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That Very Silly Thing, Indeed, the Pun—Bad Spelling and Artemus Ward—Meiosis and Hyperbole—The Technique of Verbal Forms—Mr. Ballou and Mrs. Gamp—The Amazing Genius of O. Henry.

My little dears who learn to read, pray early learn to shun

That very silly thing indeed which people call a pun.

For instance, ale will make you ail, your aunt an ant may kill,

You in a vale may buy a veil, and Bill may pay the bill;

Or if to France your barque you steer, at Dover, it may be,

A peer appears upon the pier, who, blind, still goes to sea.

Ontario School Reader. 1876.

In the above stanza, the poet (the verse looks like that of Theodore E. Hook), having called the pun a “very silly thing indeed,” proceeds to prove it to our satisfaction in the lines that follow. Yet, as I remember it, they were intended at that remote period to be very amusing, an oasis of laughter in a desert of information.

Punsters are becoming rare. Many people have probably never seen one. There is as yet no law against them but only a sort of social ostracism that meets their effort with groans. The use of the groan as a form of applause belongs wholly to the younger generation. It is as effective as it is cruel. And if anything is needed to give the pun its final quietus, the schoolboy groan can do it.

Yet in point of historic dignity the pun stands easily first among the verbal devices of nineteenth century humor. It was among schoolboys and on the border line between the nursery and the schoolroom that it flourished best. But even adults of the earlier generation leaned heavily on it for support, and at least one name—that of Tom Hood—is inscribed in the history of literature on the strength of it.

In the case of the pun, the contrast or incongruity that makes humor is got from the fact that one and the same sound means two different things, and hence the word brings into connection two things that really have nothing to do with one another. In its most elemental sense there is nothing more in it than the indignity done to the words themselves—beyond that there is no thought and no meaning.

The pun naturally flourished best, and still to some extent flourishes, in the nursery and the schoolroom. The ability to use words is a new thing to the child; the ability to misuse them, consciously, is an awakening joy. It is a sort of triumph over the words themselves.

Such are the puns of schoolboys—this ancient one, for instance, on the divisions of the map of Ireland:

“Will you lend me your Ulster?”

“I Connaught, I will never be a Leinster.”

“What a Munsterous pun!”

The “triumph,” the primitive exultation out of which humor begins, is simply over the words—knocking them down, degrading them with a “merry ha-ha!”

But outside of the nursery and the classroom, puns get infinitely tiresome. At times, of course, the sheer ingenuity of getting the sounds together excites a sort of intellectual admiration. The thing is not exactly funny, but it is as “smart” as a clever conundrum.

Thus on a famous occasion in the French Chamber of Deputies the announcement was made that the city Herat in Afghanistan had been taken and the question was asked, “What does the Shah of Persia say to it?” This isn’t funny in English and there is no funny thought to it. But there was a burst of merriment, and the member speaking said he was afraid he had “aroused the smiles of the assembly”; and then they roared again. Why? Because in French the words were:

“Messieurs, on a pris l’Hérat, (les rats)

Que dit le Shah? (le chat)

········

Je crains d’avoir éveillé les souris de la Chambre.”

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This is the class of pun characteristic of the work of the greatest of all punsters Tom Hood. It is the ingenious incongruity in the words—nothing in the thought—that generally is the basis of his pun. Thus:

Ben Battle was a soldier bold

And used to war’s alarms

But a cannon-ball took off his legs

So he laid down his arms!

The only point here is the oddity of our English language which allows a man to lay down his arms without taking them off—because arms mean two things.

Translate it and it’s all gone:

Ayant perdu les jambes par un

Coup de canon, il quitta le service.

Not so funny, is it, or rather funny in a new incongruity that the French words won’t mean what the English did.

But the pun is at once lifted into a higher range when the confusion of the sound accidentally as it were brings out a secondary effect. This is often seen in the blunders and “howlers” made by schoolboys and students in their examination papers. Here is the oft-quoted case of a schoolboy who defined the equator as a “menagerie lion” running round the earth. He meant an “imaginary line” or rather those were the words taught him. Hence the reflection on the hopelessly mechanical way in which he had been taught. The pun in this case is not a mere verbality; it carries an underlying meaning. Still better perhaps is a piece of misspelling (involuntary pun) of a pupil of mine, years ago, who wrote that “Europe in the middle ages was governed on the fuddle system.” It certainly was.

