hate and fear, or both, overspread the sky. The policy of “thorough,”
adopted by the Radicals in Congress, was not only cruel, taking no
account of the myriads in the South who had perpetrated no wrong,
but was obtusely senseless, on one hand breeding an oligarchy of
corruption, and, on the other, driving a whole people to desperation.
It was thus, and thus alone, that a “solid South” was created.
God was more merciful than Congress. The North came to see that the
South was a part of itself. Nothing happened in the South that, in
the same circumstances and conditions, would not have happened at the
North. We are indeed the most homogeneous people on the face of the
globe. Our balanced system of representative government, strong in the
hearts of the people, is the best and freest, because the most flexible
and adjustable, on earth. We have outlived secession; we have survived
reconstruction; we have weathered a disputed succession, complicated
and embittered; we are passing through, and shall surely surmount,
other and still more insidious approaches of revolution. Tilden is
dead. Hayes is dead. They were but atoms in a sum total which sweeps
onward unaffected by either of them, then, or since--a few loaves and
a few fishes the while involved--toward the goal, the yet more perfect
day, that shines before us.
~Henry Watterson~,
“Courier-Journal” Office,
Louisville, Kentucky.
[Illustration: TO ALFRED NOYES]
APOSTLE OF POETRY AND PEACE
AN APRIL GREETING ON HIS RETURN FROM THE SOUTH
BY EDWIN MARKHAM
Again the mood of Eden on the earth!
Again the summons and the mystic mirth,
The beauty and the wonder and the dare,
Thrilling the heart, the field, the delicate air!
So now once more the old remembering:
The lyric hosts come out of the South with song,
With music that can save the soul from wrong--
The immemorial multitudes a-wing
Down bright savannas, over the greening trees.
Hark, the first warbling in the bough soft-stirred!
And you, O Poet, with your wingèd word,
You come convoyed by these!
You come with all the buds and birds astart--
You with the heart of April in your heart.
So take our banded welcome as we drink
A health to you on April’s flowering brink--
To you come hither from that elder clime,
Where April has been wreathed in poet’s rhyme,
Been touched with love and tears
By English minstrels down a thousand years.
[Illustration]
And now that Sherwood Forest calls you home
Over the furrows of the ocean foam,
Take message from this people to your own--
To England, with her scented hawthorns blown,
And all her skylarks in a rapture-pain
Sprinkling the happy fields with lyric rain.
Tell her that, lordlier than her cliffs and towers,
Tell her that, mightier than her pomps and powers,
We see her line of poets stretching back
Ten centuries, a bright, immortal track.
Tell her that while she builded the things that seem,
They built her glory out of deathless dream.
Ah, more is that wild beauty left by Keats
Than all the blazon of her kingly seats;
More is that wonder from the hand of Blake
Than all her guns that make the nations quake;
More is her Shelley, with his starry dare,
Than all her flags ringed round with battle blare;
More her blind Milton voyaging the vast
Than all her squadrons shearing down the blast;
And more is Shakspere, lord of lyric seers,
Than all her conquests of a thousand years.
But none of all the line
(Save only Shelley, darling of the Nine)
Has cried as you have cried the valorous vow
Of Love’s heroic heart, God’s prayer to men
To cease the wolfish battles of the den.
And so the Muses bind upon your brow
The olive with the laurel; for your song
Bears on that dauntless prayer against the wrong,
The cry the embassy of angels sent
Of old across the Syrian firmament,
Above the stable door.
For in your voice we still can hear their cry
Sound down into our sky:
“Let there be peace: let battles be no more!”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
A PAPER OF PUNS
BY BRANDER MATTHEWS
When two major artists have chosen to turn aside from the practice of
their art to discuss one of its principles, there may be an intrusive
impropriety in a mere outsider’s rashly urging a reconsideration of any
point they have felicitously sharpened. Yet it was only by impaling
himself upon the acute weapons of his adversaries that Arnold von
Winkelried was able to make way for liberty--an act of self-sacrifice
which cost him his life and gained him immortality.
