perfectly aware of this at times, and would mark his
several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation.
He was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world,
too human to be finally of less than humanity, too
gentle to be of the finest gentility. But such
limitations as he had were in the direction I have
hinted, or perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no
means ready to make a mock of them, as it would be
so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself
suggested. To value aright the affection which
the old Bostonian had for Boston one must conceive
of something like the patriotism of men in the times
when a man’s city was a man’s country,
something Athenian, something Florentine. The
war that nationalized us liberated this love to the
whole country, but its first tenderness remained still
for Boston, and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks
of himself first as a Bostonian and then as an American,
in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with himself.
The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles
the intense public spirit of the place, and gives
it a kind of personality.
In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians
who had given the city her primacy in letters, but
when I first knew him there was no apparent ground
for questioning it. I do not mean now the time
when I visited New England, but when I came to live
near Boston, and to begin the many happy years which
I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found
time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging
to take my place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember
that in this brief moment with him he brought me to
book about some vaunting paragraph in the ‘Nation’
claiming the literary primacy for New York. He
asked me if I knew who wrote it, and I was obliged
to own that I had written it myself, when with the
kindness he always showed me he protested against my
position. To tell the truth, I do not think now
I had any very good reasons for it, and I certainly
could urge none that would stand against his.
I could only fall back upon the saving clause that
this primacy was claimed mainly if not wholly for
New York in the future. He was willing to leave
me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did
even this out of politeness rather than conviction,
and I believe he had always a sensitiveness where
Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt
of me he may have had, with reference to Boston, seemed
to satisfy itself when several years afterwards he
happened to speak of a certain character in an early
novel of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian
one could wish to be. The thing came up in talk
with another person, who had referred to my Bostonian,
and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance
in the book, and not liked him. “I understood,
of course,” he said, “that he was a Bostonian,
not the Bostonian,” and I could truthfully answer
that this was by all means my own understanding too.
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