One of the pleasantest of the protean appearances of the pun is to be found in the familiar quotation, made unexpectedly pertinent by a felicitous suggestion of an unforeseen meaning hitherto concealed in one of its words. A neat example of this is the Shaksperian motto which the late Edwin Booth caused to be inscribed on the mantelpiece of the grill-room in the club he founded for the practitioners of the allied arts: “Mouth it, as many of our Players do.” When Mrs. Stowe was on her way to Liverpool a fog suddenly shut the ship in after it had taken on the pilot; and the authoress suggested that the pilot might sing, “That Mersey I to others show, that Mersey show to me.” And in the “Autocrat” again Dr. Holmes, after dwelling on the delight he had in beholding noble oaks and spreading elms, mentioned one tree which was more than eighteen feet in girth, and expressed a hope that he might meet a tree-loving friend under its branches. “If we don’t have youth at the prow, we shall have pleasure at the ’elm.” This is added evidence, were any needed, that Holmes was not sincere in his denunciation of punning, or at least that he was willing to damn “the sins he had no mind to.”
The derogatory old saying that a pun is the lowest form of wit has been explained by the apt addition that this is because a pun is the foundation of all wit. This explanation is not strictly true, of course; the best wit is often independent of any flavor of word-play. But there is a kind of pun which is really lower than any other effort to arouse laughter; this is the pun which is due to a violent wrench made visible only by the use of italics. As a general principle we may assert that any pun is beneath contempt when it needs a typographic sign-post before it can be seen. And the unfortunate who descends to this dismal form of near-wit is of a truth the “mournful professor of high drollery” that George Eliot once castigated. Pitiable specimens of his lamentable handiwork—if anything so mechanical may fairly be described by this term—can be discovered abundantly in more than one of the inferior comic weeklies of Great Britain; and even the superior weekly “Punch” is not always free from it.
When an observer of international characteristics shall undertake the task of differentiating the British from the Americans he can scarcely fail to note that the mechanical pun, the bare play upon the sound of a word without any corresponding diversity of idea, is far commoner in the older branch of the English-speaking race than it is in the younger. This strikes us at once when we compare the comic papers or the comic operas of Great Britain with those of the United States. The transatlantic relish for purely verbal juggling is probably an inheritance from the Elizabethans, for we find it displayed in even the mightiest of them, Shakspere. Curious it is, therefore, that we colonists did not import it in the original package as we imported so many other Tudor characteristics, some of which are still discoverable on this side of the Western ocean although on the other they have fallen into “innocuous desuetude.”
FINIS
BY WILLIAM H. HAYNE
NO blood-stains on the polished floor—
Not one drop has been shed—
No wound in heart or brow or breast,
And yet the man is dead.