6 March: Boreham on Oliver W Holmes

A Cataract of Gossip
Somebody has said that there are two advantages in soliloquy. The man who talks to himself can be sure of hearing a sensible man talk, and he can be sure of having a sensible man to talk to.

The general principle obviously requires, according to circumstances, some modification, but, in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose anniversary of his death this is, it requires none at all. He was an excellent talker, and he never talked so well as when prattling away to himself. And, since it would have been a thousand pities for so much piquant and delicious wisdom to have been the monopoly of so very restricted an audience, Dr. Holmes rendered the world a notable service by placing his private chatter on permanent record.

Indeed, his real genius lay, not in making to himself such sagacious and penetrating observations but in embalming them so artlessly in the pages that he penned. In the hands of most men, his philosophising would, on paper have become ponderous and unconsciously tedious. The babbling stream of irresponsible tittle-tattle would have been transformed into a wilderness of dreary metaphysics.

But the ingenuity of Dr. Holmes in inventing the breakfast table, and in making the landlady and her boarders say the things that, in reality, he had been saying to himself, preserves his chatter as unadulterated chatter, and, incidentally, gives it universal and abiding appeal.

Literature Enters Upon A New Phase
Oliver Wendell Holmes was a dapper little man, standing barely five feet three, of slight figure, upright bearing, meticulous attire, sprightly stride, clean-shaven face, a friendly smile, and twinkling eyes that seemed to miss nothing visible.

After toying with the idea of following his father into the ministry, he applied himself to the study of law, and finished up by becoming a doctor. The rest of his life he divided into four parts. He spent three years as a general practitioner; became, for two years, professor of anatomy at Dartmouth; returned to a practice at Boston for six years; and then became, for 35 years, professor of anatomy at Harvard. It was during this last period that all his literary work was done.

And it was well done. He struck an entirely new vein. His one claim to immortality rests on the breakfast table books—The Autocrat, The Poet and The Professor at the Breakfast Table. Each volume is a cataract of chatter, and, divested of the artistry by which the conversation is attributed to all sorts of fictitious characters who are supposed to surround the famous table, the chatter simply represents the self-communings of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He is all the while gossiping away to himself.

He will always be remembered as the most charming egotist that the republic of letters has ever known. He was not crushingly, overwhelmingly egotistical like Johnson; he was not satirically, bitingly egotistical like Coleridge; he was genially, vivaciously, magnetically egotistical in a way that was all his own. He liked to hear himself talk; and, in contrast with some conversationalists possessed of that dubious propensity, he made his chatter irresistibly delightful to his listeners.

Genial Master Of A Thousand
He wields an extraordinary magic. He somehow contrives to bind his reader to himself with hoops of steel. You feel that you are in a comfortable armchair on one side of a cheerful fire, and that he is in the armchair facing you; and it never so much as occurs to you that the conversation is entirely a one-sided affair.

Or, to change the simile for one of his own, he regarded each reader almost amorously. "It is," he says, "like going for an arm-in-arm walk in the moonlight." Who can resist the fascinating guile of such an egotist? He may prattle of shoes or ships or sealing-wax; we are all ears. He may ramble on about cabbages or kings; we sit entranced at his feet. Herein lies the art—the entirely novel and original and intriguing art—of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Since the world began, no author has dealt with so many separate themes as the creator of The Autocrat. He does it without the slightest attempt to appear learned or imposing. He flits from subject to subject as lightly and as daintily as a butterfly flits from flower to flower. He knows exactly how long to pause at each point. Moreover, his moods are as varied as his topic. He is always philosophical; he is often informative; his disquisitions are frequently suffused with humour; they are sometimes touched with irony; and there are passages in which the pathos is so pronounced that tears are at no great distance.

Altogether, he is one of the most engaging figures in our literature and his admirers will grasp with avidity the excuse that an anniversary offers to sample afresh his appetising wares.

F W Boreham

Image: O W Holmes