Chapter VIII: Introduction: And Notes by Charles Francis Adams (3)

By and by there seemed--there was--a twinkling dawn of returning reason. Slowly, peacefully, with an increase unseen from day to day, the light of reason came into the eyes, and speech became coherent; but withal there came a failing of the wrecked body, and the doctor said that monsieur was both better and worse.

One evening as Charlie sat by the vine-clad window with his fireless pipe in his hand, the old colonel’s eyes fell full upon his own, and rested there.

“Charl--,” he said with an effort, and his delighted nurse hastened to the bedside and bowed his best ear. There was an unsuccessful effort or two, and then he whispered, smiling with sweet sadness:

“We did’nt trade.”

The truth in this case was a secondary matter to Charlie; the main point was to give a pleasing answer. So he nodded his head decidedly, as who should say, “Oh, Yes, we did; it was a bona-fide swap.” But when he saw the smile vanish, he tried the other expedient, and shook his head with still more vigor to signify that they had not so much as approached a bargain; and the smile returned.

Charlie wanted to see the vine recognized. He stepped backward to the window with a broad smile, shook the foliage, nodded, and looked smart.

“I know,” said the colonel, with beaming eyes; “many weeks.”

The next day he said:

“Charl--”

The best ear went down.

“Send for a priest.”

The priest came, and was alone with him a whole afternoon. When he left, the patient was very haggard and exhausted, but smiled, and would not suffer the crucifix to be removed from his breast.

One more morning came. Just before dawn Charlie, lying on a pallet in the room, thought he was called, and came to the bedside.

“Old man,” whispered the failing invalid, “is it caving yet?”

Charlie nodded.

“It won’t pay you out.”

“Oh, dat makes not’ing,” said Charlie. Two big tears rolled down his brown face. “Dat makes not’ing.”

The colonel whispered once more:

“_Mes belles demoiselles_--in paradise--in the garden. I shall be with them at sunrise.” And so it was.

COLONEL WATTERSON’S REJOINDER TO EX-SENATOR EDMUNDS

COMMENTS ON “ANOTHER VIEW OF ‘THE HAYES-TILDEN CONTEST’” (~SEE PAGE 193~)

To the Editor of ~The Century~:

Sir: If I may say so without departing from the respect and regard in which I hold Senator Edmunds, he has made rather a case at law than a contribution to history. With the trained skill of an expert, he emphasizes all that may be pleaded on his own side, whilst either ignoring or belittling the strength of the other side. The ultimate verdict in the matter of Tilden _versus_ Hayes will turn on issues which the Electoral Commission refused, by a party vote of eight to seven, to consider; on evidence in equity which was not allowed to become a part of the record; upon rulings of the majority which the minority claimed, and justly claimed I think, to have been sometimes erroneous and sometimes inconsistent, but in every instance obedient to the party exigency.

I have neither the mind nor the heart to recall the wrangles and passions of the controversy. To me they mean nothing more than the half-forgotten dreams of a very dark night of the long ago. One may dismiss the exciting incidents: the conflicting testimony in Florida and Louisiana; the contested elector in Oregon; the tergiversation in opinions of some of the members of the court; the playing State law against National law, and vice versa, in a shuttlecock process all on one side, the unescapable inference being that from the first the majority was bent upon denying Tilden the one vote needed to make him President and securing to Hayes the twelve votes needed to make him President.

One may likewise dismiss the long list of questionable persons appointed to office under the Hayes administration, apparently from no other consideration than their service as members of returning boards and officers of election, most of them charged with corrupt practices.

