Delphi complete works of.., p.605
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 605
Mark Twain writes:
Some years later we have the illustrious John Morgan Twain. He came over to this country with Columbus in 1492 as a passenger. He appears to have been of a crusty, uncomfortable disposition. He complained of the food all the way over, and was always threatening to go ashore unless there was a change. He wanted fresh shad. Hardly a day passed over his head that he did not go idling about the ship with his nose in the air, sneering about the commander, and saying he did not believe Columbus knew where he was going to or had ever been there before. The memorable cry of “Land ho!” thrilled every heart in the ship but his. He gazed awhile through a piece of smoked glass at the penciled line lying on the distant water, and then said: “Land be hanged — it’s a raft!”
When this questionable passenger came on board the ship, he brought nothing with him but an old newspaper containing a handkerchief marked “B. G.,” one cotton sock marked “L. W. C.,” one woolen one marked “D. F.,” and a nightshirt marked “O. M. R.” And yet during the voyage he worried more about his “trunk,” and gave himself more airs about it, than all the rest of the passengers put together.
It will be noted that Mark Twain makes fun of his own family; Dickens makes fun of someone else’s. This corresponds to a very important difference in their methods. It was a broad distinguishing characteristic of Mark Twain’s work, especially his earlier writing, this method of humor obtained by making fun of oneself, of making oneself the subject of humiliations, of blunders, of bashfulness. Let me offer an example or two of what is meant, in order the better to talk about it.
In the book called Roughing It (Vol. I, Chap. X) there is an account of how the writer, in traveling by overland stage across the plains, finds himself served at table at one of the overland stopping places by Slade, the notorious bandit and murderer of the West, as yet unhanged. Mark Twain writes:
The coffee ran out. At least it was reduced to one tin cupful, and Slade was about to take it when he saw that my cup was empty. He politely offered to fill it, but, although I wanted it, I politely declined. I was afraid he had not killed anybody that morning and might be needing diversion. But still with firm politeness he insisted on filling my cup and said I had traveled all night and better deserved it than he — and while he talked he placidly poured the fluid to the last drop. I thanked him and drank it, but it gave me no comfort, for I could not feel sure that he would not be sorry presently, that he had given it away, and proceed to kill me to distract his thoughts from the loss.
The final wording proceed to kill me to distract his thoughts, in point of verbal technique draws on the humor contrast and incongruity between the magnitude of the act (murder) and the mildness of the purpose (distraction). But the basic humor of the passage is in the humiliation of self. Compare in the same book the author’s account of trying to ride a bucking “Mexican plug” which he was swindled into buying. Or compare at length the famous passage in which Mark Twain and his friends of the journey, caught in a mountain snowstorm, lie down exhausted in the snow to die, and wake up to find the storm over and themselves lying about thirty feet from a hotel. “Brothers, let us die together,” said one of the group as they lay down.
This humor of personal discomfiture, written in the first person, is one of the things that absolutely distinguishes the work of Mark Twain from that of Charles Dickens. The humor of Dickens often depends, especially in the earlier books, on discomfiture — the discomfiture of Mr. Minns and of the Tuggses (at Ramsgate) and of other characters in the Sketches by Boz; the humiliation of Mr. Winkle in the Pickwick Papers when he can’t ride and can’t shoot and tumbles down on skates. But the humor never turns on the discomfiture of Charles Dickens, either real or imagined. This humor of reversed egotism — the humiliation of oneself, the holding of oneself up to laughter — is much more of an American feature than a British. It may connect perhaps with what used to be the “inferiority complex” of people on this continent as compared with the older world. Or again it may not.
Even in the matter of verbal presentation each of the two great writers has his own especial form and mold of thought. From the cheaper verbal effects both Dickens and Mark Twain were relatively free, especially Mark Twain. Dickens plays on words in their double senses, but not often in the mere guise of a pun. But Dickens, like Mark Twain, could get better and more subtle humor out of verbal forms than mere pun-making. Compare the famous Dingley Dell cricket match in Pickwick, where one of the players, a stout gentleman in cricket costume, is said to “look like half a roll of flannel,” and another cricketer to look “like the other half of the roll.” The smack of the surprise in this is unforgettable. The thing is sometimes done by a direct visual likeness, sometimes by more subtle likeness of thought. Thus with Dickens two old church sextons talk of the death of this person and of that, “as if they themselves were notoriously immortal.”
