Holmes's Heir

HOLMES OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE--M. A. DeWolfe Howe--Oxford Universify Press ($2.50).

In a Beacon Hill drawing room one Saturday afternoon in 1893 an awed young man was introduced in a loud voice to a tiny, asthmatic, homely oldster. The young man was Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe, 29, recently made assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The old man was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wittiest man of his day, unofficial Boston poet laureate, last surviving petal of the literary flowering of New England. By the next autumn, feeling "like my own survivor," Dr. Holmes had died quietly at 85 in his armchair. It was their only meeting. But of the next New England literary generation, Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe has come nearest, by temperament if not by talent, to carrying on the Holmes traditions.

Now 74, a genial wit who looks like a diffident Boston banker and has been rumored to be the prototype of The Late George Apley, Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe is a writer of light and occasional verse, author of 28 books, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning Barrett Wendell and His Letters, the monumental five-volume Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany. A professional Harvard man like Holmes, loving Boston no less than Holmes did (although he was born in Rhode Island, brought up in Philadelphia), Howe is an overseer of Harvard, was for 25 years a trustee of the Boston Athenaeum, probably knows more about New England's history and first families than any man alive. To his knowledge is credited much of the background which has gone into more polished biographies than Author Howe's; notable is The Flowering of New England, by his good friend Van Wyck Brooks.

The main emphasis of his Holmes of the Breakfast-Table is on Holmes as a forerunner of the moderns--the cool-headed doctor who not only wrote a medical classic on puerperal fever, but occasionally, as in Elsie Venner, anticipated Freud; the science popularizer whose Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table came nearer to Darwin than to the Transcendentalists; the author of The Professor, the awkward but potent anti-Calvinist Babbitt of its day.

Author Howe is at his best, however, in recapturing the charm and wit which held the Saturday Club and Boston dinner tables spellbound, prompting Charles Kingsley to stammer on his U. S. visit: "He is an insp-sp-sp--ired j-j-j-ack-daw."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.