Holmes

named by Holmes and appearing for the first
time in November 1857, were nearly simultane-
ous in origin, each owing much to each. Lowell,
the first editor of the magazine, made it a sine
qua non of accepting the editorship that Holmes
should be secured as a contributor before any-
body else. In the thirties and forties of their
century Holmes had disappointed Lowell by not
joining the more advanced advocates of many
causes of which, with Lowell, anti-slavery stood
first. Holmes, as much a patriot as any of the
more vocal reformers, would not, or could not,
swell their outcries for reform, as Lowell himself
would fain have had him do (Life and Letters,
I, pp. 295 ff.)* It is the more to Lowell's credit
as an editor, therefore, that, basing his estimate
of Holmes's powers so largely on the social qual-
ities called forth by such gatherings as those of
the Saturday Club, he could discern the unreal-
ized capacities of his friend as a magazine writer.
The result of this discernment was the remark-
able series of "Breakfast-Table" books, begun by
the "Autocrat" in the first issue of the Atlantic.
A recent critic has defined The Autocrat of
the Breakfast-Table as "that best book of one of
the first and ripest of the columnists" (Saturday
Review of Literature, Jan. 26, 1929). It is
Holmes's best book, but the definition of him as
a "columnist"—serving quite as well to suggest
what columnists are not as what Holmes was—
is an obvious attempt to characterize the witty,
tender, sophisticated, wise, learned, highly vari-
ous prose and verse of Holmes in terms adapted
to modern comprehension. There has been noth-
ing precisely comparable with The Autocrat
since its first appearance as an Atlantic serial
and its publication as a book in 1858. This was
a time when the delightful motto of Dean Briggs,
"Dulce et decorum est desipere in loco," would
have caused many good people to stand aghast,
and the unaccustomed levity of Holmes produced
frowns as well as smiles. The success of the
papers, and of the book, was, however, so pro-
nounced that they were followed by two closely
related series, The Professor at the Breakfast-
Table and The Poet at the Breakfast-Table,
which first appeared as books, respectively, in
1860 and 1872. All three of these pursued the
method of the early "Autocrat" papers of the
New England Magazine, blending the discursive,
whimsically comprehending talk of a boarding-
house sage with verses, both light and serious,
the enthusiastic reception of which has been jus-
tified by the place they have retained in Ameri-
can letters. Both "The Chambered Nautilus,"
counted by Holmes himself and by general con-
sent his best serious poem, and "The Deacon's

Holmes

Masterpiece, or the Wonderful 'One-Hoss-
Shay/ " his masterpiece in lighter verse with a
deep significance, were included, for example, in
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. The sig-
nificance of the "One-Hoss-Shay," whether or
not it was detected by its first readers, has been
recognized as lying in its character as a parable
of the breakdown of Calvinism, and the frowns
which The Autocrat and its sequels, especially
The Professor, evoked were to be seen chiefly on
the brows of the orthodox in matters of religion.
To his friend Motley, the historian, Holmes
wrote in 1861: "But oh! such a belaboring as I
have had from the so-called 'Evangelical' press
for the last two or three years, almost without
intermission! There must be a great deal of
weakness and rottenness when such extreme bit-
terness is called out by such a good-natured per-
son as I can claim to be in print" (Correspond-
ence of John Lothrop Motley, I, 361). To the
eyes of a later generation the sum of Holmes's
offending as a destructive critic of religion ap-
pears absurdly small. As a "modern" of the fif-
ties and sixties of the nineteenth century, he has
even shared the common lot of his kind in ap-
pearing somewhat old-fashioned today. When
his contemporaries complained that his books
that followed The Autocrat fell below it in merit,
they were more nearly right. The Breakfast-
Table Poet and Professor, already mentioned,
and the much later volume of the same general
structure, Over the Teacups (1891)—in spite of
containing so spirited a production of old age as
"The Broomstick Train," celebrating in verse
the earliest trolley-cars—afforded no exception
to the rule that sequels are rarely the equals of
their prototypes.

When Holmes quitted the field of the drama-
tized causerie which he had made his own in The
Autocrat and entered the field of outright fiction
he fell even farther below his highest level. His
three novels were Elsie Venner (1861), The
Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipa-
thy (1885). When a friend called the first of
them a "medicated novel" Holmes did not resent
the term; indeed he confessed in later years to
producing more than one such book. All three
were studies of abnormal states, physiological
and psychological, for which the subjects were
not primarily responsible. In this respect they
foreshadowed much fiction of later decades. But
the hand of the essayist frequently prevailed over
that of the novelist—the presentation of an idea
over the creation of a human character. In Elsie
Vewner the idea is that a snake-bite suffered by
the mother of an unborn child can affect pro-
foundly the life of that child in the world of

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