Holmes' vision of this fundamental process of dialogic alternations between impulses of “house-keeping” and “house-breaking” did not arise solely out of his private preoccupations and personal history; on the contrary, it was developed quite self-consciously as a pointed elaboration upon habits of thought widely shared in mid-century culture. Indeed, the Doctor's interest in the wall-breaking powers of levity can be seen to have emerged out of and been shaped by his desire to open up a dialogue with the works of a line of English comic writers – most notably Sterne and Dickens – who had explored in classic, caricatural form the implications of the contemporary urge to “fortification” of the self or of the domestic sphere.

Rather than simply summarizing here what we have said earlier in this study about Doctor Holmes in the conversation of his antebellum American culture, it might be most useful, in this brief conclusion, to take a step outside of the Doctor's social circles and out of his era, as a way of beginning to situate and to evaluate his achievements, to get some sense of the larger ramifications of his conversational ideal. We do not have to look further than Holmes' own household to find a perfect foil, for his son was a writer who developed out of and in reaction to the Doctor's verbal world. The distinctive literary style and stance of Justice Holmes – which made him one of the most representative voices of postbellum America – arose out of a strained lifelong “conversation” with his father, a conversation reflecting fundamental differences about the workings of conversation. If Doctor Holmes always urged the opening of conversation, we will see that Justice Holmes, while he grew up within the conversation defined by his father, finally became preoccupied with “the statement of conclusions,” and thus developed a series of new strategies for closing this conversation. Perhaps we have lost an important sense of how difficult it must have been for an extraordinarily ambitious young man to grow up in midnineteenth-century Boston – or anywhere in mid-century America – with the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior.

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America,” wrote Tocque-ville after his 1831–32 tour. And the Doctor might well have been spurred on by a very similar sociological diagnosis as he began experimenting with his first two “Autocrat” conversations in these same years. In such an environment, the “Brahmin” playground of “conversation” could be seen to have a truly “edifying” role, opening up the possibility of a sort of “town meeting of the mind” (to use Carl Bode's description of the era's Lyceum ideal), and thus serving not as the site for a last stand of defense against change, but rather as a site for change – and as a training ground for the emergence of the first forms of new ideas and of new languages.

THE FORM OF CHANGE: THE SAGE IN AN “AGE OF UNCERTAINTY”

Conversation often seems to be the verbal form most appropriate to a transitional period.

In Victorian America the “separate sphere” of the Castle-Home was never as insular, fortified, static, or coherent as its occupants might have wished. Holmes' written conversations help us to regain a sense of the dynamism of mid-century domestic life as they bring out all that is at stake in table-talk and table manners, showing how even the most mundane moments of verbal intercourse in the parlor, the dining room, or the club can become charged encounters, sparked by ongoing alternations between polarized voices struggling for power: assertion continually meets counter-assertion, dominance meets resistance. Through his structured reenactments of parlor talk, Holmes points out that the champagne-pops of repartee within genteel salon walls can have far-reaching repercussions; the matchbox explosions that divide debaters at his boardinghouse can be seen as warning shots predicting the much larger explosions soon to erupt across the entire “House Divided” of America.

“THIS CARNIVAL-SHOWER OF QUESTIONS AND REPLIES AND COMMENTS”

Almost every reader of Holmes' works, in every era, thinks of some form of fireworks when trying to describe the “explosive” literary effects of his witty extended metaphors and juxtapositions and his unusually interruptive table-talk form.

Thought about the church brings out some of Holmes' deepest ambivalences – as we have just seen in the Autocrat passage about the interwoven flights of crow and kingbird. And as we turn to other passages throughout his writings, we find that the same polarities which emerge in external relations to make a sermon seem to develop as a symbiotic household dialogue between speaker and listener can also operate internally, so that the process of all thought can be described as a dynamically unstable “marriage” between light and grave voices, and any possibility for personal change or growth – in the intellect, the emotions, or even in the bodily system – can only be imagined as emerging out of dialogical interrelations between light, airy, kingbird-like wingbeats and the solid, fixed, framing walls of the church or family home.

