[In the following essay, originally published in 1953, Carr profiles Laski's correspondence with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.]

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Judge of the American Supreme Court and the most distinguished American lawyer of recent times, commonly referred to as "Mr. Justice Holmes", to distinguish him from his father of the same name, the author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, had reached the age of 75 in the year 1916 when Mr Felix Frankfurter, head of the famous Law School of Harvard, brought to visit him at his summer residence in New England a remarkable young Englishman in his twenty-third year. Harold Laski was the son of Orthodox Jewish parents of Polish origin settled in Manchester. He had gone up to New College, Oxford, with a scholarship at the age of 18. As an undergraduate he celebrated his emancipation from his background by marrying, in defiance of all family opposition, a non-Jewish girl. On the outbreak of war in 1914, having been rejected for military service, he obtained a teaching appointment at McGill University, Montreal. A year later he became a junior instructor in the Department of Government at Harvard.

The respectful pilgrimage of the enthusiastic young neophyte to the home of the great man in his declining years is a theme familiar in history and literature. Rarely can such a visit have produced so startling a result as the two massive volumes of correspondence exchanged between Holmes and his young visitor over a period of 19 years, and now published in a model edition by a Harvard scholar.¹ Both meticulously filed and preserved the letters, so that very few seem to be missing from the collection. It is now presented to the world in its entirety. The omission of a very few proper names, presumably necessitated by the law of libel, does not detract from the extraordinary frankness and flow of the correspondence. The Laski letters passed into the possession of the Harvard Law School after Holmes's death in 1935. In 1949 Laski, a year before his own death, dispatched Holmes's letters to the same destination. He had intended himself to supervise their publication, but never found time to approach this task.

This dramatic encounter of minds which began at Beverly Hills Farm, Mass., in July 1916, clearly fulfilled on both sides some deeply felt need. This is at first sight less understandable on the side of Holmes than on that of the young disciple. Holmes's letters are, in the nature of things, far less copious and less revealing than Laski's, and contribute far less to the total picture of the man. For real insight into Holmes's mind the correspondence with Pollock, which belonged to the prime of his life and in which his partner was a contemporary and a fellow-lawyer, is far more rewarding than the correspondence with Laski. But of the warmth of Holmes's feeling for the young man, and of the unfailing eagerness with which through the long period of years his letters were received and answered, there can be no doubt whatever. "You may be sure that it was as much refreshment to me," he replied to Laski's first, bread-and-butter, letter, echoing a word which Laski had used, "to see you as it can have been to you to come here"; and later in the same letter he invoked a quotation from Morley, which spoke of "the mixture of flattered vanity and genuine love of the young" as exactly expressive of his feelings. Almost every letter to "my dear Laski" (or once, at least, "my beloved Laski") opens on a note of exultant pleasure at a letter received. "As always," one letter begins in 1921, "I go off bang when you pull the trigger."

The spectacle of old age captivated by the wide-eyed admiration and the boundless energy of youth is no novelty and no mystery. But what is remarkable about this correspondence is the extent to which it does in fact bridge the gap in years. The relationship of master and pupil, of great man and aspirant to greatness quickly falls away, and gives place to an eager volley-like exchange of ideas from which all suspicion of inequality or patronage has been eliminated. It is the more remarkable in that the two men were not really in political agreement; and it is politics which, directly or indirectly, haunts almost every page of their letters. Quite often—and usually on Holmes's side—the disagreement becomes specific. Holmes found Laski's Home University Library textbook on Communism "interesting not only in itself, but in suggesting the rationale of the differences between us", and went on:

I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy. .. . I think the robbery of labour by capital is a humbug. . . . Some kind of despotism is at the bottom of the seeking for change.

And Laski, while admitting "a real disparity between us on intellectual problems", replies composedly:

A good deal of our difference is, I think, due to our different civilizations. You are living amid a system where the classic principles of capitalism still work successfully, I amid one where the growing inadequacy of that machine is most obvious.

