Our American humorists

Front matter

BY j/%

THOMAS L. MASSON

AUTHOR OF "HUMOROUS MASTERPIECES," "BEST STORIES IN THE WORLD," "DOGS FROM LIFE," ETC.

Chapter I

IN the introduction to Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott, with the genial candor that was one of his most charming traits, laments that hitherto he has been unable to break away from the uninterrupted course of the Waverley novels. "It was plain, however," says Sir Walter, "that the frequent publication must finally wear out the public favor, unless some mode could be devised to give an appearance of novelty to subsequent productions. Scottish manners, Scottish dialect, and Scottish characters of note, being those with which the author was most intimately and familiarly acquainted, were the groundwork upon which he had hitherto relied for giving effect to his narrative." He then adds : "Nothing can be more dangerous for the fame of a professor of the fine arts than to permit (if he can possibly prevent it) the character of a mannerist to be attached to him, or that he should be supposed capable of success only in a particular and limited style."

Indeed, Sir Walter was so much impressed by the truth of his observation, that he insisted upon publishing 'Tvanhoe" anonymously, and it was only upon the assurance of its success from his publishers that he consented to the use of his name.

This danger has long been recognized by authors, and during the last half century — inspired quite possibly by the example of Sir Walter, — British writers have quite largely succeeded in overcoming the handicap. We have Mr. Kipling starting out as a writer of short sketches from India, creating a new vein of Anglo-Indian literature, but shortly breaking away from his environment and becoming a short-story writer of universal appeal, then a first rank novelist, and the only poet of his generation who has voiced in rugged song the heart and soul of Imperial England. We have Jerome K. Jerome, whose ''Three Men in a Boat" and whose housemaid's knee fastened upon him the reputation of a professional humorist, suddenly becoming a dramatist of high order. There was Thackeray of Punch, likewise a professional humorist and satirist, breaking bounds and becoming the author of "Vanity Fair" : and, after him, Du Maurier, who used to write his own jokes to his own drawings and, leaving the conference table (they say in a fit of pique) built forthwith his "Trilby" — surely a work of literary art of the first magnitude. Still more recently we have Mr. A. A. Milne, who, from being in the beginning a chance contributor to Punch, is rapidly achieving a reputation not only as a humorist and dramatist of the first rank, but as a writer whose breadth of vision is constantly increasing. There are numerous other examples in Great Britain of authors that have risen above their first reputations : Mr. Wells is a notable instance, for it would be difficult to say whether he is more preeminent as a novelist, a historian, or a sociological psychologist : and whether Thomas Hardy is greater as a poet or a novelist is a question upon which his staunchest adherents are divided.

The literature of this country is, quite inevitably, built upon smaller lines than that of Great Britain, but the same struggle of our authors to rise above their first limitation has been going on here, as there, though with less success. Mark Twain tried to rise above it in "J oan of Arc," which he published anonymously because he feared that his reputation as a humorist would detract from the dignity of his effort. The problem appears to be more difficult in America than elsewhere.

All things considered, by right of achievement and what one may term "intrinsic merit," our two leading humorists are George Ade and Finley Peter Dunne: yet neither of them has fully succeeded in breaking away from his single reputation. Mr. Dunne became widely known as the author of the inimitable Mr. Dooley : and henceforth nothing else but the observations of Mr. Dooley would satisfy an eager public. Mr. Ade became known as the author of "Fables in Slang" : and Mr. Ade is still known as the author of "Fables in Slang," although it must be said that as the creator of the comic opera "The Sultan of Sulu," the comedy, "The College Widow" and others meritorious, his fame as a dramatist is closely allied to his fame as a fablist. Yet here the observation may be made, let me hope without offense, that if ^Esop had not written his fables, it is probable that George Ade's reputation as an American humorist would have been none the less, but his reputation as a dramatist might easily have been less if Gilbert and Sullivan's operas had not been written. Of this, Mr. Ade says himself: "I wanted to do something on the order of 'The Mikado' or 'Patience,' but all the plans and specifications handed to me called for 'Chimme Fadden' minus the dialect." Nevertheless, and in spite of his modesty, Air. Ade did succeed. He produced rollicking operas with true American tang, influenced largely in his form by Gilbert. And so his fables are American fables; and the form in this instance does not particularly matter : the form, granted, is very old — like hexameter verse, or the ballade, or the sonnet. The point is that Ade is an American, which — in an American — gives one a great advantage. Ade was born in the middle of America : not exactly in the middle, but enough to insure his being an American. He wasn't born near enough to the Atlantic coast to become an Anglomaniac, or to take on too much Eastern education to obscure his racial traits. It is probable that the mud of Indiana stuck to him long enough to charm him against foreign influences. Along somewhere in the middle of his life, after he had achieved fame, he traveled abroad: he went to Egypt. But it was then too late to spoil his jokes : their racial quality had become fixed.

