The Land of Contrasts Part 5

The Humour of the "Man on the Cars"

"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."

So wrote George Eliot in "Daniel Deronda." And the truth of the apothegm may account for much of the friction in the intercourse of John Bull and Brother Jonathan. For, undoubtedly, there is a wide difference between the humour of the Englishman and the humour of the American. John Bull's downrightness appears in his jests also. His jokes must be unmistakable; he wants none of your quips masquerading as serious observations. A mere twinkle of the eye is not for him a sufficient illumination between the serious and the comic. "Those animals are horses," Artemus Ward used to say in showing his panorama.

"I know they are--because my artist says so. I had the picture two years before I discovered the fact. The artist came to me about six months ago and said, 'It is useless to disguise it from you any longer--they are horses.'"[16] This is the form of introduction that John Bull prefers for his witticisms. He will welcome a joke as hospitably as a visitor, if only the credentials of the one as of the other are unimpeachable.

Now the American does not wish his joke underlined like an urgent parliamentary whip. He wants something left to his imagination; he wants to be tickled by the feeling that it requires a keen eye to see the point; he may, in a word, like his champagne sweet, but he wants his humour dry. His telephone girls halloo, but his jokes don't. In this he resembles the Scotsman much more than the Englishman; and both European foreigners and the Americans themselves seem aware of this.

Thus, Max O'Rell writes:

De tous les citoyens du _Royaume_ plus ou moins _Uni_ l'ami Donald est le plus fini, le plus solide, le plus positif, le plus perseverant, le plus laborieux, et le plus spirituel.

Le plus spirituel! voila un grand mot de lache. Oui, le plus spirituel, n'en deplaise a l'ombre de Sydney Smith.... J'espere bien prouver, par quelques anecdotes, que Donald a de l'esprit, de l'esprit de bon aloi, d'humour surtout, de cet humour fin subtil, qui pa.s.serait a travers la tete _d'un c.o.c.kney_ sans y laisser la moindre trace, sans y faire la moindre impression.

The testimony of the American is equally explicit.

The following dialogue, quoted from memory, appeared some time since in one of the best American comic journals:

_Tomkyns_ (of London).--I say, Vanarsdale, I told such a good joke, don't you know, to MacPherson, and he didn't laugh a bit! I suppose that's because he's a Scotsman?

_Vanarsdale_ (of New York).--I don't know; I think it's more likely that it's because you are an Englishman!

An English audience is usually much slower than an American or Scottish one to take up a joke that is anything less than obvious. I heard Max O'Rell deliver one of his witty orations in London. The audience was good humored, entirely with the lecturer, and only too ready to laugh. But if his joke was the least bit subtle, the least bit less apparent than usual, it was extraordinary how the laughter hung fire. There would be an appreciable interval of silence; then, perhaps, a solitary laugh in a corner of the gallery; then a sort of platoon fire in different parts of the house; and, finally, a simultaneous roar. So, when Mr. John Morley, in his admirable lecture on the Carlyle centenary celebration (Dec. 5, 1895), quoted Carlyle's saying about Sterling: "We talked about this thing and that--except in opinion not disagreeing," there was a lapse of half-a-minute before the audience realised that the saying had a humorous turn. In an American audience, and I believe also in a Scottish one, the report would have been simultaneous with the flash.

Perhaps the Americans themselves are just a little too sure of their superiority to the English in point of humour, and indeed they often carry their witticisms on the supposed English "obtuseness" to a point at which exaggeration ceases to be funny. It is certainly not every American who scoffs at English wit that is ent.i.tled to do so. There are dullards in the United States as well as elsewhere; and nothing can well be more ghastly than American humour run into the ground. On the other hand their sense of loyalty to humour makes them much more free in using it at their own expense; and some of their stories show themselves up in the light usually reserved for John Bull. I remember, unpatriotically, telling a stock story (to ill.u.s.trate the English slowness to take a joke) to an American writer whose pictures of New England life are as full of a delicate sense of humour as they are of real and simple pathos. It was, perhaps, the tale of the London bookseller who referred to his own coiffure the American's remark apropos of the two-volume English edition of a well-known series of "Walks in London"--"Ah, I see you part your _Hare_ in the middle."

