If we remember best The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, we do so in spite of the religious and pathetic motive of the greater part of Dr.Holmes's work, and of his fancy, which should be at least as conspicuous as his humour.It is fancy rather than imagination; but it is more perfect, more definite, more fit, than the larger art of imagery, which is apt to be vague, because it is intellectual and adult.No grown man makes quite so definite mental images as does a child; when the mind ages it thinks stronger thoughts in vaguer pictures.The young mind of Dr.Holmes has less intellectual imagination than intelligent fancy.For example: 'If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener.The bird in sable plumage flaps heavily along his straightforward course, while the other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the same time the crow does;' but the comparison goes on after this at needless length, with explanations.Again: 'That blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them: that glorious licence which, having shut the door and driven the reporter from thekeyhole, calls upon Truth, majestic Virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic POSES.' And this, of the Landlady: 'She told me her story once; it was as if a grain that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualise itself by a special narrative.' 'The riotous tumult of a laugh, which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features.' 'Think of the Old World--that part of it which is the seat of ancient civilisation!...A man cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession.' 'Young folk look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation.' And that exquisitely sensitive passage on the nervous outward movement and the inward tranquillity of the woods.Such things are the best this good author gives us, whether they go gay with metaphor, or be bare thoughts shapely with their own truth.
Part of the charm of Dr.Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance.He has unpreoccupied and alert eyes.Strangely enough, by the way, this watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be the slovenly observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse's gallop, 'skimming along within a yard of the ground.' Who shall trust a man's nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him? Not an inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk.But Dr.Holmes's vigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his studies of New England inland life.Much careful literature besides has been spent, after the example of Elsie Venner and the Autocrat, upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comforts achieved by a distressing household industry, the shrillness, the unrest, the best-parlour emulation, the ungraceful vanity, of Americans of the country-side and the country-town; upon their affections made vulgar by undemonstrativeness, and their consciences made vulgar by demonstrativeness--their kindness by reticence, and their religion by candour.
As for the question of heredity and of individual responsibility which Dr.Oliver Wendell Holmes proposes in Elsie Venner, it is strange that a man whom it had sincerely disquieted should present it--not in its owninsolubility but--in caricature.As though the secrets of the inherited body and soul needed to be heightened by a bit of burlesque physiology! It is in spite of our protest against the invention of Elsie's horrible plight--a conception and invention which Dr.Oliver Wendell Holmes should feel to be essentially frivolous--that the serpent-maiden moves us deeply by her last 'Good night,' and by the gentle phrase that tells us 'Elsie wept.' But now, if Dr.Holmes shall succeed in proposing the question of separate responsibility so as to convince every civilised mind of his doubts, there will be curiously little change wrought thereby in the discipline of the world.For Dr.Holmes incidentally lets us know that he cherishes and values the instinct of intolerance and destructiveness in presence of the cruel, the self-loving, and the false.Negation of separate moral responsibility, when that negation is tempered by a working instinct of intolerance and destructiveness, will deal with the felon, after all, very much in the manner achieved by the present prevalent judicialness, unscientific though it may be.And to say this is to confess that Dr.Oliver Wendell Holmes has worked, through a number of books, to futile purpose.His books are justified by something quite apart from his purpose.