THE “CULTURE OF SHEER VERBOSITY”: ORATORY AND CONVERSATION

If each age sees the flowering of its own representative art form, it was clear that in Emerson's America the first forms for new art could only proceed out of one powerful, popular, and pervasive medium: the spoken word.

In an early review of what he rightly sensed would be Holmes' major literary work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, James Russell Lowell celebrated the dizzying effects of the many turns, shifts, and clashes basic to the Doctor's strange new verbal form as a “universal Catherine-wheeling of fun and fancy.” And indeed initially Holmes' table-talk does often seem to spin wildly out of control, sending out sparks and speeches in all directions, spiralling far from any central point or voice with an irrepressible centrifugal force, dispersing any attempt at sober signification into a carnival of jabberwocky mush, so that even more private moments of calm internal discussion develop along the lines of a three-ring circus – or of the unending, disorderly proceedings of a multivoiced committee in debate. It may be, Lowell continues, that with his conversational free-play Holmes has invented a “new kind of rocket” that can “stay up against all laws of gravity.”

In the field of psychology, too, Holmes began with French models only to go beyond them. But here, even more clearly than in his purely medical pursuits, the Doctor was always working dialogically on both sides of the issues, speaking on both sides of the arguments as they developed in a fast-changing discipline.

First, the Doctor would of course lend his voice to support what historians now describe as the “first great psychiatric revolution,” inspired in France by Philippe Pinel, who, as administrator of hospitals for the Revolutionary government, in an early version of the clinical revolt, was said to have set madmen free of their chains, and thus set in motion an international process through which madhouses became asylums, madmen became mental patients, and mad-doctors became psychiatrists. Perhaps because Americans had been introduced early on to the work of an English advocate for such reforms, the Quaker Samuel Tuke, this change met little opposition on this side of the Atlantic.

“I was just going to say, when I was interrupted …” – the first phrase in the first installment of the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, launching Holmes' series of table-talk works in the Atlantic – focuses our attention on the talk element perhaps most fundamental to his vision of conversational form: the dynamic moment of “interruption” that allows one speaker to take the floor from another and so makes possible the changes of voice, of tone, and of topic that define the most basic difference between dialogue and monologue. Traditionally, the arbiters of “polite speech” have sought to smooth over and control the potential unpleasantness of these necessary moments of alternation between voices through carefully defined rules for proper turn-taking in talk. But in mid-nineteenth-century America the issue of interruption asserted itself with a special force.

This book brings to the fore – or, it brings back to the fore – both an author (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior) and a verbal mode (conversation) that have almost completely disappeared from our maps of American literary and cultural history. Losing Holmes, we have lost a brilliant writer and a provocative thinker. We have also lost a key representative figure in the American Renaissance, both the best model and the best analyst of the dynamic of conversation that came to pervade many areas of mid-nineteenth-century American life – in what was known, after all, as America's “Age of Conversation.”

AN INTRODUCTION TO DOCTOR HOLMES

Holmes' life (1809–94) spanned most of the nineteenth century, and for much of that time he was a household name throughout America, recognized by his contemporaries as a national character, even a national institution. For foreign visitors like William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, or Oscar Wilde, a meeting with the tiny, hyperactive, loquacious Holmes became as much a part of the standard North American tour as a visit to Niagara Falls. Well into the twentieth century, the Holmes name still stood in most people's minds as a loaded, multivalent figure for a diversity of American possibilities.

Vernon Parrington seems far off the mark when he takes the Master's final word from the Poet passage examined at the end of the last chapter – “Boys must not touch off their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine” – out of its conversational context, citing it as the main piece of evidence for his influential 1927 revaluation of Holmes:

But it is difficult to sum up the social philosophy of a very complex written oeuvre and of a very self-divided man.