At the election of the seventh of November, 1876, the popular vote was as follows:

For Tilden 4,300,316
For Hayes 4,036,016
---------
Tilden’s majority 264,300

The total vote for Tilden was nearly 700,000 larger than Grant’s against Greeley. Of the electoral vote, the Republicans conceded Tilden 184. The electoral votes of Louisiana and Florida, thrown into dispute before Congress and the Electoral Commission, but finally cast by the commission for Hayes, determined the result. Referring to my narrative of the events immediately succeeding the election and preceding the creation of the electoral tribunal, judge Edmunds says:

Historically, it is very unfortunate that Mr. Watterson did not
include in his enlivening article copies of his telegraphic
and other correspondence with Mr. Tilden from New Orleans, and
elsewhere, for it would certainly and truly, as far as it went,
throw much light on the existing drama being displayed, as well as
the plans and work behind the curtain whereby (we may believe) it
was hoped to produce the election of Mr. Tilden. We Republicans at
Washington were forced to believe that an effort was being made, by
every means that could be employed, to overcome the Hayes majority
of one. During that whole period, so far as I personally knew or
was informed, there never was any scheme or act of the Republicans
to bribe any State canvassing board or elector by money or promise
in support of Mr. Hayes’s election. We did (if I may borrow an
ancient classic simile) fear “the Greeks bearing gifts.” We were
morally certain that a large majority of the legal voters in the
States of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana were earnestly
in favor of the election of Mr. Hayes, and we believe that if
violence or some other kind of unlawful influence were not brought
to bear the electoral votes of those States would be cast for
him; but when the secret though bold operations of Colonel Pelton
became partly known we were astonished and alarmed, though not
disheartened, and we went forward in our efforts to provide by law
for the final act in the great drama.

It is quite certain that all the telegraphic correspondence I had with Mr. Tilden reached Republican headquarters as soon as it reached Gramercy Park. Assuredly I never wrote or wired him a word that I should be unwilling to have appear in print. May I not claim the circumstance that the Republicans used none of it as going to the credit either of my prudence or my patriotism, or of both?

At no time did I apprehend any physical collision, although General Grant seemed to fear one, and although two of the most famous and popular heroes among the general officers of the Union army at Washington were pressing armed organization upon the Democrats. It was distinctly the South that would not listen to the suggestion of force. Truth to say, both sides were playing something of a “bluff.” Neither was either ready or anxious for a fight, and, in extremis, whichever won, the other was bound to submit. My sole thought was publicity, agitation; this I urged from the outset and continued to urge to the end.

In reverting to these events, my purpose was chiefly to vindicate the personal integrity of Mr. Tilden. Neither he nor Mr. Hewitt nor any one in authority was willing to win by fraud. As I have stated, and as Mr. Hewitt stated, fraudulent possession was offered, and I directly know that Mr. Tilden refused to accept the Presidency as the result of an arrangement perfectly simple and obvious and absolutely certain.

One might imagine, by a perusal of Judge Edmunds, that the Republican lambs were greatly afraid of the Democratic wolves, and put themselves to many pains to circumvent the Democratic conspiracy set on foot immediately after the election. As a matter of fact, the reverse is true. The returning boards were made up of Republicans, not Democrats. The Southern States were still under military surveillance and martial law. All were invoked to coerce the vote and the counting of the vote. Whatever the worst of Democrats may have contemplated, the Republicans overmatched by deeds. They held the resources and the power of possession; the State governors, the President of the United States, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the army and navy; the Democrats held only the lower House of Congress, and what they believed the justice of their case.

Hayes had to receive every vote in dispute to be elected. The loss of a single vote would have defeated him. Hence the majority of the Electoral Commission could not throw out Florida and Louisiana, as many thought the equities in each instance required. In his speech on the vote of Louisiana, the very eminent Julius H. Seelye, president of Amherst College, who sat in the Forty-fourth Congress as a Republican from Massachusetts, said:

Wiser and more candid men would be hard to find than those of this
Electoral Commission who have pronounced the decision on which
we are now called to vote. I acknowledge I think I appreciate
the strength of their position. We cannot be too jealous of
the constitutional right of a State to choose its Presidential
electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” We
cannot be too careful of congressional interference with the duly
accredited results of such a choice. Whether we like or dislike it,
the right of a State to choose its electors in its own way, and to
ascertain and certify as to the method of their choice, is beyond
our lawful control. All this I accept as a formal and technical
statement of a clear principle of our Constitution; a principle,
moreover, in its general application as wise as it is clear.