It will nearly always be found that where a distinguished person has left behind him a reputation as a punster, the puns have survived because of this secondary or further application. This is the case with that lovable man the Reverend Sydney Smith (1771-1845) sometime Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is related that on one occasion his fellow canons were discussing, with characteristic clerical prolixity, the question of putting a wooden sidewalk round the cathedral. “Come, gentlemen” interrupted Sydney Smith, “lay your heads together and the thing is done.” Anyone hearing the story reflects with a chuckle, “Yes, it would be!” An analyst would see that the humor is based on the juxtaposition of the solidity and dignity of the heads of the clergymen and their use as a sidewalk.

Sometimes the wit and merit of a pun depend on its being impromptu and actual, not merely related. Anyone could have thought it out, worked it out. In that case it isn’t amusing. But when it is obviously made on the spot, the element of the impromptu gives it a sort of intellectual merit. I remember once, years ago, in the old unredeemed days of the saloon with the long mahogany bar and the long glass mirror, seeing a bibulous gentleman, irritated at the quality of the “free lunch,” pick up a too-solid sandwich and throw it at the looking glass. A witty friend of mine standing by murmured, “There’s food for reflection.”

On another occasion at a supper party where I was present, also in the dim past, when the game of golf was just beginning its vogue in Canada, somebody spoke of the new clubhouse and of the “pro” just engaged. “It seems,” said someone else “that he’s a very deserving young man; he’s using the money he gets at golf to pay his fees at the university.” “Indeed,” said a witty guest, with a simulation of bright interest, “putting himself through college!”

This same witty friend of mine—it was away back in the year 1900, when Lord Roberts was pursuing General Cronje—once amused himself at a social gathering by announcing, with all the appearance of keen interest, a fresh item of news from the South African War.

“Did you see,” he said, “that Lord Roberts has sent out his p.p.c. cards!”

“His p.p.c. cards?” said the puzzled listener. “What for? Is he to leave South Africa?”

“Oh no—pour prendre Cronje.”

But such effects depend for their value on their actuality. Anybody with a book of rhymes and synonyms could make them up.

The part played in the development of English humor by the pun is represented in America by the part played by bad spelling. For at least a whole generation bad spelling—that is to say, incorrect spelling not sanctioned by the spelling book—was the most obvious and popular mode of comic wit.

It is interesting to see how this came about and how it fits into the theory of humor. In earlier days—in Elizabethan and Stuart times—there was nothing funny about bad spelling—or not to the people who used it, though it may look funny to us now.

Here is an example of seventeenth century spelling from the pen of a highly cultivated gentlewoman, Mrs. Ralph Verney, writing to her exiled husband somewhere about the year 1650.

I must give thee some account of our own babyes heare. For Jack his leggs are most miserable crooked as ever I saw any child’s and yett thank god he goes very strongly and is very strayte in his body as any child can bee: and is a very fine child all but his legges....

Mrs. Verney apparently forgot, or didn’t care, that she had called them his “leggs” a line or two above. A little later in the letter she goes back to “leggs,” and remarks that Jack would “very fayne goe into ffrance to his father.”

Neither Artemus Ward nor Josh Billings ever thought of such a triumph over orthography as “ffrance,” without any capital letter and with a double f.

But in the seventeenth century the idea of a single unvarying standard of spelling was only just getting well established. In an earlier age to spell well seemed to mean to find some striking, expressive and phonetic way of putting letters together to make words. Hence the variations of Shakespeare’s name and the vagaries of Elizabethan writing. Strangely enough the same idea of spelling is coming back again in the modern commercial world. “Koffy Shoppes” and “Fittite” clothes and “Kool” drinks are a reversion to the past.

But in the middle nineteenth century, especially in America, it was not so. The glory of the nation was that it could read and write. It carried its tattered spelling books to its frontier cabins. In the little red schoolhouse the “scholars” spelled out their syllables in chorus. And in the evening gatherings in the log houses and frame schools, “spelling bees,” were at once an education and a diversion. “Abe” Lincoln could “spell down” any other adult in the settlement.

Hence the very eminence of spelling rendered it all the better mark for artful degradation. Bad spelling had in it something of the fun of irreverence without the evil conscience. And of all the bad spellers who ever adorned the history of American humor Artemus Ward (Charles Ferrar Browne, 1834-1867) came easily first. This quaint pathetic person, for a brief hour the delight of London, was a sort of wandering minstrel, born centuries after his time. He wandered from a New England farm to a printer’s office in Cleveland, and from there to the new Eldorado of Nevada and California. He published strange little “pieces,” gathered into what he entitled Artemus Ward: His Book (1862). He wandered over to England, gave what he called “lectures” to uproarious audiences of the “quality” of London—whose laughter elicited from him pained expressions of disapproval. He was, indeed, a perfect artist in make-believe—a humorist not of words but of manner, gesture and assumed personality. On his English lecture tour (his health was frail) he faded and died (1867). But around his memory a loving world has entwined a garland of affection as for a lost child.

