Evening Star Newspaper, January 5, 1930, Page 82

2 = = — THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C.. JANUARY 5, 1930. of Greek culture. So he went one day to him and said something like this: “You really ought to do a little real work. Now you are going to your Summer place and I'll have some books sent up there for you to read.” Holmes acquiesced. And Brandeis got the Library of Congress to ship up to him at Beverly a big case of such books as the “Report on the Textile Industry” and “Studies on the Effect of the Eight-hour Day” and the “Em- ployment of Women in Industry,” and so on. The books arrived and were duly unpacked. Holmes, with the remark that he really must get to work, opened one of them and started in. He read for some time. Then, very softly, he Jaid it aside. “And,” my informant added, “got out his Plato and sat down to read it with all the joy of a boy reading a forbidden book behind the barn!” I FIND much more parallelism between Mr. Holmes and Lord Balfour. New England— Cambridge New England, and Boston New Eng- land—in every fiber, Mr. Justice Holmes is more English than new. Like Lord Balfour, Holmes is the inhabitant of every world of the spirit, at home in every chamber of the mind. His care for words as well as his skeptical philosophy is like Balfour’s, who said: “We can, on the naturalistic hypothesis, appeal, it would seem, to only one authority, namely, the experience of mankind.” Mr. John Dewey finds in this very quality his assurance of Holmes’ liberalism. “Liberalism,” Mr. Dewey says, “signifies the adoption of the scientific habit of mind in appiication to so- cial affairs.” Only by that definition can I Justice Holmes as a definition is Mr. Dewey's. Philosopher he is, carrying from his boy- hood, with the great transcendentalist fervor of the intellect, passion of the mind, cooled but unchilled by the scientific tendencies of six decadss. One might almost say that he is first phi- T and after jurist. For his mind seems always to proceed with two simultaneous processes. All the legal facts involved in a situ- ation wilthedfl:ehl:o m‘l;ely legalistic adumbrations are resolv ugh a larger meta- physical in its quality. He tmnxsm.l'l::‘:.chemht pouring differing elements together rather than like a painter evolving a pattern bit by bit. Inconsequeneoyouwflloflennndhvyers who complain of the difficulty of understand- ing his opinions. Holmes is aware of them and amused. He scorns to think for the unintelli- gent or to be comprehended by them. On one occasion, recently, a young lawyer was taken to see him. Probably in an effort to make himself agrecable, the young lawyer made some fla comment about the “clarity” of Holmes’ opinions. Bolmstumedwltrlendolmstnd-ld. “My God! I must be getting old!” Two months now will see the eighty-ninth regard Mr. “liberal”—and that Court remarked to me that it would be difficult to write of him because nothing but a panegyric could be written. I find that warning true. And in this respect of his incredible youth perhaps as much as in any ot For but that his tall and splendid frame has become slightly bowed, he bears no mark all, either in body or mind. He is still handsome and glowing with the energy of youth in his flashing blue eyes and sweeping mtunumthequlckhumormddeepnn- soning of his mind. He is still debonair, still the very parfait gentil knight, ITwuonlyazhonumeuothatheetmemt -, onto the front steps of the White House and lady waiting for her motor. 'I‘heladymlnoldmend.wholndmchm culty with her sight that she must wait there until her motor came around. Holmes spied I; Imvn the street in Pennsylvania avenue. This is the man who 56 years b his edition of “Kent’s commenuxmu?"w —_— It was this man over whom 47 years ago fellow professors in the Harvard Law School shook their heads and said: “He is making a He has s0o undermined his health with his work on the ‘Commentaries’ that he will never survive the strain of this work!"” This is the man who fought straight through the Civil War, who was wounded 11 t.lmz— thrice seriously—the man who knew Antietam and Balls Bluff and Maryes Hill. I have seen in Frederick, in Maryland, the little house they will always point to proudly as the place where :e t:as taken, wounded (they thought) unto eath. He cherishes his memories of the war, but he seldom talks about them, nor can he be persuaded to read books about the Civil War— except that he did read “John Brown's Body,” because it was art, not history. Once when the Chief Justice called a con- ference of the court for Memorial day, he murmured sotto voce to a fellow