Delphi complete works of.., p.102
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 102
It will of course be readily seen that the humorous quality of the above is of a mixed character, but the discomfiture of the associate editor enters largely into it.
Now, this primitive form of fun is of a decidedly anti-social character. It runs counter to other instincts, those of affection, pity, unselfishness, upon which the progressive development of the race has largely depended. As a consequence of this, the basis of humour tends in the course of social evolution to alter its original character. It becomes a condition of amusement that no serious harm or injury shall be inflicted, but that only the appearance or simulation of it shall appear. Indeed Plato himself adds, as a proviso to the definition which I have quoted above, that the misfortune which excites mirth in question must involve no serious harm. Hence it comes about that the sight of a humped back, or a crooked foot, is droll only to the mind of a savage or a child; while the queer gyrations of a person whose foot has gone to sleep, and who tries in vain to walk, may excite laughter in the civilised adult by affording the appearance of crooked limbs without the reality. This is perhaps what Kant meant by the resolution of the absolute. On the other hand, perhaps it is not.
When the development of humour reaches this stage its basis is shifted from the appearance of destructiveness and demolition to that of the incongruous. Man’s advancing view of what is harmonious, purposeful and properly adjusted to its surroundings begins to cause him a sense of intellectual superiority, a tickling of amused vanity at the sight of that which misses its mark, which betrays a maladjustment of means to end, a departure from the proper type of things. The idea of contrast, incongruity, of the false semblance between the correct and the incorrect, becomes the basic principle of the ludicrous.
To this stage of the development of the ludicrous belongs the amusement one feels at the sight of a juggler swallowing yards of tape, or of a circus clown wearing a little round hat the size of a pill-box.
Much of the humour of the farce and the pantomime, the transformation scene of the musical comedy, and the medley of the circus ring is of this class. Just why such appearances should excite laughter, why the sense of pleasure experienced should manifest itself in certain muscular movements, is a physiological, and not a psychological problem. Herbert Spencer tells us that the thing called a laugh is a sort of explosion of nervous energy, disappointed in its expected path, and therefore attacking the muscles of the face. Admirers of Spencer’s scientific method may find in this plausible statement a pleasing finality, though why the explosion in question should attack the face rather than other parts of the body still seems a matter of doubt.
To this secondary stage of development is to be assigned the first appearance of the mode of humour called wit. Wit depends upon a contrast or incongruity effected by calling in the art of words. “It is,” says Professor Bain, “a sudden and unexpected form of humour, involving a play upon words.” “Wit,” writes Walter Pater, “is that unreal and transitory form of mirth, which is like the crackling of thorns under a pot.” “It consists,” says another modern authority, Mr. Lilly, “in the discoveries of incongruities in the province of the understanding.” If the view here presented be correct, wit is properly to be regarded not as something contrasted with the humorous but offering merely a special and, relatively speaking, unimportant subdivision of a general mode of intellectual operation: it presents a humorous idea by means of the happy juxtaposition of verbal forms.
Now this principle of intellectual pleasure excited by contrast or incongruity, once started on an upward path of development, loses more and more its anti-social character, until at length it appears no longer antagonistic to the social feelings, but contributory to them. The final stage of the development of humour is reached when amusement no longer arises from a single “funny” idea, meaningless contrast, or odd play upon words, but rests upon a prolonged and sustained conception of the incongruities of human life itself. The shortcomings of our existence, the sad contrast of our aims and our achievements, the little fretting aspiration of the day that fades into the nothingness of tomorrow, kindle in the mellowed mind a sense of gentle amusement from which all selfish exultation has been chastened by the realisation of our common lot of sorrow. On this higher plane humour and pathos mingle and become one. To the Creator perhaps in retrospect the little story of man’s creation and his fall seems sadly droll.
It is of this final stage of the evolution of amusement that one of the keenest of modern analysts has written thus,— “when men become too sympathetic to laugh at each other for individual defects or infirmities which once moved their mirth, it is surely not strange that sympathy should then begin to unite them, not in common lamentation for their common defects and inferiorities, but in common amusement at them.” This is the sentiment that has inspired the great masterpieces of humorous literature — this is the humour of Cervantes smiling sadly at the passing of the older chivalry, and of Hawthorne depicting the sombre melancholies of Puritanism against the background of the silent woods of New England. This is the really great humour — unquotable in single phrases and paragraphs, but producing its effect in a long-drawn picture of human life, in which the universal element of human imperfection — alike in all ages and places — excites at once our laughter and our tears.
