Oliver Wendell Holmes | Page 7

many
subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even
mildly agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had
outlived the error concerning him.
It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an order
of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized
essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think poorly of
them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him quote with
relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his
"medicated novels." That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a faint,
faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic was
scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if any
one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what he
did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in certain
quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful criticism in
stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the successive numbers of
his story; and it was no secret that he felt the persecution keenly.
Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that time in his literary
life when he was a fact rather than a question, and when reasons and
not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or rejection. But he
had to live many years yet before he reached this state. When he did
reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do not believe any
man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved to feel himself out
of the fight, with much work before him still, but with nothing that
could provoke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all times to take
himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of a mental attitude
that misled many. As I have said before, he was universally interested,

and he studied the universe from himself. I do not know how one is to
study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no existence; but with all
his subtlety and depth he was of a make so simple, of a spirit so naive,
that he could not practise the feints some use to conceal that interest in
self which, after all, every one knows is only concealed. He frankly and
joyously made himself the starting-point in all his inquest of the hearts
and minds of other men, but so far from singling himself out in this,
and standing apart in it, there never was any one who was more eagerly
and gladly your fellow-being in the things of the soul.

IV.
In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls;
and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think all
fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between
men; we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them. Even behind his
fences, however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do
not believe any one came into personal relations with him who did not
experience this kindness. In that long and delightful talk I had with him
on my return from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly
his), we spoke of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how
fraternal the relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England,
between master and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their
common humanity. "Yes," he said, "I always felt as if English servants
expected to be trampled on; but I can't do that. If they want to be
trampled on, they must get some one else." He thought that our
American way was infinitely better; and I believe that in spite of the
fences there was always an instinctive impulse with him to get upon
common ground with his fellow- man. I used to notice in the
neighborhood cabman who served our block on Beacon Street a sort of
affectionate reverence for the Autocrat, which could have come from
nothing but the kindly terms between them; if you went to him when he
was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with a sort of
implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for the time
was profanation. The good fellow who took him his drives about the
Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the
doctor's humor, and within the bounds of