Old Cambridge by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Author:Thomas Wentworth Higginson [Higginson, Thomas Wentworth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Geschichte
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2018-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

It must be remembered that Holmes was constitutionally conservative, and the element of whim came in to make him even more so in appearance than he actually was. His favorite character, Little Boston, was a fanciful exaggeration of his own innocent cockneyism. In his day Beacon Street was still precisely what he called it, “The sunny street that holds the sifted few,” and young men and maidens in good society carried on their courtships while walking round the Common or down the long path or on the mill-dam. “Whom does Arabella walk with now?” was a question occasionally heard in careful circles of maiden aunts. Holmes did not really desire any larger social arena, and moreover got all the rural life he wanted through his summer visits in Pittsfield. He was conservative on the slavery question until the Civil War, hated quacks and fanatics with honest and unflinching hostility, and it was only the revolt of his kindly nature against Calvinism which threw him finally on the side of progress. The Saturday Club with all its attractions did not lead him in that direction. It brought together an agreeable set of cultivated men, but none of the more strenuous reformers of its day, however brilliant, except Emerson and occasionally Sumner and Howe. Edmund Quincy and James Freeman Clarke were not admitted until 1875, after the abolition of slavery. Garrison, Parker, Phillips, Alcott, Wasson, Weiss, and William Henry Channing were never members of the Saturday Club and probably never could have been elected to it; but they were to be looked for every month at the Radical Club,afterward called the Chestnut Street Club,which certainly rivalled the Saturday in brilliancy in those days, while it certainly could not be said of it, as Dr. Holmes said of the Saturday, “We do nothing but tell our old stories; we never discuss anything.” Possibly all such gatherings tend to be somewhat more conspicuous in retrospect as time goes on; men recall the bright sayings and forget the occasional gaps of triviality or dulness. I remember when Fields, on once inviting me to dine with him at the Saturday Club, during a visit to Boston, cautioned me not to expect too much; “We are sometimes stupid,” he said. I know that in thinking of the Atlantic Club I still recall with fatigue the propensity which Lowell shared with Holmes for discussing theology. After all, the Five Points of Calvinism have this in common with measles or the whooping-cough: they are interesting to those who are liable to them or have got over them; but to those who have never gone through them they are rather tiresome subjects. As to the Radical Club, Holmes in later years made an address there himself on one of his speculative themes.

Perhaps, indeed, Holmes's talk was not to be seen at best advantage in his pet clubs where he sat as undisputed autocrat, while in the more familiar intercourse of common life his conversational fertility can hardly be exaggerated, and was, perhaps, never surpassed even by Sydney Smith.

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