Delphi complete works of.., p.101
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 101
But even the existence of these brilliant exceptions to the general rule cannot invalidate the proposition that the effect of our American method upon the cycle of higher studies is depressing in the extreme. History is dwindling into fact lore and is becoming the science of the almanac; economics is being buried alive in statistics and is degenerating into the science of the census; literature is stifled by philology, and is little better than the science of the lexicographer.
Nor is it only in the higher ranges of education and book-making that the same abiding absence of general literary spirit is manifest in American life. For below, or at least parallel with the universities we have the equally notable case of our American newspapers and journals. In nearly all of these the art of writing is relegated entirely to the background. Our American newspapers and journals (with certain notable and honourable exceptions) are not written “upwards” (so to speak) as if seeking to attain the ideal of an elevated literary excellence, but “downward,” so as to catch the ear and capture the money of the crowd. Here obtrudes himself the everlasting American man with the dinner pail, admirable as a political and industrial institution but despicable as the touch-stone of a national literature. Our newspapers must be written down to his level. Our poetry must be put in a form that he can understand. Our sonnets must be tuned to suit his ear. Our editorials must speak his own tongue. Otherwise he will not spend his magical one cent and our newspaper cannot circulate. Hence it is that the bulk of our current journalistic literature is strictly a one-cent literature. This is the situation that has evolved that weird being called the American Reporter, tireless in his activity, omnipresent, omnivorous, and omni-ignorant. He is out looking for facts, but of the art of presenting them with either accuracy or attraction he is completely innocent. He has just enough knowledge of shorthand to be able completely to mystify himself; and in deciphering his notes of events, speeches, and occurrences, to fall back upon his general education would be like falling back upon a cucumber frame.
I cannot do better to illustrate the amount of literary power possessed by the American reporter than to take an actual illustration or at any rate one that is as good as actual. I will take a selection from President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and will present it first as Lincoln is known to have written it, and secondly as the Washington reporters of the day are certain to have reported it. Here is the original:— “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may soon pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword; as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”
Here is the reproduction of the above at the hands of the American reporter, piecing out his meagre knowledge of stenography by the use of his still more meagre literary ability: “Mr. Lincoln then spoke at some length upon the general subject of prayer. He said that prayer was fond and foolish, but that war would scourge it out. War was a nightly scourge. It would pile up two hundred and fifty million dollars of unpaid bonds. He recommended the lash as the most appropriate penalty, and concluded by expressing his opinion that the judgments of the Lord were altogether ridiculous.”
The ultimate psychology of this decided absence of literary power in our general intellectual development would be difficult to appreciate. It may be that the methods adopted in our education are a consequence rather than a cause, and it may well be also that, even if our educative system is a contributory factor, other causes of great potency are operative at the same time. One of these no doubt is found in the distinct bias of our whole American life towards commercialism. The vastly greater number of us in America have always been under the shameful necessity of earning our own living. This has coloured all our thinking with the yellow tinge of the dollar. Social and intellectual values necessarily undergo a peculiar readjustment among a people to whom individually the “main chance” is necessarily everything. Thus it is that with us everything tends to find itself “upon a business basis.” Organisation and business methods are obtruded everywhere. Public enthusiasm is replaced by the manufactured hysteria of the convention. The old-time college president, such as the one of Harvard who lifted up his voice in prayer in the twilight of a summer evening over the “rebels” that were to move on Bunker Hill that night, is replaced by the Modern Business President, alert and brutal in his methods, and himself living only on sufferance after the age of forty years. A good clergyman with us must be a hustler. The only missionary we care for is an advertiser, and even the undertaker must send us a Christmas calendar if he desires to retain our custom. Everything with us is “run” on business lines from a primary election to a prayer meeting. Thus business, and the business code, and business principles become everything. Smartness is the quality most desired, pecuniary success the goal to be achieved. Hence all less tangible and provable forms of human merit, and less tangible aspirations of the human mind are rudely shouldered aside by business ability and commercial success. There follows the apotheosis of the business man. He is elevated to the post of national hero. His most stupid utterances are taken down by the American Reporter, through the prism of whose intellect they are refracted with a double brilliance and inscribed at large in the pages of the one-cent press. The man who organises a soap-and-glue company is called a nation builder; a person who can borrow enough money to launch a Distiller’s Association is named an empire maker, and a man who remains in business until he is seventy-five without getting into the penitentiary is designated a Grand Old Man.
