Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Stephen Budiansky

  As he more seriously explained it, this “little army of specialists” was the new democratic elite, one based not on privilege or vague attainments of culture, but on hard technical competence that spoke for itself:

  They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are, men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery. . . . They set the example themselves; for they furnish in the intellectual world a perfect type of the union of democracy with discipline. They bow to no one who seeks to impose his authority by foreign aid; they hold that science like courage is never beyond the necessity of proof, but must always be ready to prove itself against all challengers. But to one who has shown himself a master, they pay the proud reverence of men who know what valiant combat means, and who reserve the right of combat against their leader even, if he should seem to waver in the service of Truth, their only queen.34

  It was an idea he frequently repeated in speeches and in letters to friends throughout his life. In life, as in war, it was best not to worry about the larger meaning of it all, but just get on with the job.

  AFTER RECEIVING HIS law degree in the spring of 1866 Holmes set off on a tour of Europe. It was his first trip abroad. He loved London instantly for the women and the conversation, and every time he returned over the next half century he felt the same surge of intellectual and romantic excitement.

  “I always feel twice the man I was, after a visit to London,” he once told an English friend, Lady Burghclere. Having to think on one’s feet and bandy wits with “people who being in the center of the world have seen all kinds of superlatives” was a bracing experience:

  Nothing is put up with but real personality. It must be the stiletto not a bogus masonic sword or stuffed club. You can’t stick your hand into your waistcoat and stand on a pedestal and be august. . . . You have to pay your way in London. No one takes you on faith—and I love it. You must be gay, tender, hardhearted when something misses fire, give your best, and all with lightness.35

  “The pace is tremendous,” he wrote Nina Gray in the middle of one of his later visits. “A lady said to me ‘You Americans disconcert one by waiting for us to finish our sentences.’ ” He found the English women an agreeable change from the bluestocking daughters of Cambridge and Boston intellectuals that had formed his chief circle of female acquaintances at home. “Women let their eyes wander while they talk to you, very freely—wear lower necked dresses than at home,” he wrote in his diary after one of his first dinners in London society. As he observed to Lady Pollock, “You may say what you like about American women—and I won’t be unpatriotic—but English women are brought up, it seems to me, to realize that it is an object to be charming, that man is a dangerous animal—or ought to be—and that a sexless bonhomie is not the ideal relation.”36

  Holmes arrived in May with a sheaf of letters of introduction to London society from prominent Bostonians including Charles Sumner, and a dutiful list of sights to see (“Pharaoh at British Museum”; “Johnson’s House”) and shops to patronize. More important, his entrée was eased by Henry Adams’s father, who was the American ambassador. Henry was there as well, as his father’s secretary, and the Adamses took their visiting countryman under their wing. He dined and lunched with them regularly—“sat on Mrs A’s right as Lt. Col.” he noted in his diary on the first occasion—and enjoyed a mild flirtation with Henry’s sister Mary (“each time prettier & more charming than the last”).37 He also met there Clover Hooper (“a perfect Voltaire in petticoats,” Henry James would later describe her).38 She was visiting from Boston, and in a few years would become Henry Adams’s wife.

  With the Adamses, Holmes was taken to dinners and receptions where he met and conversed with leading Liberal politicians, including the Duke of Argyll, and then the Grand Old Man himself, Prime Minister William Gladstone. Handsome, brilliant, and a wounded veteran to boot, Holmes was an instant success. “Had quite a long talk with the great Panjandrum G. himself whereat people stared—G in considn of my wounds made me sit & I was a great gun,” he wrote after an evening at the prime minister’s house.

  Invitations poured in: from John Stuart Mill to meet him at the House of Commons and accompany him to a dinner and discussion at the Political Economy Club; to Oxford, where he dined in Hall and saw a cricket match; and to observe the many courts of law in London. He heard a case before the Court of Arches, England’s ecclesiastical court—“the wife of a parson was telling how another parson solicited her favors”—and was invited by Lord Cranworth, the Lord Chancellor and Speaker of the House of Lords, to dinner and then the next day to attend the Court of Chancery. When the Chancellor saw him enter the chamber he motioned to him to come up and sit next to him on the bench: “People looked at me & grinned.”

