Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self.

• Author: Carrier, Michael A.

G. Edward White(1) has embraced a task of monumental proportions. A biography concentrating on either the life or the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. must be complex and thorough; one exploring the interaction between the two promises to be herculean. Yet White emerges victorious in the end, letting his extensive research, lucid prose, and keen insights guide the reader effortlessly through the 490-page biography.

White begins his journey with an autobiographical statement Holmes wrote as a senior at Harvard College (p. 7). The statement frames the opening chapter, "Heritage," as it introduces the subjects upon which White will initially focus: Holmes's father, mother, ancestors, experience at Harvard College, and early literary endeavors (pp. 7-8). The author first discusses Holmes's complex relationship with his father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. -- author of the Autocrat essays,(2) poet, and Harvard Medical School professor (pp. 9-11). Dr. Holmes was "one of the last true generalists ... a prime mover in an astonishing range of fields: in medicine, psychology, and theology, as well as in lecturing and literature."(3) White carefully delineates various aspects of the father-son relationship, noting both parties' competitiveness, egotism, and concealed affection for each other (pp. 11-14). The author asserts that Holmes adopted his father's idea of a "life plan," but that his self-preoccupation, in contrast to his father's vivaciousness, channelled his achievements into one field -- the law.(4) Next comes Amelia Holmes, the devoted mother trapped in the constraints of the pre-Victorian era (pp. 14-17). White notes that she "passionately grasped" opportunities for achievement within the domestic sphere and directed her energies "almost exclusively toward the comfort of her husband and children."(5) The ancestors follow, in particular, the grandfathers -- Judge Charles Jackson, member of the mercantile community and justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and the Reverend Abiel Holmes, minister and historian (pp. 17-19) -- each illustrating distinct aspects of Holmes's secular and religious heritage.

After tracing Holmes's ancestral lineage, White turns to early environmental influences on Holmes: the provincial yet intellectual Brahmin Boston (pp. 20-24) and Harvard College (pp. 25-32). Harvard's classes and professors did not have a significant influence on Holmes.(6) Indeed, the college's criteria for ranking students belied its rigid atmosphere: "Points were assigned for student achievements and reduced for disciplinary violations, so that intellectual performances and what the faculty saw as moral performances were regarded as equivalents" (p. 25). Instead, Harvard introduced Holmes to what would become lifelong activities: avid reading, writing, and the cultivation of friendships and intimacies (pp. 26-27). After a discussion of the motivation Holmes received from the art critic John Ruskin and the transcendentalist sage Ralph Waldo Emerson -- both of whom provided Holmes with a historicist perspective(7) -- White closes the chapter by highlighting the tension between "the cumulative weight" of Holmes's ancestral heritage and Holmes's current self, as revealed through his literary achievements, membership in social clubs, and participation in the Civil War (p. 47). The author remarks that Holmes even attempted to distance himself from his ancestors' "natural bent" to literature (pp. 47-48), even though the literary style would later be omnipresent in his judicial opinions and legal writings.

Chapter Two -- "The Civil War" -- emphasizes an experience that had a profound impact on Holmes's view of the world. The war affected Holmes not only in the brute force of its imagery and its revelation of the insignificance of the individual in the face of collective and historical forces,(8) but also in providing a contrast with the conversational -- and often inconclusive -- milieu of his father.(9)

White imposes on the Civil War chapter a tripartite structure that extracts and situates Holmes's post hoc memorialization of the war in his professional life. The initial section of the chapter offers a chronology of Holmes's wartime experience, tracing his involvement -- including the battles he saw and his injuries -- between his enlistment in August 1861 and his departure from the war in July 1864 (pp. 50-65). The second part highlights Holmes's contemporaneous reactions to his experience. White sketches Holmes's increasing disenchantment with war and his evolving conception of loyalty: first to a cause, then to the regiment, and finally to himself.(10) It is this evolution, with its accompanying feelings of guilt,(11) for which Holmes sought to make amends in his recollections of the war in subsequent years. Such recollections constitute the subject of the third part of the chapter, in which White depicts an "official" bloodless and duty-laden conception of the war replacing Holmes's specific memories of the atrocities.(12) Unable to relinquish the warlike spirit, Holmes sought to draw analogies between his judicial work and the war. In addressing a fiftieth reunion of the Harvard Class of 1861, for example, Holmes referred to the work of soldiers as "hammer[ing] out as compact and solid a piece of work as one can."(13) Although White acknowledges that, on one level, the analogy between war and judging could be viewed as "nonsensical," he recognizes that Holmes sought to replicate in his judicial pursuits the passions he experienced in war, and to "reassure himself that he was still participating in the fight...that he could continue to claim the privilege of having been touched with fire" (p. 86).

