Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Stephen Budiansky

  CHAPTER 2

  A New England Boyhood

  Dr. Holmes had moved to a house in the heart of the old Boston of crooked little streets upon his marriage in June 1840. His eldest son and namesake was born there just less than nine months later, on March 8, 1841. Two other children followed: Amelia Jackson Holmes, named after her mother, in 1843, and Edward Jackson in 1846.

  Tremont Street in 1860, looking toward the Common from King’s Chapel. Montgomery Place is halfway down on the left

  Montgomery Place was a tiny lane of elegant townhouses just off Tremont Street. From the corner, King’s Chapel was one block to the right; Boston Common, one block to the left. The Athenaeum library—after its move in 1849 to its new (and present-day) home —was just across the Old Granary Burying Ground, on the opposite side of Tremont Street.

  At the other end of Montgomery Place a set of small steps led down to Province Street; from there it was a two-block walk to the Old Corner Book Store, which was also the offices of Boston’s famed publishing house Ticknor and Fields—“the lounge resort of all the literary celebrities of Boston and Harvard University,” a contemporary guide to the city noted. Dr. Holmes always stopped in “to give and receive the news of the day,” and Emerson usually wandered by when he came to town, hoping to find someone to have lunch with.1

  The “little steps” at the end of Montgomery Place, in 1934

  Montgomery Place is now Bosworth Street, and a modern brick and glass high-rise hotel and condominiums now cover the block where the Holmes house stood at No. 8, but the “little steps” at the end of the street that were a touchstone of Holmes’s own earliest boyhood memories—“more venerable to me than the Cenotaph of Romulus,” he called them—still lead down to Province Street. Revisiting Boston eight decades later and gazing upon those steps, he wrote his friend Frederick Pollock, “I can get the mystery of the past. . . . By there I was born and they have not changed, and with memory they call up a Boston of two centuries ago.”2

  In its physical contours the Boston of his youth was in many ways unchanged from the early eighteenth century. There were still pumps in the backyards to supply water; light came from whale oil lamps “that it always was a bore to get started,” he recalled; and even in the city, outhouses were the norm and “the admirable contribution of Messrs. Gayetty and others to the comfort of the toilet were unknown.” That was a reference to the inventor of the first commercially marketed toilet paper; in an amusingly persistent recollection, Holmes added, “I seem to remember not only newspapers, but extra sheets of some work of my father’s performing the function.”3

  The city’s massive landfill project to convert Back Bay into a neighborhood of boulevards, parks, and stately residences was still two decades in the future; the mixture of stagnant water and untreated sewage that filled the dammed-off “Receiving Basin” came up to Arlington Street, where Holmes remembered fishing with a pin hook as a boy, and the land that is now the Public Garden was “a dreary waste.”4

  Even the Unitarian Boston of Holmes’s youth was “still half-Puritan Boston”; the old Puritan strictures against representational art, secular music, public statues, even celebrating Christmas as a holiday, held Boston “half-stifled in its bonds.” (The Puritans regarded Christmas Day festivities as superstitious popery; Boston exchanged gifts on New Year’s Day.)5

  Sundays hung over Holmes’s youth every bit as oppressively as they had for his father. “Oh—the ennui of those Sunday morning church bells, and hymn tunes, and the sound of the citizen’s feet on the pavement—not heard on other days. I hardly have recovered from it now,” he recalled to Laski in 1918. Sunday was “Dismal Day,” Holmes said, and he never did recover from its association with the tapioca pudding that was the invariable dessert at the Holmes house on the Sundays of his boyhood. “Stick-jaw,” he called it with loathing, and one guest to lunch at Beverly Farms remembered watching the justice literally throwing a bowl of it out the window when it showed up on the table there.6

