June 7, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
25 
these jokes were, for us, fairly drastic : the summit of achieve- 
mcr,t was reached, I think, by a report that a cow had met its 
death by charging an L.C.D. express from behind, and that 
the Directors, at an emergency meeting, had decided to place 
cow-catchers at the rear end of all trains. But try to imagine 
what would have been said had the London, Chatham and 
Dover Railway been in America. The most luxuriant of our 
conceptions would have been feeble compared with the 
miracles of metaphor that would have been coined to show 
the extraordinary slowness of those trains. In American 
aescriptions they would not have gone at a walking pace, 
they would not even have crawled at a snail's : at their 
fastest the snails would have overtaken them, and mostly 
they would positively have gone backwards so that passengers 
would be compelled, aiming at a certain destination, to board 
trains ostensibly proceeding in the opposite direction. Now 
1 think of it, I do seem to remember something about a cow 
boarding a train and biting the passengers. This delight 
m giving the extra turn ol the screw ttiat destroys the 
last shred of verisimiUtude for the sake of a fantastic effect 
is to be seen everywhere in American humorous writing, 
and one may take an illustration horn the other side at ran- 
dom. Mr. Stephen Leacock's description of how he tried to 
borrow a match from a man in the street will do. The account 
throws light on a common experience, and the various stages 
of the man's struggle with his pockets and production of 
toothpicks and other articles from his coat-tails whilst his 
parcels fall all round, might have been done by an English- 
man. But in the end he cannot help rounding it off by a 
piece of sheer gusto that would scarcely have occurred to 
anyone but an American. Full of compassion at the would- 
be match-lender's state of desperation, the author puts an 
end to his suffering by throwing him under a /raw— -that is to 
say, a " trolley car." Mr. Leacock happens to be a Canadian 
and not a citizen of the United States. But in this rigard 
they share the same tastes and the same habits. 
In fact, as has been said ten thousand times before, they 
love Exaggeration. All little American communities in the 
old days had Characters of whom they were proud : and the 
Character was almost always an abnormal Exaggerator or 
Vituperator — which comes to the same thing. He was a 
man with a fine flow of the extravagant or the grotesque ; 
in other words, a Champion Liar. The pleasure that such 
aitists take in their work is the pleasure of the fantastic 
embroiderer or the mediaeval carver of gargoyles. American 
essays in the Preposterous are of various sorts. Continually 
one gets the monstrously absurd simile, or the mild over- 
statement of a single fact. All American funny men make a 
practice of this. It usually becomes a habit with them ; 
they state everything in this form. Mark Twain's ordinary 
level is typified by " Twins amount to a permanent riot. 
And there isn't any real difference between triplets and' an 
insurrection " — which is rather tired and mechanical. 
O. Henry, a writer who is far more than a jester, was very 
good in this way. One may quote from his account 
of the Mayor who was lying ill in bed, with what seemed a 
grave stomachic complaint : " He was making internal noises 
that would have had everybody in San Trancisco hiking for 
the parks." I suppose one is forced to explain, for the benefit 
of the forgetful British reader, that the population of San 
Francisco lives in dread of earthquakes. But the more 
admirable kind of invention is the Impossibility upon a larger 
scale ; the calculated and nicely-worked out mendacity 
which, in proportion to its gross incredibility, is worked out 
with the highest attainable degree of simplicity and gravity, 
the frankly absurd story which is told you as the state of the 
weather or your grandmother's health might be told you. 
In the perfection of this species we have, I think, the finest 
achievement of American humour. 
Max Adeler's famous account of the poet who was engaged 
to write In Memoriam verses to go in the obituary column ol 
the local paper and brought the mob of infuriated parents 
down upon the editor's head is an early approach to this style. 
It is monstrously impossible : but it is conducted with a 
considerable amount of restraint. Later, authors have gone 
further in the self-suppression which eschews the incidental 
auctorial intervention or flamboyance of phrase for the sake 
of the whole story. Mark Twain frequently did this sort of 
thing with great circumspection. For instance, the dialogue 
with the Chief of Detectives in The Stolen White Elephant. 
The detective wants to know what the missing animal usually 
eats : 
'■ Now, what does this elephant eat, and liow much ? 
" VW>11, as to what he eats — he will eat anylliin;;. He will 
eat a man, he will eat a Bible — he will eat anything lietween 
a man and a Bible." 
