'But Why Do I Speak of Gentlemen?'

Why does one man stay up too late on a Tuesday evening in June reading Walter Savage Landor while another watches Game of Thrones? Sometimes I think everything we do is a mystery, especially to us, and life amounts to mindless forward momentum. A favorite thought experiment is taking a sample of mental life at random – a remembered scrap of song lyric, an antipathy, an enthusiasm – and tracing it backwards to its source. It doesn’t take long to hit a cul-de-sac (the French is enlightening: “bottom of the bag”). Our lazy reaction is to say: Well, I’ve always known that. But there had to be a first time. Justice Holmes writes to Harold Laski on Sept. 21, 1920:

“Last night I took up Landor’s Gebir – a little confusing in details upon rapid reading but with fine lines – ‘Is this the mighty ocean! Is this all?’ and a hundred others – sometimes emulating a little visibly Milton’s majestic use of proper names.”

Keep in mind that Holmes at the time was an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Without books to read and friends to share them with he would have been adrift. (Laski never responds to Holmes’ mention of Landor.) Landor published Gebir in 1798. It’s heavy going, not in a class with the best of his epigrams, but as Holmes says, it has “fine lines,” like these from Book I:

“But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue . . .

Shake one, and it awakens; then apply

Its polished lips to your attentive ear,

And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.”

Holmes tells Laski he is glad “you are not spurring me on to improvement” – that is, suggesting more titles for him to read. Among public men in the history of the United States, Holmes is perhaps the most formidably well-read. His hunger for books seems genuinely pleasure-driven. He’s no pedant. For him, literature and life are like conjoined twins. Holmes continues, “After [Izaak] Walton’s [Compleat] Angler – [Gilbert] White’s [Natural History and Antiquities of] Selborne – volume 2.” About White he writes: “Keen old boy and delightful. He says about earthworms what by popular report is attributed to Darwin’s book [The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits, 1881.]” Then Holmes reflects on the importance of books in his life:

“A few moments of leisure are good to pick up bits of literature that a gentleman should have read but generally hasn’t. But why do I speak of gentlemen? Have I not always said that a philosopher couldn’t be a gentleman or a gentleman a philosopher? The philosopher keeps all formulas fluid – the gentleman exists only on the footing that some are fixed – (those that concern his own personality).”

[Quotations are drawn from the two-volume Holmes-Laski Letters, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe and published by Harvard University Press in 1953, and Landor’s Poems, edited by Geoffrey Grigson and published by Centaur Press in 1964.]