  Holmes, in September 1865

  He saw the Magna Carta and the mummy at the British Museum, left his card for the Dean of Westminster Abbey, heard Dickens give a reading, and visited the famous art galleries. And on June 12 Leslie Stephen invited him to a dinner with the members of the Alpine Club.

  Stephen was from a prominent English family of Christian social reformers and abolitionists, and had met both Holmes and his famous father on a visit to Boston in July 1863. “He is a very jolly, chirpy man,” Stephen reported of Holmes Sr. at that time, “whose principal fault is that when he has once got started in talking,” no one “could get a word in.”39 In 1865 Stephen had renounced his religious beliefs, resigned as a minister of the Church of England, and begun a career as critic and man of letters; as editor of the Cornhill Magazine he would publish works by Trollope, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Henry James, among others, and would later launch the monumental Dictionary of National Biography.

  He was also a serious Alpinist, one of the wave of English mountaineering enthusiasts who from 1855 to 1865 conquered sixty Swiss peaks for the first time. In 1861 Stephen had made the first ascent of the Schreckhorn, a 13,379-foot peak in the Bernese Alps. He had since become president of the Alpine Club. In 1866, at age thirty-four, he was described as “tall and lean as a young Lincoln,” and “one of the fastest climbers of his time.”40

  At the London dinner, Holmes saw some of the surviving members of the party that had “tumbled down the Matterhorn” the year before: three English climbers and a guide in the first party to reach its summit had been killed in the descent. It had thrown the entire sport into a crisis, with public accusations that climbers were reckless egotists; it was Stephen’s job to try to restore the image of the club. When he invited Holmes to join him on a climb in the Alps the next month, Holmes readily agreed.

  A week later he was crossing to Paris, where he had arranged to meet Stephen on July 2. He saw and talked with Lincoln’s former secretary, John Hay, at the American legation; bought shirt studs and ate lobster mayonnaise and turbot that “was the best I ever tasted”; went to a foot doctor and submitted to the “ignominy” of having painful corns removed; and ogled the pretty French art students at the Louvre copying the famous pictures: “Wanted to talk to ’em but darant.”

  Carrying only a carpet bag, umbrella, and satchel he boarded the overnight train for Basel with Stephen, and his first glimpse of the Bernese Alps the next morning left him awestruck at the challenge he had rashly agreed to undertake. “This is not the place for squirts,” he wrote in his diary.

  They climbed the Balmhorn a few days later, inching up on ropes and on a precipice with sheer drops on either side, “like going along the edge of an oyster shell.” The next day they made the summit of the Tschingel Glacier in five hours, a blazing pace, Holmes cursing all the way with all the swear words in “use among the army of the Potomac,” as Stephen later cheerfully reminded him; Stephen periodically calling down to his straggling neophyte companion, “Can you come up, Yank?”41

  Holmes made it to the top horribly sunburned, his stomach violently deranged. “I had eaten nothing and after several vain attempts signalized the top by departing with the little I h
ad summarily.” Then another even higher peak a few days later, Mönch, with guides to cut steps in the ice and fourteen hours in the snow. “There is nothing to say about that most horrible grind,” he wrote afterward. “It almost recalled an army march.”

  He watched as a party of English climbers who hoped to be the second to ascend the Matterhorn set out, their local guides kneeling in front of the church as they departed to be crossed with holy water. The next day they returned, the guides having “funked.”

  He returned to Paris July 26. At the Louvre, the “same girls copying—I was stared at I was so burned.” At his hotel he found invitations awaiting him to spend August at the country homes of Sir John Kennaway, a Conservative politician, and the Duke of Argyll.