The characteristic technique of Dickens, however, is the presentation of queer comparisons. This at its best is admirable technique. Bill Nye once spoke of a bow-legged man as having “legs like twenty-five minutes after six.” The utter incongruity of the relationship between time and legs, thus brought into harmony, is fit to rank with scientific discovery. Now, Dickens had an extraordinary gift for seeing likenesses between everything and everything else, especially between animate and inanimate objects. For him, clocks wink, jugs grin, clothes dance and whisper on the clothesline, talking to the wind. Often he has line upon line and paragraph upon paragraph of these sustained comparisons. Here, for example, is young Dickens arriving in Boston:
When I got into the streets upon this Sunday morning, the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay, the signboards were painted in such gaudy colours, the gilded letters were so very golden, the bricks were so very red, the stone was so very white, the blinds and area railings were so very green, the knobs and plates upon the street-doors so marvellously bright and twinkling, and all so slight and un-substantial in appearance, that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime. . . . As I walked along, I kept glancing up at these boards, confidently expecting to see a few of them change into something; and I never turned a corner suddenly without looking out for the clown and pantaloon, who, I had no doubt, were hiding in a doorway or behind some pillar close at hand. As to Harlequin and Columbine, I discovered immediately that they lodged (they are always looking after lodgings in a pantomime) at a very small clockmaker’s, one story high, near the hotel; which, in addition to various symbols and devices, almost covering the whole front, had a great dial hanging out — to be jumped through, of course.
Mark Twain, too, had his own particular verbal forms and verbal effects, and admirable indeed they were. He kicked loose, after his earliest crude attempt at writing, from the supposed humor of bad spelling. Henceforth he used bad spelling only as a transcription for the bad language in the mouth of his characters. If he wrote “Yessiree!” it was because he meant “Yessiree.” Nor did puns make any particular hit out West, or with Mark Twain. But he found and created delight in the misuse of words, not by himself but by his characters, where a sound seems to convey the right meaning but doesn’t. Witness the case, as already quoted, of old Mr. Ballou of Roughing It, who said that the horses were “bituminous from long deprivation,” and who drank half a cup of coffee made with alkaline water and then threw the rest away, saying that it was “too technical for him.”
Take as a further example the solemn reconstruction of Shakespeare by the Duke on the raft (in Huckleberry Finn) when the Duke is preparing Hamlet’s soliloquy to be given by him as a recitation in a Mississippi village. What he makes is not a parody; that is not the point. The contrast lies as between reconstruction from memory and inspired composition:
To be or not to be: that is the bare bodkin.
But Mark Twain’s technique of words, his power over words, went much further than this. He had an extraordinary perception of the uses which words ought to have, by analogy with their ordinary use. He thus extends them into a new application. We have already cited the case where he speaks of a little town in the West where the people were very religious and where “each one of the Protestant sects had a plant of its own!” In using the word he makes an ingenious implication as to the mundane aspect of spiritual life. Plant? That would lead on to the “general manager” for the pastor, and “salesmen” for the sidesmen.
But neither the humor of Dickens nor that of Mark Twain would have attained to the eminence which it holds and deserves if it did not contain far higher elements than these. There is, as has been said, a still higher plane to which humor can attain. This is seen when the contrasts and incongruities and misfits upon which humor rests are those of life itself — the contrast between what we might be and what we are, between the petty cares and anxieties of today and the nothingness to which they fade tomorrow, between the fever and the fret of life and the final calm of death.
In retrospect all our little activities are but as nothing, all that we do has in it a touch of the pathetic, and even our sins and wickedness and crime are easily pardoned in the realization of their futility. Thus do we look back in life to the angers and the troubles of childhood. Thus might omniscient wisdom look on the fates and follies of mankind. In this divine retrospect humor and pathos become one, and the eyes of laughter brim with tears. The highest point of Dickens’s art is reached when he presents to us a crook like Alfred Jingle, and makes him almost lovable, a villain like Squeers and extracts amusement from him, a horror like Mrs. Gamp and calls forth laughter. This “divine retrospect” was the real marvel of Dickens’s genius. No one ever achieved it as he did. That is why his books rise before the mind even larger in remembrance than in perusal. This soft light of retrospect that looks back on the sins and sorrows of life, as we do on the angers of childhood, with the same understanding and forgiveness, this is humor at its greatest.
Mark Twain, too, reaches it — preëminently with Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim. The little outcast boy, floating down the broad flood of the Mississippi on his raft, the clarity of his unsullied soul — and with him Nigger Jim, who embodies the docility, the forgivingness of the Negro race — these are wonderful characters, and this is a searching indictment of our civilization. But the soft haze in which it lies, the very shadows on the waters, rob it of all anger. Huckleberry Finn could have stepped across into the pages of Dickens to talk with Alfred Jingle in the debtors’ prison; or could have carried Jingle away on his raft to join with the Duke and the King in re-editing Shakespeare. For at this point the art of the two writers has run into one. Thinking of such work as this, one wonders whether, in our age of flickering shadows and raucous voices, it can ever be done again. Perhaps the time is past.
