Cambridge Sketches

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Now and then his wit is very brilliant, lighting up its surroundings like
the sudden appearance of a meteor. The essence of humor consists in a
contrast which places the object or person compared at a disadvantage. If
the contrast is a dignified one we have high comedy; but if the reverse,
low comedy. Some of Holmes's comparisons make the reader laugh out aloud.
He says that a tedious preacher or lecturer, with an alert listener in
the audience, resembles a crow followed by a king-bird,--a spectacle
which of itself is enough to make one smile; and as for an elevated
comparison, what could be more so, unless we were to seek one in the
moon. There is a threefold wit in it; but the full force of this can only
be appreciated in the original text.

Nature commonly sets her own stamp on the face of a humorist. The long
pointed nose of Cervantes is indicative of immeasurable fun, and there
have been many similar noses on the faces of less distinguished wits.
Doctor Holmes ridiculed phrenology as an attempt to estimate the money in
a safe by the knobs on the outside, but he evidently was a believer in
physiognomy, and he exemplified this in his own case. His face had a
comical expression from boyhood; its profile reminded one of those
prehistoric images which Di Cesnola brought from Cyprus. As if he were
conscious of this he asserted his dignity in a more decided manner than a
man usually does who is confident of the respect of those about him. Thus
he acquired a style of his own, different from that of any other person
in Boston. He was not a man to be treated with disrespect or undue
familiarity.

A medical student named Holyoke once had occasion to call on him, and as
soon as he had introduced himself Doctor Holmes said: "There, me friend,
stand there and let me take an observation of you." He then fetched an
old book from his library which contained a portrait of Holyoke's
grandfather, who had also been a physician. He compared the two faces,
saying: "Forehead much the same; nose not so full; mouth rather more
feminine; chin not quite so strong; but on the whole a very good
likeness, and I have no doubt you will make an excellent doctor." After
Holyoke had explained his business Doctor Holmes finally said: "I liked
your grandfather, and shall always be glad to see you here."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was class poet of 1861, an honor which
pleased his father very much. Immediately after graduating he went to the
war, and came near losing his life at the battle of Antietam. A rifle-
ball passed through both lungs, and narrowly missed his heart. Alexander
Hamilton died of exactly such a wound in seven hours; and yet in three
days Captain Holmes was able to write to his father. The Doctor started
at once for the seat of war, and met with quite a series of small
adventures which he afterwards described in a felicitous article in the
_Atlantic,_ called "My Hunt after the Captain." His friend, Dr.
Henry P. Bowditch, lost his son in the same battle, and when they met at
the railway depot Holmes said: "I would give my house to have your
fortune like mine."

In a letter to Motley dated February 3, 1862, he says:

"I was at a dinner at Parker's the other day where Governor Andrew and
Emerson, and various unknown dingy-linened friends of progress met to
hear Mr. Conway, the not unfamous Unitarian minister of Washington,--
Virginia-born, with seventeen secesh cousins, fathers, and other
relatives,--tell of his late experience at the seat of Government. He is
an out-and-out immediate emancipationist,--believes that is the only way
to break the strength of the South; that the black man is the life of the
South; that they dread work above all things, and cling to the slave as
the drudge that makes life tolerable to them. I do not know if his
opinion is worth much."

This was a meeting of the Bird Club which Doctor Holmes attended and the
dingy-linened friends of progress were such men as Dr. Samuel G. Howe,
Governor Washburn, Governor Claflin, Dr. Estes Howe, and Frank B.
Sanborn. It has always been a trick of fashionable society, a trick as
old as the age of Pericles, to disparage liberalism by accusing it of
vulgarity; but we regret to find Doctor Holmes falling into line in this
particular. He always speaks of Sumner in his letters with something like
a slur--not to Motley, for Motley was Sumner's friend, but to others who
might be more sympathetic. This did not, however, prevent him from going
to Sumner in 1868 to ask a favor for his second son, who wanted to be
private secretary to the Senator and learn something of foreign affairs.
Sumner granted the request, although he must have been aware that the
Doctor was not over-friendly to him; but it proved an unfortunate
circumstance for Edward J. Holmes, who contracted malaria in Washington,
and this finally resulted in an early death.

