Chapter II: The Man

Among the ‘Autocrat’s’ distinguishing traits was humanity. He has recorded the feeling of ‘awe-stricken sympathy’ at first sight of the white faces of the sick in the hospital wards. ‘The dreadful scenes in the operating theatre--for this was before the days of ether--were a great shock to my sensibilities.’ His nerves hardened in time, but he was always keenly alive to human suffering. There is a note of contempt in his reference to Lisfranc, the surgeon, who ‘regretted the splendid guardsmen of the Empire because they had such magnificent thighs to amputate.’

It was once said of Holmes that he was difficult to catch unless he were wanted for some kind act. He lost no opportunity to give happiness. In old age when flattery was tedious, and blindness imminent, and the autograph hunter had become a burden, he patiently wrote his name and transcribed stanzas of ‘Dorothy Q.’ or ‘The Last Leaf’ for admirers from all parts of the earth. This was the smallest tax on his good nature. For years he had been expected to act as counsel and sometimes as literary agent for all the minor poets of America. Many of these innocents conceived Holmes as automatically issuing certificates to the virtue of their work. He was always kind and invariably plain-spoken. To the author of an epic he wrote: ‘I cannot conscientiously advise you to print your poem; it will be an expense to you, and the gain to your reputation will not be an equivalent.’

Holmes believed in the humanizing influences of good blood, social position, and wealth. It was no small matter, he thought, to have a descent from men who had played their parts acceptably in the drama of life. He preferred the man with the ‘family portraits’ to the man with the ‘twenty-cent daguerreotype’ unless he had reason to believe that the latter was the better man of the two. His amusing poem, ‘Contentment,’ is not a jest, but a plain statement of his philosophy.

Open-minded in literary and scientific matters, he was delightfully conservative about places. He respected the country and loved the town. A city man, he was also a man of one city. He professed to have been the discoverer of Myrtle Street, the abode of ‘peace and beauty, and virtue, and serene old age.’ Thus it looked to him as he explored its ‘western extremity of sunny courts and passages.’ Holmes’s books contain many proofs of his cat-like attachment to city nooks and corners, his liking for odd streets, unexpected turns, and winding ways. ‘I have bored this ancient city through and through, until I know it as an old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese.’

Holmes enjoyed above all the sense of an undisturbed possession of things. He complained of the march of modern improvement only when he found himself improved out of one house and driven to take refuge in another. He thought that a wretched state of affairs whereby a man was compelled to move every twenty or thirty years.

With his sunny nature Holmes found it difficult to be a good hater. He had but two violent antipathies, Calvinism and homœopathy. On these he concentrated the little measure of asperity he possessed, together with a large measure of vigorous logic and frank contempt.