CHAPTER V. COMIC AND SUPER-COMIC VERSE
COMIC AND SUPER-COMIC Distinguished — Poetry and Humor-Satirical Verse — Comic Verbal Effects — Comic Narrative — The Mock Heroic — The Super-Comic School.
Example of Comic Verse
When Grandmamma fell off the boat
And couldn’t swim, and wouldn’t float,
And Young Matilda sat and smiled,
I almost could have slapped the child.
Captain Harry Graham, in Ruthless Rhymes.
Example of Super-Comic Verse
Have you heard of the dreadful fate
Of Mr. P. P. Bliss and wife?
Of their death I will relate,
And also others lost their life;
Ashtabula Bridge disaster,
Where so many people died
Without a thought that destruction
Would plunge them ‘neath the wheel of tide.
The Sweet Singer of Michigan (1878).
Example of Unconscious Super-Comic Verse
I met a little cottage girl,
She was eight years old, — she said!
Mr. William Wordsworth.
Comic verse means verse that is written with the intention and with the effect of making it funny. Super-comic verse is written without the same intention but with the same effect. In the one case we laugh with the writer; in the other we laugh at him.
Captain Harry Graham’s Ruthless Rhyme, as quoted above, in which he describes the distressing death of Grandmamma, when she fell off a fishing-punt is comic verse. But the poem by Mrs. Julia Moore, the “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” recording the death of “Mr. P. P. Bliss and wife” in the Ashtabula disaster of 1874, is super-comic. The first kind of verse may be written, after a fashion, by any literary person with a sense of humor. But super-comic verse demands a peculiar combination of inspiration and ignorance, difficult to find.
James McIntyre would hardly have written his reflections on the production of the Mammoth Cheese at Ingersoll, Ontario, in 1888, without being inspired to see in the cheese a vision of the coming greatness of Canada. Nor could he, with an academic education, have retained the peculiar use of language in which he gave it expression. Such poets as Gray of the Elegy, Byron and Shelley, masters of language, if they had not been educated would have become super-comic poets. Thus, compare Gray’s thought:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
with that of the poet Mytheryll, of Georgina Township, Ontario, who writes of a funeral at the Lake Shore Church:
The bell is tolling at the door;
It seems to say, “Here comes one more.”
Gray’s expression is more sustained, perhaps more graceful; but that of Mytheryll is more direct. He seizes the central thought and states it.
Or compare, to take a further illustration more or less at random, two rival interpretations in verse of motion and transportation.
Here we have, on the one hand, Lord Byron:
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll,
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.
But put beside this the well-known poem on the Canadian Pacific Railway, attributed, though I think incorrectly, to Harry Barker of the Operating Staff of the Arts Building of McGill University.
Again we mount our flying car
And o’er the prairies fly afar;
Nothing can now our progress bar
For mountains don’t stop the C. P. R.
One admits the quality of Byron’s verse. Yet Barker’s — if it is Barker’s — moves faster. One has a feeling, after comparing the two, that the C. P. R. would beat out Byron’s fleet with ease. The speed is heightened by the artful repetition in Barker’s verse of the word “fly,” a characteristic device of the super-comic poet who realizes that saying a thing twice is twice as effective as saying it once. Compare all primitive and juvenile verse, such as “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son,” or, “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward” — equal to a league and a half in all.
But to return a moment to the two poems quoted as expressions of motion, one observes that McIntyre of Ingersoll fuses both thoughts into one by grasping the idea that the C. P. R. carries tea from China.
Canadian flags are now unfurled
In the ports of the Chinese.
A short route to the Oriental world
Gives Canada her fine, cheap teas.
Round this whole question of comic and super-comic verse and the relation of the poetic form to the expression of humor, there is a vast deal to say. Let us begin at the beginning.
Poetry at its best is the noblest instrument of human expression. It outranks prose. It conveys our emotions and the sights and sounds that inspire them with far greater power. Thus you may say in prose, “The Falls of Niagara over which a great many million gallons of water fall 160 feet to form a very impressive spectacle.” But you have not made it so. You have said it, but it doesn’t “get over.” It remains for the poet to find such words and images in which to convey his impression that you may seem to see and hear the rush and roar of the cataract.
There is no way of conveying in prose such things as:
Tears idle tears,
I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair,
· · · · · · · ·
In looking at the happy Autumn fields
And thinking on the days that are no more.
But in the world of humor, poetry plays a very subordinate part. Its range is very limited. Practically all the great masterpieces of humor are written in prose. The effects to be obtained from poetry lie rather in the domain of the “comic” than of the larger humor; they are for the most part the mere cracklings of verbal wit, water running over pebbles in the sunlight, not the deep moving current of humorous thought.
