“Shut your eyes to the squalor and rags you see here, and let your minds go back to your own homes, and recall the sound of the little tin wagon, loaded with tin soldiers and rag dolls, your own children used to pull through the house; and picture yourself standing at the gate after parting with your favorite child. Picture the scene, as the strange person carries your baby away, with her child face turned appealingly towards you, and you make no effort to bring her back to your arms and your heart.
“Would you, my good and kind women, who mean only good towards me and my children—would you call this a picture of civilization—a scene amongst enlightened people, or would you dream of it forever afterward as a picture of hell?”
THE PATHOS OF HUMOR
The average reader of newspapers and magazines imagines that humorous writers are always funny, and always saying funny things. Nothing could be farther from the real facts. The humorous side of humanity while wading through every day events, likewise sees the pathetic side. The pathos of life makes the shade and shadow of life’s picture, while the funny features make the humorous pictures—the cartoons and exaggerations.
I know a little story connected with the work of a humorous writer, so full of pathos that one can but wonder how he could write of the humorous side of life while sitting in the very presence of death.
During the days of his severest struggles for recognition (and bread) his wife’s aged father was taken ill, and the doctor said it was only a matter of a few weeks or days with the kind old man, and then his struggles on the earth would be over. And through all the nursing and watching the young author was obliged to grind out his “stuff” for the publishers who kept the wolf from his door.
One night the faithful daughter could endure the strain and loss of sleep no longer, and was obliged to go to bed, leaving only her author husband to watch at the bedside of the dying father, and to grind out his sketch for the next issue of the paper.
It was hard to forget the man who was passing over the dark stream and concentrate his mind on some ridiculous phase of life, but this he must do, for he needed yet a humorous anecdote to round out the line of argument he was introducing—that men are more truthful than their dreams. He was attempting to prove that men, while in the act of dreaming a lie, would tell the truth, if subject to speaking out loud in their sleep.