But it may well be that there is a reason for our literary inferiority lying deeper still than the commercial environment and the existence of an erroneous educational ideal, which are but things of the surface. It is possible that after all literature and progress-happiness-and-equality are antithetical terms. Certain it is that the world’s greatest literature has arisen in the darkest hours of its history. More than one of the masterpieces of the past were written in a dungeon. It is perhaps conceivable that literature has arisen in the past mainly on the basis of the inequalities, the sufferings and the misery of the common lot that has led humanity to seek in the concepts of the imagination the happiness that seemed denied by the stern environment of reality. Thus perhaps American civilisation with its public school and the dead level of its elementary instruction, with its simple code of republicanism and its ignorance of the glamour and mystery of monarchy, with its bread and work for all and its universal hope of the betterment of personal fortune, contains in itself an atmosphere in which the flower of literature cannot live. It is at least conceivable that this flower blossoms most beautifully in the dark places of the world, among that complex of tyranny and heroism, of inexplicable cruelty and sublime suffering that is called history. Perhaps this literary sterility of America is but the mark of the new era that is to come not to America alone, but to the whole of our western civilisation; the era in which humanity, fed to satiety and housed and warmed to the point of somnolence, with its wars abolished and its cares removed, may find that it has lost from among it that supreme gift of literary inspiration which was the comforter of its darker ages.
American Humour
ESSAYS UPON AMERICAN Humour, after an initial effort towards the dignity and severity of literary criticism, generally resolve themselves into the mere narration of American jokes and stories. The fun of these runs thinly towards its impotent conclusion, till the disillusioned reader detects behind the mask of the literary theorist the anxious grin of the second-hand story-teller. It is the aim of the present writer to effect something more than this, and to offer a contribution, however humble, to the theory of æsthetics, and a study of those national characteristics which are associated with the particular domain of the æsthetics in question.
The following essay is therefore intended to present a serious analysis of American humour as an art, and to discuss its relation to the character and history of the people among whom it has originated. In such a discussion it may well become necessary to introduce an actual citation of typical American jokes: but, where this is the case, it is done only in the interests of art, and with a proper sense of responsibility.
This is a somewhat venturesome task, and one for which the limits of the present essay are all too brief. The æsthetic theory of the humorous has been but little exploited, and never satisfactorily explained. It offers an open field for the talents of a future philosopher, or psychologist, who shall confine himself exclusively to the comic, and set up for us by his analysis the long-needed criterion of what is, and what is not, amusing. The philosopher who will do this for the domain of mirth will not only benefit the theory of æsthetics, but may incidentally shed upon his own province a not unpleasing illumination.
It is not to be implied from this that none of the world’s great philosophers, such as Kant, and Schopenhauer, have dealt with the analysis of humour. Several of them have done so, and have done so in a spirit which does them credit. Schopenhauer has told us — I cannot quote his phrase exactly but merely give the rough, every-day sense of his words — that all those concepts are amusing in which there is the subsumption of a double paradox. This is a proposition which none of us will readily deny, and one which, if more widely appreciated, might prove of the highest practical utility. Kant, likewise, has said that in him everything excites laughter in which there is a resolution or deliverance of the absolute captive by the finite. It was very honourable of Kant to admit this. It enables us to know exactly what did, and what did not, excite him. But the difficulty remains that the philosophical school of analysts, in their fear of being thought light, frivolous, or over-intelligible in dealing with this subject have been led to envelop themselves in a thick haze of psychological terminology which the common eye is unable to pierce. The explanation of the humorous proceeds thus ad obscurum per obscurius. The presentation in simple language for simple people of a true theory of the ludicrous has yet to be made.
It is perhaps not difficult to understand why so few writers have attempted a painstaking and scientific analysis of what is humorous. There appears to be a sort of intellectual indignity involved in the serious study of the comic.
Catullus said long ago that “nothing is more foolish than a foolish laugh,” and a recent French psychologist has added that “laughter is often an excellent symptom of intellectual poverty.” It follows, therefore, that any man of attainment is unwilling that his name should be unduly associated with the seemingly lighter side of intellectual life. He does not deny his own appreciation of the humorous. Indeed, by a strange inconsistency he shows himself highly sensitive in regard to it. Of his other faculties he is willing to admit the limitations. He is willing to make efforts to cultivate them. But his appreciation of humour he regards as a natural endowment, perfect in its degree, and needing no further cultivation. He even affects to consider the professional, or notorious humorist, with a kindly condescension, not unmixed with contempt. “There are obvious reasons,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes, “why all reputable authors are ashamed of being funny. The clown knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the gloomy fellow yonder in the black coat and the plumed hat. The wit knows that his place is at the tail of the procession.”
The initial task, then, of explaining the general nature of humour is difficult enough. But, even if this task were successfully accomplished, there remains the further difficulty of rightly explaining the essential nature of American humour. For this term does not necessarily apply to all humorous writings produced in the United States. The expression is not a geographical one, but ought to indicate certain dominant qualities, modes of thought and expression which mark off a distinctive literary product.
Even from this preliminary survey of the ground before us it can be seen that the subject under discussion is of no mean importance. Still further is its importance enhanced when one realises the peculiar position occupied by American humour in the general body of American literature.