Most typical of Artemus’ life and his work, and his place in the development of the humor of America is the famous historical occasion when Abraham Lincoln read aloud to his assembled Cabinet Artemus Ward’s “latest.”

It was on the morning of Monday, September 22, 1862, that Abraham Lincoln called his Cabinet together at the White House. He wished to announce to them what was undoubtedly the most momentous decision of his life. He was to read to them the Proclamation, which he had written the day before, setting free the slaves in the rebel States and destined to end American slavery for ever.

But first Lincoln informed the Cabinet that Artemus Ward had sent him his new book and that he would like to read them a chapter of it; with which, he read to them the “High-Handed Outrage at Utica.”

The dignified Mr. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, listened with dry disapproval. “The President,” he tells us in his diary, “seemed to enjoy it very much.” The Cabinet apparently laughed at it, except Stanton, who wouldn’t.

Then Lincoln laid the little book aside, and told the Cabinet that he had made a “promise to his Maker” which he proposed now to fulfil. With that he read aloud his proclamation for the emancipation of the slaves.

And here is what Artemus Ward wrote, and what Lincoln himself, in the cast of his mind, a humorist of the highest order, evidently found very funny:

HIGH-HANDED OUTRAGE AT UTICA

In the Faul of 1856, I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.

The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.

1 day as I was given a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn & disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.

“What under the son are you abowt?” cried I.

Sez he, “What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?” & hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.

Sez I, “You egrejus ass, that air a wax figger—a representashun of the false ’Postle.”

Sez he, “That’s all very well fur you to say but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!” with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.

The historic interest of the episode and of the extract is immense. But it seems strange that anybody could have found it very funny. Yet Artemus himself thought the “nub” of the piece (“Judas Iscarrot can’t show himself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site”), so funny that he had already used and readapted it three or four times. As to the President, it has become part of the Lincoln myth that he fell back upon these follies—the jokes and funny stories—only to relieve the breaking strain that threatened to crush him. This is nonsense. Strain or no strain, happy or unhappy, Lincoln loved what he thought a funny story. His cares and his surroundings had nothing to do with it. If he had been invited over to stay with Queen Victoria, he’d have told her a few “good ones.”

Bad spelling, as part of the technique of humor, ran riot in Artemus Ward’s day. But it died out and passed unregretted. To us even in retrospect it is never funny except in the few cases where it pleases and surprises by its ingenuity. It is funny when Artemus, in referring to a boa constrictor snake, calls it a “boy constructor.” It is funny when Josh Billings writes the word “yph” and we realize that he is trying to spell “wife.” But on the whole bad spelling exercises upon us now not a humorous effect but the contrary—which makes the written humor of the poor, lost Artemus little more than a historical product.

It is a considerable advance from the pun and bad spelling to the technique afforded by Meiosis and Hyperbole. These are very recondite terms. I remember many years ago being delighted to read the remark of a London book reviewer: “Mr. Leacock’s humor is based on an ingenious mixture of meiosis and hyperbole.” I felt that, after that, all I needed was a can of meiosis and a can of hyperbole and to go down to the cellar and mix them up.

Hyperbole, as most people know, means overstatement, exaggeration. Meiosis, as nobody knows, means understatement. Hyperbole has had a lot to do with the general development of our language. In order to “put a thing across” we state it strongly, we overstate it, often to a degree not literally possible. This is called a figure of speech. Thus we talk of people being “bathed in a flood of tears,” or being “on fire with enthusiasm.” They aren’t. Presently the very familiarity of the words weakens them. To say that a man is “incensed” or “melted” sounds quite literal and ordinary. We have to find a new exaggeration. Thus moves language. Half our words were once lies, used for effect.

But in a quite different way exaggeration was used, from the earliest times, as a mode of narrative and presently of conscious humor. All primitive literature is full of it. See the legends of the Round Table and the Sagas. In the nineteenth century this mode was worn out as narrative, except in the nursery, but came into its own as humor. It was one of the type forms of what came to be called “American Humor,” though never its main reliance. Mark Twain developed it to a high degree. In his Innocents Abroad, in describing his visits to the Italian picture galleries, he says:

We have seen thirteen thousand St. Jeromes, and twenty-two thousand St. Marks, and sixteen thousand St. Matthews, and sixty thousand St. Sebastians, and four millions of assorted monks, undesignated, and we feel encouraged to believe that when we have seen more of these various pictures, and had a larger experience, we shall begin to take an absorbing interest in them like our cultivated countrymen from Amérique.

