VHumor and Satire

"We must go, go, go away from here,On the other side the world we're overdue."

That is the song which sings itself forever in the heart of youth. Champlain and Cartier heard it in the sixteenth century, Bradford no less than Morton in the seventeenth. Some Eldorado has always been calling to the more adventurous spirits upon American soil. Thepassion of the forty-niner neither began nor ended with the discovery of gold in California. It is within us. It transmutes the harsh or drab-colored everyday routine into tissue of fairyland. It makes our "winning of the West" a magnificent national epic. It changes to-day the black belt of Texas, or the wheat-fields of Dakota, into pots of gold that lie at the end of rainbows, only that the pot of gold is actually there. The human hunger of it all, the gorgeous dream-like quality of it all, the boundlessness of the vast American spaces, the sense of forest and prairie and sky, are all inexplicably blended with our notion of the ideal America. Henry James once tried to explain the difference between Turgenieff and a typical French novelist by saying that the back door of the Russian's imagination was always open upon the endless Russian steppe. No one can understand the spirit of American romance if he is not conscious of this ever-present hinterland in which our spirits have, from the beginning, taken refuge and found solace.

We have already noticed, in the chapter on idealism, how swiftly the American imagination modifies the prosaic facts of everydayexperience. The idealistic glamour which falls upon the day's work changes easily, in the more emotional temperaments, and at times, indeed, in all of us, into the fervor of true romance. Then, the prosaic buying and selling becomes the "game." A combination of buyers and sellers becomes the "system." The place where these buyers and sellers most do congregate and concentrate becomes "Wall Street"—a sort of anthropomorphic monster which seems to buy and sell the bodies and souls of men. Seen half a continent away, through the mists of ignorance and prejudice and partisan passion, "Wall Street" has loomed like some vast Gibraltar. To the broker's clerk who earns his weekly salary in that street, the Nebraska notion of "Wall Street" is too grotesque for discussion.

How easily every phase of American business life may take on the hues of romance is illustrated by the history of our railroads. No wonder that Bret Harte wrote a poem about the meeting of the eastward and westward facing engines when the two sections of the Union Pacific Railroad at last drew near each other on the interminable plains and the two enginescould talk. Of course what they said was poetry. There was a time when even the Erie Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal to-day, in the eyes of most Americans, is something other than a mere feat of engineering. We are doing more than making "the dirt fly." The canal represents victory over hostile forces, conquest of unwilling Nature, achievement of what had long been deemed impossible, the making not of a ditch, but of History.

So with all that American zest for camping, fishing, sailing, racing, which lies deep in the Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more primitive era of actual struggle against savage beasts or treacherous men or mysterious forests. It is at once an outlet and a nursery for romantic emotion. The out-of-doors movement which began with Thoreau's hut on Walden Pond, and which has gone on broadening and deepening to this hour, implies far more than mere variation from routine. It furnishes, indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pressure of modern social and commercial exigencies. Yet its more important function is to provide for grown-ups a chance to "play Indian" too.

But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the heart and mind, rather than in the realm of actual experience. The romantic imagination insists upon taking its holiday, whether the man who possesses it gets his holiday or not. I have never known a more truly romantic figure than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut who, in response to the question, "Do you do a good business?" made this perfectly Stevensonian reply: "Well, I make a living selling crockery and tinware, but mybusinessis the propagation of truth."

This wandering idealist may serve to remind us again of the difference between romance and romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit. Romanticism shifts and changes with external fortunes, with altering emotions, with the alternate play of light and shade over the vast landscape of human experience. The typical romanticist, as we have seen, is a man of moods. It is only a Poe who can keep the pitch through the whole concert of experience. But the deeper romance of the spirit is oblivious of these changes of external fortune, this rising or falling of the emotional temperature. The moral life of America furnishes striking illustrations of thesteadfastness with which certain moral causes have been kept, as it were, in the focus of intense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwavering poetry, has transfigured such practical propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of woman, the fight against the liquor traffic, the emancipation of the individual from the clutches of economic and commercial despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, women like Julia Ward Howe, fought for these causes throughout their lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards women was not merely chivalric (for one may be chivalrous without any marked predisposition to romance), but nobly romantic also. James Russell Lowell, poet as he was, outlived that particular phase of romantic moral reform which he had been taught by Maria White. But in other men and women bred in that old New England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fervor knew no restraint. Garrison, although in many respects a most unromantic personality, was engaged in a task which gave him all the inspiration of romance. A romantic "atmosphere," fully as highly colored as any of the romantic atmospheres that we are accustomedto mark in literature, surrounded as with a luminous mist the figures of the New England transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of himself, were soldiers. They felt themselves enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious campaign. They were willing to pardon, in their comrades and in themselves, those imaginative excesses which resemble the physical excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism was thus a militant philosophy and religion, with both a destructively critical and a positively constructive creed. Channing, Parker, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, were warrior-priests, poets and prophets of a gallant campaign against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for the light.