But, Mr. Speaker, there are cases where the _summum jus_ becomes
the _summa injuria_; cases where the law, strictly interpreted and
strenuously enforced, works out results contrary to all law; and in
such cases equity lays the letter of the law aside and lifts her
voice in judgment as the sovereign spirit of the law, the spirit of
righteousness and truth declares. I find such a case in the pending
issue.

Granted--and I hold this to be incontestable--that this Electoral
Commission has clearly interpreted and accurately applied the
Constitution and the laws to the question submitted to them, yet
what if the very principle on which the Constitution and the laws
must ultimately rest becomes thereby subverted? Granted that the
decision reached is fairly within the bond; yet what if the pound
of flesh cannot be taken without its drop of blood? What if this
jealous care for State rights and constitutional prerogatives
may so foster faction, and so blunt the sense of justice, and
so increase the prevalence of fraud that the very foundation of
prerogatives and rights has disappeared?

... No nation, said Niebuhr, ever died except by suicide; and the
suicidal poison is engendered not so much in the unjust statutes
of a government as in the immoral practices of a people, which
the government is unable to punish and unable to restrain. It is
because I fear that the strict and accurate interpretation of the
Constitution, applied to the electoral vote of Louisiana, would
imperil that vote in the future, and increase the very danger which
the Constitution intended to avoid, that I am unable to concur with
such an application.

I commend this to the perusal of Senator Edmunds, though it is unlikely to impress a mind which could declare, as Senator Edmunds does declare in the April issue of ~The Century Magazine~, “that the constitutional amendments and reconstruction and other laws were passed by Congress as the best measures available in the complicated and untoward situation. These measures were not measures of cruelty or tyranny, but of justice and hopefulness. After the lapse of years it is evident to me that nothing better could have been done, and that nothing done by Congress should have been omitted.”

Against the plan of reconstruction, here approved so unreservedly and despite the events that came after, unremembered if not condoned by Judge Edmunds, I set the plan of Abraham Lincoln, laid in a larger conception of human nature and better knowledge of the character of the people of the South. None of the dangers apprehended and foreshadowed by Mr. Edmunds would have come to pass had Lincoln lived to put his plan on foot and conduct it to achievement. The South was in desolation. The leaders of the secession movement had been wholly discredited by the result of the war. All their calculations and promises had been disastrously falsified. They could no more escape the consequences of their failure than could other public men, baffled and defeated by events.

The murder of Lincoln removed the sun from the heavens. The clouds of hate and fear, or both, overspread the sky. The policy of “thorough,” adopted by the Radicals in Congress, was not only cruel, taking no account of the myriads in the South who had perpetrated no wrong, but was obtusely senseless, on one hand breeding an oligarchy of corruption, and, on the other, driving a whole people to desperation. It was thus, and thus alone, that a “solid South” was created.

God was more merciful than Congress. The North came to see that the South was a part of itself. Nothing happened in the South that, in the same circumstances and conditions, would not have happened at the North. We are indeed the most homogeneous people on the face of the globe. Our balanced system of representative government, strong in the hearts of the people, is the best and freest, because the most flexible and adjustable, on earth. We have outlived secession; we have survived reconstruction; we have weathered a disputed succession, complicated and embittered; we are passing through, and shall surely surmount, other and still more insidious approaches of revolution. Tilden is dead. Hayes is dead. They were but atoms in a sum total which sweeps onward unaffected by either of them, then, or since--a few loaves and a few fishes the while involved--toward the goal, the yet more perfect day, that shines before us.

~Henry Watterson~,
“Courier-Journal” Office,
Louisville, Kentucky.