But exaggeration taken by itself is poor stuff as humor. It needs to be combined with some other subtle elements, as a chemist makes a compound with a crude base and a minute portion of a powerful drug. Compare Bill Nye:

“There must be at least 500,000,000 rats in the United States; of course I am speaking only from memory.”

It is not the number of rats that is exaggerated; it is the power of consecutive human observation. The effect is brought out by the incongruity between the familiar form of words “speaking only from memory,” and the queer purpose to which it is put—counting all the American rats.

Sometimes the exaggeration goes beyond the bounds of what is possible in the physical world, yet retains a ludicrous analogy with common sense. As an illustration—a brave man ought not to fear lightning and should be willing to face it rather than let it subdue his native courage. But what are we to say to Eli Perkins’s statement:

“I got so sick of the lightning everlastingly fooling round my farm in Maine that one day I went out to the barnyard and took six strokes of it on my bare back.”

The opposite form to exaggeration is meiosis, or understatement, and this probably flourishes more among English writers and English people generally than anywhere else in the world. It is a part of English character. English people abhor sentimentality (the overdone expression of feeling), prefer to keep their sorrows silent rather than to parade them, and admire reserve and reticence. They like to make the least of things rather than to make the most of them.

Thus an Englishman speaks of the paintings of the great masters as “not half bad.” He classes Beethoven’s music as “rather good” and describes Niagara Falls as “quite striking.” If he is ruined financially he says he has had “rather a nasty knock.” If he has lost one arm and one leg in the war, he “came out a bit shy.” If he falls out of an airplane he says that things looked “rather ticklish for a while.” If he is dead broke, he says, he is “up a tree.” If he is half starved he says he’s “in a hole.” It will be recalled how the war news from the North Sea used to call it “certain signs of activity” when two or three war ships clashed together; and when the Germans bombarded the Yorkshire coast, spoke of it as “liveliness.”

A Frenchman, as far at least as his language goes, lives in a world of tragedies, passion and disasters. All of his words are overstatements. He is “crushed,” “overwhelmed,” “annihilated,” “transported.” All sorts of things happen to him all the time.

The American hits a happy mean between the English and the French, and whenever anything happens to him he lies about it. If he loses his money he says he has made a “clean up” and is getting out. If his wife leaves him he says she is in the Adirondacks. After all, it’s simpler and nicer for one’s friends. All three, English, American and French are just as good men. It is only the method of expression that differs.

So it comes about that the English easily slip into meiosis as a congenial form of humor. What they do unconsciously as their way of talking they do consciously as their way of joking. This is done not only in literary writing but in casual narrative. Thus an Englishman would tell about having a row with a cabman in words such as these:

“So the gentleman seemed to be getting rather excited (the cabman isn’t a gentleman and he is more than rather excited) and dancing around in most extraordinary manner and even suggesting the possibility of bashing one’s face so that one was just wondering about a little bit of persuasion over the head with a golf club, when luckily a bobby ... etc., etc.”

English story tellers of a humorous sort, such as Mr. P. G. Wodehouse (a prince among them), run easily to a sort of sustained understatement. Mr. Kipling, who could have been a great humorist if he had had time to (it is a leisurely trade), rolls off whole pages of meiosis. In his case it is better still; it is “smothered meiosis,” depending less on the single word than on a general effect. In Kipling’s hands (apart from a few pieces of exception) the whole of India is meiositated (or meiosificated), with the horror, the tragedy, and the stink taken out of it. Consider in such a connection the battle scenes in “The Drums of the Fore and Aft.” The whole story has a sort of undercurrent of something like humor running underneath. Giant Afghans are pleasant fellows, and Goorkhas with Kukri knives cheery little chaps always on the grin.... Thus ever mankind, through the mouths of those who speak for it, seeks to explain away its evils.

More than one beautiful example of meiosis is found in that superb piece of humor My Lady Nicotine, the appearance of which in 1888 indicated in James Barrie a new star on the horizon. One recalls the exquisite narrative of the killing of the editor. Here is what purports to be a part of the evidence given at the inquest held on the editor’s body:

Witness deposed:

I heard voices in altercation in a room near me. I thought that was likely to be the editor’s. I opened the door and went in. He had the editor on the floor and was jumping on him. I said, “Is that the editor?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Have you killed him?” He said, “Yes,” again. I said, “Oh!” and went away. That is all I remember of the affair.

Cross-examined: It did not occur to me to interfere. I thought very little of the affair at the time. I think I mentioned it to my wife in the evening. But I will not swear to that.

Indeed the whole book My Lady Nicotine is a sustained piece of meiosis—the understatement of life, the understatement of effort, the minimization of energy. Here is Scrymgeour who can’t bother to make the effort to correct a friend who asks after his “brother Henry” (he didn’t have any) and thus brings into mythical existence a brother who haunts his life. Here is Moggridge, who forgets to water the chrysanthemum. As technique the book is beautiful. Barrie moved on afterward to the larger humor and pathos of character and fate—the web of life. But this lighter web of gossamer should not be lost from sight.

Puns and bad spelling, overstatement and understatement are really only a few of the most obvious forms of humor in the misuse of words. The whole subject is so new and so unstudied that there is no terminology to apply to it. Thus there ought to be a word to mean “humor in the misuse of words.” But there isn’t. Still less have the various included cases any names or classification. So they must be picked up haphazard, anyhow, with such names as can in some way indicate them.

Face Value Technique. In a lot of humor effects, the technique consists in the contrast between the face value of the words or phrases as usually used and the logical significance of it. For example, we have a way of using a rhetorical question to replace a statement. We say, “Our school days, what memories do they not recall?” “My old nurse, can I ever forget her?”

Now many people—and especially Mr. Bob Benchley—see the weak spot in this construction; take the question at its face value and answer it, and what do you get?

“India”—it is Mr. Benchley writing a brief novel of Indian life—“what mysteries does the name not suggest?” Then Mr. Benchley pauses (presumably) and adds: “Well, I can think of a few that it doesn’t anyway—such as the mystery of the disappearance of the lost Charley Ross and why New York didn’t win the World Series....”

No one after getting on to these forms could ever again say, “My old nurse, can I ever forget her?” He would fear someone might say, “Yes, I think so, if you get a young one.”

Exactly the converse to the Face Value Form is found when words and phrases are rushed forward into a significance which they won’t bear on closer inspection; in fact the significance involves a complete impossibility. Yet the sense emerges with a queer incongruity between the fact that it does make sense and the equally true fact that it ought not to.

The author of the present work (if I may with modesty call myself that) has probably made more extended use of this than any other person who has written as copiously.

Thus, a rejected lover, in a wild frenzy of emotion, “leaped upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” The essence of this mode is that the words seem to be pushed forward into a meaning they don’t want. It is as if one tumbled them down hill. Example:

The legendary Bulbeks were a fabulous race, half man, half horse, half bird.

We have thus given them three halves which is more than arithmetic allows. Yet the sense is clear, and so we have as it were “taken a rise” out of the word half.

Another technique of humor somewhat analogous to Face Value is when words and phrases are, so to speak, made to work overtime. That is, they are forced into a meaning never given to them, but which on examination seems perfectly logical, as a meaning they ought to bear. The sudden verbal novelty brings a pleasant shock of surprise.

An example. A little boy said, “The food at the picnic was lovely. I’d have eaten more of it but I ran out of stomach.”

Exactly. He’d heard of people “running out of money” and “running out of bread,” etc., and he diagnosed his case as “running out of stomach.”

Much of the oft-quoted child humor (so pleasing in our own children, so tiresome in our friends’) is of this sort. It has in it, apart from its form, a pretty element of the pleasure that we take from our child being right about it, as the words really ought to mean what he makes them mean.

Mark Twain had an extraordinary facility for this extended use, this “overtime” use of words and phrases. It was one of the special features of his technique. It was based upon the same innocence of the artistic eye as enabled him to see the old Italian masters in their true colors (or lack of them).

Thus when in his Yankee he speaks of a knight’s armor as “hardware” he was right. So it would be in a Connecticut hardware store. Similarly he speaks of a little town in the Western States where the people were very religious and where every protestant sect had a plant of its own. Why not? If the apparatus of men and goods that makes up a factory is called a plant, then why not the apparatus that makes religion a going concern?

Mark Twain also employed a somewhat similar verbal trick of technique by making his characters use and confuse words that seem to be alike and seem to mean something but don’t. At times the effects are quite dazzling. See in Roughing It where “old Mr. Ballou” says that the horses are “bituminous from long deprivation.”

