BRET HARTE

There are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine excellent reasons which we could all have for admiring the work of Bret Harte.  But one supreme reason stands not in a certain general superiority to them all—­a reason which may be stated in three propositions united in a common conclusion:  first, that he was a genuine American; second, that he was a genuine humourist; and, third, that he was not an American humourist.  Bret Harte had his own peculiar humour, but it had nothing in particular to do with American humour.  American humour has its own peculiar excellence, but it has nothing in particular to do with Bret Harte.  American humour is purely exaggerative; Bret Harte’s humour was sympathetic and analytical.

In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international difference in humour.  If we take the crudest joke in the world—­the joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat—­we shall yet find that all the nations would differ in their way of treating it humourously, and that if American humour treated it at all, it would be in a purely American manner.  For example, there was a case of an orator in the House of Commons, who, after denouncing all the public abuses he could think of, did sit down on his hat.  An Irishman immediately rose, full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, “Should I be in order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?” Here is a glorious example of Irish humour—­the bull not unconscious, not entirely conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is.  But every other nation would have treated the idea in a manner slightly different.  The Frenchman’s humour would have been logical:  he would have said, “The orator denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat:  behold a good example!” What the Scotchman’s humour would have said I am not so certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability of making such speeches on top of someone else’s hat.  But American humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration.  The American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one crackle of silk.  He would say that when an important orator rose to speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the debate.  He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the subject of the imports of Jamaica.  In short, American humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination.  It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.