It is wit and not humor, no doubt, when Holmes promulgates the law of financial safety: “Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.” It is wisdom as well as wit, but is it a pun? Is it only a play on words? Is it not also a play on the idea? And take the somewhat parallel remark about the rising fortune of a successful man, to the effect that “he got on, he got honor, he got honest.” That again is wit; but is it fairly to be termed a pun? Merely verbal playfulness is more obvious in a recent remark that “some men stand for office, some men run for it, and some have a walk-over,” and yet that somehow fails to fall completely within any acceptable definition of the pun. If it is a pun, it is something more also. With these specimens may be grouped three other remarks which have not hitherto been recorded in print. When a certain critic of limited equipment was appointed to the chair of comparative literature in one of our universities, the question was asked why he was assigned to this particular professorship, since his information was mainly confined to English; and the explanation was instantly forthcoming that comparative literature was the position for which he was best fitted, because his own literature was neither positive nor superlative. A certain former Vice-President of the United States has been described as “a very cold-blooded proposition,” and yet his speeches were the usual flowery and perfervid political oratory which led an observer to make the assertion that “to hear —— speak is like catching nature in the act of self-contradiction, since it is the emission of hot air from an ice-box.”
And it was the same anonymous observer who pointed out the difference between two contemporary British authors, insisting that “Mr. George Bernard Shaw always writes with his tongue in his cheek, whereas when Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton is writing he keeps thrusting his tongue out at the public.” Now, are these remarks, strictly speaking, puns? They conform at least to one of Lamb’s definitions that a pun “is a pistol let off at the end, not a feather to tickle the intellect,” and that it is “not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit.” He warns us that “a pun may be easily too curious and artificial”; and he held that a pun, at least in actual conversation, ought to stand alone and not be followed by another. “When a man has said a good thing it is seldom politic to follow it up.” This is true enough of conversation; but it does not apply to literature. The spoken word and the written have different rules. A large part of the humorous effect of the trumpet-peddler’s eulogy of the wares he is vending is due to the heaping-up of the puns, one tumbling over another, like salmon flashing swiftly in the sunshine as they follow each other up the falls. Here our pleasure is akin to that we take at the circus as we behold the acrobats going on from one impossible stunt to its equally impossible successor and accomplishing these feats as if each was the easiest thing in the world.
There is in many passages of that rollicking satire, “A Fable for Critics,” wise as it is in its author’s acute valuation of his contemporaries, a riot of complicated riming and of unexpected punning,—passages which impress us with an abiding sense of spontaneous humor and good humor. These passages overflow with fun, and we are carried along by Lowell’s delight in displaying his verbal dexterity. For once he appears before us dancing on a metrical tight-rope and setting off iridescent fireworks at the ends of his balancing-pole. Consider, for example, these lines at the very beginning, where Apollo is discussing his plight after he had pursued Daphne and she had turned into a tree:
“‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked;
‘When I last saw my love she was fairly embarked
In a laurel, as she thought—but (ah, how fate mocks!)
She has found it by this time a very bad box;
Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it—
You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.
Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!