John Kendrick Bangs and the transition from nineteenth to twentieth [PDF]

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71-7426 COX, Virginia Lee, 1932JOHN KENDRICK BANGS AND THE TRANSITION FROM NINETEENTH TO TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN HUMOR. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1970 Language and Literature, modern

University Microfilms, A XEROX C om p any, A nn Arbor, M ichigan

(JOSit: iUiALMICK HAKG5 AND THIS TRANSITION FiiOii NINETEENTH 10 TtfKNTIEIH-CEN i'URY AMERICAS HUMOR

DISSERTATION L\:ntod in i-artial Fuli'illiaont of the Requirements for the Deyree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Lee

By y

Virginia'Cox, '-.A., !'.A, * * * * ^ *

i'he Ohio State University 1970

Approved by

' Adviser Sartmeut of English

PLEASE NOTE: Not original copy. Several pages have blurred, light and indistinct type. Filmed as received, UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS.

PREFACE

There Is scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not related, few which in some sense it has not governed. It has moved into literature, not merely as an occasional touch, but as a force determin­ ing large patterns and intentions.1 Like much of the literature produced in this country during the decade from 1890 to 1900, humorous writing was undistinguished.

The

popular wits of the day, people like Guy Wetmore Carryl, Hayden Caruth, Oliver Herford, H. C. Bunner, Carolyn Wells, and Golett Burgess, thought so clover and amusing by their cam generation, would be recog­ nized today only by the specialist in the period.

Their work, polite

and dainty in comparison with the gusto of the er.rlier tradition of nineteenth-century humor, is not likely to appeal to contemporary audiences.

It is not surprising, therefore, that while Walter Blair

and others have investigated pro-Civil War humor, and more recently Norris Yates has directed attention to twentieth-century developments,^ the humor of the nineties has remained largely unexplored.

However, as

a transitional phase in an important type of American writing it can lay claim to historical significance.

Although the "work of the genteel

authors who supplied this humor has long since faded into oblivion, it

-Constance Rourke, American Humort A Study of the National Character (New York, 1953) 1 p. 9; first published in 1930L. ^The American Humorist: (Ames, Iowa, 19^7 •)

Conscience of the Twentieth Century.

nonetheless established the precedents, introduced the changes, and reflected the trends that ultimately became the new "Little Man" humor that has prevailed since 1920.

As a stop toward understanding this

neglectod phase in the evolution of American humor, this study -will analyse the works of the most popular and representative genteel humor­ ist of the 1890's, John Kendrick Bangs* Of the nearly sixty-five volumes Bangs published in his life­ time, forty-five were intended to provide light entertainment for adult readers.

Most of this humorous writing appeared first in magazines be­

fore being published in book form, in the text or in footnotes}

(Such instances will bo noted either

if not otherwise specified the reader may

assume a given work was originally issued in book form,)

A vast amount

of his writing, especially that produced during the first four years of his career, remains unaompiled.

The research comprising this project

lias been based on that part which was collected In books because it was his best and most representative work*

Bangs's non-humorous works, his

juvenile stories, serious political books, and volumes of sentimental verse, will not be considered except insofar as they serve to Illuminate relevant aspects of his humor. The introductory chapter gives a brief summary of the major developments in American humor up to the sdd-1880's when Bangs began his career, of certain social trends in the last quarter of the nineteenth century which bore directly on the changes taking place in humorous writing, and of pertinent biographical information*

The summary of

major developments in our native tradition of humor has been organized around the characteristics which serve to define it:

iii

character-types,

subjects, techniques, and forms.

The four following chapters are de­

voted to an analysis of Bangs’s humorous works, grouped according to their general subject matter— sooial, political, literary, and super­ natural. arbitrary}

The classifying of certain selections has of necessity been a work like Katharine, for example, could be regarded as

either social or literary satire*

In such oases, I have made ny deci­

sion on the basis of what seemed to me to have been Bangs’s main satiric target.

Each of these four chapters has in turn been organised

according to more specific topics within the general category of subject matter it concerns.

Chapter VI takes up the major innovations in

American humor since 1920, for convenience designated collectively as that of the ’’Now Yorker school,"

pointing out the most significant

differenoos between this humor, the major strain of the nineteenth century, and Bangs’s genteel style.

The oonduding chapter summarizes

how Bangs’s work both continues and departs from these earlier and later schools of humor. Hyphenation in direct quotations from Bangs’s work has been altered to oonform to current practice.

iv

VITA May 23 1 1932

•* • • •

B o m - Greenfield, Ohio

1950 * • » • • • • • •

B.A# in Psychology, magna cum l&ude, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio

1 960 -6I

Teaching Assistant in Englidi, U.C.L.A., Los Angeles, California

....... .. •

1 9 6 1 ...............

M.A* in English and Junior College Teaching Credential, U.C.L.A., Los Angeles, California

1961-68

...........

Assistant Instructor in English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1968-71

............

Instructor in English, Wisconsin State University, Oshkosh, Wisconsin

FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field:

ilineteenth-century American Literature

Studies in American Humor

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE............................................... . . V I T A ....................................................

Page ii v

Chapter I,

INTRODUCTION ...................................

1

II.

SOCIAL S A T I R E .................................

27

III.

LITERARY SATIRE AND B U R L E S Q U E ..................

75

IV.

POLITICAL SATIRE...............................

Ill

THE SUPERNATURAL.................

1^9

VI,

TWENTIETH-CENTURYDEVELOPMENTS...................

167

VII.

CONCLUSION.....................................

209

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................

215

V.

vi

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

Few students today know of John Kendrick Bangs, but in the eighteen nineties he was "one of the most conspicuous eminences in American letters."-*'

His Houseboat on the Styx was the first American

book to lead Bookman*s best-seller lists, and from 1895 to 1899 the Bookman lists indicate that his works outsold those of all other American humorists.

Punch invited him to contribute to its pages, an

honor it extended to only two other nineteenth-century American humor­ ists, Artemus Ward and Mark Twain.

Bangs's friends and associates

included not only such famous literary and publishing figures as J. Henry Harper, Edward Bok, Charles Dana Gibson, Rudyard Kipling, Richard Harding Davis, A. Conan Doyle, William Dean Howells, and Twain, but other notables like Theodore Roosevelt, whose supporter and oonfidant he was both before and after Roosevelt became president.

In his

capacity as editor of two successful humor magazines, Life (from 1884 to 1888) and Puck (from 1904- to 1905), and as humor editor of four Harper publications, the Weekly, the Magazine, the Bazaar, and the Round

Wilson Follett, The Atlantic Monthly, CLXVII (July, 1941), 142.

1

2 Table (from 1888 to 1899),

Bangs exerted a singular influence on comic

journalism during the nineties.^ As the most popular and representative genteel humorist of this period, moreover, Bangs epitomizes the changes that were taking place in our national humor as it shifted from the rougher native strain that predominated for most of the nineteenth century to the sophisti­ cated humor that has prevailed since 1920.

Bangs's work reflects a

carry-over from the older tradition, belongs to nineteenth-century genteel culture,

k

and foreshadows new trends.

In order to show his

relationship to both older and later humorous writing, this chapter will summarize the identifying characteristics of the native strain of American humor and supply relevant historical and biographical informa­ tion. The following description of our old school of humor will rely principally on the Introduction to Walter Blair's anthology, Native

2

The Weekly, not to be confused with the Magazine, was founded in 1857! Harper's New Monthly Magazine, founded in 16,50, became Harper's Magazine in 192-5* the title used throughout this study; Harper's Bazar, a weekly magazine for women founded in 1867, became a monthly in 1901 and changed the spelling of its title to Bazaar in 1929; Harper's Young People, begun in 1879, changed its name to Harper's Round Tablein ^L895. and became a monthly in 1897. ^Thomas L. Masson, Our -American Humorists (New York, 1931), p. 26, ^Whon applied to culture and society in this study, the term "genteel” will be used in a broad, general sense to mean polite society, consisting of well-bred, educated people and of manness appropriate to such a class. When applied to literature— humor in particular— "genteel” will refer to techniques and style, rather than to social attitudes or moral values.

3 American Humor.^

Although It will adhere to Blair's threefold classi­

fication, into Down East Humor (I83O-I867), humor of the Old Southwest (1830~1867), and humor of the literary comedians (1855-1900), it will not, like his comprehensive essay, stress the changes that occurred throughout the nineteenth century but instead the qualities which those three phases of humor shared. Although 1830 sorvos as a conveniont date to mark the emergence of a humorous literaturo with a distinctive American cast, its basic elements wore discernible -well before thi3 timo.

The first important

typo-figurc in American humor, the Yankee, had begun taking shape as early as the late seventeenth century in Hew England and had assumed full proportions by the end of the Revolutionary War,

In Ro y a n Tyler’s

drama, The Contrast (I787X he appeared as Brother Jonathan, a country bumpkin, and later was depicted variously as a peddler, horse trader, soldier, or small town gossip;

but whatever M s occupation the Yankee

figure was on uncouth, rural eccentric Tilth certain persistent traits— caution, frugality, shrewdness, taciturnity, dry wit, a blank expression, irreverence, and ingenuity.

While seemingly naive and ignorant, his

common sense and lack of piety for "sophisticated11 values enabled him to triumph over hie more learned antagonists*

His portrayal as a

clever trickster proved to bo continually amusing to American audiences throughout tho nineteenth century.

•5San Francisco, I960; first published in 1937* The discussion also owes much to Blair’s Horse Sense in American Humor (New York, 1962), first published in 19^21 Constance Rourke1s American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York, 1953)» and Jonnotte Tandy* s Craokerbox Philosophers in American Humor and Satire (New York, 196f), first published in 19^5 •

4 Next to that of a rascal, the Yankee1a most popular role was that of the orackerbox oracle.

In this role he entered our national

literature in 1830 in the person of Jack Downing, a simple New England country boy.

From that time until the death of Will Rogers in 1935*

’’America was at no time without at least one homespun humorous philosos

pher.1’

Jack was the creation of Seba Smith, editor of the Portland,

Maine, Daily Courier, in which his letters first appeared.

In his

first letter, addressed to his Cousin Ephraim, Jack described his journey to Portland from his native Downingville, carrying a load of ax handles and his mother's cheese, and his stumbling into a session of the Maine legislature, whose squabbles he observed in rustic wonder. Later Jack traveled to Washington, where he became President Jackson's unofficial adviser and continued to comment on politics and other national affairs, exposing hypocrisy and corruption in the process. Like succeeding crackerbarrel philosophers, Jack achieved his satirical effects in one of two trays:

he uttered his opinions either as a naive,

innocent person who did not realize their broader implications, or as a clear-sighted, common sense person whose criticism of his alleged betters would be offensive if it did not come from an eccentric ’’inferior."^ Jack Downing's popular letters reflected one of the perennial subjocts of our native humor, politics! dealt with others also.

but Down East writers of comedy

The monologues of Francos N. '.-/'hitcher1a Widow

^ECLair, Native American Humor, p. 39 (footnote), ?In this capacity the crackerbox oracle carries on the tradition of the Old World Fool, his direot ancestor.

Bedott and the exploits of Benjamin P. Shillaber1s Mrs. Partington, our first female condo figures, satirized New England village life, char­ acter, and social manners*

Domestic events like teas, sewing oiroles,

and eourtings provided typical subjects for their sketches*

The works

of Whiteher and Shillaber, moreover, demonstrated the growing interest of eastern humorists in realistic and individualized portrayal, an interest that beoame increasingly apparent as this strain of humor developed until authentic regional depiction beoame its main concern* As for techniques, Down East humorists from the beginning used dialect, homely similes and metaphors, and exaggeration, all frequently combined with understatement.

Their work was also marked by illiterate

spelling and malapropJJsms, and they retained the dead pan style of tell­ ing a joke which had been part of their region's humor from its earliest expressions.

One of their favorite forms was the monologue, frequently

embodied in letters to a newspaper, narratives, or mock lectures.

They

also were fond of proverbs and aphorisms, parables, verses, jokes, essays, tales and anecdotes, plays, speeches, and sermons.

Their work

was puKLidied in newspapers, almanacs, travel books, jest books, and comic periodicals and anthologies* Yankee humor reached its apotheosis in James Russell Lowell's The Biglow Papers. Lowell started the First Series, collected and published in 184-8, during the Mexican War and the Second Series, collected and published in I867, during the Civil War.

The first letter,

printed in the Boston Courier on June 17, 1846, was signed by Ezekiel Blglow, a Massachusetts farmer, and enclosed a poem written by his uneducated son, Ho sea,

Zeke explained that Ho sea had gone to Boston

6 where ho had soon a ,(cruotin Sarjunt a struttin around as popior as a hen with 1 chicking.1’ He came homo "considerabal riled," and that night his parents hoard him thrashing around in hi 3 bedroom "like a short-tailed Ball in fll-timo,"

"Don?t you Eoe skeerod," Zeke reassured

his wife, "he's oney arnakin pottery."

Tho poem, written in rustic

dialoct like the letter, was a common sense denunciation of thorecruit­ ingsergeant and

by implication of tho Mexican War.

Inthe

Lowell began a series of excellent political, caricatures.

third letter In "Debate

in Sennit," for instance, ho parodied in an irreverent manner, what purported to bo a bombastic speech by

John C. Calhoun, concluding}

"Here wo stand on the Constitution, by thundert It's a fact o' wich ther's bushels o' proofs; Fer how could we trample on't so, I wonder, Ef ft worn't that it's oilers under our hoofs?" Soz John C. Calhoun, sez he; "Human righto hain't no more Right to come on this floor, No moro'n tho man in the moon," sea he. Lowell'o portrait of General Zachary Taylor in "Letter from a Candidate for the Presidency" is a delightful example of political satire and irony.

After two expansive verses of a campaign address Taylor con­

cluded with: "That is, I mean, it seems to me 30 , But, ef the public thinks I'm wrong, I wun't deny but whut I be so." After presenting his platform, the General said; "Ez to ny principles, I glory In havin' nothin' of the sort; I ain't a Wig, I ain't a Tory, I'm jest a candidate, in short." In other letters Lowell introduced Parson Wilbur, Hosea's pastor who wrote pendantlc prefaces to his verses, and Birdofredum Sawin, whose

letters recounted his experiences In tho war, which he found disillu­ sioning and uncomfortable.

The mosquitoes were so big that they stuck

their stingers clear through his legs, and the Mexicans, failing to understand America’s high motives, were so impolite as to shoot at the invaders.

Sawln gradually degenerated into a rascal, ingenious and

victorious, but unscrupulousnonetheless.

He was Lowell's happiest

invention and one of American literature’s most amusing rogues, Tho Bimlow Papers, then, illustrate the predominant character­ istics of Down East humor.

In them Lowell created two strongly

individualized characters, Hosea, the homespun philosopher, and Birdofredum Sawin, tho unconquerable scallawag.

The verses contained

Illiterate rustic dialect and turns of phrase, homely allusions, dry­ lipped sarcasm, and exaggeration coupled with tight understatement in monologues presented as letters.

The Biglow Papers represent an admi­

rable literary accomplishment with an unmistakable native flavor. Developing concurrently with Down East Humor was that of the Old Southwest, which treated the comic aspects of background, custom, and character in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri.

Like the Yankee, the central character in this

body of literature was illiterate, irrevent, bent on triumph, resource­ ful, and blessed with mother wit.

But he also differed:

he was

violent, cruel, immoral, boastful, more crude, and in general more exu­ berant than his wry, laconic New England counterpart.

In figures like

Davy Crockett, tho most popular exemplar of the frontiex*sman, and Hike Fink, tho king of the keelboatmen, ho became a nythic demigod capable of superhuman feats.

"Gentlemen,” tho legendary Crockett boasted,

"I'm tho darling branch of old Kentuck that can eat up a painter, hold a buffalo out to drink, and put a rifle-ball through the moon,"

As a

boy he tied together the tail of two buffaloes and carried home five tiger cubs in his cap.

He wrung tho tail off a comet and announced that

ho could "travel so all lightnin' fast that I've been known to strike O fire agin the wind," Like Davy, Mike Fink boasted loudly about his capacity to drink and fight.

Although traits of the Yankee trickster

woro obvious in the two most vivid Southwestern rascals, Johnson J, Hooper's Simon Suggs and George W. Harris' Sut Lovingood, again there vjas a difference,

V/hereas the Yankee's exploits had an ethical moti­

vation— for example, to demonstrate the superiority of rustic values over civilised values or to expose vice through satire— Sut, Simon, and their ilk were "frankly unethical and amoral,"9 When Simon swindles his father out of a horse, cheats at gambling, blackmails a widow, or steals tho collection at a camp meeting, and when Sut breaks up a wedding by sending a bull and a beehive Into the ceremony, puts lizards up a parson's pantlegs, or ties a hog-gut to a sleeping Irishman's shirttuil, each does so out of unmotivated malice.

Like most characters

in Southwestern humor, tho worthless Simon and the brutal Sut were irretrievably lowlife figures. Many of the Crockett tales concern Davy's political experiences in Washington, where, in the homespun oracle tradition, ho commented

Quoted in Rourke, p. 5^* 9p©rcy H. Boynton, literature and American Life (Boston, 1936)# pp. 614-615. Quoted in Blair, Native American Humor, p. 88,

in his shrewd, unsophisticated way on the corruption in Jackson's administration.

Sut neither politics nor tho more fomlnine, domestic

interests of 1/idow Eedott and Mrs. Partington provided typical subjects for Southwestern humor.

It favored instead ruggedly masculine and high

ly competitive activities like hunting, gambling, marksmanship, feats of strength, and hoir-breadth adventures.

For example, among the inci­

dents contained in Augustus B. Longstroet's Georgia Scenes wore a horse swap, art oar-and-no se-biting fight, a fox hunt, a shooting match, and a gander-pulling,

Many yarns from the region dwelt on physical discom­

fort and procreative and other bodily functions, reflecting the strong vulgar streak that ran through so much of its humor.

Numerous tales

concerned animals a;id their resemblance to human beings. Tho techniques employed by tho Down East and Southwest humor­ ists both resembled and differed from one another.

The Southwestern

writers from the beginning strived for an authentic rendering of char­ acter and locale and used dialect as a chief moans of achieving this realism, as had later Yankee humorists.

Their vrorks were frequently

picaresque in structure, like Hooper's Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, a loosely linked series of tales describing tho hero's devious adventures as he traveled from place to place throughout the Southwest, Although the Southwestern writers did not use the understatement typical!, of low-koyed Down East comedy, tho Yankee's blank expression was part of their regular equipment.

A straight face, in fact, was an

Inherent source of amusement in tall tales, in which the narrator re­ counted his outrageous lies as if unaware that they represented any­ thing but matter-of-fact truth.

Exaggeration, the essence of the tall

10 tales, and tho framework narrative were the two techniques which gave Southwestern humor its uniqueness;

both had their origins in

"America's greatest folk art— the art of oral story-telling."^

Brief­

ly, the device of the framework consisted of a realistic introduction ■written in literary language, describing the story's setting and the teller of the tale.

Then the introducer stood aside and let the teller,

speaking in the vernacular, relate his yarn, which invariably contained elements of fantasy.

1/hen ho had finished, the first speaker resumed

the narrative and concluded the story. three kinds of incongruities:

This box structure produced ti between the grammatical language of the

framework and the colorful dialect of tho yarn-spinnor; between the "situation at the time tho yarn was told and the situation described in the yarn itself,

and between the realism of the framework and the

fantasy of the tale.

Although all the best Southwestorn humorists used

tiiis narrative method— Long street, Hooper, Thompson, Harris, and Joseph

12

Baldwin

—

perhaps tho best example is Thomas B. Thorpe's classic,

"The Big Tear of A r k a n s a s . T h e story begins with tho narrator's detailed description of the varied passengers traveling upstream on a Mississippi steamboat.

Suddenly an Arkansas hunter, the "Big Bar,"

appears and, after a few boasts about his home state, launches into an

^Blu.ir, Bative American Humor, p. 70* n Ibid.. p. 92 .

12

Joseph Baldwin wrote Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (Mew York, 1853), an account of his experiences as a frontier lawyer. •^pirst printed in the March 27, 18^1, issue of Spirit of the Times, important as on early promoter of Southwestern humor.

H account of how ho tracked and finally caught a huge boar, not because ho hit him but bo cause it was a "creation bar" and his time had come. After the hunter finishes, tho original speaker picks up the narrative, describing the other passengers* reactions and tho [Jig bar 1s departure to have a drink, and concludes the story,

this fine skotch embodies

all the contrasts cited above— bntweon the highly formal language of the introduction and the conclusion and tho illiterate but picturesque talk of the yarn-spinner, who vividly characterizes himself in tho process of telling his tale, between the commonplace scone on the steamboat and the fantasy world of the boar hunt, and bo tirean the realism of tho sotting and tho mythical world of the tall tale. Besides tho strain of myth and fantasy which runs t'rough it, Southwestern humor was marked by other poetic effects, similar to those of Down East humor, namely homoly and comic figures of speech.

For

example, in ono tale a backwoodsman said, " A bear sat in the crotch of a treo looking at them dogs calm as a pond in low water."

Another

said, "Tho fellor looked as slunk in the face as a baked apple," and t

Sut Lovingood once remarked of a sheriff, "He drawed in the puckerinTstring ov that legil face of his'n."”^

Liko their Down East counter­

parts, Southwestern humorists expressed themselves in monologues, such as tho tall taloc, and in essays and proverbs. rable proverbs is Simon Suggs's:

Ono of the most memo­

"It is good to bo shifty in a new

country,-" but Davy Crockett also contributed several pithy ono s.

With

reference to elections, he pronounced, "A fool for luck, and a poor

^Quoted in Rourko, pp. 75 ;

12 mail for children,” and about orooked moneylenders, ,rWhat is got over the devil*s back, is sure to be spent under his bellie»”

However, South­

west comedy, which like tho Down East strain was published in newspaper$ almanacs, comic periodicals, and books, seldom took the form of letters or verso.^

"Jinstead its principal forms were the mook oral talc ("re­

productions in print of yarns told in the vernacular by a narrator of the story who might delight a fireside audience1')^ and the anecdote, which oral narrative encouraged, rather than integrated plots. The third major phase in the evolution of native American humor was introduced by the literary comedians, who first appeared during the mid-1850ts and by the end of the Civil War had established national 19

*

reputations."'

Wr. ELair cites these men as our first professional

comics because their widespread popularity and the increased esteem awarded them by the public enabled them to make a living entirely from their humorous work.

Although the list cov.1..1. be vastly e x p a n d e d , a

few of tho most famous literary comedians (given names first, followed by pseudonyms) were, in order of the books which established their reputations:

George Horatio Derby (1823-61), "John Phoenix,"

^ A n exception to this statement is William T. Thompson* s iiajor Jones, who adopted the epistolary form. l%Lair, riative American Humor, p. 89 . ELair theorised that "American humor split after the Civil War, with the professional funny men continuing the tradition of amus­ ing expression and another group, the local writers, continuing the tradition of local portrayal.”— Native American Humor, p. 126. Down East and Southwestern humor had combined these two traditions. •^In addition to tho eight mentioned here, Blair cites thirtysix more,--Native American Humor, pp. 103-0^.

13 Phoonlxlana (1855)*

Robert Henry Newell (1836-1901), "Orphous C, Kerr,"

The Orphous C. Kerr Papers (1862); 'Artemus Ward," Ar tennis Ward;

Cliarlos Farrar Browne (183^-67),

His Book (1862);

David Ross Locke (1833-

88, "Petroleum V. Nasby," Tho Hasby Papers (186*J-); 95)i "Josh Billings’1 Josh Billings;

Henry W. Shaw (1818-

His Sayings (1C65); Charles [I*

Smith (1826-1903), "Bill Arp ,'1 Bill Arp. So-Called (1866);

Edgar W.

Nye (1850-9$, "Bill Hye," Bill Bye and Boomerang (1881) Tho dominant character-type tho work of those funnoymon pro­ jected dorivod from that of earlier humor but displayed a fovr modifi­ cations.

Like their predecessors, the litorary comedians were educated

men, who, for tho purposes of being funny, assumed tho guise of an eccentric, Illiterate, irreverent, naive but shrewd, rural character,

on

Artemis Ward, as he offered advice to Lincoln during tho Civil War and commented satirically on topical matters, like the hypocritical patriots ■who dodged the draft and sold horse neat to the arny, was clearly patterned after Jack Downing, the homespun philosopher.

Bill

Arp and especially Petroleum V, Nasby wore at least as coarse and un­ scrupulous as Birdofredum Sawln and Sut Lovingood,

However, the relation­

ship botiroen tho author and the character he created differed in that tho literary comedians were lecturers as well as writers, whose pen names, representing their comic personae, became identified with them.

^ X t goes without saying that tho greatest literary comedian was Lark Twain, but he was much more besides— America's greatest humor­ ist of all time and one of her greatest writers. ^ S e b a Smith and Lowell were college graduates, most of the Southwestern writers were either lawyers or journalists, and nearly all tho literary comedians began thoir careers as newspaper writers.

Thus, while few oarlier readers associated Jack Downing with Seba Smith, lecture audiences after the Civil War bothered little about distinguishing Ar tennis Ward from Charles Farrar Broome.

This change

resulted in a blurring of characterization and weakening of individuality; Charles Henry Smith, for example, sometimes expressed views which he him­ self held and sometimos those of Bill Arp, the ignorant scoundrel. Furthermore, tho literary comedians invented few characters bosidos their public personalities.

Jack Dawning had brought to life a whole

family of eccentric, amusing Hew Englanders, but Josh Billings had no parents, uncles, or cousins. The later funnymen employed many of tho same techniques tho older humorists had, most notably hyperbole and comic figures of speech* Their dialect was also that of an illiterate person, but it did not servo to characterize the speaker, as the dialect in earlier writing had, but only to entertain.

They also inherited tho dead pan expres­

sion of tho Down East Yankee and tho western tall talker, but employed it in a different way.

As stage porforreors, their effect depended as

much on how they said something as on what they said, and uttering absurdities with a solomn face apparently proved irresistibly amusing to thoir audiences.

A reviewer from tho London Spectator said of

Artemus Ward’s lecture:

"This [bhrd's guise as a simpleton]], with tho

melancholy earnest manner of a man completely unconscious that there is anything grotesque in what he says, convoys an effect of inimitable humor."^

However, tho most striking contrast between the techniques

“^Quoted in Slair, Natlvo American Humor, p. H 6 .

of the literary comedians and those of their predeoessors lay In their emphasis on verbal devices*

Earlier comments have suggested that post*

Civil War humor stressed Individualized characters and regional differ­ ences much less than earlier humor, mainly because Its creators tried to appeal to a 'wider, more national audience*

As a result, it relied

much more for its comic impact on queer ways of putting things*

To the

bad spelling and malapropisms of the earlier humorists the literary comedians added puns, coined words, mixed metaphors, pretentious and misapplied learning, anti-climax, and mangled sentences, grammar, and logic*

For example, this sentence from Artemus Ward uses misspelling,

anti-climax, a Shakespearian quotation In an Inoongruous context, and a play on words:

"Gents, it grooves my hart in ay old age, when I'm in

the 'Sheer & yeller leef' (to cote from ay Irish fTend Ulster MoBeth) to see the Show biznis is pritty much plade out*"

And In the follow­

ing sentence, Nasby combines misspelling, anti-olimax, Incorrect grammar, and a mixed metaphor:

"• * * I ahol withdraw from public life, and start

a grocery, and In that umble callin will flote peacefully down the stream uv time, until my weather-beaten bark strikes on the rocks of death, getting ity licker in the meantime (uv wioh I consume many) at wholesale prices*"

Thus tho literary comedians exploited a larger

variety of language tricks than did the earlier humorists* Politics continued as the major Interest In the work of the literary comedians during and Immediately following the Civil War but after the 1870's declined as their chief preoccupation*

In addition,

although not concerned with local manners and character, they regarded any topic of national Interest as fair game*

For example, Artemus Ward

16 during his career attacked the Shakers, the Spiritualists, the Free Lovers, the Feminists, and the "Mormins,"

Another favorite target of

these humorists was the current trends in literature;

this subject can

best be explained try describing the form they employed in treating it. The literary comedians used many of the same forms that their predecessors had,

John Phoenix told tall tales, Petroleum V, Nasby

expressed himself in letters, Josh Billings was noted for his aphorisms, Bill Nye wrote essays, and nearly all of them told anecdotes.

The condo

lecture, however, to which these professionals owed so much prosperity and fame, was something new;

as has been pointed out above, it affect­

ed the individuality of their condo poses and increased the Importance of “acting a part,"

But their favorite form was the burlesque— of

history, the elegant essay, obituary poetry, advertisements, newspaper letters of advice, sermons, political speeches, odes, orations, bibli­ cal parables, the lyric, and above all sentimental romances.

By

mingling such devices as anti-climax and illiterate language with the artificial characters, elaborate plots, and idealized backgrounds of this type of fiction, they exposed its absurdities.

The burlesque re­

mained one of the most popular forms of humor throughout the nineteenth century,

22 A small amount of the literary comedians1 work was published

in high quality monthly magazines like Harper *s and the Century, and a larger amount in the comic weeklies like Puck and Judge, and in comic almanacs, a tradition revived in the nineties.

However, along with the

^Blair, "Burlesques in Nineteenth-Century American Humor," American Literature, H (November, 1930), 236,

lecture platform, the newspaper column was the most important medium for spreading their work and fame.

During this period nearly every

paper carried a humorous column, and editors borrowed freely from each other, with tho result that both the humorists and the newspapers gained national prominence,

Robert J. Burdette, for example, began by writing

a column for the Burlington, Iowa, Hawkeye and as ho achieved recog­ nition became known as the "Burlington Hawkeye Man."

The column

enabled him to achieve fame and he in turn made the newspaper famous. By the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, the newspaper column had became the chief outlet for tho old school of humor. To summarize briefly, the native tradition of American humor, consisting of the works of the Down Eastern and Southwestern writers and of the literary comedians, displayed throughout the nineteenth century certain persistent features:

a lower-class character, crude,

uneducated, and rural or small town in outlook, suspioious of "book larnin1" and city ways, but blessed with oommon sense*

He expressed

himself frequently in dialect and always in Informal or semi-literate language;

he was fond of homely figures of speech and exaggeration,

and the Yankee also used understatement.