The atmosphere of that score of years in New England was now superheated, now rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never quite the normal atmosphere of every day. On the purely literary side, it is needless to say, these men and women sought inspiration in Coleridge and Carlyle and other English and German romanticists. In fact, the most enduring literature of New England between 1830 and 1865 was distinctly a romantic literature.It was rooted, however, not so much in those swift changes of historic condition, those startling liberations of the human spirit which gave inspiration to the romanticism of the Continent, as it was in the deep and vital fervor with which these New Englanders envisaged the problems of the moral life.

Other illustrations of the American capacity for romance lie equally close at hand. Take, for instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Burton Stevenson has collected thePoems of American History. Here are nearly seven hundred pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While Stedman'sAnthologyreveals no doubt national aspirations and national sentiment, as well as the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr. Stevenson's collection has the advantage of focussing this national feeling upon specific events. Stedman'sAnthologyis an enduring document of American idealism, touching in the sincerity of its poetic moods, pathetic in its long lists of men and women who are known by one poem only, or who have never, for one reason or another, fulfilled their poetic promise. The thousand poems which it contains are more striking, in fact, for their promise than for theirperformance. They are intimations of what American men and women would have liked to do or to be. In this sense, it is a precious volume, but it is certainly not commensurate, either in passion or in artistic perfection, with the forces of that American life which it tries to interpret. Indeed, Mr. Stedman, after finishing his task of compilation, remarked to more than one of his friends that what this country needed was some "adult male verse."

ThePoems of American Historycollected by Mr. Stevenson are at least vigorous and concrete. One aspect of our history which especially lends itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose is the romance which attaches itself to war. It is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all wars, even the noblest, have had their sordid, grimy, selfish, bestial aspect; and that the intelligence and conscience of our modern world are more and more engaged in the task of making future wars impossible. But the slightest acquaintance with American history reveals the immense reservoir of romantic emotion which has been drawn upon in our national struggles. War, of course, is an immemorial source of romantic feeling. William James'snotable essay on "A Moral Substitute for War" endeavored to prove that our modern economic and social life, if properly organized, would give abundant outlet and satisfaction to those romantic impulses which formerly found their sole gratification in battle. Many of us believe that he was right; but for the moment we must look backward and not forward. We must remember the stern if rude poetry inspired by our Revolutionary struggle, the romantic halo that falls upon the youthful figure of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that touches the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance of the Bennington fight to the followers of Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of the "little captain," John Paul Jones:—"We have not struck, we have just begun our part of the fighting." The colors of romance still drape the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Tecumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of Kentucky, the explorers of the Yellowstone and the Columbia, the emigrants who left their bones along the old Santa Fé Trail, are our Homeric men.

The Mexican War affords pertinent illustration, not only of romance, but of reaction. Theearlier phases of the Texan struggle for independence have much of the daring, the splendid rashness, the glorious and tragic catastrophes of the great romantic adventures of the Old World. It is not the Texans only who still "remember the Alamo," but when those brilliant and dramatic adventures of border warfare became drawn into the larger struggle for the extension of slavery, the poetic reaction began. The physical and moral pretence of warfare, the cheap splendors of epaulets and feathers, shrivelled at the single touch of the satire of theBiglow Papers. Lowell, writing at that moment with the instinct and fervor of a prophet, brought the whole vainglorious business back to the simple issue of right and wrong:

"'Taint your eppyletts an' feathersMake the thing a grain more right;'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethersWill excuse ye in His sight;Ef you take a sword an' dror it,An' go stick a feller thru,Guv'ment aint to answer for it,God'll send the bill to you."

But far more interesting is the revelation of the American capacity for romance which wasmade possible by the war between the States. Stevenson'sPoems of American Historyand Stedman'sAnthologygive abundant illustration of almost every aspect of that epical struggle. The South was in a romantic mood from the very beginning. The North drifted into it after Sumter. I have already said that no one can examine a collection of Civil War verse without being profoundly moved by its evidence of American idealism. In specific phases of the struggle, in connection with certain battle-fields and certain leaders of both North and South, this idealism is heightened into pure romance, so that even our novelists feel that they can give no adequate picture of the war without using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no doubt, agree in feeling that we are still too near to that epoch-making crisis of our national existence to do it any justice in the terms of literature. Perhaps we must wait for the perfected romance of the years 1861-65, until the men and the events of that struggle are as remote as the heroes of Greece and Troy. Certainly no one can pass a final judgment upon the verse occasioned by recent struggles in arms. Any one who has studied the Englishpoetry inspired by the South-African War will be painfully conscious of the emotional and moral complexity of all such issues, of the bitter injustice which poets, as well as other men, render to one another, of the impossibility of transmuting into the pure gold of romance the emotions originating in the stock market, in race-hatred, and in national vainglory.

