"WHOEVER and wherever and however situated a man is, he must watch three
things--sleeping, digestion, and laughing," said Mr. Beecher; and he
added with equal wisdom, "they are three indispensable necessities.
Prayers are very well, and reading the Bible very well indeed; but a man
can get along without the Bible, but he can't without the other three
things." When a man has a clear conscience, good digestion ought to wait
on appetite; and when he has a good digestion and a clear conscience, he
ought to find it easy to sleep well. Yet as sleep is the only true
friend that will not come at one's call, he may be wakeful despite his
pure heart and quiet stomach; and in this case he may fairly resort to
the Patent-office reports or the British comic papers, than which
"Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world"
are more potent soporifics. Many of the avowedly humorous publications
of the day are better as a cure for sleeplessness than as a cause of
laughter. Of all sad words of tongue or pen none is sadder than what is
known in many a newspaper office as "comic copy." Wit cannot be made to
order, and humor cannot be purchased by the yard, with a discount if the
buyer takes the whole roll.
In the _History of Henry Esmond_--more veracious than many a more
pretentious history of the reign of Queen Anne and of a broader
truth--Thackeray speaks of the "famous beaux-esprits," who "would make
many brilliant hits--half a dozen in a night sometimes--but, like
sharp-shooters, when they had fired their shot, they were obliged to
retire under cover till their pieces were loaded again and they got
another chance at their enemy." And this figure expresses the exact
fact; no wit is a breech-loader--still less is he a repeating rifle
capable of discharging sixteen shots without taking thought. The
readiest man must have time to reload and the most fertile must lie
fallow now and again. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, even when he had most
carefully prepared himself, did not sparkle in private conversation as
he was able to make his characters scintillate through the long sittings
of the scandalous college. If needs must and the devil drives a poor
wretch to crack jokes unceasingly, then of necessity the edge of his wit
will not be as keen nor the strokes of his humor as effective. And this
is why the conducting of a comic paper is like the leading of a forlorn
hope. Success can scarcely be more than a lucky accident. "'Tis not in
mortals to command success," and if Cato and Sempronius were joint
editors of a comic weekly it may be doubted whether they would even
deserve it. Nor would the author of the tragedy from which this last
quotation is taken have been a satisfactory office editor of a comic
weekly, although he contributed to the _Spectator_ the delightfully and
delicately humorous sketch of Sir Roger de Coverley.
This is why the level of comic journalism is not as lofty as we could
wish. This is why we frequently find poor jokes even in journals where
every effort is made to provide good jokes. The supply is not equal to
the demand, and the jokesmith often has to set his wits to work when the
stock of raw material is running low. _Punch_ and _Puck_ are the
representative comic weeklies of the two great branches of the
English-speaking race. _Punch_ has had a great past. It may even be
questioned whether those who declare its decadence do not exaggerate its
former merits almost as much as they do its present failings. It is
vaguely remembered that in _Punch_ Hood published the "Song of the
Shirt" and Thackeray the _Book of Snobs_, and Douglas Jerrold the _Story
of a Feather_, and it is often supposed that there was a time when all
the clever men of London contributed their best things every week to
_Punch_. But one has only to turn over the leaves of any of the earlier
volumes of the British weekly to discover that if this ever were the
case, then the clever men of London were a very dull lot. _Punch_ is
very much the same now that it was in the past. Hood contributed the
"Song of the Shirt," and nothing else; Douglas Jerrold wrote the _Story
of a Feather_--but who reads Douglas Jerrold nowadays? A'Becket
composed a _Comic History of England_, and the few of us who have read
it to-day feel as Dickens felt at the time, that it is dull and
machine-made. Thackeray wrote _Mr. Punch's Prize Novelists_ and the
_Snob Papers_; and Thackeray was the "Fat Contributor;" and there has
been no one like Thackeray since he left the paper.
But the pictures of _Punch_ are as good now as ever they were; perhaps,
taking one week with another, they are better. And the letter-press is
very much what it has always been--rhymes, jingles, puns in profusion,
topical allusions--"comic copy," in short. Now and then there is
something in _Punch_ which is still worth reading. There were Artemus
Ward's papers a score of years ago, for instance, and there were more
recently some of Mr. F. C. Burnand's earlier parodies and some of his
earlier _Happy Thoughts_. Decidedly the most amusing prose which has
appeared in _Punch_ during the past four or five years is the series of
overheard conversations called _Voces Populi_.
The author of _Voces Populi_ is the "F. Anstey" who is well known in
America as the writer of _Vice Versa_ and of the _Tinted Venus_. It is
an open secret that the real name of "F. Anstey" is Guthrie, just as
everybody knows that the real name of "Mark Twain" is Clemens. (The
conjunction of these names was fortuitous, but it serves to remind me
that I once heard Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson say that the two strongest
chapters in the fiction of the past ten years were to be found, one in
the _Giant's Robe_ of "F. Anstey" and the other in the _Huckleberry
Finn_ of "Mark Twain.") The first book of an unknown author has small
chance of sudden success, and _Vice Versa_ was Mr. Guthrie's first book.