His favorite forms were the

monologue, tho proverb, and tho anecdote or short tale.

Politics was

an enduring object of his satire, and in his role as the shrewd ignora­ mus, he was able to poke fun without giving offense. The social and economic status of this comio persona points up the strong democratic bias which distinguished our native humor. always centered on and highlighted tho common man.

It has

Its pervasive anti­

18 intellectual!cm, for example, may be interpreted as a sense of confidence in the poor, plain folk of the nation to triumph over any kind of adversity through the exercise of their natural, ingenuity. Jennotto Tandy has stated in this regard;

"Only American letters can

show so largo, so persistent, and so significant a body of political and social satires, of comic 'writing and of sontentiae for which the man of the people is spokesman."^3

The irreverent nose-thumbing at the

conventions of polite society, moreover, reflects the antagonism between city and country, urban and rural viewpoints, which runs throughout this literature. Finally, during its heyday in the nineteenth century, our traditional school of comedy demonstrated an unshakable faith in values of a fixed and absolute nature, "a set of values that affirms oommon sense, self-reliance, and a kind of predictability in the world. protagonist was in command of the situation, . . .

The

Ho matter hew

sinister, amoral or reactionary his world might be, [he]] believes in its predictability and believes in his power to remain consistent with it . . .

, Native humor is sane and assured of the foundations upon

2k

which logic and experience rest.11

Two of the literary comedians lived to see the turn of the century, and Will Rogers has herein been cited as a direct continuation of the crackerbox philosopher.

The faot remains, however, that the

popularity of the old school began to decline in the 1870 *s and has

23Tandy, p. 173. ^Hamlin Hill, "Modem American Humor," College English. XXV (December, 1963)* 170.

19 continued to do so up to the prosent*

Superseding it in the late

1870'a was a now kind of humor, willoh brought with it now character types, subject, techniques, and forms.

Like the rest of our literature,

it was "rooted in those dork and still, little-understood years of the 1880*s and 1890's when all America stood suddenly as it wore, between one society and another, one moral order and another, and the sense of impending change became almost oppressive in its vividnoss,"^

As

Harold Thompson describes this development: The story [[of American humor] may therefore be roughly divided by the pivotal work of Abraham Lincoln and Hark Twain into a first phase which developed mainly out of frontier conditions as civilization moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific, carry­ ing the memories of the Old World with it, and a second phase which gave expression to the absorption of immigrant strains, the progressive industrialization and urbanization of our society, and the increasing complexities of m o d e m living. The steady drift of the; population to the cities after the Civil War affected the second phase of humor by producing a large urban reading public with different attitudes and interests from those of the preCivil War, predominantly rural, American sodoty.

Industrialization

made this urban population better off financially and provided increased material comfort,

"Every third American [by 1893], , * lived in a city,

and the average family wealth of the city dwellers was $ 9000, while

^Alprod Kazin, On Native Grounds; An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York, l^t2) ,' p. viii. ^^Literary History of the United States, ed. Spiller et al., 3rd edition, I (New York, 1963), ?29.

that of the country residents was $ 3250. " ^

As the standard of living

was improving, illiteracy was declining with the expansion of compul­ sory education, which in turn diminished the ■suspicion of learning prevalent in our earlier society.

In addition, as labor-saving machines

gave the urban public more leisure time, it began to demand more "culture and amusement, bigger and possibly better newspapers, maga­ zines, publishing houses, and bookshops • • • with correspondingly improved municipal art galleries, museums, concert halls, public li-

2fl brarles, and schools," The new school of humor— urbane, sophisti­ cated, and genteel— can be viewed as a response to these new demands and a reflection of the new metropolitan culture which was evolving under the impact of urbanization and industrialization during the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

Put simply, it differed from the

older sahool of humor beoause it was the expression of a different America* The penultimate chapter in this study will describe the salient disparities between the old and new schools of humor, but it seems appropriate to take up one matter here, the medium most responsible for publishing and spreading the popularity of the new humor. While much of the native humor appeared first in daily news­ papers, most genteel humor was published in magazines.

The best of the

general literary magazines, such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Century.

^Arthur Schlesinger, The Rise of the City 1878^1898. Cited in Larzer Ziff, The American 1890*8: Life and Time a of a Lost Generation (New York, I966), p. 21, *” ^Literary History of the United States, p. 803.

21 Sorlbnerlst Harper*a Magazine, Harper*a Weekly, and Harper1s Bazaar, printed a quota of humorous material each year,

(Of these, only the

Atlantic Monthly did not issue from New York, which had become firmly established as the nation*s literary and publishing capital.)

Partic­

ularly notable as humorous outlets were the "Editor's Drawer" department of Harper's Magazine ("famous for a generation as an institution of American humor" ) ^ and the weekly "Facetiae" page of the Bazaar (" , . * in its day quite famous and short humor published").30

• • . representative of the best

The general literary magazines were not

primarily interested in humor, of course, but the comic weeklies were. These journals, which were abundant during this period,

H

were the

single most important vehicles of genteel humor from the standpoint of the amount they published.

Puck's peak circulation reached 90,000 in

1890, while at the same time Harper's Magazine's circulation has been estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000, but Puck and its counter­ parts put out fifty-two issues a year as compared to twelve for the literary monthlies.

(Of the general magazines mentioned, only Harper's

Weekly and Harper's Bazaar were not monthly publications.)

The best and

most successful oomlo weeklies, in terms of critical opinion and lon­ gevity, were Puck (1877-1918), Judge (1881-1939)# and Life (1883-1936)#

^Francis Hyde Bangs, "John Kendrick Bangs, Humorist of the Nineties," Yale Gazette, VII (January, 1933), 5?* ^Masson, p. 26. A History of American Magazines. IV (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)# Frank Luther MotF”states that the period from 1885 to 1905 is unique in having so many humorous journals of high quality. In addition to those mentioned in the text, other popular but less longlived ones were Truth, Clips, the Lark, the Wave, and the Wasp.

22 all published in New York but nation-wide in circulation.

Like the

literary magazines, the comic journals printed some humor in the older tradition— for example, Life accepted the poetry of an "old-fashioned*1 writer like James Whitcomb Riley, and the Century serialized Huck Finn— but also like the general magazines they were genteel periodicals and as such paid much attention to finish of style and to subject matter of interest to people of some cultivation.

In trying to get

themselves accepted as family publications, they worked towards a more refined and intellectual humor,

"This refinement was a natural conse­

quence of America*s increasing civilization.

The humorists aimed more

for gentle smiles than horse laughs and tried to dissociate themselves from the frontier writers. Traveler*];

Wrote Opie Read [[editor of the Arkansaw

‘"The days of vulgar humor are over in this country.

There

was a time when a semi-obscene joke would find admirers, but the reading public is becoming more refined,*"^ Describing them as mirrors of their readers* interests, tastes, and attitudes, William Linneman, who made a study of these comic week­ lies, has concluded that in part their task was to develop a philosophy for the new city living and that in order to do this they had first to

^ N o t all comic publications of the period were genteel. Two of the most successful exceptions, which specialized in the old school, were Texas Siftings and the Arkansaw Traveler. Texas Siftings (18811897) moved to New York from Austin in 1885» for a while it achieved a circulation of 150,000, Opie Read*s Arkansaw Traveler carried on the tradition of Southwestern humor; it was founded in 1S&2, moved to Chicago from Little Rock in 1888, and discontinued publication in 1916, 33w±lllam Linneman, "American Life as Reflected in Illustrated Humor Magazines, 1877-1900" (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois, I960), p. 279. Page citations in the following paragraph refer to this thesis.

destroy the old philosophy, the one based on rural culture,

(p. 89)

Accordingly, the contrast between province and Metropolis was a constant theme in their humor.

They separated the imago of the American into two

regions, the East and the West,

The East, which to them meant the

cities of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, stood for money, facto­ ries, refinement, and the center of culture, science, and commerce. The West, which consisted of everything beyond the Appalachians, was not so much a region as a way of life; lessness.

it stood for wildness and law­

’’The towns consisted of casinos and saloons.

There was no

respect for property, and bands of desperadoes robbed and killed at will. Life was cheap and the only means of retribution were guns and lynching J’ ( p. 32)

The people who lived there did not understand cultural allu­

sions, had bad manners and loose morals, and dressed ostentatiously. The cowboy was depicted as a barbarian because he came from this unciv­ ilized region, and the farmer, carioatured as a bumpkin and a hayseed, came to symbolize any attitude or habit that was out of date.

In en­

deavoring to establish themselves as the voices of urbanity and sophistication, these oomic weeklies made the conflict between urban and rural culture more acute than it had been in the earlier humor. Puck. Judge, and Life shared many similarities— subject matter, opinions, and physical make-up— but Life surpassed the others in allaround excellence.

"It was not a mere joke book . . . its satire

really bit . . . It had a special quality and a distinctive charm; had standards and backgrounds and culture that its predecessors and

it

24 •3h,

contemporaries knew not of."

Life1s development as the most influ­

ential comic weekly of its day holds significance for this study because it is inextricably linked to the career of John Kendrick Bangs* Life was founded in January, 1883, by John A. Mitchell, a young Harvard graduate.

Bangs, the son of one of Mew York 13 most eminent

lawyers and heir of other distinguished

f o r e b e a r s , ^5

joined Mitchell's

staff as literary editor in 1884, scarcely a year after graduating from Columbia where he had edited the humor magazine, the Acta Columbiana, Although he had earned a modest reputation before joining Life, both by his work on the Acta and by contributions to Life and Puck while an undergraduate, his important formative years were those he spent at Life from 1884 to 1883.

Here he perfected his style and developed

most of the subjects, techniques, and opinions which would characterize his writing for the rest of his long and amazingly prolific career. The influence was reciprocal:

"It may fairly be said that during the

years of his editorship Life. as far as its literary aspect was con­ cerned, bore the stamp of his mind more than that of any other— always with the reservation that that yet-fomative mind was considerably

3**Mott, pp. 559-61. ^ H i s father was Francis N. Bangs, "generally recognized as the leader of the Bar of the City of Mew York during the last decade of his life.,.. His grandfather, the Reverend Nathan Bangs (1778-1862), was a prolific writer on behalf of Methodism, was a founder of its periodical literature, and is ranked second only to Bishop Asbury in the development of the American church.''— Franci0 Hyde Bongs, "John Kendrick Bangs, Humorist of the Nineties," p. 57*

25 16

influenced by the presiding genius of Life, Mitchell himself,"-^

Bangs*s affiliation with Life, however, was not responsible for his rise to national fame as a humorists

this achievement followed

from a series of associations with some of the best magazines of the period.

After leaving Life in 1888 Bangs joined the Harper organization*

taking charge of the Magazine*s humor department, "The Editor*s Drawer," of the weekly "Facetiae" page of the Bazaar, and a little later of the humorous section of the weekly Round Table, In addition to his Harper duties, ho served as managing editor of Munsey* s Weekly in 1889 and of the American edition of Literature, An International Gazette of Criticism in 1898,

After leaving the Harper organization in 1901 he

edited the New Metropolitan Magazine during 1902-03 end Puck during 190*1-05.

Besides regular contributions to the various publications he

worked for, Bangs produced a seemingly inexhaustible stream of material— not all of it comio— for every conceivable outlet: newspapers, the lecture platform, and the stage. temporaries later commented:

periodicals, books, As one of his con­

"There was a period in American journal­

ism when there was scarcely a magazine that went to press without some contribution, in verse or prose, by John Kendrick B a n g s . H i s editor­ ial authority# his creative prodigality, and his enormous popularity both as a writer and a lecturer lend support to his cnn1n claim that "Bangs stands out as a central figure in the Ameri can humorous and

•^Francis Hyde Bangs, John Kendrick Bangs: Nineties (New York, 19*1-1), p. &5*

Humorist of the

37nomy James Forman, New York Times Book Review (April 27, 19*1-1), p. 17.

comic tradition."-^®

As recently as 1S&1» nineteen years after his

death when Bangs had lapsed into almost total edged:

obscurity, Time acknowl­

"He set a whole generation's style of tame, facile humor « » * .

The next four chapters will attempt to analyze that style of humor by describing the topics it concerned and the techniques and values the treatment of these topics revealed.

The final chapter will

indicate how it relates to both the native tradition of the nineteenth century and the predominant style of twentieth-century humor.

^"John Kendrick Bangs," p, 58, 39XXXVII (April lif, 19^1), 99.

CHAPTER II SOCIAL SATIRE The rofinod humor that flourished during the nineties was highly topical, using as subjects developments in politics, literature, and religion.

But try far the greatest portion of it was devoted to

social satiro, a wry and witty commentary on the events, personalities, issues, fads, and fashions which made up the passing social scene. One of the favorite targets of the new humor— -and a new subject in American humor— was the affectations of Hew York’s high society and its pretondors.

Life deserves much of the credit for the acceptance of

this material as appropriate subject matter for popular humor, because Mitchell, unlike the other editors of comic weeklies, thought humor should reflect the follies and pretensions of fashionable lifo. Before this time the only pioture the average American had had of high society was that of the Englidi haute monde in Punch,

In an 1889

article concerning magazine illustration, Mitchell explained the theory •which guided Life’s editorial policies! The sayings and doings, the dothes and the dinners and d u b ... i various imbecilities of the British were to him [the average American]} a twice-told taleV • But the sayings and doings and various imbecilities of the moneyed Amer­ icans were as yet unrecorded ♦ , , . Mr. Henry W. HcVlckar wa3 the first American artist to give the public, through the pages of a satirical journal, those glimpses of the world of fashion which have since become a part of our literature. The drawings were cleverly made, brilliant and decorative

27

za in effect, and were truthful records of the manners, customs, homes, and sooial usages of the people they portrayed. To speak of Mr, McVickar as the first American to do a certain thing has much of the sound of ancient history. It all pagan, however, less than seven short years ago.-** The introduction of the habits of ’’moneyed Americans" as a subject of popular humor was a significant development in American humor and ono which separated the new humor of the late nineteenth century from the older humor of the native tradition, A cursory glance through the pages of Life published during the Elegant Eighties reveals that, among other things, the "world of fashion" was stricken with an acute case of Anglomania and that its members were making themselves ridiculous by trying to imitate the accent, dress, and habits of the British aristocracy.

Life delighted

in ribbing one phase of Anglomania, the dude ("the name for a new, large class of young, senseless, soulless, snobbish, stupid and would-

2 be smart specimens of manhood"), usually depicted as a young man with long, thin legs, whose greatest concern in life was a fashionable ward­ robe,

He liked to live a life of leisure, but was usually in debt}

relied completely on his manservant for all practical matters.

he

Also,

because horses and expensive vehicles provided one of the chief forms of "conspicuous con sumption," many of Life'a cartoons "portrayed the habits and postures of America1s Hobs and Swells, their Postillions and, sometimes, their Posteriors,"

Other jokes and sketches "exhibited

the jeunesse dorr? in the drawing-room, or at tennis, table, dancing,

1"Contemporary American Coriacture," Scribner's, VI (Deoeraber,

1889), 738-40. 2Mott, IV, 383.

-------------

the young men rather -wanting in courteqy toward the ladies, and very eager indeed to get to the punchbcwl or the bottle.

In summer J. A.

Mitchell exhibited Society afield at Mount Desert— then 'the wild east of fashion'— picturing the lovelier aspeots of swimming, courting, and c a n o e i n g .

yony items also satirized the vanities of the social climb­

ers and their craving for publicity.

All in all, Life1s pages are a

lively, colorful mirror of the social doings of this period. By revealing a side of American life, that of the "moneyed Americans," which had never before been recorded, Life's .jokes, drawings, and sketches in offset set a new standard for comic journalism.

Puck,

Judge, and other vehicles of genteel humor, which had originally been devoted largely to politics, were forced by Life's success to follow suit, and, accordingly, by the nineties had become almost exclusively 4

concerned with the social world.

Mitchell founded Life in January, 1883;

in the spring of 1884,

Bangs, after a frustrating year of studying law, joined the magazine's staff as associate editor in charge of literary content.

For the next

four years, hr was life's most voluminous provider of comic copy;

he

wrote editorials, countless long and short pieces of prose and verse, and tho popular "By the ’fay" page, "the most frequently quoted section of Life, its torse sayings in paragraph, verse or aphorism, being much

^Francis hyde Bangs, John Kendrick Bangs, pp. 68-69. ijln 1883 60jo of Puck's oar toons dealt with domestic politics and 123 with international politics, together constituting threefourths of tho magazine's contents. "But politics and economics yielded gradually to art and light satiro in the nineties."— Mott, HI, 530.

30 favored In tho newspaper exchange system of the country . . . ,"

5

Much of this material was unsigned and much of it was signed with a pseudonym, Carlyle Smith*

"There can he no doubt that tho reflection

of the eighties in Lifo1s pages, both in picture and in text, largely coincided with his [^Bangs’s'] own view."^ From his early association with Lifo until his doath in 1922, during which interval ho pursued successful careers as an editor, writer, and lecturor. Bangs remained pro-eminently a social satirist. In short stories, sketches, one-act farces, musical comedies, and pohtry, he gave a running commentary on the social issues of his tirie.

His

work dealt with tho lower class and the middlo class as Troll as the uppor olass.

It was always literate, never vulgar or prurient, good-

natured for the most part, and meant chiefly to entertain, although on occasional note of righteousness comes through,

Tho degree of indig­

nation varied from subject to subject and from work to work, but the Gatiro itself reflected a consistent point of view:

that of a middle-

class urban male, well-educated, respectable, conservative, and dedicated to such traditional values as thrift, industry, common sense, integrity, personal and political freedom, a stable family life, and "the sanctity of all women so long as women stuck to their two

pre­

scribed roles of ingenue and homemaker. Much of Bangs1s social satire aims at the foibles of High

^Francis Hyde Bangs, p, 79* ^Ibid., p. 67. 7tato3, p, 28,

Society and tho nouveau riche who composed the most ostentatious part

g of it.

Lorgnette (1886),

which consists of dialogue by Bangs and

black and white illustrations by 3. W. Van Schaick, one of Life*s artists, pokes fun at tho Anglomaniacs, who be^in to limp when they hear that the Prince of Wales has sprained his ankle, and at vulgar parvenus like Krs. Pennybags, whom no one dare criticise because she has i;100,000 a year in her own right.

Both Lorgnette and Katharine;

A Travesty (1888),9 a musical burlesque of The Taming of the Shrew, deal at great length ■with the dude.

In Lorgnette be is shown as a

snobbish young man, who, because ho refuses to work for a living, survives by dining with friends, but is mortally offended when his tailor dare 3 to send him a bill.

In Katharine the young male characters,

T.ncentio, Hortonsio, Gremio, and Petrucio, are all dudes, either sup­ ported by their fathers or seeking rich wives who will support them. Love among the upper classes, another theme, is depicted in Katharine as a business arrangement.

When Gremio and Tranio ask

Baptista for Blanca's hand, ho replies: 1*11 give my child to him who bids the most— iNot that I'm a mercenary host, But that this method's all the fashion And love's no more a sentimental passion (pp. 52-53)• Bangs takes upper-class women to task on several different counts in his sooial satire.

In Lorgnette young society girls are

caricatured as flighty things incapable of conversing except in the

fyiew York. 9n g w York. to this edition.

Quotations cited from this work in the text refer

32 theatre while the play Is In progress;

In their frantio efforts to be

fashionable, they develop hydrophobia because they hear that a prominent l< member of the Four Hundred did. In Katharine, the two female leads, Kate and Bianoa, are also portrayed as flokle, mercenary creatures whose main Interest is the extravagant ladles* fashions of the day.

In one

soene, for example, a salesman tiles to persuade Kate to buy one of his hats by telling her: My daughter, who*a just back from town, With all the styles for the modern gown, Went one evening to see the play. And all the ladles were dressed this way— Indeed, the papers are all In a rage Because no man can see the stage (p. 99). Idle society women, moreover, are depicted as overbearing to men.

In Katharine. Baptists is a henpecked businessman, his every

wish and command totally ignored by his wife and daughters.

In fact,

Bangs used the theme of female domination to give his "travesty" a twist at the end.

In the final soene when the gentlemen bet on whose

wife w l H obey his husband's commands most promptly, the wives band together to demand that their husbands not try to master them.

Kate

delivers the ultimatum for the othersi That boorish behavior alone inspires respect, And makes a maiden honor the groom-elect— Why, I certainly deny that the moral's fair. What has happened hero, will happen elsewhere. And to Baoon or Shakespeare I would publicly say, That the m o d e m shrew is not built that way. How if Fetruolo will to this fact agree, The management of home he may divide with me. Fetruolo submits without a struggle t Sweet Katharine, of your remarks I recognise the force; Don't strive to tame a woman as you would a horse (pp. 126-127). In addition to their domineering ways and fondness for extravagant

33 fashions* the Idle ladles tend to fill their leisure time vith so many fads that they neglect their rightful duties*

As Fetruolo com­

plains: Their pretty schemes for charity and ever constant calls Upon the pooket and the bank for Charitable Balls* Devotion to the Doroas Club and all affairs of church Which leave Papa with buttons loose and babies in the luroh (p. 119)* The theme of parental irresponsibility among the upper class receives more extensive treatment in "The Return of Christinas" (1909)*

10

a one-act farce*

The play concerns Mr* and Mrs* Randolph*

an enormously rich oouple who have returned from Europe to give their Children presents on Christmas Eve* an annual event in their busy schedule s.

Both have other engagements— Mrs* Randolph a bridge party

and Mr* Randolph a meeting with Judge Astorbllt at the Chloroform Trust*

It is obvious that the parents spend little time with their

children and know little about them*

When the governess first brings

the boy and girl into the room* they do not recognise the strange gentleman and lady*

After being introduced* they shake hands formally

and address them as Mr* and Mrs* Randolph instead of as father and mother*

The implications of this behavior completely escape Mrs*

Randolph, who comments to the governssst

"I congratulate you. Miss

Woodbridge, upon the children's manners*

They are quite au fait*"

Santa Claus enters, dressed appropriately in evening clothes* and asks what kind of presents Mr* Randolph had in mltid for his children*

^ T h i s work along with three other farces appeared under the Collective title, The Real Thing* and was published in Mew York,

Mr. Randolph replies that they may have anything they like— a house in Newport, a string of pearls, or an opera box— as long as the cost does not exceed $100,000.

To his great surprise the children choose

simple, inexpensive items like a bag of marbles and a book of fairy tales*

Even more surprisingly, as Mr*. Randolph plays marbles with

his son and Mrs. Randolph reads "Little Red Riding Hood" to her daughter, the parents forget about their social engagements and begin to take an interest in their children, obviously what Bangs feels that they should have been doing all along.

This playlet, then, criticizes

upper-class pecadillos— ostentation, wastefulness, and parental ne­ glect— from a udddle-alass point of view of what constitutes proper behavior. Preoooupation with money was a frequent object of Bangs* s satire,

Jaok and the Choobbook (1911),^ for instance, conoerns Wall

Street, high finance, and the "get-rlch-quick" philosophy.

This book,

which Bangs*s son called a 'Hall Street Fairy Book," oontains six tales, each of them based on a well-known children* s story|

for

example, "Jaok and the Cheakbook," the title story, is a take-off on "Jaok and the Beanstalk," "Puss, the Promoter" on "Puss in Boots," "The Golden Fleece" on "Rumpelstiltskin," and "The Invisible Cloak" on "The Emperor*s Hew Clothes."

All of the tales begin with "Once

upon a time" and retain the fantasies of their original plots (e,g«, the magic beanstalk, spinning gold from straw, etc.), but leave no doubt that the setting is really New York in the early 1900’is.

The

•^New York. Quotations from this work included in the text come from this edition.

35 plots aro all similar:

The main characters are financial underdog a

■who at one time possessed wealth but who through a variety of misfor­ tunes not of their own doing (but of a dishonest financier's) have been reduced to poverty.

Through their own resourcefulness and pluck, and

through the greed of Wall Street capitalists (named Bondlfeller, Rockernegie, and John Jacob Rothschild), each manages to regain his former state of affluence* The first tale concerns a poor widow, who, having Invested all her savings in shares of Amalgamated Warhoop, a mining company, faces bankruptcy because she has bought everything on the Installment plan— the piano, tho kitchen range, and the house— and cannot make the pay­ ments*

The mining company, moreover, has passed into reoeivership and

there is an assessment on the shares, amounting to four times their face value, so she cannot coll them.

Her last hope fades when her son

Jaok returns to tell her that, after calling on his late father's partner, who threw a checkbook at him in anger, he has sold the cow and bought a mess of beans*

Jack plants the beans and awakes the next

morning to discover that a giant beanstalk has sprung up*

While

as­

cending the beanstalk— by escalator— Jaok meets the queen of fairies (whose official title has become Chairman of the Board of Directors

of the U*S* Fairy Corporation of Wall Street), tho advises him to add * six zeros to the balance in the checkbook*

When the fairy learns that

the original amount was only $3,575*^57» she sniffs: less than I had thought*"

"Hm,

It is rather

After arriving in OgreviUe ("only twenty

minutes by bean-car from New York"), Jaok goes at once to the Ogre's castle*

He Is not only unintimidated by the Ogre's threats to eat him,

but also unimpressed by his hugs kingdom,

"It isn't quite as rich and

fertile as my own little place up in Vermont . * • but this little bungalow we are in strikes me as about as cute and comfy a cozy-eorner as I've visited in a month of Sundays,”

Intrigued by Jaok's casual

attitude toward wealth (he writes a check for $500,000 and makes a cigarette with it), the Ogre asks where he gets his money, and Jack explains the checkbook system— just add more zeros when the balance begins to get low,

”It is the kind that all our big financiers use—

Hr, Rockernegie, Colonel Midas, and John Jacob Rothschild, and all the rest of them.

It is merely an ingenious financial contrivance that

enables us to avoid oontaot with actual money, which is not only vulgar and dangerous to carry in large quantities but in some cases full of germs,” Dazzled by visions of unlimited wealth, the Ogre agrees to sign over his vast kingdom to Jack and Beanhilda, his stepdaughter with whom Jack has fallen in love, in return for the checkbook.

Then

the Giant heads for New fork, and Jaok and Beanhilda are married and live happily ever after, especially after learning that the greedy Ogre has been arrested for passing bad checks. This tale as well as the others are filled with references to Wall Street practices, like cornering the market, watering the stock, and trading on margin, devices by which people of the time were trying to get something for nothing, to create a fortune out of little oapital.

In this series of satires Bangs expresses his conservative

economic philosophy, that of an older America, a philosophy which ex­ alted the small, Independent businessman who relied upon his own industry to make his living and valued such traditional qualities as

37 honesty, personal freedom, and Integrity. 12 One of the poems in Cobwebs from a Library Corner, a slim volume of verse published in 1899» serves as an ironic summary of Bangs* a disapproval of the rampant materialism of his generation: The Gold-Seekers Gold, gold, goldj What oaro wo for hunger and cold? What oars we for the moil and strife, Or the thousands of foes to health and life, When there's gold for the mighty and gold for the meek, And gold for whoever shall dare to seek? Untold Is the goldi And it lies in the reach of the man that's bold: It lies in the hands of the man who'd sell His hold on life for an ice-bound hell. What care we for the fevered brain That's filled with ravings and thoughts Insane, So long as we hold In our hands the gold? The glistening, glittering, ghastly gold That your hands o'errun with the clinking gold, With nuggets of weight and of worth untold, And your vacant eyes Gloat o'er the riches of ParadiseI (pp.95-97) Bangs'a social satire was not exclusively conoerned with upperoOLass violations of middle-class mores.

A portion of it was aimed at

the lower classes, especially domestic servants. in this.

Nor was Bangs alone

The servant problem was one of the most popular humorous

themes of the Victorian era# A particularly revealing treatment of

l^New York. "The Gold Seekers" originally appeared in the September 25, 1897* issue of Harper's Weekly. The page citation following the excerpt from this poem refers to the book edition cited*

38 this topio appears in Bangs* s one-act farce, "The Real Thing" (1909)»^ which is set in on employment agency where ordinary conditions are reversed.

Genteel natrons register and then are "interviewed" ty

arrogant servants, in this case an Irish cook named Bridget, to see if their "credentials and references" are acceptable.

As Maginnis, the

manager, explains to a prospective client, a middle-class matron named a

Mrs. Perkins: •Well, our establishment, owing to certain social changes of late years, has adopted a different method— my own invention, I am proud to say. Here we keep not servants for employers to choose, but employers for domestic artists to choose. There aren’t any servants any more. I hope you see the point of difference*" (p. 7) Bridget, in her immigrant dialect, asks several ladies impudent questions, such as the sum of their bank accounts, the amount of work they will require her to do, and the number of servants they have dis­ missed in the past.

After rejecting all of these trembling ladies as

unsatisfactory, she comes to Mrs. Perkins, who rises with dignity and announces her terms:

a normal salary, one day a week off, a fair nuny

bar of duties, and her firm intention to dismiss any servant who violates these rules or otherwise proves inadequate.

'When Bridget

recovers from her shook, she resumes a proper subservient manner and accepts the position, meokly remarking to Maginnis: word,

,rXe'vo kept your

Ye*ve found the rale t'lng that oi’ve bin lookin' far."

Thus

Bridget, duly chastised, gives up hor ridiculous attempt to imitate her betters and acknowledges her rightful position,

13Thls piece originally appeared in the February, 1909, issue of Harper1a Bazaar | it was later incorporated into the volume entitled The Real Thing and Three Other Faroes. The quotations from this work in the text refer to the edition cited above.

39 Pa ate Jewels (1897)'^’ deals exclusively with servant problems* Host of the plots in this collection of short stories Involve an Ironlo twist, suggested by the title itself, in that what seem to be "jewels" at the outset (i.e., faithful servants) turn out to be "paste" by prov­ ing to be unreliable and inefficient.

The central characters in this

series are Thaddeus PerldLns and his wife Bess, who was just mentioned in the preceding synopsis*

The Perkinses (who were too of Bangs's

favorite alter egos) are, like their friends in the suburb where they live, models of cultivation and middle-class morality, which embrace a oleareut set of Christian values including allegiance to home, mother, flag, and law and order*

In each of the seven episodes comprising

Paste Jewels. Thaddeus, genial and patient by nature but the symbol of Victorian manhood nonetheless, is forced to deal sternly with a recal­ citrant servant.

