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As the pillow-cases fell to the ground, Mac was at a loss to account for my consternation. "What's gone wrong?" he exclaimed in concern. Mac was often an unconscious humorist. But the Maluka came with his ever-ready sympathy. "Poor little coon," he said gently, "there's little else but chivalry and a bite of tucker for a woman out bush." Then a light broke in on Mac.
So far from this being the case, however, it was but a few years ago, that, as we all recollect, the brilliant pen of Thackeray was brought to bear on the same subject, and the great humorist of this generation employed his talents worthily in illustrating the genius of a past age.
It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of another's fit word which goes far to establish for a man the character of boon humorist.
I already hate the names of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, Symons, Maeterlinck, and Gorky. I am only waiting for them to discover Max Klinger and Manet " "Klinger?" asked Stone. "Where have I heard that name?" "He is the great unconscious humorist of modern art, also a great etcher," said Isabel, dryly. "Have you ever heard of the Secessionists?" "Of course," replied Stone, huffily.
"The Widow Sloper and old Shackford have made a match of it," remarked a local humorist, in a grimmer vain than customary. Two ghosts had now set up housekeeping, as it were, in the stricken mansion, and what might not be looked for in the way of spectral progeny!
Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human humorist to discover in Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all nationalities. In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could safely be labelled "American" not a single human detail, inside or outside.
Of that unwise science, which, as our Humorist expresses it, "By geometric scale Doth take the size of pots of ale;" still more, of that altogether misdirected industry, which is seen vigorously thrashing mere straw, there can nothing defensive be said. In so far as the Germans are chargeable with such, let them take the consequence.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the productions of that faculty which Irishmen have always been reputed, and justly reputed, to possess in peculiar measure the faculty of humour. Compare Lever, who for a long time passed as the typical Irish humorist, with his contemporaries Thackeray and Dickens.
I knew him, I think, even before I knew Rossetti and Morris, or any of that group. He was a brother of Mr. Watts-Dunton's Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts. He lived at Park House, Sydenham, and died suddenly either in 1870 or 1871, very shortly after I had met him at a wedding party. Among the set in which I moved at that time he had a great reputation as a wit and humorist.
I could feel the blood climbing from my toes to the roots of my hair. I was too astonished and chagrined to speak or even move, though I wanted to move very much indeed. She looked at me and I at her. Then she turned coldly away. "Come, Victor," she said. But Victor was his own blase self. It took more than a trifle to shake his calm. He laughed. "It's the humorist," he repeated.
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