if I may so express my sense of a mental attitude
that misled many. As I have said before, he was
universally interested, and he studied the universe
from himself. I do not know how one is to study
it otherwise; the impersonal has really no existence;
but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make
so simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not
practise the feints some use to conceal that interest
in self which, after all, every one knows is only
concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself
the starting-point in all his inquest of the hearts
and minds of other men, but so far from singling himself
out in this, and standing apart in it, there never
was any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being
in the things of the soul.
In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked
at some people through palings and even over the broken
bottles on the tops of walls; and I think he was the
loser by this, as well as they. But then I think
all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences
between men; we need not trouble ourselves to multiply
them. Even behind his fences, however, Holmes
had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
any one came into personal relations with him who did
not experience this kindness. In that long and
delightful talk I had with him on my return from Venice
(I can praise the talk because it was mainly his),
we spoke of the status of domestics in the Old World,
and how fraternal the relation of high and low was
in Italy, while in England, between master and man,
it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity.
“Yes,” he said, “I always felt as
if English servants expected to be trampled on; but
I can’t do that. If they want to be trampled
on, they must get some one else.” He thought
that our American way was infinitely better; and I
believe that in spite of the fences there was always
an instinctive impulse with him to get upon common
ground with his fellow-man. I used to notice
in the neighborhood cabman who served our block on
Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for
the Autocrat, which could have come from nothing but
the kindly terms between them; if you went to him
when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so
with a sort of implication in his manner that the
thought of anything else for the time was profanation.
The good fellow who took him his drives about the
Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in
the joke of the doctor’s humor, and within the
bounds of his personal modesty and his functional
dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor’s
sallies, when you stood talking with him, or listening
to him at the carriage-side.
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