Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes by Alice Meynell

It is good to go, now and again -- let the American phrase be permitted -- 'back of' some of our contemporaries. We never desired them as coevals. We never wished to share an age with them; we share nothing else with them. And we deliver ourselves from them by passing, in literature, into the company of an author who wrote before their time, and yet is familiarly modern. To read Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then, is to go behind the New Humorist -- into a time before he was, or his

Humour. Obviously we go in like manner behind many another, but the funny writer of the magazines is suggested because in reference to him our act has a special significance. We connect him with Dr. Holmes by a reluctant ancestry, by an impertinent descent. It may be objected that such a connection is but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuous incident, to a man of letters. So it is. But the triviality has wide allusions. It is often a question which of several significant trivialities a critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who does not insist that all the grave things shall be told him. And, by the way, are we ever sufficiently grateful for that reader, whom the last few years have given to us, or to whom we have been given by the last few years. A trivial connexion has remote and negative issues. To go to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid of many things; to go to himself is especially to get rid of the New Humour, yet to stand at its unprophetic source. And we love such authors as Dickens and this American for their own sake, refusing to be aware of their corrupt following.