THE COMMON STOCK.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1205, 14 August 1911, Page 9

THE COMMON STOCK.

OF WIT.

Mr. Howells in his "Easy Chair" has a number of things to say about American humour. Like others, he is wondering who will fill, or partially fill, "tho void which now aches from the vast absence of Mark Twain." He considers favourably Mr. Ilolman Day, author of "The Skipper and the Skipped," because "he knows tho intensity, almost to feminine shrillness, of the New England rustics whom lie deals with." But Jlr. Howells is not quite certain of his choice, and adds, "unless, indeed, Mr. Irving Bacholler, in his ne>v departure of 'Keeping Up with Lizzie,' is going to disputo it." Mr. Dooley is placed outside the competition for the reason that "he is distinctively a philosophical observer." Picking the successor of Mark Twain, Mr. Howells naturally realises, is the right of the public at large, not of a critic, and no doubt for that reason he did not wish to seem too serious in his judgments. Yet one might have hoped to tind, even in informal speculation, an analysis of America!! humour and—since Mr. Jlowells runs back in his survey to European writers of the sixteenth century—the trend of humour sketched with some precision. He has been content, however, to givo merely off-hand opinions: "The joking iu Rabelais is not only filthy, it is atrocious." "Tho humaner humour of Cervantes ... is still . . . abominably unfeeling." "Much of the humour of Shakespeare is cruel, so, cruel that Mark Twain used to say that when it did not bore him H offended him past endurance." One generalisation of a more 'sweeping nature is risked—that humour, with the years, has groiyn more kindly. This point, if true, is Mirely worth making. It wouli be pleasant, to believe that as civilisation has advanced, laughter, a fundamental instinct, .has lost its sting. We fear that the statement is true only in part. People, no doubt, arc no longer tickled, as were the Elizabethans, by the antics of insanity, nor perhaps at seeing a victim, like Marlowe's Bojazet, caged and poked at. But many of the old brutalities remain. There is still gleeful derision for a fat or ugly-looking woman on the stago, who is become a well-recognisod type, bearing the technical naino of "lemon." Grim .humour—for better or worse—is not yet dead, nor will bq until the impulse of hilarity is greatly chastened. Samson making firebrands of foxes' tails, Don Quixote slaughtering sheep mistakenly for famous warriors, Malvolio in the process of treatment for asininity, still bring laughter from children even while cautious parents raise the finger to protest. Besides, to make good his thesis, Mr. Howells should have proved that wit of the gentler, airier sort did not exist alongside of the boisterous. He should have shown reason why Addison's smiling censures and Rosalind's tantalising are not as gracious as the witticisms of the preeeut day. If any great change has in reality como over our laughter, we may perhaps get tho clue to it by asking why Mark Twain should have been bored with much of Shakespeare's humour. His remarks imply ■that ho meant in this instance the more strictly intellectual kind—the play on words' and the elaborate tomal logic of foolishness. Says Touchstone to Audrey: "I am hsre with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths." Little wonder that the point seemed remote to Mark J. wain! The first demand of laughter is understanding. It is perfectly true that appreciation of this side of Shakespeare is confined to scholars—to the rest it sounds wofully academic and unfamiliar. Admitting this, however, is far from implying that the manner and methpd of wit have greatly altered. Mark Twain himself has a huge liking for verbal comedies- What fun he had making a.literal re-translation into English of a French version of his Jumping Fro?"; and putting into German order English sentences! So, tyo, a inoro recent writer v.-ishes us to think it funny that to drive a car in France once must procure a, license j "circulate.-'-This is typical of' much of-present-day humour—phra'siug in which the drolleries como from words used slightly out'of lune.,.As'for the formal.logic of nonsense, it, too, is holding its own. To take the most spectacular examples of it, Mr. Shaw and Mr. Chesterton get their effects most of the time from doing seriously what Shakespeare's fools did waggishlyapplying tho most rigorous logic to situations in which mankind uses, instead, common sense.

The wanner and method of wit, whatever, may be true of its technique, are much what they have been for several centuries. It is the njaterial of wit, we venture-to believe, which has in reality undergone the change. That is to say, ivhero in former years there were- jokes for high nnd for low, for north and south in this country, to-day tho same joke serves almost equally well the entire laud. The wit of Lowell, save perhaps in the "Biglow Papers," works up-, on material extremely confined in its appeal. Mark Twain, especially, broadened it to tho attitwlcs of the typical, alert, hard-headed. American, as defined first of all by the contrast with Europeans. Recent conditions have carried on enormously his initiative. Increase in travel, tho growing facilities of tho press , and the stage, the uniformity of our educational systems, havo tended to render one section of tht: country in many ways very much like any other. Already Now York's thrust at Chicago is an,.almost exhausted echo, and even tho southern colonel is scarcely any more a type. I'lays givon in New York are seen the samo vear in Sau Francisco; tho "bestsellers in Boston are read in about tho same proportion in Richmond; tho language of "fandom" is of one dialect. In a word, there is at present a much greater common stock of knowledge and custom in this country than was the case even so recently as Mark Twain's middle years. And the humorists, like George Ade and Mr. Dooley and aH'others who have any chajco of l.eing acclaimed Mark Twain's successors, aro dealing in it. A note of philosophy they sometimes strike ; of delicacy or out-of-the-way learning they know little, nor wish to, since neither is typical of tho common stock.— .New York "Nation."