We have lingered too long, perhaps, over these various evidences of the romantic temper of America. We must now glance at the forces of reaction, the recoil to fact. What is it which contradicts, inhibits, or negatives the romantic tendency? Among other forces, there is certainly humor. Humor and romance often go hand in hand, but humor is commonly fatal to romanticism. There is satire, which rebukes both romanticism and romance, which exposes the fallacies of the one, and punctures the exuberance of the other. More effective, perhaps, than either humor or satire as an antiseptic against romance, is the overmastering sense of fact. This is what Emerson called the instinct for the milk in the pan, an instinct which Emerson himself possessed extraordinarily on his purely Yankee side, and which apioneer country is forced continually to develop and to recognize. Camping, for instance, develops both the romantic sense and the fact sense. Supper must be cooked, even at Walden Pond. There must be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and the dishes ought to be washed.

On a higher plane, also, than this mere sense of physical necessity, there are forces limiting the influence of romance. Schiller put it all into one famous line:—

"Und was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine."

Or listen to Keats:—

"'T is best to remain aloof from people, and like their good parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull process of their everyday lives.... All I can say is that standing at Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North and South, I can see nothing but dullness."

And Henry James, describing New York in his book,The American Scene, speaks of "the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated 'business-man' face ... the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass—withthe confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights ... the universalwill to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price."

One need not be a poet like Keats or an inveterate psychologist like Henry James, in order to become aware how the commonplaceness of the world rests like a fog upon the mind and heart. No one goes to his day's work and comes home again without a consciousness of contact with an unspiritual atmosphere, or incompletely spiritualized forces, not merely with indifference, to what Emerson would term "the over-soul," but with a lack of any faith in the things which are unseen. Take those very forces which have limited the influence of Emerson throughout the United States; they illustrate the universal forces which clip the wings of romance. The obstacles in the path of Emerson's influence are not merely the religious and denominational differences which Dr. George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable article at the time of the Emerson Centenary.The real obstacles are more serious. It is true that Dr. Park of Andover, Dr. Bushnell of Hartford, and Dr. Hodge of Princeton, could say in Emerson's lifetime: "We know a better, a more Scriptural and certificated road toward the very things which Emerson is seeking for. We do not grant that we are less idealistic than he. We think him a dangerous guide, following wandering fires. It is better to journey safely with us."

But I have known at least two livery-stable keepers and many college professors who would unite in saying: "Hodge and Park and Bushnell and Emerson are all following after something that does not exist. One is not much more mistaken than the others. We can get along perfectly well in our business without any of those ideas at all. Let us stick to the milk in the pan, the horse in the stall, the documents which you will find in the library."

There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the transcendental movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualized, unvitalized American manhood and womanhood. No literaturecomes from it and no religion, though there is much human kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of that idealism which lifts man above the brute.

Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating thing about these forces of reaction is that they themselves shift and change. We have seen that external romance depending upon strangeness of scene, novelty of adventure, rich atmospheric distance of space or time, disappears with the changes of civilization. The farm expands over the wolf's den, the Indian becomes a blacksmith, but do the gross and material instincts ultimately triumph? He would be a hardy prophet who should venture to assert it. We must reckon always with the swing of the human pendulum, with the reaction against reaction. Here, for example, during the last decade, has been book after book written about the reaction against democracy. All over the world, it is asserted, there are unmistakable signs that democracy will not practically work in the face of the modern tasks to which the world has set itself. One reads these books, one persuades himself that the hour for democracy is passing, and then one goes out on the streetand buys a morning newspaper and discovers that democracy has scored again. So is it with the experience of the individual. You may fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for you, with the passing of the square-sailed ship. If Mr. Kipling's poetry cannot rouse you from that mood of reaction, walk down to the end of the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean liner come up the harbor. If there is no romance there, you do not know romance when you see it!

Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life is the butt of the newspaper paragraphers from one end of the country to the other. But does romance disappear from the farm with machinery and scientific agriculture? There are farmers who follow Luther Burbank's experiments with plants, with all the fascination which used to attach to alchemy and astrology. The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or a wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his farm are analyzed at his state university by men who live in the daily atmosphere of the romance of science, and who say, as a professor in the University of Chicago said once, that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knewwhat was going on within its cell-structure, you would be afraid to stay alone with it in the dark."

The reaction from romance, therefore, real as it is, and dead weight as it lies upon the soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces which destroy it. In other words, the reaction against one type of romance produces inevitably another type of romance, other aspects of wonder, terror, and beauty. Following the romance of adventure comes, after never so deep a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like the crest of another wave; and then comes what we call, for lack of a better word, the psychological romance, the old mystery and strangeness of the human soul, Æschylus and Job, as Victor Hugo says, in the poor crawfish gatherer on the rocks of Brittany.