In spite of these divergences, however, a common ground of political belief, not often explicit and not perhaps very clearly recognized on either side, did exist between them. This was not only because Laski, for all his socialism, remained all his life, in many respects and in a somewhat confused way, a liberal, but also because Holmes was in American terms a progressive, and liked to think of himself as such. He was a reformer—in his way, a great radical—who had rationalized and reshaped much of American legal thinking. He was proud of his role; and he recognized in Laski a kindred flame of reforming zeal, quite independently of the particular objects on which that flame would be directed. Even in his old age Holmes had not, as his letters bear witness, shed his restless, critical spirit; the correspondence with Laski nourished and rejuvenated it. No minor disagreements could affect the relish—the "refreshment", to use the word which had figured in their first exchange—that Holmes continued to the end to receive from his correspondent's outpourings. Holmes's last recorded letter to Laski is dated November, 1932, and ends:

You see how hard I find it to write—my affection is unabated, but I can no more. Please keep on writing to me.

Laski's letters, interrupted only by two further visits to the United States, end in February, 1935, three weeks before Holmes's death.

For the biographer of Holmes the Laski correspondence is peripheral to his career. In Laski's life the correspondence occupies a central place. These letters belong to the best, most active, most productive years of his life, before the Second World War again darkened the academic horizon and before the ill-starred political excursions and political frustrations of his last years. These letters will be vital to any future assessment of Laski as a man and as a thinker and teacher. One is indeed tempted to place them higher, and to assign to them a more lasting value, than to his more formal writings; for here the gusto, the ebullience, the versatility—together with their obverse quality, a certain slipshodness of thought and expression—which were characteristic of everything Laski wrote or said can find free rein without spoiling the reader's enjoyment or provoking his resistance. It should also be said that few men so soon after their death have had their memory exposed to so severe a test as the publication of so vast a volume of their personal and unconsidered correspondence. If Laski's letters, when put through the sieve of an exacting criticism, prove him to have been not exempt from human frailties, it may fairly be asked whether the reputation of many other men who had exposed themselves by writing so fully and frankly would have stood up better to such an ordeal.

Unhappily Laski died, and the obituary notices and commemorative articles and summings-up were written, at a moment when the tide of opinion was ebbing sharply away from nearly all the positions which Laski had occupied. His temperament and his training—he grew up before the First World War—made him throughout life a confirmed and unrepentent optimist, a fervent believer in human nature and in the ultimate triumph of reason over obscurantism and illusion. Politically his hopes centred on the Labour Party: its spectacular rise to power coincided almost exactly with his career. The record of the Labour Government in the last five years of his life confronted these hopes with intractable political realities; and hard-headed working Labour politicians, including the trade union leaders, turned away in irritation and mistrust from their would-be intellectual mentor. Thus, at the end, Laski's renown had suffered, not only from a revival of Conservative opinion in the country at large, but from a hostile current in his own party. Even in the academic institution where he worked, a certain eagerness was manifest in some quarters to live down its reputation, which he had done so much to create, as a home of "advanced" and radical thinking.

When Laski died, therefore, in March 1950, an unwontedly strong note of criticism was at once sounded; and this was renewed on the publication of Mr. Kingsley Martin's biography of Laski early in 1953. The critics—some, it would seem, a little waspishly—fastened on a notorious shortcoming which, in other men or in other circumstances, might have been treated as venial or even as endearing. In most respects English to the core, Laski in one way violated a sacrosanct English convention. The Englishman is not expected to remain within the limits of the truth when discussing his prowess as an angler, his strokes at golf or his coups at the bridge table; but on more mundane matters he observes an obligation of reticent understatement. Laski was no sportsman, and he romanced quite shamelessly on two subjects which lay near to his heart—his purchases of rare books and his encounters with the great and the famous. The first idiosyncrasy might have been forgiven him: the second was not. Mr. Edmund Wilson has recorded that, before Laski returned to England from his first American sojourn in 1920, the New Republic group had already discovered his romantic habit of speech. Naturally it ended by defeating itself; and the reader of the Holmes-Laski correspondence will probably be tempted to overdo his scepticism about particular incidents. Even the editor of the present volume has not altogether escaped the temptation. It was, no doubt, his duty, when Laski reports to Holmes a casual meeting in Germany with "von Below, the mediaevalist", to record that the only traceable German professor of the name was an economic historian who had died three years before the reported meeting. But is it not more plausible, as well as more charitable, to suppose, not that Laski had invented a not very striking conversation, but that he had simply misheard or misremembered the name?

