Oliver Wendell Holmes | Page 5

many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I
found time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my
place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief
moment with him he brought me to book about some vaunting
paragraph in the 'Nation' claiming the literary primacy for New York.
He asked me if I knew who wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I
had written it myself, when with the kindness he always showed me he
protested against my position. To tell the truth, I do not think now I had

any very good reasons for it, and I certainly could urge none that would
stand against his. I could only fall back upon the saving clause that this
primacy was claimed mainly if not wholly for New York in the future.
He was willing to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he
did even this out of politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he
had always a sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could
not seem ungenerous to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt
of me he may have had, with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy
itself when several years afterwards he happened to speak of a certain
character in an early novel of mine, who was not quite the kind of
Bostonian one could wish to be. The thing came up in talk with another
person, who had referred to my Bostonian, and the doctor had
apparently made his acquaintance in the book, and not liked him. "I
understood, of course," he said, "that he was a Bostonian, not the
Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that this was by all means my
own understanding too.
His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return from
Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles Street,
where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man came in
for the doctor's help as a physician, though he looked so very well, and
was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts whether he
had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat. The doctor
took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long out of
practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him the
address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. "And
if you don't know where Washington Street is," he said, with a gay
burst at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man's face,
"you don't know anything."
We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he
made me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I
had to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries,
the small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the
intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I
could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and

supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
two cents' worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was
towards barbarism.
The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what
that most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember
the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, "Holmes, you
are intellectually the most alive man I ever knew." "I am, I am," said
the doctor. "From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm
alive, I'm alive!" Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid
relish he had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with you a
moment without shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his
radiant humor, and he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind.
His gaiety of