Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 615
M.B.
One of those Earnest Minds writes me a circular letter wanting to know what 10 books I would enjoy reading most. Ten that I have not read.
M.B.
Minneapolis reports a seven pound baby born to a 48 pound midget. Just a block off the old chip.
M.B.
Of course, the people could go and mine their own coal, and we suppose an elephant might raise his own peanuts.
D.M.
Poetry is not what a poet creates. It is what creates poets.
D.M.
The one good thing about me is my opinion about myself.
E.W.H.
A gasoline war, now that prices are rising, is said to be imminent. Ho! for the stormy petrol!
F.P.A.
CHAPTER XI. EPILOGUE: FROM THE RIDICULOUS TO THE SUBLIME
AS HAS BEEN said several times above, humor, in its highest form, no longer excites our laughter, no longer appeals to our comic sense, no longer depends upon the aid of wit.
We have recalled the picture of little Huckleberry Finn floating down the Mississippi on his raft or discussing with his Nigger Jim the mysteries of the Universe. We have seen the poor debtors of Dickens’s debtors’ prison, with their broken lives, their pots of porter, their tawdry merriment, their pitiable dignity and their unutterable despair. Such pictures as these call forth a saddened smile of compassion for our human lot; it all seems so long past, so far in retrospect, that the pain is gone.
Such is the highest humor. It represents an outlook upon life, a retrospect as it were, in which the fever and fret of our earthly lot is contrasted with its shortcomings, its lost illusions and its inevitable end. The fiercest anger cools; the bitterest of hate sleeps in the churchyard; and over it all there spread Time’s ivy and Time’s roses, preserving nothing but what is fair to look upon.
Hence comes into being the peculiar legend of the “good old times of the past.” Each age sees the ones that preceded it through a mellow haze of retrospect; each looks back to the good old days of our forefathers. In England, people turn back affectionately, and always have, to the days when “England was England”; they can still hear the sound of the village church bells across four centuries of distance. They talk of “Merrie England,” and of the Roast Beef of Old England, forgetting that England is older now.
Seen through this refracting prism of past distance all the harsh outlines are blurred and softened, the colors mingle to a mellow richness. Beside it, all the people and things about us at the moment seem crude and hard. The dead are better companions than the living.
Each of us in life is a prisoner. The past offers us, as it were a door of escape. We are set and bound in our confined lot. Outside, somewhere, is eternity; outside, somewhere, is infinity. We seek to reach into it and the pictured past seems to afford to us an outlet of escape. When we read of the past, all the pain is out of it; so may we sit buried in some old book of battles long ago, of kings who rose and fell, of multitudes that died of plagues and were swept away in floods. How quaint and sweet sounds now the Plague of London! What terror then; what rumbling of the carts of death passing in the night! But now, what a charm to read of it in the enchanted pages of an Evelyn or a Pepys.
Such too is that escape by the inner absorption of the mind in something utterly unconnected with the pains, the pleasures, the profit and the work of life. Here, for those who can enter it, is the door of the higher mathematics — the comic sections of the Greeks, purposeless and without bearing for them on any art or occupation, but of what infinity of interest. I have often thought that for those absorbed in recondite studies, life must be peaceful indeed. But it is not so. The rapture of isolation is only caught and lost. I used to think, for example, that there must be a wondrous stillness and serenity in the life of a comparative philologist; I thought so till I knew one — a bygone colleague. I realized, as I got to know him that for him life was all storm and stress — the Annual Philological Congress to attend, each one seeming to crowd on the heels of the last; the preparation of “papers,” as terrific to him as the manufacture of nitroglycerin. He witnessed and fought all through the great revolution against the Anglo-Saxonization of English spelling, helped to drive out the legend of an Aryan prototype of Sanskrit, and, as his biggest achievement, lived to put the pluperfect subjunctive practically where it is now.
Through all this life and storm he came and went about the college abstracted, muttering, practically unknown; yet to himself a storm center of seething action.
I saw his queer little funeral — the littlest I ever saw — go past the college gates in a snowstorm. A medical student on the steps lit his pipe and asked, “What the Hell’s that?” and when they told him— “I never heard of him,” he said. Yet the man had been with us thirty years.
