The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to
the instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always
joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The
Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we
are not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But
there is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes
his perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the
sense of always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance
indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in
England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the
spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift
that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English
temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried
expectation that there is really something in what you say which, will
be clear by-and-by.
Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American
pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the
interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it
does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit
of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about
grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than
the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen
I have known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those
story-telling Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless.
It is true that, wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon
lump, the expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are
subtile spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose
delicate gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself
of a heavier and grosser fibre.
No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than
half-way for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile
spirits are shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are
also of such an exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit
is funny, they will not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our
jokers. But, if you have something fine and good in you, you need not be
afraid they will fail of it, and they will not be so long about finding
it out as some travellers say. When it comes to the grace of the
imaginative in your pleasantry, they will be even beforehand with you.
But in their extreme of impersonality they will leave the initiative to
you in the matter of humor as in others. They will no more seek out your
peculiar humor than they will name you in speaking with you.