His Brother's Brother
IT is now some years since I spent a certain agreeable evening, at the house of a Cambridge neighbor, with the celebrated Père Hyacinthe and his accomplished American wife. They had with them their only child, a little boy eight or ten, who had been described in some of the French journals as a monster of deformity inasmuch as his father had been a priest, but who was in reality beautiful in form and face, and altogether attractive. The child was in his first enthusiasm of autograph-collecting. He had a pile of little squares of paper, neatly cut, and whenever a new guest entered the room he would run to his mother or to the hostess, asking eagerly in respect to the latest visitor, “ Est-il célèbre ? ” If he was told that the newcomer was at least sufficiently celebrated for autographic purposes, the child would come shyly and gracefully up to him and ask in the sweetest of voices for his signature. At last there entered a short, squarely built man, with white hair, white mustache, and thick eyebrows still black, — with erect figure, fine carriage of the head, and a bearing often described as military. The hostess, after the usual inquiry, explained to the little boy that this new guest, though not personally famous, was the only brother of the celebrated Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. The newly arrived guest, being therefore offered one of the little pieces of paper, and having presumably heard the consultation, wrote upon it this brief inscription, “John Holmes,frère de mon frère.”
The statement, however felicitous under the circumstances, would not bear more than a general acceptance as to the facts. Few brothers so gifted were less alike in looks and habits, and although without the slightest visible disagreement, and residing but a few miles from each other, they had practically lived much apart. In their personal habits, indeed, they covered the whole range from the most vivacious and companionable existence to the most reticent and reserved. The elder brother was born to live among cheery, social groups. He was fond of society, not averse to admiration, always ready for new acquaintances and novel experiences. The younger brother, while the more distinguished and noticeable in appearance of the two, was in the last degree self-withdrawing and modest; more than content to be held by the world at arm’s length, yet capable of the most devoted and unselfish loyalty to the few real intimates he loved. Perhaps my first vivid association with him is when my elder brother, one of his especial cronies and then a law student, came home with two volumes of a newly published set of the Waverley novels, the first American edition. He said to my mother, “ Johnnie has just given me these, and he says he is going to give me the whole set.”“ But you ought not to accept them,” she protested. “ He cannot afford such a gift.” “ But he has already subscribed for them,” was the reply, “ and he says if I don’t take them he ’ll put them in the fire ; and it would be just like Johnnie to do it.” From this there was no appeal, and it would be difficult to tell how much of the enjoyment of my boyhood I owe to this imprudent generosity on the part of John Holmes.
Born at Cambridge (March 29,1812), in the “ gambrel-roofed house ” made famous by his brother; graduating at Harvard in 1832, and at the Harvard Law School in 1839, he was for years of early life kept by chronic lameness a prisoner in his chair, with one foot on a footrest. He never practiced law, nor did he attempt any other profession, and he never married, his betrothed having died of consumption in his early youth. He lived alone for many years with his aged mother, who died at the age of ninety-three, on August 19, 1862. A quaint portrait of her will be found engraved in Morse’s life of Dr. Holmes (ii. 164). Her elder son describes her as “ keeping her lively sensibilities and sweet intelligence to the last,” and goes on to add : “ My brother John had long cared for her in the most tender way, and it almost broke his heart to part with her. She was a daughter to him, she said, and he had fondly thought that love and care could keep her frail life to the filling up of a century or beyond it. It was a pity to look on him in his first grief ; but Time, the great consoler, is busy with his anodyne, and he is coming back to himself.” (Morse’s Holmes, ii. 165.)