APOSTLE OF POETRY AND PEACE

AN APRIL GREETING ON HIS RETURN FROM THE SOUTH

BY EDWIN MARKHAM

Again the mood of Eden on the earth!
Again the summons and the mystic mirth,
The beauty and the wonder and the dare,
Thrilling the heart, the field, the delicate air!

So now once more the old remembering:
The lyric hosts come out of the South with song,
With music that can save the soul from wrong--
The immemorial multitudes a-wing
Down bright savannas, over the greening trees.
Hark, the first warbling in the bough soft-stirred!
And you, O Poet, with your wingèd word,
You come convoyed by these!

You come with all the buds and birds astart--
You with the heart of April in your heart.
So take our banded welcome as we drink
A health to you on April’s flowering brink--
To you come hither from that elder clime,
Where April has been wreathed in poet’s rhyme,
Been touched with love and tears
By English minstrels down a thousand years.

And now that Sherwood Forest calls you home
Over the furrows of the ocean foam,
Take message from this people to your own--
To England, with her scented hawthorns blown,
And all her skylarks in a rapture-pain
Sprinkling the happy fields with lyric rain.
Tell her that, lordlier than her cliffs and towers,
Tell her that, mightier than her pomps and powers,
We see her line of poets stretching back
Ten centuries, a bright, immortal track.
Tell her that while she builded the things that seem,
They built her glory out of deathless dream.

Ah, more is that wild beauty left by Keats
Than all the blazon of her kingly seats;
More is that wonder from the hand of Blake
Than all her guns that make the nations quake;
More is her Shelley, with his starry dare,
Than all her flags ringed round with battle blare;
More her blind Milton voyaging the vast
Than all her squadrons shearing down the blast;
And more is Shakspere, lord of lyric seers,
Than all her conquests of a thousand years.

But none of all the line
(Save only Shelley, darling of the Nine)
Has cried as you have cried the valorous vow
Of Love’s heroic heart, God’s prayer to men
To cease the wolfish battles of the den.
And so the Muses bind upon your brow
The olive with the laurel; for your song
Bears on that dauntless prayer against the wrong,
The cry the embassy of angels sent
Of old across the Syrian firmament,
Above the stable door.
For in your voice we still can hear their cry
Sound down into our sky:
“Let there be peace: let battles be no more!”

A PAPER OF PUNS

BY BRANDER MATTHEWS

When two major artists have chosen to turn aside from the practice of their art to discuss one of its principles, there may be an intrusive impropriety in a mere outsider’s rashly urging a reconsideration of any point they have felicitously sharpened. Yet it was only by impaling himself upon the acute weapons of his adversaries that Arnold von Winkelried was able to make way for liberty--an act of self-sacrifice which cost him his life and gained him immortality.

The art of punning has had few practitioners more accomplished than Charles Lamb and Oliver Wendell Holmes. A century ago Lamb declared in a letter that “a pun is a noble thing per se: O never lug it in as an accessory. It is entire; it fills the mind; it is as perfect as a sonnet,--better. It limps ashamed in the train and retinue of humor; it knows it should have an establishment of its own.” And in a more formal essay Elia discussed the popular fallacy that the worst puns are the best. Half a century ago the Autocrat in his turn expressed an adverse opinion of a form of wit in which he delighted and for which he was marvelously gifted. Lamb analyzed at length and with intense enjoyment the immortal query of the Oxford scholar meeting a porter carrying a hare and astounding him with the extraordinary question, “Is that your own hare or a wig?” And Holmes once pretended to have overheard a remark about “the Macaulay-flowers of literature”; and he recorded the conundrum, “Why is an onion like a piano?” declaring that it was incredible for any person in an educated community who could be found willing to answer it in these words, “Because it smell odious.”