George Ade, born in Kentland, Indiana, February 9, 1866, was educated at Purdue University. It probably did him less harm than might have been done to him anywhere else he might have gone. He succeeded in preserving his Americanism : he stuck to Indiana more or less, and learned to write at first in a very practical school — a Lafayette, Indiana, newspaper office. Then, still an American, he flew to Chicago, and consorted with high and low spirits; plied his trade as a reporter and writer, and served his apprenticeship. This leads me to observe that there would be nothing the matter with American literature if it were only permitted to grow up. If a man has native talent — a gift — he needs to have it protected from foreign influences long enough for it to stand upon its own legs ! Otherwise it is crowded out and becomes merely an echo. That is so often the trouble with our most energetic writers.

George Ade practiced on his slang for a long time. It was something that came out of the American Middle West soil, and to which he gave his genius, molding it to his purpose and producing things that, as finished products, could scarcely have been produced anywhere else. That is what constitutes his merit, his claim to be an American humorist of the first rank.

Of course, no writer can produce things like that without having qualities. Mr. Theodore Dreiser, for example, is, in my opinion, a great novelist — another American — but when Mr. Dreiser writes essays attacking his own country — its vulgarity, its crudeness, its banality, etc., he charms me not nearly — no, not fractionally as much as Mr. Ade, who arrives at the same result (and so much more effectively) in his Fables. Mr. Sinclair Lewis in "Main Street" has written a long novel to prove that the people who live on Main Street are drab and uninteresting — at least so I am told by those that have read it. Personally, I do not care for Mr. Lewis's opinion of the people that live on Main Street, because I sense his book as an echo: and besides, George Ade supplies me with what I want to know about these folks in Main Street: he has them all down : he hits them off — and he doesn't waste a lot of time over them either.

At this point it is perhaps as well to make a pertinent observation about humor. It is probable that this book, if it is not classed as a regular text book, will be read quite largely by University students. Therefore, you may put it down here, as a mental note, that the right kind of humor is always in sympathy with the people it "takes off." George Ade does not hate the people he writes his fables about. He doesn't stand off and fire poisoned arrows into them, and snarl at them, and hold them up to ridicule by showing you how much he resents them. He doesn't resent them. He doesn't even go so far as to tolerate them. He likes them. He is one of them himself. They are his crowd. George Ade, born in Indiana, went to Chicago and learned the mechanics of his art. He went to Egypt, and looked it over, and left it where it was and came back to Indiana, bought a farm there, and he lives there. In other words, George Ade is a plain American, a man of genius, living among his own people, putting on no frills, and if you want information about what has really been going on in America since, say 1900, get his Fables and read them, and you will come nearer to the truth than you will find in all the books on sociology and history that have been written during this period.

I have stated that he began his trade in Chicago.

Let him here tell the story for himself, in his own inimitable manner, from a personal narrative he wrote for the American Magazine. "They Simply Wouldn't Let Me Be a Highbrow" he declares in his title, thus revealing the limitations the American public fastens upon its geniuses.

Away back in the year when the Infanta Eulalia came to Chicago, and Lake Shore Drive put on its evening clothes in the afternoon, I began to write a daily column for a Chicago newspaper. John McCutcheon drew the pictures interrupting my text, and only a thin vertical line divided us from Eugene Field and his delightful, whimsical, inimitable "Sharps and Flats."

Now this column-conducting, back there in the nineties, was not all lavender.

We had not discovered the latter-day secret, so nobly promoted by B. L. T. and F. P. A., of permitting the contributors to shoulder the bulk of the toil.

And this column, undertaken by McCutcheon and the author of this article was not a column, when you come right down to it. It was two columns.

And the daily grind, allowing for the breaks on account of cuts, had to be anywhere from fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred words in order that the stuff would get well below the fold on the second column.

He goes on to explain his difficulties with the night editor and his feverish associates to whom the news that "a guy over on the West Side beat his wife's head all to a pulp" was more important than anything else:

You can imagine what happened to my placid little yarns about shopgirls and stray dogs and cable-car conductors.

• • •

Fortunately, there was a friend at court. The high chief of the paper could not stay up every night in order to protect my fragile output, so he gave me a " department," and surrounded it with "Hands off!" signs, and told me to go ahead and revel in the inconsequential.

So I started on a seven-year Marathon.

In a little while we discovered that readers became more interested in our "Stories of the Streets and of the Town" if they could find familiar characters recurring in the yarns. The first to bob up about once a week was a brash young office employee named "Artie" Blanchard, a very usual specimen of the period. Then "Pink" Marsh, a city negro of the sophisticated kind, became a regular visitor. He was followed by "Doc" Home, an amiable old falsifier, not unlike "Lightning" so delightfully played by Bacon.

In 1898 these very bourgeois "types" had found their way into books. I had clipped out the reviews, which proved that I was almost an author. Henry B. Fuller and Hamlin Garland had spoken words of encouragement, and there was a letter from William Dean Howells which gold could not have purchased.

The publishers kept dinging at me to stop trifling with the fragmentary sketches, and to write a regular full-book story, a novel — possibly the great American novel. Why not? Everybody else was getting ready to do it.

But there was no time to write his novel. He couldn't do it with a department going. And so :

One morning I sat at the desk and gazed at the empty soft paper, and realized the necessity of concocting something different. The changes had been rung through weary months and years on blank verse, catechism, rhyme, broken prose, the drama form of dialogue, and staccato paragraphs.

Why not a fable for a change? And instead of slavishly copying TEsop and La Fontaine, why not retain the archaic form and the stilted manner of composition and, for purposes of novelty, permit the language to be "fly," modern, undignified, quite up-tothe-moment ?

Also, in order to take the curse off the performance and so that no one might accept the article under a misapprehension, and, further, lest the critical-minded might suspect that the colloquialisms were used through a vulgar ignorance of proper speech and not in a mere cut-up spirit, it seemed advisable that the thing should be called a 'Table in Slang."

Now, up to this time I had gone fairly straight. My ambition was to be known as a realist with a compact style and a clean Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and the courage to observe human virtues and frailties as they showed on the lens. I had written slang, but always in the third person. People in my stories had talked slang, but only when they had to do so in order to be plausible and probable. If I used a word or a phrase which was reasonably under suspicion, I would hang up the quotation marks so that the reader might know that I was not approving the language, but merely utilizing it for picturesque effect.

Of course, I had been tempted a million times to use the new idioms and the current catch phrases, because they were the salt needed for the proper savoring. But I didn't want to fly-speck my compositions with io OUR AMERICAN HUMORISTS

quotation marks, and I had a real fear of the law against dealing in contraband.

But after affixing the " Poison" label I could put in anything.

And it was a real lark to write in slang — just like gorging on forbidden fruit. The bridle was off and all rules had been abolished.

Still, there are niceties of distinction even when out on a slang debauch.

I never referred to a policeman as a "bull," because that word belongs in the criminal vocabulary, and Mother and the girls are not supposed to be familiar with the cryptic terms of yeggmen.

I never referred to a young girl as a "chicken." The word originated in the deepest pits of white slavery, and it always gave me the creeps. A young girl may be a flapper, a bud, a peach, a pippin, a lollypaloozer, a nectarine, a cutie, a queen, the one best bet, a daisy, or even a baby doll, without being insulted; but never a "chicken," unless one is writing a treatise on social problems.

There are words of popular circulation which don't sound well in the mouth or look pretty in type. "Slob" has always been in the Index Expurgatorius. Our fellow citizen may be a dub or even a lobster, and possibly a mutt, but let us draw the line on "slob."

Besides, this so-called "slang" that romps so gayly into the homes and offices of the socially important is not slang at all. It is not the argot of a criminal element, and more of it is hatched on the university campus than in the red parlors of the underworld. It is highly figurative speech, tinctured with the American spirit of playfulness, bantering, unconventional.

Take the first fable I ever wrote — the one that started

GEORGE ADE n

me upward on my dissolute career until I landed in the gutter of notoriety.

It was about Sister Mae, who did as well as could be expected. Mae was a sister of Luella, whose Features did not seem to know the value of Team Work. Her clothes were an intermittent Fit. She was a lumpy Dresser.

Luella worked in a Factory, and every Saturday the Boss crowded Three Dollars on her.

Sister Mae was short on Intellect but long on Shape. She became Cashier in a Lunch Room and was a Strong Card.

She married a Bucket-Shop Man who was not Handsome, but was awful Generous.

They went to live in a Flat with a quarter-sawed Oak Chiffonier and Pink Rugs.

Mae bought a Thumb Ring, and the Smell of Cooking made her Faint.