Escape is barred. And yet we look around forward and backward to find it; nor anywhere more eagerly than backward, to those wistful and haunting recollections of our childhood, that search for a vanishing identity connecting us with eternity but lost in the mist of the infinite. How much of our poetry carries the illumination of that retrospect toward childhood, colored once with the hues of the morning and now changing to those of the fall of night.
I remember, I remember, the house where I was born!
Why should that haunt us? We ought to think, “Certainly I do; it was No. 7 John St.” So shall we sing:
When you and I were young, Maggie,
And all the world was green
And every lad a King, Maggie,
And every lass a queen! . . .
What a preposterous statement, if we take it on its face; only the Royal Family of Roumania living in the green mountains could live up to it.
All through such recollections, all through such sentiments, runs the strain of the highest humor, like gold in the bed of a stream. Here belong our recollections of our school days, never recalled without a pleasant smile for even the worst of our sufferings, a laugh for our simplest adventures.
The other day upon the street I stopped a distinguished friend of mine, a dignified colonel, well up in the sixties, and I said: “Reg, I must tell you. A week or so ago, in Pittsburgh I ran across Eph Lyon.”
“Eph Lyon!” he said, brought up all standing with the sudden interest of it! If I had said, “The other day I saw the King of Siam,” my old schoolmate would have merely said, “Did you?” but here he stood in the snowflakes, repeating, “Eph Lyon! Eph Lyon! Why, let me see, I haven’t seen Eph Lyon for — what! — fifty years.”
“Fifty,” I said. “That’s right, you and I and Eph were all at the school together fifty years ago.”
“Eph,” said the colonel, standing fixed in his tracks with the snow falling round him — if he had any business he’d quite forgotten it— “Eph was the best half back on the football team.”
“Quarter back,” I said.
“Half,” he protested.
“No,” I said, “Gib Gordon was half.”
“Why, of course,” he admitted. “Gib Gordon! certainly Gib Gordon! Do you remember the day when Beer Ryckert tried to smash his face in?”
And we both laughed, thinking of that angry quarrel in the football field of fifty years ago — all past and vanished but the “humor” of it.
Hear how people talk who have known one another as children and who come together again in later life, and laugh over the angers and quarrels of their childhood.
“Do you remember that day when I took away your doll and you cried so?”
“Yes, and do you remember I simply got furious and scratched you across the face?”
They both laugh at the recollection.
“Yes, and then your Aunt Mary came in and sent you home and put me in the cupboard.”
“Shall I ever forget my rage in that awful dark cupboard?”
So it would seem to me if departed spirits later on would talk and hold converse about their previous lives — far behind them — they would talk as we talk of childhood happenings. The angers, the misfortunes, even the crimes would have faded into happy recollection, into divine retrospect, into “humor.”
“Do you remember,” thus speaks one of the dead, “the night you broke into my house and my brother and I heard you in the cellar and came down with a gun?” “Do I remember?” laughs the other. “Say, was I scared? I sat there in the coal fumbling with my darned old automatic and then just by luck I got a fair crack at your brother — and just then in hopped the police, you remember?”
They both laughed at the thought of it. “And the trial, do you remember the trial, wasn’t it simply killing?” More laughter. “Yes, and the day you were hanged, eh? Say, I’ll never forget it. Well, they were great old days!”
If, as the poet Rostand saw it, the armies of the dead still ride and flaunt over the night sky above the battle fields of Europe, there will be no sternness in their faces, no martial anger left.
They would be like the cherished picture of the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Soult riding in London in a carriage together in the eighteen forties, or like the aged men from the North and the South who in 1913 walked over again the ground of Pickett’s Charge of fifty years before at Gettysburg, laughing and mumbling of the fierce fight at the Stone Wall. Thus may the dead be standing, side by side, about their cenotaphs of today, talking together, nation with nation, ally with enemy, in a language which the living have not yet learned to use.