In the preceding essay the discussion turned upon the relatively small output of literature of the highest class upon the continent of America. Wonderful as our civilisation is on its material and practical side, it falls short as yet, in regard to literature and general culture, of the standard of the great nations of Europe. But in this relative literary sterility there has been one salient exception, and this exception has been found in the province of humorous writing. Here at any rate American history, and American life, have continuously reflected themselves in a not unworthy literary product. The humorist has followed, and depicted, the progress of our western civilisation at every step. Benjamin Franklin has shewn us the humour of Yankee commercialism, and Pennsylvanian piety — the odd resultant of the juxtaposition of saintliness and common sense. Irving has developed the humour of early Dutch settlement — the mynheers of the Hudson valley, with their long pipes and leisurely routine; Hawthorne presents the mingled humour and pathos of Puritanism; Hans Breitmann sings the ballad of the later Teuton; Lowell, the Mexican war, and the Slavery contest; Oliver Wendell Holmes, the softer side of the rigid culture of Boston; Mark Twain and Bret Harte bring with them the new vigour of the West; and, at the close of the tale, the sagacious Mr. Dooley appears as the essayist of the Irish immigrant, while a brilliant group of “up-to-date” writers — the Ades, the Adamses and the Irwins of our contemporary journalism — boldly challenge comparison with their predecessors. No very lofty literature is this perhaps, yet faithful and real of its kind, more truly and distinctively American than anything else produced upon the continent.
All of this has been said but as a somewhat overbalanced introduction. Let me now invite my readers to take with me a sudden plunge into the uttermost psychology of the subject, comparable, I fear, in its recklessness with that taken of old time down a steep place into the sea.
The basis of the humorous, the amusing, the ludicrous, lies in the incongruity, the unfittingness, the want of harmony among things; and this incongruity, according to the various stages of evolution of human society and of the art of speech, may appear in primitive form, or may assume a more complex manifestation. The crudest and most primitive form of all “disharmonies” is that offered by the aspect of something smashed, broken, defeated, knocked out of its original shape and purpose. Hence it is that Hobbes tells us that the prototype of human amusement is found in the exulting laugh of the savage over his fallen foe whose head he has cracked with a club. This represents the very origin and fountain source of laughter. “The passion of laughter,” says Hobbes, “springs from a sudden glory arising from a conception of some eminence in ourselves, as compared with the misfortunes of others.” It seems but a sad commentary upon the history of humanity to think that the original basis of our amusement should appear in the form which is called demoniacal merriment. But there is much to support the view. “The pleasure of the ludicrous,” says Plato, “originates in the sight of another’s misfortune.” Nay, we have but to consider the cruder forms of humour even among civilised people to realise that the original type still persists. The laughter of a street urchin at the sight of a fat gentleman slipping on a banana peel, the amusement of a child in knocking down ninepins, or demolishing a snow man, the joy of a school boy in breaking window panes — all such cases indicate the principle of original demoniacal amusement at work.
Even in reputable modern literature we can find innumerable examples of merriment of the lower type created in this fashion. We are all familiar with Bret Harte’s poem about the circumstances which terminated the existence of the literary society formed at the mining camp of Stanislow. The verse in which the fun of the poem culminates runs:
Then Abner Dean, of Angels, raised a point of order, when
A chunk of old red sandstone hit him in the abdomen,
And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.
Now this humour of discomfiture, of destructiveness and savage triumph may be expected to appear not only among a primitive people, but also in any case where the settlement of a new country reproduces to some extent the circumstances of primitive life. One can therefore readily understand that it enters freely into the composition of the humour of American western life. The humour of the Arkansas mule, of the bucking broncho, of the Kentucky duel, is all of this primitive character. Mark Twain’s earlier and shorter sketches contain much material of this sort. An excellent illustration of it is found in the essay called “Journalism in Tennessee.” The following extract therefrom, a little abbreviated for the sake of condensation, may be offered in citation:
The Editor of the Johnson County Warwhoop was dictating an article (to Mark Twain, the Associate Editor) on the Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual Development in America, when, in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window and marred the symmetry of his ear. “Ah,” he said, “that is that scoundrel, Smith, of the Moral Volcano; he was due yesterday.” He snatched a navy revolver from his belt, and fired. Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The Editor went on with his dictation. Just as he finished a hand grenade came down the stove pipe, and the explosion shattered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did no other damage than to knock out a couple of my teeth. Shortly after, a brick came through the window, and gave me a considerable jolt in the back. The chief said: “That was the colonel, likely.” A moment after, the colonel appeared in the doorway with a dragoon revolver in his hand. “I have a little account to settle with you,” he said: “if you are at leisure we will begin.” Both pistols rang out at the same moment. The chief lost a lock of his hair, and the colonel’s bullet ended its career in my thigh. The colonel’s left shoulder was chipped a little. They fired again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. I said I believed I would go out and take a walk as this was a private interview. Both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat.
