Part 6 (2/2)
Three American professional humourists whom I had the good fortune to meet and be with for some time were Irvin Cobb, Don Marquis, and Oliver Herford, each authentic and each so different. Beneath Mr. Cobb's fun is a ma.s.s of ripe experience and sagacity. However playful he may be on the surface one is aware of an almost Johnsonian universality beneath. It would not be extravagant to call his humour the bloom on the fruit of the tree of knowledge (I am talking now only of the three as I found them in conversation). Don Marquis, while equally serious (and all the best humourists are serious at heart), has a more grotesque fancy and is more of a reformer, or, at any rate, a rebel. His dissatisfaction with hypocrisy provoked a scorn that Mr. Cobb is too elemental to entertain.
Some day perhaps Don Marquis will induce an editor to print the exercises in unorthodoxy which he has been writing and which, in extract, he repeated to us with such unction; but I doubt it. They are too searching. But that so busy a man should turn aside from his work to dabble in religious satire seemed to me a very interesting thing; for nothing is so unprofitable--except to the honest soul of him who conceives it.
One of Don Marquis's more racy stories which I recollect is of a loafer in a country town who had the habit of dropping into the store every day at the time the free cheese was set on the counter, and buying very little in return. When the time came for the privilege to be withdrawn the loafer was outraged and aghast. Addressing the storekeeper (his friend for years) he summed up his ungenerosity in these terms: ”Your soul, Henry,” he said, ”is so mean, that if there were a million souls like it in the belly of a flea, they'd be so far apart they couldn't hear each other holler.”
As for Oliver Herford, he is an elf, a sprite, a creature of fantasy, who may be--and, I rejoice to say, is--in this world, but certainly is not of it. This Oliver is in the line of Puck and Mercutio and Lamb and Hood and other lovers and makers of nonsense, and it is we who ask for ”more.” He had just brought out his irresponsible but very searching exercise in cosmogony, ”This Giddy Globe,” dedicated to President Wilson (”with all his faults he quotes me still”) and this was the first indigenous work I read on American soil. Oliver Herford is perhaps best known by his ”Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten,” and there is a kitten also in ”This Giddy Globe”:
”Hurray!” cried the Kitten, ”Hurray!”
As he merrily set the sails, ”I sail o'er the ocean to-day To look at the Prince of Wales.”
--this was when the Prince was making his triumphant visit to New York in 1919--
”But, Kitten,” I said dismayed, ”If you live through the angry gales You know you will be afraid To look at the Prince of Wales.”
Said the Kitten, ”No such thing!
Why should he make me wince?
If a Cat may look at a King A Kitten may look at a Prince!”
This reminds me that the story goes that when the Prince expressed his admiration for Fifth Avenue he was congratulated upon having ”said a mouthful.” Beyond a mouthful, as an encomium of sagacity or sensationalism in speech, there is but one advance and that is when one says ”an earful.”
THE CARS
The journey from San Francisco to Chicago, once the fruit country is pa.s.sed, is drearily tedious, and I was never so tired of a train. The s.p.a.cious compartments that one travelled in on the Indian journeys, where there are four arm-chairs and a bath-room, are a bad preparation for the long narrow American cars packed with humanity, and for the very inadequate was.h.i.+ng-room, which is also the negro attendant's bed-chamber: ”Although,” he explained to me, ”when the car isn't full I always sleep in Berth Number 1.” If the night could be indefinitely prolonged, these journeys would be more tolerable; but for the general comfort the sleeping berths must be converted into seats at an early hour. In addition to books, I had, as a means of beguilement, the society of a returned exile from the Philippines, who told me the story of his life, showed me the necklace he was taking home to his daughter's wedding, and asked my advice as to the wisdom or unwisdom of marrying again, the lady of his wavering choice having been at school with him in New England and being now a widow in Nebraska with property of her own.
Besides being thus garrulous and open, he was the most helpful man I ever met, acting as a nurse to the three or four restless children in the car, and even producing from his bag a pair of scissors and a bottle of gum with which to make dolls' paper clothes. Never in my life have I called a stranger ”Ed” on such short acquaintance; never have I been called ”Poppa” so often by the peevish progeny of others.
It was on this train that I began to realise how much thirstier the Americans are than we. The pa.s.sengers were continually filling and emptying the little cups that are stacked beside the fountains in the corridors, and long before we reached Chicago the cups had all been used. In England only children drink water at odd times and they not to excess. But in America every one drinks water, and the water is there for drinking, pure and cold and plentiful. It is beside the bed, in the corners of offices, awaiting you at meals, jingling down the pa.s.sages of hotels, bubbling in the streets. In English restaurants, water bottles are rarely supplied until asked for; in our hotel bedrooms they seldom bear lifting to the light. As to whether the general health of the Americans is superior or inferior to ours by reason of this water-drinking custom, I have no information; but figures would be interesting.
CHICAGO
In Chicago the weather was wet and cold, and it was not until after I had left that I learned of the presence there of certain literary collections which I may now perhaps never see. But I spent much time in the Museum, where there is one of the finest Hobbemas in the world, and where two such different creative artists as Claude Monet and Josiah Wedgwood are especially honoured. But the chief discovery for me was the sincere and masterly work in landscape of George Inness, my first impression of whom was to be fortified when I pa.s.sed on to Boston, and reinforced in the Hearn collection in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
It was in Chicago, in the Marshall Field Book Department--which is to ordinary English bookshops like a liner to a houseboat--that I first realised how intense is the interest which America takes in foreign contemporary literature. In England the translation has a certain vogue--Mrs. Garnett's supple and faithful renderings of Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievski, and Tchekov have, for example, a great following--but we do not adventure much beyond the French and the Russians; whereas I learn that English versions of hundreds of other foreign books are eagerly bought in America. Such curiosity seems to me to be very sensible. I was surprised also to find tables packed high with the modern drama. In England the printed play is not to the general taste.
It was in Chicago that I found ”window-shopping” at its most enterprising. In San Francisco the costumiers' windows were thronged all Sunday, but in Chicago they are brilliantly lighted till midnight, long after closing hours, so that late pa.s.sers-by may mark down desirable things to buy on the morrow.
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