In tho first tale, "The Emancipation of Thaddeus,"

the newly-married couple has just inherited two "jewels" from their respective families— £ U e n , who has served as cook for Thaddeus1 family since before his birth, and Jane, the table maid for Bess’s parents for as long as she can remember.

Although from the beginning the two

servants do not get along and seem unable to adjust to the new routine of the Perkins’ household, Thaddeus and Bess fabricate excuses for them and refrain from taking disciplinary action.

But the servants' pre­

sumption and insubordination continue to grow— Ellen refuses to serve breakfast on time and Jane takes several days off— and then finally the turning point ocour a.

Thaddeus returns unexpectedly from summer

^ N e w lorkj subtitled Seven Tales of Domestic Woe. from this work in the text refer to this edition.

Citations

vacation to find the house vacant and untended ■while the family ’‘jewels” are off amusing themselves. not be tolerated;

This flagrant overttopping of limits can­

Thaddeus dismisses Ellen and Jane and hires two

new servants, whom he vows to train properly from the outset. In another story in Paste Jewels. ‘'The Christinas Giftof Thaddeus, the Perkin s' three domestic personnel again behave in a manner inappro­ priate to their station:

Bridget the cook spending more and more time

caring for sick relatives, Mary the waitress going to "church," and John the handyman attending funerals.

After various polite but inef­

fectual appeals, Thaddeus resolves to give them their just regard at Christinas time— and fires them all: "Cook, from the first of January, may go to her relatives, and stay until they're everyone of them restored to health, if it takes forty years. Mary may consider herself presented with sixty years' vacation without pay; and for you, John, I have written this letter of recommendation to the proprietors of a large undertaking establishment in New York, who will, I trust, engage you as a ohief mourner or perhaps a hearsedriver, for the balance of your days." (pp. 143-144) When Bess ventures that his aot was a rather hard thing to do on Christmas Day, Thaddeus replies:

"Oh, no.

the circumstances, and quite appropriate. on earth and good-will to men.

It was very easy under This is the time of peace

The only way for us to have peace on

earth was to get rid of those two tinmen;

and as for John, he has ay

good-will, now that he is no longer in ay employ."

(p. 145)

That

Thaddeus, Bangs's spokesman, Ignored what servants in real life might think of suoh "gifts" shows how completely his viewpoint was circum­ scribed by middle-class attitudes. Another of the servant dilemmas described in Paste Jewels indicates that while Thaddeus thinks of himself as fair and reasonable

41 in dealing with hie hired help, he i3 also capable of snobbery.

In

"An Object-Lesson" the Perkinses contemplate hiring a Frenchmaid so that their son can learn French easily. But when friends come

to spend

the weekend they observe with considerable dismay that the couple1s children have picked up the cockney accent of their maid and abruptly change their minds about hiring a French maid.

When Bess asks if It

would really be that horrible for their son to use "language whloh he never got from you or from me," Thaddeus patiently explains to hen "It isn*t for the parents of the successful youth, but for the successful youth himself it's something awful , . • . Success entails oonspiouousness, and conspicuousness makes error almost a crime. Put your mind on it for a moment. Think of Teddy here. How nervous it would make him in everything he undertook to feel that the eyes of tho world were upon him." (p. 103) Speeches such as these make it evident that Bangs regarded breaches of decorum in language impermissible to the members of his olass. "The Valor of Brinley," one of fifteen short stories published under the collective title of The Booming of Aore Hill (1900) presents a variation in the treatment of the servant problem. tale again oonoems an arrogant and inefficient oook.

The

When Brinley, the

master of the house, criticises the way his wife has handled the matter, she suggests that he confront Ellen himself.

Brinley is the-pioture

of masculine authority as he enters the kitchen to dismiss the offend­ ing servant.

But when he returns he sheepishly admits that he has

raised her wages instead.

At that point— to Brinley1s great relief—

^ H o w York, The stories comprising this volume first appeared in The Ladies Home Journal during 1898-99. Citations from this work in the text refer to the book edition specified.

his wife fires her*

At tines, it seems, household problems oould prove

too much for Bangs* s respectable, middle-class males, and their wives

moved in to handle these troubles with poise and efficiency.

This

variation is a particularly interesting one in the evolution of Amer­ ican humor because it foreshadows tho development of a major theme in the twentieth-century humor of tho Net/ Yorker school, the working class’s intimidation of the "Little Man*” which will bo discussed in Chapter VI of this study.

But the note of uncertainty so mildly sound­

ed in "The Valor of Brinley" was the exception in Bangs’s work.

The

rest of his satire dealing with the lower class oloarly shows that he, like his readers and other creators of genteel humor, simply did not believe in sooial or natural equality.

He accepted as axiomatic that

some people were naturally superior to others and that this elite should rightfully enjoy privileges to which

^-ts

inferiors were not

entitled. The stories composing Paste Jewels and The Booming; of Acre Hill represent still another preoccupation of Bangs’s social satire, life in suburbia, a continual theme in American humor from the late nineteenth century to the present.

The central characters through*

out Paste Jewels. Thaddeus and Bess Perkins, live .in the suburbs, and their various servant problems constitute one of the difficulties of suburban life.

The stories contained in $he Booming of Acre Hill,

however, do not feature the same characters, each tale dealing instead

Bangs was not the first humorist of suburbia. His prede­ cessors included Frederick Swartwout Cozaens, author of tho Sparrowgraso Papers (1855)» Hayden Caruth, whose "Letters from a Country Place," were a foatune in Harper’s Magazine, and Honry Cryler Bunner, author of The Suburban JSage (1596).

43 with a different complaint of the suburban householder. The opening sketch in this volume, which provides its title, expresses Bangs's typioal point of view' most strongly, The sketoh concern g a new housing development springing up near the old established suburb of Dumfries Corners,

When no one buys the

new lots, the developers hit upon the scheme of hiring Jocular Jimson Jones, "an impecunious but popular member of the Uppertendom whose name had been appearing in the society journals with great frequency for years," to give the area snob appeal by entertaining his fancy friends there and thus induce social climbers to settle.

The scheme worksi

Months went by, and where sixteen empty houses had been, there were now sixty all occupied* and lots were going like hot cakes. Tuxedo was in the shade. Lenox was dying* Newport was dead. Society flocked to Acre Hill and hobnobbed with Acre Killians, Acre Killians became proud of themselves and rather took to looking down upon Dumfries Corners people, Dumfries Corners people were nice, and all that, but not particularly interesting in the sense that "our set," with Jocular Jimson Jones at the head of it, was interesting (pp, 10-01) • But when the homes woro sold* Jocular is discharged and moves away, and Acre Hill becomes just another vulgar neighborhood. In this ironic tale Bangs expresses the resentment of the dignified older resident "whose distriot is being exploited by a new and blatant mode of promotion.

As a result of this promotion, the

vicinity around his home has declined from an upper-middle-class to a lower-middle-olass area."^ Acre Hill ten years ago was as void of houses as the primeval forest. Indeed, in many ways it suggested the primeval forest. Thon the Acre Hill Land Improvement

■^Yates, P* 54

Company sprang up in a night, and before the bewildered owners of its lovely solitudes and restful glades, who had been pay­ ing taxes on their property for many years, quite grasped the situation they found that they had sold out, and that their old-time paradise was as surely lost to them as was Eden to Adam and Eve* Today Acre Hill is gridironed with macadamised streets that are lined with houses of an architecture of various degrees of badness* VIhere birds once sang, and squirrels gambolled, and stray foxes lurched, the morning hours are made musical by the voices of uilkmen, and the squirrels have given place to children and nurse-maids* Where sturdy oaks stood like senti­ nels guarding the forest folk from intrusion from the outside world now stand tall wooden poles with glaring white electric lights streaming from their tops. And the soughingr dfithe wind in the trees have given place to the clang of the bounding trolley. All this is the work of the Acre Hill Land Improve­ ment Company (pp* 1-2), The satire in this story reflects the point of view of an older, estab­ lished middle-class person disapproving of a newer, ambitious generation which has neither the taste nor the desire for his way of life. The second tale in The Booming of Acre Hill* "The Strange Misadventures of on Organ," features Carson, a cultured resident of Dumfries Corners who is able to cope with all of life's irritations without losing his gentlemanly composure— that is, until ho offers to give his expensive organ to the church, only to have the clergymen ask him also to donate money for having it moved.

This proves too much

even for Carson, who vigorously tells the ungracious churchmen his opinion of their ingratitude and puts the organ in M s hayloft.

Thus,

although M s equanimity and genteel manners fails him momentarily, Carson demonstrates that M s independence of mind and individuality are std.il intact. In addition to satirizing the upper and lower classes, Bangs's social humor also poked fun at matters of a more general nature, muoh of it featuring middle or upper-middle class characters who resembled

45 Bongs and his associates. The Bicyclers and Throe Other Farces (1896)

is a collection

of four playlets "which good-naturedly satirize the then current bicycle craze and the fad for amateur theatricals.

Although each play is solf-

aontained, the same set of characters appears in all of them.

Thaddeus

Perkins and his wife Bess are the leads in the first three, and Barlow and Yard sioy, two of their baoholor friends, appear in all four.

The

plays are appropriately called farces, because of the broad humor they involve*

In the first one, for instance, Thaddeus repeatedly falls

off his bicycle in his efforts to learn to ride it, banging bone each time;

his shin

one of his friends, engaged in the same endeavor,

spends most of his time making dents in the floor with his head.

In

tho second work, the Perkins* friends proceed to w e e k their apartmenttaking up carpets* ripping out fireplacos, and constructing fountains in the parlor— as they re-arrange it for the play they are rehearsing. A H of tho plays end ironically.

In the first, Bradley, who Jeered at

the cycling enthusiasts at tho beginning, tries the sport and becomes wild about it, while Thaddeus, one of the original enthusiasts, gives him his own bike in disgust and limps off to nurse his aching shins. In the third farce, Thaddeus, who ridiculed the others* acting and relegated himself to curtain pulling, has to play the villain in their amateur production because the character originally scheduled to play the part has been confused about the curtain time by f,a fatal message,"

^jtlew York, All of the dramas comprising this collection first appeared in Harper's Magazine during 1896.

46 Peepg at People (1899)^ Is a collection of sketches satirizing a net: phenomenon in journalism at that time, "the inquisitorial and impertinent female journalist,"

20

"a class of woman who would stoop to 21

any resort or indulge in any venture to create a story."

The heroine

of these tales, Anno Warrington Wither up, displays several limitations— in interviewing Emile Zola, for example, she ignores his explanation of the Dreyfus affair and persists in demanding his favorite recipes— but compensates for her limitations with perserverance. Like the Royal Mounted Police, Anne always gets her man.

An excellent example of her

resourcefulness is her pursuit of the elusive Rudyard Kipling.

After

looking first at his residence in Vermont, (die sought him: at his lodgings in London, but the fog was so thick that if ho was within I could not find him. Then taking a P. & 0. st steamer, I went out to Calcutta,rarid thence to Simla. In neither place was he to be found and I sailed to Egypt, hired a camel, and upon this ship of the desert cruised down the easterly coast of Africa to the Transvaal, whero I was informed that, while he had been there recently, Mr, Kipling had returned to London. I immediately turned about, and upon uy faithful and wobbly steed took a short-cut catacornerwise to Algiers, where I was fortunate enough to intercept the steamer upon which the object of my quest was sailing back to Britain (pp. 123-024). That tho objects of her quests might be entitled to some privacy never occurs to the determined Anne, Several of Bangs*s verses also genially satirize general social

^Now York. Citations from this work in the text refer to this edition. The sketches comprising this work first appeared in Harper *s Bazaar during 1898. 20Francis Hyde Bangs, p. 188, ^Linneman, p. 245,

47 fads and issues.

"The Pathetic Tale of the Caddy Boy"

in-cheek spoof of golfomania.

22

is a tongue-

It recounts the aad story of four chil­

dren who are "orphaned" when their father and mother become so enamored with golf that they desert tho home. "The Specialists"2^ uses reductio ad absurdum to ridicule the growing tendency toward specialization: It was a blithe Conductor on an urban trolley-line. ilia uniform was spandy, and his buttons they wore fine. I asked him would he tell me whore I ought to leave the tram To get the nearest Ferry to North Central Rotterdam, He paid me no attention but danced gayly down the aisle With very supercilious and Irritating smile. Again I put the question, and he coldly answered met "When seeking Information ask Conductor Twenty-three," His specialty I now saw well Was merely the jingling of a bell (pp. 10^-05). Tho most extensive and tho best of Bangs's general social satire is found in the Idiot series;

for this reason and because of

tho unusual nature of the so works, they will be treated as a unit and given special consideration in this chapter. In Kay of 1892 a series of "conversational sketches" began appearing in the ’Facetiae" section of Harper's Bazaar;

in 1893 they

were published in book form under the title Coffee and Repartee. The event is significant for this study for two reasons:

(1) with the

publication of this small volume "Bangs stepped forth as a humorist of national proportions, achieving immediate popular acclaim. book sold over fifty-four thousand copies . . . .

This little

accounted a very

22This poem is included in Cobwebs from a Library Corner, mentioned above. 23l’his appears in a collection of poetry entitled The Foothills

48 great calo for a book of its kind";

24

and (2) it introduced tho Idiot,

tho persona which for two dooades Bangs used most frequently, eventu­ ally filling seven books with his opinions: Three Weeks in Politics (1894); (1900);

Coffee and Repartee (1893);

Tho Idiot (1895)»

Inventions of the Idiot (1904);

Half-hours with the Idiot (1917) •^

The Idiot at Homo

The Genial Idiot (1908);

and

Although these collections of

Idiot papers vary in quality, they represent Bangs's most felicitous creation and the clearest expression of his beliefs.

Tho basic situa­

tion in all the Idiot volumes (except for The Idiot at Home) is the same:

the Idiot resides in Mrs. Smithers1 high-class boardinghouse

for single gentlemen, "such a home as was conspiouous in the middlen/

class life of tho nineties,"

whore over the breakfast table he dis­

cusses timely issues with tho other boarders: Schoolmaster;

the Bibliomaniac;

Hr. Whlteohoker, the preacher; the poet;

Mr* Podagog, the

the Genial Gentleman who Imbibes; Mr. Brief, tho lawyer;

and Dr. Capsule, tho physician.

Mr. Scribbleur;

Although at the beginning

of his career, tho Idiot is loss prosperous than Thaddeus Perkins (at first he is a broker's clerk, but later marries the boss's daughter and becomes a partner in his father-in-law's V7all Street firm), he exhibits many of the same traits as Perkins does.

He i3, for instance, well-bred

of Parnassus, published in New York in 190.4, in the 'text refer to this edition,

Citations from the poem

^Francis Hyde Bangs. p. 128. ^-5Thro a Ueoks in Politics is concorned with politics and will not be inducted in this chapter*s discussion, 2^Francis Hyde Bangs, p. 128.

k9 and literate, and also informed about public affairs.

His name, more­

over, is ironic, because he repeatedly demonstrates that he is the only one in the boardinghouse capable of original, independent thought. Speaking with the voice of reason, moderation, and responsibility, he exposes the pretensions and conventional mentality of the others.

Like

Perkins, the Idiot resembles his creator in sovoral ways, serves as his spokesman on important issues, and represents his ideal of right thinking and right acting. In one episode ter. Pedagog and tho Bibliomaniac conspire to embarrass the Idiot by discussing a book which they know he has not rtad, Robert Elsmere by ters. Humphrey Ward.

After declaring, irWhy,

everybody has read Elsmere that pretends to have read anything," they ask the Idiot if he has read it.

He answers, 'Well, I didn’t . . . .

The same ground was gone over two years before in Burrows' groat story, Is It, or Is It Hot? and anybody who ever read Clink’s books on the Non-Extstont as Opposed to Vfoat Is, knows whore Burrows got his points*"^ Hot to bo outdone, the Bibliomaniac ana Mr. Pedagog immediately pre­ tend to have read these two books, only lo l o a m that they never existed. gome.

Thu3 their vanity allows the Idiot to beat them at their own

On another occasion, the group is debating whether or not to

permit an actor to reside in the boardinghouse;

all except the Idiot

are opposed because they feel tho actor's profession renders him "morally unacceptable."

Tho Idiot attacks their smug and hypocritical

attitude;

^7Coffoo and Repartee (Now York), p. 26.

50 "The men whoso lives are given over to the amusement of man­ kind, and who ore willing to place them selves in most outrageous situations night after night in order that we may for the time being seem to be lifted out of the unpleasant situations Into which we have got ourselves, ore in ny opinion doing a noble work* The theatre enables us to woo forgetfulness of self successfully for a few brief hours, and I have seen the time when an hour or two of relief from actual cares has resulted in great g o o d , " 2 8 Tho Idiot differs from Thaddeus Perkins in being deliberately whimsical, a habit which earned him his name*

In one sketoh, he pro­

poses a scheme to correct the sensationalism of the press by publishing a newspaper that "will devote its space to telling what hasn’t happenedJ1 As he describes it: "Put on your front page, for instance, an item like this 'George Bronson, colored, aged twenty-nine, a resident of Thompson Street was caught cheating at poker last night. He was not murdered, * There you tell what ha3 not happened. There is a variety about it. It has tho charm of the unexpected. Then you might say: 'Curious incident on Wall Street yester­ day, So-and-so, who was caught on the bear side of the market with 10,000 shares of J, B, & S, K. W,, paid off all his obligations in full, and retired from business with $1,000,000 clear.'" V/hen tho others call his plan ridiculous, the Idiot defends it: "You aro in reality commending those who refrain from criminal practice, instead of delighting those who are fond of departing from the paths of Christianity by giving them

n o t o r i e t y . "29

In advancing his whimsical schemes, the Idiot demonstrates not only an interest in contemporary issues, but also a sense of responsi­ bility,

In one sketch, after the Idiot has voiced his opinions on

2®The Idiot (New York), p, 29, 29ibid., pp. 52-53.

51 architocturo, his companions try to expose his ignorance by asking him what he would do if someone gave him $800,000 to build a cathedral. His answer leaves them with little to gloat about: "ITd make him out a plan providing for tho investment of his $800,000 in five-percent gold bonds, which would bring him in an income of $40,000 a year; after which I should call his attention to the faot that $40,000 a year would enable him to take 10,000 poor children out of this sweltering city into the country, to romp and drink frosli milk and eat wholesome food for two weeks every summer from now until the end of time, which would build up a human structure that might be of more benefit to the world than any pile of bricks, marble, and wrought-iron I or any other architect could conceive of."-' Other schemes reveal the Idiot* s disapproval of developments which violate middle-class values or impinge on middle-class territory. In one conversation he proposes replacing the streets with canals and houses with canal boats.

The plan would not only eliminate tho dis­

comforts of public transportation but also protect the home-owners1 property:

"The canal could run down as much as it pleased, the neigh­

borhood could deteriorate eternally, but it could not affect the value of this house as the homo of refined people as long as it was possible to hitch up a team of horses to the front stoop and tow it into a better locality. "31

Elsewhere the Idiot suggests relieving traffic

congestion by building streets in tiers, the first one for sowers and telegraph pipes, the second for water mains, the third for trucks, the fourth for carriages, and the fifth for pedestrians,

"The promenade for

pedestrians should be divided into four sections-— one for persons of leisure, one for those in a hurry, one for peddlars, and one for

-^Ibid., p. 36* ~^Tbid.. p. 4.

52 beggars.11 VJhon hie listeners jeor, the Idiot points out tho 3ocial advantages of tho arrangement: "and as for the pedestrians, the beggars, if relegated to themselves, would be forced out of business as would also the street peddlers, /.The’men in a hurry would not be delayed by loungers, beggars, and peddlers, and the loungers would derive inestimable benefit from tho arrangement in the saving of wear and tear on their clothes and minds by contact with the busy world,"*^ The Idiot*s comments on science are particularly interesting because at tho same timo that they reveal his knowledge of its achieve­ ments, they also express a conservative attitude, distrustful of new ways and dedicated to the status quo of an earlier America,

In dis­

cussing the impact of science on tho future, tho Idiot asserts, "But science has everything to do with it. make tho future great . . . .

It is science that is going to

Science, by a purely logical advance

along the lines already mapped out for itcoif, and in part already traversed, will enable men to avoid the pitfalls and reap only the windfalls of life. . , tag.

But such progress carries a high price

As man uncovers the secrets of the universe:

"he will tackle some elementary principle of nature, and he*11 blow the world to smithereens." There was a silence at the tablo. This at least seemed to be a tenable theory. That man should have the temerity to take liberties with elementary principles was quite within reason, man being an animal of rare conceit, and that the result would bring absolute destruction was not at all at variance with probability.-^ In such instances as these, the Idiot*s ideas reveal him to be

32coffee and Repartee, p. 6h. 33fhe Idiot, p. 68, ^ Tbid., p. 89.

a man of reason, whose opinions fall in the middle-ground between extremes.

Ho also displays Initiative and self-reliance, perhaps

nover more clearly than when asking for his employerTs daughter1s hand in marriage,

" ’When I went to see Nr. Barlow in the matter, he told me

that ho liked me very much, and he had no doubt I would make a good hus­ band for his daughter, but after all, he added that I was nothing but a confidential clerk on a small salary, and he thought his daughter could do bettor,’"

The Idiot agreed and immediately suggested a solution:

" ’I put it . , , * that a good confidential clerk would make a good partner for him, and he, after thinking it over, thought I was right,1"35 (The Idiot* s enterprise paid off;

at tho end of The Idiot at Home ho

mad© $140,000 on a stock market venture and departed for a European vacation with his family.) In his p r o n o u n c e . o n a variety of i3suoc, such as garish advertising, tho inconveniences of city life, and tho commercialization of Christmas, the Idiot continually reveals his belief in the moral superiority of "the good old days," when industry and virtue were reward­ ed andra man was free to control his destiny.

His gumption shows his

Yankee heritage, and, although he speaks in cultivated accents and belongs to the urban middle-class (and, as he becomes increasingly successful, to the uppernniddle class), there is much of tho common sense philosopher about him.

He was, in fact, the olosest thing to a wise fool

that genteel humor produced.

For example, although his proposals— such

as converting streets into oanals and building sidewalks in tlers-^were

3^Ibid., pp. 113-114.

often made tongue-in-cheek, obviously not intended to be taken liter­ ally, they always ensued from a practical-minded recognition of a problem and a dosiro to correct it.

But Bangs1s wise fool differs from

that of tho old school in that the Idiotrs eccentrioity nevor involved tho kind of wide-eyed obtuseness that the comic masks of tho native hu­ morists projected.

The Idiot was always in command at Mrs, Sroithers*

boardinghouse and used his whimsy deliberately, to prod his audience into thinldLng.

The native humorists often shared this goal, but ‘the

naivete of thoir comic mouthpieces was an inherent part of their char­ acters,

Moreover, tho Idiot, like Thaddeus Perkins, resembled his

creator in significant ways, notably in his educational and social status.

Like Bongs, the Idiot was urbane, respectable, cosmopolitan,

and thoroughly middle-class in his outlook.

The traditional humorists

did not resemble their public alter egos in the same way.

These pro­

fessional funnymen were'also educated and, sometimes, sophisticated people who impersonated thick-witted bumpkins, first of all, as a means of being funny (through mispronunciations, misspellings, misquotations, and the like) and, in tho second place, as a means of appealing to a different clientele from that of Bangs, one consisting of persons of little education who lived in the country or small tovnG.

Thus, although

the Idiot and the common sense philosopher of tho old school espoused many of the same values, they expressed their commitment to them in different ways, Tho works comprising Bangs1s sooial satire contain all the humor­ ous dev3.ees which characterize the rest of his comedy,. The works cited In this chapter may, therefore, serve as a basis for describing Bangs1e

55 favorite co:nic tochniquos. Like the humor of tho native tradition, .Bangs*3 is highly verbal, abounding in word play of all kinds. word play takes tho form of funny names:

At its simplest, this

Chloroform Trust, Amalgamated

Warhoop, RockornoSlo, Bondifoiler, tho Committee on Leaks, Literature, and Lemonade, otc. puns.

On a more sophisticated lovol, it takes the form of

For o:camplo, whon Jack of "Jack and the Checkbook" first en­

counters Boanliilda in Ogroville, ho a sic3 her if ho can get a bite there, She roplioo: you."

"X foar you might if ny stopfathor should happen to soe

Whon iirs. Porkins insists on having lomon pio for a particular

dinner guoot, Thaddeus comments: lomon pio and Bradley.

"I fail to soe tho connection between

Bradley is not sour or crusty."

And when

Carson, the exasperated horo of "Tho Strange I-Iisadvonturos of an Organ," "was in need of composure, ho sought out *1110 composers'". Bangs's humor also displays a fondness for comic figures of speech.

Tho Idiot onco observed irreverently:

"Columbus' discovery of

America was like shooting at a barn door with a Gatling gun. bound to hit it sooner or later." Carson remarked:

He was

In attempting to givo away his organ,

"A man doesn't want a church organ in his homo any

more than lie wants an elephant for a lap dog."

And Thaddeus Perkin3,

in commenting on the maid's cooking, said dryly to his wife:

"The

stoak this morning looked like a stake that martyrs had boon burned at." The Idiot's pronouncements often take on an epigrammatic cast: "It is easier to pull down an idol than it is to rear an ideal," he onoe said, and on another occasion:

"If there aro tiro incompatible tilings in

this world, they aro men and bric-a-brac."

Bangs also used exaggeration .frequently.

In "Jack and the

Checkbook" and "The Return of Christmas," for example, he exaggerated sums of money until they beoame ridiculous.

The sum in Jack’s check­

book after ho added six zeros was throe trillion, 575 billion, k57 million.

And Thaddous Perkins remarked one night when his handyman had

"fixed" the furnace so effectively that the library resembled a cold storage room:

"I think we could make this house into an ar pticPar‘adis0*,f

Tho Idiot specialized in overstatement when disparaging the cook at tho boardinghouse.

For example, he declares that her coffee i3 as warm as

a glas3 of ice water and that her cooking in general is "a crime of arson," Dangs’s humor overflows with allusions of all sorts— historical* Biblical, mythological— but literary and topical ones predominate.

In

Katharine. Hortensio, diepulsed as a music teaoher, asks Bianca which tune sho would prefer to hear, "Sweet Bye and Bye" or "Wide Awake, Ko and the Uoon," tiro popular ballads at tho time Bangs wrote his travesty. And whon Kate objects to a kiss with: you dare," Potrucio counters:

"I'll strike thee dawn* sir, if

"All right, Sullivan.

I'll take care,"

Brinley's cook makes loaves of broad that "reminded one of the stories of hardtack in Cuba during the late unploasantnoss £the Spanish American War.3"

And the cook's pie cruets "rivalled Harveyized stool in its

impenetrability,"

In asking a friend where ho has found his excellent

servant, Thaddous Perkins inquires: up on jewels of her kind.

"I had a vague hope we could stook

Where did you get her anyhow— Tiffany's?"

Tho topical allusions of two works discussed in this chapter Involved anachronisms, a source of humor which Bangs employed in other

important -works, particularly The TTousoboat on the Sty?: (cuv\)» his greatest success.

In Katharinet for example, although tho play is

ostensibly set in Renaissance Padua, the principals send telegrams to one another and travel by streetcar or one-horse shay.

"Jack and the

Checkbook,1' -with its escalators, "aeroplanes,11 and elevated railways, owes as much to tho early twentieth century as it does to the timeless never-never land of fairy tales. The Idiot excelled at literary allusions. wits, he sighed: desert air,"

After ono contest of

"I feel as if I were wasting my sweetness on the

Sometimes Bangs paraphrased or reworded tho allusion to

fit the situation,

For example, in "The Proposal," Bradley, in trying

frantically to think how to propose, cries out: kingdom for a v;ord!"

"A word!

A word!

1-ty

In Paste Jewels, Bangs described the Perkins*

servants1 progressive deterioration in these terms:

"Whether custom

staled tho infinite variety of the coo^s virtues, and age withered tho efficiency of i'ary . . . Thaddeus and Bessie could not make out." But Bangs1s specialty was witty repartee.

All of his works are

filled with verbal fencing, but the best examples, not surprisingly, are found in the Idiot series. "What is a Professor Emeritus, Mr.Pedagog?" the Idiot inquires one morning. "He*s a professor who is paid a salary for doing nothing," comes the brisk response. Usually the Idiot wins these verbal sparring matches. "Do you really remember what you say?" sneered Ur. Pedagog on one occasion.

"You must have a great memory for trifles."

"Sir,1' replied tho Idiot, "I shall never forget you." But he does not always win,

After telling the boardinghouse

group about a friend who was unable to get his comic writing published, the Idiot concluded with:

"So he gave up jokes,"

"Does he still know you?" asked Mrs. Smithers, "Yos, madamo," observed the Idiot, "Then he hasn't given up all jokes," she retortdd with fine scorn. Sometimes Bangs used these humorous devices in a simple, un­ complicated way, merely to provoke a chuokle.

The illustrations of

funny names and anachronisms cited above carry no serious implications. But at other times, Bangs's humorous devices functioned on a second, deeper level, either to reinforce the satirical moaning of a passage or to express a serious idea in a clever manner,

Tho exaggerations of

money in "Jack and the Checkbook" and "The Return of Christmas," for example, intensify tho ridicule of materialism in these two works. And such an epigram as "It is easier to pull down an idol than it is to roar an ideal" cannot be dismissed as a frivolous observation. Although informal. Bangs's writing always stays within the bounds of "correct" English.

Missing altogether in his writing aro

such hallmarks of the old school as rural dialect and illiterate speoch, non sequiturs, anti-climaxes, and mixed metaphors.

Bang3 and

tho native humorists did nevertheless use some of tho same devices: exaggeration, comic figures of speech, puns and othor forms of word play, and misquotations of the classics.

But there are sometimes

differences in the way each kind of humorist employed these techniques.

59 Exaggeration in the hands of the traditional humorists could serve a simple purpose, such as to create a funny image, as in the story about the man xdio was so tall that he had to get upon a ladder to shave himself, or in tho joke about the old gentleman who vras so absent-minded that he tucked his pantaloons into bod ono night and hung himsolf on the back of his chair, where he froze to d e a t h , I n the southwestern tall tale

overstatement created laughter by the disparity

it established between the solemnity of the yarn-splnner and the pre­ posterousness of his story.

