Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes Part 5

At the close of the year when the twelve numbers of _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ were completed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and published in book form, the _British Review_ wrote of the ill.u.s.trious author as follows:

"Oliver Wendell Holmes has been long known in this country as the author of some poems written in stately cla.s.sic verse, abounding in happy thoughts and bright bird-peeps of fancy, such as this, for example:

The punch-bowl's sounding depths were stirred, Its silver cherubs smiling as they heard.

And this first glint of spring--

The spendthrift Crocus, bursting through the mould, Naked and shivering with his cup of gold.

He is also known as the writer of many pieces which wear a serious look until they break out into a laugh at the end, perhaps in the last line, as with those on _Lending a Punch Bowl_, a cunning way of the writer's; just as the knot is tied in the whip cord at the end of the lash to enhance the smack.

"But neither of these kinds of verse prepared us for anything so good, so sustained, so national, and yet so akin to our finest humorists, as _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_; a very delightful book--a handy book for the breakfast table. A book to conjure up a cosey winter picture of a ruddy fire and singing kettle, soft hearth-rug, warm slippers, and easy chair; a musical chime of cups and saucers, fragrance of tea and toast within, and those flowers of frost fading on the windows without as though old Winter just looked in, but his cold breath was melted, and so he pa.s.sed by. A book to possess two copies of; one to be read and marked, thumbed and dog-eared; and one to stand up in its pride of place with the rest on the shelves, all ranged in shining rows, as dear old friends, and not merely as nodding acquaintances.

"Not at all like that ponderous and overbearing autocrat, Doctor Johnson, is our Yankee friend. He has more of Goldsmith's sweetness and lovability. He is as true a lover of elegance and high bred grace, dainty fancies, and all pleasurable things, as was Leigh Hunt; he has more wordly sense without the moral languor; but there is the same boy-heart beating in a manly breast, beneath the poet's singing robe.

For he is a poet as well as a humorist. Indeed, although this book is written in prose, it is full of poetry, with the 'beaded bubbles' of humor dancing up through the true hippocrene and 'winking at the brim'

with a winning look of invitation shining in their merry eyes.

"The humor and the poetry of the book do not lie in tangible nuggets for extraction, but they are there; they pervade it from beginning to end.

We cannot spoon out the sparkles of sunshine as they shimmer on the wavelets of water; but they are there, moving in all their golden life and evanescent grace.

"Holmes may not be so recognizably national as Lowell; his prominent characteristics are not so exceptionally Yankee; the traits are not so peculiar as those delineated in the _Biglow Papers_. But he is national.

One of the most hopeful literary signs of this book is its quiet nationality. The writer has made no straining and gasping efforts after that which is striking and peculiar, which has always been the bane of youth, whether in nations or individuals. He has been content to take the common, homespun, everyday humanity that he found ready to hand--people who do congregate around the breakfast table of an American boarding-house; and out of this material he has wrought with a vivid touch and truth of portraiture, and won the most legitimate triumph of a genuine book....

"Holmes has the pleasantest possible way of saying things that many people don't like to hear. His tonics are bitter and bland. He does not spare the various foibles and vices of his countrymen and women. But it is done so good-naturedly, or with a sly puff of diamond dust in the eyes of the victims, who don't see the joke which is so apparent to us.

As good old Isaak Walton advises respecting the worm, he impales them tenderly as though he loved them."

How vividly every personage around that delightful "Breakfast-Table" is photographed upon the reader's mind! Can you not see the dear "Old Gentleman" just opposite the "Autocrat," as he suddenly surprises the company by repeating a beautiful hymn he learned in childhood? And the pale sweet "Schoolmistress" in her modest mourning dress? no wonder the eyes of the Autocrat frequently wandered to that part of the table and certain remarks are addressed to her alone! To tell the truth, we can't help falling in love with her ourselves! What a fine foil to this "soft-voiced little woman," is the landlady's daughter--that "tender-eyed blonde, with her long ringlets, cameo pin, gold pencil-case on a chain, locket, bracelet, alb.u.m, autograph book, and accordion--who says 'Yes?' when you tell her anything, and reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylva.n.u.s Cobb Junior, while her mother makes the puddings!" Then there is the "poor relation" from the country--"a somewhat more than middle-aged female, with parchment forehead and a dry little frizette shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, and a black dress too rusty for recent grief." Can you not hear the very tones of her high-pitched voice as she remarks that "Buckwheat is skerce and high."

