He laughed.
"Not bad!" he said, "you've got the author right, but the book is A
Tale of Two Cities."
He then asked me to guess what two authors sold best among the troops at the front during the war.
"Charles Garvice and Nat Gould," I said, and the Professor thought me a wonderful fellow, for I had guessed aright.
There is a whiskered Ford story which tells that Mr. Ford took a new car from his factory and invited a visitor to have a spin. They started off, and went seven miles out. Then the car stopped. Ford jumped out and lifted the bonnet.
"Good Lord!" he cried, "the engine hasn't been put in! The car must have run seven miles on its reputation!"
I think that books run many miles on reputation alone. Like a snowball the farther a circulation rolls the more it gathers to itself. But what is it that makes a book popular? The best press notices in the world will not send the circulation of a book up to a hundred thousand level. What sells a book is talk. Scores of people said to me: "Oh, have you read The Young Visitors?" I hasten to add, as a Scot, that I personally did not help to increase the circulation; I borrowed the book from an enthusiast. Talk sells a book, but we have to discover why people talk about The Young Visitors and not about—er—The Booming of Bunkie. The book that is to sell well must be able to touch a chord in the crowd heart, and The Young Visitors sold because it touched the infantile chord in the crowd heart; it brought back the happiest days of life, the schooldays: again, its naïve Malapropisms appealed to the crowd, because we are all glad to laugh at the social and grammatical errors we have made and conveniently forgotten about.
Bunkie did not reach the hundred thousand level because it was too clever; it was a purely intellectual essay in wit rather than humour. And the crowd distrusts wit, and that is why the witty plays of Oscar Wilde are seldom produced, while Charley's Aunt goes on for ever.
I am tempted to go on to a comparison of wit with humour, but I shall only remark that wit is an intellectual thing, whereas humour is emotional. Humour is elemental, but wit is cultural. Without a language you could have humour, but without language there could be no wit.
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