Not long after Mrs. Holmes’s death the old house became the property of Harvard University, and John Holmes lived for the rest of his life in a little cottage on the short street called Appian Way. Here he boarded with an excellent and faithful woman who had been for many years in the service of the Holmes household. His mode of life, always blameless and abstemious, was now almost Spartan in its simplicity; few college students at the present day have rooms so bare, and he would allow himself no indulgence beyond occasional carriage-driving with old friends. His circle of intimates included only six or eight persons in Cambridge : James Russell Lowell, John Bartlett, Dr. Estes Howe (Holmes’s classmate and Lowell’s brother-in-law), Professor James B. Thayer, and for a time James Murray Howe, Dr. Howe’s younger brother. With these he used to take walks on Cambridge Common, which he called the “ philosopher’s camp,” and with the first three of them he used regularly to play whist. There were included in his circle also a few ladies whom he had known from youth, and the late Robert Carter, Lowell’s associate in editing The Pioneer, whom the poet had christened Don Roberto Wagonero, or, more briefly, the Don. Holmes owned a little real estate in Cambridge, yielding him a modest support and freeing him from pecuniary anxiety. He had at intervals recurrences of the old lameness and also of weak eyes, but his buoyancy of temperament made these quite subordinate. His friends read aloud to him a great deal. His neighbor and legal adviser, George C. Lawrence, Esq., tells me that he read to Holmes nearly the whole series of the Erckmann-Chatrian historical novels ; the reader receiving from his friend the brevet name of Cobus, from a sergeant in one of the stories, and being habitually called on for the countersign before entering the door. Lowell’s Letters, on the other hand, Holmes never wished to have read to him, saying that he " knew it all before.” He had plenty of such little whims, as for instance in disliking to have flowers sent to him, and saying he did not enjoy their odor. He was never prominent in the circle of his brother’s friends, except in the case of Lowell. His name does not once occur in the index to Longfellow’s memoirs, though the two men lived within a few blocks of each other, and Miss Alice Longfellow was afterward his faithful friend ; and it is found but four times in the index to Morse’s Life of Dr. O. W. Holmes. In the two volumes of Lowell’s Letters, on the other hand, John Holmes appears nearly as often as his more famous brother.
The main incidents of John Holmes’s eighty-seven years of life — for he died on January 27, 1899 — consisted of two visits to Europe : one made when he was a law student; and again when he went with Mr. and Mrs. J. R. Lowell in July, 1872, remaining this time until June of the following year, having spent most of the period in Paris, but also a month in Italy and a short time in Germany. He was never a profuse letter writer, and even his brief European epistles give us little beyond routine. In spite of the companionship of Lowell, he was restrained by his own infirmities in respect to sight and locomotion ; so that he says in one of these letters to Mr. Bartlett (Paris, November 26, 1872) : “You see that it is by no means a gay life that I lead away from home, though now a very comfortable one, and so far as domestic life is concerned a very pleasant one, except that I am necessarily a great deal alone. J. L. [Lowell] has to go out a good deal, and I cannot of course accompany him. Paris is more beautiful than I remembered it to be, and a more solid city than London, if stone is considered more massive than brick.” Compare with this, on the other hand, the endless amusement he extracts in Cambridge from the midsummer desertion of a college town : —
“ Solitude reigns here. The average number of people that pass for twelve hours from 6 to 6, per hour is 1/12. At 105 P. M. the travel (of pedestrians) is 0, and from that time till 6 the next morning, you can hear a small dog bark, over the river. I should like to hear a hand-organ, or some firecrackers, or some saw-filing, or something. The only amusement we have is the burglaries. You would be surprised to see how cheerful everybody looks when there has been a ‘ breaking and entering ’ (Legal expression). But they are very rare. Of course we can’t count the funerals that pass through town as gaieties: but I fear that some people — I hesitate to express my thought— yes, I will say it — that some people begin to enjoy them. The city government foresaw the dullness & melancholy of midsummer and by a happy thought, they instituted repairs on the old burial ground to keep people’s spirits up. There are no mosquitoes nor bugs and I confess I miss them,—they make things lively, at any rate.”
Then follows : —
DIARY OF A CITIZEN OF CAMBRIDGE.
August 1. Repairs of meetinghouse & burying ground going on — a dorbug flew in at a window — caused alarm of burglars — great excitement in the town.
August 2. Repairs still going on ; a man who had n’t left enough in his bottle fell off his cart, but escaped without broken legs — a great deal of excitement in the town.
August 8. Repairs still going on.
August 4. Repairs continued.
August 5. Repairs on the meetinghouse going on.
August 6. Repairs of meetinghouse & burial ground very considerably advanced.
August 7. Workmen still busy on the meetinghouse.
August 8. The repairs of the church are continued.
