Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest
of ’em for washbasins! A new race, and a whole new world for the
new-born human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it,
and has been any time these hundred years! That’s all I claim
for Boston--that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and
therefore of the planet. (_Ibid._, p. 104.)
If the mind is free other things will take care of themselves--this
pretty much sums up Holmes’s social philosophy. Only, he would add,
when the mind is used to its freedom, it will create a culture that
is well-mannered, that does not run to extravagant agitation, that
considers time, place, and outward circumstance in effecting needful
changes--the quiet decency of Channing rather than the noisier way
of Parker. The Brahmin way, after all, was the better way, Holmes
believed; and Channing was a Brahmin:
Parson Channing put a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it
out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was the wheel of
that side was down. T’other fellow’s at work now; but he makes more
noise about it. When the linchpin comes out on his side, there’ll
be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the old cart, and
they pretend to say that there are valuable things in it which may
get hurt. Hope not--hope not. But this is the great macadamizing
place--always cracking up something. (_Ibid._, p. 19.)
Certainly not on the intellectual side could Holmes be set down as
a conservative. He did not relish any such imputation and defended
himself with vigor:
If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke
up and keep the soul’s windows down--to shut out the sun from the
east and the wind from the west--to let the rats run free in the
cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul’s typhus
is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or
rave in its delirium--I, Sir, am a _bonnet-rouge_, a redcap of the
barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative. (_Ibid._, p.
18.)
It was this spirit of rationalism that made him--at some risk of
unpopularity--an unsparing critic of romantic equalitarianism. Here
again is an echo of the older century. Neither the Jacksonian nor the
transcendental version of the new gospel found favor in his eyes;
both seemed to run counter to the open facts of history. As a realist
he discovered justification for John Adams’s doctrine of economic
determinism: all society, he was convinced, tends to stratify in lines
of wealth distribution, in America as well as in Europe, and no dogmas
can prevent it. He went further and insisted that the possession of
wealth makes possible comfort, ease, leisure, culture; that those
lacking wealth are necessarily unfree and their lives in consequence
are meaner and narrower. Much of his criticism of Yankee villagers
and countrymen--and except Cooper, he was perhaps the most critical
commentator on Yankee provincialisms of speech and manners--springs
from the conviction that a niggardly economics had created a niggardly
society. He desired more wealth to the end of more culture. He was too
completely Brahmin to set material well-being as the ultimate goal
of the competitive struggle; that seemed to him the object of State
Street and of the plutocracy he frankly detested. In _The Poet at the
Breakfast Table_ he apologizes for calling one of his characters a
capitalist, on the ground that “the word seems to be equivalent to
highway robbery in the new gospel of Saint Petroleum.” Wealth as a
means to power he would have none of; but wealth as a means to leisure,
and leisure as a means to cultivated living, he was fond of extolling.
The machinery of Brahmin life must be well oiled, but the life is more
than the machinery. Always he returned to the intellectual as the
hallmark of every society that may be accounted excellent, and his
instinctive dislike of the middle class was founded on its intellectual
sterility. It lived opulently but meanly; its rich dinners wanted the
spice of wit, its ostentatious display lacked the salt of manners. It
was vulgar at heart, and Holmes hated vulgarity even more than he hated
John Calvin’s dogmas.
Unfortunately his Brahminism sealed pretty tightly certain windows of
his mind that might better have been kept open. A radical in the field
of theology where personal concern brought him to serious grappling
with the problem, a tolerant rationalist in the realm of the intellect,
he remained a cheerfully contented conservative in other fields. He was
unconsciously insulated against the currents of social and political
thought flowing all about him. Economic inequality he accepted rather
too complacently. His daily life ran so easy and comfortable a course
as never to prod him into questioning how other lives might be running.
By instinct and training he was an aristocrat, and he was never at
pains to conceal his preference for the well born and well mannered. He
professed a philanthropic sympathy for the cause of the slave, but he
shared the Beacon Street dislike of agitation--it was not well bred and
it might bring down more things than he cared to have brought down. The
most completely class-conscious of the Boston writers, he deprecated
all proletarian appeals. They were not, in his opinion, “wholesome
moral entertainment for the dangerous classes. Boys must not touch off
their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine.” The less said
about the wrongs of labor, the better--at least publicly. Social strata
being determined by economics, the agitator is little better than a
firebrand.
You can’t keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat
to make it. Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world
were reduced to ashes, you’d have a new set of millionaires in a
couple of years or so, out of the trade in potash. In the meantime,
what is the use of setting the man with the silver watch against
the man with the gold watch, and the man without any against them
both?... Here we are travelling through the desert together like
the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more
quails than others, and ought to help their hungry neighbors more
than they do; ... but we don’t want the incendiary’s pillar of a
cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead us in the march
to civilization, and we don’t want a Moses who will smite the rock,
not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to burn us all
up with. (_The Poet at the Breakfast Table_, pp. 5-6.)
