Part 28 (2/2)

”Though you're bright, and though you're pretty, They'll not love you if you're witty.”

Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier are good ill.u.s.trations of this point. The former, by her fearless expressions of wit, exposed herself to the detestation of the majority of mankind. ”She has shafts,” said Napoleon, ”which would hit a man if he were seated on a rainbow.”

But the sweetly fawning, almost servile adulation of the _listening_ beauty brought her a corresponding throng of admirers. It sometimes seems that what is p.r.o.nounced wit, if uttered by a distinguished man, would be considered commonplace if expressed by a woman.

Parker's ill.u.s.tration of Choate's _rare humor_ never struck me as felicitous. ”Thus, a friend meeting him one ten-degrees-below-zero morning in the winter, said: 'How cold it is, Mr. Choate.' 'Well, it is not absolutely tropical,' he replied, with a most mirthful emphasis.”

And do you recollect the only time that Wordsworth was _really_ witty?

He told the story himself at a dinner. ”Gentlemen, I never was really witty but once in my life.” Of course there was a general call for the bright but solitary instance. And the contemplative bard continued: ”Well, gentlemen, I was standing at the door of my cottage on Rydal Mount, one fine summer morning, and a laborer said to me: 'Sir, have you seen my wife go by this way?' And I replied: 'My good man, I did not know until this moment that you _had_ a wife!'”

He paused; the company waited for the promised witticism, but discovering that he had finished, burst into a long and hearty roar, which the old gentleman accepted complacently as a tribute to his brilliancy.

The wit of women is like the airy froth of champagne, or the witching iridescence of the soap-bubble, blown for a moment's sport. The sparkle, the life, the fascinating foam, the gay tints vanish with the occasion, because there is no listening Boswell with unfailing memory and capacious note-book to preserve them.

Then, unlike men, women do not write out their impromptus beforehand and carefully h.o.a.rd them for the publisher--and posterity!

And now, dear friends, a cordial _au revoir_.

My heartiest thanks to the women who have so generously allowed me to ransack their treasuries, filching here and there as I chose, always modestly declaiming against the existence of wit in what they had written.

To various publishers in New York and Boston, who have been most courteous and liberal, credit is given elsewhere.

Touched by the occasion, I ”drop into” doggerel:

If you p.r.o.nounce this book not funny, And wish you hadn't spent your money, There soon will be a general rumor That you're no judge of Wit or Humor.

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