"The Professor" under chloroform--"the young man whom they call John,"

appropriating the three peaches in ill.u.s.tration of the Autocrat's metaphysics--the boy, Benjamin Franklin, poring over his French exercises--the Poet, who had to leave town when the anniversaries came round--and the divinity student whose head the Autocrat tries occasionally, "as housewives try eggs," all these are so real to the reader that he can but feel they were something more than imaginary characters to the writer.

Among the poems that close each number of the _Autocrat_, are some of the finest in our language. _The Chambered Nautilus_, _The Living Temple_, _The Voiceless_, and _The Two Armies_, are full of inspiring thought and deep pathos, while _The Deacon's Masterpiece_, _Parson Turell's Legacy_, _The Old Man's Dream_, and _Contentment_, sparkle with the Autocrat's own peculiar humor.

"When we think of the familiar confidences of the Autocrat," says Underwood, "we might liken him to Montaigne. But when the parallel is being considered, we come upon pa.s.sages so full of tingling hits or of rollicking fun, that we are sure we are mistaken, and that he resembles no one so much as Sidney Smith. But presently he sounds the depths of our consciousness, explores the concealed channels of feeling, flashes the light of genius upon our half-acknowledged thoughts, and we see that this is what neither the great Gascon nor the hearty and jovial Englishman could have attempted, ... when the world forgets the sallies that have set tables in a roar, and even the lyrics that have set a nation's heart on fire, Holmes' picture of the ship of pearl will preserve his name forever."

CHAPTER X.

ELSIE VENNER.

The _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ was followed in 1859 by _The Professor_, a series of similar essays, in which we are introduced to "Iris" and "Little Boston," and begin to realize Doctor Holmes'

inimitable skill in dramatic effect as well as in character painting.

_The Story of Iris_ has been printed by itself in Rossiter Johnson's _Little Cla.s.sics_, and reads like an exquisite prose poem; but after all, we like best to follow the delicate thread of narrative just as the professor himself has introduced it--a dainty aria whose harmony runs under and over and all through the deep philosophy and sparkling table talk of the book.

It prepares us, too, for _Elsie Venner_, the "Professor's Story"--a novel whose weird conception holds us spell-bound from beginning to end, in spite of the sadness--"the pity of it." At the very first introduction to Elsie we have a hint of the strange hereditary curse that throws its blight over her whole nature:

"Who and what is that," asks the new master, "sitting a little apart there--that strange, wild-looking girl?"

The lady teacher's face changed; one would have said she was frightened or troubled. She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear the master's question and its answer. But the girl did not look up; she was winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if in a kind of reverie.

Miss Dailey drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to hide her lips.

"Don't look at her as if we were talking about her," she whispered softly, "that is Elsie Venner."

The more we read of her, the more her sad beauty fascinates us.

"She looked as if she might hate, but could not love. She hardly smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. A person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source of disorder, could hardly help a.n.a.lyzing the impression such a face produced upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like the l.u.s.tre of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was in its stony apathy the pathos which we find in the blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love."

The mother of Elsie, some months before the birth of her child, had been bitten by a rattlesnake. The instant use of powerful antidotes seemed to arrest the fatal poison, but death ensued a few weeks after the birth of her little girl.

"There was something not human looking out of Elsie's eyes.... There were two warring principles in that superb organization and proud soul.

One made her a woman, with all a woman's powers and longings. The other chilled all the currents of outlets for her emotions. It made her tearless and mute, when another woman would have wept and pleaded. And it infused into her soul something--it was cruel to call it malice--which was still and watchful and dangerous--which waited its opportunity, and then shot like an arrow from its bow out of the coil of brooding premeditation."

But the cloud--"the ante-natal impression which had mingled an alien element in Elsie's nature"--is mercifully lifted just before her death.

She had fallen into a light slumber, and when she awoke and looked up into her father's face, she seemed to realize his tenderness and affection as never before.