The difference between Lamb and Holmes is that Elia is frank in declaring his delight in the ingenious dislocation of the vocabulary, whereas the Autocrat pretends to deprecate it, to depreciate it, and to disparage it as evidence in favor of the doctrine of the total depravity of man. He even invented a polysyllabic quotation from an earlier autocrat, the ponderous Doctor Johnson: “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion.”

This is an appalling overstatement of the case; and Holmes was happier in another of the remarks made in the same chapter of the book in which he expressed the utmost of his own witty wisdom: “People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight-train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” Here the doctor is on solid ground; a pun may be a good thing in itself, as good as a sonnet even, but it is only dirt--that is to say, matter in the wrong place--when it is injected into good talk only to throw the conversational locomotive off the track. Oddly enough, the Autocrat was once himself derailed by a pun a score of years after he had thus laid down the law; and, as it happens, I had the full particulars of the fatal accident from the punster who placed the penny on the track. In this case the disturber of traffic was the late Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

When Matthew Arnold paid his first visit to America thirty years ago, Aldrich gave him a dinner and invited the best that Boston and Cambridge had to show to do honor to his alien guest. He put Arnold on his right and Holmes on his left; and early in the dinner he discovered that the Autocrat was in fine form and ready to discourse in his best manner. Holmes began by suggesting that it must be amusing to meet unexpected characters, burglars, for example, and pirates, and cannibals. “What would you do,” he asked, “if you were to meet a cannibal walking down Beacon Street?” And he paused for the reply that he did not desire, whereupon Aldrich saw his chance and responded promptly, “I think I should stop to pick an acquaintance.” The rest of the company laughed at this sally, but Holmes looked at his host reproachfully and then shut up absolutely, saying scarcely a word during the rest of the dinner. The witticism, even if it was bright and not battered, had upset the freight-train of the Autocrat’s conversation. And as Aldrich asserted, in telling the sad story, the host had to repent in a sack-coat and cigarette-ashes for the rest of his life. Autocrats are autocrats, after all; and not with impunity are their unlimited expresses to be flagged by an unauthorized pun.

Possibly it was the painful memory of this unfortunate experience which led Dr. Holmes to omit from the final edition of his complete works the very amusing account of his “Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters,” which he had included in an earlier volume--“Soundings from the ‘Atlantic’”--now out of print. He tells us in this paper that he was surprised to find that the asylum was intended wholly for males; and yet on reflection he admitted the remarkable psychologic fact that “there is no such a thing as a female punster. At least,” he adds, “I never knew or heard of one, though I have once or twice heard a woman make a single detached pun, as I have known a hen to crow.” And when we recall the proverbial fate of the crowing hen, the fair sex may rejoice that there are no female punsters, whatever may be the psychological explanation of the remarkable fact itself. The fact might indeed be accounted for easily by those ungallant cynics who maintain that women are careless in the employment of words (which are the raw material of puns), commonly using them as counters to convey emotions rather than as coins to express thoughts.

Holmes’s account of his visit to the asylum reverberates with the rattle of a corps of conundrummers; and every one of the inmates is ready with his contribution, from the superintendent who explained why “they did not take steppes in Tartary for establishing insane hospitals, because there are nomad people to be found there,” to the retired sailor who had gone as mate on a fishing-schooner, giving it up because he “did not like working for two-masters.” The most imaginative touch is at the end of the paper when the visitors are introduced to a centenarian inmate, who asks affably, “Why is a--a--a like a--a--a? Give it up? Because it is a--a--a.” Then he smiled pleasantly; and the superintendent explained that the ancient man was “one hundred and seven last Christmas. He lost his answers about the age of ninety-eight. Of late years he puts his whole conundrums in blank--but they please him just as well.”

Lowell, who was Holmes’s chief rival among the Cambridge wits, did not pretend to disdain the pun, as Holmes affected to do. But he insisted upon the absolute identity of sound with an equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Lowell pointed out that Hood, who is said to have lain on his death-bed “spitting blood and puns,” abounded in examples of this sort of fun, “only his analogies are of a more subtle and perplexing kind.” To illustrate this assertion Lowell quoted Hood’s elegy on the old sailor, whose

“... head was turned, and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died.”