"Good — very good indeed, but too general. Details are neces- 
sary — details are the only valuable things in our trade. Very 
well — as to men. At one m:a' — or, if you prefer, during one 
day — how many m.°n will he eat, if fresh ? " 
■' He would not care whether they were fresh or not ; at a 
single meal he would eat five ordinary men." 
Very good ; five men ; we will put that down. What 
nationalities would he prefer ? " 
" He is indifferent about nationalities. He prefers acquaint- 
ances, but is not prejudiced against strangers." 
" Very good. Now as to Bibles. How many B'bles would 
he cat at a meal ? " 
" He would eat an entire edition." 
It is hardly succinct enough. Do you mean the ordinary 
octavo, or the lamily illustrated ? " 
" I think he would be indifferent to illustrations ; that is, I 
think, he would not value illustrations above simple letter- 
press." 
No, you do not get my idea. I refer to bulk. The ordinary 
octavo Bible weighs about two pounds and a half, while the 
great quarto with the illustrations weighs ten or twelve. How 
many Dore Bibles would he eat at a meal ? " 
" If you knew this elephant, you could not ask. He would 
take what they had." 
Well, put it in dollars and cents, then. We must get at it 
somehow. The Dore costs a hundred dollars a copy, Russian 
leather, bevelled." 
" He would require about fifty thousand dollars' worth — say 
an edition of five hundred copies." 
" Now that is more exact. I will put that down. Very well ; 
he likes men and Bibles ; so far, so good." 
That is businesslike ; that is sober realism. Given the 
leading idea everything is related with complete propriety. 
The elaboration of it was clearly a labour of love to its author. 
« * * « ♦ 
A more modern instance is Mr. Ellis Parker Butler's Pigs 
is Pigs, a short story which may or may not have been pub- 
Hshed in this country. A pair of guinea-pigs are transported 
from one town to another by an Express Delivery Company. 
An obstinate official insists in charging thirty cents a head on 
them, the rate for pigs ; an equally obstinate consignee refuses 
to pay more than the twenty-five cents due on pets. Pending 
agreement the guinea-pigs are left in the office. The man- 
in-charge writes to headquarters about it, and causes great 
bewilderment by mentioning two animals in his first letter, 
eight in his second, and 32 in his third. The struggle con- 
tinues (an enormous bill for cabbage-leaves being run up) 
until the office is one large range of hutches and the guinea-pigs 
number very many thousands. The man has only to step 
(or rather creep, for there is little space) into the street for 
five minutes, and on his return he finds that there are a 
hundred more. This story is told with perfect composure : 
there is only one joke in it, and that is the whole story. The 
effect of this kind of thing is the effect of parody. It is parody 
of life and close to the humour of Butler's Erewhon. No one 
can equal the American humorist at it. The Americans — 
I use the word in the most complimentary sense — -are the 
Greatest Liars in Creation. 
* * * • ^. * 
Professor Leacock, in his essay. trpon American Humour 
says : " Essays upon American Humour, after an initial 
effort towards the dignity and serenity of literary criticism, 
generally resolve themselves into the mere narration of 
.\merican jokes and stories. The fun of these runs thinly 
towards its impotent conclusion, till the disillusioned reader 
detects behind the mask of the literary theorist the anxious 
grin of the secondhand story-teller." How untrue that is; 
and how unfair. 
***** 
In order to get back on him for his gratuitous malice, I 
shall steal from his Literary Lapses, a final example of his 
great gift of making an idiot of himself. He sets himself to 
consider whether or not the bicycle is a nobler animal than 
the horse. 
I find that the difference between the horse and the bicycle 
is greater than I had supposed. 
The horse is entirely covered with hair ; the bicycle is not 
entirely covered with hair, except the '89 model they are 
using in Idaho. 
In riding a horse the performer finds that the pedals in which 
he puts his feet will not allow of a good circular stroke. He 
will observe, however, that there is a saddle in which — 
especially while the horse is trotting — he is expected to seat 
himself from time to time. But it is simpler to ride standing 
up with the feet in the pedals. 
There are no handles to a horse, but the 1910 model has a 
string to each side of its face for turning its head when there 
is anything you want it to see. 
Coasting on a good horse is .superb, but should be under 
control. 
1 should like to hear Professor Freud's views on the 
hidden implications of this. 