In his attitude toward the present comfortable arrangement of society,
Holmes was no rebel. He was not callous to the evils of society, but
he was willing to take a longer time in the march towards civilization
than more exigent souls wished; it was a pleasant march on the whole,
and why quarrel over the difference in packs? If his attitude was
not the indifferentism of the well-to-do, it was near kin to it. He
reflected the negative qualities of Unitarianism, rather than the
positive, the free mind rather than the tender conscience. His social
bias is sufficiently revealed in the tributes of praise he bestowed
so generously. Among those whom he delighted to honor, the names of
Garrison, Phillips, Parker, Thoreau, Greeley, John Brown, do not
appear; instead he offered his praises to Everett, Webster, Bryant,
Whittier, Agassiz, Parkman, Wilkie Collins, the Grand Duke Alexis,
and a host of lesser celebrities known to the Back Bay. His heroes
were respectable souls rather than militant. As a critic his vision
seems to have been blurred by certain astigmatisms, and he discovered
heroic qualities more readily in the militant dead than in the militant
living. He delighted in the Boston of ’76, but it is reasonably
certain that if he had lived then he would have walked the streets of
that older Boston as a genial Tory, and would have suffered the fate
of other gentlemen who found it desirable to withdraw with Gage’s
Redcoats--unless, indeed, his love of the place had held him despite
his politics.
In his literary work Holmes was always the talker rather than the
writer. The charm of the vivid and racy colloquial marks every page.
A clever aphorism or telling pun is the objective of every paragraph,
and it explodes with a brilliant shower of sparks. But like every
talker his discursiveness is inveterate; he wanders far in pursuit
of his point and sometimes returns empty-handed. He was always an
amateur; life was too agreeable for him to take the trouble to become
an artist. The essay was his most congenial form--his novels are to be
taken no more seriously than his occasional verse. _Elsie Venner_ wraps
up the familiar problem of moral determinism in pleasantly discursive
chat of Yankee bumpkinism in contrast with Yankee Brahminism, and he
returns his impeccable hero to Beacon Street, after his sojourn in
the provinces, to reward him with the Brahmin rewards--a munificent
practice, a charming wife, and an exalted social position. What richer
reward could be desired by one who had tasted to the full the mellow
flavor of that society? Staid, delightful, self-satisfied, righteous
little Beacon Street! Last refuge and citadel of the old Brahmin
respectability; basking in the afternoon sunshine of its culture, not
realizing that its sun is already well past the meridian; in love with
its own virtues and unaware that the morrow will see the invasion of
the Huns and Vandals of plutocracy, to whose plethoric bank books
Brahmin culture must eventually bow--who would not have liked it?
It was something after all to have been its favorite wit, its ready
oracle, its clever poet, who in praising his fellow Brahmins was well
aware that he discreetly praised his own admirable qualities. Kindly,
delightful, fortunate Dr. Holmes! chief citizen of the Hub of the
Universe! He was born and lived with a silver spoon in his mouth, and
if a grudging posterity inclines to rate him and his little world
somewhat lower than he rated them, what difference can that make to
him? Tolerant himself, we should perhaps emulate his example, and not
insist too rudely that he is only a minor figure in American literature.
II • James Russell Lowell • Cambridge Brahmin
Whatever the critics may eventually come to say about Lowell, he was
certainly the ablest and most distinguished of the old Cambridge
breed, in the days when the Brahmin caste was disintegrating and
Brahmin ideals losing their hold on New England--a man of fine native
abilities in whom Harvard culture did its best to strike fire and light
and understanding to serve as a beacon to the rest of America. He was
not of the Concord line of transcendental individualists, nor of the
militant strain of reforming enthusiasts; but of the true Brahmin line
of Josiah Quincy and Edward Everett and Oliver Wendell Holmes--men of
sound culture who could serve God valiantly in the social station in
which He had placed them, without wanting to pull down the old church
to build a new. Like Charles Eliot Norton--_clarum et venerabile
nomen_--he had no plans of a new building in his pocket, but was
content to enlarge and embellish the old. He would serve culture rather
than causes. His gifts were Brahmin gifts, his prejudices were Brahmin
prejudices; and so in spite of a “certain sprightliness of brain”
that tempted him to rebel at the aridity of the scholastic commons on
which he fed, and in spite of certain youthful vagaries and incursions
into indiscreet places, he remained at bottom a Harvard conservative,
content with his birthright, hopeful that his ways were God’s ways.
This suffices to explain the extraordinary reputation of Lowell in