Americanisms and Briticisms Part 6

and his visitors to "An East-End Poultry Show;" he knows them through and through; he sees their weakness; and after all he is tolerant, he does not dislike them in his heart, he handles them as though he loved them. We confess his kindliness of touch, even though it moves us to no more friendly feeling of our own. "Vox populi, vox Dei," says the adage, as true as most adages; but these _Voces Populi_, if not "Voces diaboli," might at least be called to the witness-box by the devil's advocate. It is a terrible indictment of contemporary British manners that we hear in these conversations, humorous as they are; and the indictment is perhaps the severer in that it is wholly unconscious. It is quite unwittingly that Mr. Guthrie offers this evidence to prove the truth of Matthew Arnold's a.s.sertion that one could see in England "an aristocracy materialized and null, a middle cla.s.s purblind and hideous, a lower cla.s.s crude and brutal."

In this respect at least no greater contrast could be found to the _Voces Populi_ of Mr. Guthrie, reprinted from the British _Punch_, than the _Short Sixes_ of Mr. H. C. Bunner, reprinted from the American _Puck_. The impression with which one rises from the reading of Mr.

Bunner's tales is as different as possible from that with which one rises from the reading of Mr. Guthrie's dialogues. In the one book we see the British selfish, brutal, narrow-minded; and in the other we see the Americans lively, kindly, good-humored. In each case the volume is made up of matter contributed week by week to a comic journal. If it be objected that the satirist is bound perforce to show the seamy side of human nature, the obligation ought to be equally respected on both sides of the Atlantic; and the fact is that Mr. Guthrie reports conversations which are very clever and very amusing, but which give us no liking for his fellow-countrymen; whereas Mr. Bunner's men and women we are ready and glad to take by the hand, even if we do not take them all to our hearts. Look down the _dramatis personae_ of Mr. Bunner's thirteen stories, and even the old curmudgeon who befools the little parson of one of "The Two Churches of Quawket" has humor enough to save him from hatred, and the little parson himself is pitiful rather than contemptible. Neither Colonel Brereton's Aunty nor the mendacious and persuasive colonel is a character whom any American would cross the street to avoid--far from it. And as for the pert young person who engages in "A Sisterly Scheme," and who is perhaps the most forward and objectionable young woman of recent fiction, where is the American who could object to her? Where, indeed, is the American who does not envy m.u.f.fets the fun of his courts.h.i.+p and the joy of his marriage?

George Eliot in one of her novels tells us that "a difference of taste in jests is a great strain on the affections"--a profound truth. There is little hope of happiness in a union where one party has a highly developed sense of humor and the other none at all. That is perhaps the reason why so few international marriages are happy. Certainly, the chief characteristic of the figures in Mr. Guthrie's little dramas is their absence of humor, and one of the chief characteristics of the people in Mr. Bunner's prose comedies is their abundance of humor. We laugh at the speakers in _Voces Populi_, while we laugh with the actors in _Short Sixes_. And we find in Mr. Bunner's book an unfailing variety, an unflagging ingenuity and an unforced humor, now rich and now delicate. We are delighted by wit, playful and incessant and never obtrusive. We discover ourselves to be dissolved in laughter, and often it is "the exquisite laughter that comes from a gratification of the reasoning faculty," as George Eliot called it in one of her letters.

Never is it laughter that we ever feel ashamed of; near the smile there is often a tear, hidden, and to be found only by those who seek. "The Tenor," for example, which may seem to some hasty readers almost farcical, is in reality almost tragic, in that the heroine sees the shattering of an ideal and stumbles over the clay feet of her idol. The "Love Letters of Smith" are broadly funny, if you choose to think them so, but I feel sorry for the reader who pays that clever sketch the tribute of careless laughter only.

Next, perhaps, to Mr. Bunner's firm grasp of character, to his delicate perception, to his keen observation, to his faculty of hinting a pathetic undercurrent beneath the flow of humor, comes his felicity in suggesting the very essence of New York. Only three of the thirteen little tales are supposed to happen in this great city, and these are, perhaps, not likely to be the most popular; but they are enough to show again what Mr. Bunner had already revealed in the _Story of a New York House_ and in the still uncollected _Ballads of the Town_, that he has a knowledge of this busy city possessed by no other American writer of fiction. It is knowledge not paraded in his pages, but it permeates certain of his characters. Take "The Tenor," for example. In that lively story the young girl, seeking out the being whom she has wors.h.i.+pped from afar, rashly ventures into the hotel where the singer and his wife live.

She goes as a servant, and she has a chance interview with one of the employees of the house--"a good-looking, large girl, with red hair and bright cheeks." This young person sees the name "Louise Levy" on the heroine's trunk. "You don't look like a sheeny," she remarks promptly.

"Can't tell nothin' about names, can you? My name's Slattery. You'd think I was Irish, wouldn't you? Well, I'm straight Ne' York. I'd be dead before I was Irish. Born here. Ninth Ward, an' next to an engine-house." Could anything be more intensely, impressively, essentially Manhattan than this little vignette framed in the doorway of a hotel?

There are those who choose to speak of Mr. Bunner as a humorist, because he is the editor of _Puck_. He is a humorist, no doubt, and his humor will endure, for it is founded on observation and on an understanding of his fellow-man. But he is a poet--as a true humorist must be. Perhaps his best story is "Love in Old Clothes," in which the humor and the poetry are inextricably blended, and in which there is a pure tenderness of touch I cannot but call exquisite. And yet, perhaps, I do not like it as well as the vigorous sketch called the "Zadoc Pine Labor Union." This is an object-lesson in Americanism; it is a model of applied political economy. And Zadoc Pine himself is one of the most direct and manly characters who has stepped from real life into literature. He has gumption and he has grit; he is an American as Benjamin Franklin was an American, and as Abraham Lincoln was. He could think as straight as he could shoot; and the tale of his rise in life is as potent a plea for freedom as Mr. Herbert Spencer's.

But about Mr. Bunner's writings I confess that I can never speak with the expected coldness of the critic, for the author is my friend for now many years. We have dwelt beneath the same roof for months at a time.

We have exchanged counsel day and night; we have heard each other's plans and projects; we have read each other's ma.n.u.script; we have revised each other's proof-sheets; more than once we have written the same story together, he holding the pen, or I, as chance would have it.

But shall friends.h.i.+p blind me to the quality of my comrade's art? When he puts forth a book, shall I pa.s.s by on the other side, silent, and giving no sign? That may be the choice of some, but it is not mine.

1891