The Rock Island Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1877-1885, 1882-06-08
American Humor.

In some respects, though in some only,
Charles Lambs humor anticipates the
type of humor which we now call, in
the main, American. When, for instance.
he gravefy narrated the origin of the
Chinese invention of roast pig, in the
burning down of a house when he told
a friend that he had moved just forty
two inches nearer his beloved London
and again, when he wrote to Manning
IN China that the new Persian Ambas-
sador was called s.Shaw Ali Mirza,'' but
the common people called him 'sShaw
Nonsense we might think we were
listening to Artemus Wards or MARI
Twain's minute and serious nonsense.
But for the most part Charles Lambs
humor is more frolicsome, more whim-
sical and less subdued in its extraya-
gance: more like the gamboling of a
mind which did not care TO conceal its
enjoyment of paradox, and less like the
inward, invisible laughter in which the
Yankees most delight. Lamb dearly
loved a frisk, and when, for instance,
he blandly proposed to some friend who
offered to wrap up for him bit of old
cheese which he had seemed to like at
dinner, to let him have bit of string
with which he could probably dead it
home," there was certainly nothing in
him of the grim impassiveness of Yam
kee extravaganza. 1t might be asserted,
perhaps, that, even if the prospect of a
great future for English humor is good,
there is still reason to fear that it must
dwindle in largeness of conception, so
that such massive forms of hunsor as we
find, for instance, in ''Gulliver's Tray
els" or the Tale of Tub" are not
likely to return.
Dickens who as a humorist was prob
ably not inferior in conception, and GER
tainly more abundant in creation, than
any humorist IN the worlds wholly
modern, and he certainly has by no
means exhausted the field even of that
sort of humor in which he himself was
most potent The field of what we may
call idealized vulgarities, which includes
sketches of the abstract monthly nurse
whose every thought and action breathe
the fawning brutalities of the Mrs. Camp
species-of beadles who incarnate all
beadledom-of London pickpockets who
have assinilated all that is entertaining
in the world of professional slang and
nothing that is disgusting-of boarding
house keepers whose mind is transform
ed into an instrument for providing
enough food and gravy and amusement
for their commercial gentlemen-of
water-rate collectors gloritied by one ideal
passion for the ballet-of rascally school
masters whose very action betrays the
coward and bully-or of hypocrites
who secrete airs of pretentious benevol-
ence as an oil-gland secretes oil, is by no
means exhausted hardly attacked.
And vet it promises a sort of humor
particularly well adapted to this period
of at once almost sordid realism and in
genious abstraction. Nor can it be de-
MED that tsAlice in Wonderland, espec-
tally such plaintive ballads as that of the
walrus and the carpenter, provide us
with type of grotesque fancy almost
cut free from the realities of life, and yet
quantity reproducing all the old human
tendencies under absurdly new eondi-
tons; nor that this promises well for in
finite fexibility of the laughing faculty
in man. We quite admit that we never
expect to see the great types of transat-
lantic humor reproduced on this side of
the Atlantic. These for the most part
imply rare faculty for turning the
mind aside from the direct way of saying
thing to one that is so indirect rs to
lead you travelling on totally opposite
track, as for example, when Bret Harte
declares that one of his rowdies:
Took point of order. when
A chunk of old red sandstone hit him in the alb
dOfnen.
And he smiled q kind o. sickly smile, and curl
cd up on the floor,
And the subsekent proceedings interested him
no more;
or when the American blasphemer re-
torted that if his censor had but Jump
ed out of bed on to the business end of
a tin-tack, even he would have cursed
some.n This wonderful power of sug
gesting misleading analogies taken from
the very province which would seem to
be least suggested either by analogy or
contrast seems to be, digenous in the
United States. -LondonSpectator.