The 20-Year Dialogue

HOLMES-LASKI LETTERS (1,650 pp.)--2 Vols. edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe--Harvard ($12.50).

It all began with a simple bread & butter note that Harold J. Laski, 23, sent to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 75, one day in 1916. Laski, then an instructor in government at Harvard, assured the Great Dissenter that "you teach our generation how we may hope to live," pressed a couple of books on him, and begged permission to "write sometimes and ask you questions." In the next two decades, Briton Laski asked precious few questions of Yankee Holmes, and frequently he wrote three or four letters to Holmes's one, but the sparks flying between two well-charged minds produced what is perhaps the longest and most scintillating correspondence of the 20th century.

The early Laski, eager and adulatory, often buttered up Holmes as if he were a, rich uncle with a legacy to hand out. If this cloyed on Holmes, he never gave a sign; he was obviously having too much fun watching Laski's continuous intellectual floor show. Holmes soon learned to value the new friendship so dearly that when Laski left the U.S. in 1920 to teach at the London School of Economics, Holmes wrote: "I shall miss you sadly. There is no other man I should miss so much."

The age gap was easily bridged. Materialist Holmes, with his suppleness, curiosity and gusto, was perennially young; Socialist Laski, with his dogmas and his immense learning, was prematurely old. For the rest, a passion for ideas, a faith in reason (as used by men of intellect), a dim view of organized religion, mutually known books and friends marked the common court on which they played out a tennis match of the mind. In time, they batted everything and everybody over the net, from Aristotle to Hemingway, from dentists to doorknobs, from Communism to the common cold.

"The Asm for Isms." Two facts emerge clearly from the letters: 1) Laski was bright but Holmes was wise; 2) latter-day liberals who have appropriated Holmes as the spiritual godfather of the New Deal will never be able to square that image of him with what he says in these letters, as they could never square it with his other writings. Time & again Holmes gently ribbed Laski and his friends on their "asm for isms."

Wrote Holmes: "I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy . . . If I am to consider contributions they vary infinitely--all that any man contributes is giving a direction to force. The architect does it on a larger scale than the bricklayer who only sees that a brick is laid level. I know no a priori reason why he should not have a greater reward. Kant did it on a larger scale than the architect . . . Some kind of despotism is at the bottom of the seeking for change. I don't care to boss my neighbors . . . even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal."

"The Dogmatic Instinct." Replied Laski: "Your economic diagnosis . . . is at bottom the economics of the soldier who accepts a rough equation between isness and oughtness . . . You are living amid a system where the classic principles of capitalism still work successfully. I amid one where the growing inadequacy of that machine is most obvious."

Laski was never caught without a complete set of opinions. Their range, if not their Tightness, unfailingly delighted Holmes. Some of Laski's views:

On himself: "A great Pope was lost in me. I have the dogmatic instinct."

On peace conferences: "It's well to go into these things with open eyes. The difficulty is that our democrats go in with an open mouth."

On Christianity: "I think it is gloriously dead intellectually and I think the French Revolution killed it."

On Yale students: "The Yale students have not the intellectual force of Harvard but they have all the irresistible charm of youth."

On mystics: "I like the fellows who tell you where they got their information from. These damned mystics with a private line to God ought to be compelled to disconnect."

On meeting Galsworthy: "So pure, so high-minded . . . that I wanted to shout for the Folies Bergeres."

On Henry James: "If ever God made a lame cat, James was the boy. Culture without perception, delicate to the verge of indelicacy . . . it all sounds to me like high middle-class life described from the angle of a natural-born valet."

On Kipling: "I saw no power of reflection, though there was a real gift of happy phrase . . . When he said anything especially good he looked up as if waiting for you to clap your hands."

On Churchill (1921): "Unquestionably he has real genius; but he lacks staying-power, and the egoism of his utterance would be appalling if he were not so obviously just a grown-up child."

On Holmes as a ladies' man: "At Haldane's on Sunday his sister said that she remembered you most perfectly in the 'nineties as the most perfect flirt in London. It was all, she said, in a way you had of cocking your eye that they found quite ravishing."

A Hole in the Boat. Cocking an older eye at the frail Laski's furious round of reading, writing, lecturing, politicking and literary partygoing. Holmes continually warned his half-century junior against "working your machine too hard." Pithier than Laski and more profound, he matched him dictum for dictum, except that the Holmes dicta more often suggested the open mind than the clenched fist. Some of Holmes's views:

On the role of reason: "As I grow older I realize how limited a part reason has in the conduct of men. They believe what they want to--and although liable to shipwreck, they very generally get off with a hole in the bottom of their boat and stick an old coat into that."

On progress: "The attempt to lift up men's hearts by a belief in progress seems to me like the wish for spiritualism or miracles, to rest on not taking a large enough view or going far enough back."

On tradition: "Continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity."

On convention: "Man is an idealizing animal--and expresses his ideals (values) in the conventions of his time. I have very little respect for the conventions in themselves, but respect and generally try to observe those of my own environment."

On feminists: "With your belief in some apriorities like equality you may have difficulties [with the feminists]. I who believe in force (mitigated by politeness) have no trouble--and if I were sincere and were asked certain whys by a woman should reply, 'Because Ma'm I am the bull.' "

On the Sacco-Vanzetti case: "I think the row that has been made idiotical if considered on its merits, but of course it is not on the merits that the row is made, but because it gives the extremists a chance to yell . . ."

The Price of Beer. On the rights of man: "I don't talk much of rights, as I see no meaning in the rights of man except what the crowd will fight for. I heard the original Agassiz (Louis) say that in some part of Germany there would be a revolution if you added a farthing to the cost of a glass of beer. If that was true, the current price was one of the rights of man at that place."

On his own atheism: "I can't help an occasional semi-shudder as I remember that millions of intelligent men think that I am barred from the face of God unless I change. But how can one pretend to believe what seems to him childish and devoid alike of historical and rational foundations?"

On Bernard Shaw: "I regard him as he once described himself, as a mountebank--good to make you laugh but not to be taken too seriously."

On Economist-Planner John Maynard Keynes: "Gifted cove--I suspect dogmatic and unprepossessing but seeing things."

On the fate of ideas: "When we were boys we used to run tiddledies on the frog pond in the Common--that is, jump from piece to piece of the ice, each being enough to jump from but sinking under you if you stopped. I said [to Brandeis], having ideas was like running tiddledies --if you stopped too long on one, it sank with you."

In his 92nd year, Holmes finally felt he could no longer keep up his end of the long dialogue. "If you keep a list of your charities," he wrote to Laski, "my name should lead all the rest . . . My affection is unabated--but I can no more. Please keep on writing to me." For two years and two months more, until Holmes's death, Laski loyally did.

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