The art of punning has had few practitioners more accomplished than
Charles Lamb and Oliver Wendell Holmes. A century ago Lamb declared
in a letter that “a pun is a noble thing per se: O never lug it in as
an accessory. It is entire; it fills the mind; it is as perfect as a
sonnet,--better. It limps ashamed in the train and retinue of humor; it
knows it should have an establishment of its own.” And in a more formal
essay Elia discussed the popular fallacy that the worst puns are the
best. Half a century ago the Autocrat in his turn expressed an adverse
opinion of a form of wit in which he delighted and for which he was
marvelously gifted. Lamb analyzed at length and with intense enjoyment
the immortal query of the Oxford scholar meeting a porter carrying
a hare and astounding him with the extraordinary question, “Is that
your own hare or a wig?” And Holmes once pretended to have overheard
a remark about “the Macaulay-flowers of literature”; and he recorded
the conundrum, “Why is an onion like a piano?” declaring that it was
incredible for any person in an educated community who could be found
willing to answer it in these words, “Because it smell odious.”
The difference between Lamb and Holmes is that Elia is frank in
declaring his delight in the ingenious dislocation of the vocabulary,
whereas the Autocrat pretends to deprecate it, to depreciate it, and
to disparage it as evidence in favor of the doctrine of the total
depravity of man. He even invented a polysyllabic quotation from an
earlier autocrat, the ponderous Doctor Johnson: “To trifle with the
vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper
with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the
sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the
paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without
an indigestion.”
This is an appalling overstatement of the case; and Holmes was happier
in another of the remarks made in the same chapter of the book in which
he expressed the utmost of his own witty wisdom: “People that make puns
are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They
amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset
a freight-train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.”
Here the doctor is on solid ground; a pun may be a good thing in
itself, as good as a sonnet even, but it is only dirt--that is to say,
matter in the wrong place--when it is injected into good talk only to
throw the conversational locomotive off the track. Oddly enough, the
Autocrat was once himself derailed by a pun a score of years after
he had thus laid down the law; and, as it happens, I had the full
particulars of the fatal accident from the punster who placed the penny
on the track. In this case the disturber of traffic was the late Thomas
Bailey Aldrich.
When Matthew Arnold paid his first visit to America thirty years
ago, Aldrich gave him a dinner and invited the best that Boston and
Cambridge had to show to do honor to his alien guest. He put Arnold
on his right and Holmes on his left; and early in the dinner he
discovered that the Autocrat was in fine form and ready to discourse
in his best manner. Holmes began by suggesting that it must be
amusing to meet unexpected characters, burglars, for example, and
pirates, and cannibals. “What would you do,” he asked, “if you were
to meet a cannibal walking down Beacon Street?” And he paused for the
reply that he did not desire, whereupon Aldrich saw his chance and
responded promptly, “I think I should stop to pick an acquaintance.”
The rest of the company laughed at this sally, but Holmes looked at
his host reproachfully and then shut up absolutely, saying scarcely
a word during the rest of the dinner. The witticism, even if it was
bright and not battered, had upset the freight-train of the Autocrat’s
conversation. And as Aldrich asserted, in telling the sad story, the
host had to repent in a sack-coat and cigarette-ashes for the rest of
his life. Autocrats are autocrats, after all; and not with impunity are
their unlimited expresses to be flagged by an unauthorized pun.
Possibly it was the painful memory of this unfortunate experience which
led Dr. Holmes to omit from the final edition of his complete works the
very amusing account of his “Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed
Punsters,” which he had included in an earlier volume--“Soundings from
the ‘Atlantic’”--now out of print. He tells us in this paper that he
was surprised to find that the asylum was intended wholly for males;
and yet on reflection he admitted the remarkable psychologic fact that
“there is no such a thing as a female punster. At least,” he adds, “I
never knew or heard of one, though I have once or twice heard a woman
make a single detached pun, as I have known a hen to crow.” And when we
recall the proverbial fate of the crowing hen, the fair sex may rejoice
that there are no female punsters, whatever may be the psychological
explanation of the remarkable fact itself. The fact might indeed be
accounted for easily by those ungallant cynics who maintain that women
are careless in the employment of words (which are the raw material of
puns), commonly using them as counters to convey emotions rather than
as coins to express thoughts.