August 9. The meetinghouse still under repair.
Later in the season he notes the premonitions of the autumnal return of his Cambridge neighbors : “ You see at dusk a little procession move wearily along Appian Way. The smallest child has something or other to carry. It does n’t look like a jubilant return.”
While in Paris Holmes studied French most faithfully, though perhaps tardily, and he used every summer afterward to work away at his French grammar, on the piazza of my brother’s house at Cohasset, or that of Dr, Charles Ware, their classmate and boyish playmate, at Rindge, New Hampshire. My sister-inlaw described him as the pleasantest of inmates, always able to amuse himself even in the intervals of French grammar ; a little whimsical and old-bachelorish, but never taking offense and never moody or suffering from ennui. This was all in keeping. The mere wit is lost without a companion with whom to cross swords; but the humorist finds a companion in the passing stranger, in a stray dog, in a butterfly, or in a cankerworm. This, at least, was true of John Holmes.
I do not suppose that there was ever a moment in John Holmes’s peaceful and prolonged existence when he could really have been said to feel envious of his famous brother. The “ cool sequestered vale of life ” was the choice of his temperament, and he certainly had it. When Ralph Waldo Emerson once said of him, “ John Holmes represents humor, while his elder brother stands for wit,” he really placed the younger the higher of the two; but it is doubtful whether the latter ever heard the remark, or would have paid much attention to it had it reached him. Wits are not uncommon and are seldom unappreciated ; but the inborn humorist, for whom daily life furnishes its own entertainment, is less recognized by the public, yet seldom suffers by the omission. The most commonplace event, the most uninteresting tramp who wandered through the little street, was enough to feed John Holmes’s thoughts and to supply his conversation with spice. He kept piles of assorted coins on his window seat with which to supply, according to his whim, the stray passers-by, sometimes questioning them and getting an ample money’s worth before they left him. Next to them in his confidence were his friends’ children, to whom also the intrinsic charm of a little bit of silver must be taught. His devices in overcoming their scruples were varied and indeed endless. I have heard him say to one of them, “ My dear, did you know that a toll has to be paid for every child who passes through this street ? ” And when met by an anxious and wondering glance, he would persevere : “ Yes, it is true, it always must be paid, but it makes no difference who pays it; you may pay it to me, or I will pay it to you. It will be the same thing. So you will have to take this quarter of a dollar,” — a sum which the child would then receive and bear away with a vague sense of that virtue which is its own reward.
His humor was singularly spontaneous, and took oftenest the form of a droll picture culminating in a little dramatic scene in which he enacted all the parts. A grave discussion, for instance, as to the fact, often noticed, that men are apt to shorten in size as they grow older, suggested to him the probable working of this process in some vast period of time like the longevity of the Old Testament patriarchs. His busy fancy at once conjured up a picture of Methuselah in his literally declining years, when he has shrunk to be less than knee-high compared with an ordinary man. The patriarch is running about the room, his eyes streaming with tears. “ What’s the matter, Thuse ? ” says a benevolent stranger. “ Why are you crying ? ” “I ain’t crying,” responds the aged patriarch, brushing away the drops. " It ’s these plaguy shoestrings that keep getting into my eyes.” Again, in answer to an inquiry about a child, I made some commonplace remark on the tormenting rapidity with which one’s friends’ children grow up, and he said eagerly: “ That’s it! That’s it! It is always the way! You meet an old friend, and say to her in a friendly manner, ‘ By the way, how is that little girl of yours ? ’ and she answers: ‘Very well, I thank you. She is out in Kansas, visiting her granddaughter.’ ” Did any other man ever concentrate four whole generations of human life into so brief a formula ?
