'Like a Soaking Rain'

In the epilogue to the third volume of The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-74), Shelby Foote describes the origins of Memorial Day and recounts a speech delivered on that observance in 1884, at Keene, N.H., by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935). As an army captain during the Civil War, Holmes was seriously wounded three times. Twenty years before his speech, when Lincoln had stood on a parapet at Fort Stevens, Holmes is supposed to have hollered, “Get down, you damn fool!” In 1884, less than two decades after Appomattox, speaking to fellow Civil War veterans, Holmes said Memorial Day was “the most sacred of the year,” and would always be observed by Americans: 

“But even if I am wrong, even if those who are to come after us are to forget all that we hold dear, and the future is to teach and kindle its children in ways as yet unrevealed, it is enough for us that to us this day is dear and sacred. . . . For one hour, twice a year at least – at the regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous than the living, and on this day when we decorate their graves – the dead come back and live with us. I see them now, more than I can number, as I saw them on this earth.”

 

When I was a kid we observed Memorial Day every year – parade, speeches at the cemetery, picnic. The day is no longer held sacred, of course. Whether it is observed by Americans as other than a day off from school or work seems unlikely for most. Patriotism is no longer kneejerk gratitude for our blessings as American citizens. Many see no alternative to what Lionel Trilling called “adversary culture.” Love of country is deeply unhip.

 

At the time of his speech, Holmes was serving as an associate justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. In 1902 he was nominated by President Theodore Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He retired from the court at age ninety in 1932. That’s Holmes the public man. Privately, he was a reader and one of the finest writers of letters in American literature – perhaps the finest. Among his few rivals are William James and George Santayana.  His letters to Morris R. Cohen and Felix Frankfurter have been published but best of all are the Holmes-Laski Letters, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe and published by Harvard University Press in two fat volumes in 1953. Harold Laski was an English economist and a political twit. But like Holmes he was an ambitious reader and their exchanges make entertaining reading. Here is Holmes writing to Laski on September 29, 1929. Holmes is eighty-eight; Laski, thirty-six:

 

 “Happy the man who can take books leisurely, like a soaking rain, and not inquire too curiously for the amount of fertilizer they contain. It takes robust and staying power to get adequate pleasure out of even the greatness of the past. It takes other and richer gifts to find all the good there is in the second rate. But I fear that I drool – farewell.”

 

“Fertilizer” shouldn’t be understood as manure. Holmes means a book’s pedagogical content, its vitamin quotient: Is it good for you? That’s not the only way to gauge a book’s worth. Does it give you pleasure? Earlier in the letters Holmes describes his mixed reaction to Proust, saying he is “out jamesing H. James in his rotation of nuances.” For some of us, that’s a positive quality. Joseph Epstein once wrote that he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes and H.L. Mencken.

 

Holmes was born March 8, 1841, and died on this date, March 6, in 1935, three days before his ninety-fourth birthday.