Once a crowd of English actors started to have some fun with Barry about his long residence in America and his American marriage. Then they started on the American language.
“Why you see the way they spell over here,” they cried. “Good old humour and honour have become humor and honor.”
“Yes,” said Barry. “You see, they don’t think they have to come to you for either one of these qualities, so in such matters they leave “u” out.
Speaking of “humor,” I like to think of Anatole France’s brilliant illumination of the word, which, paraphrased, runs something like this: “The Angel of Humor is sent us that she may teach us to laugh at the wicked and foolish, whom, without her aid, we might have the weakness to hate.” In my reading of funny stories, the really good ones have an element of sadness; also I have watched the development of the faces of the humorists I have known. As they grow older the lines of mirth are sure to be backed by signs of very deep feeling. Humor is distinct from wit (which is the joyousness of childhood) and comes after suffering, proving a man to have graduated from the cave-dweller class. Savages are bitter and yell when hurt, but a gentleman keeps quiet. Humor, to me, is the cry of a well-bred man in pain.
When we New Englanders tell stories of ourselves and our forbears, they are generally based fundamentally on the hard lives, or the characteristic qualities that resulted from the hard lives, which those first settlers on the coast of the Atlantic were forced to lead. Their sense of humor conceals an infinitude of suffering, as does that of the men who live in the hills of Kentucky. Professor Shaler of Harvard told me that he had found them very much alike in their laconicism and understatement—two parents of humor.
To illustrate what I mean—my mother’s sewing woman in Concord, the dried-up individual who made my breeches, always with a mouthful of pins—was asked by the neighbors when her mother died:
“Was she willin’ to go?”
“Willin’! My dear, she was obleeged.”
“Did she leave anythin’?”
“Yes, she left everythin’. Didn’t take nothin’ with her.”