Oliver Wendell Holmes | Page 8

his personal modesty and his

functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor's sallies,
when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the carriage-
side.
The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is
commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness.
Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor
Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to
those who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to
those who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear
and comfortable to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was
were those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him
for some help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek
his sympathy. With all such he was most winningly tender, most
intelligently patient. I suppose no great author was ever more visited by
letter and in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his
guests. With those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a
miraculous tact, and I fancy in his treatment of all the physician native
in him bore a characteristic part. No one seemed to be denied access to
him, but it was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted,
and any one who was at all sensitive must have felt from the first
moment in his presence that there could be no trespassing in point of
time. If now and then some insensitive began to trespass, there was a
sliding-scale of dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really
saved the author from the effect of intrusion. He was not bored because
he would not be.
I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I
shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories. Vivid
among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the
publisher, then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had
newly become the sole editor. We wished to signalize our accession to
the control of the magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the
public eye, and we thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something
again in the manner of the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast
Table. Some letters had passed between him and the management
concerning our wish, and then Osgood thought that it would be right
and fit for us to go to him in person. He proposed the visit, and Doctor
Holmes received us with a mind in which he had evidently formulated

all his thoughts upon the matter. His main question was whether at his
age of sixty years a man was justified in seeking to recall a public of
the past, or to create a new public in the present. He seemed to have
looked the ground over not only with a personal interest in the question,
but with a keen scientific zest for it as something which it was
delightful to consider in its generic relations; and I fancy that the
pleasure of this inquiry more than consoled him for such pangs of
misgiving as he must have had in the personal question. As commonly
happens in the solution of such problems, it was not solved; he was
very willing to take our minds upon it, and to incur the risk, if we
thought it well and were willing to share it.
We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
following. It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped;
not because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed
to say them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but
because it was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind
with an achievement which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar
species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think
also of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so
soon; but the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his
advent alienated rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet
had come first he would have had no second place in the affections of
his readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of
the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and
greatest that Doctor Holmes ever wrote. I mean "Homesick in Heaven,"
which seems to me not only what I