justice: “I don’t like to meet on that day!” And once he said: “Sixty-six years ago today I was in the Battle of Antietam.” But he does not reminisce about the war— the old man “laudator temporis acti.” I think there is no question of the impor- tance of that experience in the making of the great justice. However he may soar into the ‘clouds of philosophy, he never completely forgets the earth. However he may deprecate the florid, he cannot escape the heroic. He knows the difference between sentiment and romance. For sentiment is fiction and romance is action. He is no passive spectator, but a fighter. Though his life is of the mind and his work that of the judge, it is the mind in action and the law in conflict. Not strange this passion for him of idealistic youth. Nowhere in any call to arms will you find more glorious challenge than in his words about the profession of the law. “Booted into the bar by my father,” he once said he was, but you well know, if you know Holmes, that, no matter how he arrived or what calling he arrived at, he would have become a leader of those who love to fight. In this there is an interesting difference be- tween him and that other New Englander and % thinker, who long made Washington his home— Mr. Henry Adams. Adams observed life from much the same height of intellectual hauteur as Mr. Justice Holmes. But Adams shrank from life. Holmes mastered it. Adams pre- ferred the society of women. Holmes preferred the society of men. Yet he shared always that life and -the companionship of all good things with one woman—a woman fine and extraor- dinary in many ways as himself—his wife. Still is the memory carried by early friends of theirs of the days when they began together, Holmes nibbling at the practice of law in Bos- ton, she making a home for him in a little flat over an apothecary shop where she ar- rangsd their breakfast and worked in the eve- ning at something those friends call “painting in wool”"—embroidering delightful patterns upon canvas without a stamped design. “creat- ing,” as his friend said, “a new art.” N:w England as himself, she was a woman of great force of character, his greatest ad- mired and sympathetic but determined task- master. ONIfihmH’nmthIl of an occasion when he tried to take Holmes away from his books up at Beverly. Mrs. Holmes protested that he had to work, but at last she let him go on condition that he return by 3 o'clock. There was a visiting Englishman of dis- tinction in the party and there was a new yacht to be tried out and there was a beauti- ful day to be enjoyed and time sped along without arfy of the gentlemen being aware of its passage until suddenly it was dinner time and the engineer persuaded the justice to wait and eat a bite of dinner before going .\ Just as they were sitting down, the tele- story which helps to make us realize that Olympians, too, are hu- man beings. It was such a woman of New England as this, with all a New England woman's sense of duty, appreciation of fineness, who built about the justice a perfect environment. alone. For him, too, beauty is beauty. Along with his youth in retains today his joy in bursting bud river bank and fleeting sunset cloud lovely thing that nature shows, or forms of art in which he is 3t home—painting Falcon. By Theda Kenyon. My love is falcon, horizon-free of wing, Sensing the flight it never yet has known. It perches on my shoulder, quivering; Its talons pierce my flesh and grip the bone . . . But I must keep it hooded, a gold chain About its slender ankle, while above, In delicate, safe arcs bought by my pain, * The small birds sing gay mockery of my love! Flameless Film Combustion. Onaflwmwmotdlnmmm handling of nitrocellulose films used for motion pictures and X-ray purposes is the fact that they can burn with a flameless com- bustion likely to pass almost unnoticed until the presence of poisonous gases resulting causes severe illness or death, or until an explosive mixture has developed that announces itself with devastating emphasis. The worst part about this flameless combus. tion is that it may be started at a temperature of 150 degrees centigrade, and even lower, when subjected to the temperature for a period of any length. These low temperatures mean that contact with a spark, friction, or close proximity to a steam pipe may easily create a small combus- tion zone, which spreads gradually through- out the mass of the stored film. .This is par- ticularly disastrous in cases where the films are in insulated storage places where the heat is allowed to accumulate until the flaming point is reached. The danger