Herman A.H.
For some time I have been grieving over the dearth of humor in America,
and wondering who the great coming humorist was to be. Several papers have
already deplored the lack of humor in our land, but they have not been
able to put their finger on the approaching humorist of the age. Just as
we had begun to despair, however, here he comes, quietly and
unostentatiously, modestly and ungrammatically. Unheralded and silently,
like Maud S. or any other eminent man, he slowly rises above the Kansas
horizon, and tells us that it will be impossible to conceal his identity
any longer. He is the approaching humorist of the nineteenth century.
It is a serious matter, Herman, to prescribe a course of study that will
be exactly what you need to bring you out. Perhaps you might do well to
take a Kindergarten course in spelling and the rudiments of grammar;
still, that is not absolutely necessary. A friend of mine named Billings
has done well as a humorist, though his knowledge of spelling seems to be
pitiably deficient. Grammar is convenient where a humorist desires to put
on style or show off before crowned heads, but it is not absolutely
indispensable.
Regarding the “Joliest Books” necessary for your perusal, in order to
chisel your name on the eternal tablets of fame, tastes will certainly
differ. I am almost sorry that you wrote to me, because we might not
agree. You write like one of these “Joly” humorists such as people employ
to go along with a picnic and be the life of the party, and whose presence
throughout the country has been so depressing. If one may be allowed to
judge of your genius by the few autograph lines forwarded, you belong to
that class of brain-workers upon whom devolves the solemn duty of pounding
sand. If you are really a brain-worker, will you kindly inform the writer
whose brain you are working now, and how you like it as far as you have
gone?
American humor has burst forth from all kinds of places, nearly. The
various professions have done their share. One has risen from a tramp
until he is wealthy and dyspeptic, and another was blown up on a steamboat
before he knew that he was a humorist.
Suppose you try that, Herman. M. Quad, one of the very successful
humorists of the day, both in a literary and financial way, was blown up
by a steamboat before he bloomed forth into the full flush and power of
success. Try that, Herman. It is a severe test, but it is bound to be a
success. Even if it should be disastrous to you, it will be rich in its
beneficial results to those who escape.
[Illustration]
What We Eat.
On 3d street, St. Paul, there stands a restaurant that has outside as a
sign, under a glass case, a rib roast, a slice of ham and a roast duck
that I remembered distinctly having seen there in 1860 and before the war.
I asked an epicure the other day if he thought it right to keep those
things there year after year when so many were starving throughout the
length and breadth of the land. He then straightway did take me up close
so that I could see that the food was made of plaster and painted, as
hereinbefore set forth and by me translated, as Walt Whitman would say.
A day or two afterward, at a rural hotel, I struck some of that same roast
beef and ham. I thought that the sign had been put on the table by
mistake, and I made bold to tell the proprietor about it, on the ground
that “any neglect or impertinence on the part of servants should be
reported at the office.” He received the information with great rudeness
and a most disagreeable air.
There are two kinds of guests who live at the average hotel. One is the
party who gets up and walks over the whole _corps de hote_, from the
bald-headed proprietor to the bootblack, while the other is the meek and
mild-eyed man, doomed to sit at the table and bewail the flight of time
and the horrors of starvation while waiting for the relief party to come
with his food.
I belong to the latter class. Born, as I was, in a private family, and
early acquiring the habit of eating food that was intended to assuage
hunger mostly, it takes me a good while to accustom myself to the style of
dyspeptic microbe used simply to ornament a bill of fare. Of course it is
maintained by some hotel men that food solely for eating purposes is
becoming obsolete and _outre_, and that the stuff they put on their bills
of fare is just as good to pour down the back of a guest as diet that is
cooked for the common, low, perverted taste of people who have no higher
aspiration than to eat their food.
Of course the genial, urbane and talented reader will see at once the
style of hotel I am referring to. It is the hotel that apes the good hotel
and prints a bill of fare solely as a literary effort. That is the hotel
where you find the moth-eaten towel and the bed-ridden coffee. There is
where you get butter that runs the elevator day times and sleeps on the
flannel cakes at night.
It is there that you meet the weary and way-worn steak that bears the
toothprints of other guests who are now in a land where the early-rising
chambermaid cannot enter.
I also refer to the hotel where the bellboy is simply an animated polisher
of banisters, and otherwise extremely useless. It is likewise the house
where the syrup tastes like tincture of rhubarb, and the pancakes taste
like a hektograph.
The traveling man will call to mind the hotel to which I refer, and he
will instantly name it and tell you that he has never spent the Sabbath
there.
I honestly believe that some hotel men lose money and custom by trying to
issue a large blanket-sheet bill of fare every day, when a more modest
list containing two or three things that a human being could eat with
impunity would be far more acceptable, healthy and remunerative.
Some people can live on cracked wheat, bran and skimmed milk, no matter
where they go, and so they always seem to be perfectly happy; but, while
simplicity is my watchword, and while I am Old Simplicity himself, as it
were, I haven't been constructed with stomachs enough to successfully
wrestle with these things. I like a few plain dishes with victuals on
them, cooked by a person who has had some experience in that line before.
I am not so especially tied to high prices and finger-bowls, for I have
risen from the common people, and during the first eighteen years of my
life I had to dress myself. I was not always the pampered child of
enervating luxury that I now am, by any means. So I can subsist for weeks
on good, plain food, and never murmur or repine; but where the mistake at
some hotels seems to have been made, is in trying to issue a bill of fare
every day that will attract the attention of literary minds and excite the
curiosity of linguists instead of people who desire to assuage an internal
craving for grub.