We must remember that we are endeavoring to measure great spaces and to take account of the "amplitude of time." The individual "fact-man," as Coleridge called him, remains perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as the dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single generation is compounded all of fact or all of dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that therewas an ideal United States, which Dickens did not discover during that first visit of 1842; he would have set the Cambridge which he knew over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs. Trollope; he would have asserted that the homes characterized by refinement, by cultivation, by pure and simple sentiment, made up the true America. But even among Longfellow's own contemporaries there was Whitman, who felt that the true America was something very different from that exquisitely tempered ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who, over in Concord, had been pushing forward the frontier of the mind and senses, who had opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the boundless and mysterious territory of Nature. There was Emerson, who was preaching an intellectual independence of the Old World which should correspond to the political and social independence of the Western Hemisphere. There was Parkman, whose hatred of philanthropy, whose lack of spirituality, is a striking illustration of the rebound of New England idealism against itself, of the reaction into stoicism. What different worlds these men lived in, and yet they were all inhabitants, so tospeak, of the same parish; most of them met often around the same table! The lesson of their variety of experience and differences of gifts as workmen in that great palace of literature which is so variously built, is that no action and reaction in the imaginative world is ever final. Least of all do these actions and reactions affect the fortunes of true romance. The born dreamer may fall from one dream into another, but he still murmurs, in the famous line of William Ellery Channing,—

"If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea."

No line in our literature is more truly American,—unless it be that other splendid metaphor, by David Wasson, which says the same thing in other words:—

"Life's gift outruns my fancies far,And drowns the dreamIn larger stream,As morning drinks the morning-star."

A distinguished professor in the Harvard Divinity School once began a lecture on Comedy by saying that the study of the comic had made him realize for the first time that a joke was one of the most solemn things in the world. The analysis of humor is no easy matter. It is hard to say which is the more dreary: an essay on humor illustrated by a series of jokes, or an exposition of humor in the technical terms of philosophy. No subject has been more constantly discussed. But it remains difficult to decide what humor is. It is easier to declare what seemed humorous to our ancestors, or what seems humorous to us to-day. For humor is a shifting thing. The well-known collections of the writings of American humorists surprise us by their revelation of the changes in public taste. Humor—or the sense of humor—alters while we are watching. What seemed agood joke to us yesterday seems but a poor joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke! What is true of the individual is all the more true of the national sense of humor. This vast series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call America; has it produced a humor of its own?

Let us avoid for the moment the treacherous territory of definitions. Let us, rather, take one concrete example: a pair of men, a knight and his squire, who for three hundred years have ridden together down the broad highway of the world's imagination. Everybody sees that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are humorous. Define them as you will—idealist and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer and proverb-maker—these figures represent to all the world two poles of human experience. A Frenchman once said that all of us are Don Quixotes on one day and Sancho Panzas on the next. Humor springs from this contrast. It is the electric flash between the two poles of experience.

Most philosophers who have meditated upon the nature of the comic point out that it is closely allied with the tragic. Flaubert once compared our human idealism to the flight ofa swallow; at one moment it is soaring toward the sunset, at the next moment some one shoots it and it tumbles into the mud with blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden poignant contrast between light, space, freedom, and the wounded bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and the littleness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or to cry at what he sees. Those collisions and contrasts out of which the stuff of tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the higher and lower nature of a man, between his past and his present, between one's duties to himself and to his family or the state, between, in a word, his character and his situation, are all illustrated in comedy as completely as in tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city man in the country, is in a comic situation. Here is a coward named Falstaff, and Shakespeare puts him into battle. Here is a vain person, and Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted bya clown. Here is an ignoramus, and Dogberry is placed on the judge's bench. These contrasts might, indeed, be tragic enough, but they are actually comic. Such characters are not ruled by fate but by a sportive chance. The gods connive at them. They are ruled, like tragic characters, by necessity and blindness; but the blindness, instead of leading to tragic ruin, leads only to being caught as in some harmless game of blind-man's-buff. There is retribution, but Falstaff is only pinched by the fairies. Comedy of intrigue and comedy of character lead to no real catastrophe. The end of it on the stage is not death but matrimony; and "home well pleased we go."

A thousand definitions of humor lay stress upon this element of incongruity. Hazlitt begins his illuminating lectures on the Comic Writers by declaring, "Man is the only animal that laughs or weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." James Russell Lowell took the same ground. "Humor," he said once, "lies in the contrast of two ideas. It is the universal disenchanter. It is the sense of comic contradiction whicharises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the impressions received through the imagination." If that sentence seems too abstract, all we need do is to think of Sancho Panza, the man of understanding, talking about Don Quixote, the man of imagination.

We must not multiply quotations, but it is impossible not to remember the distinction made by Carlyle in writing about Richter. "True humor," says Carlyle, "springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love." In other words, not merely the great humorists of the world's literature—Cervantes, Rabelais, Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens—but the writers of comic paragraphs for to-morrow's newspaper, all regard our human incongruities with a sort of affection. The comic spirit is essentially a social spirit. The great figures of tragedy are solitary. The immortal figures of comedy belong to a social group.