But in the fabulouB tales involving

frontier heroes like Davy Crockett and Ilike Fink, comic hyperbole served as a means of transcending tho terrors of the wilderness.

The

extravagant feats of Crockett and Fink magnified tho human capacities needed to overcome struggles in the wilderness.

Also, by bragging,

as Crockett and his ilk wrro much given to, one dispelled his fears and apprehensions.

Thus the exaggeration intrinsic in backwoods humor

represented a genuine folk expression, a kind of bravado asserting it­ self in the faco of the uncertainties of surviving in a rugged country. The overstatement of native humor was quite different in origin from Bangs's contrived exaggerations, designed to provoko a polite chuckle or to satirize a social fad of the moment, Tho comic figures of spooch so dear to the hearts of the old school humorists differed from Bangs’s mainly in being derived from rural life and featuring the objects and experiences common to this kind of existence. and vivid.

They were sometimes crude and vulgar, but usually original

Artemus Ward, for example, often made remarks like these:

36cited in Rourke, p. 57.

"If so bo you wants to so© mo say so, if not, say so, & I ’m orf like a jus handlo,"

Frequently thoso figures of spooch wore less dolicato,

Sut Lovingood onco do scribed a man eating by noting that his food was

"a-goin* down his throat just like a 3nake troadin1 through a wot sausago gut,"

And .Petroleum V. Uasby expressed his state of jubilation

ovor election results by saying ho felt like

"a bridegroom, vich

comoth from Ids brido in the mornin feolin roleeved in tho knowledge that she wore not palpitators, nor falso calves, nor nothin false, aforo she wuz hizn."

Bangs’s good breeding, urbanity, and strict ad­

herence to the genteel code would have precluded his uso of such crude similes, and his urban background and audience made it unlikely that he would havo used homely figures of speech. Tho literary comedians wore given to word play of various sorts. Sometimes, like Bangs, they aimed to amuse through innocent puns, as for example when Artomus Ward bragged about tho success of his lecture tour in England by saying that he had "rolled them in the aisles— the British Isles." in Oregon.

Or in the following passage:

"They have queer hotels

I remember one where they gave me a bag of oats for a

pillow— I had night mares of course.

In the morning the landlord

said— How do you feel— old hoss— hay7— I told him I felt my oats."

At

other times, also like Bangs, the literary comedians used word play to convey a satirical thrust.

Ward once remarked:

"Our £lndian^] breth­

ren drink with impunity , . . and anyone else that will ask them." David R 033 Locke (Petroleum V. Ilasby) deliberately misspelled Democrisy so that it suggested hypocrisy.

And Josh Billings once said:

"It has

bin observed, ’that corporashuns hain’t got enny soils.’ There i3

61 excepshuns tow this rule, for i kno ov several that hav got the mean­ est kind uv souls."

The obvious difference between Banks's word play and

that of the native humorists is that Bangs always expressed his puns and other statements in correct English, eschewing the illiteracies and other linguistic eccentricities of his old-school counterparts. The literary comedians, again like Bangs, often turned to allu­ sions to familiar works as a source of humor.

But, unlike Bangs, they

usually misquoted, misspelled, or mispronounced the passage, sometimes combining these tricks with anti-climax or non soquitur. sole,"

"Bo still my

Word drawled solemnly, "and you# heart, stop cuttin1 up."

Billings observed:

"Truth is mitey and will prevail;

Josh

so iz cider

mitey, but yu hav got tow tap tho barrel before it will prevalo."

The

mangled quotations could carry sorious undertones, as in Billings1: "Han was 'created a little lower than tho angels and has bin gittin a little lower over since."

This quotation has obviously been deliber­

ately altered to make a point.

But for the most part, tho fractured

allusions uttered by tho literary comedians were presented as uninten­ tional, as if the solemn lunkhead were unaware of his foolish pretentious­ ness.

In Bangs’s case, however, whon he reworded allusions, tho audience

was supposed to recognize that the deviations wore deliberate— intended, in fact, as illustrations of the author’s clovornoss and hence to be savored by the enlightened reader, who would, of course, immediately identify the allusions. One might claim a resemblance between Bangs’s epigrams and the aphorisms which pervade all phases of the native tradition of humor. At tho very least the statements from each represent a conciso, pointed

egression of an idea.

Out considered coll.octivoly, the two reflect

significant diffcroncos.

The proverbial sayings of the hu.-.espun comics

constituted kernels of horse sense wisdom vihich armed thoir listeners with truths with which to surmount tho obstacles that confronted them ill settling an alion land.

For example, hero is one by Josh Billings:

"I have worked on a farm just long enough to know that there is no prayers so good for poor land as manure, and no thoory con boat twelve hours each day (Jundays excepted) of honest labour applied to the sile,"

Bangs's epigrams— the serious ones, at least—

also purport to

contain a percaptivo observation about life, but thoy ore directed toward a sopliisticated, urbane audience, and their neatly balanced phrases smack unmistakably of "book larnin*" and "sniffilisation,11 both anathema to tho native school of cornody. In addition to variations in humorous techniques, Bangs and tho older comics differed in many of the subjocts thoy chose as targets for social satiro. Tho introductory paragraphs of this chapter state that Bangs, throughout his long- and successful career, was pre-eminontly a social satirist, selecting as his topics issues involving all classes of society populatin; hi 3 chosen territory, dew York City— tho Four Hundred, the immigrants, and members of his own well-educated, financially comfortable middlo class.

The social satiro of the first two phases in tho develop­

ment of native humor, those of Down East and Southwestern humor, differs from Bangs's both in subject matter and objectives.

From its beginning,

tho old school of comedy was non-conformist, unconventional, and rebel­ lious against the established social order and set about exposing its

63 falsonoss,

As Jesse Bier 3ugg03ts in The r.iso and Fall of American

Humor (V)68) t nativo satire was always more negative than corrective.^ In tho Down Fast phase, particularly during the Revolutionary V/ar period, the comic tales focused on the Yankee’s outwitting a slick, polished Englishman, a symbol of the Old World.

For example, Constance Rourko

recounts the tale of the Yankee who is coaxed into a tavern by some English sharp or s.

They drink throe bottles of wine and depart.

" ’Ah,*11

said tho landlord, wagging his hoad in mock sympathy, '1 seo you aro not acquainted with our London blades.

You must pay the reckoning.*

Jonathan looked discomfited, slowly drew out a handful of silver, gazed at it, and ordered another bottle.

When tho landlord left to

fetch this, simple Jonathan ran to the mantelpiece, chalked the sum, scrawled, *1 leave you a Yankee handle for your London blados,* and ran out of tho door."

(American Humor, p. 17)

Lise Rourko proposes that the mythical figure of tho Yankee was an: "ideal image, a self-image, one of those symbols which people spontaneously adopt and by which in corao measure thoy live . , • . His slanting dialect, homely metaphors, the penotrating rhythms of his speech, gave a fillip toward the upset of old and rigid balances; creating laughter, he also creatod a fresh sense of unity. He ridiculed old values; the persistent con­ trast vrith tho British showed part of his intention; to some extent created now ones. Ho was a symbol of triumph, of adapt­ ability, of irrepressible life— of many qualities needed to induce confidence and self-possession among a now and unamalgamatod pcoplo." (p. 35) Although it may bo claimed that Bangs also ridiculed the pre­ tenses and excesses of a superior social class, tho High Society, he

37i'ow York, p. 30*

do nan was ever charged with having ao­ quired his money by shady methods* The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is "Get money* Get It qhiokly. Get it in abundance* Get it in prodigious abundance* Get it dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must." (p* 77) Twain was the most caustic of all the literary comedians In his onslaught on economic corruption and the subversions of industrial capitalism, and considerably more caustic than Bangs.

In addition

Twain and his fellow humorists were greatly concerned with the tie-up between Big Business and government, with its accompanying political corruption, whereas Bangs's social satire dwelt more on the effeots of greed on middle-class domestic life and on the manners and affectations

of New York* a nouveau riche.

But both kinds of homorlsts believed

that the new business ethics threatened the superior moral values of an older day* Another topic popular with both Bangs and the literary come­ dians was the feminist movement* which began during the middle of the nineteenth century and persisted until the granting of female suffrage In 1920,

The Idiot series provides the best expression of Bangs* s ideas

on this subject*

In The idiot at Home, the hero speaks disapprovingly

of pseudo-intellectual women who* while discussing Darwin* Browning, music, eto., at their d u b meetings, neglect their husbands and lose them.

He remarks proudly to his old breakfast table antagonists that,

In proper Victorian fashion, his own wife is not guilty of exceeding her female limitations.

In Half Hours with the Idiot, the hero asserts

that tired men want to discuss Ade’s "The Flapper that Flipped," and not intellectual subjects. The literary comedians also deride the female attempt to secure "equality." the suffragettes.

Ward, among the others, early dedared war against

ho

In his piece "Woman's Rights"

Ward describes how

he happened to set up his show in a small town in "Injanny" where he was approached by a "deppytashun of ladles who oome up & sed they wos members of the Bunkumville Female Moral Refamnin & Vimin's Rite's Assooiashun."

They request free admission to his show, and when Ward

refuses, the good ladies proceed to deliver a severe lecture about the slavery and "tyrinny" to which women have been subjected sinae the

^ Artemus Ward: His Book (Santa Barbara, Calif., 196*0, pp. 119-122, Page citations in the text refer to this edition.

69 beginning of time and about their determination to seek equality vith men*

Ward replies as follows:

"The female woman is one of the greatest instltooshuns of whioh this land can boste, It's onpossible to get along with­ out her. Had there bin no female windn in the world, I should scarcely be here with my unparailed show on this very ocoashun. She is good in good in wellness— good all the time, 0, woman, woman!" I cried, my feelins worked up to a hi poetick pitchi "you air a angle when you behave yourself i but when you take off your proper appalrel & (metty-fortoally speaken)— get into pantyloons— when you desert your firesides, & with your heds full of womin's rites noshuns go round like roarin lyons, seek­ ing idiom you may devour— in short, when you undertake to play the man, you play the devil and air an emfatio noonsanoe," (pp, 121-22) Billing also had his say on the issue. problem in these terms:

He onoe described the

"A man out at the elbows, and his wife out

tew a woman's rites oonvenshun,

i kant see why she shud be histed up

into a posiehun, where man has got to cease luving her, just in pro­ per shim as tha are asked to wonder at her,"

The one exception to this

conservative guffawing at the feminist movement was Naeby, who fought consistently against "the social restrictions that kept women from achieving what they might,"

He did not want women to become less

feminine but advocated 'riving them freedom (which included the vote) to develop their abilities.

His position rested upon his belief of

what this freedom would contribute to the rest of society:

"I would

strengthen her, and through her the race,"^ Nasby, also like his fellow literary comedians and Bangs, expressed disapproval of the wholesale immigration policy operating during the latter part of the century and singled out the Irish as his

^Petroleum V, Nasby, p, 57*

70 primary target*

The great wave of Irish Immigration was at Its height

during Nasby's and the other humorists' lifetimes*

Throughout the

sixties, seventies, and eighties, over a million and a half residents of the U* S* were of Irish birth* York City*

A large proportion lived In New

Nashy criticized the exploitation of their poverty and

ignorance by the maohlne politicians of Tammany Hall, a subject dis­ cussed in Chapter IV of this study*

Nasby feared that the admission

of paupers and criminals would damage American institutions and that unrestricted immigration would encourage the worst elements of foreign lands to seek shelter in America.

"If the truth was known, it would

show that the majority of all who have entered into the riots of the past in our large cities are foreigners of the lowest dasa, of whom their people were only too glad to be rid."

(pp. 58-59)

Ward also

wrote a few pieces ridiculing Irish, German, and Italian immigrants,^ and Billings, with his characteristic pithiness, commented!

"Alayens

aint liable for the draft, espeeahily if tha cum from the aity of Ireland • • •" Lc In "John Chinaman in New York," ^ Twain presents himself as an indignant citizen who is shocked at the exploitation of a Chinese, reduced to posing as an advertising attraction in front of a tea store* The sketch's narrator poignantly describes the "long queue dangling down his backj

his short silken blouse, ourlouaLy frogged and

^Artemus Ward, p* **3» **5The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain, ed, Charles Neider, (New York, 1961) , pp. 13^-35* Page citations in the text refer to this edition*

71 figured . , . his blue cotton, tight-legged pants, tied dlose around the ankles;

and his clumsy blunt-toed shoes with thick cork sole s.11

The narrator becomes so moved by this sordid sight that he makes a generous ..proposal to the Chinaman: ’’Cheer up-*donlt be downhearted, It is not America that treats you in this way, it is merely one citizen, whose greed of gain has eaten the humanity out of his heart, America has broader hospitality for the exiled and oppressed, America^and the Americans are always ready to help the unfortunate, Money shall be raised— you shall go back to China— you shall see your friends again. What wage3 do they pay you here?” He received this astonishing reply:

"Divil a cint but four dollars

a week and find me self 5 but it's aisy, barrin' the troublesome furrin clothes that's so expin sive,"

The narrator decides that "Hew

York tea merchants who need picturesque signs are not likely to run out of Chinamen,"

(pp, 13^-35)

In comparing Bangs's and the literary comedians' treatment of inmd.gratlon, particularly that of the Irish, it is again obvious that both Bangs and the old school writers feared that this phenomenon might damage precious American institutions and values, but that Bangs (in his social satire at least) emphasized such things as the trans­ gressions of lower class servants against middle-class standards.

The

literary comedians, by contrast, were primarily concerned with the political repercussions of immigration, rather than with the social manners of foreigners and the possible domestic problems they might pose. Despite the occasional similarity in choice of topics, evidence shows that the social satire of the literary comedians was broader in scope than Bangs's.

Bangs was "provincial" in the sense that he was

72 interested mainly in timely subjects which his readers would also be affected by or aware of and hence would enjoy their being presented humorously*

In other words, Bangs for the.Tjnohtppart— with exceptions

like the women's rights movement! which was natiomd.de— confined him­ self to the sooial world of New York City:

its fads, the excesses of

various Glasses, the problems of living there, and the common every­ day dilemmas which a middle-class gentleman like himself might have to contend with* On the other hand, the sooial satire of the native tradition was less topical and localised than Bongs'a and more prooccupied with general human targets like hypocrisy, bigotry, conformism, and smallmindedness*

Its attackb on subjeots like women and capitalism became

attacks on human nature in general,^

add beneath all of its works

lay a comic assault upon the falsification and repression of genteel culture, of which Bangs was the shining epitome. In summary, the sooial satire of the old school, in all phases of its development, differs from Bangs's, not just in choice of topics but also in its objectives and essential nature*

The old school was

antithetical toward inherited lies and was hell-bent on cradling through them to the truth of national life*

Bangs, by contrast, was

always a defender of the established order, specifically his own urban middle class, and undertook to chastise offenses against this order,.or often merely to laugh at its activities*

He represented the new humor,

designed to amuse a class of readers newly created and growing rapidly

^Bier, p* 86*

73 in numberi

the nameless, faceless middle-class workers who had moved

to the city from a small town to take their places among the ranks of white collar workers, filling Jobs created by industrialization.

Bangs*a

writing triod to projeot an ideal image, one that reflected what his readers aspired to bo, oven if reality cast a shadow on the dream* However, significantly, despite the differences in objectives, audiences, and techniques, Bangs and the native humorists shared a consistent point of view in their comedy— one characterised by modera­ tion, good sense, and conservatism, Josh Billings;

Walter Blair has stated about

"For the most part, though, when he wrote about the

problems men had to solve, he was satisfied to put into his queer language sentences which spoke wall of old-fashioned virtues and the Joy they brought— a good home life, an honest (though shrewd) business career, and simple but strong religion*

These passages— and those which

simply explained the characters of men and women 6f different sorts— showed his knowledge of human nature and his thorough acceptance of (l9 old ideas about it," ' Ward was a middle of the roader, making extremes of any kind his chief object.

When he laughed at tho Shakers, the

Mormons, or the Free Lovers, he knew that he, like Bangs, was speaking for the majority of his audience* To conclude, Bangs's sooial satire was usually genial and always literate and in good taste from the standpoint of style.

In his

collectibo opinions on a variety of social issues. Bangs consistently displayed a middle-class, urban point of view*

He ridiculed both the

^7Blair, Horse Sense in American Humor, p. 225*

upper and lower classes for their violations of middle-class norms*

He

criticized the upper class, for exa^'I, for the laziness and shallow­ ness of its dudes and young ladies, and the ostentation, greed, and irregular family life of its idle rioh.

And he aondemned the lower

class for both its lack of culture and for its presumption in trying to Imitate its betters*

His work, through implied contrasts, repeated­

ly expresses his conservative beliefs, which embrace such traditional qualities as individualism, self-reliance, common sense, moderation, and civic and marital responsibility.

All of these beliefs pervade the

rest of his humor and also the humor of the old tradition*

CHAPTER I H LITERARY SATIRE AMD BURLESQUE1

Among authors of all schools of comedy, native as wall as genteel, literary burlesque was one of the most popular forms of humor in America during the late nineteenth century.

There was scarcely a

well-known work on either side of the Atlantic which was not parodied in either newspapers, magazines, or books, or on the lecture platform. The literary comedians, who perpetuated the native tradition of humor in the latter part of the centuxy, excelled at burlesquing the popular sentimental works of that period;

Bangs, as a writer and magazine

editor, naturally took a lively interest in the literary scene;

and

as a professional humorist he frequently made comic capital out of its events*

For over twenty years, In novels, short stories, poems, and

musical comedies, he satirized a wide range of subjects, including best­ selling authors and their works, realism, and popular genres like the historical romance and the detective story,

A comparison of Bangs*s

satires to those of the traditional humorists reveals that both ridiculed

•^Inasmuch as neither the literary comedians (See Blair, •'Burlesques in Nineteenth-Century American Humor," p* 236) nor Bangs made a distinction between the terms burlesque and parody this chapter will follow their example and use these terms interchangeably to mean a humorous imitation and exaggeration of the conventions in plot, characterization, and style peculiar to a literary type, the works of a certain author, or a particular book, play, short story, or poem*

75

many of the same contemporary tendencies in literature and in general hold mary similar beliefs about whuL constituted good writing, but also differed in other ways, such as in their techniques and in their attitudes toward realism*

The literary comedians employed such characteristic

devices of the native tradition as the lower-class persona* Illiterate dialect, and rural backgrounds.

They oIbo carried on the native

school’s practice of portraying both character and locale frankly and honestly.

Bangs, however, as a genteel humorist writing for genteel

audiences, always attempted to display sophistication and to demonstrate the sophistication and delicacy appropriate to his brand of refined humor*

He believed, moreover, that realism inhibited a writer’s imag­

ination and produced literature which was vulgar and dull.

These

similarities and differences between Bangs and the literary comedians are dearly reflected in their literary satire and burlesque. Sentimental writing of all types predominated in this country during most of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth*

This literature was characterised in general by an over­

emphasis on ideality— most dearly reflected in the tendency of its heroes and heroines to represent models of human perfection— and a corresponding de-emphasis of objective reality in creative writing*

an

optimistic attitude toward evil*

a tendency to moralize on the conven­

tional ethics of polite society;

a false exaggeration of everything

conneoted with fooling or emotion*

an avoidance of all things nasty or

ugly* and a sterility of language, style, and form.

The literary come­

dians, on the other hand, believed that good writing should be, among other things, dear, simple, natural, and true to experience.

They

disliked the pretentious and pedantic, the artificial and the spurious. It is not surprising, therefore, that this group of humorists, which Included as its best writers Arterms Ward, Bill Nye, Orpheus C, Kerr, and Mark Twain, specialized in attacking the false idealism of their day. One of their favorite targets, as Walter Blair points out in his article, "Burlesques in Nineteenth-century American Humor," "ornate romantio historical works of the period."

(p. 2hZ)

2

wa3 the These

works strived to point up some obvious point or moral and consequently arranged events or overlooked and altered facts which might have proved injurious to the famous persons under consideration, frequently at the expense of accuracy and actuality.-^

Generally written in florid prose,

those philosophical, didactic histories largely Ignored "the workaday life of ordinary people."

(LHU5, p. 526)

As a corrective to a kind of

writing which they thought was pompous and false, the literary comedians offered their own comic version of history, in which they "made histori­ cal events comical by stressing foibles of honored leaders," and "constantly mingled the realistic with the romantic, the colloquial with the elegant."

(Blair, p. 2A2)

In "The Late Benjamin Franklin,"** for

example, Mark Twain irreverently declares that Ben "was of a vicious

r> ‘‘'Page citations to Blair throughout this chapter will refer to this piece. 3Ljterary History of the United States. I, 527. Page citations to this work in the text will ha preceded hy the abbreviation LHUS. Sketches New and Old (New York, 1875)» RP* 211-0,6. Citations from this work in tu; text refer to this edition.

disposition, and early prostituted hie talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages,11

(p, 211)

In "An Interview with

Prince Napoleon,"'* Artemus Ward dismisses Alexander the Great with the dry and unflattering observation that:

"Alexander the Grate was

punkins , . • but Napoleon was punkinserl

Alio wept becaws -there was

no more worlds to scoop, and thon took to drinkin.

He drawnded his

sorrers in the flowin bole, and the flowin bole was too much for him* It ginerolly is*"

(p. 132)

Bill Nye displays a similar delight in

tying up "homely material with glamorous figures or romantic moments of history" (Blair, p, 2^3) by describing how Spartocus borrows a chew of tobacco before delivering a victory oration to a hushed throng in the Roman forum.^

Orpheus C. Kerr follows suit in the "Life of General

G a r i b a l d i b y making his illustrious subject wipe his nose on pine shavings and w a r "two yellow patches , , • flaming from the background of his seat of learning."

Kerr also burlesques the pedantic stylo of

contemporary history writing in such passages of nonsensical double talk as this:

5ln The Complete Works of Charles Farrar Browne (London, 1883), pp. 133L-13^« Citations from this’work in the text refer to this edition* ^In "The Great Oration of Sparatcus," Chestnuts: (Chicago, 1888), pp. 1$&*199*

New and Old

^Tho Orpheus C. Kerr * ;,pers (New York, 1862), pp, 297-30^» Citations from this work in the text refer to this edition.

79 Had he [Garibaldi^ not boon educated, he would have been un­ educated j had he not gone to sea he would never have been a sailor; had he not fought for Uo .'t , ho would have laid down arms in her cause; were he not not; fighting for Italian inde­ pendence, he would bo otherwise engagedI Thus the aspect presented by Garibaldi throughout his career, leads our thoughts into all the deep moandorings of the German mind, and teaohes us to perceive that "whatever is, is right," as whatever is not, is tirong, (p. 303) In the so and many other similar burlesques, the humorists of the native tradition satirized "the gilded mannerisms and the height­ ened materials" of romantic history writing.

(Blair p, 2^3)

But if history writing provided irresistible subjects for ludicrous imitation, popular fiction provided even more. comedians valued woll-construoted, consistent plots; believable, natural characters;

The literary

originality;

and straightforward prose with dialogue

appropriate to a given character.

They disliked sentimentality, sen­

sationalism, flatulence, and exaggeration.

It is not surprising, there­

fore, that they declared collective war on the romantic sentimental novels of their day.

Catering to the publics desire for ©scape, these

confections featured artificial, idealized characters; probable plots;

Inflated diction;

contrived, im­

and excessive emotion.

popular kind of all was the historical novel.

The most

Books of this type, such

as VJhen Knighthood Was in Flower. Ben ilur, Quo Vadis, and Graustark, topped the bestseller lists week after week during the 1890*s and early 1900*s.

They wore characterized by handsome, dashing heroes, usually

noble by birth but occasionally pirates or corsairs, who demonstrated remarkable physical and moral superiority to ordinary men.

The heroines

were also well-bred and high-principled (although somewhat acoidentprone) and the villains impossibly evil.

The plots were filled with

80 exciting action, like duels at midnight, secret escapes, and breath­ less pursuits, but, after several heart-rending scones of death and lovers parting, usually ended happily with virtue triumphing and true love regarded.

The narrative style as well as the dialogue tended to

be turgid and self-consciously literary.

Time after time, with obvious

gusto, comic writers of the native tradition ridiculed these excesses. O In "Pumpking Jim; or the Tale of a Busted Jackass Rabbit," Bill Nyc givos us a hero who is so preoccupied with gazing nobly into the sunset that he falls off his mule and it sits on him. thee, thou base and treacherous mule I"

he muttered brokenly £eohoing

the language of a typical romantic hero.]

"By my beard, thou has

poorly repaid me for ity unremitting kindness to thee. alack, alack--1 11 (p. 106)

In "Higgins,

"Curses upon

Ah, alack,

an Autobiography.

By

Q

Gushalina Crushit,"

a parody of a "woman1s'1 novel, Orpheus C. Kerr

tells the tearful but preposterous tale of a young woman who falls madly in love— at first sight, naturally— with a man who curses her, orders her to black his boots, and addresses her by such fond epithets as "poor little beast,"

"Jfoung scorpion," "viper," and "idiot."

The plot becomes as improbable as the heroine’s instant passion.

She

leaves Higgins for no clear reason to go live in a cavern near Hew Orleans,

Seventy-five years later, Higgins miraculously appears and

the two fall into each other's arm3 as if they had never parted.

^Bill Hye and Boomerang (Chicago, 1881), pp. 90-106, from this work in the text refer to this edition.

The

Citations

^Tho Orpheus Cj_ Kerr Papers, pp. 63-7*1-. Citations from this work in the text refer to the edition named above.

81 heroine’s emotional reaction to this event (couched in suitably elegant language) proves that she deserves the name of Gushalina: '•Was it the music of a higher sphere that I smelt, or was I still in this world of folly and sin? and were all ny toils, ay cares, Tty heartbreathings, try hope sobbings, my soul writh­ ing 3 to end thus gloriously at last in the adoration of a being on whom I lavished all ry spirit’s purest gloatings? Ity bliss was more than I could endure* Tearing all the hairpins from ry hair and tying ry pocket handkerchief about ry heaving neck, I flung ryself upon his steaming ohest." (p, 73) In "A Medieval Romande.”^0 a burlesque of a]historical novel, Mark Twain contrives such a complicated plot that he is unable to finish it and stops abruptly to announce:

“The truth is, I have ny hero (or

heroine) into such a particularly d o s e place that I do not see how I am ever going to got him (or her) out of it again, and therefor I will wash ny hands of the whole business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers— or else stay there,1’ (p. 221)

Artemus Ward

was also fond of satirising the historical romance and produced several, such as ’'Roberto the Rover: Red Hand;

A Tale of Sea and Shore,"

"The

a Tale of Revenge," and "The Fair Inez," all of vihioh

feature pirates, picturesque corsairs, and other sv:ahhbuolcLing desperadoes as loading characters,

"Moses, the Sassy;

or, the Disguised

Duke" epitomizes the approaoh he used in the other burlesques,11

The

opening deflates the highflown prose of the period’s romances by oxpressing paraphrases of pretentious cliahes in the vernacular:

1QSketohes New and Old, pp. 221-233* Citations from this work in the text come from the edition already given, •^All of these sketch-3 appear in The Complete Works of Charles Farrar Browne. Citations to "Moses, the Sassy" will refer to tho edition given above.

82 In the parlor of a bloated aristocratic mansion on Bacon Street sits a luvly young lady, whose hair is cuverd ore with the frosts of between 17 Summer s. She has just cot down to the piany, and is warbling the poplar ballad called "Smells of the Notion," in which she tells how, with pensive thought, she wandered by a C beat shore. The son is setting in its horizon, and its gorjus light pores in a golden aeller flud through the winders, and makes the young lady twict as beautiful nor what she was before, which is onnecessary • • • • Presently she jumps up with a wild snort, and prossin her hands to her brow, die exclaims, ,rKethinks I see a voiceJ" (pp. 92-93) Ward then introduces tho hero, Moses, who although only foreman of Engine Co. Ho 4-0, is quickly revealed to be of noble birth because he returns from a fight with ’?*his arms full of trofeos, to wit:

^ scalps,

5 eyes, 3 fingers, 7 ears (which he chawed off), and several, half and quarter sections of noses."

A3 the improbable story unfolds, Moses

goes to France to discover that he is really the Duko of France.

On

the way homo he singlehandodly wards off an attack by a shipful of "piruts" and returns to live happily ever after with his childhood sweetheart.

At tho end of this spoof, Ward piously states:

"This is

ny 1st attempt at writin a Tail., & it is far from being perfecki

but

if I have indoosed folks to see thatln 9 cases out of 19 they can either make Life as harron as -die Dessert 6f Sarah, or as joyyus as a flower gardlng, ny objeck will have bin accompli died, and more too."

(p. 95) The other literary comedians used tho same methods of attack

in thoir parodies of romantic nineteenth-century fiction as Ward did in "Moses, the Sassy."

Like Ward, "they exaggerated the unlifelilce

characterizations, tho absurd plots, and tho water-color backgrounds which wore fashionable, until their absurdity, thus magnified, became quite evident»"

(Blair, p. 2*4-7)

Implicit in those burlesques was a

defense of the standards these humorists valued in literature and thought romanticism violated;

clecu', unadorned prose;

natural, sympathetic characters;

inventiveness;

and convincing plots.

tially agreed on all of these points.

Bangs essen­

As in the rest of his comedy, he

represented tho golden mean betweon extremes, the common sense point of view of a man of taste and reason.

In general ho liked characters that

wore true to life (as he experienced it), stories which wore entertain­ ing and original and neither dull nor sensational, and dialogue which was natural and informal.

Ho opposed triteness, pretentiousness, con­

descension, aivi the extravagance in character, spoech, plot, or emotion» which characterized the thon popular fiction.

The closeness of these

views to those of the literary comedians is reflected in his numerous satires of romantic and sentimental literature. Bangs wrote only one burlesque history, Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica (1895).

12

a "biography" of Napoleon, but its broad comic intent de­

parted little from that of Kerr in "Life of Garibaldi" and that of similar satires produced by other literary comedians:

to deride

(1) the overidealiaed and distorted accounts of famous figures and events, and (2) to deride the affected style characteristic of ninetoenth-century romantic histories.