Why is it that members of the medical profession should take an
exceptional interest in poisonous reptiles? Professor Reichert and Dr. S.
Weir Mitchell spent a large portion of their leisure hours for several
years in experimenting with the virus of rattlesnakes, and of the Gila
monster, without, however, quite exhausting the subject. Doctor Holmes
kept a rattlesnake in a cage for a pet, and was accustomed to stir it up
with an ox-goad. A New York doctor lost his life by fooling with a
poisonous snake, and another in Liverpool frightened a whole congregation
of scientists with two torpid rattlesnakes which suddenly came to life on
the president's table. Does it arise from their custom of dealing with
deadly poisons, or is it because they officiate as the high priests of
mortality?

Doctor Holmes's "Elsie Venner" was one of the offshoots of this peculiar
medical interest, and when we think of it in that light the story seems
natural enough. The idea of a snaky woman is as old as the fable of
Medusa. I read the novel when I was fifteen, and it made as decided an
impression on me as "Ivanhoe" or "Pickwick." I remember especially a
proverbial saying of the old doctor who serves as the presiding genius of
the plot: he knew "the kind of people who are never sick but what they
are going to die, and the other kind who never know they are sick until
they are dead." If Doctor Holmes had taken this as his text, and written
a novel on those lines, he might have created a work of far-reaching
importance. He appears to have known very little concerning poisonous
reptiles; had never heard of the terrible fer-de-lance, which infests the
cane-swamps of Brazil--a snake ten feet in length which strikes without
warning and straight as a fencer's thrust. But "Elsie Venner" and
Holmes's second novel, "The Guardian Angel," are, to use Lowell's
expression on a different subject:

"As full of wit, gumption and good Yankee sense,
As there are mosses on an old stone fence."

In the autumn of 1865 some Harvard students, radically inclined, obtained
possession of a religious society in the college called the Christian
Union, revolutionized it and changed its name to the Liberal Fraternity.
They then invited Emerson, Henry James, Sr., Doctor Holmes, and Colonel
Higginson to deliver lectures in Cambridge under their auspices. This was
a pretty bold stroke, but Holmes evidently liked it. He said to the
committee that waited upon him: "What is your rank and file? How deep do
you go down into the class?" He also promised to lecture, and that he did
not was more the fault of the students than his own. He was by no means a
radical in religious matters, but he hated small sectarian differences--
the substitution of dogma for true religious feeling. In his poem at the
grand Harvard celebration in 1886 he made a special point of this
principle:

"For nothing burns with such amazing speed
As the dry sticks of a religious creed."

Creeds are necessary, however, and an enlightened education teaches us
not to value them above their true worth.

In 1867 Doctor Holmes published a volume of poetry which was generally
well received, but was criticised in the _Nation_ with needless and
unmerciful severity. Rev. Edward Everett Hale and other friends of his
had already been attacked in the same periodical, and the Doctor thought
he knew the man who did it; but whether he was right in his conjecture
cannot be affirmed. There can be no doubt that these diatribes were
written by a Harvard professor who owned a large interest in the
_Nation_, and who was obliged to go to Europe the following year in
order to escape the odium of an imprudent speech at a public dinner. In
this critique Holmes's poetry was summed up under the heading of
"versified misfortunes"; and Holmes himself wrote to Mrs. Stowe that the
object of the writer was evidently "to injure at any rate, and to wound
if possible."

It was certainly contemptible to treat a man like Doctor Holmes in this
manner,--one so universally kind to others, and whose work was always, at
least, above mediocrity. He behaved in a dignified manner in regard to
it, and he made no attempt at self-justification, although the wound was
evidently long in healing. What recourse has a man who places himself
before the public against the envenomed shafts of an invisible adversary?
Of this at least we may be satisfied, that whatever is extravagant and
overwrought always brings its own reaction in due course; and Doctor
Holmes's reputation does not appear to have suffered permanently from
this attack. The general public, especially the republic of womankind,
forms its own opinion, and pays slight attention to literary criticisms
of that description.

Holmes's poetry rarely rises to eloquence, but neither does it descend to
sentimentality. It resembles the man's own life, in which there were no
bold endeavors, great feats, or desperate struggles; but it was a life so
judicious, healthful and highly intellectual that we cannot help admiring
it. "Dorothy Q." is perhaps the best of his short poems, as it is the
most widely known. The name itself is slightly humorous, but it is a
perfect work of art, and the line,

"Soft and low is a maiden's 'Yes,'"

has the beautiful hush of a sanctuary in it. A finer verse could not be
written. Also for a comic piece nothing equal to "The Wonderful One-hoss
Shay" has appeared since Burns's "Tam O'Shanter." It is based on a
logical illusion which brings it down to recent times, and the gravity
with which the story is narrated makes its impossibility all the more
amusing. The building of the chaise is described with a practical
accuracy of detail, and yet with a poetical turn to every verse:

"The hubs of logs from the 'Settler's ellum',--
Last of its timber,--they couldn't sell 'em;
Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips,
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips";

I believe that even cultivated readers have found more real satisfaction
in the "One-Hoss Shay" than in many a more celebrated lyric.

Doctor Holmes lived amid a comparatively narrow circle of friends and
acquaintances. He attended the Saturday Club, but Lowell appears to have
been the only member of it with whom he was on confidential terms. He was
rarely seen or heard of in Longfellow's house. In the winter of 1878 he
met Mrs. L. Maria Child for the first time at the Chestnut Street Club.
It appears that she did not catch his name when he was introduced to her,
and stranger still did not recognize his face. When the Doctor inquired
concerning her literary occupation she replied that she considered
herself too old to drive a quill any longer, and then fortunately added:
"Now, there is Doctor Holmes, I think he shows his customary good
judgment in retiring from the literary field in proper season." What the
Doctor thought of this is unknown, but he still continued to write.

At the age of seventy his _alma mater_ conferred on Doctor Holmes an
LL.D., and this was followed soon afterwards by Oxford and Cambridge, in
England; but why was it not given ten or fifteen years earlier, when
Holmes was in his prime? Then it might have been a service and a
satisfaction to him; but when a man is seventy such tributes have small
value for him. There had been an _Atlantic_ breakfast for Doctor
Holmes in Boston, and a Holmes breakfast in New York. He was in the
public eye, and by honoring him the University honored itself. So Harvard
conferred an LL.D. on General Winfield Scott just before the fatal battle
of Bull Run,--instead of after his brilliant Mexican campaign. If the
degree was not conferred on Holmes for his literary work, what reason
could be assigned for it; and if he deserved it on that account, Emerson
and Hawthorne certainly deserved it much more. Let us be thankful that no
such mischief was contemplated. If honorary degrees are to be given in
order to attract attention to a university, or worse still, for the
purpose of obtaining legacies, they had better be abolished altogether.

During his last visit to England Doctor Holmes was the guest of F. Max
Muller at Oxford, and years afterwards Professor Muller wrote to an
American correspondent concerning him and others:

"Froude was a dear friend of mine, related to my wife; so was Kingsley--
dear soul. Renan used to fetch books for me when we first met at the
Bibliothique Royale. Emerson stayed at my house on his last visit here.
But the best of all my American friends was Wendell Holmes. When he left
us he said, 'I have talked to thousands of people--you are the only one
with whom I have had a conversation.' We had talked about [Greek: ta
megisthta]--the world as the logos, as the thought of God. What a pure
soul his was--a real Serene Highness."

This is trancendentalism from the fountainhead; and here Doctor Holmes
may fairly be said to have avenged himself on the _Nation's_
excoriating critic.

FRANK W. BIRD, AND THE BIRD CLUB.

It is less than four miles from Harvard Square to Boston City Hall, a
building rather exceptional for its fine architecture among public
edifices, but the change in 1865 was like the change from one sphere of
human thought and activity to another. In Boston politics was everything,
and literature, art, philosophy nothing, or next to nothing. There was
mercantile life, of course, and careworn merchants anxiously waiting
about the gold-board; but there were no tally-ho coaches; there was no
golf or polo, and very little yachting. Fashionable society was also at a
low ebb, and as Wendell Phillips remarked in 1866, the only parties were
boys' and girls' dancing-parties. A large proportion of the finest young
men in the city had, like the Lowells, shed their blood for the Republic.
The young people danced, but their elders looked grave.

At this time the political centre of Massachusetts and, to a certain
extent of New England, was the Bird Club, which met every Saturday
afternoon at Young's Hotel to dine and discuss the affairs of the nation.
Its membership counted both Senators, the Governor, a number of ex-
Governors and four or five members of Congress. They were a strong team
when they were all harnessed together.

[Illustration: F. W. BIRD]

Francis William Bird, the original organizer of the club, was born in
Dedham, October 22, 1809, and the only remarkable fact concerning his
ancestry would seem to be that his great-grandmother was a Hawthorne, of
the same family as Nathaniel Hawthorne; but there was no trace of that
strongly-marked lineage in his composition. As a boy he was quick at
mathematics, but not much of a student, so that he was full eighteen
years of age before he entered Brown University. His college course also
left him in a depleted physical condition, and it was several years later
when he commenced the actual labor of life. His father had intended him
for the law; but this did not agree with his health, and his physician
advised a more active employment. Accordingly we find him in 1835 engaged
in the manufacture of paper at East Walpole, an occupation in which he
continued until 1892,--always suffering from dyspepsia, but always equal
to whatever occasion demanded of him. He was a tall, thin, wiry-looking
man, with a determined expression, but of kind and friendly manners.

He must have been a skilful man of business, for all the great financial
storms of the half century, in which he lived and worked, rolled over him
without causing him any serious embarrassment. His note was always good,
and his word was as good as his note. He always seemed to have money
enough for what he wanted to do. In prosperous times he spent generously,
although habitually practising a kind of stoical severity in regard to
his private affairs. He considered luxury the bane of wealth, and
continually admonished his children to avoid it. He was an old-fashioned
Puritan with liberal and progressive ideas.

After his marriage in 1843 to Miss Abigail Frances Newell, of Boston, he
built a commodious house in a fine grove of chestnuts on a hill-side at
East Walpole; and there he brought up his children like Greeks and
Amazons. Chestnut woods are commonly infested with hornets, but he
directed us boys not to molest them, for he wished them to learn that
hornets would not sting unless they were interfered with; an excellent
principle in human nature. Mrs. Bird resembled her husband so closely in
face and figure, that they might have been mistaken for brother and
sister. She was an excellent New England woman of the old style, and well
adapted to make her husband comfortable and happy.

The connection between manufacturing and politics is a direct and natural
one. A man who employs thirty or forty workmen, and treats them fairly,
can easily obtain an election to the Legislature without exercising any
direct influence over them; but Frank Bird's workmen felt that he had a
personal interest in each one of them. He never was troubled with
strikes. When hard times came his employees submitted to a reduction of
wages without murmuring, and when business was good they shared again in
the general prosperity. As a consequence Mr. Bird could go to the
Legislature as often as he desired; and when he changed from the
Republican to the Democratic party, in 1872, they still continued to vote
for him, until at the age of seventy-one he finally retired from public
life.

On one election day he is said to have called his men together, and to
have told them: "You will have two hours this afternoon to cast your
votes in. The mill will close at 4 o'clock, and I expect every man to
vote as I do. Now I am going to vote just as I please, and I hope you
will all do the same; but if any one of my men does not vote just as he
wants to, and I find it out, I will discharge him to-morrow." One can
imagine Abraham Lincoln making a speech like this, on a similar occasion.

Frank W. Bird, like J. B. Sargent, of New Haven, was a rare instance of
an American manufacturer who believed in free-trade. This was one reason
why he joined the Democratic party in 1872. He considered that protection
encouraged sleazy and fraudulent work, and placed honest manufacturers at
a disadvantage; though he obtained these ideas rather from reading
English magazines than from any serious study of his own. He was
naturally much more of a Democrat than a Whig, or Federalist, but he
opposed the doctrine of State Rights, declaring that it was much more
responsible for the Civil War than the anti-slavery agitation was.

The same political exigency which roused James Russell Lowell also
brought Francis William Bird before the public. In company with Charles
Francis Adams he attended the Buffalo convention, in 1848, and helped to
nominate Martin Van Buren for the Presidency. He was, however, doing more
effective work by assisting Elizur Wright in publishing the
_Chronotype_ (the most vigorous of all the anti-slavery papers),
both with money and writing; and in a written argument there were few who
could equal him. He appears to have been the only person at that time who
gave Elizur Wright much support and encouragement.

