Oliver Wendell Holmes | Page 4

FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Oliver Wendell
Holmes
by William Dean Howells

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were
of ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the
skies. Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping
verses at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a
flute in the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but
the MS. of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of
bridges; or serving as apothecaries' 'prentices--we were good society
from the beginning. I think this was none the worse for us, and it was
vastly the better for good society.
Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her
supremacy in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old
Puritanic seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people
who were and who had been socially first in the city ever since the
self-exile of the Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott,
Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson,
Channing, was to say patrician, in the truest and often the best sense, if
not the largest. Boston was small, but these were of her first citizens,
and their primacy, in its way, was of the same quality as that, say, of
the chief families of Venice. But these names can never have the effect
for the stranger that they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for
I doubt whether in Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and
that their equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most
famous, if not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not
mentioned with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by
his sympathies and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned
Oliver Wendell Holmes, because I think his name would come first into
the reader's thought with the suggestion of social quality in the
humanities.
Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was

allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For a
long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that alone,
its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to stand in
his 'second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make friends
with the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I think,
with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an eye
askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would
mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He
was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be
finally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But
such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or
perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock
of them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has
himself suggested. To value aright the affection which the old
Bostonian had for Boston one must conceive of something like the
patriotism of men in the times when a man's city was a man's country,
something Athenian, something Florentine. The war that nationalized
us liberated this love to the whole country, but its first tenderness
remained still for Boston, and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of
himself first as a Bostonian and then as an American, in a way that no
New-Yorker could deal with himself. The rich historical background
dignifies and ennobles the intense public spirit of the place, and gives it
a kind of personality.

II.
In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given
the city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I
visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to
begin the