In pursuing this aim, Bangs, like

the literary comedians, presented his subject and his deeds in an absurd

■^Hew York. Citations from this work in the text refer to this edition. Francis II* Bangs reports that Mr. Bonaparte, one of his father1s great successes* appeared in March, "when The Idiot stood in second place among books in American authorship in ihe hest-sellor . lists, and it forthwith tied Tho Idiot for that position in April, and itself took second place in Kay."

way, juxtaposing colloquial and formal language and shifting from sorious to frivolous attitudes. Works about Napoleon were enjoying a great vogue at tho time Bangs wrote his burlesque biography;

highly adulatory and idealising

articles about tho lrronoh emperor had been appearing in such respected journals as the Century. Cosmopolitan, and HcCluro1s.

Tho solemnity of

these works was underscored by their authors' tendency to document their matefcial by referring to authentic sources of one kind or another, frequently a lottor or memorandum just discovered in the papers of one of ’lapoleon's associates.

In Hr. Bonaparte, Bangs makes Napoleon a

vain, overbearing, and stupid little man who gets headaches from wear­ ing his crown to bed and keeps referring to hie military tactics as "tiotacs,"

Bangs also treats the famous events in his hero's career

in an irreverent manner.

For example, when tho French people begin to

grow restive under the Consulate, Talleyrand suggests to his commander that he resign. n tjfta rather cross the Alps,’ said Bonaparte. to resign.

*1 don't like

Moving is such a nuisance, and I must soy I find the

Tuilerios a vory pleasant place of abode.

It's more fun than you can

imagine rummaging through the late Icing's old buroau-drawers,

Suppose

I get up a near army and load it over the Alps.1 " Bust the thing,1 said Talleyrand,

'Only it will be a very

snowy trip,* "'I'm used to snow-balls,' said Napoleon, , . . 'Just order an arny and a mule and I *11 set out,' "So it was that Bonaparte sot out upon hi3 perilous expedition

85 over tho Groat St. Barnard.**

(pp. 156-58)

Bangs also pokes fun at tho stuffy Napoleon histories of his time by shifting suddenly from mock-serious narrative to colloquial quips, as in the following account of the defeat of the French anry at Moscow: "It was too late.

Nothing could be done, and the conquering

hero of nearly twenty years now experienced the bitterness of defeat. Rushing through the biasing town, he ordered a retreat, and was soon sadly winding his way back to Paris. "Mia sro afraid* * he murmured, *that that Moscow1fire has cooked our imperial goose,'"

(p. 210)

Like the serious biographers of the Little Corporal, Bangs "documents" his version of events.

For example, after describing the

first encounter between Napoleon and his future general, Junot, the narrator declares solemnly:

"There have been various other versions of

this anecdote, but this is the only correct one, and is now published for the first time on the authority of M. le Comte de B~— , whose grand­ father was tho bass drummer upon whoso drum Junot was writing the now famous letter, and who was afterwards ennobled by Napoleon for his services in Egypt, where, one dark, drizzly night, he frightened away from Bonaparte's tent a fierce bond of hungry lions by pounding vigor­ ously upon his instrument." this reference:

(p. 68)

On another occasion Bangs offers

"With this remark Napoleon jumped into bed, and on the

authority of M. le Comte de Q—

, at this time Charge d'Affaires of the

Luxembourg, and later on Janitor of the Tuileries, was soon dreaming of the Empire."

(p. 1^0)

In Mr. Bonaparte, then, Bangs ridiculed the same tendencies in nineteenth-century romantic histories that the humorists of the native tradition did in their burlesques of the same genre.

Elsewhere, and

again like the native humorists, he concentrated his gift of comic mimicry on the popular fiction of his period.

There was in fact hardly

a well-known romancer of his generation whom Bangs did not parody at one time or another.

He filled "three entire volumes with satires of

these successful writers— Hew Waggings of Old Tales. The Dreamers, and 13 Potted Fiction — and parts of several other volumes.

The list of his

victims roads like a Who*s Who in popular literature around the turn of the century:

Richard Harding Davis, Rudyard Kipling, Hall Caine,

Anthony Hope, Ian Maclaren, Sir James Barrie, Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, H, Rider Haggard, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and Frank Stockton, to cite a few.

Of the gentlemen named above, seven appeared

on Bookman’s best-seller lists from 1896 through 1899: Davis, Hope, Caine, Kipling, and Sienkiewicz,

Maclaren, Barrie,

Bangs's parodies of these

gentlemen’s work, moreover, reveal a significant point of departure between Bangs and the native humorists which will be elaborated on be­ low, namely that Bangs preferred to deal with a specific individual or work, while the native humorists dealt almost exclusively with types of literature. In burlesquing these romantic authors, Bangs customarily seized upon a characteristic feature of the author's work— theme, plot, setting, or prose style— and treated it in a grotesque manner,

•*-3ilew v/aggings was published in Boston in 1888, The Dreamers in Hew York in 1899# and Potted Fiction in Hew York in 1900,

incongruous with the serious intention of the original work.

In his

•iji

parody of Riohard Harding Davis* Van fibber series,

for example.

Bangs made the hero, whom Davis had portrayed as a sophisticated young man from New York high society who "never failed in anything he under­ took, " a snobbish braggart who drinks absinthe by the sohoonerful and hides terrified behind young ladles at the first sign of danger.

In a

burlesque of Ian Madaren and James Barrie jointly,^ Bangs concentrated on these authors* use of a thick Scotch dialect.

When the two char­

acters in his sketch decide at Its conclusion to "ge oop Scutch doealect," the narrator commends their kindness to the reading public "in thus declining to give them more of something of which they had already enough."

(p. 228)

In another sketch, satirizing Anthony

Hope*s The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau, Bangs has Rupert Rassondyl, the main character of both of these novels, express the hope that there will not be another sequel, because, as Rupert explains, "13 it not better to be the happy husband of Dolly of the Dialogues, than to be going about like a knight of the Middle Ages clad in the evening dress of the nineteenth century, doing Impossible things?"

(p, 162) Although Bangs most frequently chose to deal with a specifio

l^This sketch also appears in The Dreamers. ^Entitled "Lang Tammas and Dr urnsheugh Swear Off," this parody appears in The Dreamers. Citations from this work in the text refer to the edition already named. ^Entitled "Dolly Visits Chicago," this sketch also appears in The Dreamers, Citations to this work in tho text refer to the edition specified.

88 author*s work, in one burlesque he collaborated with Bert Leston Taylor and Arthur Folwoll to satirize a type, the historical romance* In this delightful spoof, Monsieur D 1 en Broohette» (1905).^ Bangs demonstrated onco again, as he had in Mr* Bonaparte, the similarities between his literary burlesque of this popular genre and that of the traditional humorists by ridiculing the same excesses:

its noble,

picturesque heroes, artificial settings, 'flimsy plots, and ornate language. Tho hero of this novel, Huevos Pasada par Agua, Count of de Foie Gra d* en Brochette, and Marquis Presumptive of the Estates of Pollio Grille in Spain, is impoverished but aristooratic to his finger tips (ho runs his rapier through a head waiter who fails to please him) $ he will do anything to defend the honor of his family name, protect the king, and pursue a beautiful woman.

His bravery impels him to

attempt superhuman feats (for which he generously congratulates him­ self), and no matter what tho odds he always emerges victorious:

in

one episode he easily disposes of an attacker with a sword six feet seven inches long, and in another he kills twenty ruffians singlehandedly.

("It will be like stringing beads," he sneers as he approaches

them.) But in spite of these admirable traits, Broohette frequently

■^7Hew York, Citations from this work in the text refer to this edition. Monsieur D 1 ert Brochette first appeared serially in Puck during 190?! Bangs was editor of the magazine at this time, and Folwell and Taylor were members of its staff. Although there is no record of which author contributed specific material, the work as a whole is so consistent with ‘ fangs1s outlook and technique that it seems justifiable to treat it a3 if it had been written entirely by Bangs.

cats like a buffoon.

On one memorable occasion he runs out of a

restaurant in hot pursuit of his foes and leaps on his horso . . . only to land in the gutter because the horso has been impounded by La Societe Prevenir Cruate d'Animals [ sio^j. Another time while rushing to attack an opponent ho trips and falls downstairs. The plot creaks with melodramatic effects;

at every turn

Broohette encounters trap doors, secret passages, dank dungeons, and cackling villains.

Three different men successfully disguise themselves

as the Due dc3 Pommes do Terre au Gratin (the hero's chief adversary) by merely putting an artificial mole on their chin3.

There are other im­

probable elements, such as the numerous coincidences. While riding a horse which he has "appropriated1* after his own was impounded, Brochette Inadvertently presses a spring in tho saddle and finds in a hidden com­ partment a letter revealing a conspiracy against King Louis XIV.

Many

escapades later Brochette is again forced to appropriate a horse and discovers that it is tho same one, with another important message hidden in the saddle. The plot complications are as inexplicable as they are numerous* Isabelle, the story's heroine with whom Brochette falls in love, offers the only apparent explanation for them.

When Broohette asks her why

twenty men attacked them, she replies: 11'I know not, unless-’ ’"Yes, ry pearl, unless--1 '"Unless 'tis because,' she ventured, 'we live in historical times.1,1

(pp. 159**60)

To add further to the confusion of the plot, each of the three

collaborators writes a final chapter, because, as a publisher's note explains, they were unable to agree upon how tho story should end, Taylor's version tells how Brochatte goes on to perform many more deeds of unparalleled bravery in behalf of king and country; Broohette and Isabelle emigrate to America

Folwell has

and Bangs makes them fall

into a deep mud puddle where they die ecstatically in each other's arras* Monsieur D' en Brochette illustrates more clearly than any other of Bangs’s burlesques the literary standards upon which he and the humorists of the old school agreed:

believable characters, well-

constructed plots, clear, natural language, common cense, and no exaggeration.

But Bangs and these other humorists also disagreed on

certain of their beliefs about literature.

First of all, the literary

comedians differed from Bangs in the techniques they used to make fun of trends in contemporary writing.

These techniques, in turn, derived

directly from their audiences and outlets and from their attitudes toward realism. As Chapter I points out, the native humorists in the second half of the nineteenth century did not rely as extensively on politics or regional peculiarities as older humorists had, but did nevertheless carry on several distinctive traditions.

Specifically, they used the

persona of a wise fool or lower class eccentric; erate speech;

and western or rural backgrounds.

dialect and/or illit-

18

Pumpkin Jim,

**-®It should be pointed out that this statement characterises their literary satire in gonoral. As several of the excerpts from their works cited in this chapter indicate,, not all of these men ad­ hered to all of these traditions all of the time when writing literary burlesque, Kerr often wrote in correct English, for example, and some of Ward's burlesques do not use a western background.

91 for example, with his mule squatting on him, is clearly a man of the frontier*

The fondness for tobacco which Spartacus displays would have

been much more common in rural than urban areas.

The humor in Ward's

burlesque of grandiloquent diction and unnatural dialogue in "Moses, the Sassy" obviously relies on the expression of such language in tho illiterate, generalized rural dialect that Word customarily employed. Twain, furthermore, ploys thevwise fool in "The Late Benjamin Franklin11 when he states with a straight face that he knows Ben was twins because two houses in Boston claim to be his birthplace. These .iannorisms are related to the audiences and outlets to which native American humor has traditionally been directed.

Although

many of tho literary comedians achieved national or even international prominence (e.g., Twain and Ward), all of them began their careers in the West, Midwest, or Southwest, attracting attention first as news­ paper columnists and then frequently becoming comic lecturers.

Con­

sequently many of their humorous devices reflected the qualities and tastes of their audiences, who tended to be rural or smalltown in out­ look, unsophisticated, formally uneducated, and somewhat suspicious of "city slickers" and "intellectuals." Bangs1s humor, however, was designed to appeal to a different audience, that of the genteel magazines like Harper *s whore hi3 literary satire first appeared.

On the whole this audience was eastern, urban,

middle to upper-middle class, with pretensions to refinement and cultivation.

Because Bangs most frequently parodied specific authors

r&ther than types of literature, the locales of his parodies necessarily varied according to the work he was dealing with, but the methods he

used for unifying his three major collections of parodies clearly have liis usrual genteel, cosmopolitan audience in mind*

Potted Fiction, for

example, "a Series of Extracts from the World*s Best-Sellers Put Up in Thin Slices for Hurried Consumers," is, as the Foreword states:

"to be

consumed as opportunity presents on trolleyoars, between courses at quick lunch counters, between rubbers at bridge parties, or in those restful hours which the consumer may be called upon to endure at lectures, during after-dinner speeches of unusual length, or between the acts of current dramas and comic operas,"

(p, v)

The Dreamers, inspired by-

Stevenson* s remark that the plot of Dr, Jekyll and Hr. Hyde had occurred to him during a nightmare, features a group of smart young Hour York dudes, with such names as the Snobbes, Bedford Parke, Greenwich Place, Fulton Streote, and Haarlem Bridge, who meet to recount and record their "dreams," each dream being a parody of a well-known author.

The scenes

depicting the encounters of this group indicate that Bangs wanted to satirize the general class it represented, as vail as popular writers, r

this class being, in effect, his usual audience, i.e., one that lived in New York and was eminently concerned with appearing sodally correot. Moreover, that Bangs chose specific writers and their works for his literary humor suggests that he expected his readers to be familiar with these subjects, an assumption whioh the literary comedians, who made a point of being anti-intellectual and anti-literary, apparently did not make.

Moreover, Bangs strongly disapproved of vulgarity or any

other hint of "bad form,"

Thus, while his diction was ofton colloquial,

it remained standard and scrupulously observed the amenities of "correct" English*

He resorted to dialect, illiterate speech, or slang only when

93 he wished to deride them, and he never used profanity*

His concept of

propriety would never have permitted him to employ the kinds of frank and sometimes crude homely details of frontier life which native humor­ ists often did.

And as Chapter II explains, his famous character, the

Idiot, was the closest ho came to a persona of a wise fool, and this character resembled Bangs*s readers in -ways that Ward1s thick-witted bumpkin did not— the Idiot m s well-educated., respectable, and thoroughly genteel* The literary satire of Bangs and the traditional humorists re­ veals that they differed In another significant respect.

Although they

botli believed that literature should be interesting and original, they disagreed about the part realism should play in the creation of such literature,

Tho literary comedians emphasized the Imaginative bringing

to life of "real" people (by which they meant the common folk), places, and events; it.

in other words, truth to experience as the realists defined

Blair and other commentators on American humor have pointed out

the contribution to realism in literature made by tho native tradition of humor.

19

One of tho most distinctive qualities in this strain of

humor had from the beginning been the vivid and truthful depiction of charaoter and locale, and dedication to these qualities lay behind the

^In'Burlesques in Nineteenth-Century American Humor," Blair cites Pattoe* s A History of American Literature Since 1870 (Heir York: Century, 1915) ,~p. ^+3; King*s Doctor George William Bagby (Hew York: Columbia, 1927), p. 62; V/ilt*s Some American Humorists (Hew lork: Nelson, 1929), p. xi, and Meine*s Tall Tales of the Southwest (Hew York: Knopf, 1930), pp. xxix-xxx. In "Satires of American Realism, 1880-1900," (American Literature, 1962), Linneraan cites Parrington's Rain Currents in American Thought (New York, 1927)$ II, 166-172, and DeVoto's Mark Twain *s America (Boston, 1932), pp. 91-99*

literary comedians1 satire of sentimental and romantic conventions. When those humorists burlesqued the heroes and plots of the popular novols of their day, they did so because these elements violated their insistence upon an honest representation of life, accurately perceived and presented.

The heroes were absurd because they did not resemble

real men, and the plots were foolish because in real life women did not fall in love with desperadoes, pirates, or demons like Gushalina's hero (modeled after Charlotte BronteTs Rochester.)

The romantie histories

of the time rang false because they lacked objectivity, subverted fact to sentiment, and treated leaders like supermen instead of human beings. Humorists of the old school also promoted realism in ways more direct than burlesque.

The lack of realism prompted Twain's celebrated

criticism of Cooper in "The Literary Offenses of Fonimoro Cooper," Artemus Ward once wrote: has got sense.

"I like it [The Atlantic Monthly] because it

It don't print stories with piruts and honist young

men into 'em, making the piruts splendid fellers and the honist young men dis'groe'ble idiots— so that our darters very nat'rally prefer the piruts to the honist idiots; literatoor,"^®

but it gives us good square American

In addition, Bill Kye devoted an entire column to

praising the development of realism in American fiction: One of the very noticeable improvements of the age In the literary line is the remarkable braoing up of the mental faculties of those who write fiction. From the Sabbath school book to the more elaborate novel, there has been in the last few years a pronounced effort on the part of those who ereot this class of literature to introduce so far as possible

OA

The Complete Works of Charles F. Browne, p. 277.

characters who resemble live people. Pictures of beautiful white girls sitting on the back of an ambling palfry and looking like Rowena riding to the castle of Front de Eeuf, will hardly go down. Captive maid­ ens in the hands of the Indians are in luck if they can ride at all. A pict w o representing tho pale prairie flower walk­ ing over the velvety cactus in her stocking feet, and holding on to tho tail of the chief*s pony, would be more life-like, although it might mar the stage effect on the book,21 Dangs, however, did not display a comparable enthusiasm for realism.

Ho believed, in fact, that it could produce literature just

as reprehensible and vulnerable to parody as romanticism, as his numerous satires of realist writing indicate.

This is a particularly

significant point of departure because it entails other deep-seated differences botween native and genteel humor. Bangs*s reservations about the realists* approach to writing are understandable from his point of view.

Realism was a more objec­

tive way of writing than had theretofore been practiced. fidelity to actuality;

It emphasized

if the literature It produced was mild and

prosaic, its authors could not bo blamed because, after all, that was what life was like,

Tho realists argued that literature ought to

strive for truth and exactness, not for entertainment.

Such beliefs

were blasphemy to a humorist who regarded amusement as the purpose of writing.

Tho achievement of this purpose took precedence over a strictly

objective rendering of ordinary life (which was likely to be unexciting and, worse yet, depressing) and permitted "stretching the truth" to the extent of using events which woro not characteristic of ordinary life but

^•"Fiction, '* Forty Liars, and Other Lies (Chicago, 18J&), pp. 226—227,

which were novel and could be made convincing through the author*s skillful handling of them.

Dangs himsolf based several of his plots on

phenomena which have no counterpart in nature or in faot.

In A Rebellious

Heroine, for example (see below), tho central female character is the fictional creation of the story's hero, a novelist, who is unable to make her do tho acts which ho describes in the book he is writing about her.

3ho livos an independent life and at the end of the novel comes

to life and marries her resigned oreator.

In Olympian Nights (see

Chapter V, dealing with Bangs's "supernatural" *:orks), the narrator, an A.orican tourist in Greece, blunders into the home of the ancient Greek gods, Apollo, Adonis, Hercules, et insideMh.,Olympus.

al., who are alive and well

In these works and others incorporating a fanciful

"donnoe," Bangs depicted his characters realistically, as normal, late nineteenth-century mortals, and often, as in A Rebellious Heroine. he also treated tho settings realistically.

Both dialogue and narration

were written in a natural and informal style.

Although the basic pre­

mise or certain events in such works as these involve fantasy, Bangs made every effort to "carry them off,"to make them soem convincing and consistent with other factors and to see that they never got out of control and lapsed into the ridiculous. In short, Bangs liked the natural speech of educated people, realistically depicted characters (from a genteel point of view of acceptability) taken from the urban upper-middle class to which he be­ longed, and lively plots vihiah should avoid the extremes of improbability typical of tho threadbare formulas of historical romances but which nevertheless could depart from reality to include elements

of fantasy

if they were properly prepared for.

Moreover, being conservative by

nature, ho tended to distrust anything that struck him as "too experi­ mental, " -whether in literature, politics, or social trends, and certain tenets of realism struck him as unpleasantly radical.

Finally, although

he believed that humor should serve a serious purpose, he felt that it should do this by exposing only the bright side of life, and realism often seemed to dwell on tho sordid. Thus, although Bangs, like old school humorists, deplored the excessive sentimentality, overwrought prose, and unbelievable, pastetc^rd manneklns typical of romantic literature, he nonetheless did not share the literary comedians' and the realists' convictinn that liter­ ature should bo totally "honest" in the sense of giving a literal transcription of life.

To Bangs's way of thinking, the writer's first

responsibility was to be interesting (and, if he wore a humorist, to be amusing), and if this responsibility entailed the use of fantasy, in tho form of, say, making a character in a story come to life. Bangs did not objoct so long as the author demonstrated originality and clever­ ness and mado it "come off" by making it seem possible in terms of the other circumstances involved. To a certain extent, the difference between Bangs's attitude toward realism and that of the traditional humorists comes down to a matter of degree, but more importantly their differences involve a contrast between the assumptions from which the respective attitudes of each kind of humor derived.

The old-school boys identified not just with

rural values but often with a frontier viewpoint which delighted in de­ flating all of the "civilised" values connected with tho Establishment,

93 small town and urban, middle class and upper class.

They were not

interested in distinguishing among degrees of realism or different forms of literary falsification, but regarded the whole of genteel culture as fair game for satiric attack, and romantic literature was only one aspect of that culture * Bangs*s parodies of realistic writing raised several objections to its characteristic tendencies, such as the comparative frankness rrith which it treated sexual matters. Retribution"'''

by Hellinor Gryn,

In "Six Months|

a Tale of

Bongs chides Elinor Glyn for the

sensationalism and immorality of her loosely autobiographical novel, Three Weeks,

The novel's hero is Paul, a well-bred Englishman betrothed

to a dull but propor girl, who takes a vacation to Italy where he falls madly in love with a beautiful married woman.

Their affair takes them

to a mountain retreat where they engage in frantic and frequent love making.

The description of the love scenes was considered, in that day,

daringly explicit.

In his 3atire of Mis3 Glyn's work, Bangs ridicules

its sexual frankness by substituting asterisks for several passages which have supposedly come from it. note appears:

At the end of the sketch the following

"Referring to.the omissions in tho above extracts from

Miss Glyn*s novel the Editor wishes to announce that tho paragraphs presented contain all tho news that's fit to print."

(n. 57)

Bangs further implies that Miss Glyn's notives in writing her notorious novel wore not artistic but mercenary.

V/hen the publisher in

^ T h i s sketch appears in Potted Fiction, Citations from this work in the text refer to the odition specified. The satires compris­ ing thi3 collection first appeared as a syndicated feature in The New York Herald,

99 the satire suggests that some readers might find her story offensive, she replies: n,Imjnorali how they trill*

It is so quaint a word, ny Pauli

Each one sees it

For me it is immoral to be false, to be moan, to steal,

to choat, to stoop to low actions and small ends.

In this work I have

gone in for fine writing and large ends,* 1,1 Largo ends?1 said Paul dreamily. M,Yes, dearest,’ she replied softly, as she snuggled closer, • D i v i d e n d s . ( p p . 47-48) Another of Pangs’s objections was realism’s-excessive use of detail, which, ho contended, prevented the reader from separating tho significant from tho insignificant.

The carefully recorded but trivial

convornations, tho descriptions of commonplace things and events, and tho lonqthy explanations of behavior and motives were tedious and sorvod no apparent purpose.

The characters, furthermore, were ’’blood -

lens” and void of vitality, and the plots were uninteresting because they lacked nation and emotion.

Moreover, because realistic works were

based on everyday experiences, there was no way to end them.

Bang3

travestied all of those features in ’’The Overcoat, a Farce in Two Sconos,

an imitation of William Doan Howells. Tho play begins in tho Boston apartment of Mrs. Robort Edwards,

who is saying solemnly to herself;

”1 think it will rain today, but

thero is no need to worry about that.

Robert has his umbrella and his

^ 4 'The Overcoat” was ono of the parodies comprising The Dreamer; citations from it in the text trill refer to the edition already mentioned.

xoo mackintosh, and I don't think he is idlotlo enough to lend both of them. If he does, he'll get wet, that's all*"

The stage directions then

describe Mrs* Edwards and the room she is sitting in in minute detail; Mary the maid enters and is in turn described at great length*

As the

two women exchange a few simple words about what to fix for supper, their every aotion, however insignificant, is finely desoribed: "Mrs. Edwards sighs, and, walking over to the window, looks out upon the trolley-cars for ten minutes;

then, picking up one of the pins from

the floor and putting it in a pink silk pin-oushion which stands next to an alarm d o c k on the mantelpiece, a marble affair with plain caryatids and a brass fender around the hearth, she resumes her seat before the sewing-machine, and threads a needle*"

(pp* 63-6^)

The menu having been agreed upon, Mrs* Edwards, alone once again, talks to herself about going to the theatre that evening to see "Humpty Dumpty": "It is very dramatic, and I do so like dramatic things* Even when they happen in my own life I like dramatic things* I ' U never forget how I enjoyed the thrill that oame over me, even in terror, that night last winter when the trolley-car broke down in front of this house; and last summer, too, when the car-look broke in our rowboat thirty-three feet from the shore; that was a situation that I enjoyed in spite of its peril* How people can say that life is humdrum, I can't see* Exciting things, real third-act situations, climaxes I might even call them, are always happening in my life, and yet some novelists pretend that life is humdrum, just to exouse their books for being humdrum. I'd like to show these apostles of realism the diary X could have kept if I had wanted to* Beginning with the fall ay brother George had from the hay-wagon, back in I876, running down through my first meeting with Robert, which was romantic enough— he paid my car fare in from Brookline the day I lost my pooketbook— even to yesterday, when an entire stranger called me upon the telephone, ny life has fairly bubbled with dramatic situ­ ations that would take the humdrum theory and utterly annihilate it*" (pp* 68-69)

101 The point of such ironic speeches In unmistakablej

Bangs held

that the mundane occurrences of everyday life did not provide the excitement and diversion that literature was supposed to* In a sketch entitled, "The Involvular Club;

or, The Return of

the S c r e w , B a n g s singles out another .Of'-America* a major figures in the movement toward realism, Henry James*

Bangs's satire reproaches

James for his intellectual! sm— hi a characters were either so learned that they shamed the average reader or else so peculiar that they mystified— and for his style, which was so complex and obscure that his novels were not only dull, they were downright hard to read*

For

example, the first sentence of this burlesque ghost tale runs three and a half pages non-stop* A partial quotation will suffice to indi­ cate its complicated syntax and analytical tone: The story had taken hold upon us as we sat around the blazing hearth of Lord Ormont's smoking room, at Castle Andnta, and sufficiently Interfered with our comfort, as indeed from various points of view, not to specify any one of the many, for they were, after all, in spite of the diversity, of equal value judged by any standard, not even excepting the highest, that of Vereker's disturbing narrative of the uncanny visitor to this chamber, whloh, the reader may recall— indeed, must recall if he ever read it, since it was the most remarkable ghost story of the year— a year in which many ghost stories of wonderful merit, too, were written— and by whloh his reputation tras made— or rather extended, for there were a certain few of us, including Ferverel and Vanderbank and myself, who had for many years known him as a constant— almost too constant, some have ventured, tentatively perhaps, but not the less convlnoedly, to say— (pp. 233-3fc) and so on for several hundred more words*

When the second sentence

proves to be Just as long and difficult to follow, one of the members of the group to whom the tale is being recited breaks in:

pli

This piece also appears in The Dreamers: citations from it in the text refer to the edition already mentioned*

102 ,tfLet's get this story straight*

As X understand the first

sentence somebody told a ghost story* didn't he?* "'Yes,1 replied Jones [the"author"]# a trifle annoyed* "'And the second sentence means that those tho heard it felt creepy?1 " 'Precisely* * '"Then why the deuce couldn't you have said, "When 3o-and*So!ihdd finished, the company shuddered??* "'Beoause,' replied Jones, MI am reading a story which is con­ structed after the manner of a certain school* postal card or a cable message,'"

I'm not reading a

(pp. 239-40)

After the author reads several more equally Involved sentences, he finds to his disgust that the rest of the company has fallen into a deep sleep*

Determined nevertheless to finish his masterpiece, he

resumes reading*

"For ten minutes he continued, and then on a sudden

his voioe falteredj

his head fell forward upon his ohest, his knees

collapsed beneath him, and he slid Inert, and snoring himself, Into his chair*

The MS* fluttered to the floor, and an hour later waiters

entering the room found the club unanimously engaged In dreaming onoe more*"

(p. 246)

It seems unlikely that the readers of this

sketch would fall to perceive Bangs's opinion of James's characteristic subtlety and density:

It bored him*

In his most extensive satirical treatment of realism, the novel A Rebellious Heroine (1896),2^ Bangs further criticized the

25Hew York. Citations from this work In the text refer to this edition. This novel first appeared serially in Harper's Magazine during June and July, 1996*

movement by claiming that it rested on a fallacious assumption, i.e., that a writer is capable of an impartial recording of experience.

Eaoh

man, Bangs suggests in his work, perceives events in his own distinctive way and henoe must perforce distort them in relating them to another human being.

He dramatizes this conviction in A Rebellious Heroine

through the central character, Stuart Harley, a young author who en­ counters great difficulty in completing a novel aooording to his real­ ist theories.

His friend, the unnamed narrator of the story who is just

as ardently anti-realism as Harley is pro, tells the young author that he is "like most other realists, who pretend that they merely put down life as it is, and who go through their professional careers serenely unaonsoious of the truth that their fancies, after all, serve them when their facts are lacking."

(p. ±76)

In one scene, Harley describes his latest plot revision to the narrator, concluding with the comments "'As I want it to be, so must it be.1 "'Good,* [the narrator replies]], 'it will no doubt be excellent} but be honest, and don't insist that you've taken down life as it isi for you may have an astigmatism, for all you know, and life may not be at all that it has seemed to you while you were putting it down."1

(P. 178) Such speeches as these clearly express Bangs's belief that the reillsts were deceiving themselves in purporting to give a "truthful" rendering of experience.

