Chapter III: The Writer

In his characteristic prose style Holmes is easy, familiar, off-hand, in short, conversational. He may have spent hours over his paragraphs, but with their air of unpremeditation they give no sign of it. The manner of his prose is well-bred but nonchalant. Yet there is always a note of reserve. The Autocrat is less familiar than he seems.

The conversational style permits abrupt turns, sudden transitions, a pleasant negligence. It also has narrow limits; it cannot rise to eloquence, and fine writing is apt to seem out of place. Holmes knew pretty accurately the limits of his instrument.

Like other practised writers, he varied his style to fit his subject. And while a certain winsomeness is never wanting, it is less apparent in the novels than in the ‘Breakfast-Table’ books, and in the biographies than in the novels. Often he becomes business-like, extremely matter of fact, clearly determined to make his point or to solve his problem without waste of words or superfluous ornament.

With respect to his verse we have been told that Holmes was a ‘consummate master of all that is harmonious, graceful, and pleasing in rhythm and in language.’ Had the eulogist been speaking of Tennyson, or Swinburne, or Shelley, he could have said little more. Holmes’s verse is neat, precise, felicitous, often graceful, unmistakably clever, abounding in pointed phrase and happy rhyme, but taken as a whole it must be adjudged the poetry of a cultivated gentleman and a wit rather than the poetry of a poet.

Much of it has a distinctly old-fashioned air, contrasting oddly with the freshness and ‘modernity’ of the poet’s prose. In his own phrase Holmes ‘was trained after the schools of classical English verse as represented by Pope, Goldsmith, and Campbell.’ The metrical essays (_Poetry_, _Astræa_, _Urania_) show how strong was the Eighteenth-century influence. The choice of metre cannot be questioned. If audiences will have poetic dissertations, they probably suffer least under the heroic couplet. It is easy to comprehend, and not difficult to write; and the form of the verse tempts to cleverness.