The Arkansaw traveler., 1885-07-04
AMERICAN HUMoR.
IEXchan0A-l

In some respects, though in some only Charles Lambs humor anticipates thu type of humor which we now call, in the main, American. When, for instance he gravely narrated the origin of the Chinese invention of roast pig, in the burning down of house-when he told a friend that he had moved just forty-two inches nearer to his beloved London and again, when he wrote to Manning in China that the new Persian ambassado, was called "Shaw Ali Mirza," but tha, the common people called him "Shaw Nonsense" we might think we were listening to Aremus Wards or Mark Twain's minute and serious nonsense. But for the most part Charles Lambs humor IS more frolicsome, more whimsi- cal, and less subdued in its extravagance more like the gamboling of a mind which did not care to conceal its enioy- ment ofparadox, and less like the inward invisible laughter in which the Yankees most delight Lamb dearly loved frisk. And when, for instance, he blandly pro- posed to some friend who offered to wrap up for him a bit of old cheese which he had seemed to like at dinner. to let him have bit of string with which he could probably "lead It home" there was certainly nothing in him of the grim impassiveness of Yankee extravagance. It might be asserted, perhaps, that, even if the prospect of great future for Eng lish humor is good, there is still reason to fear that it must dwindle in largeness of conception, so that such massive forms of humor as we find, for instance, in "Gulliver's Travels" or the "Tale of a Tub," are not likely to return. But even this we greatly doubt. Dickens-who as humorist was probably not inferior in conception, and certainly more abundant in creation, than any humorist in the worlds wholly modern, and he cer- tainly has by no means exhausted the field even of that sort of humor in which he himself was most potent.
 The 6eld 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 assim- Hated all that is entertaining In the world of professional slang and nothing that is disgusting-of boarding house keepers whose whole mind is transformed into an instrument for providing enough food and gravy and amusement for their con- mercial gentlemen-ot water rate col lectors glon6ed by one ideal passion for the ballet-of rascally schoolmasters whose every action betray the coward and the bully-or of hypocYites who secrete airs of pretentious benevolence as an oil-gland secretes oil, is by no means exhausted, hardly more than attacked. And yet it promises sort of humor par ticularly we'll adapted to this period of at once almost sordid realism and ingenious abstraction. Nor can 1t be denied that Alice in Wonderland" especially 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 quaintly re- producing all the old human tendencies under absurdly new conditions; nor that this promises well for the infinite hexi- bility of the laughing faculty of man. We quite admit that we never expect to sec the greater types of transatlantic humor reproduced on this side of the Atlantic. These, for the msst part, imply a rare faculty for turning the mind aside from the direct way of saying thing to one that is so indirect as 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 chuck of old red sandstone hit him in the
 abdomen,
 And he smiled kind O sickly smile, and
 curled 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 "jumped out of bed on to the business end of a tack, even he would have cursed some" This wonderful power of suggesting mis- leading analogies taken from the very province which would seem to be least suggested either by analogy or contrast seems to be in some sense, indigenous in the United States.