Chapter IV

_THE AUTOCRAT_ AND ITS COMPANIONS, _OVER THE TEACUPS_, _OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE_

The motto, ‘Every man his own Boswell,’ on the title-page of _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_, is a key to the book. The conceit has merits besides that of novelty. There is a world of humorous suggestion in the idea of ‘doubling’ the parts of philosophic wit and worshipping reporter.

The scene is a Boston boarding-house with its more or less commonplace people, the landlady, her daughter, her son Benjamin Franklin, the young fellow called John, the old gentleman who sits opposite, the poor relation, the divinity student, the schoolmistress, and the Autocrat himself. They talk, listen, jest, laugh. Little by little the commonplace characters grow attractive. Pleasant and lovable traits come to light. There is pathos, sentiment, a deal of mirth, but little action. The Autocrat marries the schoolmistress towards the close of the book. So much likeness is there to an old-fashioned love story, and no more.

In general the characters interest less for what they say than for what they prompt the Autocrat to say. He says many things, and all so wise, so entertaining, so clever. When Holmes threw off these sparkling paragraphs month by month, he could have had little idea what the index would reveal. He glances from subject to subject, touching lightly here and lightly there. Poetry, pugilism, horse-racing, theology, and tree-lore are all equally interesting to him and to us. The reader is not too long detained by any one thing. An infinite number of topics are handled with effervescent gayety in a manner sometimes called ‘French.’ Holmes accused Emerson of want of logical sequence. That was a master stroke. Open a volume of the Breakfast-Table series at random and you chance on the oddest combinations of subjects, as when a paragraph on insanity is followed by a paragraph on private theatricals--perhaps a less illogical juxtaposition than at first sight appears. Waywardness and inconsequence are among the principal charms of _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_.

That a book so distinctively local in atmosphere and allusion should have attained at once and kept to this day widespread popularity is a little surprising. For local it is--provincial, as New Yorkers would say. At all events, it is Bostonian to the last degree. The little city, compact and picturesque, was not merely the background, the scene of the breakfast-table episodes and conversations; the entire volume is saturated with the atmosphere of Boston. To Holmes it was the one city worth while, the city whose State House was Hub of the Solar System. By his testimony (and who should know better?) you could not pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.

The _Autocrat_ was followed by the _Professor_ and the _Poet_. The critical history of sequels is well known. Seldom a complete failure, they are rarely an unqualified success. Yet it is not easy to see wherein _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table_ falls much below _The Autocrat_. The book would be justified were it only for the pathetic figure of Little Boston, to say nothing of Iris, the young Marylander, the Model of all the Virtues, and the Koh-i-noor. It is something, too, to have seen the landlady’s daughter appropriately wedded to an undertaker, and the young fellow called John also married, and in possession of ‘one of them little articles’ for which he had longed in the days of bachelorhood, to wit, a boy of his own.

_The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, a storehouse of delightful inventions, proved the least attractive of the three to the public. But all of Holmes’s old-time skill returned when he wrote _Over the Teacups_, his last book. The framework is simple but attractive, the characters have genuine vitality and pique the reader by suggesting that they must have been drawn from life. The Dictator is an old friend. Number Five, the Tutor, the Counsellor, the two Annexes, Number Seven, the Mistress and Delilah are agreeable acquaintances, and the misfortune is ours if we do not know them as well as the figures of _The Autocrat_.

All these books are personal, known as such, and deriving half their charm from the reader’s ability to recognize Holmes himself under various disguises. In _Our Hundred Days in Europe_ the author speaks _in propria persona_, and the volume may be described as a big printed letter addressed to the writer’s friends, who, loving him as they do, will rejoice in his happiness and his triumphs.