These odd fancies were never worked up in advance, rarely duplicated, often forgotten. You might tell him his own bits of humor six months after, and he would credit them to you, as your own. Often the fun consisted merely in an expression of surprise, a drawing up of the mouth, a shutting of the eyelids, so whimsical that in any other hands the story would have failed. Such was one that he was sometimes called upon to duplicate, where a young man at a party, having been served with tea and cake, and finding the tea top hot to drink and not able near on which to rest it, seeks in vain to pour it into his saucer for cooling. He is unable to do it because of the piece of cake in his hand. At last a happy thought occurs to him. He will put the cake in his mouth, and leave his hands free. The tea is poured with success, and he is about to drink it, when he remembers all at once that he still has the cake in his mouth, and is as far off as ever from relief. John Holmes’s look of sudden despair and hopelessness, when the young man makes this discovery, is something which no one else could equal. Hopeless, also, was the attempt of any one else to render the look which he gave to the betrayed mother, when her boy, again and again replenished with ice cream before company, still obtains new supplies by the threat, “ If you don’t give it to me, I ’ll tell.” On being finally met with refusal, he shouts forth to the embarrassed guests the awful domestic mystery, “ My new breeches are made out of the old window curtains ! ” Stories that in themselves were nothing rose to dramatic episodes when acted out by Holmes.
Another of John Holmes’s spontaneous dramatic pictures was this. Something was said about the increasing number of students who failed to complete their undergraduate course in the accustomed four years, but had to be dropped from class to class before they could finish it. It was admitted that the number of these unfortunates was increasing, and Holmes predicted, without hesitation, that a race of Harvard students would be ultimately developed who would never get through at all, but might perhaps die, at the age of ninety, on the very day before Commencement, thus depriving the institution of the glory of their final diploma. In his lively imagination, a group of President and Faculty was seen gathered around the bed of the aged man, imploring him to make the final effort necessary to hold out just one day longer. “ Think,” they said, “ what an honor it would be to the university to have graduated you at last, and what a disappointment should you expire an undergraduate after all! Rouse yourself ! Make one more effort! Live until to-morrow, and die a Bachelor of Arts ! ”
John Holmes was an admirable mimic, which his brother Wendell was not, and he had a favorite story of a Yankee farmer of his acquaintance who used to preface a sentence by five different enunciations of the word “ well.” The first would come lightly, as if finding the question trivial, " Well! ” The second more drawlingly, on beginning to see the importance of the matter, “ We-ell ! ” The third more drawlingly still, but solemnly, as if grappling meditatively with the whole extent of the subject, “ We-e-ell ! ” The next impatiently, relapsing into the vernacular and bringing the whole thing emphatically into the field of action, “ Wal! ” as if to be settled now or never. And then at last decisively, as if the case were made up, and no human power could overrule it, “ Well! ”
This creative and dramatic quality of John Holmes’s humor is vividly shown in his comment — made in a private letter to his friend John Bartlett — on the appendix to that gentleman’s well-known Shakespeare Phrase Book, in which the careful editor gives by way of appendix eighty pages of " comparative readings,” faithfully setting down all the Shakespearean lines from various editors, preserved because rejected by him. Holmes thus portrays the probable mental conflicts of his friend in deciding which reading to adopt in each case, and which to assign to what he calls “ the wastebasket : ” —
“ I am glad that the brief episode of the wastebasket is attached to the magnum opus. The bold emancipation of the author from his own tyranny, the ferocious hurling of his work to apparent destruction, the savage exultation of the mob (of one), the calm resistance of the conservative party (of one), the return of the mob to reason and of the tyrant to power, when the outcast of the night before is raised and hugged by the repentant populace, ... it is altogether an admirable dramatic arrangement, in which a terrific combination of tragic elements (all that the supposed spectator can bear) suddenly culminates in wise resolution, unanimous action, and general happiness. Had not the insensate mob changed its mind,
“ ' You had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work.' ”
To appreciate the following extract from Lowell’s Letters, it must be remembered that in the rural days of Cambridge the Holmes parsonage and its surrounding acres constituted a considerable farm, with all the accompaniments of garden lot, mowing lot, large barn, corn barn, horse stable, cow stable, and dog kennel: " Cambridge boasts of two distinguished farmers, John Holmes of Holmes Place, and him who would be, in the properly constituted order of things, the Marquess of Thompson Lot with a P.” (That is, Lowell himself, the character being taken from a then favorite play of Toodles.) Lowell goes on : " The Marquess, fearing that (since Squire Holmes cultivated his own estate with his own hands and a camp stool) his rival might be in want of food and too proud to confess it, generously resolved to give him a dinner, which, to save his feelings, he adroitly veiled with the pretense of an agricultural festival and show of vegetables.” In the subsequent narrative, the chairman gives the toast " Speed the Plough,” which is " acknowledged by Mr. Holmes in a neat speech; ” but the speech as given is so thoroughly Lowell’s, and so remote from Holmes, by reason of its multitude of poor but ingenious puns, that the personal Holmes evidently disappears from the scene. John Holmes’s humor sometimes, however, took the form of puns, but always with an apology, while Lowell never spared anything but the apology. Holmes was Lowell’s favorite guest, and when he asks Howells in 1869 to eat roast pig with him on Saturday at half past four p. M. — an abnormal dinner hour, now happily obsolete— he says to him : " Your commensals will be J. H. [John Holmes], Charles Storey [father of Moorfield Storey], and Professor [George M.] Lane, — all true blades who will sit till Monday morning, if needful. The pig is just ripe, and so tender that he would fall from his tail if lifted by it, like a mature cantaloupe from its stem.” (Letters, i. 313.) These were all clever men, and Lowell must have had his fill of that " Lambish quintessence of John ” which he described in verse. Again, on Christmas Day, 1876, Lowell writes: " I had expected my two grandsons to dinner, but the weather will not let them run the risk, so I am to have my friend John Holmes (the best and most delightful of men) and a student whom I found to be without any chance at other than a dinner in Commons.”
It was but two or three times in John Holmes’s life that he trusted himself in print, and here too he kept carefully on his own ground, Old Cambridge. One may have faithfully perused Lowell’s delightful Fireside Travels without getting the very inmost glimpse of village life in the earlier Cambridge, unless he has also read John Holmes’s Harvard Square in the Harvard Book. Here live again, for instance, P. &; S. Snow, the veteran oyster dealers whom Lowell has immortalized in delicious rhyme; but John Holmes’s imagination goes beyond the dealers to the articles in which, they dealt, and says of them, " The oysters seemed to know the brothers personally as old familiars of their element, and appeared satisfied and serene when they saw who had forced their doors.” Lowell speaks of the old First Church, but no one has ever described like Holmes the outlet given to youthful vivacity, even in Puritan strongholds, by the dropping of the pew seats: “ The seats, which were independent of one another, were made to fold back, that their occupants might find support against the wall or the side of the pew during the time of prayers, when, at that day, all stood up ; and leaves, suspended on the side of the pew, which could be extended and supported by an appropriate pine rod, seemed to recall an older Puritan time, when taking notes was an important part of the exercises. When the seats were let down, at the close of prayer, the effect was much like that of the abrupt discharge of a load of boards from a cart, but with more numerous percussions. They were lowered every way but quietly. Childhood was quick and energetic, age was slow, and between them were all modes of sublapsarianism. Perhaps they came down more violently after a very long prayer than at other times. It was a phenomenon, and the only one I recollect, at variance with the very strict decorum observed. It drew no attention whatever.”
Lowell himself has not described so graphically as John Holmes the great colonial festival which the Harvard Commencement Day furnished in the middle of the eighteenth century : —
“ A day or two beforehand, the agent charged with that duty measured the spaces on the Common allotted by the town, for a consideration, to the occupants of tents, and scored the number of each in the sod. Grave citizens watched the numerals; children circulated their reports with increase. The popular test of Commencement was the number of tents erected. When the work of construction began, fathers led out little children that they might themselves, without reproach, loiter near the delightful tumult. Selectmen are said to have hovered around the spot in a semi-official attitude. The inhabitants of the town, alive to their responsibility, prepared, and tradition says worthily, to bestow their hospitalities. And truly it was time to be up and doing. A man might pass the whole year, until Commencement, without knowing the number and value of his friends. Then everybody and everything turned up. A prodigal son, supposed on a voyage up the Straits, arrived on Monday by coaster from Chappequiddick, to eat the fatted calf. In the afternoon, an unappreciated relative, presumed to have perished in the late war, appeared, with an appetite improved by open-air residence among the Indians. The more remote affinities at this period revealed their strength. On Tuesday, after the nearer relatives had arrived, there might drop in at evening a third cousin of a wife’s half-brother from Agawam, or an uncle of a brother-in-law’s step-sister from Contoocook, to re-knit the family ties. The runaway apprentice, who was ready to condone offenses and accept hospitality, was referred to the barn, as well as the Indian from Mr. Wheelock’s Seminary, whose equipment was an Indian catechism and a bow and arrow, with which latter he expected to turn a fugitive penny by shooting at a mark on the morrow. The wayward boy, over whose watery grave Mr. Sam Stedman had so many times fired his long ducking-gun (cannon being scarce in those days), returned from a truant visit to his uncle on the ‘ New Hampshire Grants ’ [Vermont]. The College sloop, that shadowy craft which floats in time indefinitely, always arrived in time for the flood tide on Tuesday. The Watertown lighter was uniformly driven ashore on Tuesday evening by the perils of the seas ; that is, by the strong current that prevailed in the river about Commencement time. The captain and crew, like judicious men, made it a point to improve their minds while detained, and always attended the literary exercises on the Common.”
