CHAPTER III
Humourists
American humour has come to be a bugbear in England, pretty much like American canned meats.
Twenty years ago, when anybody on this side of the Atlantic wished to be rather crudely and shockingly amused, he sent to the libraries for something American. In that day and generation Mark Twain was at the zenith of his fame and powers, and the names of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings were names to conjure with. Autres temps autres moeurs. The popularity of Mark Twain has suffered woeful eclipse, and Artemus Ward and Mr. Billings have gone clean out of vogue, and are remembered only as the originators of a very tiresome kind of humour which depends on phonetic spelling for its more excruciating effects.
The fact is that America and England alike have been dosed to death with the lucubrations of handy scribblers who caught something of Mark Twain’s trick and pretended to something of his gift, and the label “American humourist” nowadays repels with an even greater insistence than it formerly attracted. Mr. Twain made desperate and valiant efforts to retrieve his waning popularity with a book called “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.” If ever there was a piece of writing nicely calculated to tickle and make purr the fat-necked American here was the article. But it fizzled in the pan, failed in short to bring ’em on again. And it now belongs to the category of books that people have forgotten. So much for Mr. Twain, whom I admire, but of whom, nevertheless, I have taken leave to speak the truth.
Artemus Ward and Josh Billings are dead, and their souls, I trust, are with the saints; so that they will pardon me when I venture on the opinion that the humour they gave us was of the thinnest sort, and, taking into account the furore it created, extraordinarily ephemeral. However any person of sense came to accept the following for humour passes my comprehension:—
Experiences as an Editor
“In the Ortum of 18— my friend, the editor of the Baldissville Bugle, was obleged to leave perfeshernal dooties & go & dig his taters, & he axed me to edit for him doorin his absence. Accordinly I ground up his Shears and commenced. It didn’t take me a grate while to slash out copy enuff from the xchanges for one issoo, and I thawt I’d ride up to the next town on a little Jaunt, to rest my Branes which had bin severely rackt by my mental efforts (This is sorter Ironical) So I went over to the Rale Rood offiss and axed the Sooprintendent for a pars.
‘You a editer,’ he axed, evinebtly on the point of snickerin.