At the end of the nineteenth century in America, realism helped to encourage the novel of social debate or the problem novel, whloh was

104 concerned with exposing and reforming economic and political abuses* 26 In "Rollo In the Hetropolous11 by Dopeton Hotair, a satire inspired ty Upton Sinclair1s The Jungle. Bangs expressed his distrust of the re­ formers who wrote muckraking novels in an effort to correct sooial evils. The tale features a poor» innocent young man who goes to the big city and falls In with a group of rich capitalists who drink, gamble, cheat, and divorce one another with such regularity that they forget who have and have not been their spouses*

Just as the young man, now hopelessly

corrupted, is about to be shot as a prank at a drunken orgy, he wakes up to discover that he is in bed in his old home with the doctor lean­ ing over him: "’Have 1 been ill?* gasped Rollo, rubbing his eyes* 1,1 Novelitis*

Very, * said the dootor*

'You have had a bad attack of Yellow

X would advise you to give up current literature and confine

your reading hereafter to the Little Purdy Books or the Dotty Dimple S e r i e s . ( p * 40) Opie Read, editor of the Arkansaw Traveler, a journal of South­ western humor, was one humorist in the native tradition who shared Bangs's attitudes toward realism*

His comic weekly contained numerous

satires of and critical editorials on realistic literature. was an exception}

But Read

the collected works of the other humorists in the

native sohool who wore Bangs's contemporaries aontain no burlesques of realism*

As has been already noted, our old school of humor had from

its beginning demonstrated realistic traits which the later realism

^This sketch appears in Potted Fiction* Citations from it in the text will refer to the edition mentioned above*

charodi

characters drawn in local environment;

daily life;

subjects taken from

and natural speech used in conversation*

That literary

comedians like Kerr and Nye did not object to these qualities in the realistic writing of the late nineteenth century, and hence did not make them the targets of literary satire, Is not surprising*

It is also

not surprising, however, that Bangs, who believed that a faithful ad­ herence to commonplace experience could not produce "interesting" literature, and to whom characters drawn in local environment always meant decorous, refined urbanites, did*

These differences point up once

again that Ward, Twain, and company belonged to a sohool of humor whloh thrived in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, while Bangs represented a new trend in humor, one which sprang up to fill the needs of a new group of readers, to wit, that which lived in a major eastern city like New York or Boston and strived to be well-informed about events in the social and literary world* In four works Bangs combined literary burlesque with social satire*

In Katharine, the musical adaptation of The Taming of the

Shrew desorlbed in Chapter II, Bangs coupled a take-off on Shakespeare with satiric jibes at High Society, yellow journalism, German opera, irresponsible servants, and vice in the big city*

In Peeps at People*

also mentioned in Chapter II, he simultaneously caricatured the female reporter and such prominent literary personalities as Henry Sienkiewicz, author of Quo Vadls. Emile Zola, Andrew Lang, and Rudyard Kipling*

106 Mrs. Raffles (1905)^ and

Holmes & Co. (1906)2® combine burlesque of

the popular detective and crime fiction of the day with social satire, specifically of the Four Hundred. highly successful Raffles stories.

Mrs. Raffles parodies E. W. Hornung's The brother-in-law of A. Conan

Doyle, Horaung published in 1899 the first of four volumes of Raffles* adventures, The Amateur Cracksman. The book bore the dedication: A.C.D.

This form of Flattery,"

ably from Doyle's.

"To

but Homung*s hero differed consider­

A. J. Raffles is handsome, charming, well-educated,

and fond of expensive things, gambling, and cricket.

Although born a

gentleman, he has no means to support his preferred manner of living and of necessity turns to burglary. Mrs. Raffles:

In the twelve episodes comprising

Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman. Bangs

not only spoofs H om u n g 1s rogue hero but also lampoons the idle rich. As the title indicates, Bangs uses A. J.'s widow (the original Raffles neither married nor died), Henrietta, as his central character.

Match­

ing her late husband in criminal imagination,' Henrietta establishes her headquarters at Newport, "the sooial capital of the United States," where she takes great delight in relieving its wealthy residents of their possessions.

Most of her schemes, although intricately planned, as

were Raffles', are rather absurd.

For example, one episode concerns

her elaborate strategeras to prevent Mrs. Van Variok Shadd from scoring the sooial coup of the season, giving a musical soiree for Jockobinski, the monkey virtuoso, "who could play the violin as well as Ysaye, and

Now York, 2ft New York. Weekly in 1905,

These stories originally appeared in Puck in 1905, These stories originally appeared in Harper's

107 who as a performer on the piano was vastly the superior of Paderewski, because, taken In his infancy and specially trained for the purpose, he could play with his feet and tail as well as with his hands,"

In another

equally complicated escapade, she induces Andrew Carnegie to donate a $200,000 library to her by getting herself dedared a municipality, Raffleshur st-by-the-Sea* The idle rich provide willing victims for Henriette's maneuvers* Bongs portrays these people pretty muoh tho same way he does in works like Katharine and "The Return of Christmas," that is, as snobbish, ostentatious, careless with money, preoccupied with "one-upping" one another socially, and casual in their personal morals*

In foot, Mrs*

Raffles ends ironically with Henrietta marrying Mr, Constant Scrappe, the wealthy gentleman whose Newport house she had appropriated while he was In South Dakota divorcing his latest wife. R. Holmes & Co.;

Being the Remarkable Adventures of Raffles

Holmes. Esc*. Detective and Amateur Cracksman by Birth, is an amusing collection of tales burlesquing both Doyle and Hornung, to whom the book is dedicated! E. W. Hornung*"

'With Apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mr*

As the grandson of Raffles and the son of Sherlock

Holmes, the hero of this series "inherited traits from eaoh, and thus became an artist both in the committing of crime and in the detecting of it*"2? R. Holmes*s split personality establishes the pattern of these adventures*

Because of his Raffles1 instincts, he steals valuable

^Francis H. Bangs, p* 239,

108 jewels, but later, thanks to his reputation as a master sleuth, he is called In by the owners to looate them and then collects a sizable re* ward for their return.

E, Holmes's victims are members of New York

High Society whose concern over their social positions enables the schizophrenic hero to take advantage of them.

For example, in an

episode entitled "The Adventures of Mrs. Burlingame's Diamond Stomacher," R, Holmes steals an expensive ornament and then collects the $25,000 reward for its recovery because ho succeeds in persuading its owner that the thief could only have been one of tho members of her exclusive circle, most probably an English duke, her prize acquisition.

Rather

than pursue the matter, Mrs. Surlingame deoides to take her stomacher, give R. Holmes & Co. the reward, and forget about oapturing the thief. Although "Rollo in the Metropolus" has been used in this chapter as an example of Bangs's satire of realism, it could just as easily have been classified as social satire because implicit in its oritlcism of the mnckrakers lies a fundamental disagreement between their and Bangs' s attitudes towards American society in general.

Although the

muckrakers often belonged to the middle-class or even the upper-alass, in their endeavor to correct the inequities which they observed in the country they indioted the country's whole economic and pblltioil system, not just one of the many sooial classes who were profiting by that system.

Their liberal philosophy led them to imply that tho whole way

in which America's economic and political life had been established and how it functioned had to be either reformed or revolutionized• Bangs, however, although flar from blind to contemporary injustices, was a traditionalist and a conservative, and as such wanted to maintain

109 that way of life because it provided seourity and advancement for his blase*

Henoe hie satire of the Four Hundred, which, like his own class,

lived off the system that the muokrakers were condemning, made fun of the manners of the nouveau riche, but did not attack the system which made their way of life possible.

Moat of the works discussed in this chapter were written during the period of Bangs* s greatest creativity and popularity, 18901905*

It may safely be said that during these years Bangs was a

prominent member of tho literary community, on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter has shown that he used the events of this community for humorous purposes, treating a variety of subjeots in a variety of ways. He was, in fact, eoleotio in his choice of subjects, regarding all potential targets as fair game.

As a talented and facile parodist,

he was ready to attack any extreme in literary fashion, from the super­ noble heroes and frothy plots of historical romances to the preoccupa­ tion with the details of ordinary life seen in realistic novels.

His

literary satire reveals much about the qualities he believed good literature should possess:

prose which was informal but oorreot,

characters who were believable from a genteel point of view, and original and entertaining plots, even if they departed from reality to include a touch of fantasy*

His avoidance of several of the techniques favored

by the traditional humorists and his resistance to the innovations brought in by realism indicate that the attitudes underlying his parodies deviate little from those reflected in the rest of his humorous writing* they were essentially those of a well-educated, middle-class professional male, who was genteel, urbane, and conservative in viewpoint, and

110 rather intolerant of departures from the standards of his class.

The

differences between the literary satire of Bangs and the literary comedians help to mark the shift from the predominance of the native tradition throughout the first sixty years of the nineteenth century to a more sophisticated kind of humor which has prevailed for most of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER IV POLITICAL SATIRE

Little of Bangs1a humorous writing ooncems politics, a some­ what surprising circumstance in light of his lifelong participation in politioal affairs.

He ran for mayor of Yonkers in 1894 and was narrow­

ly defeated'*'; he was an active stump-speaker for Taft in the 1908 TaftBryan campaign;

and he vigorously promoted General Leonard Wood for the

Republican nomination in 1920.

Wood indicated, in fact, that if he

won the election he intended to appoint Bangs ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Bangs enjoyed a close relationship with Theodore

Roosevelt while Roosevelt was successively governor of New York and vice-president of the country.^

One of the high points of this associa­

tion was Roosevelt's personal request to Bangs to write a defense of America's oooupatlon of Cuba following the Spanish-American War;

this

After this experience Bangs vowed that he would never again run for elective office, but in 1900 he was nominated for vice-president by Mark Twain to be bis running mate on the Plutocratic Ticket. 2In John Kendrick Bangs, Fronds Hyde Bangs details the relationship between Roosevelt and his father at great length, citing many letters that the two exchanged. His oomments show that "Roosevelt watched Harper's Weekly and its politioal comments with an eagle eye. He took even its most casual quips seriously where they affected him; and he occasionally used the Weekly indirectly to make clear his political alms. There are a half doaen written requests at this time that Bangs visit Washington or Oyster Bay to talk over politioal matter a."— p. 216. Later, however, Bangs became disillusioned with Roosevelt's trustbustlng and other taotios, and in the election of 1904 switched his support to the Democratic Party. Ill

112 request produced U n d e Sam Trustee (1902)

a carefully documented

acoount of the accomplishments of the American Army of Occupation while stationed in Cuba.

As editor of Harper1s Weekly, which special­

ized in commentary on public affairs, Bangs took a stand in his editor­ ials on all the prominent issues of the day, including the Boer War, protective tariffs, U. S. Imperialism, Populism, the Boxer Rebellion, Tammany Hall, the Cuban situation, and candidates for public office,^ In later years, from 1907 to 1922, when he confined himself principally to lecturing, Bangs oontinued to speak out on national affairs, using the lecture platform as his editorial chair,

Almost everywhere he went,

he was interviewed by local newspapers, and his observations received national press coverage. Despite the evidenoe of Bangs*s genuine concern with the politi­ cal events of his time, only two of his books, three short stories, and a few poems deal specifically with political Issues.

But these works

contain his most biting satire, at times reaching a pitch of righteous indignation in which all pretense of trying to "amuse" is abandoned. Although small, this body of satire attacks a fairly wide variety of

^New York* ^In his biography, A World Worth While (New York, 1922), W. A. Rogers, the Jfaekly*a ohief cartoonist during Bangs*s editorship, paid Bangs the great compliment of saying: "Bangs, more than all of the others feditors of the Weekly], kept closely in touoh with current eventst ana &s ay work as a cartoonist carried me into similar fields we were often closely associated. In all politioal movements Bongs was to be found exercising an independent judgment, taking sides as conscience or reason demanded. . . . He was never a compromiser or a trimmer. I was associated with him in more than one campaign and always felt a sense of security when I had him to stand with me or to back me up."— p. IJL.

politioal targets such as the pitfalls of campaigning, corrupt voting practices, and Populist reform measures.

In treating these subjects,

Bangs affirms the same genteel code which characterizes the rest of his work and sets it apart from the native tradition of humor— decorum In oonduot, correctness in language, and unashamed learning, all incorpor­ ated in a narrative persona of dignity, prosperity, and respectability. But at the same time his political attitudes embody the same traditional values that the major strain of nineteenth-century American humor does: patriotism, individualism, responsibility, good sense, moderation, and a belief in democratic principles.

To be sure, the political satire of

the native strain shows as much cheerful disrespeot for the conventions of polite society as the rest of its comedy, and the native humorists defined some of the value-terms differently from Bangs, but this does not alter their mutual allegiance to those common values. T*1 Three Weeks in Politics (1897)#^ Bangs uses his favorite mouthpiece, the Idiot, to recount to the other boarders at Mrs. Smithers* High-dass Boardinghouse for Gentlemen his experiences while assisting his friend Thaddeus Perkins in Perkins1 bid for the mayoralty of Phillipseburg-on-the-Dunwoodies, a suburb of 30,000 located a few miles from New York*

6

7 Two stories in The Booming of Aore Hill (1900),'

^ftew York, this edition,

Citations from this work in the text will refer to

^This suburb bears a strong resemblance to Dumfries Corners, the suburban setting for the short stories comprising The Booming of Aore Hill* Both Fhllllpseburg and Dumfries Corners strongly resemble Yonkers, which during Bangs* s residency there (1892-1907) was also a community of 30,000 looated fifteen miles outside of New York. 7New York. Citations from either of these two stories in the text will refer to this edition.

"The Mayor*s Lamps" and "The Balance of Power," also concern Perkins' mayoral campaign, but in these pieces the Idiot does not serve as narrator.

In all these works, Perkins (who along with the Idiot was

Bangs*s favorite alter ego) serves as his creator*s ideal of the model citizen.

In addition to possessing the usual traits of a conventional

gentleman, he is public-spirited, right thinking, and eager to fulfill his oivio responsibilities conscientiously.

He is not a professional

politician and entertains no vulgar ambition for office but feels it is his duty as a citizen to sacrifice some of his time and energy to the publio good.

At the outset of his campaign he is determined to confront

the issues directly and discuss them openly and intelligently with his fellow suburbanites.

His experiences, however, prove to be sadly dis­

illusioning, and he emerges from his venture (his first and last) skeptical about politics and politicians in general.

Although he does

not abandon his faith in democracy, he is seriously alarmed about the abuses which could jeopardize the democratic system and in the process abrogate cherished values. The greatest single cause of Perkins' disillusionment is the herd of common people with whom he comes in contact during his campaign. His attitude stems from the same snobbish intolerance of tho lower classes that Bangs's social satire refleots, and accordingly his mis­ givings about the common people's ability to discharge their political re sponsibiUtie s. Usually depicted as Irish immigrants— the Irish, it seems, largely controlled municipal politics— the mass of voters of Phillipseburg are Ignorant of the Issues involved in the campaign, uninterested

115 In learning about thoin, and, worst of all, indifferent to the principles of democratic government#

At the same time, they are eager to sell their

votes for a beer or a bribe.

In "The Mayor1s Lamps," the narrator tells

how Ihaddeus "travelled five miles through mud and rain to address an organization of taxpayers, and found them assembled before the long mahogany counter of a beer-saloon, which was the 'Hall1 they had secured for the reception of the idol of their hopes#"

After Thaddeus outlines

his views for sixty-eight minutes, his opponent rises and quickly con­ cludes his part of the debate with: "'YJell, boys, I'm not much of a talker, but I'll soy one thing— Perkins, while my adversary, is still ny friend, and I'm proud of him# on me.'"

How if you'll all join me at the bar, we'll drink his health(pp# 128-32)

Needless to say, tho narrator wryly notes,

Perkins' opponent won the debate# The mob of wage-earning voters, moreover, does not make its political deoisions according to principles or rational judgment, but is swayed instead by its selfish interests and prejudices#

Bangs por­

trays the striker, a symbol of the idle, incompetent, and irresponsible lower-olass citizen whom the labor movement protected in attempting to gain its demands through work stoppages, as shrewdly playing off the Republican and Democratic parties against each other.

The striker

knows that each group needs his support and is willing to cater to him (by buying beer or donating funds to causes which will benefit him) in order to secure it#

So he promises simultaneously to support the

candidates of both parties in order to receive these favors.

He is

influenced not at all by policies and positions, however right these

116 may bo in terms of the entire oommunity. illustrates the striker*s opportunism.

An lnoidont in Three Weeks In a speech Thaddeus expresses

his disapproval of the law which accords wholesale pensions to veterans, regardless of their disabilities.

He sympathizes fully ■with the deserv­

ing members of an organization like the Veterans of the Civil War, 11but he could never understand why, thirty years after the war, there should bo more deserving survivors of the dreadful conflict than there were twenty years before it,"

This statement loses him the support of

all the veterans in Phillipseburg because their prejudice for their own kind precludes an openminded consideration of the matter. This irrational narrowmindedness on the part of special interest groups enables corrupt political bosses, because of their strict control over their wards, to swing elections.

In the short story "The Balance

of Power," Thaddeus refuses to call a plumber to repair the pipes in the laundry before the election, because, as he explains to his per­ plexed wife, such a move could tip the balance of power,

"There are

hundreds of plumbers here in Dumfries Corners, and each one controls at least five assistants, which makes six hundred voters in all.

If I call

In one, he and his five workers will vote for me, but the other five hundred and ninety-four will vote for Haskins [his adversary]*"

(p* 152)

As it turns out, his caution was in vain because his son Bobby meets Jorrigon, who controls the Eighth Ward, and calls him a striker, as he has often heal'd his father do beoause Jorrigan has often stayed off his job in the name of "bettering the workingman*s lot,"

Out of sheer pique,

Jorrigan induces everyone in the ward to vote against Perkins, thus swinging the election to

his opponent*

Such inoldents as these under­

score Bangs's skepticism about investing politioal power in the

hands

117 of those who are not capable of using it wisely. Bangs attributes part of the irresponsibility of the common voters to their being immigrants.

In several passages he suggests that

their flaunting of old-fashioned American Ideals like justice and fair play was due to the fact that they were not "true Americans."

For

instance, he described one meeting as consisting of "some fifty persons, most of whom began life in other countries, under different skies, and to whom the national anthem ’America’ meant less and aroused fewer sentiments worth having than that attractive two step 'St Patrick's Day in the Horning*. • . *"

("Balance," p. 1 65)

In Three Weeks, the Idiot

declares that people such as these "would do their country a great service If they'd disappear and never come back,"

(p. 5)

Bangs makes no effort whatever to disguise his personal revul­ sion for the mass of plain folk who constitute the bulk of the voting public.

He Invariably depicts them as crude, dirty, and ill-mannered.

For instance, Perkins describes one ward boss (an Irish laborer, of course) as a "burly combination of red hair and bad manners."

One

evening he returns home from campaigning, white as a sheet and on the verge of collapse. however.

"There was nothing the matter with him physically,

He had been slapping inebriates on the back and digging the

ribs of loafers for two hours, and one of the leafere had dug back and called him Taddy, and it made him sick in his mind."

(Three Weeks, p. 68)

Incident after incident exposes their stupidity and lack of education.

In one episode in Three Weeks, a speaker fefers to Perkins

as a "son of the Muses and a native of Parnassus," whereupon the "good people of Phillipseburg" imagine that they are being deceived.

They had

been told that Thaddeus was Born in Phillip seburg, and when the campaign

118 orator discloses that ho Is a native of Parnassus they become convinced that they have been betrayed and that Thaddeus1 parly is trying to foist a carpetbagger on the community.

The Idiot describes Phillipseburg as

a town "where few of the inhabitants fanow an anapeotia measure from a bushel basket, and where you could get a leading citizen to sign a petition requiring the substitution of hexameters for water meters in all private dwellings with your eyes shut." "’This Phillip seburg must be a queer spot,* said the Bibliomaniac, "’It is,* said the Idiot as he left the table, it resembles every other spot in the universe,*"

’In which respect

(pp, 1^-15)

At one point in his campaign, Thaddeus delivers a speech to his wife in the privacy of his home;

the speech merits extensive

quotation beoauce it summarizes Bangs’s frank opinion of the masses: "Demagogues and Fellow Inebriates: One of the most pleasur­ able of the many thoughts that arise in ay mind at this present moment is that ay ancestors, having joined the great majority on the other side of the dark river, cannot now witness ny humili­ ation, or penetrate the veil of my hypocrisy, when I stand here and tell you that I consider you the most intelligent body of men that I ever addressed, although ny private opinion of you is that you are an Incorrigible body of unmitigated strikers. Gentlemen— and I apply the term to you with certain mental reser­ vations, for you are not gentlemen by any means— what are we hero for? I am here to ask for your votes, for unfortunately the franchise is so broad, embracing, as it does, ignorance, vicious­ ness, and corruptibility, that while to a man of prinoiple your votes are a dishonor, they are likewise a necessity. You are here to listen respectfully until I get through, after which you will seek information as to the size of ny bank account and ny standing in the Saloon Keepers Brad street. . . . Gentlemen, thanking you for your attention, and hoping that Election Day and night will shew that we are true to our principles, I bid you good evening. Sic semper tyrannis. Status quo ante in Honolulu." (Three Weeks, p. $5) But despite the obvious snobbery expressed in the foregoing passages, Bangs by no means believed that the proletariat was the only

class guilty of political chicanery.

Works like Jack and the Checkbook

(q.v.) make clear that he was no friend of the greedy plutocrats who also attempted to manipulate the government to serve their selfish interests and in the process violated old-fashioned virtues like honesty and justice.

Furthermore, in Throe Weeks and the other works dealing

with Perkins' campaign, Bangs censures members of his own class, re­ presented by the General Committee (i.e., the officials of the local party organization), who are willing to sacrifice principle to exped­ iency.

To begin with, they asked Perkins to run, not because of his

views or his moral character, but because after observing his patent leather shoes and silk hat they assumed he was wealthy.

Once the campaign

is underway, they pressure Perkins to oompromise himself by behaving hypocritically.

They advise him, for instance, to abandon his custom­

ary decorum and speak to the public on its level, that is, illiterately* They also urge him to discard his well-tailored clothes and don work­ ingmen's overalls and brogans when appearing at a rally.

In addition

they recommend that he say whatever is necessary during the campaign in order to appease the various voting blocks, to promise them whatever they demand, and then quietly do as he pleases after he is elected.

As

one mentor expresses it: "•You've probably noticed that if a candidate is to come out like a lion, he's got to go in like a lamb, and retain his lamblike qualities until the votes are counted. are counted he can bo any animal he pleases.'"

After the votes

(Three Weeks, p. 8)

The Committee also suggests that Perkins engage In "jollying* in order to secure votes. "*Jollying,'" as Perkins' manager explains, means that "'the candidate, meeting the inconspicuous voter on the

street, slaps him on the back and shakes him by the shoulders, or pokes him in the ribs, cracks a joke with him, and ends up hy asking him to have a cigar or take a drink.1,1

(Three Weeks, p. 66)

But the Committee

worst fault is the efficiency with which it spends its candidate*s money— mostly for such "incidentals" as "Independent Club3, beer, cigars, and so forth.

Individually these men are the soul of honor.

They cannot be bought or sold, but they regard themselves as purchasing agents in the candidate fs behalf, . . . "

(Three Weeks, p. 25)

Thaddeus* dislike of them is solidified when he learrethat many, after discovering that he is not willing to spend money for such "incidentals, vote for his opponent. Bangs also dwelt on the part dishonest journalists and biased reporting played in politics.

For example, Perkins cordially enter­

tains in his home a reporter whom he has known for years and who had requested an Interview with him.

He answers most quostions honestly

and directly but refuses to comment on issues about which he has nothing to say.

The next day he discovers in the paper that the reporter has

written on extremely dor0gatory— and rdaLoading— pioco about him*

In

addition, the editor of the local paper, also a long-time friend, deliberately prints prejudicial articles about him just because ho be­ longs to the opposing party.

One of these articles impugns Perkins*

patriotism by suggesting that because he has Persian and Turkish rugs on his floor, Bohemian glass on his tables, and French pictures on his walls, he has an aversion to all things American.

Such an implication

must have been particularly offensive to a strong patriot like Perkins. Another aspect of our political system to tohich Bangs calls

121 attention is the power of money to control elections.

For reasons

already set forth— the greed and dishonesty of the voters and the pres­ sures on candidates to accede to their demands— Bangs charges that "any nan who can command the 'long green* [i.e., money]] in sufficient bulk can have almost anything he wants in this world politically, , , ," (Three Weeks, p, 29) Bangs*s satire expresses a serious criticism of the way politics affects the thoughtful citizen who tries to take part* him of his freedom and individuality,

it robs

Thaddeus is forced to disguise

his true nature in an effort to win votes;

ho is not permitted to

express his position on the issues or hiB real feelings about the people and the incidents which concern him.

In "The Mayor's Lamps," when

Thaddeus hears that he has lost, the narrator comments!

"There came

to Perkins a feeling very much like that which the small boy experiences on the day before Christmas.

He has been good for two months, and he

knows that tomorrow the^period of probation will be over and he can be as bad as ho pleases again for a little while anyhow,"

(p» IkZ)

His

elation over losing is due mainly to therrestoration of his independence. Despite the severity of his tone in these works dealing with Porkin s' mayoral campaign, Bangs saw nothing intrinsically wrong with either demooraoy or capitalism— the thought of sooialism, communism, or anarchism horrified him— only with the honesty and virtue of the men who controlled them.

The abuses he points out in works like Three Weeks he

attributes largely to the shortsighted and selfish men who exploited these institutions, not to the institutions themselves.

And, as his

criticism of the General Committee indicates, these men could be found

122 on all levels of society and in any political party.

Although he was

convinced that "tho mob" was indifferent, stupid, and immoral, he also believed that another type of voter existed, one who, like Perkins, was thoughtful, conscientious, and well-informed. Bangs's political satire also dealt forcefully with the Populist movement, a major political force in this country from 1891 to 190*f. Its organization, called the People's Party, became the third political parly in size and strength during this period.

Dedicated to reforms

which would ameliorate the plight of the country's economically down­ trodden, the farmers and factory workers, the movement advocated such policies as tho free coinage of gold and silver, the abolition of the national banking system, tho issue of enough paper currency to transact the business of the country on a cash basis, a graduated Income tax, and the national ownership of publlo utilities and means of communica­ tions, like the railways, telephone, and telegraph.

In scoffing at

these doctrines and the Utopian state which their advocates envisioned, Bangs exposed once again his reservations about the trustworthiness of the populace and his apprehension that such "radical" reforms would Jeopardize America's traditional values.

His criticism of Populism

also revealed once again his position as a moderate conservative, in that although his urge to reform betrayed serious limitations, he did not oppose remedying the conditions the measures were designed to, but rather feared the threat he believed the changes presented to the politi­ cal and economic foundations of democracy, which in the latter instance meant capitalism.

123 Q In "The Rhyme of the Ancient Populist," Populists' fiscal theories.

Bangs ridicules the

In the poem the Ancient Populist tells of

his plan to abolish the gold standard: "When wo got in and run the State We'll tackle gold, we'll legislate. This is the country of the free, and free this land shall be As coon as we the 'people* have had our opportunity." What this "opportunity" means, as the poem proceeds to make clear, Is that with gold no longer backing the dollar, the working man will be able to purchase whatever he want 3 and pay for it -with whatever he has— tho tailor with coats, the baker with cake, the beggar with rags, and so on.

Soon there will be no poverty. "A splendid scheme," quoth I [the narrator^; "but stayI V/hat of the nation's credit, pray?" "Ha-haJ ho-hol" he loudly roared. "We'll leave that problem to the Lord. And if He fails to keep us straight Once more we'll have to legislate, And so create, Confounding greed, As much of credit as we need," (pp. 83-35)

This poom expresses Bangs's deep fear that the Populists, in using American political machinery to achieve their aims, which may not be unworthy (the speaker, although disapproving of greed, admits that eliminating poverty would be splendid), may undermine the economy of the entire nation.

His reluctance to entrust "the people" with

political power is in turn related to his doubt about their ability to handle it wisely.

^Cobwebs from a Library Corner. New York, 1399* this work’in' the text refer to this edition.

Citations from

124 In two political satires, Bangs seems to be directing his criticism more toward the popular Utopian fiotion of the late nlneteenthe century than toward Populism,

Initiated in 1888 by Edward Bellairy*3

Looking Backward, the vogue for this literature lasted until after the turn of the century.

Like Populism, this literature was aimed at

correcting social injustices.

Host of the Utopians, such as Bellamy

and William Dean Howells, America* s two most Influential Utopian novel­ ists, advocated a non^revolutionary, Fabian sooialism, which emphasized public control of tho means of production of the use of natural resources, and of the distribution of wealth.

In the cooperative commonwealth

these writers envisioned, everyone worked, not for others but for the state.

All services, such as medical treatment and transportation,

were supplied by the state.

Everyone received the same wages, and

government supervision saw to it that he spent his money wisely. Economic equality brought with it social equality. In Looking Backward, Bellamy describes how the people, meaning the proletariat, organized the nation as: one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies wore swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shored. , , . In a word, the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd years before they assumed the conduct of their own government, organiz­ ing now for industrial purposes on precisely the Game grounds that they had then organized for political purposes.^

^Quoted in American Heritage: An Anthology and Interpretive Survey of Our Literature, ed. Leon Howard, et al., II (Boston, 1955)* 424.

125 All goods, which of course were produced by the state, were obtained from a large central warehouse.

The Boston of 2000 A. D. depicted in

Eollamy's novel was physically as well as economically beautiful:

well-

tended park3 and handsome buildings had replaced tho slums and dreary xirban centers of the 1880fs.

A president still headed Bellamy*s ideal

state, but ho served merely as a spokesman for the people’s wishes and hence there was no public discontent with government.

The ideal society

of 2000, moreover, had freed the institution of marriage from its ancient restraints so that, through a process of sexual selection, the race was improving morally from generation to generation.

Bangs disagreed

with and ridiculed moot of these ideas. In A Traveler from Altrurla (189*0, Howells’ first and best Utopian novel, a Utopian socialist leaves his colony to srtudy life In capitalist citios at the close of the nineteenth century,

Bangs may

have had this work in mind when ho wrote Alice in Blunderland (1907) in which ho usos the characters of Lewis Carroll’s classic and its basic plot device, one that, like A Traveler from Altrurla, Involves the central character’s leaving his society and being introduced to another, quite different one.

In Alice in Blunderland, Bangs raises j

several objections to the Utopians* proposal for the common ownership of everything and to the idea of social equality which such a system encouraged.

But his more serious concern had to do with the danger

that he believed this demand posed to individualism, freedom, initiative,

■**0Uew York. edition.