"Elsie dear," he said, "we were thinking how much your expression was, sometimes, like that of your sweet mother. If you could but have seen her so as to remember her!"

The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart for the mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed, undistinguishable eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the understanding that she might soon rejoin her in another state of being,--all came upon her with a sudden overflow of feeling which broke through all the barriers between her heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed to her father as if the malign influence--evil spirit it might almost be called--which had pervaded her being, had at least been driven forth or exorcised, and that these tears were at once the sign and pledge of her redeemed nature. But now she was to be soothed and not excited. After her tears she slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never before.

While "Elsie Venner" is a purely imaginary conception, the author tells us that after beginning the story he received the most striking confirmation of the possibility of the existence of such a character.

The reader is awakened to new views of human responsibility in the perusal of Elsie's life, and with good old pastor Honeywood learns a lesson of patience with his fellow creatures in their inborn peculiarities and of charity in judging what seem to him wilful faults of character.

The Professor's story while centring the interest upon Elsie, gives numerous side glances of New England village life; and old Sophy, Helen Darley, Silas Peckham, Bernard Langdon, d.i.c.k Venner, and the good Doctor are portrayed in vivid colors. There is a deal of psychology throughout the book, and not a little theology--good wholesome theology too, as the following brief extract shows:

"The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so much of the world's life and happiness. 'With the heart man believeth unto righteousness;' a man's love is the measure of his fitness for good or bad company here or elsewhere. Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes!"

The pathos of poor Elsie's story is relieved now and then by humorous descriptions of country manners and customs. The Sprowles' party and the Widow Rowen's "tea-fight" give a vein of light comedy that rests the sympathetic reader as a sudden merry smile upon a grave and troubled face.

_The Guardian Angel_, the second novel of Doctor Holmes, was not published until 1867, but it is interesting to compare the two stories, for there is a strong family likeness between them. Both show the power of inherited tendencies, though Myrtle Hazard, the heroine of _The Guardian Angel_, has no alien element in her blood like that which tormented poor Elsie. With Myrtle "it was as when several grafts, bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the same stock. Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her father and mother, but various ancestors came uppermost in their time before the absolute and total result of their several forces had found its equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known as an individual. These inherited impulses were therefore many, conflicting, some of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil held mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her hands; but sweet and gracious influences were also born with her; and the battle of life was to be fought between them, G.o.d helping her in her need, and her own free choice siding with one or the other."

The scene opens in a quiet New England village which is roused from its usual lethargy by the startling announcement in the weekly paper of a lost child. This is none other than the little orphan, Myrtle Hazard, who after a few dreary years in the dismal Wither's homestead, escapes by night in her little boat, is rescued by a young student from a frightful death at the rapids, and brought back to her distressed Aunt Silence by good old Byles Gridley--the true "Guardian Angel" of her life.

When old Doctor Hurlbut "ninety-two, very deaf, very feeble, yet a wise counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases," comes to prescribe for the young girl, he says to his son:

"I've seen that look on another face of the same blood--it's a great many years ago, and she was dead before you were born, my boy,--but I've seen that look, and it meant trouble then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now. I see some danger of a brain fever. And if she doesn't have that, then look out for some hysteric fits that will make mischief.... I've been through it all before in that same house. Live folks are only dead folks warmed over. I can see 'em all in that girl's face.--Handsome Judith to begin with. And that queer woman, the Deacon's mother--there's where she gets that hystericky look. Yes, and the black-eyed woman with the Indian blood in her--look out for that--look out for that.

... Four generations--four generations, man and wife--yes, five generations before this Hazard child I've looked on with these old eyes.

And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every one of 'em in this child's face--it's the forehead of this one, and it's the eyes of that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look that I remember in another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that same voice before--yes, yes--as long ago as when I was first married."

Aside from the interest of the story there is a strange fascination in tracing the development of these various ancestral traits.

"This body in which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans is not a private carriage, but an omnibus," says old Byles Gridley in his _Thoughts on the Universe_--dead book that was destined to so grand a resurrection! Surely no one can deny the successive development of inherited bodily aspects and habitudes, and the same thing happens, the author avers, "in the mental and moral nature, though the latter may be less obvious to common observation."