Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 656
But the above distinction as between British and American humorous drawings must not be pushed too far. It is a tendency rather than an absolute line of direction. After all, if an American cartoonist can draw a man without a chin, the caricaturist Mr. Aubrey Hammond can dispense entirely with the nose: and if Theodore Roosevelt could be reduced to a box of teeth, at least one English statesman of our day has been reduced to an eye-glass. Indeed, if one turns back to the grotesques of a century and a half ago with which modern British caricature begins, one finds that exaggeration and distortion of outline was the very essence of them — long noses, protruding bellies, spindle-shanks and bulging eyes. These were rather the products of malice than of true humor. But it may be said that if one regards not the caricature portraits done by the great masters of the art, but the thousand and one ‘comic’ drawings which appear in the current press, the distinction becomes more marked. American ‘funny pictures’ do attempt to appeal by exaggeration of outline and by the substitution of the single detail for the ensemble, while British illustrations aim rather at a drawing beautifully true and yet beautifully funny.
Chapter IX. HUMOR AND SUBLIMITY
HUMOR IN ITS highest reach touches the sublime: humor in its highest reach mingles with pathos: it voices sorrow for our human lot and reconciliation with it. Life, for many people, is not satisfactorily explained: but at least as it passes into retrospect it matters less. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of and our little life is rounded with a sleep,” — so said Shakespeare: and again, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”
That is exactly the point of view: not that these lines are humor, for there is no humor in that, but they convey the point of view from which the greatest humor seems to start. It is born, as it were, in perplexity, in contemplation of the insoluble riddle of existence. If it here gave up the task it would turn to indifference, to cruelty or at best to an Epicurean philosophy of eating, drinking and being merry, ‘for to-morrow we must die.’ Incidentally this is not what Epicurus meant, but we use the word in that sense. But humor is saved from that by having made first acquaintance and then union with pathos, meaning here, pity for human suffering. United, each tempers and supports the other: pathos keeps humor from breaking into guffaws and humor keeps pathos from subsiding into sobs. It is like the union of two metals, one too hard, the other too soft for use alone. Sunt lachrymae rerum; the world is full of weeping. But it would be a terrible place if there were nothing else. Nor can laughter stay alone except for the loon and the jackass.
We have seen in this book how humor has gradually moved upwards from rude beginnings to higher and kindly forms. The underlying thesis is that humanity has as a whole grown better, and its literature has grown also from simpler forms to higher meaning and complexity. The first of these propositions would meet with fairly general, though not universal assent. Most of us feel that the world has progressed in the moral sense since ancient days: slowly if you like, but yet moving forward. We are less cruel than earlier peoples, except in moments of fury: we have not their indifference. Gladiators are replaced by county cricket; a torture chamber by a police station; and a Chinese execution by a stipendiary magistrate. It is true that we read of single and idyllic tribes of the remote past, or of remote geography, unsullied by human crime, unspoiled by human vice. They are like Mr. Irvin Cobb’s Bolshevik, who is a man who will give you everything he’s got and he hasn’t got anything. These idyllic views of savage life seem to dissolve on closer sight: behind the bright greens of the foreground are the dark shadows of cannibalism and infanticide and the fungus of filth. Among these idylls was once the North American Indian, otherwise ‘Lo,’ whose untutored mind saw God in clouds and heard him in the wind. Eighteenth-century literature depicted him as ‘the noble savage,’ tall feathers on his head, a blanket draped about him, and an air of independence that didn’t even need a declaration. I can speak for ‘Lo.’ Proper study and investigation has put him where he belongs. There is no moral grandeur about him. Hard by the place where I write this book is a ‘Shrine’ erected over the scene of one of his hideous burnings. Without going the length of Mark Twain and lumping the whole period from the Garden of Eden to George Washington into one solid condemnation as the ‘Middle Ages,’ I think most of us will agree that the present is ‘better’ than the past: more humane even if less certain of a better world to come.
But the other proposition above, that literature has come up and up, that the literature of the present (meaning, say, the last two or three hundred years) is superior to that of the past, would be warmly denied by many people. What is more, the people who would chiefly deny it would be among those who have devoted most study to words and books, indeed know little or nothing else. Classical scholars claim that once and for all the Greek drama reached a form that we are not likely to rival or to emulate. The mould is broken. The drama of Æschylus with just two people on the stage, or call it on the platform, at the same time, seems to me about as exciting as the ‘dialogues’ that we used to have at ‘entertainments’ in the little red school-house sixty years ago. But that is only a personal opinion. Nor can I find in the ancient world anything to correspond with the vast domain of modern imaginative fiction, a garden of enchantment. It would be possible, I suppose, to sit and read Homer over and over as cottagers read their Bible, and socialists read Karl Marx. But in fairness I have to admit that those who uphold ancient literature against modern, may mean that Greek drama, Greek philosophy and Greek history are written with purer form, deeper thought and a more powerful idiom than that of to-day.
Even the idiom I would deny. The eighteenth-century idea that modern languages are broken-down forms of ancient languages and hence inferior as any broken-down thing is to the thing of which it is the fragments, is as silly as it is illogical. Our modern languages, broken from forms with affixes and suffixes into single words, have an indescribably greater flexibility. One need not go to Greek to see that: one has only to compare with English the language of the Ojibway Indians. The point is perhaps beside the scope of this book. Yet if I wanted to write a joke I think I could write it better in English than in Greek.
But what I strenuously assert on ground that I feel to be solid is that the world’s humor in literature has notably gone forward. Again one is confronted with ‘Attic wit’ and the ‘sallies’ of Aristophanes: nor can there be any settlement. I can again only express my opinion as personal, not as didactic: as telling students what I think and not as claiming that it is what is thought by everybody. To me there is hardly any humor in Greek and Latin literature. But the discussion in the first chapter has already covered the question, or indicated its existence. What I am talking about in this chapter is the growth of that element in humor which lifts it into sublimity. I think that that has come as a consequence of our advance in humanity, and that it could not have come without it.
Let me indicate at closer range the point of view before discussing its embodiment in the works of authors. Life is full of anxiety, of fret, of pain. At the end of it is death, and when we look upon a dead face somehow the pain has gone from it — there is ‘all eternity to rest in.’ So, when we see them in retrospect, what were the troubles of to-day become the trifles of yesterday; as things drift into the past, animosity and anger fade out of them; the hate is gone, the bitterness is washed out. More than that: it seems a psychological law that when pain steps out of the window joy comes in at the door. We look back in retrospect and the anger turns to laughter, the bitterness to fun. Listen to any two people, meeting again in old age after knowing one another as children, laughing over the recollection of quarrels, blows, tears that at the moment were bitter tragedy. So with the past, for all of us. Round it grows the legend of a golden age, the idea of the good old times, the winters that were, the Christmases that used to be.
The past loses its pain. We can sing of ‘battles long ago,’ with a weird sense of charm as of a thing of beauty, not of horror. “It was a summer’s evening, old Kaspar’s work was done” — observe that, “a summer’s evening.” Kaspar and the children digging up the skulls of the Blenheim soldiers at midnight in a thunderstorm would be something else. The picture must fit to a summer’s evening.
It is out of these subtle elements, delicate as gossamer, that the humor of sublimity is made. It views life, even life now, in as soft a light as we view the past. Observe the distinctions to be made. Often we can understand what a thing is by being told what it is not. So in the present instance consider the humor of Dickens in Oliver Twist, and the suffering of the little victims of the workhouse, or in Nicholas Nickleby and the brutal establishment of Squeers. This is not the humor of which we speak because there is angry protest in it: humor here blends with passion, not with pathos. Now look at this example, beautiful as a cut cameo. It is from an American illustrated paper of years ago. Here is a picture of two little ragged starvelings in a garret, thin little boys, so thin the pencil’s outline can hardly draw them. To the one lying sick in a truckle bed the other is reading a newspaper. He is evidently reading out an account of the ‘luxury dogs’ of the New York dog show just happening. “Fido, after he has his evening lamb chop, is always wrapped in a warm ermine coat with a blue and silver belt around it.” “Some dogs,” says the other little boy, “is luckier than — others.” No diatribe against poverty: just the little sickly faces, and the changed end of the child’s sentence as he instinctively altered it.
Now this is the humor in the broad and beautiful sense that is found in the book Huckleberry Finn and that confers on it immortality. It may seem a strange thing, but I think it is more found in the pages of American humor than in British. I do not mean that it is not found in British: one has only to think of Sir James Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy, or of that beautiful masterpiece of yesterday, Good-bye, Mr. Chips.
But I think it is found in America more: and it is possible, and even profitable to discuss why this is so, although here we are stepping out on to the open heath of conjecture without even a footpath in sight.
A great many of us in North America (the United States and Canada, which last the word America seems to omit) will admit that on the whole our literature — history, belles lettres, poetry and fiction all included — has not equalled in volume or value that of the older English-speaking world. Some of the world’s greatest books have been written in America: but the honor roll of Britain is longer.
But many of us think that humor is an exception to this, and that here the American product reckoned in value, volume, number of laughs per page, or plumbed for depth, is equal to anything in the world. Indeed, American humor, when it first rose in its distinctive form, made such a sudden conquest of England that no one has since doubted its merit. The humor that we call American is based on seeing things as they are, as apart from history, convention and prestige, and thus introducing sudden and startling contrasts as between things as they are supposed to be — revered institutions, accepted traditions, established conventions — and things as they are. Like many other things this humor came out of the West, beyond the plains. You had to get clear away from civilization to start it.
Till the middle nineteenth century, humor in America was represented either in the polite culture of Washington Irving or Hawthorne, a part of the British heritage, or as an indigenous product of wild exaggeration, tall stories and crude spelling. But a new era opened for American humor when such men as young Sam Clemens and Artemus Ward and Bret Harte went West and took a look back at America from the top of the Rocky Mountains: not only America, they could look clear across to Europe and see it as no one had ever seen it before. They enjoyed what painters call the ‘eye of innocence’ which most of us lose in infancy. This ability to see things as they are became the basis of new American humor. It is embodied in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad more than in any other book. But it lies at the basis of the work of all the ‘school,’ if one can give such a name to people who hardly went there. When Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee speaks of the armor of a knight as ‘hardware,’ he is seeing it as no one could see it who was used to calling it bassinet, gorget, greaves and hawberk.
Such humor, of course, can easily degenerate into mere cheap irreverence, making fun of things merely because they are exalted while in reality there is nothing to make fun of. It can also take the perverted form of scoffing at things merely because they are different from things at home. An American who comes over to Europe and laughs at it isn’t necessarily a humorist. Moreover American humor carries with it, by custom and convention, though not in all cases, a peculiar technique of words as already discussed. This too can be strained and overdone, and false effects substituted for true ones. Hence there are found people, otherwise intelligent, who ‘don’t care’ for American humor. But as a rule this means that they don’t care for humor in general, or have been unlucky in their American samples.
Now what I am saying here is that in my opinion when we come to that high form of humor in which the pathos of life in general is the basis — the incongruous contrast between the eager fret of our life and its final nothingness — American humor reaches to it more easily and more often than British. The point is one which can only be a matter of taste and judgment. There is no rule, no objective criterion.
Let me cite here the work of the late Ring K. Lardner, an American journalist and story-writer who died, all too soon, in 1933. Some of his best stories are published in a volume called Round Up. Among them is a beautiful thing called Then and Now. It is a story written as two sets of letters, sent home from a holiday resort in the West Indies. The first are written to a girl friend by a young bride, in the first flush of matrimonial bliss, and matrimonial conceit in her husband’s slavery. The style is set almost to the point of vulgarity and the egotism almost to the point of being tiresome: “Of course, he this . . . and of course, he that . . . and of course, he won’t hear of playing golf without me,” etc.
The next set of letters are from the same woman to the same correspondent from the same place a few years later (not too many). The point lies in the change — no tragedy, nothing violent has happened: just that now the ‘of course’ is the other way. No blame to anyone: just life. The pathos of it is as soft as a sigh.
The writings of O. Henry again and again exhibit this peculiar quality. Let anyone read the matchless story called The Pendulum. Here are a young husband and wife, ‘flat dwellers’ of New York with their drab house, its limited outlook, the husband at work all day and back at supper-time, the wife always cooking and washing up; and every night at about a quarter past eight the husband would “summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and his wife would deliver this speech in a querulous tone:
‘Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?’
‘Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,’ he would answer, ‘and play a game of pool or two with the fellows.’”
Then one night when John comes home Katy is not there — called away by a telegram from a sick mother. She has left cold supper for him. She will write to-morrow. All of a sudden he sinks into consternation. It is their first time apart in their two years of marriage. A great loneliness comes over him. How can he ever have left her alone in the evenings! When she comes back it shall all be different. And at that moment Katy, who has been called away on a false alarm, comes in at the door.
“Nobody heard the click and the rattle of the cogwheels as the third-floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and the wheels revolved in their old orbits.
John Perkins looked at the clock. It was 8.15. He reached for his hat and walked to the door.
‘Now, where are you going, I’d like to know, John Perkins?’ asked Katy, in a querulous tone. ‘Thought I’d drop up to McCloskey’s,’ said John, ‘and play a game or two of pool with the fellows.’”
But many people will agree that the book which develops this high type of humor more than any other is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It was first published in 1884: it has ever since been one of the world’s books. Mark Twain’s wife and the admiring New England circle who undertook to make a gentleman of him, did their affectionate best to spoil his work by trying to make it ‘respectable.’ They wanted it to be on the level of a ‘Friendship’s Garland’ or a ‘Youth’s Guide.’ As a result of this ‘ordeal’ as Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has called it (The Ordeal of Mark Twain, 1920), Mark Twain never knew ‘where he was at’ and could not value or estimate properly his own literary ideas and literary ‘urges.’ For all he knew, they might turn out to be improper. So he wrote masses of stuff in wrong directions: because they told him that he mustn’t be irreligious, he was attracted by the idea of writing up hell and heaven, and wrote them up in secreted manuscripts. He was quite unaware that the heaven and hell of his manuscripts belonged to Missouri anno domini 1835 and hadn’t been seen since. On the other hand, Joan of Arc being a virgin and a martyr and therefore respectable, he was encouraged to write a whole book about her. The book is as close to drivel as anything could be when written with such prestige.
But Mark Twain also kept dreaming of writing an account of an outcast boy, so humble that his opinions couldn’t matter: and this boy was to go floating down the Mississippi on a raft, with a Negro for his companion: and that would let the writer bring in all the glory and wonder of the river — the moving mist rising from the water, the woods on the farther shore often a mile away, the islands here and there, the swirling currents, and, when night fell on the waters, the sound of voices heard half a mile off, and the lights of a great river steamer, bright as a hotel, with a trail of sparks from its tall funnels into the dark. The river was in Mark Twain’s mind as its furthest memory, as its abiding picture: he could realize the majesty and mystery of it. Contrast him with Charles Dickens, who came to America when Mark Twain was six years old and went as far west as the Mississippi and forthwith turned into a peevish Cockney, seeing nothing in the great rivers and forests of this continent but swamps, bull-frogs, marshes and malaria.
