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During his theatrical experiences he had come across scores of such men, dapper little fellows, wizened of face yet curiously youthful in manner; but they, each and all, were labeled "low comedian." Certainly, a rare intelligence gleamed from this man's eyes, but that is an attribute not often lacking in humorists who command high salaries because of their facility in laughter-making.
Several men, of brilliant renown, were grouped in the luminous zone immediately around the piano: Heine, the saddest of humorists, listened with the interest of a fellow countryman to the narrations made him by Chopin of the mysterious country which haunted his ethereal fancy also, and of which he too had explored the beautiful shores.
He did not know very much more about the case of the humorist than when he first sat down to listen; but he realized that no amount of words from his Swedish friend would help to reveal the real facts. A personal interview with the author himself could alone do that. "All humorists are worth saving," he said with a smile, as she poured out tea.
In literature, when we want to be even hysterically diverted, we must, as a rule, buy our fun from the American humorists. If we cannot make laughter ourselves, at least we can, and do, laugh with them. A vast amount of American humour may be called local and middle-class.
How curious that so many great wits and humorists should have worn the clerical garb! To mention only four, there were Rabelais, Erasmus, Swift and Sterne; each of whom has added to the world's gaiety, and also helped to free it from superstition.
Charles H. Warren was the prince of humorists among us, and would have been so anywhere. Channing said to me one day, "I want to see your friend Warren; I want to see him as you do." I could not help replying, "That you never will; I should as soon expect to hear a man laugh in a cathedral." I never knew a man quite so full of the power to entertain others in conversation as he was.
I saw then that, humorist as the old man might be, his humour, like that of all true humorists, lay close about the wells of weeping. "The old man seems a little out of sorts," I said to his wife.
How shall the worried critic dispose of the more or less professional humorists who have created characters and localities: Irvin S. Cobb, who, capable of better things, prefers the paths of the grotesque and rolls his bulk through current literature laughing at his own misadventures; Finley Peter Dunne, inventor of that Mr.
Billy inquired of Bertie, as they led the black gelding back to the road; and Bertie laughed like an infant. "Gentlemen," said he, in Oscar's manner, "we now approach the multiplicity of the ego." The black gelding must have thought it had humorists to deal with this day. Oscar, as a matter of fact, was eating his cheap lunch away over in Cambridge.
The eccentricities of his youth, embalmed by Sydney Smith and the other humorists of the 'thirties and 'forties, had disappeared when I made his acquaintance; but to the last he was absolutely careless as to public opinion, except on such points as those on which he himself shared that opinion.
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