It is 1866, and "Petroleum V. Nasby," writing from "Confedrit X Roads,"
Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's views on education. "He didn't bleeve
in edjucashun, generally speekin. The common people was better off
without it, ez edjucashun hed a tendency to unsettle their minds. He
had seen the evil effex ov it in niggers and poor whites. So soon ez a
nigger masters the spellin book and gits into noosepapers, he becomes
dissatisfied with his condishin, and hankers after a better cabin and
more wages. He towunst begins to insist onto ownin land hisself, and
givin his children edjucashun, and, ez a nigger, for our purposes, aint
worth a soo markee."
The single phrase, "ez a nigger," spells a whole chapter of American
history.
That quotation from "Petroleum V. Nasby" serves also to illustrate a
species of American humor which has been of immense historical
importance and which has never been more active than it is to-day: the
humor, namely, of local, provincial, and sectional types. Much of this
falls under Bergson's conception of humor as social censure. It rebukes
the extravagance, the rigidity, the unawareness of the individual who
fails to adapt himself to his social environment. It takes the place,
in our categories of humor, of those types of class humor and satire in
which European literature is so rich. The mobility of our population,
the constant shifting of professions and callings, has prevented our
developing fixed class types of humor. We have not even the lieutenant
or the policeman as permanent members of our humorous stock company.
The policeman of to-day may be mayor or governor to-morrow. The
lieutenant may go back to his grocery wagon or on to his department
store. But whenever and wherever such an individual fails to adapt
himself to his new companions, fails to take on, as it were, the colors
of his new environment, to speak in the new social accents, to follow
the recognized patterns of behavior, then the kindly whip of the
humorist is already cracking round his ears. The humor and satire of
college undergraduate journalism turns mainly upon the recognized
ability or inability of different individuals to adapt themselves to
their changing pigeon-holes in the college organism. A freshman must
behave like a freshman, or he is laughed at. Yet he must not behave as
if he were nothing but the automaton of a freshman, or he will be
laughed at more merrily still.
One of the first discoveries of our earlier humorists was the Down-East
Yankee. "I'm going to Portland whether or no," says Major Jack Downing,
telling the story of his boyhood; "I'll see what this world is made of
yet. So I tackled up the old horse and packed in a load of ax handles
and a few notions, and mother fried me a few doughnuts ... for I told
her I didn't know how long I should be gone,"--and off he goes to
Portland, to see what the world is made of. It is a little like Defoe,
and a good deal like the young Ulysses, bent upon knowing cities and
men and upon getting the best of bargains.
Each generation of Americans has known something like that trip to
Portland. Each generation has had to measure its wits, its resources,
its manners, against new standards of comparison. At every stage of the
journey there are mishaps and ridiculous adventures; but everywhere,
likewise, there is zest, conquest, initiation; the heart of a boy who
"wants to know"--as the Yankees used to say; or, in more modern
phrase,--
"to admire and for to see,
For to behold this world so wide."
There is the same romance of adventure in the humor concerning the
Irishman, the Negro, the Dutchman, the Dago, the farmer. Each in turn
becomes humorous through failure to adapt himself to the prevalent
type. A long-bearded Jew is not ridiculous in Russia, but he rapidly
becomes ridiculous even on the East Side of New York. Underneath all
this popular humor of the comic supplements one may catch glimpses of
the great revolving wheels which are crushing the vast majority of our
population into something like uniformity. It is a process of social
attrition. The sharp edges of individual behavior get rounded off. The
individual loses color and picturesqueness, precisely as he casts aside
the national costume of the land from which he came. His speech, his
gait, his demeanor, become as nearly as possible like the speech and
carriage of all his neighbors. If he resists, he is laughed at; and if
he does not personally heed the laughter, he may be sure that his
children do. It is the children of our immigrants who catch the sly
smiles of their school-fellows, who overhear jokes from the newspapers
and on the street corners, who bring home to their foreign-born fathers
and mothers the imperious childish demand to make themselves like unto
everybody else.
A similar social function is performed by that well-known mode of
American humor which ridicules the inhabitants of certain states. Why
should New Jersey, for example, be more ridiculous than Delaware? In
the eyes of the newspaper paragrapher it unquestionably is, just as
Missouri has more humorous connotations than Kentucky. We may think we
understand why we smile when a man says that he comes from Kalamazoo
or Oshkosh, but the smile when he says "Philadelphia" or "Boston" or
"Brooklyn" is only a trifle more subtle. It is none the less real. Why
should the suburban dweller of every city be regarded with humorous
condescension by the man who is compelled to sleep within the city
limits? No one can say, and yet without that humor of the suburbs the
comic supplements of American newspapers would be infinitely less
entertaining,--to the people who enjoy comic supplements.