Mark Twain of course had no monopoly on this misuse of words put into the mouth of a funny character. On the contrary it became one of the most universal modes of fun in the nineteenth century. The only trouble was the difficulty in doing it well. From the pens of lesser people it became as tiresome as a bad pun. But at its best it is delightful. Charles Dickens could do it beautifully when he wanted to. Dickens, of course, could have been a burlesque writer if he had not been fortunately saved from it by his emotionalism, his eager conceit and his desire to save the world. See how easily he drops into pure burlesque in the opening chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit. And in the same book, in the language of the immortal Mrs. Gamp, we see the technique of confused words effected to perfection. (Readers of the newer age see under Gamp, Sairey, or Sarah, character by Dickens, Charles (1812-1870) in his book Chuzzlewit, Martin.) Mrs. Gamp speaks of the steamer that ran from London to Antwerp as the “Ankworks package.” Why not? If a steamer can come to be a packet, why can’t it be a “package”? And if foreigners insist on such outlandish names as “Antwerp” surely “Ankworks” is close enough, and sounds more British and straightforward.

But if one wants to see a perfect glory and riot of verbal forms one must turn to the American O. Henry. Here it is as a garden exuberant with mingled weeds and blossom. No one ever used language as O. Henry did. The careless way in which he threw it round has never been equaled or approached.

We are told that the “reading public” is losing touch—have lost touch—with O. Henry. But the thinking public has not—and will not. O. Henry’s name and his works belong to the history of letters, and not in America alone. The circumstances of our time—the easy print, the flowing syndicated page—render the “reading public” and the pabulum on which it feeds a transitory and changing thing, like water in a pipe or colors in a chameleon. But as the “public” passes and dies, literature, the real literature, remains, like the golden sands left in the bed of the stream.

To this literature belongs the name and the memory of O. Henry. Yet the circumstances of his life—his lack of school, his roving life in the West, the fugitive years in Latin America and then the dark shadow of the prison, his emergence into the twilight, his broken life and its decline—all of this gave to his work a peculiar and fragmentary character. It is as it were only an indication of what he might have done, as if it showed that henceforth nothing for him was worth while. Nor was it. Readers of Bob Davis’s fascinating book, The Caliph of Bagdad—O. Henry, can appreciate the background and the spirit of O. Henry’s work.

None of it is complete. None of it is the work of absorption. Much of it is as the careless sport of genius, the mind elsewhere. Other natures, perhaps, blighted thus by earth’s cruelty, might have retired, silent, into the dark, written perhaps a priceless sonnet or two, and so died. Not so O. Henry. He wrote—because he needed money—and because he couldn’t help writing. But he wrote, often with a queer contempt of writing itself; his was the exact opposite to the self-conscious artist, choosing his words, luxuriating in his own conceit, trimming and clipping his prose like a Dutch gardener on a lawn.

O. Henry’s mind was incapable, or had by fate been rendered incapable, of a long and sustained flight. His wings broke easily under him. Life was not worth the effort of the altitude. Hence the form of his writing runs to short stories; “anecdotes” they have been falsely called; but we can fuse them together into a vast single picture of his Enchanted Bagdad or his Illimitable West. And hence too in point of technique O. Henry developed an extraordinary aptitude for misused verbal forms—quick and lazy. It was as if he shifted certain gears and gadgets in his head and the words automatically came out a little off-center. Just as the pun becomes to the inveterate punster, almost automatic, a matter of auricular nerve and sound reproduction—a self-starter, so to speak—so O. Henry’s quaint verbal forms flow effortless from his pen.

Especially does he love to put them into the mouths of his Western characters, his Jeff. Peters, his Andy Tucker and Telemachus Hicks. The collection of stories called Heart of the West is a perfect garden of such flowers. Here are a few odd blossoms:

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“She was a woman” [says Telemachus Hicks in describing his rivalry with Paisley Fish for the affections of the widow Jessup], “that would have tempted an anchovy to forget his vows.”

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“It’s right plausible of you, Mr. Pratt” [says Mrs. Sampson, another Western widow with rival lovers], “to take up the curmudgeons on your friends’ behalf, but it don’t alter the fact that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to ruffle the ignominy of any lady.”

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“She sang some” [relates Jud Odour in speaking of Miss Willella of Pimienta], “and exasperated the piano with quotations from the operas.”

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“I tell you, Andy” [says old Mack Lonsbury in disclaiming all knowledge of women], “I never had the least intersection with their predispositions.”