And the American critic called this “inimitable, like all the best of Hood’s puns. To the ear it is perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical non-sequiturs. And yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in the _and so_.”

Another quotation from Hood also won high commendation from Lowell. It was taken from the peddler’s recommendation of his ear-trumpet:

“I don’t pretend with horns of mine,
Like some in the advertising line,
To magnify sounds on such marvelous scales
That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale’s.

There was Mrs. F.
So very deaf
That she might have worn a percussion-cap
And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
Well, I sold her a horn; and the very next day
She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.”

Is that last line wit or humor? It is a play on a word, no doubt, and that would relate it to wit. But it has the imaginative exaggeration that we are wont to associate with humor. Lowell noted that we find it natural to speak of the breadth of humor, while wit, by the necessity of its being, is “as narrow as a flash of lightning, and as sudden.” Humor has also its unexpectedness, and while most good puns must be classed as specimens of wit, some few transcendent examples may fairly claim to be specimens of humor--that last line of Hood’s, for example. Many other instances might be advanced. A very distinguished British scientist had the foible of inventing thrilling episodes in his own autobiography; and on one occasion after he had spun a most marvelous yarn, with himself in the center of the coil, a skeptical friend looked him in the eye and asked sternly, “Clifford, do you mean to say that this really occurred to you?” Whereupon the imaginative man of science laughed lightly and with a most imperturable assurance calmly answered, “Yes--it just occurred to me!”

It is wit and not humor, no doubt, when Holmes promulgates the law of financial safety: “Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.” It is wisdom as well as wit, but is it a pun? Is it only a play on words? Is it not also a play on the idea? And take the somewhat parallel remark about the rising fortune of a successful man, to the effect that “he got on, he got honor, he got honest.” That again is wit; but is it fairly to be termed a pun? Merely verbal playfulness is more obvious in a recent remark that “some men stand for office, some men run for it, and some have a walk-over,” and yet that somehow fails to fall completely within any acceptable definition of the pun. If it is a pun, it is something more also. With these specimens may be grouped three other remarks which have not hitherto been recorded in print. When a certain critic of limited equipment was appointed to the chair of comparative literature in one of our universities, the question was asked why he was assigned to this particular professorship, since his information was mainly confined to English; and the explanation was instantly forthcoming that comparative literature was the position for which he was best fitted, because his own literature was neither positive nor superlative. A certain former Vice-President of the United States has been described as “a very cold-blooded proposition,” and yet his speeches were the usual flowery and perfervid political oratory which led an observer to make the assertion that “to hear ---- speak is like catching nature in the act of self-contradiction, since it is the emission of hot air from an ice-box.”

And it was the same anonymous observer who pointed out the difference between two contemporary British authors, insisting that “Mr. George Bernard Shaw always writes with his tongue in his cheek, whereas when Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton is writing he keeps thrusting his tongue out at the public.” Now, are these remarks, strictly speaking, puns? They conform at least to one of Lamb’s definitions that a pun “is a pistol let off at the end, not a feather to tickle the intellect,” and that it is “not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit.” He warns us that “a pun may be easily too curious and artificial”; and he held that a pun, at least in actual conversation, ought to stand alone and not be followed by another. “When a man has said a good thing it is seldom politic to follow it up.” This is true enough of conversation; but it does not apply to literature. The spoken word and the written have different rules. A large part of the humorous effect of the trumpet-peddler’s eulogy of the wares he is vending is due to the heaping-up of the puns, one tumbling over another, like salmon flashing swiftly in the sunshine as they follow each other up the falls. Here our pleasure is akin to that we take at the circus as we behold the acrobats going on from one impossible stunt to its equally impossible successor and accomplishing these feats as if each was the easiest thing in the world.