So it is with the larger divisions of our national life. Yankee,
Southerner, Westerner, Californian, Texan, each type provokes certain
connotations of humor when viewed by any of the other types. Each type
in turn has its note of provinciality when compared with the norm of
the typical American. It is quite possible to maintain that our
literature, like our social life, has suffered by this ever-present
American sense of the ridiculous. Our social consciousness might be far
more various and richly colored, there might be more true provincial
independence of speech and custom and imagination if we had not to
reckon with this ever-present censure of laughter, this fear of
finding ourselves, our city, our section, out of touch with the
prevalent tone and temper of the country as a whole. It is one of the
forfeits we are bound to pay when we play the great absorbing game of
democracy.
We are now ready to ask once more whether there is a truly national
type of American humor. Viewed exclusively from the standpoint of
racial characteristics, we have seen that this question as to a
national type of humor is difficult to answer. But we have seen with
equal clearness that the United States has offered a singularly rich
field for the development of the sense of humor; and furthermore that
there are certain specialized forms of humor which have flourished
luxuriantly upon our soil. Our humorists have made the most of their
native materials. Every pioneer trait of versatility, curiosity,
shrewdness, has been turned somehow to humorous account. The very
institutions of democracy, moulding day by day and generation after
generation the habits and the mental characteristics of millions of
men, have produced a social atmosphere in which humor is one of the
most indisputable elements.
I recall a notable essay by Mr. Charles Johnston on the essence of
American humor in which he applies to the conditions of American life
one familiar distinction between humor and wit. Wit, he asserts, scores
off the other man, humor does not. Wit frequently turns upon tribal
differences, upon tribal vanity. The mordant wit of the Jew, for
example, from the literature of the Old Testament down to the raillery
of Heine, has turned largely upon the sense of racial superiority, of
intellectual and moral differences. But true humor, Mr. Johnston goes
on to argue, has always a binding, a uniting quality. Thus Huckleberry
Finn and Jim Hawkins, white man and black man, are afloat together on
the Mississippi River raft and they are made brethren by the fraternal
quality of Mark Twain's humor. Thus the levelling quality of Bret
Harte's humor bridges social and moral chasms. It creates an atmosphere
of charity and sympathy. In fact, the typical American humor, according
to the opinion of Mr. Johnston, emphasizes the broad and humane side of
our common nature. It reveals the common soul. It possesses a
surplusage of power, of buoyancy and of conquest over circumstances.
It means at its best a humanizing of our hearts.
Some people will think that all this is too optimistic, but if you are
not optimistic enough you cannot keep up with the facts. Certain it is
that the pioneers of American national humor, the creators of what we
may call the "all-American" type of humor, have possessed precisely the
qualities which Mr. Johnston has pointed out. They are apparent in the
productions of Artemus Ward. The present generation vaguely remembers
Artemus Ward as the man who was willing to send all his wife's
relatives to the war and who, standing by the tomb of Shakespeare,
thought it "a success." But no one who turns to the almost forgotten
pages of that kindly jester can fail to be impressed by his sunny
quality, by the atmosphere of fraternal affection which glorifies his
queer spelling and his somewhat threadbare witticisms. Mark Twain, who
is universally recognized by Europeans as a representative of typical
American humor, had precisely those qualities of pioneer curiosity,
swift versatility, absolute democracy, which are characteristic of the
national temper. His lively accounts of frontier experiences in
_Roughing It_, his comments upon the old world in _Innocents Abroad_
and _A Tramp Abroad_, his hatred of pretence and injustice, his scorn
at sentimentality coupled with his insistence upon the rights of
sentiment, in a word his persistent idealism, make Mark Twain one of
the most representative of American writers. Largeness, freedom, human
sympathy, are revealed upon every page.
It is true that the dangers of American humor are no less in evidence
there. There is the danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain's
earlier writings was carried to lengths of absurdity. There is the old
danger of the professional humorist of fearing to fail to score his
point, and so of underscoring it with painful reiteration. Mark Twain
is frequently grotesque. Sometimes there is evidence of imperfect
taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is actual vulgarity. In his
earlier books particularly there is revealed that lack of discipline
which has been such a constant accompaniment of American writing. Yet a
native of Hannibal, Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and in a
country printing-office and in mining-camps, can scarcely be expected
to exhibit the finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Arnold.
