This is an appalling overstatement of the case; and Holmes was happier in another of the remarks made in the same chapter of the book in which he expressed the utmost of his own witty wisdom: “People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight-train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” Here the doctor is on solid ground; a pun may be a good thing in itself, as good as a sonnet even, but it is only dirt—that is to say, matter in the wrong place—when it is injected into good talk only to throw the conversational locomotive off the track. Oddly enough, the Autocrat was once himself derailed by a pun a score of years after he had thus laid down the law; and, as it happens, I had the full particulars of the fatal accident from the punster who placed the penny on the track. In this case the disturber of traffic was the late Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
When Matthew Arnold paid his first visit to America thirty years ago, Aldrich gave him a dinner and invited the best that Boston and Cambridge had to show to do honor to his alien guest. He put Arnold on his right and Holmes on his left; and early in the dinner he discovered that the Autocrat was in fine form and ready to discourse in his best manner. Holmes began by suggesting that it must be amusing to meet unexpected characters, burglars, for example, and pirates, and cannibals. “What would you do,” he asked, “if you were to meet a cannibal walking down Beacon Street?” And he paused for the reply that he did not desire, whereupon Aldrich saw his chance and responded promptly, “I think I should stop to pick an acquaintance.” The rest of the company laughed at this sally, but Holmes looked at his host reproachfully and then shut up absolutely, saying scarcely a word during the rest of the dinner. The witticism, even if it was bright and not battered, had upset the freight-train of the Autocrat’s conversation. And as Aldrich asserted, in telling the sad story, the host had to repent in a sack-coat and cigarette-ashes for the rest of his life. Autocrats are autocrats, after all; and not with impunity are their unlimited expresses to be flagged by an unauthorized pun.
Possibly it was the painful memory of this unfortunate experience which led Dr. Holmes to omit from the final edition of his complete works the very amusing account of his “Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters,” which he had included in an earlier volume—“Soundings from the ‘Atlantic’”—now out of print. He tells us in this paper that he was surprised to find that the asylum was intended wholly for males; and yet on reflection he admitted the remarkable psychologic fact that “there is no such a thing as a female punster. At least,” he adds, “I never knew or heard of one, though I have once or twice heard a woman make a single detached pun, as I have known a hen to crow.” And when we recall the proverbial fate of the crowing hen, the fair sex may rejoice that there are no female punsters, whatever may be the psychological explanation of the remarkable fact itself. The fact might indeed be accounted for easily by those ungallant cynics who maintain that women are careless in the employment of words (which are the raw material of puns), commonly using them as counters to convey emotions rather than as coins to express thoughts.
Holmes’s account of his visit to the asylum reverberates with the rattle of a corps of conundrummers; and every one of the inmates is ready with his contribution, from the superintendent who explained why “they did not take steppes in Tartary for establishing insane hospitals, because there are nomad people to be found there,” to the retired sailor who had gone as mate on a fishing-schooner, giving it up because he “did not like working for two-masters.” The most imaginative touch is at the end of the paper when the visitors are introduced to a centenarian inmate, who asks affably, “Why is a—a—a like a—a—a? Give it up? Because it is a—a—a.” Then he smiled pleasantly; and the superintendent explained that the ancient man was “one hundred and seven last Christmas. He lost his answers about the age of ninety-eight. Of late years he puts his whole conundrums in blank—but they please him just as well.”
Lowell, who was Holmes’s chief rival among the Cambridge wits, did not pretend to disdain the pun, as Holmes affected to do. But he insisted upon the absolute identity of sound with an equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Lowell pointed out that Hood, who is said to have lain on his death-bed “spitting blood and puns,” abounded in examples of this sort of fun, “only his analogies are of a more subtle and perplexing kind.” To illustrate this assertion Lowell quoted Hood’s elegy on the old sailor, whose
“... head was turned, and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died.”
And the American critic called this “inimitable, like all the best of Hood’s puns. To the ear it is perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical non-sequiturs. And yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in the and so.”
Another quotation from Hood also won high commendation from Lowell. It was taken from the peddler’s recommendation of his ear-trumpet:
“I don’t pretend with horns of mine,