Wonderful Letters
Biddle, Francis
Wonderful Letters Holmes-Laski Letters, the correspondence of mr. justice holmes and harold j. laski, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe. Harvard University Press. 1650 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by...
...McReynolds thought of Holmes as "a bird that had befouled his own nest" . . . "Cardozo, with his beautiful face and nature...
...Brandeis, someone had said, was not afraid of a balance sheet...
...But it was a faith of the heart, not of the mind, and he was never willing to put the one to the service of the other...
...Yet Holmes had a profound faith in the enjoyment of life itself, in its vitality and flavor...
...and an unswerving devotion to the principles of free thought and the toleration of its expression...
...For a skeptic who so profoundly distrusted absolutes, and knew that the life of the law was based not on the formulas of logic but in the changing flow of experience, his affirmations—his apercues, as he liked to call them— sometimes sound a little dogmatic...
...Reviewed by Francis Biddle ONE OF the persistent charms of these letters, 'begun when Justice Holmes was 75 and Harold Laski 23, and continued over a period of almost 20 years, lies in their gaiety...
...He thought it unlikely that we know anything about the universe...
...Commenting on Rosika Schwimmer he expressed his feeling that all "isms" were silly, and her pacifism, "this hyper-aethereal respect for human life . . . perhaps the silliest of all...
...Holmes thought him rather watery socialism, Laski was stirred by what he wrote, his prophecies of the possible, the brave pictures of a world that had been tidied by intelligence, obviously not Utopia, but a decent, an endurable place for living...
...He despised the will to believe...
...He was a religious skeptic, the last of the Puritans, in that 300-year struggle between belief and doubt coming after Emerson, whom as a young man he had so romantically admired...
...His faith was in the prevalence of reason in the long run...
...II Laski, too, was a religious skeptic, and a distruster of absolutes, whose faith, unlike Holmes, admitted the possibility of improvement, even in a world in which so many of the contemporary reformers seemed to show a pathetic trust in environmental change...
...Faith can never accept skepticism...
...Judges but too often considered themselves "independent mouthpieces of the infinite...
...And both wrote letters that made the long correspondence glow with their personalities, and created from day to day a sense of intellectual adventure and excitement...
...Holmes was not often restrained...
...Did Laski think his "brother would object if he spoke of his voluble discourse...
...All law means," he wrote elsewhere, "I will kill you if necessary to make you conform to my requirements...
...but here more than ever some sense of regained youth, the deep satisfaction of knowing that his brilliant young friend understood what he was after and appreciated what he had tried to say, falteringly perhaps, in the opinions...
...He realized "the eternal necessity of man to idealize," but such a realization did not lead him to consider morality more than a "sort of higher politeness that stands between us and the ultimate fact-force...
...And how could it be otherwise...
...He distrusted increasingly extending the functions of government, not from any a priori theory, but because the more he saw of his fellow human beings the less was he inclined to increase their power...
...It was to be remembered that even they were human beings...
...Perhaps their difference can best be illustrated by their view of H. G. Wells...
...Each man had native wit, scholarship, a rich and broad culture, and an open mind...
...Holmes commented pretty freely (never indiscreetly) about his brethren on the Court...
...Yet he could write the profoundly moving and beautiful dissent to the holding of the Court that she must be denied citizenship because she would not bear arms...
...Yet they can co-exist, even as they did in Holmes...
...He didn't believe in the infinite importance of man, and saw no reason to think that "a shudder would go through the sky if the whole ant heap were kerosened...
...and it may be expected that the great judge—greater, Lord Haldane once told me, he was inclined to think, than Chief Justice Marshall—will again be attacked by the believers in natural law, whose faith is based on the assumption of an absolute moral system...
...If a man's world is built on unalienable standards he who disagrees is heretical...
...The performance of the Chief Justice [Taft] in a particular case had been rather "spongy...
...particularly the very fact that they were so different in age and in background, so fundamentally opposed in outlook—these things gave him a sense of freedom from decorum, as if he could cut up a bit...
...In one opinion he had put in a quotation from Byron "to pain the boys...
...Such strong language the devout have not liked in the past, and will not applaud in the future...
...Holmes believed with all his soul in certain values—but his mind refused to clothe them in the cloak of absolute verities...
...The quotation came out...
...Holmes indulges, as might be expected, in the reiteration of some of his old convictions...
...He didn't talk much of rights, as he saw no meaning in them except what the crowd would fight for...
Vol. 17 • May 1953 • No. 5