White appropriately locates an origin of Holmes's judicial passion in his Civil War background. Yet he fails to explore three other origins of Holmes's motivation. First, Holmes's mother endowed her son with a strong ambition. As Holmes wrote, "[B]y the temperament I get from my mother, without some feeling of accomplishment I feel as if it were time for me to die."(14) Second, Holmes's Puritan background -- the spirit that dictates that "to take the easy way is to take the wrong way"(15) -- impelled him onward. Finally, intellectual exploration motivated Holmes; his ambition manifested itself not in a quest for particular positions, but in a constant test of his mental capacity.(16)

White continues his exploration of Holmes's nonlegal life in the third chapter, tracing Holmes's "Friendships, Companions, and Attachments" between 1864 and 1882. After briefly discussing Holmes's attendance at Harvard Law School -- "a desultory, tedious experience" (p. 91), yet one that convinced him that the law was to be his profession -- White turns to Holmes's social acquaintances. Beginning in 1866, and continuing through 1913, Holmes embarked on nine sojourns to Great Britain to partake of the high society, culture, and conversations that life there availed (pp. 95-102). He would cultivate intimate relationships on these trips, particularly one -- described in Chapter Seven -- with Clare Castletown, a member of the "Ascendancy," or Anglo-Irish land-owning class (pp. 230-49). Although Holmes visited Castletown several times in his travels, it is the correspondence between them that has generated the most attention. The pair traded letters from 1896 until 1927, often sharing their innermost thoughts. Holmes wrote to Castletown in September 1896 that a recent letter she sent "is what I have been longing for and is water to my thirst,"(17) and two years later, after returning from abroad, rejoiced: "Oh my dear what joy it is to feel the inner chambers of one's soul open for the other to walk in and out at will."(18) Holmes wrote perhaps his most passionate letter two weeks later, in language revealing that he had lost control of his emotions: "I long long long for you and think think think about you. You would be satisfied I think."(19)

In stark contrast to such passion stands Holmes's wife of fifty-two years, Fanny Dixwell Holmes. Fanny was not privy to her husband's professional work, nor did she accompany him on his trips abroad.(20) In fact, she was more of a social recluse than he, in part, perhaps, because of an attack of rheumatic fever one month after marrying Holmes (p. 105). Although she possessed a strong wit, effectively played the role of hostess upon the Holmeses' arrival in Washington, D.C., and provided emotional support for her husband, she was "relegated to a distinctly bounded realm of Holmes' existence" (p. 107). For in the end, Holmes would not let anyone interfere with his work.

In Chapter Four, White turns to Holmes's early legal scholarship, examining such work for its own sake and not merely as a precursor to his more famous subsequent work. The author notes that scholarship was "the professional center of [Holmes's] life during his late twenties and thirties" (p. 112). Although such scholarship often derived from the works of others, Holmes refused to acknowledge, and even downplayed, his predecessors' contributions.(21) White traces Holmes's methodological shift from the philosophical classification of legal subjects (pp. 117-18, 122-23) to systems of historical analysis (pp. 129, 133-34) to considerations of public policy (pp. 139-40). Despite such shifts, the new interpretive techniques did not completely displace their predecessors, but instead combined to provide Holmes with a distinctive methodology (p. 147).

White's examination of Holmes's early scholarship takes on new meaning by the time the familiar opening paragraph of The Common Law arrives in Chapter Five:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy ... even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the...