  His final weeks in Britain were a throwback to what seemed a feudal world: shooting parties for grouse and roe deer; flirting with the daughters of peers; reciting “The Old Sergeant” to the admiration of the ladies in the drawing room after dinner; driving through the lanes of Devon with Miss Kennaway, as men touched their caps and women curtsied; Sir John assembling the servants each morning for prayers, at which he “read & expounded the Bible in patriarchal fashion.” Then days of festivities to mark the coming of age of the duke’s son at Inveraray Castle, with Highland games; a party for the tenantry in an outbuilding erected for the occasion, where Holmes danced with the daughter of the duke’s man of business, a Miss Jessie Robertson, who snubbed him, then wrote a letter apologizing for her rudeness, to which he replied “soothing her”; and a county ball at which he misbehaved himself but was rescued by a Scottish peer “and no one was wiser.” Then more fishing and shooting, and flirting with several aristocratic Miss Campbells, who warned him they had sided with the South in the American Civil War.

  Then back across the Atlantic in berth 183 of the Cunard steamship S.S. China, which docked in Boston on September 11, after a quick ten days’ passage.

  Holmes called his subsequent election as “an unworthy member of the English Alpine Club” one of a number of undeserved honors he had “squeaked into” by chance. He never climbed again. But his weeks in the Alps ranked among the most moving of his life. “The great emotions that I have known from external events was due to the Swiss Mountains, a storm at sea, battle, and a total eclipse of the sun,” he related to a friend a half century later.42

  To his intimate friend Lady Castletown he offered the same list, but added one more item: “Women.” But he also told her that “the romance of the mountains is in my soul forever” from that “brief but vivid experience of the Bernese Oberland.” He never forgot, he said, “the silence of the snow or the passion of the return to life when one first hears running water on the descent.”43

  WHILE HE WAS in London, he had received a small warning from his mother that his friend William James was taking advantage of his absence to moon about his old schoolmaster’s daughter Fanny Dixwell:

  Fanny is living quietly in Cambridge with the exception of visits from Bill James, who appears to go there at any time from 9 o’clock in the morning. I told her to let me know how the flirtation got on—she says he is a person who likes to know his friends well. I had a little fun with her, about him, & told her I should write to you about it.44

  “She said you told her you shouldn’t write,” his mother added. Prompted by the hint Holmes immediately sent Fanny a note, enclosed in a letter to his mother, which Mrs. Holmes promised to relay at once.

  Fanny was not at all a beauty, but she had the attractions of youth and a lively wit, which gained her more than a few admirers. Holmes’s sister reported that one particularly persistent caller that summer, whom they nicknamed “Taurus,” was “besieging their house now, inquiring for her—He comes once a week, but rarely gets in.”45

  William James wrote his brother Wilky that spring describing his own infatuation. “I have made the acquaintance of the eldest Miss Dixwell of Cambridge lately. She is about as fine as they make ’em. That villain Wendell Holmes has been keeping her all to himself out at Cambridge for the last 8 years; but I hope I may enjoy her acquaintance now. She is A1, if any one ever was.”46

  Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, c. 1870

  Holmes had met William James for the first time when he was at home in Boston recovering from his wound at Antietam. Their fathers were acquainted already. Henry James Sr., a philosophical enthusiast and writer of self-financed works of distinctly less than fully baked diktats on Utopianism, Swedenborgianism, and the Realm of Divine Love, had known Emerson since 1842; in 1863 he was invited to join Dr. Holmes’s famous Saturday Club.47

  When Holmes and William James met again after the war they became fast friends. James, a year younger than Holmes, was studying medicine at Harvard. His brother Henry, after a misbegotten year at Harvard Law School, had already decided he would try to make a living writing.

