One of the most popular of American humorists has elicited from a member
of an English audience, who did not quite hear him lecture, a remark of
an amusing sort. The aggrieved listener proclaimed that he "had a right
to hear." This was one of the turbulent people who should read Mazzini,
and learn that man has no rights worth mentioning--only duties, one of
which is to hold his tongue in season. If Mr. Bret Harte's words did not
reach all his audience, his writings at least have come home to most
English readers. They suggest a consideration of the many points of
difference which distinguish American from English humour. The Americans
are of our own stock, yet in their treatment of the ludicrous how unlike
us they are! As far as fun goes, the race has certainly become
"differentiated," as the philosophers say, on the other side of the
Atlantic. It does not seem probable that the infusion of alien blood has
caused the difference. The native redskin can claim few descendants
among the civilized Americans, and the native redskin had no sense of
humour. We all remember Cooper's Hawk-eye or Leather Stocking, with his
"peculiar silent laugh." He was obliged to laugh silently for fear of
attracting the unfavourable notice of the Mingo, who might be hiding in
the nearest bush. The red men found it simpler and safer not to laugh at
all. No, it is not from the natives that the people of the States get
their peculiar fun. As to the German emigrants--But why pursue the
subject? The Abbe Bouhours told the bitter truth about German wit,
though, in new conditions and on a fresh soil, the Teuton has helped to
produce Hans Breitmann. We laugh at Hans, however, and with his creator.
Hans does not make us laugh by conscious efforts of humour. Whence,
then, come Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and Mr. Bret Harte, who are probably
the American humorists whose popularity is widest? Mr. Bret Harte's own
fun is much more English and less thoroughly Yankee than that of his
contemporaries. He is a disciple of Thackeray and Dickens. Of all the
pupils of Dickens he is perhaps the only one who has continued to be
himself, who has not fallen into a trick of aping his master's
mannerisms. His mixture of the serious, the earnest, the pathetic, makes
his humour not unlike the melancholy mirth of Thackeray and Sterne. He
is almost the only American humorist with sentiment. It is only the air,
not the spirit, that is changed--_coelum non animus_.
The changed atmosphere, the new conditions, do, however, make an immense
superficial difference between the humour even of Mr. Bret Harte and that
of English writers. His fun is derived from the vagaries of huge, rough
people, with the comic cruelty of the old Danes, and with the unexpected
tenderness of a sentimental time. The characters of the great Texan and
Californian drama are like our hackneyed friends, the Vikings, with a
touch, if we may use the term, of spooniness. Their humour is often
nothing more than a disdainful trifling with death; they seize the comic
side of manslaughter very promptly, and enjoy all the mirth that can be
got out of revolvers and grizzly bears. In Mr. Bret Harte's poems of
"The Spelling Bee" and of "The Break-up of the Society upon the
Stanislaw," the fun is of this practical sort. The innate mirthfulness
of a chunk of old red sandstone is illustrated, and you are introduced to
people who not only take delight of battle with their peers, but think
the said battle the most killing joke in the world. The incongruities of
these revels of wild men in a new world; their confusion when
civilization meets them in the shape of a respectable woman or of a baby;
their grotesque way of clinging to religion, as they understand it, make
up the transatlantic element in this American humour. The rest of it is
"European quite," though none the worse for that. It is more humane, on
the whole, than the laughable and amazing paradoxes of Mark Twain, or the
_naivetes_ of Artemus Ward.
Two remarkable features in American humour, as it is shown in the great
body of comic writers who are represented by Mark Twain and the "Genial
Showman," are its rusticity and its puritanism. The fun is the fun of
rough villagers, who use quaint, straightforward words, and have
developed, or carried over in the _Mayflower_, a slang of their own. They
do not want anything too refined; they are not in the least like the farm-
lad to whose shirt a serpent clung as he was dressing after bathing. Many
people have read how he fled into the farm-yard, where the maidens were
busy; how he did not dare to stop, and sought escape, not from woman's
help--he was too modest--but in running so fast that, obedient to the
laws of centrifugal motion, the snake waved out behind him like a flag.
The village wits are not so shy. The young ladies, like Betsy Ward, say,
"If you mean getting hitched, I'm on." The public is not above the most
practical jokes, and a good deal of the amusement is derived from the
extreme dryness, the countrified slowness of the narrative. The
humorists are Puritans at bottom, as well as rustics. They have an
amazing familiarity with certain religious ideas and certain Biblical
terms. There is a kind of audacity in their use of the Scriptures, which
reminds one of the freedom of mediaeval mystery-plays. Probably this
boldness began, not in scepticism or in irreverence, but in honest
familiar faith. It certainly seems very odd to us in England, and
probably expressions often get a laugh which would pass unnoticed in
America. An astounding coolness and freedom of manners probably go for
something in the effect produced by American humour. There is nothing of
the social flunkeyism in it which too often marks our own satirists.
Artemus Ward's reports of his own conversations with the mighty of the
earth were made highly ludicrous by the homely want of self-consciousness,
displayed by the owner of the Kangaroo, that "amoosin' little cuss," and
of the "two moral B'ars." But it is vain to attempt to analyze the fun
of Artemus Ward. Why did he make some people laugh till they cried,
while others were all untouched? His secret probably was almost entirely
one of manner, a trick of almost idiotic _naivete_, like that of Lord
Dundreary, covering real shrewdness. He had his rustic chaff, his
Puritan profanity; his manner was the essence of his mirth. It was one
of the ultimate constituents of the ludicrous, beyond which it is useless
to inquire.
With Mark Twain we are on smoother ground. An almost Mephistophilean
coolness, an unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects,
after the mean possibilities of the sublime,--these, with a native sense
of incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration, make up his stock-
in-trade. The colossal exaggeration is, of course, natural to a land of
ocean-like rivers and almighty tall pumpkins. No one has made such
charming use of the trick as Mark Twain. The dryness of the story of a
greenhorn's sufferings who had purchased "a genuine Mexican plug," is one
of the funniest things in literature. The intense gravity and self-pity
of the sufferer, the enormous and Gargantuan feats of his steed, the
extreme distress of body thence resulting, make up a passage more moving
than anything in Rabelais. The same contrast, between an innocent style
of narrative and the huge palpable nonsense of the story told, marks the
tale of the agricultural newspaper which Mr. Twain edited. To a joker of
jokes of this sort, a tour through Palestine presented irresistible
attractions. It is when we read of the "Innocents Abroad" that we
discern the weak point of American humour when carried to its extreme.
Here, indeed, is the place where the most peculiarly American fun has
always failed. It has lacked reverence and sympathy, and so, when it was
most itself, never approached the masterpieces of Thackeray and Dickens.
To balance its defect by its merit, American humour has always dared to
speak out, and Mark Twain especially has hit hard the errors of public
opinion and the dishonest compromises of custom.