A noted American poet, novelist, and editor; born at Belchertown, Mass., July 24, 1819; died in New York, Oct. 12, 1881. He left the practice of medicine to become editor of the Springfield Republican, which position he held from 1849 to 1866. He was editor of Scribner’s Monthly, later the Century Magazine, 1870–81. Among his prose works are: “Life of Abraham Lincoln;” “Letters to the Young;” “Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects;” “Gold Foil;” and the novels “Arthur Bonnicastle,” “Seven Oaks,” and “Nicholas Minturn.” His poems are published under the titles: “Bitter-Sweet;” “Kathrina;” “The Mistress of the Manse;” “Garnered Sheaves;” and “The Puritan’s Guest.” Part of his poems were written under the pseudonym “Timothy Titcomb.”

Personal

  Doctor Holland was at his post till the very last. His last day was a busy one, and one full of interest and pleasure. He was writing his editorials; he was talking over new projects; he had time to go out to see some beautiful stained-glass windows, whose rich and exquisite tones gave him the greatest delight; but especially the day was devoted by him to thoughts of our late President, whom he knew personally…. Doctor Holland was engaged that day in writing an editorial (which remains unfinished) on poverty as a means of developing character; and his illustrations were taken from the lives of Lincoln and Garfield. While writing this a book was handed to him, entitled “Garfield’s Words.” For an hour or so he pored over its pages, reading aloud to one of his associates the passages that struck him as most telling. He laughed his approval at one bit after another of sententious humor; his voice trembled at every passage made pathetic by the President’s tragic fate.

  Doctor Holland was a man of dignified and impressive presence; he had something of that talent for affairs which is indispensable to the journalist, but he was also a man of rare simplicity and transparency. He often showed his inmost thoughts to strangers, and sometimes cast the pearls of his confidence before swine who turned upon him. He loved approbation and he craved affection.

  Dr. Holland took the contemptuous treatment of the critics much more to heart than Mr. Roe apparently did; and the epithet, “The American Tupper” (invented, if I remember rightly, by the New York “Sun”), rankled in his gentle mind. Even though the sale of his books ran up into hundreds of thousands, the tolerant patronage or undisguised sneer of the reviewer remained the drop of gall in the cup of his happiness.

  Dr. Holland personally belonged to that class of persons “whose souls by nature sit on thrones,” no matter by what degree of poverty or of misfortune obscured. There was not a particle of arrogance in him, but it never occurred to him that he was not the peer in respectability of any man, and in one of his books, where a discussion is going on as to the relative shades of blueness in the blood of certain families, he goes right to the heart of the matter by making the speaker say, “God makes new Adams every day.” Certainly He makes some men with such an irrepressible bent toward this or that line of work, that they cannot escape this destiny of their faculties. J. G. Holland was one of these, although it took till he was thirty years old for him to make sure of his work and place in the world—to fulfil his mission and deliver his message—with what indefatigable faithfulness wrought out and delivered, let his life-story tell; for it may as well be said, first as last, that no matter what literary form—poem, story, essay—his writings took, he was essentially a preacher, and ever and always an expounder of those things that make for righteousness. If ever his sad-hearted mother had a dream for him, it was that he might be a minister; and when she once expressed a regret that her wish had not been granted, he pointed out the larger sphere of influence given him in the newspaper, though he hardly thought she was convinced.

General

  These “Letters” first appeared in the “Republican,” under the signature of “Timothy Titcomb,” and attracted universal attention for their beauty of style, purity of English, and sound common sense. The advice contained in them is excellent, entirely practical, sufficiently minute, and eminently judicious,—intended to make, not angels, but useful and happy men and women; and they richly deserve all the popularity they have received.