of nitrocellulose films first came prominently to the fore as far back as Septem- ber 27, 1909, when a building in Pittsburgh was Exhaustive tests were carried on by the Bureau of Mines as a result of thie accident, and the flameless .combustion feature of the films was discovered. Some of the film was set off by a spark in a dark room and the film was consumed, although there was a complete absence of flame or light of any kind. A de- cided increase in temperature was found, how- ever, - The nature of the chemical reaction of the - these gases are present in large quantity. Little or no attention has been given to the tendency of nitrocellulose, as used in fims, to undergo spontaneous decomposition. Such ce- “turences, however, have been very frequent with such nitrocellulose as is used it ] Fe 85988 acid present. Yet if a small amount acid remains, it reacts to decompose the n cellulose, and, in “doing so, frees progressively until the temperature of tire mass has risen to such a point bursts into flame. ‘The property of the nitrocellulose films g other source of danger and must be guarded against. The Bureau of Mines is endeavoring to impress on all who handle or store the films their dangerous nature unless proper precautions are taken. - —— (oot of his opinions are quite unprintable) and etching There may be other jurists w! from the bench to Goya I do not know them. know nothing about. - minded.” But in painting and in letters and ln&hemrldo!nmmhegehtmendln(n- freshment. Two ways these two things—art and nature— find him in tune. Because, like nature itself, muwmzmwm;munwmum sincere. Because, like art, he transfuses a thou= sand thoughts, emotions, experiences, into one drop of their essential being. He lives in the day, not in “today,” with its momentary passions, passing enthusiams, teme porary hysteria. But in each day of his own, thrown new-made for him from the wheel of time, to be caught and used, to be enjoyed. “If the good God should tell me,” he once re- marked to a friend, “that I had only five min- utes to live, I would say to Him: ‘I'm sorry you can't make it 101" b, I would have said there was mo sfightest touch of the mystic here, except for the fact that Mr. Justice Holmes (besides being a master of classical prose) has written some beautiful verse, some of which has been published. And for one other story I have heard of him. Looking at one of those arrangements of col- ored glass which old Boston sets in here it is not the mys- ticism of philosopher, but the mysticism of poet, “The East invented religion,” he remarked one day, “and the West invented the railroad train. On the whole, I prefer the railroad train!” ONR of our greater living jurists remarked of him that his outstanding characteristics were three—his ability to extract rapidly the salient features from & mass of material (“an ability,” he said, “essential for all lawyers, and especially for judges”), his ability to express conclusions succinctly and his ability to move with the currents of thought. These may be, on the purely legal side, his outstanding qualities. On the human side I find them to be courage and pride. In this connection Mr. John Dewey speaks of the “intellectual humility of the scientific spirit.” I should call the Hplmesian spirit scie entifically experimental, but far from humble, For one thing, works of the human mind, which all men find , he does with too much ease, with 100 much swiftness, to learn humility. He knows half a dozen languages, ancient and modern; riffies through & book in any one of them as if it were his native tongue. He even reads “Black Letter.” correspondents or those opinions whose Eng- lish make them not only law, but literature. And yet he can take & case on Saturday, pare it by Sunday, write it by Monday and have it at the printer's by Tuesday. But Holmes demands that the pudding of meymn‘ shall be all raisins, Never impatient with an; really alive, he can be fatigued only by ineptitude, Not so long ago, before they put sound deadeners in the ceiling of the Supreme Court ersary, . With all his humor, all his scintillating wit, his is a life of intellectual sanctity, a devotion spiritual as that of the it may be, that i, 00, is sccking the Divine.”" Leaflet Shows Styles. The leaflet goes into considerable detail, showing various styles and various materials to well. In particular, the leaflet points to the ad- vantage of certain new types of cotton cloth which are declared to be as suitable as wool for cold-weather use. Weatherproof clothes for rainy-day use are also described and designed in the leafiet,