CHAPTER IX

THE AUTOCRAT

In 1852 Holmes delivered a course of lectures on the “English Poets of the Nineteenth Century,”—Wordsworth, Moore, Keats, Shelley, and others. At the end of each lecture he read a poem, and these poems now appear in his collected works as “After a Lecture on Wordsworth,” “After a Lecture on Moore,” etc.

In a letter to an official he states the terms on which he is willing to give this course of lectures in various towns and cities:

“My terms for a lecture, when I stay over night, are fifteen dollars and expenses, a room with a fire in it, in a public house, and a mattress to sleep on,—not a feather bed. As you write in your individual capacity, I tell you at once all my habitual exigencies. I am afraid to sleep in a cold room; I can’t sleep on a feather bed; I will not go to private houses; and I have fixed upon the sum mentioned as what it is worth to go away for the night to places that cannot pay more.”

The landlady in the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” also has something to say about his lectures:

“He was a man that loved to stick around home as much as any cat you ever see in your life. He used to say he’d as lief have a tooth pulled as go away anywheres. Always got sick, he said, when he went away, and never sick when he didn’t. Pretty nigh killed himself goin’ about lecturing two or three winters,—talkin’ in cold country lyceums,—as he used to say,—goin’ home to cold parlors and bein’ treated to cold apples and cold water; and then goin’ up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin’ home next mornin’ with a cold in his head as bad as the horse distemper.”

Perhaps this is why Holmes was not more of a traveler, going to Europe but twice, and hardly ever leaving his birthplace of Cambridge or his home in Boston.

So twenty years passed by after he published his first volume of poems before he did anything else very literary. His fellow professor Longfellow had become famous; and so had Hawthorne; and so, too, had Lowell and Whittier. But Holmes seemed to have no desire for fame. He had written a few amusing poems, and delivered some lectures.

But when the _Atlantic Monthly_ was about to be started, all the literary folk turned to Holmes and said, “That jolly old fellow could write something good, if he only would.”

The young publishers, Phillips & Sampson, were enthusiastic about the new magazine. Lowell was chosen editor, and Francis H. Underwood was assistant, though the idea was originally his. They called in Longfellow and Emerson, and Motley and Holmes. This distinguished company met at a dinner and talked over the new project. Holmes suggested the name _Atlantic Monthly_. Longfellow would contribute a poem now and then, and Emerson an essay from time to time; but poems and essays do not fill up a magazine very fast. So Lowell determined to get something from Holmes, some light, gossipy prose, that should continue on from month to month. The doctor remembered that he had written some papers twenty-five years before for the _New England Magazine_, and he determined to “shake the same bough again” and see what fruit he could get. So he began where he had left off all those years before with an “As-I-was-saying.” And for a year or more, every month in the _Atlantic_, the “Autocrat” gave his opinions of life, cracked his little jokes on men and things, recited a poem, or gossiped with his landlady and fellow boarders. And each month that distinguished literary company met at some hotel or restaurant in Boston and had a dinner which was a feast of reason and good things for the mind and heart as well as for the stomach; and Holmes was the wit and soul of every banquet.

At last Oliver Wendell Holmes had come before the world as a great poet and a great humorist. The “Autocrat” is the very soul of humor, so genial, so wise in his good advice, so gay in his good nature, so light and sparkling and kind. Now was published “The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”; and by its side that most beautiful of all the poems Holmes ever wrote, “The Chambered Nautilus.” When the Princess of Wales asked him to write in her album, he copied the last verse of “The Chambered Nautilus,” as he had done in the album of many a subject of our great republic. Listen! Holmes could be stately and beautiful as well as gay and humorous:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

If you wish to know the wise things Holmes said about anything and everything, read “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Here are a few bright sayings which you will not find in that book, but which will give you an idea of the kind of things with which the volume is filled:

“An Indian is a few instincts on legs, and holding a tomahawk.”

“If a doctor has the luck to find out a new malady, it is tied to his name like a tin kettle to a dog’s tail, and he goes clattering down the highway of fame to posterity with his æolian attachment following at his heels.”

Gunpowder: “Chemistry seals up a few dark grains in iron vases, and lo! at the touch of a single spark, rises in smoke and flames a mighty Afrit with a voice like thunder and an arm that shatters like an earthquake.”

“The scholar’s mind is furnished with shelves like his library. Each book knows its place in the brain as well as against the wall or in the alcove. His consciousness is doubled by the books which encircle him, as the trees that surround a lake repeat themselves in its unruffled waters. Men talk of the nerve that runs to the pocket, but one who loves his books, and has lived long with them, has a nervous filament which runs from his sensorium to every one of them.”

“Slang—is the way in which a lazy adult shifts the trouble of finding any exact meaning in his (or her) conversation on the other party. If both talkers are indolent, all their talk lapses into the vague generalities of childhood. It is a prevalent social vice of the time, as it has been of times that are past.”

Perhaps the most famous expression in the “Autocrat” is that in which he calls Boston “the hub of the solar system” (often wrongly quoted as “the hub of the universe”).

“The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” was such a success that it sold the _Atlantic Monthly_ by the thousands of copies. The editors and publishers both said, “This is just the thing: give us more, give us more.” So Holmes wrote another book, which he called “The Professor at the Breakfast Table”; and then “The Poet at the Breakfast Table.”

In the “Autocrat” Holmes said that every man had in him the writing of at least one novel. As the demand for his work was great, he thought he would write one. So he produced “Elsie Venner, a Romance of Destiny.” It is a strange story of a girl who has the nature of a snake. Holmes had heard of cases like that of Elsie Venner, and he worked her story out in a scientific manner. We read it as if it were really true, and it exercises a weird fascination over us.

Later he wrote another novel, entitled “The Guardian Angel.”