After she had broken into Society and was in the Heyday of Prosperity, did she forget Luella? No, indeed. She gave Lu a Position as Assistant Cook at Five a Week.

And the Moral was that Industry and Perseverance bring a sure Reward.

That's only a rough idea, but you get the whole plot. Just a piece of Cold Truth told jocosely in large type and trimmed up with colored phraseology.

It was a specimen of willful freakishness rather than an exposition of slang, but it was called slang so as to have an alibi in case of barbarisms, Americanisms, colloquialisms, provincialisms, or any "ism" that stood on the doubtful list. /

It was simply a gleettn little experiment in outlawry, and was not intended to corrupt the morals of

Methodist families and teach babes in arms to grow up to be poker players.

It went into the grist as a thousand other items had gone before, and little did I suspect that it was the beginning of the end of a serious-minded young novelist.

Next day the score-keepers told me I had knocked a home run.

The young women on the staff told me the piece was "just killing."

I found the head editor giggling over the darn fool thing.

"You've struck a lead," he said. "Follow it up."

Then I heard from the publisher.

"Write a lot more of those fables for the paper," he said. "Because of the bold type, they are filling; and in a little while we can get out a book and substitute it for The College Widow.' "

"The College Widow" as a novel never got beyond the "dummy" stage. Five years later it appeared as a play, and later it was a movie, and only yesterday it bobbed up as a musical comedy.

Closed in upon by frantic advisers, the harried author began to write fables in slang with both hands.

In vain did he protest that he was not a specialist in the easy-going vernacular, and that he wanted to deal with life as it is instead of verbal buck-dancing and a bizarre costuming of capital letters.

The friends told him to take the gifts that were falling into his lap, and not crave the golden persimmons that grow on the hill tops.

So the crazy fables became a glaring feature of our newspaper department, and McCutcheon did most amusing imitations of the old-style woodcuts.

When the first volume called "Fables in Slang" appeared in the shop windows (impudently bound in yellow and black) I began to get messages of commendation from nearly every one except Mr. Howells.

I seemed to have tickled the orthodox citizen's sneaking fondness for the unconventional.

Also I learned that, in the writing game, if you have for sale an article that is a variation on the standardized ingredients of a six-and-seven-eighths, cutawaycoat newspaper, you can sell it to a great many different people and draw many salaries.

After ten years of clanking toil on a daily paper and being heralded as the author of several books, and finally earning the sacred privilege of signing my initials, I commanded a salary of sixty dollars a week.

Soon after backing out of the newspaper office and falling into the arms of the wizard who sold syndicate features to the daily press, I was getting eight hundred dollars a week as my share of the conspiracy, and later on, the nuggets became larger and we passed the thousand mark.

My father was cashier of a modest county-seat bank down in Indiana, and I sent him all my checks, so that he could show them to the loyal townspeople, wellwishers, and members of the Helping Hand who had told him in 1883 that it was a mistake to send me to college.

Father read the fables, and several times he wrote and asked if I had concealed from him any of my sources of revenue.

One short story a week instead of six long ones !

Checks that looked like three-sheet posters fluttering out of the large square envelopes used by the generous Robin Hood who was taking it away from the newspaper owners and sending it on to me !

Publishers setting traps for me and baiting them with lumps of sugar !

Could anything be more salubrious? Apparently not.

In those first breathless days of purple prosperity, when the whole world seemed to be slapping me in the face with twenty-dollar bills, I had not fully encompassed the fact that the net result of all this Barnum and Bailey presswork would be to make me a Professional Slangster for the rest of my life, even if I lived to be a thousand years old.

The idea was to grab a lot of careless money before the reading public recovered its equilibrium, and then, later on, with bags of gold piled in the doorway to keep the wolf out, return to the consecrated job of writing long and photographic reports of life in the Middle West.

Man proposes, and a triumvirate composed of the tired business man, the lady in the morning wrapper, and the human mechanism that sits at a roll-top desk do the subsequent disposing.

So the twentieth century opened up, and I learned from the clipping agencies that I was a "humorist/' I went around denying it, but the newspapers had more circulation than I had,

Of course Mr. Ade is a humorist, and a first-class one at that, not essentially because he is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, as because he has sounded a genuine American note in a manner of his own. The real trouble with the majority of people who read him is that they don't take him seriously enough : that is, they don't study him : they don't realize, as I have already hinted, that if you want real information about America, real insight into American character snapshots at the American animal in his haunts, so to speak, here is where to get it.