No recent discussion of humor is more illuminating and more directly applicable to the conditions of American life than that of the contemporary French philosopher Bergson.Bergson insists throughout his brilliant little book onLaughterthat laughter is a social function. Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever is stiff, automatic, machine-like, excites a smile. We laugh when a person gives us the impression of being a thing,—a sort of mechanical toy. Every inadaptation of the individual to society is potentially comic. Thus laughter becomes a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we visit upon one another. But we do not isolate the comic personage as we do the solitary, tragic figure. The comic personage is usually a type; he is one of an absurd group; he is a miser, a pedant, a pretentious person, a doctor or a lawyer in whom the professional traits have become automatic so that he thinks more of his professional behavior than he does of human health and human justice. Of all these separatist tendencies, laughter is the great corrective. When the individual becomes set in his ways, obstinate, preoccupied, automatic, the rest of us laugh him out of it if we can. Of course all that we are thinking about at the moment is his ridiculousness. But nevertheless, by laughing we become the saviors of society.

No one, I think, can help observing that this conception of humor as incongruity is particularly applicable to a new country. On the new soil and under the new sky, in new social groupings, all the fundamental contrasts and absurdities of our human society assume a new value. We see them under a fresh light. They are differently focussed. The broad humors of the camp, its swift and picturesque play of light and shade, its farce and caricature no less than its atmosphere of comradeship, of sentiment, and of daring, are all transferred to the humor of the newly settled country. The very word "humor" once meant singularity of character, "some extravagant habit, passion, or affection," says Dryden, "particular to some one person." Every newly opened country encourages, for a while, this oddness and incongruity of individual character. It fosters it, and at the same moment it laughs at it. It decides that such characters are "humorous." As the social conditions of such a country change, the old pioneer instinct for humor, and the pioneer forms of humor, may endure, though the actual frontier may have moved far westward.

There is another conception of humorscarcely less famous than the notion of incongruity. It is the conception associated with the name of the English philosopher Hobbes, who thought that humor turned upon a sense of superiority. "The passion of laughter," said Hobbes, "is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of others, or with our own formerly." Too cynical a view, declare many critics, but they usually end by admitting that there is a good deal in it after all. I am inclined to think that Hobbes's famous definition is more applicable to wit than it is to humor. Wit is more purely intellectual than humor. It rejoices in its little triumphs. It requires, as has been remarked, a good head, while humor takes a good heart, and fun good spirits. If you take Carlyle literally when he says that humor is love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's conviction that laughter turns upon a sense of superiority, and yet surely we all experience a sense of kindly amusement which turns upon the fact that we, the initiated, are superior, for the moment, to the unlucky person who is just having his turn in being hazed. It may be theplay of intellect or the coarser play of animal spirits. One might venture to make a distinction between the low comedy of the Latin races and the low comedy of the Germanic races by pointing out that the superiority in the Latin comedy usually turns upon quicker wits, whereas the superiority in the Germanic farce is likely to turn upon stouter muscles. But whether it be a play of wits or of actual cudgelling, the element of superiority and inferiority is almost always there.

I remember that some German, I dare say in a forgotten lecture-room, once illustrated the humor of superiority in this way. A company of strolling players sets up its tent in a country village. On the front seat is a peasant, laughing at the antics of the clown. The peasant flatters himself that he sees through those practical jokes on the stage; the clown ought to have seen that he was about to be tripped up, but he was too stupid. But the peasant saw that it was coming all the time. He laughs accordingly. Just behind the peasant sits the village shopkeeper. He has watched stage clowns many a time and he laughs, not at the humor of the farce, but at the naïve laughterof the peasant in front of him. He, the shopkeeper, is superior to such broad and obvious humor as that. Behind the shopkeeper sits the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster is a pedant; he has probably lectured to his boys on the theory of humor, and he smiles in turn at the smile of superiority on the face of the shopkeeper. Well, peeping in at the door of the tent is a man of the world, who glances at the clown, then at the peasant, then at the shopkeeper, then at the schoolmaster, each one of whom is laughing at the others, and the man of the world laughs at them all!

Let us take an even simpler illustration. We all know the comfortable sense of proprietorship which we experience after a few days' sojourn at a summer hotel. We know our place at the table; we call the head waiter by his first name; we are not even afraid of the clerk. Now into this hotel, where we sit throned in conscious superiority, comes a new arrival. He has not yet learned the exits and entrances. He starts for the kitchen door inadvertently when he should be headed for the drawing-room. We smile at him. Why? Precisely because that was what we did on the morning of ourown arrival. We have been initiated, and it is now his turn.

If it is true that a newly settled country offers endless opportunities for the humor which turns upon incongruity, it is also true that the new country offers countless occasions for the humor which turns upon the sudden glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is amusing to the man of the settlements, and the backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share of amusement out of watching the "tenderfoot" in the woods. It is simply the case of the old resident versus the newcomer. The superiority need be in no sense a cruel or taunting superiority, although it often happens to be so. The humor of the pioneers is not very delicately polished. The joke of the frontier tavern or grocery store is not always adapted to a drawing-room audience, but it turns in a surprisingly large number of instances upon exactly the same intellectual or social superiority which gives point to thebon motsof the most cultivated and artificial society in the world.

