MR. JUSTICE HOLMES
Otto, Max C.
Mr. Justice Holmes YANKEE FROM OLYMPUS. Justice Holmes and His Family, by Catherine Drinker Boweii.- Little, Brown and Company. $3. Reviewed by Max C. Otto HANNAH NEWELL HOLMES, who died the...
...Mrs...
...But no doubt she invented much besides these externals, such as thoughts and feelings of people, and that can scarcely be regarded as harmless...
...Down in her pew," the story goes, "Mistress Holmes, tablet on knee, raised her bonneted head suspiciously...
...This portrayal of Justice Holmes, remarkably successful in setting forth his personality, pays for this achievement by the neglect of his philosophy...
...Dwight was a dramatic preacher...
...Dwight, and said so to anyone who cared to listen...
...And behind the large company of individuals and their ambitions and doings, is pictured the panorama of American history, wars and territorial expansion, industrial invention and economic strife, panics and prosperity^ the rise and decline of political, social, and educational ideas, told in the staccato style of a journalist, but with sensitivity, liberal mindedness, and artistic skill...
...John Holmes knew well that she was capable of it...
...Reviewed by Max C. Otto HANNAH NEWELL HOLMES, who died the year Thomas Jefferson was born, is outstanding even among the ancestors of Justice Holmes, all of whom seem to have been persons of extraordinary quality...
...It is all most skillfully done, and it enhances the life and drama of the account, giving unusual roundness and body to the persons and reality to the events lavishly introduced...
...Dwight, for the benefit of her family...
...She had taught herself a kind of shorthand and so took down what she heard...
...She has quite evidently steeped her mind in a vast amount of material bearing upon Justice Holmes from childhood to old age, upon his father and grandfather, and upon various men and women who came more or less intimately into contact with them...
...Holmes did not walk out of the meeting—but she never again could be induced to write after Mr...
...Her husband looked at her and looked away quickly...
...Catherine Drinker Bowen has written an excellent biography, informed and understanding, -but the attentive reader cannot but ask himself over and over how she could know these things...
...ON the other hand, nothing is clearer than its author's intention to tell a true story...
...Bowen can plead as excuse, as she does in refusing to discuss Holmes' opinion in the Debs case, which was widely criticized, that "such discussion is not within the plan of .this book...
...Even the personages who have only a secondary place in the story, such as "Uncle John" Holmes, William James, Justice Brandeis, and others like them, leave a distinct impression upon the reader's mind...
...Dwight know these things...
...It is this philosophy, however, which it is very desirable for us to know, and a definitive biography of Justice Holmes will have to take it into account...
...On the occasion of a series of sermons dealing with the plight of the Children of Israel in Egypt his sense of drama carried him pretty far...
...In this imperfect world every virtue has its drawback...
...If she got up and walked out of the meeting it would be a most awful scandal...
...Mistress Holmes, as she was called, was in the habit of analyzing and discussing the sermons of her minister, Mr...
...The sound she made was loud, and remarkably like a sniff...
...Yet one has the uneasy feeling of reading not only a biography but a novel, frequently not knowing which is which...
...She admits inventing stage setting and sometimes rearranging the chronology, both harmless innovations...
...His vivid sermons drew a congregation from miles around, and won him fame in his time and place...
...We must therefore wait for the biography for which this plea shall not have to be made...
...His voice trembled and there were tears in his eyes as he hoarsely whispered : "The streets of Israel were paved with the skulls of the Israelites...
...How could Mr...
...The Scriptures made no mention of such sights . . . closing her tablet with a snap, (she) sat bolt upright...
...She naturally comes to mind just now because of a story told about her in the present biography...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 29