From this general settling of the subject let me turn to the more immediate consideration of American humour as such, and inquire what special sources of contrast and incongruity, what particular modes of thought and expression might well be engendered in American life, and reflected in American writing. Perhaps the most evident, and the most far-reaching, factor in the question is the circumstance that we Americans are a new people, divorced from the traditions, good and bad, of European life, and are able thereby to take a highly objective view of European ideas and institutions. Our freedom from the hereditary and conventional view has enabled our writers to take an “outside” view of things, and to discover many contrasts and incongruities hidden from the European eye. We have been able to view the older civilisation from a distance, and to judge it on its merits. The objective view — the deliberate insistence in judging things as they are, and not as hallowed tradition interprets them — forms the essential “idea” of much of what is considered typically Yankee humour. It is one of the leading qualities in the humour of Franklin’s Poor Richard, of Major Downing, of Sam Slick and of Hosea Biglow. It is connected essentially with the development of Yankee character, and of the Yankee view of the outside world. “A strange hybrid indeed,” said an English writer half a century ago, “did circumstance beget in the new world upon the old Puritan stock, and the earth never before saw such mystic practicalism, such niggard geniality, such calculating fanaticism, such castiron enthusiasm, such sour-faced humour, such close-fisted generosity.”
This peculiar vein of Yankee character has nowhere been better exploited for purposes of humour than in James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers. Here we have New England wisdom detached from the conventional view of things; how complete and surprising this detachment may sometimes appear is seen in the poem on the Mexican war, intended as a protest against the rampant militarism of the Southern expansionists, in which occurs the following verse:
We were getting on nicely up here to our village,
With good old idees o’ wut’s right and wut ain’t,
We kind o’ thought Christ went again’ war an’ pillage,
An’ that eppylettes worn’t the best mark of a saint.
But John P.
Robinson, he
Sez this kind o’ thing’s an exploded idee.
A great deal of Mark Twain’s humour rests upon a similar basis. The humorous contrast is found by turning the “artistic innocence” of the western eye to bear upon the civilisation of the old world. The result is amply seen in those two most amusing of American books, The Innocents Abroad and the New Pilgrims’ Progress. A few words from a preface written by Mr. Hingston for an English edition of the “Innocents” admirably develop the fundamental basis of the contrast here utilised as a source of humour.
“From the windows of the newspaper office where Mark Twain worked (the office of the Territorial Enterprise, of Virginia City, Nevada) the American desert was visible: within a radius of ten miles Indians were encamped among the sage bush: the whole city was populated with miners, adventurers, traders, gamblers and that rough-and-tumble class which a mining town in a new territory collects together. He visited Europe and Asia without any of the preparations for travel which most travellers undertake. His object was to see things as they are and record the impressions they produced upon a man of humorous perception, who paid his first visit to Europe without a travelling tutor, a university education or a stock of conventional sentimentality packed in a carpet bag. He looked at objects as an untravelled American might be expected to look, and measured men and manners by the gauge he had set up for himself among the goldhills of California and the silver mines of half-civilised Nevada.”
It will be understood that a humorist enjoying the special advantage of so profound an ignorance was in a position to make amazing discoveries. I regret that the limited space at my disposal prevents an elaborate citation from Mark Twain’s descriptions of Europe. But perhaps his reflections upon the old masters and their works in the picture galleries of Italy may serve as an illustration:
“The originals,” he writes, “were handsome when they were new, but they are not new now. The colours are dim with age; the countenances are scaled and marred and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall. There is no life in the eyes. But humble as I am and unpretending in the matter of Art, my researches among the painted monks and martyrs have not been wholly in vain. I have striven hard to learn. I have had some success. I have mastered some things, possibly of trifling import in the eyes of the learned but to me they give pleasure and I take as much pride in my little acquirements as do others who have learned far more and who love to display them fully as well. When I see a monk going about with a lion and looking tranquilly up to heaven, I know that that is Saint Mark. When I see a monk with a book and a pen, looking tranquilly up to heaven and trying to think of a word, I know that that is Saint Matthew. When I see a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranquilly up to heaven with a human skull beside him and without any other baggage, I know that it is St. Jerome. When I see other monks looking tranquilly up to heaven but having no trademark, I always ask who these parties are. I do this because I humbly wish to learn. I have seen thirteen thousand St. Jeromes, twenty-two thousand St. Marks, sixteen thousand St. Matthews and sixty thousand St. Sebastians, together with four million of assorted monks undesignated, and I feel encouraged to believe that when I have seen some more of these various pictures and had a larger experience I shall begin to take a more absorbing interest in them.”