The humor arising from incongruity, then, and the humor arising from a sense of superiority, are both of them social in their nature.No less social, surely, is the function of satire. It is possible that satire may be decaying, that it is becoming, if it has not already become, a mere splendid or odious tradition. But let us call it a great tradition and, upon the whole, a splendid one. Even when debased to purely party or personal uses, the verse satire of a Dryden retains its magnificent resonance; "the ring," says Saintsbury, "as of a great bronze coin thrown down on marble." The malignant couplets of an Alexander Pope still gleam like malevolent jewels through the dust of two hundred years. The cynicism, the misanthropy, the mere adolescent badness of Byron are powerless to clip the wings of the wide-ranging, far-darting wit and humor and irony ofDon Juan. The homely Yankee dialect, the provinciality, the "gnarly" flavor of theBiglow Papersdo not prevent our finding in that pungent and resplendent satire the powers of Lowell at full play; and, what is more than that, the epitome of the American spirit in a moral crisis.

I take the names of those four satirists, Dryden, Pope, Byron, and Lowell, quite at random; but they serve to illustrate a significant principle; namely, that great satire becomes ennobled asit touches communal, not merely individual interests, as it voices social and not merely individual ideals. Those four modern satirists were steeped in the nationalistic political poetry of the Old Testament. They were familiar with its war anthems, dirges, and prophecies, its concern for the prosperity and adversity, the sin and the punishment, of a people. Here the writers of the Golden Age of English satire found their vocabulary and phrase-book, their grammar of politics and history, their models of good and evil kings; and in that Biblical school of political poetry, which has affected our literature from the Reformation down to Mr. Kipling, there has always been a class in satire! The satirical portraits, satirical lyrics, satirical parables of the Old Testament prophets are only less noteworthy than their audacity in striking high and hard. Their foes were the all-powerful: Babylon and Assyria and Egypt loom vast and terrible upon the canvases of Isaiah and Ezekiel; and poets of a later time have learned there the secrets of social and political idealism, and the signs of national doom.

There are two familiar types of satire associated with the names of Horace and Juvenal.Both types are abundantly illustrated in English and American literature. When you meet a bore or a hypocrite or a plain rascal, is it better to chastise him with laughter or to flay him with shining fury? I shall take both horns of the dilemma and assert that both methods are admirable and socially useful. The minor English and American poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were never weary of speaking of satire as a terrific weapon which they were forced to wield as saviors of society. But whether they belonged to the urbane school of Horace, or to the severely moralistic school of Juvenal, they soon found themselves falling into one or the other of two modes of writing. They addressed either the little audience or the big audience, and they modified their styles accordingly. The great satirists of the Renaissance, for example, like More, Erasmus, and Rabelais, wrote simply for the persons who were qualified to understand them. More and Erasmus wrote their immortal satires in Latin. By so doing they addressed themselves to cultivated Europe. They ran no risk of being misunderstood by persons for whom the joke was not intended. All readers of Latin werelike members of one club. Of course membership was restricted to the learned, but had not Horace talked about being content with a few readers, and was not Voltaire coming by and by with the advice to try for the "little public"?

The typical wit of the eighteenth century, whether in London, Paris, or in Franklin's printing-shop in Philadelphia, had, of course, abandoned Latin. But it still addressed itself to the "little public," to the persons who were qualified to understand. The circulation of theSpectator, which represents so perfectly the wit, humor, and satire of the early eighteenth century in England, was only about ten thousand copies. This limited audience smiled at the urbane delicate touches of Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison. They understood the allusions. The fable concerned them and not the outsiders. It was something like Oliver Wendell Holmes reading his witty and satirical couplets to an audience of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in the vernacular, but in a vernacular as spoken in a certain social medium. It is all very delightful.

But there is a very different kind of audience gathering all this while outside the Harvardgates. These two publics for the humorist we may call the invited and the uninvited; the inner circle and the outer circle: first, those who have tickets for the garden party, and who stroll over the lawn, decorously gowned and properly coated, conversing with one another in the accepted social accents and employing the recognized social adjectives; and second, the crowd outside the gates,—curious, satirical, good-natured in the main, straightforward of speech and quick to applaud a ready wit or a humor-loving eye or a telling phrase spoken straight from the heart of the mob.