Holmes’s account of his visit to the asylum reverberates with the
rattle of a corps of conundrummers; and every one of the inmates is
ready with his contribution, from the superintendent who explained
why “they did not take steppes in Tartary for establishing insane
hospitals, because there are nomad people to be found there,” to the
retired sailor who had gone as mate on a fishing-schooner, giving it up
because he “did not like working for two-masters.” The most imaginative
touch is at the end of the paper when the visitors are introduced to
a centenarian inmate, who asks affably, “Why is a--a--a like a--a--a?
Give it up? Because it is a--a--a.” Then he smiled pleasantly; and
the superintendent explained that the ancient man was “one hundred
and seven last Christmas. He lost his answers about the age of
ninety-eight. Of late years he puts his whole conundrums in blank--but
they please him just as well.”
Lowell, who was Holmes’s chief rival among the Cambridge wits, did not
pretend to disdain the pun, as Holmes affected to do. But he insisted
upon the absolute identity of sound with an equally absolute and
therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Lowell pointed out that Hood,
who is said to have lain on his death-bed “spitting blood and puns,”
abounded in examples of this sort of fun, “only his analogies are of a
more subtle and perplexing kind.” To illustrate this assertion Lowell
quoted Hood’s elegy on the old sailor, whose
“... head was turned, and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died.”
And the American critic called this “inimitable, like all the best
of Hood’s puns. To the ear it is perfect, but so soon as you attempt
to realize it to yourself, the mind is involved in an inextricable
confusion of comical non-sequiturs. And yet observe the gravity with
which the forms of reason are kept up in the _and so_.”
Another quotation from Hood also won high commendation from Lowell. It
was taken from the peddler’s recommendation of his ear-trumpet:
“I don’t pretend with horns of mine,
Like some in the advertising line,
To magnify sounds on such marvelous scales
That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale’s.
There was Mrs. F.
So very deaf
That she might have worn a percussion-cap
And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
Well, I sold her a horn; and the very next day
She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.”
Is that last line wit or humor? It is a play on a word, no doubt, and
that would relate it to wit. But it has the imaginative exaggeration
that we are wont to associate with humor. Lowell noted that we find it
natural to speak of the breadth of humor, while wit, by the necessity
of its being, is “as narrow as a flash of lightning, and as sudden.”
Humor has also its unexpectedness, and while most good puns must be
classed as specimens of wit, some few transcendent examples may fairly
claim to be specimens of humor--that last line of Hood’s, for example.
Many other instances might be advanced. A very distinguished British
scientist had the foible of inventing thrilling episodes in his own
autobiography; and on one occasion after he had spun a most marvelous
yarn, with himself in the center of the coil, a skeptical friend looked
him in the eye and asked sternly, “Clifford, do you mean to say that
this really occurred to you?” Whereupon the imaginative man of science
laughed lightly and with a most imperturable assurance calmly answered,
“Yes--it just occurred to me!”
It is wit and not humor, no doubt, when Holmes promulgates the law of
financial safety: “Put not your trust in money, but put your money
in trust.” It is wisdom as well as wit, but is it a pun? Is it only
a play on words? Is it not also a play on the idea? And take the
somewhat parallel remark about the rising fortune of a successful
man, to the effect that “he got on, he got honor, he got honest.”
That again is wit; but is it fairly to be termed a pun? Merely verbal
playfulness is more obvious in a recent remark that “some men stand
for office, some men run for it, and some have a walk-over,” and yet
that somehow fails to fall completely within any acceptable definition
of the pun. If it is a pun, it is something more also. With these
specimens may be grouped three other remarks which have not hitherto
been recorded in print. When a certain critic of limited equipment
was appointed to the chair of comparative literature in one of our
universities, the question was asked why he was assigned to this
particular professorship, since his information was mainly confined to
English; and the explanation was instantly forthcoming that comparative
literature was the position for which he was best fitted, because
his own literature was neither positive nor superlative. A certain
former Vice-President of the United States has been described as “a
very cold-blooded proposition,” and yet his speeches were the usual
flowery and perfervid political oratory which led an observer to make
the assertion that “to hear ---- speak is like catching nature in the
act of self-contradiction, since it is the emission of hot air from an
ice-box.”