The ''highbrows'' are doubtless fooled because the fable is short, because it is offhand and slangy and because it isn't always so funny as it might be. All that comes from a mistaken idea about the nature and quality of humor. Some people should never attempt to read anything humorous. It cannot possibly do them any good : it only makes them worse. It is amazing indeed to see how little attention is paid to understanding or reading of humor in our public schools. I venture the assertion that a really good piece of literary prose humor or humorous verse — a classic if you will — would meet with scarcely any appreciation by an average class of high-school students. I know this because I have tried it.

It has been my experience that George Ade's "Fables" are hard to read aloud to a group of average people (if there be such a thing). The reason is perfectly plain. These Fables are high literary art, but not dramatic art, because the impact of the slang word is often just too late to produce the instantaneous effect necessary to the listener. This of course is not always so : but it is so often enough to make the reading of these fables anything but a certainty: occasionally a clear-cut phrase will go home with telling effect : but, generally speaking, Ade's Fables need to be lingered over in silence : they are concentrated food ; to be taken as a tonic, say one or two after a meal. It is quite natural also that they should not all be good : or that some of them should be better than others. But, in this respect, be not deceived. Your personal knowledge means much: you are sure to respond more to those things which reveal your own experience: so that if a certain fable appears to fall flat, it may easily be because that part of life has not particularly touched you.

They are, in quite a large sense, allegorical. You have to rise to the bait yourself. This is the beginning of one of Ade's "Fables" :

Once there was an Indian who had a Way of putting on all his Feathers and breaking out of the Reservation.

Think of reading that aloud to a committee of eight or ten — say a Board of Education or a Board of Health. You would have to explain at once that Ade in reality was not talking about an Indian at all : that he might indeed be talking about the Chairman of the Committee himself. You would then have to make a personal appeal to the Chairman, and ask him if he ever felt like an Indian, felt like putting on his store clothes, and sneaking out of the side door for the purpose of raising Cain. By this time you would be engaged in a controversy — which proves certain things that those who understand will already know, and those who do not understand can never be taught.

Personally, I haven't read Ade's "Fable of the two Mandolin Players" for some years : but I know precisely what kind of "birds" they are, and I like to think about them. He did not make me hate or despise them — he only made me laugh at them. There are certain things inside of me that are just like the things inside of those two Mandolin Players of Ade's. I know they are there because I have been reminded of them : and I know there are also other things in other people in the other fables of Ade's that are like the other things I have inside of me, and somehow I am not so ashamed of them as I was before I read the Ade "Fables," because it has made me feel after all, that we are all of us, East and West and North and South, a great deal alike : made up of about the same parts, in various combinations.

George Ade united with the late Henry James the distinction of having achieved literary fame without benefit of clergy : that is to say, without matrimonial aid. This is the only respect, however, in which they appear to have anything in common. Henry James scorned his native land — George Ade revels in his Indiana farm. Henry James took himself seriously and wrote in a language that few understand. George Ade snapped his countrymen, living among them and doing them good by his presence. His slang is almost wholly his own: you see plainly where he gets it from : but he rolls it a little and fits it in and changes it to suit his plan. It is impossible to overestimate the unconscious effect of a George Ade upon a generation : a combination of naturalness, common sense, sympathy, raillery, tolerance — this gives us glimpses of ourselves, that as a corrective, is an asset for genuine Democracy much more powerful than we have any idea of. That kind of humor which reflects American traits : rough in spots, dull in spots, but true in its essence and untainted by foreign influences — that is extremely valuable to us as a people: highly sanitary, and serves, possibly more than we realize, to keep us in control of ourselves at critical moments. This kind of raillery, of frankness, displayed in our train of humorists — Josh Billings, Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, George Ade and other natives — came out of the original town meeting — a by-product of the process of self-government. It has helped to make of the American people — climatically nervous and daring — one of the most patient and tolerant peoples in the world. Characterized by the bluster and brag that comes as the aftermath of the conquering of a new continent, with the rawness and vulgarity that jars upon Dreiser so much — all this in its full uninterrupted swing doubtless is offensive: but with it, this rough sense of humor — the capacity, so to speak, to "josh" oneself has given us something as a corrective which will be a large help as we grow up into more "cultured" ways. Besides, I am not so sure that this America of ours is so crude a thing as the critics would have. Art is not confined to any medium. In new forms it is misunderstood in the beginning, and it is quite possible that in a larger sense there is an art to the living of a national life by a whole people far beyond any particular form of art. The Greeks developed the highest sense of art in Architecture, Sculpture, Philosophy, Drama, but they broke down in the art of preserving themselves. It is possible that America is developing a soul — something hitherto thought superfluous in a Christian people.