Thus does life, if we look at it from sufficient distance, dissolve itself into “humor.” Seen through an indefinite vista it ends in a smile. In this, if what the scientists tell us is true, it only offers a parallel to what must ultimately happen to the physical universe in which it exists. Matter, we are told, is not matter in the real or solid sense. It is only a manifestation of force or energy, seeking to come to rest. An atom is not an atom in the sense of being a particle or thing. It is just an area inside whose vast empty dimensions unmatched forces, stresses and strains are trying to come together and neutralize one another. When they do this — at some inconceivable distance of time — then the universe ends, finishes; there is nothing left of it but nothingness. With it goes out in extinction all that was thought of as matter, and with that all the framework of time and space that held it, and the conscious life that matched it. All ends with a cancellation of forces and comes to nothing; and our universe ends thus with one vast, silent, unappreciated joke.
The Greatest Pages of American Humor
CONTENTS
Chapter One . THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN HUMOR
Chapter Two . SELECTIONS FROM BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S WORKS
Chapter Three . CLASSIC AMERICA SMILES
Chapter Four . SELECTIONS FROM IRVING AND HAWTHORNE RIP VAN WINKLE
Chapter Five . DEMOCRACY STARTS A LAUGH OF ITS OWN
Chapter Six . SELECTIONS FROM CROCKETT, MAJOR DOWNING AND JOSH BILLINGS
Chapter Seven . ARTEMUS WARD: HIS LIFE, HIS BOOK, HIS DEATH
Chapter Eight . SUNRISE IN THE WEST
Chapter Nine . BRET HARTE’S LOTH AW
Chapter Ten . MARK TWAIN
Chapter Eleven . SELECTIONS FROM MARK TWAIN
Chapter Twelve . THE “AFTER-MARK” OF AMERICAN HUMOR
Chapter Thirteen. SELECTIONS FROM MAX ADELER, UNCLE REMUS AND OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Chapter Fourteen. THE CENTURY RUNS OUT
Chapter Fifteen. SELECTIONS FROM MR. DOOLEY, JOHN KEN- DRIK BANGS, HASHIMURA TOGO, AND GEORGE ADE’S FABLES
Chapter Sixteen . THE ENCHANTED WORLD OF O. HENRY
Chapter Seventeen . SELECTIONS FROM O. HENRY
Chapter Eighteen . HUMOR IN A CHANGING WORLD
Chapter Nineteen . SELECTIONS FROM BENCHLEY, COBB AND LARDNER
Chapter Twenty . L’ENVOI: OUR PRESENT NEED OF HUMOR — OUR BRILLIANT CONTEMPORARIES
Chapter One . THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN HUMOR
THE INDIANS AND the Puritans — A Poor Start for Fun — Action and Reaction — Puritan Sobriety Breeds Yankee Irreverence — From Psalm Books to Farmer’s Almanacs — Benjamin Franklin Brings Down Lightning and Light and Laughter.
ON ITS FIRST SETTLEMENT from Europe, the outlook for humor in America, and chiefly in New England, looked rather grim. Here on the spot was the Indian, probably the least humorous character recorded in history. He took his pleasure seriously — with a tomahawk. Scientists tell us that humor and laughter had their beginnings, in the dawn of history, in the exultation of the savage over his fallen foe. The North American Indian apparently never got beyond the start. To crack his enemies’ skull with a hatchet was about the limit of the sense of fun of a Seneca or a Pottawottomie. The dawning humor of such races turned off sideways and developed into the mockery and the malice which are its degenerated forms. The distinction is still seen today as between the genial writings of the humorist compared with the snarls of the literary critic.
Not all races were like this. The equatorial Negroes were laughing when the white found them and are laughing still. The Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons were fond of a roaring laugh but had to get drunk first to enjoy it properly. They still do. As beside these merrier races the saturnine Indian, his face carved in stone, seems a thing to shudder at. Long after he had ceased to terrorize the frontier he still terrorized the sidewalk in front of the tobacco stores. Of him it has been written
The painted Indian rides no more;
He stands, at a tobacco store;
His cruel face proclaims afar
The terror of the cheap cigar.
To the Indian was added the Puritan. He came from a land where there was plenty of laughter. But he didn’t care for it. Indeed, it was on that account that he left it. Puritanism was one of the products of the break-up of the Europe of the Middle Ages. The old feudal world was a stagnant place, rather piggish and rather brutal, but rudely comfortable and little changing from century to century. It broke up to give way to a new and restless world — of eager discovery, of unwonted luxury, of rising art and learning, and furious religion. It brought with it a contrast between the new strenuousness and the older ease, between the fat friar, round as Bacchus, and the lean sectary, narrow as a lath; the placid Abbot dozing over a vellum book, and the inquisitive Galileo searching the sky with glass. People of an easy temperament no doubt looked upon the new reformers and preachers, printers and astronomers, much as later ages, rightly or wrongly, looked upon suffragettes, osteopaths and prohibitionists.
Out of the conflict came the Puritan. From a world that laughed too much and worshiped too little, which roared over profane play-acting and danced around maypoles, he turned to the silent ecstasy of the wilderness.
In any great quarrel it is always clear, in retrospect, that both sides were right. It must be so, or there could be no great quarrels among people of valor and conscience. So the Puritan, patterned on an Oliver Cromwell, was right, and the cavalier, embodied at his best and bravest in the merry King Charles the Second, was just as right as he was. The cavalier went to Virginia hoping to laugh. The Puritan went to New England determined not to. In the course of time the Virginian, in a land of beauty and adventure, turned to chivalry and romance; the Puritan, grown irreverent from overpiety, turned into a humorist.
But, at the start, at any rate, the Puritan got what he wanted. Sermons that lasted for hours in plain log meetinghouses, bitter with the cold: no note of music but the human voice and the cheerless pitchpipe; in meeting and out of it a perpetual searching of the soul, varied only with the rude struggle to keep alive the body. Danger was always near. Death was always imminent.
Away went all the festivals and “holy days” of the Church of England, their public celebration forbidden by the laws of the Puritan settlements. Judge Sewell of Boston could write, in 1685, of Christmas Day:
Some somehow observe the day but are vexed to believe that the body of the people profane it, and blessed be God, no authority yet to compel them to keep it.
All evil games were prohibited: the import, the sale and the use of cards were equally against the law; so too dice; and, very generally at first, quoits, bowls and ninepins. It was not till well on in the seventeen hundreds that a reverend pastor first allowed himself a set of pins. But the path was too hard, the pace was too arduous. It went beyond the capacity of human nature. “You may throw nature out with a fork,” says the Roman poet, “but back it comes.” With one kind of holiday gone, another kind rose up. Thus originated Thanksgiving Day — or rather Thanksgiving Week — that first appeared in 1621. It was an orgy of feasting, including the consumption of “a great store of wild turkeys and enough deer and waterfowl to last six days. The company had ‘King Massasoyt’ and ninety of his Indians as fellow revellers with the fifty-five whites.” In the pauses of eating there were public prayers and military drill. For the young folks there were such games as religion sanctioned, such as “stool-ball” or “wicket,” a bat and ball game in which one can reconstruct with reverence the twilight beginnings of the World’s Baseball Series.
Nor could the highest pitch of piety be maintained even in church. Members would doze off asleep, and a “tithing man” was needed to prod them back to attention. The young folks got inattentive and giggled. We read how in the town of Norwich — the year might be about 1670 “Tabatha Morgus of said Norwich did on ye 24 day of February, it being Sabbath on ye Lordes Day, profane ye Lordes day in ye meeting house of ye west society in ye time of ye forenoon service on s’d Day by her rude and Indecent Behaviour in Laughing and Playing in ye time of ye said service which Doinges of ye s’d Tabatha is against ye peace of our Sovereign Lord ye King, his Crown and Dignity”. Tabatha’s parents had to pay three shillings and sixpence. But someone ought to put up a monument to the wicked little girl as America’s first comedian.
But in spite of grimness, merriment would have its way. The law forbade dancing schools, but dancing grew apace. A colonial governor in 1713 actually gave a ball. All sorts of games broke loose, some innocent some cruel, such as capturing wolves and tying them up to be worried to death by dogs. Music came back to its own. The organ appeared in 1711. There was a “consort perform’d by Sundry Instruments at the Court Room by the Town Dock in 1732.” Public punishments, whipping, the stocks, the pillory, and, above all, public executions, developed in New England as in old, into a form of public diversion. The hanging of Captain Quelch and five other pirates at Boston in 1704 was a huge event: Judge Sewell wrote that “cousin Moody saith there were a hundred fifty boats and canoes in the river to look on. He told them.” Meaning he counted them. “When the scaffold was let to sink there was such a screech of the women that my wife heard it,” says the Judge, “sitting in our entry a mile away.”
