By Michael F. Duggan
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. kept up a variety of correspondences with all kinds of people, including a British baronet and jurist (Frederick Pollock), a number of Jewish intellectuals (Harold Lasky, Morris R. Cohen, Felix Frankfurter), a Chinese intellectual (John Wu), an Irish Catholic bishop (Patrick Sheehan), and a number of women, including an Anglo-Irish noblewoman (Lady Castletown), and an Irish nationalist senator of the first legislature of the Irish Free States (Alice Stopford Greene).
It is a curiously egalitarian group of pen pals for an elderly Boston Brahmin of 100 years ago. As former US circuit court judge, Richard Posner observers in the introduction to The Essential Holmes, “his letters to women have the same intellectual content as his letters to men,” and “he was remarkably unprejudiced for his time. He had none of the snobbism, anti-Semitism, and contempt for American culture and institutions held by his childhood friends, Henry James and Henry Adams.”
In 1925 Marguerite Christine Hay (Ralli), stepdaughter of American diplomat and historian, Lewis Einstein (1877-1967), wrote a letter to Holmes asking him for his philosophy, his larger view of things.
As far as I know, Ms. (actually, Marchioness—her husband was an English Marquess) Hay’s letter to Holmes no longer exists, but Holmes’s reply of 100 years, two weeks ago (I planned to post this earlier in the month) does, and he does not hold back. In the first law review article I wrote, I suggest that there are three Holmeses: the legendary, public Holmes of gusto, romanticism, humor, and verve (this is the “touched with fire” Holmes of his occasional speeches and public events), the darkly skeptical Holmes in the “back of the heart” (the “real” Holmes, philosophically speaking), and where the two overlap, is the hard-headed, realistic judge, and associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
When I first came across this letter almost 30 years ago in The Holmes-Einstein Letters, I was surprised. I have liked Holmes for a long time, not only as a jurist, but as a philosopher. As a young man, he belonged to the celebrated (but illusive) Metaphysical Club from which emerged, not only American pragmatism, but William James (probably the most important American psychologist), Charles Sanders Pierce (likely the greatest American philosopher of logic and science), and Chauncey Wright (who was the subject of my doctoral dissertation). In some ways, Holmes is like an aristocratic, more formally intellectual, Beacon Hill version of Twain.
And yet in this letter, Holmes’s dark Kantian skepticism borders on the anti-intellectual with the idea that not only is the universe beyond our understanding, but that it is not our place to inquire into it. While I agree with Kant (and Holmes) that much of the cosmos is beyond our ability to know–and that the biggest questions are not scientifically meaningful–I believe that is not only within our purview to ask, but a duty. Inquiry is a fundamental human activity. We are curious monkeys.
Holmes writes to Ms. Hay:
“May 6, 1925
My dear Marchioness:
It is short and, as you say, long since a direct word has passed between us, and I am truly rejoiced that the silence is broken. In the meantime you have married and have children whom I never have seen and I have become an old man…
Turning to what you write about, of course you have to take a hand, and I think it futile to ask what does it all amount to. One may ask that about all human activities; and to one who thinks as I do, there is no answer except that it is not our business to enquire. It is a question of the significance of the universe, when we do not know even whether that is only a human ultimate quite inadequate to the I-know-not-what of which we are a part. It is enough for us that it has intelligence and significance inside of it, for it has produced us, and that our manifest destiny is to do our damnedest because we want to and because we have to let off our superfluous energy just as the puppies you speak of have to chase their tails. It satisfies our superlatives and it seems to me unnecessary to demand of the Cosmos an assurance that to it also our best is superlative. It is so in our world and that is as far as we can go. So I accept the motives of vanity, ambition, altruism, or whatever moves us as fact, only reserving the right to smile on half-holidays at the obvious dureté of nature to get our work out of us. One of my old formulas is to be an enthusiast in the front part of your heart and ironical in the back. It is true that many people can’t do their best, or think they can’t, unless they are cocksure.
As long ago as when I was in the Army [1861-64] I realized the power that prejudice gives a man; but I don’t think it necessary to believe that the enemy is a knave in order to do one’s best to kill him. However, I am now a spectator in everything except my judicial duties. I don’t read the papers and am not what the reporters call abreast of the time. I read and try to enrich my mind when I am not turning out stuff that other people have to read; but in the main I read books not periodicals; though I pick up some things from my wife’s reading while I play solitaire of an evening. I read a little of the old, but one can’t read the old with much profit until one is mature. What the old can tell us is better said and more clearly understood in modern books. An idea becomes part of the common stock in twenty years (the common stock of the civilized that is, for the humbugs that Malthus killed a hundred years ago are alive and kicking today). So when I read the classics or anything of that sort it is more to enlarge my historical understanding than for themselves, bar, of course, the aesthetic pleasures one can laboriously pick out here and there.
My work for this term is mainly done and so I have spent a part of this forenoon in driving in Rock Creek Park, (Do you remember it?) by the side of the stream through all manner of tender greens with the white of the dogwood blossoms flashing out on one. It always makes me remember ‘to haunt, to startle and waylay’ — which seems written for it as much as for a woman. Also agreeable zoological possibilities roundabout one from wolves and lions to a swan setting on her nest between the road and the creek laughing regardless of automobiles.
If now I could have a talk with you it would put the comble to my felicity. But indeed I have vivid thoughts and affectionate recollections of you, and am delighted that you have remembered me enough to write.
Ever sincerely yours, O.W. Holmes”