Will an author choose to address the selected guests or the casual crowd? Either way lies fame, if one does it well. Your uninvited men find themselves talking to the uninvited crowd. Before they know it they are famous too. They are fashioning another manner of speech. Defoe is there, with his saucy ballads selling triumphantly under his very pillory; with hisTrue-Born Englishmanpuncturing forever the fiction of the honorable ancestry of the English aristocracy; with hisCrusoeandMoll Flanders, written, as Lamb said long afterwards, for the servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, withhis terrificDrapier's Letters, anonymous, aimed at the uneducated, with cold fury bludgeoning a government into obedience; with hisGulliver's Travels, so transparent upon the surface that a child reads the book with delight and remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon humanity. And then, into the London of Defoe and Swift, and into the very centre of the middle-class mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin Franklin in search of a style "smooth, clear, and short," and for half a century, with consummate skill, shapes that style to his audience. His young friend Thomas Paine takes the style and touches it with passion, until he becomes the perfect pamphleteer, and hisCrisisis worth as much to our Revolution—men said—as the sword of Washington. After another generation the gaunt Lincoln, speaking that same plain prose of Defoe, Swift, Franklin, and Paine,—Lincoln who began his first Douglas debate, not like his cultivated opponent with the conventional "Ladies and Gentlemen," but with the ominously intimate, "My Fellow Citizens,"—Lincoln is saying, "I am not master of language; I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon dialectics,as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words. I know what I meant, andI will not leave this crowd in doubt, if I can explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph."

"I will not leave this crowd in doubt"; that is the final accent of our spoken prose, the prose addressed to one's fellow citizens, to the great public. This is the prose spoken in the humor and satire of Dickens. Dressed in a queer dialect, and put into satirical verse, it is the language of theBiglow Papers. Uttered with the accent of a Chicago Irishman, it is the prose admired by millions of the countrymen of "Mr. Dooley."

Satire written to the "little public" tends toward the social type; that written to the "great public" to the political type. It is obvious that just as a newly settled country offers constant opportunity for the humor of incongruity and the humor arising from a sense of superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus to the use of satire. That moralizing Puritanstrain of censure which lost none of its harshness in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full play in the colonial satire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the topics for satire grew wider and more political in their scope, the audiences increased. To-day the very oldest issues of the common life of that queer "political animal" named man are discussed by our popular newspaper satirists in the presence of a democratic audience that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Is there, then, a distinctly American type of humor and satire? I think it would be difficult to prove that our composite American nationality has developed a mode of humor and satire which is racially different from the humor and satire of the Old World. All racial lines in literature are extremely difficult to draw. If you attempt to analyze English humor, you find that it is mostly Scotch or Irish. If you put Scotch and Irish humor under the microscope, you discover that most of the best Scotch and Irish jokes are as old as the Greeks and the Egyptians. You pick up a copy ofFliegende Blätterand you get keen amusement from its revelation of German humor. But howmuch of this humor, after all, is either essentially universal in its scope or else a matter of mere stage-setting and machinery? Without the Prussian lieutenant theFliegende Blätterwould lose half its point; nor can one imagine aPunchwithout a picture of the English policeman. The lieutenant and the policeman, however, are a part of the accepted social furniture of the two countries. They belong to the decorative background of the social drama. They heighten the effectiveness of local humor, but it may be questioned whether they afford any evidence of genuine racial differentiation as to the sense of the comic.

What one can abundantly prove, however, is that the United States afford a new national field for certain types of humor and satire. Our English friends are never weary of writing magazine articles about Yankee humor, in which they explain the peculiarities of the American joke with a dogmatism which has sometimes been thought to prove that there is such a thing as national lack of humor, whether there be such a thing as national humor or not. One such article, I remember, endeavored to prove that the exaggeration often found in Americanhumor was due to the vastness of the American continent. Our geography, that is to say, is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Birrell, an expert judge of humor, surely, thinks that the characteristic of American humor lies in its habit of speaking of something hideous in a tone of levity. Many Englishmen, in fact, have been as much impressed with this minimizing trick of American humor as with the converse trick of magnifying. Upon the Continent the characteristic trait of American humor has often been thought to be its exuberance of phrase. Many shrewd judges of our newspaper humor have pointed out that one of its most favorite methods is the suppression of one link in the chain of logical reasoning. Such generalizations as these are always interesting, although they may not take us very far.

Yet it is clear that certain types of humor and satire have proved to be specially adapted to the American soil and climate. Whether or not these types are truly indigenous one may hesitate to say, yet it remains true that the well-known conditions of American life have stimulated certain varieties of humor into such arichness of manifestation as the Old World can scarcely show.

Curiously enough, one of the most perfected types of American humor is that urbane Horatian variety which has often been held to be the exclusive possession of the cultivated and restricted societies of older civilization. Yet it is precisely this kind of humor which has been the delight of some of the most typical American minds. Benjamin Franklin, for example, modelled his style and his sense of the humorous on the papers of theSpectator. He produced humorous fables and apologues, choice little morsels of social and political persiflage, which were perfectly suited, not merely to the taste of London in the so-called golden age of English satire, but to the tone of the wittiest salons of Paris in the age when the old régime went tottering, talking, quoting, jesting to its fall. Read Franklin's charming and wise letter to Madame Brillon about giving too much for the whistle. It is the perfection of well-bred humor: a humor very American, very Franklinian, although its theme and tone and phrasing might well have been envied by Horace or Voltaire.

