X
HUMORS OF THE ROAD
It appears to be the habit of every age to lament its own dearth of humor, and in our own time we have not been exempt from the charge that we have no humorists. It is my own candid opinion in respect to this matter that we are confronted by a paradox in that we have so many humorists that in effect we seem to have none; so much of humor that in the very surfeit of it its brilliance does not appear; in short, that because of the trees we cannot see the wood.
A period that has produced a Dooley, and an Ade, and an Irvin Cobb, and a Bert Leston Taylor, is surely not poor in humorous possessions of a scintillating character, whether we demand that our humor shall be a product of pure fun or of profoundly serious thinking. J. Montgomery Flagg in picture and in text is as much a master of effervescent foolery as ever was either John Phœnix or Artemas Ward; and in the humor that is designed to interpret life itself I find an endless store of it in the works of Wallace Irwin, of Montague Glass, of Miss Edna Ferber, and of Mrs. Alice Regan Rice; the last two, by the way, forming a complete refutation of the preposterous notion that women are devoid of the sentiment that cheers but does not inebriate. And as for the wits, if Oliver Herford were as lonely among wits as he is unique, I should still feel that we were rich beyond measure in that form of humor which is for the most part intellectual, of the mind rather than of the emotions.
But even if the charge were true—which of course it is not—that we no longer have any purveyors of humor of the first class upon whom we may rely for a service as regular as is our supply of milk, butter, and eggs, we could still lay the flattering unction to our souls that American life is full of humor. If any one doubts the fact, let him throw himself headlong into the Lyceum Seas and find out from personal contact. To me it seems to crop up everywhere, and whether I travel north, south, east, or west I find it in great abundance—humor conscious, and humor unconscious; humor of the mind, and humor of the heart, or pathos; humor of situation, and the humor involving a mere play upon words; humor in all its infinitely varied qualities, and of a character most appealing. Writing a short while ago of an alleged similar condition in another field of letters, that of lyric poetry, I permitted myself the following rather sentimental reflections:
No singers great are here to-day?
Perhaps! Let the indictment stand.
I hear no strong voice on the way,
No lilt from some immortal hand;
And yet as on the silver mere
I float, and towering hillsides scan,
Deep in my heart I seem to hear
Again the merry pipes of Pan.
No lyrics worthy of the name
Are sung to-day by living men?
Perhaps! Yet naught is there of shame
That we have not old Herrick's pen,
For as I wander 'neath these skies
As fairly blue as skies can be
And gaze into two special eyes,
All life a lyric is to me.
With equal truth and sincerity I could say much the same in respect to humor, and indeed I might properly even go further. I could not perhaps say that all Americans, or even many Americans, are lyrists; but I should not fall far short of the mark were I to say that most Americans are humorists. In my travels I come across occasional "nonconductors," as a clever woman of my acquaintance once called a certain social light who was as impervious to wit as is the rhinoceros to the sting of a gnat; but they are few and far between. For the most part I have found natural born humorists on nearly every bush.
In a previous chapter I have confessed to some disappointment in the quality of the humor of the negro as I have encountered it in Southern climes; but there have been, nevertheless, delightful rifts in that cloud. I recall an aged son of Ethiopia who called for me one wintry morning at four o'clock to drive me from my hotel at Greenville, South Carolina, to the railway station. He was a ragged old fellow, and with his snowy, wool-covered head composed a study in black and white worthy of the brush of any of our best limners of character. He was as communicative as he was ragged, and confided to me at the very beginning of our acquaintance that he had moved away from Charleston to become a resident of Greenville because down in Charleston he couldn't eat "pohk" (which I took to be pork) without having to take to his bed; while in the more salubrious climate of Greenville he could "swaller a whole ham at a settin', an' nebber hyear a woid from dat old ham forebber after." His name, he told me, was "mos' gin'rally George"; but he "warn't biggetty" about what people called him, since he was willin' to come "ef dey on'y jes' whistled."