Mark Twain was often accused in the first years of his international
reputation of a characteristically American lack of reverence. He is
often irreverent. But here again the boundaries of his irreverence are
precisely those which the national instinct itself has drawn. The joke
stops short of certain topics which the American mind holds sacred. We
all have our favorite pages in the writings of this versatile and
richly endowed humorist, but I think no one can read his description of
the coyote in _Roughing It_, and Huckleberry Finn's account of his
first visit to the circus, without realizing that in this fresh
revelation of immemorial human curiosity, this vivid perception of
incongruity and surprise, this series of lightning-like flashes from
one pole of experience to the other, we have not only masterpieces of
world humor, but a revelation of a distinctly American reaction to the
facts presented by universal experience.
The picturesque personality and the extraordinarily successful career
of Mark Twain kept him, during the last twenty-five years of his life,
in the focus of public attention. But no one can read the pages of the
older American humorists,--or try to recall to mind the names of
paragraphers who used to write comic matter for this or that
newspaper,--without realizing how swiftly the dust of oblivion settles
upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is enough, perhaps, that they
caused a smile for the moment. Even those humorists who mark epochs in
the history of American provincial and political satire, like Seba
Smith with his _Major Jack Downing_, Newell with his _Papers of Orpheus
C. Kerr_, "Petroleum V. Nasby's" _Letters from the Confedrit X Roads_,
Shillaber's _Mrs. Partington_--all these have disappeared round the
turn of the long road.
"Hans Breitman gife a barty--
Vhere ish dot barty now?"
It seems as if the conscious humorists, the professional funny writers,
had the shortest lease of literary life. They play their little comic
parts before a well-disposed but restless audience which is already
impatiently waiting for some other "turn." One of them makes a hit with
a song or story, just as a draughtsman for a Sunday colored supplement
makes a hit with his "Mutt and Jeff." For a few months everybody
smiles and then comes the long oblivion. The more permanent American
humor has commonly been written by persons who were almost unconscious,
not indeed of the fact that they were creating humorous characters, but
unconscious of the effort to provoke a laugh. The smile lasts longer
than the laugh. Perhaps that is the secret. One smiles as one reads the
delicate sketches of Miss Jewett. One smiles over the stories of Owen
Wister and of Thomas Nelson Page. The trouble, possibly, with the
enduring qualities of the brilliant humorous stories of "O. Henry" was
that they tempt the reader to laugh too much and to smile too little.
When one reads the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ or _Diedrich
Knickerbocker's History of New York_, it is always with this gentle
parting of the lips, this kindly feeling toward the author, his
characters and the world. A humorous page which produces that effect
for generation after generation, has the stamp of literature. One may
doubt whether even the extraordinary fantasies of Mark Twain are more
successful, judged by the mere vulgar test of concrete results, than
the delicate humor of Charles Lamb. Our current newspaper and magazine
humor is in no respect more fascinating than in its suggestion as to
the permanent effectiveness of its comic qualities. Who could say, when
he first read Mr. Finley P. Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" sketches, whether this
was something that a whole nation of readers would instantly and
instinctively rejoice over, would find a genial revelation of American
characteristics, would recognize as almost the final word of kindly
satire upon our overworked, over-excited, over-anxious,
over-self-conscious generation?
The range of this contemporary newspaper and magazine humor is
well-nigh universal,--always saving, it is true, certain topics or
states of mind which the American public cannot regard as topics for
laughter. With these few exceptions nothing is too high or too low for
it. The paragraphers joke about the wheel-barrow, the hen, the mule,
the mother-in-law, the President of the United States. There is no
ascending or descending scale of importance. Any of the topics can
raise a laugh. If one examines a collection of American parodies, one
will find that the happy national talent for fun-making finds full
scope in the parody and burlesque of the dearest national sentiments.
But no one minds; everybody believes that the sentiments endure while
the jokes will pass. The jokes, intended as they are for an immense
audience, necessarily lack subtlety. They tend to partake of the
methods of pictorial caricature. Indeed, caricature itself, as Bergson
has pointed out, emphasizes those "automatic, mechanical-toy" traits of
character and behavior which isolate the individual and make him ill
adapted for his function in society. Our verbal wit and humor, no less
than the pencil of our caricaturists, have this constant note of
exaggeration. "These violent delights have violent ends." But during
their brief and laughing existence they serve to normalize society.
They set up, as it were, a pulpit in the street upon which the comic
spirit may mount and preach her useful sermon to all comers.
Despite the universality of the objects of contemporary American humor,
despite, too, its prevalent method of caricature, it remains true that
its character is, on the whole, clean, easy-going, and kindly. The old
satire of hatred has lost its force. No one knows why. "Satire has
grown weak," says Mr. Chesterton, "precisely because belief has grown
weak." That is one theory. The late Henry D. Lloyd, of Chicago,
declared in one of his last books: "The world has outgrown the dialect
and temper of hatred. The style of the imprecatory psalms and the
denunciating prophets is out of date. No one knows these times if he is
not conscious of this change." That is another theory. Again, party
animosities are surely weaker than they were. Caricatures are less
personally offensive; if you doubt it, look at any of the collections
of caricatures of Napoleon, or of George the Fourth. Irony is less
often used by pamphleteers and journalists. It is a delicate rhetorical
weapon, and journalists who aim at the great public are increasingly
afraid to use it, lest the readers miss the point. In the editorials in
the Hearst newspapers, for instance, there is plenty of invective and
innuendo, but rarely irony: it might not be understood, and the crowd
must not be left in doubt.