As a subdivision of this Yankee humour which finds its starting point in the unprejudiced wisdom of the detached mind, is to be reckoned another mode of literary expression characteristic of the New England cast of thought. This is the production of a humorous effect by the affectation of a deep simplicity, a literary quality which perhaps had its root in the shrewdness in bargain-driving, highly cultivated among a people pious but pecuniary. No one was a greater master of this style than Artemus Ward. Ward was perhaps a comedian rather than a humorist. His early death prevented his leaving any great literary legacy to the world, but his lectures in New York and London of fifty years ago are still held in kindly recollection. It was his custom to appear upon the platform in what seemed a deep and embarrassed sadness; to apologise in a foolish and hesitating manner for the miserable little “panorama” lighted with wax candles which was supposed to offer the material of his lecture; to regret that the moon in the panorama was out of place; then in a shamefaced way to commence a rambling “Lecture upon Africa” in which, by a sort of inadvertence, nothing was said of Africa till the concluding sentence, when with a kind of idiotic enthusiasm which he knew so well how to simulate, he earnestly recommended his audience to buy maps of Africa, and study them. The following little speech made in explanation of his panorama may be taken as typical of his style:
“This picture,” he used to say, “is a great work of art; it is an oil painting done in petroleum. It is by the Old Masters. It was the last thing they did before dying. They did this, and then they expired. I wish you were nearer to it so that you could see it better. I wish I could take it to your residences, and let you see it by daylight. Some of the greatest artists in London come here every morning before daylight with lanterns to look at it. They say they never saw anything like it before, and they hope they never shall again.”
Somewhat similar in conception is the willful simplicity of his statement,— “I was born in Massachusetts, but I think I must have been descended from an old Persian family, as my elder brother was called Cyrus.” On one occasion he startled a London audience by beginning his lecture with the words, “Those of you who have been in Newgate,” — the audience broke into laughter; Ward looked at them in reproach and added— “and have stayed there for any considerable time.” Of a cognate character is the ultra-simple announcement which he printed at the foot of his lecture programme: “Mr. Artemus Ward must refuse to be responsible for any debts of his own contraction.”
Among more modern writers Mr. Edgar Wilson Nye has fully availed himself of this truly American principle of the deliberate assumption of simplicity. The episode of his visit to the Navy Yard in the days before Mr. Roosevelt, when the American Navy was a proper target of national scorn, is a fine example of a humorously wilful misconception of the purpose of things:
“The condition of our navy,” says Mr. Nye, “need not give rise to any serious apprehension. The yard in which it is placed at Brooklyn is enclosed by a high brick wall affording it ample protection. A man on board the Atlanta at anchor at Brooklyn is quite as safe as he would be at home. The guns on board the Atlanta are breech loaders; this is a great improvement on the old-style gun, because in former times in case of a naval combat, the man who went outside the ship to load the gun, while it was raining, frequently contracted pneumonia.”
But let us return from the humour of simplicity to the main form of Yankee humour of which it is a part, the humour based on that freedom from traditional ideas and conventional views, characteristic of a new country. It will readily be perceived that, unless sustained and held in check by the presence at its side of an elevated national literature, this form of writing easily degenerates. Freedom from convention runs into crudity and coarseness; and a tone of cheap vulgarity is introduced calculated to discredit grievously the literature to which it belongs. It is unfortunate that even the work of the best American humorists is disfigured in this way. It would be offensive here to cite in detail such conspicuous examples as the account of the Turkish bath in the Pilgrims’ Progress. An excellent example of what is meant is offered by Mark Twain’s Cannibalism in the Cars. In this little sketch the vein of real humour may be obscured in the minds of many readers by the gruesomeness of the setting. I cite a part of it, not to excite laughter, but to illustrate the point under discussion. The story is that of a number of Congressmen, snowed in, in a railway train, and after a week of confinement, driven by hunger to the awful extremity of choosing one of their number to die that the rest may live. The fun of the piece is supposed to lie in the contrast offered by the awful circumstances of the event, and the formal legislative procedure which the Congressmen, trained in American politics, apply to the case from sheer force of habit.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Richard H. Gaston, of Minnesota, “it can be delayed no longer. We must determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest.”
Mr. John S. Williams, of Illinois, rose and said, “Gentlemen, I nominate the Reverend Jas. Sawyer, of Tennessee.”
Mr. Wm. R. Adams, of Indiana, said, “I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote, of New York.”
Mr. Slote: “Gentlemen, I decline in favour of Mr. John A. Van Nastrand, of New Jersey.”
Mr. Van Nastrand: “Gentlemen, I am a stranger among you, I have not sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a delicacy — —”
Mr. Morgan, of Alabama (interrupting): “I move the previous question.” The motion was carried. A recess of half an hour was then taken, after which Mr. Roger, of Missouri, said:
“Mr. President, I move to amend the motion by striking out the name of the Rev. Mr. Sawyer, and substituting that of Mr. Lucius Harris, of St. Louis, who is well and honourably known to us all. I do not wish to be understood as casting the least reflection upon the higher character and standing of Mr. Sawyer. I respect and esteem him as much as any gentleman here: but none of us can be blind to the fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here than any of us.”
The Chairman: “What action will the house take upon the gentleman’s motion?”
