Stewart — Watt—Legends of Paul Bunyan. 649 
Tom Hickathrift, of England. Moreover, like other legend 
groups, the Bunyan stories tend to be concerned with a 
single locality, Round River or Big Onion River. Finally, 
many of the legends are more or less closely connected with 
a single exploit, the clearing of the pyramid forty, in much 
the same way, to compare the little with the great, that 
Greek legends center in the Argonautic Expedition and the 
Trojan War, and Arthurian legends in the search for the 
Holy Grail. 
Of more interest, however, is the remarkable quality of 
the exaggeration in the Bunyan legends. This quality is 
worth analysis not only because it shows universal tenden¬ 
cies, but because it is the basis of what has come to be known 
as typical American humor. The tendency in all legend is 
to exaggerate, to make the physical strength or craft of the 
hero much greater than normal, to make an Ajax or an 
Odysseus of him. But in classical romance and epic this 
exaggeration is a thing of slow growth. It happens natur¬ 
ally, through a desire to make the deeds of the hero seem 
more wonderful, and not deliberately, through a desire to 
arouse amusement by gross exaggeration; it is an apotheosis, 
not a caricature. The exaggeration in the legends of Paul 
Bunyan is certainly of a different sort from that in classical 
legend; it is more Munchausenesque. The teller of the tale 
of the pea-soup lake, and of the camp-distillery, and of the 
great Round River drive has two motives: first, he wishes to 
excite wonder; second, he wishes to amuse. In their wonder- 
motive the Bunyan legends belong to that numerous class 
of travelers’ tales typified by the fabulous accounts in 
Mandeville and Hakluyt, and in the books of other collectors. 
They are stories designed to be swallowed by camp-followers 
and tenderfeet for the entertainment of hardened dwellers 
in the woods. In their humor-motive they belong to that 
large class of stories which depend for their effectiveness not 
upon true representations of facts but upon gross departures 
from normal standards. Humor is a difficult thing to de¬ 
fine, but one of its important elements is certainly that sur¬ 
prise which comes from the sudden and unanticipated con¬ 
templation of an incongruous variation from the normal. 
Good taste has gradually set limits to what cultivated 
persons regard as legitimate humor, but the child still 
