If the style of writing is important, how much more is the manner of verbal narration. The wittiest story may fall to pieces in the hand of the inartistic, while the most trivial incident humorously handled may be greeted with shrieks of merriment.
The raconteur must give his audience the impression of frank geniality and friendliness without familiarity, his attitude cunningly eloquent of the man who is about to open his heart to a confidante.
Orchestra chairs and gallery are his bosom friends. He twinkles and patters at them right merrily. If he paints their peculiarities or laughs at their social ways he must flavor his babbling with the tender fun of that greatest of humorists, Charles Lamb, who never aped or scoffed at physical deformity, and was never cynical at another’s expense.
The caricatures depicted by mimicry must be cleansed of that sour Voltaire bitterness and cruelty, the artist always remembering that he is performing in order to beguile, and he must cultivate that delicate tact which prevents him from imitating the withered idiosyncrasies supposed to be typical of the old maid in the drawing-room, when he knows that some spinster relative or friend is present.
The public possesses a vast fund of humor, and there is nothing it loves so much as a hearty laugh, but its risibilities should be handled as delicately as a trout is tickled, and if they are only provoked at the dear expense of some unfortunate individual, they are coarse and vulgar, and the artist himself is culpable. The broad double meanings of apparently innocent witticisms one might have heard at some vaudeville halls should be rigorously avoided. There are gentlemen, fine-souled and clean of mind, in your gallery as in your orchestra chairs. Treat them as such. Appeal to the best, to the refined sense of the ludicrous that lurks in every mind, and you will be as welcome in the most select drawing-room as in the theater.
Humor and fun are as bracing and purifying a tonic as a breath of sea air. They should be steeped in the salt ozone of wit, but never in the withering blight of vulgarity.
An Artist—and a Gentleman
The artist should be large-souled and natural in attitude and gesture—a gentleman from head to heel in the best sense of the word—and the result will brace up and encourage him, for he will observe the faded city merchant laughing with the heart-whole abandon of the child.
It is not necessary, and it may become even monotonous, to pose forever as the comedian who sees fun in every incident around him. A great and versatile artist, now deceased, in the middle of his recital would sit down at the zither when the room was still ringing with laughter, provoked by his keen shafts of humor, and win tears by the exquisite pathos of the refrain: “The mill will never grind with the water that is past.”
Maudlin melodrama is not pathos any more than vulgar mockery is humor. A thin veil lies between tears and laughter, and both are nearer the surface than some artists realize. Both are noble and wholesome, and so should never be made puny by too little giving or rendered grotesque by too much.