We may be sure that John Holmes describes in full the Commencement procession of 1750 and its accompanying services: “ The sober academic colors were relieved by occasional gold-laced hats and coats, by a sprinkling of his Majesty’s uniforms, and by the scores of silver shoe-buckles which glistened in the sun at every footstep, to the delight of the public and of the wearers of them. . . . The President occupied the pulpit, and the Governor the great chair in front; the rest, with mutual congées, self-sacrificing offers, and deprecatory acceptances of seats, distributed themselves on the stage. The cocked hats were hung on the brass-headed nails which lined the beams projecting from the wall between the pulpit and the galleries. . . . The [Latin] Salutatory goes off brilliantly,—that is to say, nobody seems depressed by it; the audience chats in a lively manner. A Latin thesis is called for, which goes rather heavily, but is relieved by the arrival of old Judge Trowbridge, who comes up the outside stairs, and with multiplied attentions is seated on the stage. He is the most famous recondite old lawyer in the Province, and has lost himself in a lucubration this morning, so as to forget the time. Another Latin thesis is helped off by a row at the west door of the church, at the sound of which young James Winthrop slips out and witnesses the victory of the ‘ constable and six men ’ over two drunken English sailors.”
In describing the Commencement dinner he draws a new moral from the creation of the mosquito. “ There was,” he says, “ no great affinity between the English gentleman, or courtier, of that day and the average New England colonist. . . . Two topics, under these circumstances, did excellent service, — the heat of to-day and the mosquitoes of last night. On these points there was a cordial unanimity, with an amount of circumstantial difference that extended the conversation most profitably. The patient who tosses and kicks under the lancet of the mosquito, or, worse, listens to his hum, as he selects the spot for puncture, is not in a mood for reflection. Let him, however, remember that the torment of the night will become a social medium on the morrow to draw him nearer friends and soften his relation to strangers.”
In those days, there was in the afternoon a separate series of addresses and a separate procession. “ The afternoon audience, we may suppose, was largely composed of those who attend everything on principle. All reasonable people were now in a blissful state. The excellent Dr. Appleton, the minister of the parish, walking in the afternoon procession, smiled unconsciously on the collective license of the crowd. The rough village doctor, though witnessing the abominable breach of hygienic law everywhere, felt the cheering influence of the day, and his old mare with perplexity missed half her usual allowance of cowhide. The dry, skeptical village lawyer, returned from his dinner at Miss Chadbourne’s to his dusty office in his best mood, prepared to deny everything advanced by anybody, and demand proof. On the Common, the Natick Indians, having made large gain by their bows and arrows, proceeded to a retired spot, and silently and successfully achieved the process of inebriation.”
For one to whom the past was thus vivid, it might seem that the present must be shadowy in comparison ; yet the latest visitor, the most recent passerby, was to him a figure equally animated ; nor was any picture of past or present so characteristic and original, after all, as was the inexhaustibly fertile mind from which it came. It is this which gives to those who knew John Holmes a sense of loss so unique and irreparable. Men and events will come and go, but we shall no longer listen to hear what he will say about them ; it is as if the art of instantaneous photography had perished with its inventor.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson.