Picaresque romance
That the picaresque romances embody such stories as the fableau is perfectly evident. Dissect, for instance, "Lazarillo de Tormes," or better, "Guzman de Alfarache," and you will see that the various adventures of the heroes would make capital fableaux or humorous contes. The idea of combining low adventures into a series connected with one hero comes down from the days of Nero, when Petronius Arbiter wrote his "Satyricon." But the term picaresque romance refers to the Spanish popular tales of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the heroes of which are rascals, or picaros. As sharpers, they are the prototypes of our more modern Yankee in fiction who always "does" the other fellow before the other fellow "does" him. Some of them, like the "Yank," are not so much mean as just bold and resourceful when at a disadvantage. They go to court like the Connecticut Yankee and see their betters, whom they criticise most straightforwardly. They are older and naughtier Tom Sawyers and Huckleberry Finns. In short, by their vernacular of the highway and by their impudent deeds they stand in the historical line of types which includes the heroes of the fableau and the heroes of the modern burlesque or comic tale. The difference between humorous and comic and between comic and burlesque is a difference of degree.
Of the direct imitations of these Spanish rogues there is the French Gil Blas; there are the English Roderick Random, Jonathan Wild, and Miss Becky Sharp; there is the Amateur Cracksman; and, come to think about it, there is our own late American Saturday Evening Post's ubiquitous Mr. Farthest North, promoter, success attend him!
To write a humorous story you will need to employ epigram, point, climax, colloquialisms, and perhaps dialect. If you touch dialect, however, take care to know what you are about; for nothing is more repellent to a reader familiar with a particular vernacular than to be confronted with pitiful and incorrect attempts at it. To write negro dialect you should be as well versed as Joel Chandler Harris; to write Irish, as apt as Samuel Lover or W. B. Yeats; to reveal children, as sympathetic as Kate Douglas Wiggin; to give us boy's fun, as charming and wholesome as Thomas Bailey Aldrich; to combine humor and the ingenious tale, you should be as inventive as Frank R. Stockton; and to smile at Americans and their foibles you should be as patriotic and kindly as Charles Battell Loomis.
George Washington Cable, Ian Maclaren, Thomas Nelson Page, J. M. Barrie, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman have written excellent dialect, but they are not primarily humorists. They use the vernacular of the people as aids to character revelation.
The difference between a humorous story and comic anecdote is the difference of length and veracity. An anecdote purports to be true. A humorous story, only "drawn from life."
The Expatriation of Jonathan Taintor
Reprinted by permission from Loomis's "Cheerful Americans." Copyright, Henry Holt and Company.
While I was in London I met a New York friend who was stopping in that America-in-London, Bloomsbury, and during our conversation he told me that he had for a fellow-boarder no less a person than Jonathan Taintor.