There is in many passages of that rollicking satire, “A Fable for Critics,” wise as it is in its author’s acute valuation of his contemporaries, a riot of complicated riming and of unexpected punning,--passages which impress us with an abiding sense of spontaneous humor and good humor. These passages overflow with fun, and we are carried along by Lowell’s delight in displaying his verbal dexterity. For once he appears before us dancing on a metrical tight-rope and setting off iridescent fireworks at the ends of his balancing-pole. Consider, for example, these lines at the very beginning, where Apollo is discussing his plight after he had pursued Daphne and she had turned into a tree:

“‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked;
‘When I last saw my love she was fairly embarked
In a laurel, as _she_ thought--but (ah, how fate mocks!)
She has found it by this time a very bad box;
Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it--
You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it.
Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress!
What romance would be left?--who can flatter or kiss trees?
And for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogue
With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,--
Not to say that the thought would forever intrude
That you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood?
Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,
To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;
Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting, but now,
As they left me forever, each making its bough!
If her tongue _had_ a tang sometimes more than was right,
Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’”

Almost worthy to be set beside Lowell’s lines is Mr. William A. Croffut’s “Dirge concerning the late lamented King of the Cannibal Islands” in which he rings the changes on a single theme:

“And missionaries graced his festive board,
Solemn and succulent, in twos and dozens,
And smoked before their hospitable lord,
Welcome as if they’d been his second cousins.
When cold he warmed them as he would his kin--
They came as strangers, and he took them in.

“He had a hundred wives. To make things pleasant
They found it quite judicious to adore him;
And when he dined, the nymphs were always present--
Sometimes beside him and sometimes before him.
When he was tired of one, he called her ‘sweet,’
And told her she was ‘good enough to eat!’

“We grow like what we eat. Bad food depresses;
Good food exalts us like an inspiration,
And missionaries on the _menu_ blesses
And elevates the Feejee population.
A people who for years saints, bairns, and women ate
Must soon their vilest qualities eliminate.

“How fond he was of children! To his breast
The tenderest nurslings gained a free admission.
Rank he despised, nor, if they came well dressed,
Cared if they were plebeian or patrician.
Shade of Leigh Hunt! O, guide this laggard pen
To write of one who loved his fellow-men!”

Lamb would have enjoyed the stanzas of this elegy, with the effortless ease of the long succession of puns, playing leap-frog; and Hood would have appreciated them without envy. Perhaps Lamb would have liked even better than Hood a superbly impossible pun in John Brougham’s burlesque of “Pocahontas,” a long popular piece, which perhaps owed a part of its success to the unhistoric marrying off of Captain John Smith and the dusky heroine. When Smith is bound to the sacrificial rock and the war-club of Powhatan is raised aloft to dash out the Englishman’s brains, Pocahontas rushes in with the plaintive cry, “For my husband I scream!” Whereupon Smith lifts his head and asks, “Lemon or vanilla?” This has not a little of the illogical impossibility of “Is that your own hare or a wig?” and like that immortal query it defies analysis. It is not merely a play on a word; it is a play on an idea, which we cannot ourselves formulate.

Brougham was an Irishman who was a past-master in the art of punning. Perhaps his chief rival was the British playwright Henry J. Byron, who once wrote a burlesque on a theme from the “Arabian Nights” which he entitled “Ali Baba, or the Thirty-Nine Thieves--in accordance with the author’s habit of taking one off.” Byron, however, was wont to besprinkle the dialogue of his more ambitious comedies with puns not always fresh and not always appropriate. In one of his forgotten farces a retired soldier who had served in India makes a bore of himself by talking forever about the Bungalura River. Finally, one of the other characters, in a moment of natural irritation, ejaculates, “Oh, damn the Bungalura River!” To which the old officer responds instantly, “Sir, they have vainly endeavored to do so!” This is an ingenious quip in itself; but it was not at all in keeping with the character, since it was a remark the bore was quite incapable of making.

An earlier British dramatist, Douglas Jerrold, is said by his son and biographer never to have put a pun in the dialogue of any one of his plays; and if this assertion is well founded, the fact is the more curious since Jerrold was prolific of puns in conversation and in correspondence. In a letter written just after Queen Victoria had been fired at, Jerrold declared that he had seen her out driving, adding that “she looked very well, and--as is not always the case with women--none the worse for powder.” And it was at one of the “Punch” dinners that he made his cruellest retort, a pun with a venomous sting in the tail of it. Gilbert A Becket--author of a “Comic History of England” and a frequent contributor to “Punch” at the time when Jerrold was providing that weekly with “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures”--claimed a friendly interest from his associate, declaring, “You know we row in the same boat.” To which Jerrold retorted brutally, “Yes--but with different skulls.”

One of the pleasantest of the protean appearances of the pun is to be found in the familiar quotation, made unexpectedly pertinent by a felicitous suggestion of an unforeseen meaning hitherto concealed in one of its words. A neat example of this is the Shaksperian motto which the late Edwin Booth caused to be inscribed on the mantelpiece of the grill-room in the club he founded for the practitioners of the allied arts: “Mouth it, as many of our Players do.” When Mrs. Stowe was on her way to Liverpool a fog suddenly shut the ship in after it had taken on the pilot; and the authoress suggested that the pilot might sing, “That Mersey I to others show, that Mersey show to me.” And in the “Autocrat” again Dr. Holmes, after dwelling on the delight he had in beholding noble oaks and spreading elms, mentioned one tree which was more than eighteen feet in girth, and expressed a hope that he might meet a tree-loving friend under its branches. “If we don’t have youth at the prow, we shall have pleasure at the ’elm.” This is added evidence, were any needed, that Holmes was not sincere in his denunciation of punning, or at least that he was willing to damn “the sins he had no mind to.”

The derogatory old saying that a pun is the lowest form of wit has been explained by the apt addition that this is because a pun is the foundation of all wit. This explanation is not strictly true, of course; the best wit is often independent of any flavor of word-play. But there is a kind of pun which is really lower than any other effort to arouse laughter; this is the pun which is due to a violent wrench made visible only by the use of italics. As a general principle we may assert that any pun is beneath contempt when it needs a typographic sign-post before it can be seen. And the unfortunate who descends to this dismal form of near-wit is of a truth the “mournful professor of high drollery” that George Eliot once castigated. Pitiable specimens of his lamentable handiwork--if anything so mechanical may fairly be described by this term--can be discovered abundantly in more than one of the inferior comic weeklies of Great Britain; and even the superior weekly “Punch” is not always free from it.

When an observer of international characteristics shall undertake the task of differentiating the British from the Americans he can scarcely fail to note that the mechanical pun, the bare play upon the sound of a word without any corresponding diversity of idea, is far commoner in the older branch of the English-speaking race than it is in the younger. This strikes us at once when we compare the comic papers or the comic operas of Great Britain with those of the United States. The transatlantic relish for purely verbal juggling is probably an inheritance from the Elizabethans, for we find it displayed in even the mightiest of them, Shakspere. Curious it is, therefore, that we colonists did not import it in the original package as we imported so many other Tudor characteristics, some of which are still discoverable on this side of the Western ocean although on the other they have fallen into “innocuous desuetude.”

FINIS

BY WILLIAM H. HAYNE

No blood-stains on the polished floor--
Not one drop has been shed--
No wound in heart or brow or breast,
And yet the man is dead.

No dirk or pistol in the room--
No sign of death’s dark goal--
And yet the man who seems alive
Has murdered his own soul.

T. TEMBAROM

BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

Author of “That Lass o’ Lowrie’s,” “The Shuttle,” etc.

WITH DECORATIVE PICTURES BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN