The Postman Rings Twice

HOLMES-POLLOCK LETTERS Mr. Justice Holmes & Sir Frederick Pollock--Harvard (2 vols., $7.50).

One scorching day in 1862, a Boston Brahmin stood on the battlefield of Antietam, from which some 5,000 bodies had just been removed. The old man was the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, the author of The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay and The Chambered Nautilus--Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. He had heard that his son, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 21, was shot through the neck, and he had dashed down from Boston to find the boy or his body. He found neither at Antietam. A week later, in Harrisburg, Pa., the Doctor ran into his son at last. "How are you, Boy?" said the Brahmin casually. "How are you, Dad?" said the Captain.

The bullet that sliced through young Holmes's neck came out the other side. He survived the wound to be: 1) wounded for the third time at Second Fredericksburg; 2) made a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army; 3) professor of law at Harvard; 4) Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court; 5) editor of The American Law Review; 6) author of The Common Law and editor of Kent's Commentaries; 7) Associate Justice (1902-32) of the U.S. Supreme Court; 8) the oldest Justice and the most famous dissenter who ever sat in that court.

Last week readers of the Holmes-Pollock Letters found that he was also coauthor of one of the great collections of U.S. letters. The other author was Sir Frederick Pollock, a shy, learned Englishman who was one of the greatest authorities on the English common law, author of Principles of Contract, and The Law of Torts.

First letter (from Pollock to Holmes) is dated 1874; the last (from Holmes to Pollock) is dated 1932. What they wrote in between fills two volumes of 275 and 309 pages, superbly edited by Biographer Mark DeWolfe Howe. When they began writing each other letters, Holmes was 33, Pollock, 28. When they stopped writing Holmes was 91. They wrote through eight wars and nine revolutions. During all this troubled time the two men sat at or near the heart of government of the world's two greatest powers. But they did not write about wars and revolutions in their letters.

They wrote like two sage old Romans from twin centers of the later empire. Their interest was in philosophy, literature, in the arcana of their craft, in their misfortunes and ailments (once Holmes slipped on a piece of ice, again Pollock was struck by a bicyclist), in Washington heat and London fog, in the wonder that returning spring has for aging men. The year the Japanese sank the Russian fleet at Tsushima, Pollock dropped Holmes a postcard: "Certainly I believe you are as real as I am, but, as you are ejusdem generis with me, that does not make you a Ding an sich in the Kantian sense." The Italians grabbed Tripoli from Turkey, and Holmes wrote Pollock: "I have taken up Vita Nuova with Rossetti's translation alongside. Rossetti justifies to my mind my proposition that everything is dead in 25 years. ... As to Dante ... his discourse seems in equal parts from the heart and through the hat."

Sometimes their subject was the universe. Wrote Holmes: "My formula as a bettabilitarian (one who thinks you can bet about it but not know) is a spontaneity taking an irrational pleasure in a moment of rational sequence. . . . Functioning is all there is. ... I wonder if cosmically an idea is any more important than the bowels."

During the first 20 years, while their friendship was still somewhat stiff and formal, they wrote a good deal about the law. Even after their friendship mellowed, Pollock stuck sternly to his salutation--My dear Holmes. Holmes began to salute his correspondent occasionally as Dear F. P.; when Pollock was 82 he ventured to write My dear young Frederick, adding later "Frederick really is growing up." He seldom failed to send his love to "your Lady." Justice Holmes had a sharp eye for ladies, was once known to stare after a pretty girl and mutter: "Oh, to be 80 again!"

Sometimes they ventured to tell each other stories. Pollock writes cautiously: "It is said--I don't vouch for it--that when President Wilson et ux. were here Mrs. W. asked the Queen what she thought about the Freedom of the Seas, and the Queen answered that she had not quite made up her mind about mixed bathing." Both men were insatiable readers; but books were not an end in themselves but a part of life, and they treated them with less formality than they treated one another. Typical Pollock treatment:

>"Tolstoy had no business to be born in Europe. He should have been an Indian sage, and then his exit to meditate in the wilderness would have ... troubled nobody."

>"Bertrand Russell is a mighty clever philosopher, too clever I think. His theodicy so far as I make out consists in being angry with the gods for not existing, because if they did he would like to break their windows."

>"As for Wells's opinions on things in general, I have never thought them worth attention any more than Bernard Shaw's. Both are clever impostors but Shaw has the advantage of knowing it."

Holmes's opinions are even pithier:

>"When you open Pepys you get one leg on the flypaper at once and it is hard to get away."

>On Bergson's Creative Evolution--"I think he is churning the void to make cheese--but I find him full of stimulus."

>"Hegel can't persuade me that a syllogism can wag its tail."

In 1932 Holmes wrote his last letter and last literary opinion to Pollock. Then to their 57-year-old correspondence he set this last line: "Is this enough of my gossip?"

The greatness of letters is in the mind they reveal. Pollock's mind was keen, erudite, somewhat suspicious, drily humorous, shyly human. Holmes's mind had a larger quality. There is nothing like battle to mature the mind it does not destroy. The bullet that passed through Holmes's neck at Antietam lodged in his brain. He lived the rest of his life as if the words with which he closed his 90th birthday address were momently true: "Death plucks my ear and says Live--I am coming." He lived with the wise irreverence of a soldier who has seen the end of the story too often and knows that its only novelty is in its surprise. This vast tolerance was really neither liberal nor conservative. The natural perch of his mind was that high narrow ledge where there is room only for those who know that without the courage to change perpetually there is no growth, and without reverence for tradition there is human and social disaster. "If a man is great," he said, "he makes others believe in greatness."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.