  The woman Dr. Holmes had married, Amelia Lee Jackson, was “well off” as they said in Boston—not quite the same thing as possessing “a fortune,” but sufficient to allow the couple to marry without delay (the house on Montgomery Street was a gift to the couple from her father, Judge Charles Jackson). Dr. Holmes had got to know her through her uncle Dr. James Jackson; another uncle was Patrick Tracy Jackson, a leading Boston merchant and financier. He, along with Francis Cabot Lowell, had founded the new textile manufacturing center on the Merrimack River forty miles northwest of Boston that bore Lowell’s name. As one of the Boston Associates, the forty or so families who controlled nearly all of the textile mills of northern New England, Patrick Jackson had subsequently expanded his interests into banking and railroads.7

  These were men of business and civic power, the financial counterpart to the Brahmin caste of Dr. Holmes’s family. Even Judge Jackson was more a businessman than an intellectual: he owed his appointment to the state’s high court to the connections he had developed over his years of practice as a commercial lawyer, rather than to any contributions to legal scholarship or public service.8

  It was from his mother, Holmes said, that he inherited his melancholy streak, such as it was, his father by contrast being “almost too bright and cheerful.” He remarked once that his mother had also given him his skeptical temperament—implying perhaps that his father’s ready insights into everything did not impress his more practically reared wife as much as it did the admiring members of his literary and intellectual circle.9

  An inheritance of $2,000 she received in 1849 allowed the family to build a country retreat in Pittsfield at the western end of Massachusetts, and as a boy Holmes spent every summer there, from age eight to fifteen. The land had been in the family going back to Dr. Holmes’s great-grandfather Jacob Wendell, who in 1738 bought a thirty-six-square-mile tract from the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The original parcel had included nearly all of the land of present-day Pittsfield, though by Dr. Holmes’s time all that remained in the family’s possession was a 280-acre tract, located south of town on the road to Lenox, known as Canoe Meadow.10

  It was a beautiful New England farm, with hills, fields, streams, and meadows, and the Housatonic River meandering through the middle. (There is still a Holmes Road there today, and a Massachusetts Audubon Society wildlife sanctuary called Canoe Meadows.)

  The Holmes place in Pittsfield

  With his usual energy Dr. Holmes threw himself into country life, ordering seedling trees from English nurseries, putting up fences, chairing the judging committee of a plowing contest at the Berkshire County fair.

  But “one thing led to another,” the doctor found. The house, which an architect had assured him could be built for the $2,000 Mrs. Holmes had inherited, grew increasingly elaborate, more country estate than summer cottage, sprouting window pediments, roof gables, dentil moldings, corner quoins, gingerbread porch railings, and ended up costing twice as much. Then the doctor decided he needed a barn, and then a horse and wagon; and then, as usual, he gave it all up. It was too expensive, and too far away from Boston to take care of properly.

  “I loved the trees, and while our children were little it was a good place for them,” Dr. Holmes wrote, “but we had to sell it; and it was better in the end, although I felt lost without it for a great while.” He had planted nearly all of the trees with his own hands, and leaving them behind seemed to hurt the most; he “never had the courage” to visit the place again, he sadly told a friend.11

  But the love for the New England countryside that his son acquired during those idyllic summers in Pittsfield was part of his life ever after. His father reported that Wendell spent most of his days there fishing, swimming, shooting, and drawing. The outdoor life did him good; he was growing tall and slim. His nickname was “Leany Holmes,” in notable contrast to his cousin John, who was “Fatty Morse.”12

  Sixty summers later Holmes wrote a friend, “This country has my earliest associations and
they largely affect if they don’t control our deepest loves and reverences. Among the foundations of my soul are granite rocks and barberry bushes.”13

  LIKE MOST BOYS of his class and time, Holmes was placed in the charge of private schoolmasters for his early education. He took to it from the start, as a member of the Holmes family would have been expected to. After a year at a “dame’s school,” the equivalent of a kindergarten for boys and girls, run by a schoolmistress—that was where he had earned his report for talking too much—he attended a boys’ school that met in the basement of the Park Street Church, a block from the Montgomery Place home.

  “Young as he is,” reported his schoolmaster three years later, “his habits of application are confirmed, while his proficiency in all the English branches, and his love of study are remarkable for his age.” That was for a letter of introduction to the headmaster of the Private Latin School, where Holmes, at age ten, began in the fall of 1851. The headmaster was Epes Sargent Dixwell. In the small world of Boston Brahmins, Dixwell had studied law for a year in the office of Judge Jackson, but had abandoned the profession to accept an offer to become headmaster of the Boston Latin School a few years later.14

  Dixwell had decided to open his own school in the spring of 1851 when the city adopted an ordinance requiring public school teachers to live within the city limits; Dixwell had a home in Cambridge, at 58 Garden Street, that he had built around 1840 and where his growing family lived comfortably in a quiet neighborhood filled with Harvard professors and other members of the Cambridge intelligentsia, just a few blocks north of Harvard Yard.15 John Holmes said that so little ever happened in Cambridge that, if two cats crossed the street, all the neighbors rushed to the windows to watch.16 But Garden Street, with its spacious homes, old trees, and well-tended gardens was in fact a welcome and bucolic haven amid Greater Boston’s rapidly increasing growth and commercial bustle of the mid-century, which by 1859 would drive Dr. Holmes to move from his downtown Boston homes twice in a decade in search of quieter neighborhoods.

  Holmes’s schoolmaster and future father-in-law, E. S. Dixwell

  E. S. Dixwell’s wife was the daughter of Nathaniel Bowditch, a self-taught mathematician and astronomer who in 1802 published The New American Practical Navigator, which to this day remains the standard reference work in navigation, universally known to sailors as “Bowditch.” His eldest daughter was Fanny Bowditch Dixwell—who would marry her father’s new pupil twenty-one years later.

  Dixwell was a renowned classical scholar. But the main focus of his school—as it had been at Boston Latin—was to prepare students for admission to Harvard, which meant cramming them with Latin, Greek, ancient history, and mathematics, the only subjects covered on the college’s entrance examination. A contemporary said that Dixwell ran a “classical grind-mill.” It probably says more about his young charge’s intellectual curiosity than about the headmaster’s instructional methods that Holmes emerged with his love of learning apparently intact. But Dixwell was a kind and generous man, and between the rote lessons he hammered into his pupils’ skulls he seems to have at least not closed the door to the intellectual vistas beyond; years later, when Holmes was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the schoolmaster wrote his son-in-law and former pupil of his fond recollections of the days “when you used to wait after school to walk along with me and talk of all topics as I went home. It was a very pleasant relation we then held and is still alive with me.”17

  Years later Holmes recalled to friends the “futile shrinking from new things” that had kept him from learning in his childhood to ride or drive a horse, to ice skate, or dance, but he was not referring to physical timidity; it was rather that he already had a sense of what it took to truly master a subject, and an inkling of the dissatisfactions of half-knowledge.

  “Alas I know too much in other directions not to divine how much there is to know,” he told Mrs. Gray, explaining why in later years he similarly could never apply himself to learning about the rocks and birds of the North Shore that he loved. He knew he could not give such subjects the attention required to do them justice, and would only be frustrated at dabbling. He felt the same way about games like bridge. “I give up in advance all games that require intelligence,” he remarked to Lewis Einstein. “I am sure I never could do them well just as I am almost equally sure I never could have been a good fencer, and at least doubt if I ever could have been a good dancer.”18

  The Dixwell house on Garden Street in Cambridge

  HARVARD MIGHT HAVE broadened minds or it might have trained them in useful occupations for a growing nation, but in the 1850s it did neither, and proudly so. For Holmes’s Class of 1861, as for previous generations at Harvard, there was no choice of major, few electives, barely any modern science, and a great deal of Latin, Greek, and Rhetoric, all taught by rote recitation.

  Henry Adams, who was three years ahead of Holmes, was scathing in his assessment of what passed for education at the Harvard of their day when he looked back a half century later. “It taught little,” Adams said, “and that little ill.” What was taught in religion, ethics, philosophy, history, literature, art, and science, “stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.” But “any other education would have required a serious effort,” Adams observed, and “no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.”19

  Harvard’s undergraduates were graded on an elaborate point system (eight points for a perfect recitation in a class, twenty-four for a perfect written exercise) with an equally elaborate system of deductions for disciplinary violations (eight points for being late to compulsory daily morning chapel). For each student, the tally of points per semester ran to the thousands, all meticulously recorded, and just as universally derided. At the end of his freshman year, Holmes received a demerit of thirty-two points for creating a “disturbance” in the Yard following his last examination.20

  His more serious college rebellions involved ideas.

  One of the required subjects for all Harvard freshmen was Religious Instruction, consisting of a semester each of classes in “Christian Morals” and “Christian Evidences.”

  The instructor was the Preacher to the University and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, Frederic Dan Huntington. His instruction consisted mainly of arguments for the truth of the Christian faith and the simple perfection of its moral precepts.21 During one class, he told his students that it was under any circumstance and in all cases evil and wrong to lie. Holmes, fifteen years old, promptly challenged him. Would it be equally evil and dishonest, he asked, if a white woman being chased by a band of Indians tried to fool her pursuers by concealing herself in a swamp and placing a piece of moss over her head? Was not that equally an attempt to convey an untruth to another person, which is the essence of a lie? When Holmes told the story to Mark Howe seventy years later he could not remember what Huntington’s reply had been, but did recall that he had proceeded to explicate to the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals “the fallacious distinction between falsehood in word and action.”22

  In his sophomore year Holmes published an essay, entitled “Books,” in the December 1858 issue of Harvard Magazine, an undergraduate literary journal. It was Holmes’s first published work; it exhorted his classmates to reject the conventional wisdom of organized religion and think for themselves about the urgent questions of life.

  A hundred years ago we burnt men’s bodies for not agreeing with our religious tenets; we still burn their souls. And now some begin to say, Why is this so? Is it true that such ideas as this come from God? . . . And when these questions are asked around us,—when we, almost the first of young men who have been brought up in an atmosphere of investigation, instead of having every doubt answered, It is written,—when we begin to enter the fight, can we help feeling it is a tragedy? Can we help going to our rooms and crying that we might not think? . . . It will not do for Ruskin to say
, Read no books of an agitating tendency; you will have enough by and by to distress you. We must, will we or no, have every train of thought brought before us while we are young, and may as well at once prepare for it.23

  Following his own advice, he began devouring as many books outside the narrowly prescribed college curriculum as he could lay his hands on, particularly philosophy, art, and art history. By his senior year, and now one of the editors of the magazine, he was regularly provoking his more conventionally devout classmates—and the college authorities, as well—with articles questioning Christianity’s claim to moral superiority, the adequacy of Harvard’s curriculum, and the competence of its professors.

  In an essay in the October 1860 Harvard Magazine, Holmes argued that even the great religious art of the past, as exemplified by Albert Dürer’s engravings, does not ultimately depend on “religious form” or the “stories” and “simple and childlike faith” of the Christianity of those earlier times. He added, “Nowadays we see that duty is not less binding had the Bible never been written, or if we were to perish utterly tomorrow.”24

  That brought an outraged reply from a fellow student who accused Holmes of copying Emerson and of adopting a flippant attitude toward Christian virtue.

  But the authorities were more incensed by an article that had appeared in the previous issue attacking the Reverend Huntington—who, to the astonishment of the Harvard community, had announced he was resigning from the college and joining the Episcopal Church. The article, which was written by Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, offered as a parting shot the opinion that Huntington had “never won the hearts of the students,” “was not frank and open,” and had pursued a course of “sectarian and religious narrowness.”25

  Harvard’s president, Cornelius Felton, was so scandalized that he wrote Dr. Holmes asking him to rein in his disruptive son—and warning that the faculty would certainly shut down the magazine if it continued to print articles “disrespectful in tone and language.”26