Fortunately it came into the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang a few days after
it was published, and Mr. Lang was so taken with its freshness, its
truthfulness to boy nature, and its almost pathetic humor that he wrote
a column about it in the _Daily News_--a column of the heartiest
appreciation. "It was Lang's review that made the success of _Vice
Versa_," said Mr. Guthrie to me once in London, two or three years ago,
when we were planning to write a story together. And it was Mr. Lang who
afterwards introduced the author of _Vice Versa_ to the staff of
_Punch_.
In _Voces Populi_ Mr. Guthrie has gathered a score and a half of
fragmentary dialogues, casual, plotless, but never pointless. They are
thumbnail sketches of British character, "At a Dinner Party," "At a
Wedding," "At the French Play," "At a Turkish Bath," "In an Italian
Restaurant," in "Trafalgar Square" during a demonstration, and in "A
Show Place." They are photographic in their accuracy, making due
allowance for humorous foreshortening. They hit off the foibles of
fashionable frivolity; they depict with unfaltering exactness the
inconceivable limitations and narrowness of the middle class; but where
they are most abundantly and triumphantly successful is in the rendering
of the lower orders of London. Mr. Guthrie has caught the cockney in the
very act of cockneyism, and he has here pilloried him for all time, but
wholly without bitterness or rancor. Mr. Guthrie knows his roughs, his
ruffians, his house-maids, his travellers, "Third Class--Parliamentary,"
and his visitors to "An East-End Poultry Show;" he knows them through
and through; he sees their weakness; and after all he is tolerant, he
does not dislike them in his heart, he handles them as though he loved
them. We confess his kindliness of touch, even though it moves us to no
more friendly feeling of our own. "Vox populi, vox Dei," says the adage,
as true as most adages; but these _Voces Populi_, if not "Voces
diaboli," might at least be called to the witness-box by the devil's
advocate. It is a terrible indictment of contemporary British manners
that we hear in these conversations, humorous as they are; and the
indictment is perhaps the severer in that it is wholly unconscious. It
is quite unwittingly that Mr. Guthrie offers this evidence to prove the
truth of Matthew Arnold's assertion that one could see in England "an
aristocracy materialized and null, a middle class purblind and hideous,
a lower class crude and brutal."
In this respect at least no greater contrast could be found to the
_Voces Populi_ of Mr. Guthrie, reprinted from the British _Punch_, than
the _Short Sixes_ of Mr. H. C. Bunner, reprinted from the American
_Puck_. The impression with which one rises from the reading of Mr.
Bunner's tales is as different as possible from that with which one
rises from the reading of Mr. Guthrie's dialogues. In the one book we
see the British selfish, brutal, narrow-minded; and in the other we see
the Americans lively, kindly, good-humored. In each case the volume is
made up of matter contributed week by week to a comic journal. If it be
objected that the satirist is bound perforce to show the seamy side of
human nature, the obligation ought to be equally respected on both sides
of the Atlantic; and the fact is that Mr. Guthrie reports conversations
which are very clever and very amusing, but which give us no liking for
his fellow-countrymen; whereas Mr. Bunner's men and women we are ready
and glad to take by the hand, even if we do not take them all to our
hearts. Look down the _dramatis personae_ of Mr. Bunner's thirteen
stories, and even the old curmudgeon who befools the little parson of
one of "The Two Churches of Quawket" has humor enough to save him from
hatred, and the little parson himself is pitiful rather than
contemptible. Neither Colonel Brereton's Aunty nor the mendacious and
persuasive colonel is a character whom any American would cross the
street to avoid--far from it. And as for the pert young person who
engages in "A Sisterly Scheme," and who is perhaps the most forward and
objectionable young woman of recent fiction, where is the American who
could object to her? Where, indeed, is the American who does not envy
Muffets the fun of his courtship and the joy of his marriage?
George Eliot in one of her novels tells us that "a difference of taste
in jests is a great strain on the affections"--a profound truth. There
is little hope of happiness in a union where one party has a highly
developed sense of humor and the other none at all. That is perhaps the
reason why so few international marriages are happy. Certainly, the
chief characteristic of the figures in Mr. Guthrie's little dramas is
their absence of humor, and one of the chief characteristics of the
people in Mr. Bunner's prose comedies is their abundance of humor. We
laugh at the speakers in _Voces Populi_, while we laugh with the actors
in _Short Sixes_. And we find in Mr. Bunner's book an unfailing variety,
an unflagging ingenuity and an unforced humor, now rich and now
delicate. We are delighted by wit, playful and incessant and never
obtrusive. We discover ourselves to be dissolved in laughter, and often
it is "the exquisite laughter that comes from a gratification of the
reasoning faculty," as George Eliot called it in one of her letters.
Never is it laughter that we ever feel ashamed of; near the smile there
is often a tear, hidden, and to be found only by those who seek. "The
Tenor," for example, which may seem to some hasty readers almost
farcical, is in reality almost tragic, in that the heroine sees the
shattering of an ideal and stumbles over the clay feet of her idol. The
"Love Letters of Smith" are broadly funny, if you choose to think them
so, but I feel sorry for the reader who pays that clever sketch the
tribute of careless laughter only.
Next, perhaps, to Mr. Bunner's firm grasp of character, to his delicate
perception, to his keen observation, to his faculty of hinting a
pathetic undercurrent beneath the flow of humor, comes his felicity in
suggesting the very essence of New York. Only three of the thirteen
little tales are supposed to happen in this great city, and these are,
perhaps, not likely to be the most popular; but they are enough to show
again what Mr. Bunner had already revealed in the _Story of a New York
House_ and in the still uncollected _Ballads of the Town_, that he has a
knowledge of this busy city possessed by no other American writer of
fiction. It is knowledge not paraded in his pages, but it permeates
certain of his characters. Take "The Tenor," for example. In that lively
story the young girl, seeking out the being whom she has worshipped from
afar, rashly ventures into the hotel where the singer and his wife live.
She goes as a servant, and she has a chance interview with one of the
employees of the house--"a good-looking, large girl, with red hair and
bright cheeks." This young person sees the name "Louise Levy" on the
heroine's trunk. "You don't look like a sheeny," she remarks promptly.
"Can't tell nothin' about names, can you? My name's Slattery. You'd
think I was Irish, wouldn't you? Well, I'm straight Ne' York. I'd be
dead before I was Irish. Born here. Ninth Ward, an' next to an
engine-house." Could anything be more intensely, impressively,
essentially Manhattan than this little vignette framed in the doorway of
a hotel?
There are those who choose to speak of Mr. Bunner as a humorist,
because he is the editor of _Puck_. He is a humorist, no doubt, and his
humor will endure, for it is founded on observation and on an
understanding of his fellow-man. But he is a poet--as a true humorist
must be. Perhaps his best story is "Love in Old Clothes," in which the
humor and the poetry are inextricably blended, and in which there is a
pure tenderness of touch I cannot but call exquisite. And yet, perhaps,
I do not like it as well as the vigorous sketch called the "Zadoc Pine
Labor Union." This is an object-lesson in Americanism; it is a model of
applied political economy. And Zadoc Pine himself is one of the most
direct and manly characters who has stepped from real life into
literature. He has gumption and he has grit; he is an American as
Benjamin Franklin was an American, and as Abraham Lincoln was. He could
think as straight as he could shoot; and the tale of his rise in life is
as potent a plea for freedom as Mr. Herbert Spencer's.
But about Mr. Bunner's writings I confess that I can never speak with
the expected coldness of the critic, for the author is my friend for now
many years. We have dwelt beneath the same roof for months at a time.
We have exchanged counsel day and night; we have heard each other's
plans and projects; we have read each other's manuscript; we have
revised each other's proof-sheets; more than once we have written the
same story together, he holding the pen, or I, as chance would have it.
But shall friendship blind me to the quality of my comrade's art? When
he puts forth a book, shall I pass by on the other side, silent, and
giving no sign? That may be the choice of some, but it is not mine.
1891
* * * * *
By THOMAS W. HIGGINSON.
CONCERNING ALL OF US. With Portrait. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00.
There is so much amiable optimism contained in these papers that they
are well calculated to produce a cheerful frame of mind in their
readers.... Their reasonableness is their merit, and they are
distinguished by a ripeness of reflection and temperateness of judgment
that are fortunately within reach of every average man and woman.--_N.
Y. Evening Post_.
Colonel Higginson has the advantage of a sound and simple philosophy of
life to show off his fine literary culture. The one makes him worth
reading--strong, open-minded, and wholesome; the other gives him graces
of form, style, and literary attraction in great variety.--_Independent_,
N. Y.
WOMEN AND MEN. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00.
These essays are replete with common-sense ideas, expressed in
well-chosen language, and reflect on every page the humor, wit, wisdom
of the author.--_N. Y. Sun_.
Bright, suggestive, practical, and charming, and the work is sure to be
widely popular.--_Interior_, Chicago.
Delightfully clever.... Perfect examples of what the short essay on a
social subject should be.--_Boston Transcript_.
The papers have not only the merit of brevity, but they are bright,
witty, graceful, and interesting. They are such papers as women delight
to read, and men will enjoy them quite as much.--_Critic_, N. Y.
Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.
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