  We could easily show that “Bitter-Sweet” was not this and that and t’other, but, after all said and done, it would remain an obstinately charming little book. It is not free from faults of taste, nor from a certain commonplaceness of metre; but Mr. Holland always saves himself in some expression so simply poetical, some image so fresh and natural, the harvest of his own heart and eye, that we are ready to forgive him all faults in our thankfulness at finding the soul of Theocritus transmigrated into the body of a Yankee. It would seem the simplest thing in the world to be able to help yourself to what lies all around you ready to your hand; but writers of verse commonly find it a difficult, if not impossible, thing to do. Conscious that a certain remoteness from ordinary life is essential in poetry, they aim at it by laying their scenes far away in time, and taking their images from far away in space—thus contriving to be foreign at once to their century and their country. Such self-made exiles and aliens are never repatriated by posterity. It is only here and there that a man is found like Hawthorne, Judd, and Mr. Holland, who discovers or instinctively feels that this remoteness is attained and attainable only by lifting up and transfiguring the ordinary and familiar with the mirage of the ideal. We mean it as very high praise when we say that “Bitter-Sweet” is one of the few books that have found the secret of drawing up and assimilating the juices of this New World of ours.

  It is a little difficult to estimate rightly and fairly the author whose books and moral influence have given us occasion for this article. Like a true American, he has tried a good many departments of authorship. We may say of him what Johnson wrote of one of his own, and the world’s, friends, Nullum fere, scribendi genus non tetigit; and if he has not done all things equally well, he has done many things excellently. Being a journalist, he began, it would seem, with historical sketches in his own journal, and afterward made them into an “outline history;” from history he went into the adjoining field of romance; next climbed the tempting hill of poesy; and latterly has been gathering—upon this hill elsewhere—and discoursing upon samples and principles of morals…. That Dr. Holland has imagination in a high degree is shown, not only by many passages in which objects, persons, and scenes are wonderfully well thrown out, but by the whole book, “Bitter-Sweet.” That he has good power of reasoning, and a very good command of language and sense of the strength of words, he evinces abundantly. That he has an honest and good purpose, and is in earnest about it, he everywhere proves to us thoroughly. He writes honestly and purely, and he does not write in general, but in the plainest and strongest way rebukes particular vices; and that not like one who willingly meddles with forbidden subjects, but like one who honestly feels that men and women ought to be rebuked for wickedness known to be too common, and ought to be shamed out of it, even at the risk of shocking some false delicacy…. Throughout his books we everywhere find fresh and manly sense and morals…. “Bitter-Sweet” we consider by far his best-wrought novel, as well as his most imaginative book.

  As a prose writer, Dr. Holland is admitted by all to be one of our best. As a poet, he has received much adverse, and some unkind criticism. His “Kathrina” doubtless is open to criticism. Yet it is idle to deny to this poem great and distinguishing merit. The author, at all events, may console himself with the fact, that while the critics flout, the people read and buy. No American poem, with the single exception of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, has had such tangible evidences of popularity.

  His novels are his best works, artistically considered. “The Bay Path” is a story of the first settlement of the Connecticut Valley, and the characters and events are mainly historical. The author makes no attempt to reproduce the ancient forms of speech, but he understands well and has faithfully represented the ideas and manners of the time. “Miss Gilbert’s Career” has many good points. It is a novel of modern times, and is as new, and near, and devoid of romantic associations, as a pine-shingled house in the factory village it depicts. But its principal figures are exhibited with a certain stereoscope fidelity, and the characteristic virtues and meanness of a Yankee neighborhood are naturally developed in the course of its events.

  He was preëminently a moralist. Whether he wrote poetry or prose, letters or essays, novels or editorials, the moral purpose never forsook him. It is by this that he is to be judged. His art was never merely for art’s sake, but it served to give wings to his instructions.

  He was a man of good gifts, consecrated by a great motive. Of clear and vigorous intellect, he was best of all, like Noah of old, a preacher of righteousness, and one of rare power and singular sweetness. Writing of plain and homely themes, he never touched one of them that he did not ennoble; and over all that he wrote there breathed the spirit of one who loved God, and who, therefore, like Ben Adhem, “loved his fellow-man.” His writings found an acceptance which has often puzzled the critics, and confounded the literary prophets. But their secret was not far to seek. They helped men. They lifted them up. They rebuked meanness. They encouraged all noble aspirations. They were always a word for “God and the right,” spoken with courage, but spoken most of all in a tone of manly and brotherly sympathy that could not be misunderstood.

