Volume 24 65
1857 it were second nature to do so. As a directive
for both the critic and writer, this standard carried
weight well into the late nineteenth century. Ex-
tracted from their philosophical ground, the con-
cepts of the Ideal and the Actual had degenerated
into trite maxims for the selection of subject-matter
and the choosing of words. The conspicuous in-
sipidness of much American writing and painting
of the period is traceable to this critical formula, not
to the so-called “genteel tradition.” Notions of gen-
tility no doubt affected social behavior, but such no-
tions cannot clearly be related to literary taste.
Reference to the habit of condemning the Actual
and demanding the Ideal will provide a better ex-
planation of much nineteenth-century criticism—
e.g., objections to the “realism” of William D.
Howells—then loose of an assumed “tradition” of
gentility. As for Victorian prudery too often charged
to the Puritans, it operated to rule out entirely from
the range of selection certain subject matter; but, as
our illustration of taste shows, considerations of
prudery need not be evoked at all. Here the magic
formula provides the only standard except for those
recollections of Blair not inconsistent with it.
A usable, or at least not damaging, directive
for a writer of Hawthorne’s interest and talents, the
formula was scarcely the right one for Holmes. Us-
ing it, Motley was led to discount—perhaps was
blinded to—his friend’s gift for satire. For exam-
ple, he enjoined Holmes to omit from “The Exile’s
Secret” the sharp couplet:
I dress the phrases of our tarry friend,
As lawyers trim the rascals they defend.Apparently assuming that his friend’s taste was su-
perior to his own, Holmes accepted all Motley’s crit-
icism, except two trivial verbal ones. Had Holmes
resisted this imposition of a standard alien to his tem-
per and his talent, he would have been a wiser and
possibly a better poet than he was. However suc-
cessful a venture into the Ideal “The Chambered
Nautilus” (1857) may be and may have seemed to
its author (or to Motley), “The Last Leaf” (1831) is
a better indication of where Holmes’s real, if slight,
talent lay. Finally, our illustration of taste suggests
that a question possibly worth investigation is how
far other writers (e.g., Henry James) were deflected
from their courses by explicit or implicit exhorta-
tions to soar into the heavenly æther of the Ideal.
Source:Eleanor M. Tilton, “Holmes and His Critic Mot-
ley,” in American Literature, Vol. 36, No. 4, January 1965,
pp. 463–74.Sources
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-
Table, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1960, pp. 88–90, 92.
—, “The Chambered Nautilus,” in The Poetical Works
of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Houghton Mifflin Company,
1975, pp. 149–50, 152.
Macy, John, “Holmes,” in The Spirit of American Litera-
ture, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913, pp. 155–70.
Parker, Gail Thain, “Sex, Sentiment, and Oliver Wendell
Holmes,” in Women’s Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1972, p. 49.
Prothero, Rowland E., “A Review of The Writings of Oliver
Wendell Holmes,” in Quarterly Review, Vol. 179, No. 359,
January 1895, pp. 189–206.Further Reading
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Nature and Selected Essays,
Penguin, 2003, originally published by J. Munroe and
Company, 1836.
Emerson’s first and most influential work on the post-
Romantic philosophy of transcendentalism, Nature
is a crucial work in the historical context of mid-
nineteenth-century Boston.
Gibian, Peter, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of
Conversation, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
In this important book about Holmes’s place in
American history, Gibian provides a literary and his-
torical analysis of Holmes and his intellectual circle.
Hawthorne, Hildegarde, The Happy Autocrat: A Life of
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longmans, Green, 1938.
Hawthorne’s biography of Holmes sketches the his-
torical context surrounding “The Chambered Nau-
tilus” and provides a useful overview of the poet’s
life and career.
Traister, Bryce, “Sentimental Medicine: Oliver Wendell
Holmes and the Construction of Masculinity,” in Studies in
American Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 2, Autumn 1999, pp. 203–25.
Although it does not discuss “The Chambered Nau-
tilus,” Traister’s article provides an interesting com-
mentary about Holmes’s views on gender relations,
particularly his idea of male medical authority and
its approach to women.The Chambered Nautilus