The Arena | Page 5

Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," one of the most thoughtful, graceful, and able investigations into philosophy and culture ever written. We have the author in every mood, playful and pathetic, witty and wise. Who can ever forget the young fellow called John, our Benjamin Franklin, the Divinity student, the school-mistress, the landlady's daughter, and the poor relation? What characterization is there here! The delightful talk of the autocrat, his humor, always infectious, his logic, his strong common sense, illumine every page. When he began to write, Dr. Holmes had no settled plan in his head. In November, 1831, he sent an article to the New England Magazine, published by Buckingham in Boston, followed by another paper in February, 1832. The idea next occurred to the author in 1857,--a quarter of a century afterwards, when the editors of the Atlantic Monthly, then starting on its career, begged him to write something for its pages. He thought of "The Autocrat," and resolved, as he says, "to shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early windfalls." At a bound "The Autocrat" leaped into popular favor. The reading public could hardly wait for the numbers. All sorts of topics are touched upon from nature to mankind. There is the talk about the trees, which one may read a dozen times and feel the better for it. And then comes that charming account of the walk with the school-mistress, when the lovers looked at the elms, and the roses came and went on the maiden's cheeks. And here is a paragraph or two which makes men think:
"Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The angel of life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection. Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop them; they cannot stop themselves; sleep cannot still them; madness only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case, and seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart, silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads.
"If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count the dead beats of thought after thought, and image after image, jarring through the overtired organ! Will nobody block those wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut the string that holds those weights, blow up the infernal machine with gun-powder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest!--that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time, embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from beams in hempen lassos?--that they jump off from parapets into the swift and gurgling waters beneath?--that they take counsel of the grim friend who has but to utter his one peremptory monosyllable and the restless machine is shivered as a vase that is dashed upon a marble floor? Under that building which we pass every day there are strong dungeons, where neither hook, nor bar, nor bed-cord, nor drinking vessel from which a sharp fragment may be shattered, shall by any chance be seen. There is nothing for it, when the brain is on fire with the whirling of its wheels, but to spring against the stone wall and silence them with one crash. Ah, they remembered that,--the kind city fathers,--and the walls are nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable upholstery. If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world give for the discovery?"
"The Autocrat" was followed by "The Professor at the Breakfast Table,"--a book in every way equal to the first one, though, to be sure, there are critics who pretend to see diminished power in the author's pen. It is, however, full of the same gentle humor and keen analyses of the follies and foibles of human kind. It is a trifle graver, though some of the characters belonging to "The Autocrat" come to the front again. It is in this book that we find that lovely story of Iris,--a masterpiece in itself and one of the sweetest things that has come to us for a hundred years, rivalling to a degree the delicious manner and style of Goldsmith and Lamb. In 1873 the last of the series appeared, and "The Poet" came upon the scene to gladden the breakfasters. Every chapter sparkles with originality. "I have," says Dr. Holmes, "unburdened myself in this book, and in some