the mountain of Mind, is a tableland of far vaster extent than the domain of the mere poem. Its products are never so rich, but infinitely more numerous, and more appreciable by the mass of mankind. writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and expression - (the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic, or the humorous) which are not only antagonistical to the nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its most peculiar and indispensable adjuncts; we allude, of course, to rhythm. It may be added, here, par parenthèse, that the author who aims at the purely beautiful in a prose tale is laboring at a great disadvantage. For Beauty can be better treated in the poem. Not so with terror, or passion, or horror, or a multitude of such other points. And here it will be seen how full of prejudice are the usual animadversions against those tales of effect, many fine examples of which were found in the earlier numbers of Blackwood. The impressions produced were wrought in a legitimate sphere of action, and constituted a legitimate although sometimes an exaggerated interest. They were relished by every man of genius: although there were found many men of genius who condemned them without just ground. The true critic will but demand that the design intended be accomplished, to the fullest extent, by the means most advantageously applicable. We have very few American tales of real merit - we may say, indeed, none, with the exception of The Tales of a Traveller, of Washington Irving, and these Twice-Told Tales of Mr. Hawthorne. Some of the pieces of Mr. John Neal abound in vigor and originality; but, in general, his compositions of this class are excessively diffuse, extravagant, and indicative of an imper

fect sentiment of Art. Articles at random are, now and then, met with in our periodicals which might be advantageously compared with the best effusions of the British magazines; but, upon the whole, we are far behind our progenitors in this department of literature.

[From Hawthorne's Tales, 1842. Reprinted, with the permission of Herbert S. Stone and Co., from Works, vol. vii, pp. 29-33.]

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

[Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 29, 1809, and died in Boston, Oct. 7, 1894. He was educated at Phillips Andover Academy, and at Harvard, where he belonged to the class of 1829. There he came under Unitarian influence, and belonged to a rather gay club of students. So strong was his reaction from earlier religious influences that even in the Pilgrim's Progress, much as he felt its literary power, he was violently repelled by the religious system it contains. During his early education, as later, he was a skipping reader, tasting many books, taking few entire. He showed his tendency toward literary expression by his connection with a college periodical, and by the conscious literary form of his early letters. He liked especially the English classics, Pope's Homer, and the Encyclopædia. After graduation he went for a year to the Dane Law School. Disliking the study, he began immediately to study medicine in Boston. After graduation he went to Europe, in the spring of 1833, studying medicine for a year at Paris, travelling a little, and returning in the autumn of 1835. The next year he began practice and published later some medical essays which stood well and contained discoveries of some importance. In 1847 he became Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the medical school of Harvard University, a post which he held for thirty-five years. A considerable part of his time was devoted to lecture tours about the country. His connection with the Atlantic Monthly began in 1857, through the influence of James Russell Lowell. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table appeared in that periodical in 1857-58, The Professor at the Breakfast Table in 1859, The Poet at the Breakfast Table in 1872, and Over the Teacups in 1891. Besides this series he published three novels, Elsie Venner (1861), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885), and two biographies, a Life of John Lothrop Motley (1879) and a Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1885). Pages from an Old Volume of Life contains essays written from 1857 to 1881. His time went more and more to literary pursuits and less to medicine as his life advanced.]

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES has left several of the most popular volumes of prose in American literature. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, and, to a less extent, The Poet at the Breakfast Table, are among the small number of essays which have a large American public. Although

they are essays, the freedom of their form-in turn narrative, dramatic, and expository matches the variety of their subjects, so that their unity is in the personality of the writer. It is mainly wit that makes these books live, but the wit is composed largely of wisdom, and is carried along in an easy, flowing, and limber style, at once familiar and finished, - a style which expresses not only the man, but the time and place. New England has given to literature names which are greater, but none which springs more unmistakably from her soil. Distinct thought about life, expressed with wit and elegance, must have much that is common to civilization, but the breakfast-table series is as deeply saturated with New England as it is with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston was the universe to Holmes. Concentration of life and thought in one atmosphere gave to his writings their flavor rather than their substance, and it is largely their flavor which has recommended them to his countrymen.

ear.

Thoroughly as Holmes belongs to New England, he is part of no group. The larger tendencies of his time, which found their expression in the transcendental movement, left the Autocrat untouched. Democracy never whispered its vaguer poetry in his His part of New England life was not its aspiration, but its Yankee shrewdness, youthful, independent, wide-awake, matter of fact, even in the statement of truths tinged with imagination. Vagueness, color, a reaching out after something not yet seen, is the characteristic of the bulk of New England's greatest literature. Clearness, precision, confidence, are the elements of Holmes's Yankee mind. In the Autocrat this concrete and witty intellect is at its gayest The Professor has less dash, and more ripeness and mild breadth. Naturally, therefore, the earlier book is still the more popular, and its successor the favorite of the most cultivated fraction of readers. It is not less witty. It is only less epigrammatic and more leisurely. As these books, begun when the author's powers were at their height, took from his mind its brightest crystals, the world has put the two later instalments of the series on a lower shelf. Of the novels, the first two were popular in their time, and Elsie Venner is still much read, but they have never been treated as important contributions. Holmes's mind was not constructive, but discursive. He could create characters and tell

stories, but it was in the manner of conversation. The best things in his fiction are digressions. The psychological interest dominates, and most of the formal development seems an effort of the will. "A Romance of Destiny," the sub-title of Elsie Venner, suggests his attitude toward his "medicated novels," as an old lady called them. Every one of his volumes contains brilliant passages, from the medical essays to Over the Teacups, but if posterity shall seek the author in the Autocrat, the Professor, and the Poet, it will find the whole of him. In his happiest passages he is all those persons: an autocrat, revelling in his own personality; a professor, with information, and interest in the larger psychology; and a poet, who loved Pope and would have been the same had Wordsworth never lived. "This series of papers," he tells us, was not the result of an express premeditation, but was, as I may say, dipped from the running stream of my thoughts." In it he has left such an intimate picture of himself as daily conversation would have given.

66

The types of New England character which are sketched dramatically and sharply in these papers did as much to give them their immediate success as the humorous philosophy of the principal speaker. They range from the broadly comic to the pathetic, although humor and pathos are never far apart. The landlady and her daughter, the schoolmistress, Little Boston, and as many others, have become familiar persons, but perhaps the most brilliantly executed, next to the autographical character, is "the young man ↓ whom they call John." In him American humor, independence, and crudity take their most distinctive and most entertaining form. He is what the Autocrat would have been without culture, — the observant wit in its primitive state. Next to him come the series of loquacious and unreasonable women, universal personages, talking not about the details of the life about them, so much as about the things which people everywhere discuss, yet proving their nationality in the turn of every phrase. The characters which are less comic, especially those which are supposed to have a touch of aristocratic distinction, are not so firmly drawn. The single passages which stand out for individual brilliancy are usually those in which the Autocrat moralizes in his own person, covering important subjects with his special genial comment. He felt, kindly