And it was the same anonymous observer who pointed out the difference
between two contemporary British authors, insisting that “Mr. George
Bernard Shaw always writes with his tongue in his cheek, whereas when
Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton is writing he keeps thrusting his tongue
out at the public.” Now, are these remarks, strictly speaking, puns?
They conform at least to one of Lamb’s definitions that a pun “is a
pistol let off at the end, not a feather to tickle the intellect,” and
that it is “not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit.” He warns us
that “a pun may be easily too curious and artificial”; and he held
that a pun, at least in actual conversation, ought to stand alone and
not be followed by another. “When a man has said a good thing it is
seldom politic to follow it up.” This is true enough of conversation;
but it does not apply to literature. The spoken word and the written
have different rules. A large part of the humorous effect of the
trumpet-peddler’s eulogy of the wares he is vending is due to the
heaping-up of the puns, one tumbling over another, like salmon flashing
swiftly in the sunshine as they follow each other up the falls. Here
our pleasure is akin to that we take at the circus as we behold the
acrobats going on from one impossible stunt to its equally impossible
successor and accomplishing these feats as if each was the easiest
thing in the world.
There is in many passages of that rollicking satire, “A Fable for
Critics,” wise as it is in its author’s acute valuation of his
contemporaries, a riot of complicated riming and of unexpected
punning,--passages which impress us with an abiding sense of
spontaneous humor and good humor. These passages overflow with fun,
and we are carried along by Lowell’s delight in displaying his verbal
dexterity. For once he appears before us dancing on a metrical
tight-rope and setting off iridescent fireworks at the ends of his
balancing-pole. Consider, for example, these lines at the very
beginning, where Apollo is discussing his plight after he had pursued
Daphne and she had turned into a tree:
“‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked;
‘When I last saw my love she was fairly embarked
In a laurel, as _she_ thought--but (ah, how fate mocks!)
She has found it by this time a very bad box;
Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it--
You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.
Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!
What romance would be left?--who can flatter or kiss trees?
And for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogue
With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,--
Not to say that the thought would forever intrude
That you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood?
Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,
To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;
Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting, but now,
As they left me forever, each making its bough!
If her tongue _had_ a tang sometimes more than was right,
Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’”
Almost worthy to be set beside Lowell’s lines is Mr. William A.
Croffut’s “Dirge concerning the late lamented King of the Cannibal
Islands” in which he rings the changes on a single theme:
“And missionaries graced his festive board,
Solemn and succulent, in twos and dozens,
And smoked before their hospitable lord,
Welcome as if they’d been his second cousins.
When cold he warmed them as he would his kin--
They came as strangers, and he took them in.
“He had a hundred wives. To make things pleasant
They found it quite judicious to adore him;
And when he dined, the nymphs were always present--
Sometimes beside him and sometimes before him.
When he was tired of one, he called her ‘sweet,’
And told her she was ‘good enough to eat!’
“We grow like what we eat. Bad food depresses;
Good food exalts us like an inspiration,
And missionaries on the _menu_ blesses
And elevates the Feejee population.
A people who for years saints, bairns, and women ate
Must soon their vilest qualities eliminate.
“How fond he was of children! To his breast
The tenderest nurslings gained a free admission.
Rank he despised, nor, if they came well dressed,
Cared if they were plebeian or patrician.
Shade of Leigh Hunt! O, guide this laggard pen
To write of one who loved his fellow-men!”
Lamb would have enjoyed the stanzas of this elegy, with the effortless
ease of the long succession of puns, playing leap-frog; and Hood would
have appreciated them without envy. Perhaps Lamb would have liked even
better than Hood a superbly impossible pun in John Brougham’s burlesque
of “Pocahontas,” a long popular piece, which perhaps owed a part of
its success to the unhistoric marrying off of Captain John Smith and
the dusky heroine. When Smith is bound to the sacrificial rock and
the war-club of Powhatan is raised aloft to dash out the Englishman’s
brains, Pocahontas rushes in with the plaintive cry, “For my husband I
scream!” Whereupon Smith lifts his head and asks, “Lemon or vanilla?”
This has not a little of the illogical impossibility of “Is that your
own hare or a wig?” and like that immortal query it defies analysis.
It is not merely a play on a word; it is a play on an idea, which we
cannot ourselves formulate.
Brougham was an Irishman who was a past-master in the art of punning.
Perhaps his chief rival was the British playwright Henry J. Byron,
who once wrote a burlesque on a theme from the “Arabian Nights” which
he entitled “Ali Baba, or the Thirty-Nine Thieves--in accordance with
the author’s habit of taking one off.” Byron, however, was wont to
besprinkle the dialogue of his more ambitious comedies with puns not
always fresh and not always appropriate. In one of his forgotten farces
a retired soldier who had served in India makes a bore of himself by
talking forever about the Bungalura River. Finally, one of the other
characters, in a moment of natural irritation, ejaculates, “Oh, damn
the Bungalura River!” To which the old officer responds instantly,
“Sir, they have vainly endeavored to do so!” This is an ingenious quip
in itself; but it was not at all in keeping with the character, since
it was a remark the bore was quite incapable of making.
An earlier British dramatist, Douglas Jerrold, is said by his son
and biographer never to have put a pun in the dialogue of any one of
his plays; and if this assertion is well founded, the fact is the
more curious since Jerrold was prolific of puns in conversation and
in correspondence. In a letter written just after Queen Victoria had
been fired at, Jerrold declared that he had seen her out driving,
adding that “she looked very well, and--as is not always the case
with women--none the worse for powder.” And it was at one of the
“Punch” dinners that he made his cruellest retort, a pun with a
venomous sting in the tail of it. Gilbert A Becket--author of a “Comic
History of England” and a frequent contributor to “Punch” at the time
when Jerrold was providing that weekly with “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain
Lectures”--claimed a friendly interest from his associate, declaring,
“You know we row in the same boat.” To which Jerrold retorted
brutally, “Yes--but with different skulls.”
One of the pleasantest of the protean appearances of the pun is to
be found in the familiar quotation, made unexpectedly pertinent by a
felicitous suggestion of an unforeseen meaning hitherto concealed in
one of its words. A neat example of this is the Shaksperian motto which
the late Edwin Booth caused to be inscribed on the mantelpiece of the
grill-room in the club he founded for the practitioners of the allied
arts: “Mouth it, as many of our Players do.” When Mrs. Stowe was on her
way to Liverpool a fog suddenly shut the ship in after it had taken on
the pilot; and the authoress suggested that the pilot might sing, “That
Mersey I to others show, that Mersey show to me.” And in the “Autocrat”
again Dr. Holmes, after dwelling on the delight he had in beholding
noble oaks and spreading elms, mentioned one tree which was more than
eighteen feet in girth, and expressed a hope that he might meet a
tree-loving friend under its branches. “If we don’t have youth at the
prow, we shall have pleasure at the ’elm.” This is added evidence, were
any needed, that Holmes was not sincere in his denunciation of punning,
or at least that he was willing to damn “the sins he had no mind to.”
The derogatory old saying that a pun is the lowest form of wit has
been explained by the apt addition that this is because a pun is the
foundation of all wit. This explanation is not strictly true, of
course; the best wit is often independent of any flavor of word-play.
But there is a kind of pun which is really lower than any other effort
to arouse laughter; this is the pun which is due to a violent wrench
made visible only by the use of italics. As a general principle we may
assert that any pun is beneath contempt when it needs a typographic
sign-post before it can be seen. And the unfortunate who descends to
this dismal form of near-wit is of a truth the “mournful professor of
high drollery” that George Eliot once castigated. Pitiable specimens
of his lamentable handiwork--if anything so mechanical may fairly be
described by this term--can be discovered abundantly in more than one
of the inferior comic weeklies of Great Britain; and even the superior
weekly “Punch” is not always free from it.