I heard many stories in America, where every one is a raconteur, but
none was better than this, which my San Francisco host narrated, from
his own experience, as the most perfect example of an honest answer ever
given. When a boy, he said, he was much in the company of an old trapper
in the Californian mountains. During one of their expeditions together
he noticed that a camp meeting was to be held, and out of curiosity he
persuaded Reuben to attend it with him. Perched on a back seat, they
were watching the scene when an elderly Evangelical sister placed
herself beside the old hunter, laid her hand on his arm, and asked him
if he loved Jesus. He pondered for some moments and then replied thus:
"Waal, ma'am, I can't go so far as to say that I love Him. I can't go so
far as that. But, by gosh, I'll say this--I ain't got nothin' agin Him."
The funniest spontaneous thing I heard said was the remark of a farmer
in the Adirondacks in reply to my question, Had they recovered up there,
from the recent war? "Yes," he said, they had; adding brightly, "Quite a
war, wasn't it?"
In a manner of speaking all Americans are humourists. Just as all
French people are wits by reason of the epigrammatic structure of their
language, so are all Americans humourists by reason of the national
stores of picturesque slang and analogy to which they have access. I
think that this tendency to resort to a common stock instead of striving
after individual exactitude and colour is to be deplored. It discourages
thought where thought should be encouraged. Adults are, of course,
beyond redemption, but parents might at least do something about it with
their children. One of the cleverest American writers whom I met made no
effort whatever to get beyond these accepted phrases as he narrated
one racy incident after another. With the pen in his hand (or, more
probably, the typewriter under his fingers) his sense of epithet is
precise; but in his conversational stories men were as mad "as Sam
Hill," injuries hurt "like hell," and a knapsack was as heavy "as the
devil." We all laughed; but he should have had more of the artist's
pride.
Three American professional humourists whom I had the good fortune to
meet and be with for some time were Irvin Cobb, Don Marquis, and Oliver
Herford, each authentic and each so different. Beneath Mr. Cobb's fun is
a mass of ripe experience and sagacity. However playful he may be on the
surface one is aware of an almost Johnsonian universality beneath. It
would not be extravagant to call his humour the bloom on the fruit of
the tree of knowledge (I am talking now only of the three as I found
them in conversation). Don Marquis, while equally serious (and all the
best humourists are serious at heart), has a more grotesque fancy and is
more of a reformer, or, at any rate, a rebel. His dissatisfaction with
hypocrisy provoked a scorn that Mr. Cobb is too elemental to entertain.
Some day perhaps Don Marquis will induce an editor to print the
exercises in unorthodoxy which he has been writing and which, in
extract, he repeated to us with such unction; but I doubt it. They are
too searching. But that so busy a man should turn aside from his work
to dabble in religious satire seemed to me a very interesting thing;
for nothing is so unprofitable--except to the honest soul of him who
conceives it.
One of Don Marquis's more racy stories which I recollect is of a loafer
in a country town who had the habit of dropping into the store every
day at the time the free cheese was set on the counter, and buying very
little in return. When the time came for the privilege to be withdrawn
the loafer was outraged and aghast. Addressing the storekeeper (his
friend for years) he summed up his ungenerosity in these terms: "Your
soul, Henry," he said, "is so mean, that if there were a million souls
like it in the belly of a flea, they'd be so far apart they couldn't
hear each other holler."
As for Oliver Herford, he is an elf, a sprite, a creature of fantasy,
who may be--and, I rejoice to say, is--in this world, but certainly is
not of it. This Oliver is in the line of Puck and Mercutio and Lamb and
Hood and other lovers and makers of nonsense, and it is we who ask for
"more." He had just brought out his irresponsible but very searching
exercise in cosmogony, "This Giddy Globe," dedicated to President
Wilson ("with all his faults he quotes me still") and this was the first
indigenous work I read on American soil. Oliver Herford is perhaps best
known by his "Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten," and there is a kitten also
in "This Giddy Globe":
"Hurray!" cried the Kitten, "Hurray!"
As he merrily set the sails,
"I sail o'er the ocean to-day
To look at the Prince of Wales."
--this was when the Prince was making his triumphant visit to New York
in 1919--
"But, Kitten," I said dismayed,
"If you live through the angry gales
You know you will be afraid
To look at the Prince of Wales."
Said the Kitten, "No such thing!
Why should he make me wince?
If a Cat may look at a King
A Kitten may look at a Prince!"
This reminds me that the story goes that when the Prince expressed his
admiration for Fifth Avenue he was congratulated upon having "said
a mouthful." Beyond a mouthful, as an encomium of sagacity or
sensationalism in speech, there is but one advance and that is when one
says "an earful."