  The James children had suffered from a bizarre upbringing. Henry James Sr. disbelieved in all organized education just as he disbelieved in all organized religion, and had moved the family to Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne, Paris again, Boulogne again, Newport, Geneva yet again, Bonn, Newport, and finally Cambridge in pursuit of educational opportunities for his children. William had studied science, painting, science, painting again, before finally settling on chemistry and medicine.48

  William and Henry were understandably more than a little awed by Holmes’s self-confident sense of direction. “The only fellow here I care anything about is Holmes,” William James wrote an acquaintance in 1866, “who is on the whole a first-rate article, and one which improves by wear. He is perhaps too exclusively intellectual, but sees things so easily and clearly and talks so admirably it’s a treat to be with him.”49

  William, who was already plunged into the explorations of psychology and philosophy that would be his life’s work, met Holmes once a week for philosophical chats and nearly always came away feeling inferior, even as he was drawn to him.50 “You have a far more logical and orderly mode of thinking than I,” he wrote Holmes a couple of years later, “and whenever we have been together I have somehow been conscious of a reaction against the ascendancy of this over my ruder processes—a reaction caused by some subtle deviltry of egotism and jealousy . . . as if you threatened to overrun my territory and injure my own proprietorship.”51

  He blamed his own “meanness” for those feelings, and while he was away in Germany for a year he admitted to Holmes, “I . . . cursed myself that I didn’t make more of you when I was by you, but . . . threw evening after evening away which I might have spent in your bosom, sitting in your whitely-lit-up room, drinking in your profound wisdom, your golden jibes, your costly imagery, listening to your shuddering laughter, baptizing myself afresh, in short, in your friendship.”52

  William was also intimidated by Holmes’s war record and ease with women, neither of which he shared. The two younger James sons had been in the war; Wilky was Shaw’s adjutant and seriously wounded in the assault on Fort Wagner. But their father had apparently discouraged his two older sons from enlisting, wanting to save them for the great work he thought he saw in them, and Henry, at age eighteen at the start of the war, had suffered what he called a “horrid even if an obscure hurt” while helping man a fire pump that gave him a more legitimate excuse.53

  But William and Henry were both tormented over their timidity in having sat out the war. Visiting Wilky at the army camp at Readeville, Massachusetts, Henry “gaped” at the display of military manhood, sardonically observing of himself, “By the blessing of heaven I could in default of other adventures still gape.” Later, in the “bronzed, matured faces” of the returning veterans—and even more in their “bronzed, matured characters,” possessing a “stored resource of overwhelming reference”—he caught a glimpse of a world he would forever be a stranger to.54

  If William was mooning hopelessly around Fanny Dixwell, he mooned hopelessly about a series of other girls as well: he vaguely pursued Clover Hooper, and then her sister, both of whom had other plans.
And all of the men of their circle were smitten with the Jameses’ cousin Mary Temple, known as Minny. She was slender, dark-haired, lively and outspoken, possessed of a keen sense of the “play of life in others,” “ever the heroine of the scene,” Henry James later wrote, and she was dying of tuberculosis.55

  Minny Temple

  An early short story of Henry James’s, “Poor Richard,” re-created a trip he, Holmes, and John Chipman Gray made in August 1867 to North Conway in the White Mountains of New Hampshire where the Temples were also vacationing, and the title character’s hopeless feelings of inferiority as a rival of the two young soldiers for the heroine’s affections.56

  “Every one was supposed I believe to be more or less in love with her,” Henry wrote his brother after her death. In fact, neither Holmes nor Gray was, from the available evidence of her letters, but both James brothers may well have been, in their usual ineffectual way.57 The Jameses’ mother in any case expressed relief in early 1867 when Holmes seemed to be out of the running, telling their sister Alice that Minny had become “quite disenchanted, and evidently looks at Holmes with very different eyes from what she did; that is she sees him as others do, talks of his thinness and ugliness and pinchedness, as well as of his beautiful eyes—and seems to see his egotism.”58

  Years later, when some of Minny Temple’s letters were published in Henry James’s Notes of a Son and Brother, Holmes wrote to John Gray’s wife, Nina,

  I knew Minnie Temple with the rest—quite well I think I may say. Oh yes she had charm—the psychological insight of the Jameses with aristocratic feelings from the Temple side made a strange mixture. Her death affected me more than almost any that I have had to lament. She had her judgment of all of us.

  “Few spirits have been more free than hers,” William James agreed, and said that her death in 1870, at age twenty-four, left a mark on them all. “We felt it together as the end of our youth.”59