Thursday, November 13, 2014

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes to John Lothrop Motley

Boston, February 16th, 1861.

My Dear Motley,—It is a pleasing coincidence for me that the same papers which are just announcing your great work are telling our little world that it can also purchase, if so disposed, my modest two volume story. You must be having a respite from labour. You will smile when I tell you that I have my first vacation since you were with us — when was it? in ’57? — but so it is. It scares me to look on your labours, when I remember that I have thought it something to write an article once a month for the Atlantic Monthly; that is all I have to show, or nearly all, for three and a half years, and in the meantime you have erected your monument more perennial than bronze in these two volumes of alto relievo. I will not be envious, but I must wonder — wonder at the mighty toils undergone to quarry the ore before the mould could be shaped and the metal cast. I know you must meet your signal and unchallenged success with little excitement, for you know too well the price that has been paid for it. A man does not give away the best years of a manhood like yours without knowing that his planet has got to pay for his outlay. You have won the name and fame you must have foreseen were to be the accidents of your career. I hope, as you partake the gale with your illustrious brethren, you are well ballasted with those other accidents of successful authorship.

I am thankful for your sake that you are out of this wretched country. There was never anything in our experience that gave any idea of it before. Not that we have had any material suffering as yet. Our factories have been at work, and our dividends have been paid. Society — in Boston, at least — has been nearly as gay as usual. I had a few thousand dollars to raise to pay for my house in Charles Street, and sold my stocks for more than they cost me. We have had predictions, to be sure, that New England was to be left out in the cold if a new confederacy was formed, and that the grass was to grow in the streets of Boston. But prophets are at a terrible discount in these times, and, in spite of their predictions, Merrimac sells at 1125. It is the terrible uncertainty of everything — most of all the uncertainty of opinion of men. I had almost said of principles. From the impracticable Abolitionist, as bent on total separation from the South as Carolina is on secession from the North, to the Hunker, or Submissionist, or whatever you choose to call the wretch who would sacrifice everything and beg the South's pardon for offending it, you find all shades of opinion in our streets. If Mr. Seward or Mr. Adams moves in favour of compromise, the whole Republican party sways like a field of grain before the breath of either of them. If Mr. Lincoln says he shall execute the laws and collect the revenue though the heavens cave in, the backs of the Republicans stiffen again, and they take down the old revolutionary king's arms, and begin to ask whether they can be altered to carry minie bullets.

In the meantime, as you know very well, a monstrous conspiracy has been hatching for nobody knows how long, barely defeated in its first great move by two occurrences — Major Anderson's retreat to Fort Sumter, and the exposure of the great defalcations. The expressions of popular opinion in Virginia and Tennessee have encouraged greatly those who hope for union on the basis of a compromise; but this evening's news seems to throw doubt on the possibility of the North and the Border States ever coming to terms; and I see in this same evening's paper the threat thrown out that if the Southern ports are blockaded, fifty regiments will be set in motion for Washington! Nobody knows, everybody guesses. Seward seems to be hopeful. I had a long talk with Banks; he fears the formation of a powerful Southern military empire, which will give us trouble. Mr. Adams predicts that the Southern Confederacy will be an ignominious failure.

A Cincinnati pamphleteer, very sharp and knowing, shows how pretty a quarrel they will soon get up among themselves. There is no end to the shades of opinion. Nobody knows where he stands but Wendell Phillips and his out-and-outers. Before this political cataclysm we were all sailing on as quietly and harmoniously as a crew of your good Dutchmen in a treckschuyt. The Club has flourished greatly, and proved to all of us a source of the greatest delight. I do not believe there ever were such agreeable periodical meetings in Boston as these we have had at Parker's. We have missed you, of course, but your memory and your reputation were with us. The magazine which you helped to give a start to has prospered since its transfer to Ticknor and Fields. I suppose they may make something directly by it, and as an advertising medium it is a source of great indirect benefit to them. No doubt you will like to hear in a few words about its small affairs. I don't believe that all the Oxfords and Institutes can get the local recollections out of you. I suppose I have made more money and reputation out of it than anybody else, on the whole. I have written more than anybody else, at any rate. Miss Prescott's stories have made her quite a name. Wentworth Higginson's articles have also been very popular. Lowell's critical articles and political ones are always full of point, but he has been too busy as editor to write a great deal. As for the reputations that were toutes faites, I don't know that they have gained or lost a great deal by what their owners have done for the Atlantic. But oh! such a belabouring as I have had from the so-called “Evangelical” press for the last two or three years, almost without intermission! There must be a great deal of weakness and rottenness when such extreme bitterness is called out by such a good-natured person as I can claim to be in print. It is a new experience to me, but is made up by a great amount of sympathy from men and women, old and young, and such confidences and such sentimental épanchements, that if my private correspondence is ever aired, I shall pass for a more questionable personage than my domestic record can show me to have been.

Come now, why should I talk to you of anything but yourself and that wonderful career of well-deserved and hardly-won success which you have been passing through since I waved my handkerchief to you as you slid away from the wharf at East Boston? When you write to me, as you will one of these days, I want to know how you feel about your new possession, a European name. I should like very much, too, to hear something of your everyday experiences of English life, — how you like the different classes of English people you meet—the scholars, the upper class, and the average folk that you may have to deal with. You know that, to a Bostonian, there is nothing like a Bostonian's impression of a new people or mode of life. We all carry the Common in our heads as the unit of space, the State House as the standard of architecture, and measure off men in Edward Everetts as with a yard-stick. I am ashamed to remember how many scrolls of half-an-hour's scribblings we might have exchanged with pleasure on one side, and very possibly with something of it on the other. I have heard so much of Miss Lily's praises, that I should be almost afraid of her if I did not feel sure that she would inherit a kindly feeling to her father and mother's old friend. Do remember me to your children; and as for your wife, who used to be Mary once, and I have always found it terribly hard work to make anything else of, tell her how we all long to see her good, kind face again. Give me some stray half-hour, and believe me always your friend,

O. W. Holmes

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Volume 1, p. 359-62

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