It is a pity that this minor eccentricity, which never carried with it the slightest trace either of malice or of selfseeking, should have intruded so conspicuously on estimates of Laski's career and influence. For here there is still much to be said. It is plain that Laski had none of the qualities of the practical politician. In more than one of his letters to Holmes he appears to show an understanding of his limitations in this respect and an unwillingness directly to enter the political arena. In the sense that he never attempted to enter Parliament he maintained this attitude to the end. But in the 1920s he had done far more than any other individual to mould the thinking of the intellectual wing of the Labour Party, many of whose members had risen to high office in it; he had been elected year after year by overwhelming majorities to the Party Executive; he had toiled without sparing himself in its service. After 1945 he found himself in a situation where he could not have effaced himself from a position of influence in party affairs, even had he so wished, but where equally he had no direct authority and no responsibility. Superhuman tact would have been required to navigate these treacherous waters without shipwreck; and this Laski did not possess. He became an easy target for the enemy, a liability rather than an asset to his friends; and the end came in bitterness, prejudice and frustration which eclipsed his immense services to the party in the past—services which will one day again be remembered and honoured.

If Laski was not, in any ordinary sense of the word, a politician, he was also no thinker. He had an unbounded verve and versatility in the acquisition of knowledge. But, where he skimmed everything, he never plunged deep. The extent of his reading was colossal, even if one assumes that he did not more than turn the pages of some of the works which he mentions. "Of books I have read but few in the week," he reports to Holmes in October 1923, and proceeds to enumerate five quite solid titles, including Charles Reade's Hard Cash and Plato's Republic "reread for work". But in the letters, as in his published works, it is difficult to discover not merely a consistent political philosophy, but any real search for a political philosophy at all. Laski had strong emotional attitudes towards politics—many of them the characteristic emotional attitudes of the ordinary Englishman who is not politically minded; and he had immense wealth of learning in many fields. But he wrote and spoke and taught so much that he never gave himself time to find a permanent resting-place for his ideas, or to bring the vast uncoordinated mass of his knowledge under a single roof. In this respect Laski had many of the qualities of perpetual youth—always curious, always seeking, always enthusiastic over some new discovery that might provide just the key which he had been wanting to the problems of the universe.

It was these qualities which were perhaps the secret of his greatness as a teacher. For this cannot be denied him; and to this a whole generation of students bears witness. Laski founded no school, and left no body of disciples to carry on a specific line of thought or investigation. He did both more and less than this. It may be true that the most mature and profound of his students ended by travelling beyond him. But few teachers have been so uniformly successful in inspiring and fertilizing the minds, not merely of a select élite, but of a whole group of students. Hardly any student who passed through his classes failed to learn from him or to catch something of his infectious enthusiasm. Outside the formal classes he was unstintingly generous with his time, with his interest and—on occasions—with his money, of which he had not much to spare. His students were drawn from Asia as well as from Europe and from every part of the Englishspeaking world; and his close associations with the United States gave his teaching a certain breadth of outlook and made it stand out against the insular background which still distinguished much of British education in the 1920s. Laski was probably one of those whose names are more widely known outside their own country than at home.

Paradoxically, the Holmes correspondence provides a better key to Laski's achievement than the numerous textbooks into which his lectures were distilled and which ran through many editions in his lifetime. For the way in which he fired and stimulated the aging American judge must have been in many ways similar to the impact which he made on his students. Almost every letter which he wrote to Holmes contains what is in effect an annotated reading-list and was awaited and welcomed by its recipient as such; and the unending flow of discoveries, ideas and anecdotes with which he regaled Holmes was not at all unlike the characteristic approach to his students. Laski was always himself. He did not keep his different interests and activities in separate compartments; and his success with students was partly due to his enviable capacity to establish contact with them as human beings. His textbooks and other writings belong to their own time and will scarcely outlive the present generation. But his letters to Holmes contain so much of the essence of a remarkable man and of a remarkable friendship, and present so vivid and many-sided a picture of the intellectual life of a period that has already passed into history, that they may well prove to have a more durable quality. They merit survival, both for their own intrinsic interest and as a fitting—if unconventional—memorial to a great and inspiring teacher.

NOTES

¹Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916-1935. Edited by Mark De Wolfe Howe, in two volumes (London: Oxford University Press; Cumberlege).