Native American Humor

$3.75

THE shaggy background of our country is gradually edging into the foreground. Writers and anthologists —all very busy, ingenious, and inspired have put the neon to the homespun, and we are asked to examine in bright light the rough texture of the product and assure ourselves that we had it once before we lost it. Or so it seems. And they all tell about it with such a love and fervor that the patchwork past by now is clearer to us all than the wretched bedlam which we call the present. Of course the spirit of that past is in its speech. Me are coming to know the flavor of that speech even when it is given to us indirectly, as in an historical novel. Now and then we get it direct.

Take humor. No one knows so much about that as the humorists; but a lot of them are dead and none of them ever talked much about the others. We are a funny race by international agreement, and not all our little jokes are ghosted for the current (downs. Apparently we were always funny. Mr. Aswell presents this beguiling collection to prove it. He holds up its contents, much to advantage, against the artificial capers and whimsy of the 1890’s, to which he merely alludes in a sharp little foreword. Against the last decade or two — say Leacock, Bench-ley, Sullivan, Thnrber, and White — most of this is like dipping your fingers in the cold springs that feed a river.

But note the cold springs: for hero is some very real, unstudied prose at which you may smile rather than laugh, but which von will probably like. The range is wide, for the editor obviously has silted a vast, amount, of material. Some of it is tedious. None of it is quite so salty as yon would think. The old names are here: Harte and Clemens, Artenms Ward, Bill Nve, Franklin, Judge Haliburtou, P. T. Barnum, Ambrose Bierce, Josh Billings, and Joel Chandler Harris. The unexpected include Stephen A. Douglas and Kdward Kverett; and the named unknown appear as numerous as the darkly anonymous. It all hulks to a worth-while book. Somehow the old boys disappoint, bill an unsigned piece of good length like “Farc You Well, Joe Clark” is an utter delight; ditto Seba Smith’s “My First Visit to Portland.”of which a modern counterpart still floats about the milk bars. No Southern editor could eschew Jonathan F. Kelley’s happy burlesque of Emerson. ("Ralph don’t group his metaphorical beauties, or dainties of Webster . . . but rushes them out in torrents.”) If I miss Rowland E. Robinson of Vermont and Annie Trumbull Slosson of Connecticut, their absence cannot be attributed, I know, to sectionalism, for I have missed all my life this essay by Edward Everett, and these words are being written in the Cambridge house in which he lived.

DAVID McCORD