Whatever it was, my hearer at once capped it by the reply of a Boston girl to her narration of the following anecdote: A railway conductor, on his way through the cars to collect and check the tickets, noticed a small hair-trunk lying in the forbidden central gangway, and told the old farmer to whom it apparently belonged that it must be moved from there at once. On a second round he found the trunk still in the pa.s.sage, reiterated his instructions more emphatically, and pa.s.sed on without listening to the attempted explanations of the farmer. On his third round he cried: "Now, I gave you fair warning; here goes;" and tipped the trunk overboard. Then, at last, the slow-moving farmer found utterance and exclaimed: "All right! the trunk is none o' mine!"

To which the Boston girl: "Well, whose trunk was it?" We agreed, _nem.

con._, that this was indeed _Anglis ipsis Anglior_.

These remarks as to the comparative merits of English and American humour must be understood as referring to the average man in each case--the "Man on the Cars," as our cousins have it. It would be a very different position, and one hardly tenable, to maintain that the land of Mark Twain has produced greater literary humorists than the land of Charles Lamb. In the matter of comic papers it may also be doubted, even by those who most appreciate American humour, whether England has altogether the worst of it. It is the fashion in the States to speak of "poor old _Punch_," and to affect astonishment at seeing in its "senile pages" anything that they have to admit to be funny. Doubtless a great deal of very laborious and vapid jesting goes on in the pages of the _doyen_ of English comic weeklies; but at its best _Punch_ is hard to beat, and its humours have often a literary quality such as is seldom met with in an American journal of the same kind. No American paper can even remotely claim to have added so much to the gaiety of nations as the pages that can number names like Leech and Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold and Tom Hood, Burnand and Charles Keene, Du Maurier and Tenniel, Linley Sambourne and the author of "Vice Versa," among its contributors past and present. And besides--and the claim is a proud one--_Punch_ still remains the only comic paper of importance that is always a perfect gentleman--a gentleman who knows how to behave both in the smoking-room and the drawing-room, who knows when a jest oversteps the boundary line of coa.r.s.eness, who realises that a laugh can sometimes be too dearly won.

_Punch_ is certainly a comic journal of which the English have every reason to be proud; but if we had to name the paper most typical of the English taste in humour we should, perhaps, be shamefacedly compelled to turn to _Ally Sloper_.

The best American comic paper is _Life_, which is modelled on the lines of the _Munchener Fliegende Blatter_, perhaps the funniest and most mirth-provoking of all professedly humorous weeklies. Among the most attractive features are the graceful and dignified drawings of Mr. Charles Dana Gibson, who has in its pages done for American society what Mr. Du Maurier has done for England by his scenes in _Punch_; the sketches of F.G. Attwood and S.W. Van Schaick; and the clever verses of M.E.W. The dryness, the smart exaggeration, the point, the unexpectedness of American humour are all often admirably represented in its pages; and the faults and foibles of contemporary society are touched off with an inimitable delicacy of satire both in pencil and pen work. _Life_, like _Punch_, has also its more serious side; and, if it has never produced a "Song of the Shirt," it earns our warm admiration for its steadfast championing of worthy causes, its severe and trenchant attacks on rampant evils, and its eloquent tributes to men who have deserved well of the country. On the other hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it sometimes descends to a level of trifling flatness and vapidity which no English paper of the kind can hope to equal. It is hard--for a British critic at any rate--to see any perennial interest in the long series of highly exaggerated drawings and jests referring to the gutter children of New York, a series in which the same threadbare _motifs_ are constantly recurring under the thinnest of disguises. And occasionally--very occasionally--there is a touch of coa.r.s.eness in the drawings of _Life_ which suggests the worst features of its German prototype rather than anything it has borrowed from England.

Among the political comic journals of America mention may be made of _Puck_, the rough and gaudy cartoons of which have often what the Germans would call a _packende Derbheit_ of their own that is by no means ineffective. Of the other American--as, indeed, of the other British--comic papers I prefer to say nothing, except that I have often seen them in houses and in hands to which they seemed but ill adapted.

Among the characteristics of American humour--the humour of the average man, the average newspaper, the average play--are its utter irreverence, its droll extravagance, its dry suggestiveness, its _navete_ (real or apparent), its affectation of seriousness, its fondness for ant.i.thesis and anti-climax. Mark Twain may stand as the high priest of irreverence in American humour, as witnessed in his "Innocents Abroad" and his "Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." In this regard the humour of our transatlantic cousins cannot wholly escape a charge of debasing the moral currency by buffoonery. It has no reverence for the awful mystery of death and the Great Beyond. An undertaker will place in his window a card bearing the words: "You kick the bucket; we do the rest." A paper will head an account of the hanging of three mulattoes with "Three Chocolate Drops." It has no reverence for the names and phrases a.s.sociated with our deepest religious feelings. Buckeye's patent filter is advertised as thoroughly reliable--"being what it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be." Mr. Boyesen tells of meeting a venerable clergyman, whose longevity, according to his introducer, was due to the fact that "he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity." One of the daily bulletins of the captain of the large excursion steamer on which I visited Alaska read as follows: "The Lord only knows when it will clear; and _he_ won't tell." And none of the two hundred pa.s.sengers seemed to find anything unseemly in this official freedom with the name of their Creator. On a British steamer there would almost certainly have been some st.u.r.dy Puritan to pull down the notice. One of the best newspaper accounts of the Republican convention that nominated Mr. J.G. Blaine for President in 1884 began as follows: "Now a man of G.o.d, with a bald head, calls the Deity down into the _melee_ and bids him make the candidate the right one and induce the people to elect him in November." If I here mention the newspaper head-line (apropos of a hanging) "Jerked to Jesus," it is mainly to note that M.

Blouet saw it in 1888 and M. Bourget also purports to have seen it in 1894. Surely the American journalist has a fatal facility of repet.i.tion or--?

American humour has no reverence for those in high position or authority. An American will say of his chief executive, "Yes, the President has a great deal of taste--and all of it bad." A current piece of doggerel when I was in Washington ran thus:

"Benny runs the White House, Levi keeps a bar, Johnny runs a Sunday School-- And, damme, there you are!"

The gentlemen named are the then President, Mr. Harrison; the Vice-President, Mr. Morton, who was owner or part owner of one of the large Washington hotels; and Mr. Wanamaker, Postmaster General, well known as "an earnest Christian worker."

I have seen even the sacred Declaration of Independence imitated, both in wording and in external form, as the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a hotel.

A story current in Philadelphia refers to Mr. Richard Vaux, an eminent citizen and member of a highly respected old Quaker family, who in his youth had been an _attache_ of the American Legation in London. One of his letters home narrated with pardonable pride that he had danced with the Princess Victoria at a royal ball and had found her a very charming partner. His mother replied: "It pleaseth me much, Richard, to hear of thy success at the ball in Buckingham Palace; but thee must remember it would be a great blow to thy father to have thee marry out of meeting."

Philosophy, art, and letters receive no greater deference at the hands of the American humorist. Even an Oliver Wendell Holmes will say of metaphysics that it is like "splitting a log; when you have done, you have two more to split." A poster long used by the comedians Crane and Robson represented these popular favourites in the guise of the two lowermost cherubs in the Sistine Madonna. Bill Nye's a.s.sertion that "the peculiarity of cla.s.sical music is that it is so much better than it sounds" is typical of a whole battalion of quips. Scenery, even when a.s.sociated with poetry, fares no better. The advertising fiend who defaces the most picturesque rocks with his atrocious announcements is, perhaps, hardly ent.i.tled to the name of humorist; but the man who affixed the name of Minniegiggle to a small fall near the famous Minnehaha evidently thought himself one. So, doubtless, did one of my predecessors in a dressing-cabin at Niagara, who had inscribed on its walls:

"Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them, Volleyed and thundered!

But the man who desc_i_nds Through the Cave of the Winds Can give points to the n.o.ble six hundred."

Of the extravagant exaggeration of American humour it is hardly necessary to give examples. This, to the ordinary observer, has perhaps been always its salient feature; and stock examples will occur to everyone. It is easy to see how readily this form of humour can be abused, and as a matter of fact it is abused daily and hourly. Many would-be American humorists fail entirely to see that exaggeration _alone_ is not necessarily funny.

To ill.u.s.trate: the story of the woman who described the suddenness of the American cyclone by saying that, as she looked up from her gardening, "she saw the air black with her intimate friends," seems to me a thoroughly humorous application of the exaggeration principle.

So, too, is the description of a man so terribly thin that he never could tell whether he had the stomach-ache or the lumbago. But the jester who expects you to laugh at the tale of the fish that was so large that the water of the lake subsided two feet when it was drawn ash.o.r.e simply does not know where humour ends and drivelling idiocy begins.

The dry suggestiveness of American humour is also a well-known feature. In its crudest phase it a.s.sumes such forms as the following: "Mrs. William Hankins lighted her fire with coal oil on February 23.

Her clothes fit the present Mrs. Hankins to a T." The ordinary Englishman will see the point of a jest like this (though his mind will not fly to it with the electric rapidity of the American's), but the more delicate forms of this allusive style of wit will often escape him altogether. Or, if he now begins to "jump" with an almost American agility it is because the cleverest witticisms of the Detroit _Free Press_ are now constantly served up to him in the comic columns of his evening paper. We have got the length of being consumers if not producers of this style of jest.

In its higher developments this quality of humour melts imperceptibly into irony. This has been cultivated by the Americans with great success--perhaps never better than in the columns of that admirable weekly journal the _Nation_. Anyone who cares to search the files of about eight or ten years back will find a number of ironical leaders, which by their subtlety and wit delighted those who "caught on,"

while, on the other hand, they often deceived even the elect Americans themselves and provoked a shower of innocently approving or depreciatory letters.

Apart altogether from the specific difference between American and English humour we cannot help noticing how humour penetrates and gives savour to the _whole_ of American life. There is almost no business too important to be smoothed over with a jest; and serio-comic allusions may crop up amongst the most barren-looking reefs of scrip and bargaining. It is almost impossible to imagine a governor of the Bank of England making a joke in his official capacity, but wit is perfected in the mouth of similar sucklings in New York. Of recent prominent speakers in America all except Carl Schurz and George William Curtis are professed humorists.

When Professor Boyesen, at an examination in Columbia College, set as one of the questions, "Write an account of your life," he found that seventeen out of thirty-two responses were in a jocular vein. Fifteen of the seventeen students bore names that indicated American parentage, while all but three of the non-jokers had foreign names.

Abraham Lincoln is, of course, the great example of this tendency to introduce the element of humour into the graver concerns of life; and his biography narrates many instances of its most happy effect. _All_ the newspapers, including the religious weeklies, have a comic column.

The tremendous seriousness with which the Englishman takes himself and everything else is practically unknown in America; and the ponderous machinery of commercial and political life is undoubtedly facilitated in its running by the presence of the oil of a sub-conscious humorous intention. The American att.i.tude, when not carried too far, seems, perhaps, to suggest a truer view of the comparative importance of things; the American seems to say: "This matter is of importance to you and for me, but after all it does not concern the orbit of a planet and there is no use talking and acting as if it did." This sense of humour often saves the American in a situation in which the Englishman would have recourse to downright brutality; it unties the Gordian knot instead of cutting it. A too strong conviction of being in the right often leads to conflicts that would be avoided by a more humorous appreciation of the relative importance of phenomena. To look on life as a jest is no doubt a deep of cynicism which is not and cannot lead to good, but to recognise the humorous side, the humorous possibilities running through most of our practical existence, often works as a saving grace. To his lack of this grace the Englishman owes much of his unpopularity with foreigners, much of the difficulty he experiences in inducing others to take his point of view, even when that point of view is right. You may as well hang a dog as give him a bad name; and a sense of humour which would prevent John Bull from calling a thing "un-English," when he means bad or unpractical, would often help him smoothly towards his goal. To his possession of a keen sense of humour the Yankee owes much of his success; it leads him, with a shrug of his shoulders, to cease fighting over names when the real thing is granted; it may sometimes lean to a calculating selfishness rather than spontaneous generosity, but on the whole it softens, enriches, and facilitates the problems of existence. It may, however, be here noted that some observers, such as Professor Boyesen, think that there is altogether too much jocularity in American life, and claim that the constant presence of the jest and the comic anecdote have done much to destroy conversation and eloquence.

Humour also acts as a great safety-valve for the excitement of political contests. When I was in New York, just before the election of President Harrison in 1888, two great political processions took place on the same day. In the afternoon some thirty thousand Republicans paraded the streets between lines of amused spectators, mostly Democrats. In the evening as many Democrats carried their torches through the same thoroughfares. No collisions of any kind took place; no ill humour was visible. The Republicans seemed to enjoy the jokes and squibs and flaunting mottoes of the Democrats; and when a Republican banner appeared with the legend, "No frigid North, no torrid South, no temperate East, no _Sackville West_," n.o.body appeared to relish it more than the hard-hit Democrat. The Cleveland cry of "Four, four, four years more" was met forcibly and effectively with the simple adaptation, "Four, four, four _months_ more," which proved the more prophetic of that gentleman's then stay at the White House.

At midnight, three days later, I was jammed in the midst of a yelling crowd in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, watching the electoral returns thrown by a stereopticon light, as they arrived, on large white sheets. Keener or more interested partisans I never saw; but at the same time I never saw a more good-humored crowd. If I encountered one policeman that night that was all I did see; and the police reports next morning, in a city of a million inhabitants let loose in the streets on a public holiday, reported the arrest of five drunk men and one pickpocket!

Election bets are often made payable in practical jokes instead of in current coin. Thus, after election day you will meet a defeated Republican wheeling his Democratic friend through the chuckling crowd in a wheelbarrow, or walking down the Bond Street of his native town with a coal-black African laundress on his arm. But in such forms of jesting as in "White Hat Day," at the Stock Exchange of New York, Americans come perilously near the Londoner's standard of the truly funny.

In comparing American humour with English we must take care that we take cla.s.s for cla.s.s. Those of us who find it difficult to get up a laugh at _Judge_, or Bill Nye, or Josh Billings, have at least to admit that they are not quite so feeble as _Ally Sloper_ and other cognate English humorists. When we reach the level of Artemus Ward, Ik Marvel, H.C. Bunner, Frank Stockton, and Mark Twain, we may find that we have no equally popular contemporary humorists of equal excellence; and these are emphatically humorists of a pure American type. If humour of a finer point be demanded it seems to me that there are few, if any, living English writers who can rival the delicate satiric powers of a Henry James or the subtle suggestiveness of Mr. W.D.

Howells' farces, for an a.n.a.logy to which we have to look to the best French work of the kind. But this takes us beyond the scope of this chapter, which deals merely with the humour of the "Man on the Cars."

FOOTNOTES:

[16] In an English issue of Artemus Ward, apparently edited by Mr.

John Camden Hotten (Chatto and Windus), this pa.s.sage is accompanied with the following gloss: "Here again Artemus called in the aid of pleasant banter as the most fitting apology for the atrocious badness of the painting."

This note is an excellent ill.u.s.tration of English obtuseness--if needed, on the part of the reading public; if needless, on the part of the editor.

IX

American Journalism--A Mixed Blessing

The average British daily newspaper is, perhaps, slightly in advance of its average reader; if we could imagine an issue of the _Standard_, or the _Daily Chronicle_, or the _Scotsman_ metamorphosed into human form, we should probably have to admit that the being thus created was rather above the average man in taste, intelligence, and good feeling.

Speaking roughly, and making allowances for all obvious exceptions, I should be inclined to say that a similar statement would not be as universally true of the American paper and the American public, particularly if the female citizen were included under the latter head. If the intelligent foreigner were to regard the British citizen as practically an incarnation of his daily press, whether metropolitan or provincial, he would be doing him more than justice; if he were to apply the same standard to the American press and the American citizen, it would not be the latter who would profit by the a.s.sumption. The American paper represents a distinctly lower level of life than the English one; it would often seem as if the one catered for the least intelligent cla.s.s of its readers, while the other a.s.sumed a standard higher than most of its readers could reach. The cultivated American is certainly not so slangy as the paper he reads; he is certainly not keenly interested in the extremely silly social items of which it contains several columns. Such journals as the New York _Evening Post_ and the Springfield _Republican_ are undoubtedly worthy of mention alongside of our most reputable dailies; but journals of their admirably high standard are comparatively rare, and no cultivated English visitor to the United States can have been spared a shock at the contrast between his fastidious and gentlemanly host and the general tone of the sheet served up with the matutinal hot cakes, or read by him on the cars and at the club.

Various causes may be suggested for this state of affairs. For one thing, the ma.s.s of half-educated people in the United States--people intelligent enough to take a lively interest in all that pertains to humanity, but not trained enough to insist on literary _form_--is so immense as practically to swamp the cultivated cla.s.s and render it a comparatively unimportant object for the business-like editor. In England a standard of taste has been gradually evolved, which is insisted on by the educated cla.s.s and largely taken on authority by others. In America practically no such standard is recognised; no one there would continue to take in a paper he found dull because the squire and the parson subscribed for it. The American reader--even when himself of high education and refinement--is a much less responsible being than the Englishman, and will content himself with a shrug of his shoulders where the latter would write a letter of indignant protest to the editor. I have more than once asked an American friend how he could endure such a daily repast of pointless vulgarity, slipshod English, and general second-rateness; but elicited no better answer than that one had to see the news, that the editorial part of the paper was well done, and that a man had to make the best of what existed. This is a national trait; it has simply to be recognised as such. Perhaps the fact that there is no metropolitan press in America to give tone to the rest of the country may also count for something in this connection. The press of Washington, the political capital, is distinctly provincial; and the New York papers, though practically representative of the United States for the outside world, can hardly be said to play a genuinely metropolitan role within the country itself.