Citations from this work in the text refer to this

126 and the democratic process by the resulting extension of government control over people's lives.

He also called attention to the waste and

inefficiency which he thought the Utopians' excessive idealism and impraoticality would inevitably lead to. The story opens with Alice falling asleep in her room one rainy afternoon, only to be awakened by her old chums, the Had Hatter and the March Hare,

They invite her on a tour of the model city they have

founded, Blunderland, "where everything goes just right," because every­ thing belongs to the People— "street card, gutters, pavements, theatres, electrio light, cabs, manicures, dogs, cats, canary birds, hotels, barber shops, candy stores, hats,uumbreHas, bakeries, oakeries, steakerles, shops— you can't think of a thing that the city don't own."

(pp. 11-12)

Including toothbrushes.

When Alice ventures that

she would prefer to own her oim toothbrush, the Hatter informs her that they have recently passed a law in Blunderland providing for the Municipal Ownership of Teeth.

As a result of this new law, the Hatter

continues smugly, "When a toothless wanderer wants a hickory nut craoked he has a perfectly legal right to stop anybody in the street who has teeth and make him crack the nut for him,"

(p. 13)

He does concede,

however, that they have had a little trouble enforcing the law because "long-continued possession has seemed to convince peoplo that they have inherent rights to the things they have enjoyed that they put up a fight and appeal to the Constitution and all that , . .

(p. 1^)

As the tour of the Utopian city progresses, the Hatter and the Hare show Alice several of the town's facilities, owned and run by the local government, of course.

The two guides are enormously proud of

the administration of these facilities, but Alice's probing questions reveal that most of them do not work well, if at all.

The M, 0, Express

(M* 0, for Municipal Ownership), for example, proves to be an immovable trolley, "just one big circular car that runs all around tho city and joins Itself where it began in the beginning,"

This stationary railway

resulted from tho City Council's efforts to answer complaints about the old system and keep the town's citizens happyj

with only one car going

around the city thore are no more collisions and people are no longer irritated by having to wait for cars.

The Hattor admits, however, that

a few passengers have complained about not getting anywhere and having to walk home, but the town has eliminated this embarrassment by putting these people in jail.

After all, "as an officer of the government the

conductor has a right to arrest anybody who sasses him as guilty of dodition,"

(p, 3^)

While Inspecting Blunderland1s Gas and Hot Air Plant, Alice is told how, through exerting his "public mind," the Hattor has correct­ ed tho ugliness and stench which usually characterize such privately owned facilities.

The city's gas plant is a beautiful building whloh

produces a delicious aromatic scent.

Unfortunately, it does not produce

gas, but those who object to this aLight fault are taken care of by the Common Council's law declaring that the plant'a aromatic hot air is gas of tho most excellent quality and making it a misdemeanor for anyone to say it is not.

A few who persisted in their criticism were fined $500

and put in jail for six months.

There were few complaints after that,

Mien Alice asks if the people could over become dissatisfied enough to vote the TTatter and his administration out of office, he

128 assures her that this Is a most unlikely eventuality.

In the first

place, whenever the citizens make demands, he promises to fulfill them: "That’s one of the strong points about Municipal Ownership. easiest system to make promises under you ever knew.

It's tho

You can promise

anything, and later on if you don’t make good you can promise something better, and so on."

(p. 66)

In the second place, idle Hattor continues,

he has taken the precaution of employing a "safe majority of the voters" in the government, so that a vote against it is a vote against them­ selves* But the pride and joy of Blunderland i3 the Kunicipaphone, which abolishes all class distinctions.

In every room in every house, on nil

the lampposts, hydrants, telegraph poles, "in fact everywhere there is a chance or room enough to hang one," one of these phones will be found. The phonebook lists the names and numbers of everyone in town.

"There

is no man, woman, or child so poor and humble of birth, that he or she cannot get into immediate relations with the haughty and proud.

Every­

body is on speaking terms with everybody else, and we have thereby reached socially a condition wherein all men though not related are nevertheless connected."

(pp. ?8-79)

In fact, in addition to being a social leveller,

the Kunicipaphone also acts as a moral force in the community because it monitors the calls and thus controls speech. recorded and censored.

All conversations are

If one of the parties in tho conversation utters

a word which the Polite Speech for All Classes Committee deems unaccept­ able (Gosh, Golramit, and Dodgastit are particularly offensive), both parties are fined.

When Alice suggests that this policy seems rather

harsh on the innovent party, the Hatter reminds her:

"In all oases

129 whore the public welfare is concerned, private interests must yield however great the hardship.

That is one of the fundamental principles

of Municipal Owner ship.11 (p, 84) This comment leads Alice to ask if such censorship will not eventually exterminate private life altogether.

The Hatter modestly

confesses that "It is toward that Grand Civic Eventuation that I and ny associates in this noble movement ore constantly striving."

Even

now, all applications for marriage licenses must be approved by a special group, the Committee on Matrimony; property.

children have also become public

As the Hatter explains, "Just as the Nation has gone in for

paternalism, we here in Blunderland have gone In for maternalism," (p. H O ) As Alice begins to comprehend what it means to have tho City as parents, she runs axray in horror to find her way back to her old home, Sho awakes to discover with enormous relief that sho has been having a nightmare. Through the irony and reductio ad absurdum of Alice in Blunderland, Bangs attempts to show that the socialistic programs of the Utopians would create a government which was not only inefficient and corrupt, but which also presented alarming threats to the individual citizen and his Qonstitutional rights,

A government which owns the

means of communication, such as the telephone, may also diotate how they are to be used, which in turn can lead to censorship and the invasion of privacy.

The doctrine of public ownership of property,

when carried to an extreme, would mean taking children from their parents and allowing the state to raise them as it saw fit, thus

130 depriving tho private citizen ofone of his basic natural rights and producing a race of robots, not individuals,

v/hen Gig Government becomes,

in effect, Big .Business, the citizen is rendered powerless to effect changes, because, among other suppressions, he is no longor permitted to criticize the governments policies.

The individual becomes a pawn

of tho state, unable to control his own destiny.

The result is nothing

short of a police state. Bangs elaborated on the frightening repercussions of Big Govern­ ment as Dig Business in "A Glance Ahead,"**-1' a short story concerning a young man who falls asloep on Christmas Eve, 1898, and wakes up on December 25, 35^8*

Although there exists no factual evidence that

Bangs read Looking Backward. the resemblance between the fantastic premiso upon which it and this tale rely— the hero's falling asloep and awaking over one hundred years later— an assumption.

is strong enough to warrant such

In addition, it should be noted that Bellamy published

a coquol to his Utopian novel in I897, a treatise entitled Equality, in which he elaborated on essentially the same theories dramatized in Looking Baclcward.

"A Glance Ahead" appeared first in 1399 in Harper's

Uoekly and was later included in a collection of tales.

In any event,

this story clearly demonstrates Bangs's intention to attack ideas ident­ ical to those espoused by Bellamy and other Utopian authors. As the hero of "A Glance Ahead" reads his morning newspaper, he learns that the federal government now manages all enterprises— grocery stores, department stores, railways, etc.— and in fact conducts

•*~*-In Over the Plum Pudding (New York, 1901), pp. 105-139. Citations fromthis work in the text refer to this edition.

131 Its affairs as if it wore a large corporation. waged, for profit.

War, for example, is

The paper proudly announces that ’'the bombardment

of St. Petersburg by tho Anglo-Indians under our management, thanks to tho efficient service of the Cook excursion steamers direct to the scene of action, has brought us in several hundred millions more,”

(p. 114-)

Because the United States has become a profit-making organization, it pays dividends instead of levying taxes, so that ”all loyal citizens” receivo a .guaranteed monthly income of $10,000. Put such developments, whatever their benefits, have not come about without sacrifices, especially in freedom.

Citizens are forced

to patronize government-owned establishments, for example, and criticism of the government1s policies is considered an act of treason punish­ able by death.

Also, as in 31underland, these policies have created

a system of enforced social equality, so that tho country1s social and intellectual olite must endure the arrogance of the working class.

For

example, when Dawson, tho hero of tho story, tries to discharge his impudent valet, the man remarks coldly:

"You might just as well try to

discharge the President of the United Stateg as roe . . .

. You have

overlooked the fact that tho government since 1900 has gradually absorb­ ed nil businoss-overy function of labor is now governmental— and a roan who arbitrarily bounces a cook, as the ancients used to put it, strikes at the administration."

(p. 132)

So

although poverty has been abolish­

ed in Utopia, on employer no longer has the right to hire and fire whom ho chooses.

In effect, when political control is transferred to the

hands of the people and the govornmeht regulates its affairs to serve their interests, tho personal freedom of the individual citizen is

curtailed, linen Dawson learns that he cannot fire his valet, ho falls into a fit of rage and wakes up to find himself back in 1898,

Later, in

describing to a friend the particulars of his dream— -the guaranteed income, absence of taxes, and "servants with the manners of custom house officials11--Dawson asks the friend if he considers the dream peculiar, "‘Ho,» said I £the friend^, 'not very.

It strikes mo as a

reasonable forecast of what is likely to be if things keep on as thqy are going,'"

(p, 134-)

Implicit in Bangs's political satire is his conviction that the problems of his ago could be solved by tho reassertion of time-honored ideals,

Hoirever, although he had a strong feeling of social responsi­

bility, his understanding of these problems was limited by his member­ ship in the privileged urban upper-middle class.

He showed no Interest

in the plight of the farmers, for example, or sympathy for organized labor, and he dismissed out of hand eaonomic panacea and the single tax.

like free silver

However, insofar as ho did not oppose reform

per se but only what he regarded as crackpot schemes for achieving it, hie position is best described as right of center rather than extreme rightr-in other words, that of a moderate conservative.

Evidence of

this position has emerged In several ways in this chapteri

for example,

in Bangs’s advocation of exposing corrupt political practices of all kinds, his denunciation of the control of Bis Business over Big Govern­ ment, and hia desire to eliminate poverty through what ho considered prudent moans.

Chapter II also indioates, in connection with the Idiot’s

133 opinions, that Ban33 actively promoted-a variety of urban reforms, beginning with exorbitant rents and depreciation of property due to the encroachment of slums and extending to the careful handling of civic monies in order to provide for the increasing number of city waifs.

In

essence, Bangs thought that most ills could bo alleviated through honest government, and that honest government in turn required the participation of good citizens.

When he thought of good citizens, he thought of gentle­

men liko himself and his gentool confroros. In his political writing a 3 in the rest of his humor, Bangs believed that ho was defending the values of an earlier, purer America which the now industrial order challenged. As Chapter I has explained, politics was a favorite topic of our traditional humor throughout tho nineteenth century.

Beginning in

1830 with Jack Downing, our first crackerbarrel philosopher,

12

comic

literature doaling with politics reached a peak of popularity during the Civil War and the Reconstruction period and then steadily declined during the eighties and the nineties until in Bill Nye, the last of the old-time funny men (who died in I896), one finds only a small portion of political material.

Spanning nearly a century as it does, the

political humor written in the native vein naturally exhibits great variety— in themes, attitudes, and, to some extent, techniques.

While

it did not hesitate to attack any subject, it was also highly topical so that the work of any given author concentrates on the events of his

12

Mo st of the comedians who dealt with the subject adopted the persona of the crackerbarrel philosopher (q.v.), who delivered his views in some form of a monologue, such as a letter to the editor, newspaper column, or lecture.

time— the Jackson administration, the Hexlcan War, the Civil War, and so on.

Some writers, like Seta Smith ("Jack Downing"), treated their

subjects genially, but others, like David Ross Locke ("Petroleum V, Nasby"), vrore extremely virulent.

Some, like Charles H» Smith ("Dill

Arp"), displayed strong partisanship, but some, like Charles Farrar Browne ("Artomus Ward") endeavored to remain neutral.

Despite those

variations, this body of humorous work takon as a whole bears certain traits in common vrhich mark it as belonging to a single school of comody.

The techniques on which it relies separate it from Bangs1s

political satire, but other qualities reveal the continuity between Bagno’s humor and that of the old school.

Although each attributed

certain timo-honored values to different classes of society, thoy both endeavored to protect these values, democracy, and tho country.

Each

brand of humor, in its own way, was committed to perpetuating what it conceived to bo "tho American droam," and to defending it from threat­ ening forces on all sidos.

Each placed this large national goal above

personal, political allegiances.

And finally, although each kind of

humorist entertained serious misgivings about tho ability of the mindless macsos to accopt tho responsibilities democracy required, oach dedicated his political satire to arousing tho conscience of tho responsible few in tho belief that in idiom lay tho greatest hope for tho government's viability. Bangs and the crackorbox oraclos shared a skepticism about politics and politicians and often dealt with the some general subjeota* Bill Eye, for example, criticized government inefficiency, denounced tho whole business of political pay-off, and advocated independence

135 and objectivity in malting political decisions.

In "A Patent Oratorical

Steam Organnotte for Railway Stumping"^ ho also mado fun of the campaigning candidate who instead of discussing the issues flattors his audience with ompty inanities about its "cute little town,"

Twain

described the effect on an election of a dishonest and prejudicial Ik prose in "Running for Governor." In the seventies and thereafterf some of -the native humorists turned their attention to conditions produced by tho rapid industrialization and urbanisation which took place in the country following tho Civil War.

Locke, concerned about the

corruption in big city machine politics, transferred his incorrigible rascal Masby to the nefarious Sixth Ward in how lork, whoro he quickly found Iris niche in tho Democratic Party, rigging elections by giving away boose to Irish immigrants add ploying upon thoir ignorance and bigotry.

Bill IJye voiced disapproval of immigration because it jeopard­

ized precious rights like freedom and discriminated against tho "real" American: We guarantee that ovoiy man in America shall fill himself up . full of liberty at our expense, and the less of an American he is tho more liberty ho can havo. If lie do siros to enjoy himself, all, he needs is a slight foreign accent and a willingness to mix up with politics as soon as ho can get his baggage off tho steamer. The more I study American institutions tho more I regret that I was not born a foreigner, so that I could havo something to say about the management of our great land, . . • host everybody can havo a good deal of fun in this country oxcopt the American, He seems to bo so busy paying his taxes all the time that he

13Bill Hye's Sparks (Plow York, 1891), pp. 1^-20.

iA The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Aark Twain, pp. 161-165.

13 6 has very little time to mingle in the giddy whirl with the alien,1^ The political humor of tho orackerbox oracle3 , both early and late, affirmed the values oommonly regarded as the traditional ones of this country, and they are the same values that Bangs sought to preserve: industry, thrift, good sense, honesty, resourcefulness, independence, patriotism, and a belief in democratic principles,

Tho tales about

Davy Crockett, for example, dwell on his independence and honesty as a politician, emphasizing that he made his decisions not according to lavr books or convention but according to Id.a frontier code of morality, Davy1s comments about hio term as justice of the peace sum up his genoral philosophy as a public servant:

"My judgments wore never

appealed from, and if they had been they would have stuck like wax, as I gavo ry docisions on the; principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on low learning to guide me * , ,

16

Artemus Ward scoldod tho government

more than once for its prodigality, and during tho Civil War x*epeatedty stressed tho importance of saving the Union,

One memorable plea occurred

during an imaginary interview with tho Confederate loader, Jofferson Davis,

11. • • tho minit you fire a gun at the piece of dry-goods called

the Star-Spangled Banner [Ward told DavisJ, tho Worth gits up and rises on massy, in defence of that banner.

Hot agin you as individooals,—

not agin tho South oven— but to cave the flag*

Wo should indeed bo

^"liberty Enlightening the World," Bill Nyefe Sparks, pp, 66-70. ■^Quoted in Blair, Horae Sense in American Humor, p, 31 •

137 weak in tho knees, unsound in the heart, milk-wit© in the liver, and soft in the hod, if wo stood quietly by, and saw this glorus Govymont smashed to pieces, either by a furrin or a intestine foe,"

Undecbivod

by military pomp or emotional rhetoric, Ho sea Biglow denounced tho im­ mortality and hypocrisy of tho United States1 involvement in tho Hoxican War and the people who supported this involvement, such as Gineral C», who . , . goes in for tho war; Ho don't vally princerpLo more 'n an old cud; 'Jut did God make us rayticnal creoturs for, But glory an* gunpowder, plunder an* blood?! The nativo humorists w r o also, like Bangs, motivated not by party loyalty but by principle regardless of thoir personal commitments* David Boss Locke, for one, bolongod to ’tho republican Party most of his life but did not hositato to attack policies ho disagreed with,

Davy

Crockett, for anothor, ontorod Congress as a firm Jackson supporter, but quiclcly switched aUogianco whon the spoils system and other abuses swept tlirougli Jackson's administration.

In "Second Letter to the

Presidont"^ B i n By©, writing as a mugwump, chided President Cleveland for appointing cabinet officers on tho basis of political patronage rather than individual merit, The political satire of the traditional humorists affirmed

17"The Show is Confiscated," Ward, p, 170,

Tho Complete Works of Artoimis

^ ’"What Lr. Robinson Thinks," The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1897), pTTBIT. Infill liyo's Rod Book (Chicago, I 89I), pp, 66-72,

138 moderation, as did Bangs’s, protesting extremes of liberalism and con­ servatism or of any other kind of radical position.

Seba Smith, for

example, approved of many of JacksonTc measures but satirized ■what he considered excesses, such as tho unduo influence of tho Kitchen Cabinet* David Ross Locko fought passionately for racial equality all of his life, but waged a persistont comic war against ’the Garrisonian abolitionists, whom ho considered hotheaded idealists who did not recognize tho perils of freeing the slaves procipitously.

Robert IIowoll ("Orpheus C. Kerr")

sympathized trith the Union cause during the Civil War but dorided military personnel on both sides who committed atrocities ’while spout­ ing high-sounding shibboleths. .Although tho comic writers of the old school stood, like Bangs, s four square behind democracy, they also displayed considerable skeptic­ ism (often bordering on cynicism) about the ideal of the rational citizen upon which, our popular government rosts.

They often depicted tho mass

of common people as stupid, gullible, immoral, selfish, and vicious, Petroleum V. Uasby once commented dryly "that soven-tenths uv manking is bad in a greater or loss degree;

that the devil hez a warranty deed on

four-tenths, a quit-claim to tiro-tenths, and a mortgage nn another tonth.

Tho-’ . in which he hoz a present or prospective interest aro very

largely in the majority,"^®

In "Interview with President Lincoln"2’*'

Artemus 'ford condemned tho horde of sycophants who swarmed around President Lincoln aftor his olection, seeking sinecures and avoiding

20Tho I;ashy Letters (Toledo, 1893)» P» ^31* ^ T h o Co.ivolote VJorks of Artemns hard, pp. 100-105. from this sketch in the text refer to this source.

Citations

constructive service.

In Tho Biglow Papers, Lowell presented several

unscrupulous characters to represent a largo portion of tho electorate, e.g., Birdofredum Sonin, Jolin P. Robinson, Increase D. O ’Phace, and the Pious editor, Bark Train also revealed serious misgivings about "the herd.”

In "Running for Governor," tho tale cited above, an honest

{gubernatorial candidate is forced to withdraw from a campaign because tho false, calumnious allegations of several prejudiced newspapers are accepted uncruostioningly by ’the "outraged and insulted public," who rout tho innocent candidate out of his homo in the middle of tho night, "breaking furniture and windows in thoir righteous indignation as they came, and talcing off such proporty as they could carry when thoy Trent," Another tale, "Tho Great Revolution in Pitcairn,"

22

describes tho serene,

happy colony created by tho descendants of tho HIIS Bounty's mutineers on tho lonely South Pacific isle of Pitcairn. people were farming and fishing; sorvicoc.

"The sole occupations of the

thoir solo rocreation, religious

Tharo was novor a shop in the island, nor any monoy.

The

habits and dress of tho people havo always boon primitive, and their laws simple to puerility.

Thoy have lived in a deep Sabbath tranquillity,

far from the world and its ambitions and vexations, and noithor knowing nor coring what was going on in the mighty empires that lie boyond thoir limitless ocoan solitudes."

(p. 339)

However, when a devious

American, one Lutterworth Stavcly, joins tho colony, tho pious inhabit­ ants chow that they are as suscoptible of corruption as the rest of

^ Tho Complote Humorous Sketches and Tplos of hark Twain, pp. 333-393. Citations from thic tale in tho text rofer to this source.

humanity.

Stavoly immediately set3 out to subvert the island's

government by, first, dividing tho people into religious factions, thon impeaching tho ohiof magistrate, and finally, after appointing himsolf emperor, declaring indopondonco from England,

VJithin a briof poriod of

timo, tho onco peaceful, idyllic sottlomcnt has boen turned into a militant, discontious ono, duo to tho gullibility and vonality of it 3 inhabitants,

Twain oxprosso3 oven more cynical opinions about the

public's capacity for rational thought in such lator works as Bark 23 Twain in Eruption, a collection of miscollanoous commentaries edited by Bernard Do Voto.

In "Tho iicnarchy," Twain asserts that tho ultimate

government of idle United States will be a monarchy ("what our generation calls a dictatorship") rather than a ropublic because tho people, through stupidity, vanity, and indifference, will fail to tako measures to prevent this eventuality, but instead will "invent thoir oppressors, and thoir opprossors sorvo tho function for which they nro invent­ ed, , .

In another pioce in mark Twain in Eruption, tho author

furthor donouncos tho commonppooplo1s political wisdom by complaining that although Thoodore Roosevelt, tho incumbent president, obviously grandstands and proposes riinous legislation, t!io vast mass of the nation lovos him, is frantically fond of him, oven idolizes him. This is tho simple truth. It sounds liko a libel upon tho intolligenco of the human raco but it isn't; thero isn't any way to libol tho intelligence of the human raco. (p. 18)

23 Bow York, 19*1-0« to this edition.

Citations from this work in tho text rofer

.... To my* mind, the bulk of any nation's opinion about it3 president, or its king, or its emperor, or its politics, or its religion, is without valuo and not worth weighing or considering or examining. There is nothing mental in it; it is all feeling, and procm’cd at secondhand without any assistanco from the juopriotor's reasoning poorers. (pp. 24-25) In voicing this skepticism about the masses, tho old-school humorists projected two images as Bangs had done— that of tho mob man and that of tho toughmindod citizon who keeps abreast of tho issues and trios to think thorn out sensibly.

In "Interview with President Lincoln,"

for example, Growno held up the example of the shroud showman, Arteraus Ward, who, unlilco tho crowd of colfich offico sookors, displays politi­ cal insight and social conscience.

Recognizing that "old Abe" faces

gravo problems and should not bo distracted, Ward drives tho hypocrites away.

"Go homo, you micorablo men, go homo E till the silo I Go to

poddlin -tinware— go to choppin wood— go to bilin' cope— stuff oassengers— blacl: boots— git a clorkship on somo rospoctablo '.iianuro cart— . , . any­ thing for a honest living, but don't como round horo dvivin Old Abo crazy by your outrajis ciittings upl"

(p. 103)

ifion Old Abe thanks

Wal'd, saying "How ld.n I ovor repay you, Wr. Ward, for your kindness?", tho shovmian roplios, "By givin tho -whole country a good, sound administration . . . By pursooin1 a patriotic, firm, and just course,,, . (p. 104)

In a similar mannor, Hosoa biglow stands apart from

Birdofrcdum, John R. Robinson, and the other villains, not because of social or economic advantages, but bocauso of his natural moral superiority.

Even Twain, in skotchos like "Traveling with a Reformer,

Oil

Tho Complete Humorous Sketches and Tqlos of Hark Twain, pp. 610-623. Citations from this work in tlio text refer to this source.

142 portrays a person who, despite his fanaticism and tendenoy to stretch the truth, "stood for citizenship* • • • His idea was that every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial police­ man, and keep unsalaried watoh and ward over the laws and their execution.

He thought that the only effective way of preserving the

protecting public rights was for each oitizen to do his share in pre­ venting or punishing such infringements of them as came under his personal notice*"

(p* 610)

Ward, Biglow, and other characters of their

ilk represented ^heir creators' ethical ideal, just as Perkins did to Bangs— the model oitizen, the hard-thinking man who accepts and fulfills his political responsibilities*

In short, what every American should

be but often is not* At this point Bangs and the traditional humorists part con?)any. Although the prototypes of both stand for ethical superiority, to Bangs this quality was inextricably associated with the other qualities of his class, to wit, learning, refinement, residenoe in a large east­ ern city, and so forth*

But from the beginning the oraokerbox critics

in alii phases ot our native humor represented the littli people who came from the lower ranks of sooiety and enjoydd none of the privileges that wealth and social position would confer*

The opinions of the

rustic philosophers derived not from books or the conventions of polite sooiety but from what Walter Blair calls horse sense, that is, the "good, sound, practical sense" a man is born with*

A man endowed

with horse sense "is lucky in that he can handle whatever problems he has to face— deal with them properly*

He does not have to look into a

book to find the answers, does not have to ask anybody on earth what

11*3 to do*

He con solve his own problems because he was born with a long

head on him, he has *been around, * and he has learned everything he oan from experience,"2-* He s&ses up situations and reaches answers on the basis of this kind of wisdom* These remarks show thattthe common sense which both Bangs and the older humorists attributed to their comic heroes differein that to Bangs it was the possession of the genteel middle-class* while Seba Smith and his successors associated it with the nation*s untutored plain folk*

As Jennette Tandy has explained* the homespun oraole was

a personification of the folk* a hero of democracy, who expressed the viewpoint of the man of the people.*^

However* as has been pointed out*

the older humorists believed that the bulk of the people failed to exeroise horse sense in political affairs*

In effect, these comic

writers regard it as the function of the rural sage to set an example for the unthinking masses in hopes that they would sea matters clearly and aot properly upon them* As they vent about dispensing their homely observations, the rustic spokesmen displayed many traits which Bangs abhorred* wore coarse, irreverent* presumptuous, and unconventional.

They

Davy

Crockett, for example* delighted in shocking Washington society by appearing at the White House in his buckskins and ooonskln cap*

Jaak

Downing and Artemus Ward, like other lowborn sages* treated the president with back-slapping familiarity and never hesitated to "set him

^"Preface," Horse Sense in American Humor, pp* vi-vii*

26

"Introduction," Craokerbox Philosophers in American Humor and 3fttire, pp. ix-xl*

straight11 when they thought he was wrong.

And as usual they spoke in

either a country dlaleot or illiterate English.

It is unthinkable that

either Thaddeus Perkins or the Idiot would be guilty of such glaring breaches of etiquette.

But regardless of the differences between the

condo personae of Bangs and the older humorists, the political satire of both presented two imagos— that of mass man or mob man and that of s sensitive, thinking man and eitisten.

The versions of the two images

differ, reflecting prejudices boro of urban and rural backgrounds, but the writers of both schools of oomedy stressed the contrast between them and embodied the positive values in their image of the thinking American, who represented the baokbone of the country.

Eaoh kind of

humorist was defending an ideal, the uncommon common man, that is, one who is common in origin and tastes but uncommon in ability (as each defined these terms according to whether he expressed an urban middleclass or rural lower-class viewpoint.) The differences in the protagonists adopted by Bangs and the older humorists in their political satire also involved differences in techniques.

As the preceding discussion indicates, Bangs used to ex­

press his ideas in characters much like himself.

Both Thaddeus Perkins

and the Idiot closely resemble their oreator— they live in the suburbs and are respectable and well-educated. writer.)

(Perkins is even a New fork

But there was a great distance between the untutored rustics

and their oreator s.

Seba Smith and Lowell were educated men, who like

Charles Farrar Browne and Robert Newell, assumed the guise of an unso­ phisticated yokel when delivering their opinions.

This meant that most

of them made use of the devioe of the wise fool, whioh functioned in two ways.

It enabled them either to voice their oritioism directly, in

the manner of a keenminded common man, or, donning the mask of a simpleton, express ideas obviously lacking horse sense so that readers would see at onoe that they were foolish*

Thus, for example, when

Jaak Downing first stumbled into the Maine legislature, he wrote home a glowing letter expressing his admiration for the wrangling politicians, but his naive oomments inadvertently exposed their pettiness.

Later,

when Jaok journeyed to Washington to "help” President Jaokson, he commented with blunt shrewdness on the craftiness of Martin Van Buron and the other members of Andy 1a Kitchen Cabinet.

Sometimes the fool

was an unmitigated scoundrel who expounded views the author really wanted to discredit.

David Ross Locke, for instance, made Petroleum

V. Nasby a braggart, a liar, a loafer, a drunkard, a coward, and a hypocrite who sided with the South during the Civil War.

Locke counted

on his readers* seeing that the Ideas of such a vicious oharacter were worthless. The

persona of the wise fool proved very useful to the tradi­

tional humorists in their political satire, given the rural audience to whom they addressed themselves and the often crude nature of their work.

For one thing, such a hayseed character flattered his readers

by giving them a sense of superiority over him while at the same time holding their attention, a feat whloh editors, professional politicians, and other members of the "Establishment11 could not always accomplish. In addition, the rube's own supposed deficiencies permitted him to "insinuate many things forbidden. • .betray official double-dealing. • • [and]] tell all manner of alighting stories about the great " without

146 giving offen so*2?

finally, any criticism of such insinuations would

bo dirooted at the fictitious oraolo rather than at his oreator* Bangs's polite and sophisticated humor made it unnecessary for him to hide behind this kind of proteotive mask, and, furthermore, such an impersonation would have been unsuitable to the urban, middle-class readers whose attention he tried to attract*

All in all, his use of

the device of the wise fool, in the persona of the Idiot, was much more limited than that of the native humorists.

As Chapter n

explains, the

Idiot was often deliberately whimsical as he went about exposing the wrong thinking of his boardinghouse associates, but he never descended to the level of an oblivious dolt, as Downing did, and never came re­ motely close to Nasby's villiiny* By the time Bangs began to produce his political satire, the old school had nearly played itself out*

Host of its members had either

died or had long since completed their significant work.