The gentle humor of Irving is marked by precisely those traits of urbanity and restraint which characterize the parables of Franklin. Does not theAutocrat of the Breakfast Tableitself presuppose the existence of a truly cultivated society? Its tone—"As I was saying when I was interrupted"—is the tone of the intimate circle. There was so much genuine humanity in the gay little doctor that persons born outside the circle of Harvard College and the North Shore and Boston felt themselves at once initiated by the touch of his merry wand into a humanized, kindly theory of life. The humor of George William Curtis had a similarly mellow and ripened quality. It is a curious comment upon that theory of Americans which represents us primarily as a loud-voiced, assertive, headstrong people, to be thus made aware that many of the humorists whom we have loved best are precisely those whose writing has been marked by the most delicate restraint, whose theory of life has been the most highly urbane and civilized, whose work is indistinguishable in tone—though its materials are so different—from that of other humorous writers on the other side of the Atlantic. Onits social side all this is a fresh proof of the extraordinary adaptability of the American mind. On the literary side it is one more evidence of the national fondness for neatness and perfection of workmanship.

But we are something other than a nation of mere lovers and would-be imitators of Charles Lamb. The moralistic type of humor, the crack of Juvenal's whip, as well as the delicate Horatian playing around the heart-strings, has characterized our humor and satire from the beginning. At bottom the American is serious. Beneath the surface of his jokes there is moral earnestness, there is ethical passion. Take, for example, some of the apothegms of "Josh Billings." He failed with the public until he took up the trick of misspelling his words. When he had once gained his public he sometimes delighted them with sheer whimsical incongruity, like this:—

"There iz 2 things in this life for which we are never fully prepared, and that iz twins."

But more often the tone is really grave. It is only the spelling that is queer. The moralizing might be by La Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld. Take this:—

"Life iz short, but it iz long enuff to ruin enny man who wants tew be ruined."

Or this:—

"When a feller gits a goin doun hill, it dus seem as tho evry thing had bin greased for the okashun." That is what writers of tragedy have been showing, ever since the Greeks!

Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone of the great French moralists:—

"It iz a verry delicate job to forgive a man without lowering him in his own estimashun, and yures too."

See how the moralistic note is struck in the field of political satire. It is 1866, and "Petroleum V. Nasby," writing from "Confedrit X Roads," Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's views on education. "He didn't bleeve in edjucashun, generally speekin. The common people was better off without it, ez edjucashun hed a tendency to unsettle their minds. He had seen the evil effex ov it in niggers and poor whites. So soon ez a nigger masters the spellin book and gits into noosepapers, he becomes dissatisfied with his condishin, and hankers after a better cabin and more wages. He towunst begins to insist onto ownin land hisself,and givin his children edjucashun, and, ez a nigger, for our purposes, aint worth a soo markee."

The single phrase, "ez a nigger," spells a whole chapter of American history.

That quotation from "Petroleum V. Nasby" serves also to illustrate a species of American humor which has been of immense historical importance and which has never been more active than it is to-day: the humor, namely, of local, provincial, and sectional types. Much of this falls under Bergson's conception of humor as social censure. It rebukes the extravagance, the rigidity, the unawareness of the individual who fails to adapt himself to his social environment. It takes the place, in our categories of humor, of those types of class humor and satire in which European literature is so rich. The mobility of our population, the constant shifting of professions and callings, has prevented our developing fixed class types of humor. We have not even the lieutenant or the policeman as permanent members of our humorous stock company. The policeman of to-day may be mayor or governor to-morrow. The lieutenant may go back to his grocery wagon or on to his department store. Butwhenever and wherever such an individual fails to adapt himself to his new companions, fails to take on, as it were, the colors of his new environment, to speak in the new social accents, to follow the recognized patterns of behavior, then the kindly whip of the humorist is already cracking round his ears. The humor and satire of college undergraduate journalism turns mainly upon the recognized ability or inability of different individuals to adapt themselves to their changing pigeon-holes in the college organism. A freshman must behave like a freshman, or he is laughed at. Yet he must not behave as if he were nothing but the automaton of a freshman, or he will be laughed at more merrily still.

One of the first discoveries of our earlier humorists was the Down-East Yankee. "I'm going to Portland whether or no," says Major Jack Downing, telling the story of his boyhood; "I'll see what this world is made of yet. So I tackled up the old horse and packed in a load of ax handles and a few notions, and mother fried me a few doughnuts ... for I told her I didn't know how long I should be gone,"—and off he goes to Portland, to see what theworld is made of. It is a little like Defoe, and a good deal like the young Ulysses, bent upon knowing cities and men and upon getting the best of bargains.

Each generation of Americans has known something like that trip to Portland. Each generation has had to measure its wits, its resources, its manners, against new standards of comparison. At every stage of the journey there are mishaps and ridiculous adventures; but everywhere, likewise, there is zest, conquest, initiation; the heart of a boy who "wants to know"—as the Yankees used to say; or, in more modern phrase,—

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