  The common heart of the people always kept time to his music. And his wide influence was on the right side. Practical wisdom, broad Christian charity, earnest patriotism, and crystal purity marked his writings.

  It was not merely for the sake of telling a pleasant story, not merely for the sake of describing real life, that he wrote, but also with the ulterior purpose of exposing and redressing some wrongs, of helping forward some good causes, of making social life better than it is…. It is enough to say that he understood what he was about, when he wrote novels with a purpose. And it must be admitted by everybody that his purposes were high and pure; that the blows he struck with this good weapon of fiction were telling blows…. We may not agree with him in all the lessons that he seeks to teach in these poems; I own that I do not; but we cannot deny the lofty purpose and the earnest thought that pulsate through them all. Whatever we may say of their philosophy, the spirit that breathes through them is large and free.

  It was the special distinction of Doctor Holland that he used the newspaper’s power to serve the preacher’s purpose…. He used the daily or the monthly journal to purify and sweeten the fountains of personal and family life. He spoke continually the word that should inspire young men to be pure, and women to be strong; the word that shed poetry over the home life; the word that threw on every interest the light of conscience and the warmth of moral feeling…. He was faithful to the light that was in him; he was open-eyed and sensitive to the conditions of the time; he met the opportunity as it offered. And thus he did the work that was given him to do. He did a work large in itself; large in the impress it left on two great periodicals; large as an omen of the nobler work to be done by the press, an instance of the new and greater channels through which God fulfills his purposes.

  He is at once the least poetical and one of the most popular of all the American poets. He has the peculiar faculty of writing for the people what the people want to read and can understand.

  None of our writers has better understood the average national heart.

  Holland’s writings fall naturally into three classes: poems, novels, and essays and papers. His fame as a poet depends on his long narrative poems, “Bitter Sweet” and Kathrina,” which, despite their moralizing tendencies and their manifest lack of poetic inspiration, were at one time highly popular with the lovers of the sentimental…. Holland was not a great literary artist and he has not portrayed in enduring colors this life which he understood. He was first of all a moralist. He was at his best in his lay sermons to the young and in his papers on familiar subjects. The didactic and the moralizing are in everything he wrote, even in his poems and novels. His Timothy Titcomb letters are excellent. Their style is plain and homely, their subjects are often commonplace, yet they set true ideals before the reader in such an earnest, honest way that they can hardly fail to impress and benefit.

  The people [“Bitter Sweet”] were natural flesh and blood creatures, of a more cultured class, perhaps, than those described in “Snow-Bound.” The verse is pure and lucid, and the underlying doctrine that evil is an essential part of the divine plan, clearly and even ostentatiously set forth. The hero, it is true is a prig, whose sky-soaring instincts would not descend to explanation which would have relieved his devoted wife of much of her suffering. Certain parts also might have been omitted without in the least affecting the unity of the work. But prolixity had so long been the bane of our minor singers that it might well be condoned in this instance where there was so much of merit…. The promise indicated in “Bitter-Sweet” was not fulfilled in the author’s later works. “Kathrina,” even more than its predecessor, is overweighted with didacticism. To that large class whose tastes are gratified with a liberal mixture of Tupperism, it proved a revelation, as shown by the immense sale. The impression after reading it is one of mild wonder that the author should venture to consume several thousand lines of blank verse to prove that religion is essential to happiness. All through “Bitter-Sweet” and “Kathrina” the intent is disagreeably obstrusive to write a moral poem. The diction is frequently disfigured with mannerisms, petty affectations, and strained conceits…. In “The Mistress of the Manse” there are fewer offences against good taste, and less a tendency to sermonizing. It is decidedly among the best narrative poems of the Civil War. A tender, grave, and patriotic spirit characterizes the work throughout. It failed of the popular success attained by the earlier poems, perhaps because there was not enough of preaching to satisfy the poet’s former admirers, and not enough of poetry to please those of a more critical judgment.