There sounds aloft a warning scream,
The jingling bell gives tongue below,
She breasts again the busy stream,
And cleaves its murky tide to snow.
Bereft of burnished glittering brass,
Ungainly bulging fore and aft,
Slowly from shore to shore they pass--
The matrons of the river craft.
Mr. Glass believes that humorous writing in America has changed more
than any other sort. But he does not, as I thought he would, attribute
this change to the increased cosmopolitanism of the country, to the
influx of people from other lands.
"Certainly our ideas of what is funny have changed," he said. "Humor is
an ephemeral thing. A generation ago we laughed at what to-day would
merely make us ill. The subjects and the methods of the humorists are
different. Who nowadays can find a laugh in the pages of Artemus Ward,
Philander Q. Doesticks, or Petroleum V. Nasby? Yet in their time these
men set the whole continent in a roar.
"Contrast two humorists typical of their respective periods--Bill Nye
and Abe Martin. I remember many years ago reading a story by Bill Nye
which every one then considered tremendously funny. He told how he went
downtown and got a shave and put on a clean collar and as he said,
'otherwise disguised himself.' When he got home his little dog refused
to recognize him, and several pages were devoted to his efforts to
persuade the dog of his identity. Then, failing to convince the dog that
he was really the same Bill Nye in spite of his shave and clean collar,
he impaled it on a pitchfork and buried it, putting over it the epitaph,
'Not dead, but jerked hence by request.'
"Now contrast with that a good example of modern American humor--a joke
by Abe Martin which I recently saw. There was a picture of two or three
men looking at a tattered tramp, and one of them was represented as
saying: 'You wouldn't think to look at him that that man played an
elegant game of billiards ten years ago!'
"It is an entirely different form of humor, you see. Bill Nye and the
writers of his school got their effects by grotesque misspelling,
fantastic ideas, and by the liberal use of shock and surprise. The
modern humor is subtler, more delicate, and more likely to endure.
"I do not think that the fact that America has become more cosmopolitan
has anything to do with this altered sense of humor. The American
humorists do not select cosmopolitan themes; the best of them are
distinctively American in their subject. Irvin Cobb, George Fitch, Kate
Douglas Wiggin, Edna Ferber Stewart, who wrote _The Fugitive
Blacksmith_--all these people draw their inspiration from purely
American phases of the life around them."
"What is it, then," I asked, "that has changed American humor?"
"Leisure," answered Mr. Glass. "Philander Q. Doesticks and other
humorists of his time wrote to amuse pioneers, people rough and
elemental in their tastes. Their audience consisted of men who worked
hard most of the time, and therefore had to be hit hard by any joke that
was to entertain them at all. But as Americans grew more leisurely, and
therefore had time to read, see plays, and look at pictures, they lost
their taste for crude and violent horseplay, and the new sort of humor
came in. Undoubtedly the same thing occurs in every newly settled
country--Australia, for example. It is unlikely that the Australian of
one hundred years from now will be amused by the things that amuse
Australians to-day.
"But the humor that entertains the citizens of a country of which the
civilization is well established is likely to retain its charm through
the years. Mark Twain's stories do not lose their flavor. But Mark Twain
was not exclusively a humorist; he was a student of life and he
reflected the tragedy of existence as well as its comedy. So does Irvin
Cobb, who is the nearest approach to Mark Twain now living.
"One source of Mark Twain's strength is his occasional vulgarity. That
surely is something that we should have in greater abundance in American
humor. I do not mean that our humorists should be pornographic and
obscene; I mean merely that they should be allowed great freedom in
their choice of themes. There is no humor without vulgarity. Our
humorists have been so limited and restrained that we have no paper fit
to be compared with _Simplicissimus_ or _Le Rire_.
"You see, a vulgar thing is not offensive if it is funny. Fun for fun's
sake is a much more important maxim than art for art's sake. The
humorists have a greater need for freedom in choice of themes than the
serious writers, especially the realistic writers, who are always
demanding greater freedom."
Mr. Glass returned to the subject of the failure of cosmopolitanism to
influence American literature by calling attention to the fact that very
few American writers find their themes among their foreign-born
fellow-citizens. "Where," he asked, "are the German-Americans and the
Italian-Americans? No writer knows these foreign-born citizens well
enough to write about them. The best American stories are about native
Americans. I admit that my stories are not about people peculiar to New
York--you can find counterparts of 'Potash and Perlmutter' in Berlin,
Paris, and London. But mine are not among the best stories of American
character. The best story of American character is 'Daisy Miller.'"
Mr. Glass believes that the technique of the short story has improved
greatly during the last score of years, but he is not so favorable in
his view of the modern novel, especially of the "cross-section of life"
type of work. He believes that the war will produce a great revival of
literary excellence in Europe, just as the Franco-Prussian War did; and
he called attention to something which has apparently been neglected by
most people who have discussed the subject--the tremendous inspiration
which Guy de Maupassant found in the Franco-Prussian War. But he said,
in conclusion:
"But any man who sits down to judge American literature in the course of
a few minutes' talk is an ass for his pains. Literary snap judgments are
foolish things. Nothing that I have said to you has any value at all."
_THE "MOVIES" BENEFIT LITERATURE_