In 1850 Bird was elected to the State Legislature and worked vigorously
for the election of Sumner the ensuing winter. His chief associates
during the past two years had been Charles Francis Adams, the most
distinguished of American diplomats since Benjamin Franklin, John A.
Andrew, then a struggling lawyer, and Henry L. Pierce, afterwards Mayor
of Boston. Now a greater name was added to them; for Sumner was not only
an eloquent orator, perhaps second to Webster, but he had a worldwide
reputation as a legal authority.

Adams, however, failed to recognize that like his grandfather he was
living in a revolutionary epoch, and after the Kansas struggle commenced
he became continually more conservative--if that is the word for it--and
finally in his Congressional speech in the winter of 1861 he made the
fatal statement that personally he would be "in favor of permitting the
Southern States to secede," although he could not see that there was any
legal right for it. This acted as a divider between him and his former
associates, until in 1876 he found himself again in the same party with
Frank W. Bird.

During the administration of Governor Banks, that is, between 1857 and
1860, Bird served on the Governor's council, although generally in
opposition to Banks himself. He went as a delegate to the Chicago
Convention of 1860, where he voted at first for Seward, and afterwards
for Lincoln. From that time forward, until 1880, he was always to be
found at the State House, and devoted so much time to public affairs that
it is a wonder his business of paper manufacturing did not suffer from
it. Yet he always seemed to have plenty of time, and was never so much
absorbed in what he was doing but that he could give a cordial greeting
to any of his numerous friends. His face would beam with pleasure at the
sight of an old acquaintance, and I have known him to dash across the
street like a school-boy in order to intercept a former member of the
Legislature who was passing by on the other side. Such a man has a good
heart.

Frank Bird's abilities fitted him for higher positions than he ever
occupied; but he was so serviceable in the Legislature that all his
friends felt that he ought to remain there. He was inexorable in his
demand for honest government, and when he rose to speak all the guilty
consciences in the house began to tremble. He was the terror of the
lobbyist, and of the legislative log-roller. This made him many enemies,
but he expected it and knew how to meet them. He was especially feared
while Andrew was Governor, for every one knew that he had consulted with
Andrew before making his motion. He was the Governor's man of business.

He came to know the character of every politician in the State,--what his
opinions were, and how far he could be depended on. In this way he also
became of great service to Sumner and Wilson, who wished to know what was
taking place behind their backs while they were absent at Washington.
Sumner did not trouble himself much as to public opinion, but this was of
great importance to Wilson, who depended on politics for his daily bread.
Both, however, wanted to know the condition of affairs in their own
State, and they found that Frank Bird's information was always
trustworthy,--for he had no ulterior object of his own.

Thus he acquired much greater influence in public affairs than most of
the members of Congress. When Mr. Baldwin, who represented his district,
retired in 1868, Frank Bird became a candidate for the National
Legislature, but he suffered from the disadvantage of living at the small
end of the district, and the prize was carried off by George F. Hoar,
afterwards United States Senator; but going to Congress in the seventies
was not what it had been in the fifties and sixties, when the halls of
the Capitol resounded with the most impressive oratory of the nineteenth
century.

Frank Bird did not pretend to be an orator. His speeches were frank,
methodical and directly to the point; and very effective with those who
could be influenced by reason, without appeals to personal prejudice. He
hated flattery in all its forms, and honestly confessed that the
temptation of public speakers to cajole their audiences was the one great
demon of a democratic government. He liked Wendell Phillips on account of
the manly way in which he fought against his audiences, and strove to
bring them round to his own opinion.

He was as single-minded as Emerson or Lincoln. In November, 1862, Emerson
said to me: "I came from Springfield the other day in the train with your
father's friend, Frank Bird, and I like him very much. I often see his
name signed to newspaper letters, and in future I shall always read
them." Strangely enough, a few days later I was dining with Mr. Bird and
he referred to the same incident. When I informed him that Emerson had
also spoken of it he seemed very much pleased.

If any one paid him a compliment or expressed gratitude for some act of
kindness, he would hesitate and become silent for a moment, as if he were
reflecting whether he deserved it or not; and then would go on to some
other subject.

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