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.We would make haste to ignore their posterity, and to assure them that we absolve them from any fault of theirs in the bastardy.
Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must explain why the little humour in Elsie Venner and the Breakfast Table series is not only the first thing the critic touches but the thing whereby he relates this author to his following and to the world.The young man John, Colonel Sprowle with his 'social entertainment,' the Landlady and her daughter, and the Poor Relation, almost make up the sum of the comic personages, and fifty per cent.of the things they say--no more--are good enough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off.But that half is excellent, keen, jolly, temperate; and because of that temperance--the most stimulating and fecundating of qualities--the humour of it has set the literature of a hemisphere to the tune of mirth.Like Mr.Lowell's it was humour in dialect--not Irish dialect nor negro, but American; and it made New England aware of her comedy.Until then she had felt within herself that there was nothing to laugh at.
'Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman,' says Dr.Oliver Wendell Holmes.Rather, she takes herself seriously when she makes the average spiritual woman: as seriously as that woman takes herself when she makes a novel.And in a like mood Nature made New England and endowed her with purpose, with mortuary frivolities, with long views, with energetic provincialism.
If we remember best The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, we do so in spite of the religious and pathetic motive of the greater part of Dr.
