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4. Diagnosing the Gentle Iconoclast: Dr. Holmes on Emerson
- University of Iowa Press
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73 F O U R Diagnosing the Gentle Iconoclast Dr. Holmes on Emerson Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Ralph Waldo Emerson appeared in December 1884, the fourth major biography of Emerson in three years and the seventh volume in Houghton, Mifflin’s American Men of Letters series. It was a quick and documentable success, at least measured by its brisk sales, which catapulted it within its first month well past any competing biography of Emerson—indeed, well past any other volume in the AML series, before it or after. Even so, Holmes himself readily admitted the book’s shortcomings. In a letter to Franklin B. Sanborn just a month after its publication, Holmes acknowledged his factual mistakes, while shrugging them off with his typical affability: “they are just such scraps that critics live on when they have nothing else[,] like the bite of old shoes that starving shipwrecked folks live on, for want of beef-steaks.” And it was true, Holmes also conceded, that he had downplayed Emerson’s reformist activities—particularly abolitionism, as readers had already pointed out. “I have no reason to complain of my critics,” Holmes told Sanborn. “I know very well my task was not a difficult, but an impossible one—that of satisfying readers each of whom had already formed his personal estimate of Emerson, from some of whom I must widely differ, with out one of whom I should be in perfect accord. But I meant to be fair and my book has been more generously received than I expected.” One reason Holmes’s expectations were so low was the widespread perception—even Holmes seemed to believe it—that his lifelong skepticism toward Transcendentalism rendered him unable to write a book about Emerson with sympathy and understanding. Holmes acknowledged 74 C H A P T E R F O U R being “a late comer as an admirer of the Concord Poet and Philosopher,” a judgment echoed both by early reviewers of his book, who often expressed polite surprise at how well it turned out, and by cronies of Emerson like Rockwood Hoar, who privately thought Holmes’s mind “not commensurate ” with Emerson’s. The opposition of Emerson and Holmes is as persistent as it is wrong-headed. If Eleanor M. Tilton, Holmes’s best modern biographer, burlesques the case when she says Emerson’s admirers considered Holmes a “satanic materialist,” a belief in the essential incompatibility of the two New England Brahmins was nevertheless commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century. Holmes’s nephew by marriage, John Torrey Morse Jr., who wrote the standard life-and-letters biography of him, put the case typically in 1896: “Emerson wrote of religions, Holmes wrote of creeds; Emerson dealt with Man, Holmes concerned himself with men; Emerson found his topics in idealities, Holmes found his in things concrete.” As assiduously as Victorian America nudged the idea of Emerson ever closer to Holmesean respectability, historians a century later have driven the two men apart again, with Emerson lionized and Holmes kicked to the literary curb—a prolific but unimaginative poet-for-hire who saw the world with a wry skepticism but meekly knuckled under to the status quo. In the words of one recent intellectual historian, Holmes “had all the equipment for debunking convention and, for the most part, no impulse to use it.” In part the misperception derives from Holmes’s own studied diffidence about his talents as a writer and thinker. A medical doctor and professor of anatomy, he cultivated a reputation for being “outside of the charmed circle drawn around the scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord” and confessed to Emerson himself that he had “nothing to do with thoughts that roll beyond a certain width of orbit.” But there is something disingenuous about Holmes’s claims to outsider status, for the record of his half-century friendship with Emerson paints another picture. Sons of ministers and Harvard, close in age and cultural geography, they enjoyed a longstanding acquaintance, their lives intertwined in pervasive if intermittent ways that remind us how small the neighborhood of Boston was. Holmes’s brother John was Emerson’s pupil in Cambridge in the early 1820s; Emerson’s son Edward was Holmes’s pupil at Harvard’s medical school a half-century later. Waldo’s brother Charles attended Harvard in the class of 1828, just a year ahead of Holmes; upon Charles’s death in 1836 Holmes mourned him in verse as “too fair to die!” Holmes’s...