Possibly the old-fashioned satire has disappeared because the game is
no longer considered worth the candle. To puncture the tire of
pretence is amusing enough; but it is useless to stick tacks under the
steam road-roller: the road-roller advances remorselessly and smooths
down your mischievous little tacks and you too, indifferently. The huge
interests of politics, trade, progress, override your passionate
protest. "Shall gravitation cease when you go by?" I do not compare
Colonel Roosevelt with gravitation, but have all the satirical squibs
against our famous contemporary, from the "Alone in Cubia" to the
"Teddy-see," ever cost him, in a dozen years, a dozen votes?
Very likely Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Chesterton are right. We are less
censorious than our ancestors were. Americans, on the whole, try to
avoid giving pain through speech. The satirists of the golden age loved
that cruel exercise of power. Perhaps we take things less seriously
than they did; undoubtedly our attention is more distracted and
dissipated. At any rate, the American public finds it easier to forgive
and forget, than to nurse its wrath to keep it warm. Our characteristic
humor of understatement, and our equally characteristic humor of
overstatement, are both likely to be cheery at bottom, though the mere
wording may be grim enough. No popular saying is more genuinely
characteristic of American humor than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst
is yet to come."
Whatever else one may say or leave unsaid about American humor, every
one realizes that it is a fundamentally necessary reaction from the
pressure of our modern living. Perhaps it is a handicap. Perhaps we
joke when we should be praying. Perhaps we make fun when we ought to be
setting our shoulders to the wheel. But the deeper fact is that most
American shoulders are set to the wheel too often and too long, and if
they do not stop for the joke they are done for. I have always
suspected that Mr. Kipling was thinking of American humor when he wrote
in his well-known lines on "The American Spirit":--
"So imperturbable he rules
Unkempt, disreputable, vast--
And in the teeth of all the schools
I--I shall save him at the last."
That is the very secret of the American sense of humor: the conviction
that something is going to save us at the last. Otherwise there would
be no joke! It is no accident, surely, that the man who is
increasingly idolized as the most representative of all Americans, the
burden-bearer of his people, the man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief, should be our most inveterate humorist. Let Lincoln have his
story and his joke, for he had faith in the saving of the nation; and
while his Cabinet are waiting impatiently to listen to his Proclamation
of Emancipation, give him another five minutes to read aloud to them
that new chapter by Artemus Ward.
VI
Individualism and Fellowship
It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the old doctrine
of individualism than is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on
"The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the grim child of Calvinism as
he fires his "Annandale grapeshot" into that sophisticated London
audience: "Men speak too much about the world.... The world's being
saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We
should look to ourselves.... For the saving of the world I will trust
confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own
saving, which I am more competent to!"
Carlyle was never more soundly Puritanic, never more perfectly within
the lines of the moral traditions of his race than in these injunctions
to let the world go and to care for the individual soul.
We are familiar with the doctrine on this side of the Atlantic. Here is
a single phrase from Emerson's _Journal_ of September, 1833, written on
his voyage home from that memorable visit to Europe where he first made
Carlyle's acquaintance. "Back again to myself," wrote Emerson, as the
five-hundred-ton sailing ship beat her way westward for a long month
across the stormy North Atlantic:--"Back again to myself.--A man
contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is
made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must
be from himself.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man
with himself."
In the following August he is writing:--
"Societies, parties, are only incipient stages, tadpole
states of men, as caterpillars are social, but the butterfly
not. The true and finished man is ever alone."
On March 23, 1835:--
"Alone is wisdom. Alone is happiness. Society nowadays makes
us low-spirited, hopeless. Alone is Heaven."
And once more:--
"If AEschylus is that man he is taken for, he has not yet
done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe
for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master
of delight to me. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall
avail him nothing. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand
AEschyluses to my intellectual integrity."
These quotations have to do with the personal life. Let me next
illustrate the individualism of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude
of two famous individualists toward the prosaic question of paying
taxes to the State. Carlyle told Emerson that he should pay taxes to
the House of Hanover just as long as the House of Hanover had the
physical force to collect them,--and not a day longer.
Henry Thoreau was even more recalcitrant. Let me quote him:--