The last

bonaflde humorist in the mainstream of American comedy, B U I Hyo, died on in I896. One of his pieces, written in 1891, criticized the govern­ ment for its abuse of the farmer by charging high taxes and failing to protect his interests in other ways, but with this exception none of the political humor of the old sohool concerns Populism or other develop­ ments after the turn of the century, making it impossible to compare the views of its writers on these subjects to those of Bangs. However, it is interesting to speculate what those views might

2?Ibld.. p. 25, 2®"The Farmer and the Tariff,"

Bill N.ye's Sparks, pp. 128-136.

have been*

It seems likely that, because of 'their rural bias, the older

humorists would have sympathized with the plight of the farmers— the piece by r a n Nye lndloates that he, for one, did— and supported the alms of the Populists*

But even If they did, it Is probable that they

would also have continued to adhere to the golden mean and discouraged radicals whose drive for immediate change might have threatened the welfare of the country as a whole*

Their skepticism about the masses

may have led them to question the idealism which lay behind the PopuListb* scheme for the public ownership of utilities, and their dedication to the old-fashioned virtues of Individualism, freedom, and self-reliance may have caused them to oppose the trend toward Increased government control that certain Populist and Utopian measures entailed.

Objections

suoh as these would be consistent with the attitudes implicit In the rest of their political writing, which Is characterized by a moderate conservatism*

Like Bangs, the native humorists favored correcting

the imperfections In our governmental system by reasserting America's traditional values and resisted any changes vhioh they thought might undermine those values* The similarities between the political philosophies of Bangs and the native humorists suggest that the attitudes appropriate to the crackerbox philosopher and his rural audience might also fit the solid genteel citizen and his urban readers*

The old school, it is true,

tended to associate these attitudes with the American of rural or small­ town origin, while Bangs associated them with the prosperous and cultivated middle to upper-middle-class oity dweller*

But the belief

of Bangs and the bid school In the same ideals transcended any differences

in techniques or versions of the ’’unooramon common man” who exemplified these ideals*

Both were distrustful of the massesf defenders of the

old moral order, and moderates inppolitics, regardless of whether they developed their humor through a crackerbox character or a Thaddeus Perkins.

Bangs, as he confidently voiced the majority opinion of his

readers, adapted the old beliefb to the service of new urban problems. In so doing, he demonstrated his position as a transitional figure in American humor.

CHAPTER V

THE SUPERNATURAL

A portion of Bangs1s humorous writing does not pertain direotly to the central subject of this study, the author's status as a transitional figure In American humor, but it does warrant mention because It is a sizable body of work, consisting of eight volumes, and because it includes his greatest single success and what he termed his "sole refuge for the future," A Houseboat on the Styx.

This portion

of Bangs* s work deals with what can be generally classified as super* natural themes:

ghosts and assorted Immortal beings, hallucinations,

transmigration, multiple personalities, and other psychical phenomena. In employing such topics, Bangs was not demonstrating any particular originality.

The supernatural was a major theme In popular fiction

during the time Bangs composed his occult tales.

Dorothy Scarborough",

author of The Supernatural In Modern English Fiotlon (1917),^ has theorized that, although fasoination with the supernatural had been evident in literature since its earliest expressions, thepperlod from 1890 to 1917 experienced "a definite revival of interest in the supernatural. . . ."

(p. 231)

Numerous American authors, some of them

quite distinguished, published works in this vein— for example, Henry James, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Frank Stockton, F. Marlon Crawford,

3-New York and London. refer to this edition.

Citations from this work in the text

149

150 and Brander Matthews*

Stories dealing with various phases of the

supernatural were in faot much in demand try- both "high-toned” literary magazines like Harper*s and condo journals like Puok and Life.2 In analyzing the differences between supernatural fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and that written between 1890 and 1917» Miss Scarborough states that in general the later material exhibits more variety and subtlety than the earlier.

Influences like

the scholarly investigation of parapsyohologioal phenomena, modern spiritualism with its seanoes and medium!stic experiments, and scien­ tific advances, such as in optics, furnished new themes.

In addition,

the later writers treated the Gothio conventions of the earlier period with greater freedom and complexity.

For example, Gothio spirits of

the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seem primitive and super­ ficial.

Usually vaporous skeletons, they were confined to a particular

locale, such as a family vault, a cemetery, or a medieval castle, and appeared usually at night, frequently during a severe thunder storm* The later ghosts, ty contrast, could assume any form, from a bodiless head to an ordinary mortal, dress in anything they liked, and do their haunting anywhere they chose, from a seashore in the middle of the after­ noon to bungalows and steamer staterooms.

The earlier Gothic specters

also tended to be rather simpleminded souls with one-track minds. Their principal motives were to request burial, seek revenge, warn of imminent danger, and make revelations, such as the true oircumstances of their deaths.

But the motivations of their more recent counterparts

o Linnoman, p. 280;

Franois Hyde Bangs, p. 124.

151 ran the gamut of human emotions— •jealousy, love, curiosity, gratitude, mischievousness, etc.

In effect, Miss Scarborough's study indicates

that Bangs and his contemporaries were at times dealing with new super­ natural motifs and at others working variations on older Gothic conventions.

However, these innovations notwithstanding, the later

ghost stories— such as those of Henry James, for example— tend to ex­ hibit their authors' characteristic preoooupations and techniques. The same tendency is evident in Bangs's supernatural work3, which re­ semble the attitudes, themes, and style of the rest of his humor.

This

fact suggests that, because of its popularity, the "ghost" genre became a kind of vehicle whioh writers with very differing aims and concerns adapted to their own special purposes.

Bangs was no exception.

Although he cannot olalm credit for the innovations in super­ natural motifs. Bangs led the vanguard in treating lightly the heretofore sacrosanct subjects of occult literature.

The introduction of "purely

humorous supernaturalism" into fiction was, according to Kiss Scarborough, "essentially a new thing," a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century.

She characterizes Bangs as "creator extraordinary

of jovial ghosts," and declares that his work "illustrates the free and easy manner of the moderns toward ghosts, ploturing them in unconven­ tional situations and divesting them of all their ancient dignity, » • • His convivial spooks In their ghost dub, his astrals who play pranks on mortals, and their confreres are examples of the mod em flippancy toward supematurals."

(pp. 293-9*0

This chapter will divide Bangs' s supernatural works into two groups.

The first includes stories dealing with a variety of ocault

152 phenomena.

Some of these tales are not humorous in that although they

are Intended to divert they do not strive to provoke laughter.

They

might best be described as light fiction, similar to, say, an Ellery Queen mystery.

Others, however, are consciously humorous and rely on

Bangs’s usual comedio devices, such as puns, witty repartee, and topical allusion.'

The work in the second group, all of which are humorous,

exploit the device of treating famous immortals (some real, some imagin­ ary) in an informal and familiar way, as if they were, in fact, human beings very much like Bangs and his readers. Three works comprise the first category:

Toppleton’s Client

(1893), The Water Ghost and Others (189*0, and Ghosts I Have Met (1898),^ The first of these was published originally as a novel, but the other two ore collections of short stories, most of which appeared first in Harper’s Weekly throughout the nineties. thematic variety.

These works show remarkable

Toppleton’s Client, for example, conoerns a dis­

embodied spirit, formerly an English Barrister, who has been deprived of his "mortal habitation" by an ambitious and inhuman fiend.

(Tech­

nically, thhe evicted spirit is not a ghost because he has never been dead,)

The evil ghoul had offered to win for the barrister an important

law suit involving a large sum of money if the young man would lend him his body for the duration of the trial.

The young man consented, but

after winning the trial the fiend refused to give up either the money or the body and has been successfully impersonating the disembodied

3a11 three of these works were published in New York. Almost all of the short stories comprising The Water Ghost and Others and Ghost8 I Have Met originally appeared in Harper’s Weekly throughout the nineties.

barrister for thirty years.

When Toppleton, the young Amorican lawyer

who is the hero of the tale, tries to restore the body to its original occupant, the fiendish spirit contrives to steal Toppleton* 8 body, leaving the American with the somewhat shopworn habitation of his client. "Carleton Barker, First and Second" deals with the subject of double Jl

identity.

In this story two Americans visiting the Lake District

stop to aid an injured Englishman.

Later when they read in the news­

papers that he is suspected of murder, they go to court to testify that he was in their company at the time the killing took place.

After his

acquittal, the Englishman tells the Americans that he has a mysterious double, apparently the evil side of his nature, which materializes and commits crimes for which he is later charged.

At the end of the story,

the Americans again learn that the Englishman has been arrested for murder, convicted, and sentenced to hang.

On the day of the execution

the double appears in the Americans1 room but quiokly fades away at the instant the hangman pulls his lever. Bangs adds a soientifio touch.^

In "The Speck on the Lens"

This tale concerns a man who has such

an extraordinary left eye that when he looks through a newly invented lens ho sees around the world to the back of his own head, which he thinks is a speck on the lens.

In "A Midnight Visitor"

a distraught

^Thls tale originally appeared in Scribner^ Magazine in Ootober, 1893» and was later collected in Ghosts I Have Met. Bangs had dealt seriously with the theme of double identity in an earlier work, Roger Camerden (New York, I887). 5This tale originally appeared in the May 28, 1892, issue of Harper1s Weekly and was later collected in The Water Ghost and Others, as were the next five pieces cited. ^This tale originally appeared in the December 10, I892, issue of Harper *8 Weekly.

program chairman who has been unable to devise entertainment for his club's monthly meeting is confronted by a stage-struck Beelzebub who offers to perform magic tricks.

The d u b members declare the amateur

magician the best attraction of the year*

"A Quick-silver Cassandra"?

involves a young man who is nervously pacing his sweetheart's parlor as he attempts to work up the courage to propose. When he looks in the mirror to check his appearance, he sees the reflection of himself kneeling before his beloved, who is firmly shaking her head in refusal. At that moment, the young woman appears in the flesh, and the crest­ fallen suitor blurts out his experience.

But the story ends happily

as the girlfriend laughs and reminds the young man that mirrors "have O a habit of reversing everything." In "A Psychical Frank" another young man much smitten with a young lady is puzzled when she boards the street oar he is riding and, even though most of the seats are empty, persists in standing and hdding onto a strap.

After this

incident she snubs the young man, and word reaches him through a mutual acquaintance that she finds him discourteous.

The two do not meet again

until a year later, by which time the young woman has married.

When the

gentleman mentions the incident on the street car, she laughs gaily and explains that she had thought all the seats were occupied because the members of the Boston Theosophical Society had projected their bodies onto the oar.

She was the only one who perceived them, however,

?This tale originally appeared in the September 24, 1892, issue of Harper's Weekly. ®This tale originally appeared in the August 12, 1093 issue of Harper's Weekly.

155 beaause, unknown to har at the time, she is psychic.

The young nan

turns away silently, unamused by the prank of the Theosophical Society. In most of the stories just described, Bangs was using new pre­ ternatural themes introduced by science and psychical research.

His

ghost stories, however, often retained effeots characteristic of Gothio literature, such as crumbling mansions, eerie atmospheres, and nysterious happenings.

But unlike many popular ghost writers of his day Bangs

treated these effeots lightly, exploiting their comic and not their sensational possibilities. Despite their harmLessness, Bangs's spooks came in a variety of shapes and eccentricities and displayed remarkable originality in their methods of haunting the unfortunate mortals who had to struggle with them.

"The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall1'9 features the wraith of a

maiden who, because she drowned herself in a fit of pique, has been doomed to haunt her family's ancestral estate, Harrowby Hall.

Accord­

ingly, for the past two hundred years she has appeared on Christinas Eve, terrorizing the manor's oooupants and saturating everything in her way. Finally, the latest heir of Harrowby Hall gets rid of her by tricking her outside where she promptly freezes;

he then places her in oold storage

where she can no longer do any harm.

"The Spectre Cook of Bangletop"^

is a comic version of the revenge ghost.

The vengeful spirit in this

tale has disrupted the kitchens of Bangletop Hall for centuries because a medieval baron discharged her without wages.

She is finally persuaded

^This tale originally appeared in the June 27, 1891 issue of Harper's Weekly. l^This tale originally appeared in the December 5* 1893 issue of Harper's Weekly.

156 to discontinue her mischief when a Yankee, who rentedflangletop without knowing of her presence, buys her an aristocratic title from an im­ poverished Italian nobleman.

In "The Dampmere Mystery"-^- an author rents

a remote cottage In order to work in peace;

however, when he, his dog,

his Chinese houseboy, and his hair mattress all develop standing hair, he abandons his retreat in the middle of the night.

In another story^

the main character professes to be unintimidated by phantoms.

One

evening ho is visited by what turns out tote a ghost, and while ho manages to keep his composure, he discovers the next morning that his horsehair sofa has turned white,

11

"The Ghost Club" ^ tells of a young man in prison who declares that he is the innocent victim of a ghostly prank.

The young man had

encountered the spirit of a former friend, Hawley Hicks, fifteen years after Hioksfs death.

The ghost invited the young man to join him for

the evening at his "club," which boasted as members some of the most eminent figures in history— Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Napoleon, Solomon, etc.

As he is leaving the dub, the young man is stopped by Queen

Isabella and King Ferdinand who insist that he take some valuable silver spoons as a memento of his visit.

He no more than reaches the street

than he Is accosted by a wealthy gentleman who claims that both the

■^This story originally appeared in the December 10, 1892 issue of Harper's Weekly and was later collected in Ghosts I Have Hot, 12

"The Mystery of My Grandmother's Hair Sofa"; it originally appeared in the December 14, 1695 issue of Harper's Weekly and was later collected in Ghosts I Have Met. •^This story originally appeared in the Marah 19, 1892 issue of Harper's Weekly and was later dolleoted in The Water Ghost and Others.

157 apartment and the spoons are his.

No one believes the young man’s

explanation, naturally, so he goes to jail. This story is slight and ends rather weakly, but it holds special significance for Bangs because it introduced the idea that he used in his most famous work, A Houseboat on the Styx (1095), and repeated in four subsequent works, The Pursuit of the Houseboat (1897)* The Enchanted Typewriter (1899), Olympian Nights (1902), and The Autobiography of Methuselah (1909). works is the same;

14

The formula in all of these

Bangs takes celebrated figures from various sourc­

es— politics, philosophy, literature, classical mythology, and the Bible— places them in a thinly disguised contemporary setting, and depicts them as human beings with the full share of frailties and pro­ blems that flesh is heir to. In Houseboat he gathers an Impressive group of immaterial greats— Shakespeare, DTvJohnson, Nero, Cassius, Confucius, Demosthenes*. Washington, Napoleon, P. T. Bamum, Hamlet, Darwin, Omar Khayyam, and Artemus Ward to cite a few at random— and puts them on a "Florentine barn on a canalboat" floating doom the River Styx.

Considering that it

is located in Hades, this establishment Is singularly congenial.

In

faot it resembles nothing so much as one of the exclusive men’s clubs

1h. All five of these works were published in New fork. The sketches comprising the first three appeared originally in Harper's Weekly in serial form, Houseboat from August to November, 1095; Pursuit from February to April, 18971 and Typewriter from Augugt to September, 1897.

158 which thrived in New York during the eighties and nineties.

15

(The

architecture of the Houseboat was even Florentine like that of the prestigious Century Club.)

Like these organizations, the Houseboat

allows gentlemen from various professions— publishing, music, the theatre, business— to associate in an informal atmosphere;

like its

earthly counterparts, the Houseboat contains a library, a smoking room, and a billiards room.

Many of the Houseboat's special functions, like

birthday dinners and Storytellers1 Night, resemble actual events that took place at Bangs's own club, the Aldine,

l6

The Houseboat, moreover,

is run just as a real olub would bo, with separate committees appointed to handle such matters as entertainment, complaints, and the admission of new members. The '’Associated Shades” (as the residents of the Houseboat call -themselves) also behave just as one might imagine the members of a human club would.

For example, they treat one another informally.

"Hullo, William,” Dr. Johnson greets Shakespeare.

"How's our little

•^Van VJyok Brooks, The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (New York, 1952), p. 8. Brooks believes that the establishment of these organiza­ tions was the reflection of a growing cultural consciousness in New York during the eighties and nineties, ^ T h e chapter in Houseboat entitled "Storytellers' Night" describes on evening affair in which the members sit around in a more or less Informal way and entertain one another by telling stories they have written or by recounting adventures. Francis Hyde Bangs's bio­ graphy of his father states that fcvonts such as these, also called Storytellers1 Nights, were regular functions at the Aldine and were attended by prominent literary figures of the day, for example, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, James M. Barrie, Hall Caine, Ian Ha alaren, and Rlohard Harding Davis. (William D. Howells always declined the invi­ tations to participate.) On one such occasion in I897, designated as "Ghost Night," only tales of the supernatural were recounted. Bangs was one of the tellers. (See Francis Hyde Bangs, p. 169,)

Swanlet of Avon this afternoon?"

And, as one would expect In a gather­

ing of forceful personalities, they frequently squabble among themselves* Shakespeare and Dr*Johnson argue about which one of them is the great master of the English language* who won at Waterloo*

Napoleon and Wellington wrangle over

Columbus pouts because Washington, not he, is

aailed "the Father of his country."

Despite their famous achievements,

the Shades on the Houseboat reveal that they are guilty of the same weaknesses that mere mortals have always displayed#

Queen Elizabeth

has to rescue Sir Walter Raleigh by throwing him her ruff* is relentlessly henpecked by Xanthippe* bag;

Socrates

Carlyle is an irascible wind­

and Dr* Johnson repeatedly nudges Boswell to make sure Boswell

records his witticisms. Each of the characters is individualized to the extent of exhibiting a trait consistent with his original existence, whether fictional or actual— e.g., Raleigh is chivalrous, Baron Munchausen exaggerates, Xanthippe is bossy, end Demosthenes speaks with pebbles in his mouth.

But the characters also resemble one another and Bangs*s

other creations in their cultivated speech, level of education, good manners, and urban attitudes.

Even lower class characters like Artemus

Ward and Hamlet* s Yorick use standard English*

A country boy like

Robert B u m s engages in a learned conversation about gourmet cooking, Phidias* sculpture, and Turner*s painting.

Although the raillery

among the Houseboat*s members is constant, it never crosses the bounds of good taste.

Like any good New Yorker, Shakespeare declares that he

would like to commute from the Styx to the real world, Just like a suburban resident "who sleeps in the country and makes his living in

160 the city,11 and everyone enjoys a hearty laugh upon hearing about an unsophisticated production of Hamlet in the western part of the United States.

All in all, Bangs seems to have modeled his famous shades

after his fellow clubmen and his readers, who were largely prosperous, respectable, middle-class people. Francis Hyde Bangs claims that in Houseboat his father, as "the first person in modern literary history to introduce sweetness and light and laughter on any scale into the erstvihile unhappy territory [of Hades]] . . • put himself in the succession of Homer, Vergil, and Dante, as a major historian of the Lower Regions."

Furthermore, "if

Cervantes can be said to have laughed Chivalry away. . .

Bangs, with

equal truth, may be said to have done the same for Fire and Brimstone," However skeptically an impartial critic might regard such extravagant praise, the younger Bangs*s assertions about the book*s popularity rest on solid evidonce.

After being published in late November, 1895,

Houseboat immediately appeared on the best-seller lists about the country, and in January and February, I896, led the lists in Bookman. "It was the first American book to arrive at such a distinction, as primary place through 1895 had been held successively by DuMaurier's Trilby, and Ian Maclaren1s two volumes, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush and In the Days of Auld Lang Syne, No other American book in the nineties distinctively designated as humorous was ever so received."^ Houseboat ends with the female inhabitants of the Erebean coun­ try— Queen Elisabeth, Ophelia, and Xanthippe are the ringleaders—

^Francis Ilydo Bangs, pp. 163-67.

boarding the vessel during the absence of its regular members, who have gone ashore to watch a boxing match between Samson and Goliath.

The

•women have long resented their exclusion from the club and its usurp­ ation of their companions* time and interest.

While they inspect its

handsome furnishings, Captain Kidd and his pirate crew slip stealthily aboard and sail away, unaware of their precious cargo.

Bangs*s sequel

to Houseboat, The Pursuit of the Houseboat, resumes the adventures of the Associated Shades at this point.

Under the cool guidance of

Shorlock Holmes (Conan Doyle had killed his famous detective in 1893) the club charters another craft, the Gehenna, and takos up the chase of the clubhouse and it3 helpless prisoners.

Ironically, tho Shades find

themselves rescuing the bewildered pirates, who proved to be no match for their clever, atrong-minded captives and as a result ended up on a deserted isle.

In the final chapter the men overtake the Houseboat and

in exchange for its return agree to grant the ladies membership privileges. With the exception of the unifying device of the chase, Pursuit is similar to its predecessor, featuring the same eminent figures, clashes of personality, and casual tone.

Although its success was not

so great as that of Houseboat, it enjoyed considerable popularity. After its publication in Hay it immediately appeared on tho best-seller lists and stayed there for several months. In 1899 Bangs wrote The Enchanted Typewriter as "an Hadean chronicle in further exploitation of the Styx and the contiguous pro1A vinoe of Cimmeria.”

This chronicle differs from the previous two,

XQlbid.. p. 180.

however, in that it is written nightly between midnight and four A.M. on a magic typewriter.

The narrator of these episodes, an ordinary

mortal, tells how he discovered an old typing machine in his attic one day and repaired it but was never able to make it work satisfactorily* One night when he is returning late from his dub, he enters the library to find tho typewriter clicking away apparently unaided.

When he

wonders aloud what is going on, the machine tape out an answer, thus beginning a dialogue between the narrator and the unseen typist, who introduces himself as Jim Boswell, editor of the Stygian Gazette*

In

return for using the typewriter to write out his news stories about the latest doings in Hades, Boswell agrees that the narrator may publish this material and keep tho royalties. swell's reports indicate that the population along the Styx has not clianged since The Pursuit of the Houseboat and that its members are up to their old trleke— Baron Munchausen persists in tolling out­ rageous lies, and Napoleon is still trying to engineer a coup d 1 etat to unseat Old Hick and take over as emperor.

The problems they wrestle

with sometimes possess unusual complications, but differ little in kind from those that confronted Bangs and his many readers who worked in Mew York but lived in the pleasant, middle-class suburbs surrounding it.

Golf, for example, has become a great fad in tho nether world, and

the players constantly bicker over the rules and falsify their score­ cards.

One of Bosvrell1s bulletins reports that the City of Cimmeria

has sued the State of Hades for ten years of baok dog taxes because it contends that Cerebuo, the state*s official watch dog, should wear three licenses, one for each of his three heads.

Judge Blaokstone tries

163 the case arid the city loses* In Olympian Nights (1902) and The Autobiography of Methuselah (1909)i Bangs abandons Hades as his setting but again depicts august personages as what he considered ordinary people -with common~and con­ temporary— problems and failings.

The former work tolls l ow an

American tourist in Greece is robbed and then deserted by his guide at the foot of Mt. Olympus, shelter in a cave*

l/hen a rainstorm begins, tho American seeks

Although surprised to discover an elevator at tho

back of the cave, he enters it and asks to go up.

In the course of

his conversation with tho cherubic elevator boy (who ho learns I 3 Cupid), the American realizes that he has found his way into the home of tho ancient Greek gods, who apparently are still thriving*

His subsequent

encounters with various inhabitants of Mr, Olympus expose their human qualities and strip them of their f,divinlty.n

Cupid and his wife Psyche

have separated because she could not get along with his mother; Apollo proves to be an inept mnsioian; of being a reckless driver.

and Phaeton has the reputation

Adonis is an accomplished philandereri,

and Narcissus cannot hold a steady job beoause he spends most of his time primping.

As in Houseboat, many activities of tho immortals are

similar to those of mortals.

The gods also play golf, for example,

and whilo their game takes on larger proportions— an ordinary drive travels seventy-five miles— it presents many of the same frustrations— the caddies still drop clubs and steal balls,

Olympus also has a one-

man football team, Hercules, who plays the All-Hades team for the championship of the universe and wins because the Hades team members— Hannibal, Caesar, Napoloon, Achilles, and others like them— argue over

164 which one is going to command the field, allowing Hercules to grab the ball and run. Eventually tho American woars out his welcome, and Jupiter orders him back to earth,

Tho visitor leaves his immortal acquaintances

Tilth little sons© of regret or loos, for, as he says in evaluating his brief stay in Olympus:

"In ita results it has perhaps been neither

elevating nor remarkably instructive, but it has given me a better tinder standing of, and a better liking for, that great company of mytho­ logical beings who used to preside over the destinies of the Greeks. They appeared more human than godlike to my 0310s,"

(pp. 223-24)

In The Autobiography of Methuselah Bangs takes the same attitude toward his Biblical hero that ho had adopted nearly fifteen years oarlior in Houseboat and extends it to the other Biblical figures mentioned in the book: human beings.

he regards them as normal urban, middle-class

Ages are exaggerated, to be sure— Methuselah i 3 still in

his youth at 200 and does not roach his prime until 632. And many wellknown Old Testament events are described, such as Noah’s building the Ark and tho foud between Cain and Abel.

f

But for the most part Methuselah

and his many relatives might just as well bo living in tho early twentieth century.

Aunt Jerusha, for example, Is a suffragette who

espouses tho franchise for all single women over 3^0;

Noah incorporates

his Ark under the title of the International Marine and Zoo Floatation Co. and sells watered down stocks to widows and orphans;

and Adam

and Eve face that perennial inconvenience of suburban living, the lack of good servants. In those works dealing with supernatural themes, 3angs is

usually content to provide amusement by relying on either the bizarre nature of the stories themsolves, as in tho ghost tales included in the first category, or on the familiar treatment of celebrated characters, as in the five volumes comprising the second category.

Occasionally,

however, as tho discussion of Methuselah would indioate, he indulges his fondness for coclal satire and comments on or alludes to contemporary matters.

One chapter in Houseboat, for instance, reoounts a debate

between Dgrxiin and the rest of tho Associated Shades on the theory of evolution (the others make it seem so ridiculous that Darwin gives up the fight in despair); in The Enchanted Typewriter a longtliy conversa­ tion takes place between the narrator and Xanthippe, Boswell’s proxy for tho night, on the subject of the New Woman,

The narrator concedes

that women should be given more freedom but maintains that most men prefer to marry "wives rather than old ohap3,l! Methuselah also over­ flows with allusions to prominent topics and figures of tho day, such as "the popular soor Ber Hard Pshaw, acknowledged leader of the MeoBunkum School of night Thinking,’1 and Teddy Roosevelt, disguised as His Highness King Ptush, a visiting head of state who goes around shoot­ ing everything in sight, smiling, and diouting, "Deee-lightedJ11 The point of view that Bangs expresses toward subjects like the Hew Woman and the theory of evolution in those works is consistent with that revealed in M s social and political satirej

ho measures these new

developments against the ideals of an earlier day and finds them unaccept­ able. In writing his tales about mischievous ghosts and jovial "astrals,” Bangs was neither continuing andimportant theme established

by native Amerioan humorists nor setting a precedent for post-1925 humorists to follow.

He was, first, in all probability, catering to

the contemporary demand for such literature and, secondly, expressing personal interests and prejudices.

His son and biographer, Francis

Hyde Bangs, relates that Bangs, who was an avid bibliophilo, possessed an unusual collection of ghoctlore and was regarded by his colleagues as an authority on the subject.

He also devoted a part of his spare

time to studying "the more rocondito and mysterious phases of human behavior."

In addition, although Bangs was a religious man all of his

life, he was impatient with Calvinist beliefs which held that all men from the day of thoir births were doomed to burn in Hell.

Works like

A Houseboat on the Styx and Olympian Bights, with their cheerful treat­ ment of heaven and hell and afterlife, clearly reflect a more relaxed religious attitude than Bangs*s grandfather, tho Reverend Nathan Bangs, would have been permitted to express in his lifetime.

Apart from Bangs*s

personal interest in supernatural!sm, his works dealing with the subject differ little in overall design from those written by follow gonteel humorists and published in the same magazines.

But, as was

true of so much of Bangs's humor, he wrote more and bettor than the others did. Bangs’s good friend, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, developed an absorbing interest in spiritualism after tho death of his oldest son in World War I,

Doyle once reported that he had received a message

from Bangs from "the bourne from which no traveler returns,"

But,

according to Bangs's son, "Sir Arthur failed to declare whether the locale of that bourne was from over the Styx or not."

CHAPTER VI TWEt 1XETH-CEN T URT DEVELOPMENTS XM. HUMOR

Walter HLair, one of the most widely recognized authorities in American humor, proposes 1900 as a convenient but arbitrary date to mark tho close of the most vigorous and prolific period of our native humor.

But no school of humor springs up full-blown, without antecedents,

any more than any other kind of literary tradition does, nor does one stop abruptly, leaving no trace. humor.

Although it lost momentum toward the end of the century, it did

not disappear. them,

So it was with our native tradition of

Four "oraokor box survivals,n as Norris Tates dubbed

perpetuated many of its conventions in the twentieth century.

Throe were midwostem newspaper columnists— George Ada (1866-1944), Frank "Kin" Hubbard (1868-1930), and Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)-and one, Will Rogers (1879-1935), was a cowboy entertainer who among his sundry activities also wrote a syndicated newspaper column.

Each

of these humorists retained unmistakable earmarks of his homespun, horse sense forebears.

Each, also like his predecessors, often satir­

ized the same subjects as Bangs, and in doing so expressed values similar to Bangs*s. As Norris Tates describes them in the chapters he devotes to

Ichapters four through seven of Tates*s book The Amerioan Humorist, are devoted to these humorists; my discussion of them is indebted to these chapters.

167

those "survivals,11 they all employed rural or lower-middle-olass characters who expressed themselves In either dialect or semi-literate language;

they all distrusted traditional culture, preferring to rely

on common sense;

and they all habitually played the wise fool;

that

is, they expressed criticism which might otherwise have offended their audiences in an ecoentrio and uneducated manner.

For example, like

Jack Downing and Artemus "Ward before him, Will Rogers claimed familiarity t*ith presidents and, in the role of the naive rustic who assumes that the highest official in the land will be delighted to hoar his unso­ phisticated opinions, offers the president "advice" on how to run the country.

In one Vletter" sent to President Wilson, whom ho called

" P r e s , W i l l questioned his choice of representatives at the Geneva "Dissarmament" Conference: "Mow you are sending these fellows over there to talk about dissarming.

Now just use your own judgment.

Can

you picture these Army and Navy fellows being enthusiastic for dissarm­ ing?

Can you see Andy {’Admiral Andrew Long] and Hilary [Admiral Hilary

Jones] voting a Battleship out from under themselves? • . • your own case.

Just take

Can you see yourself attending a Conference to abolish

or even cut down on Presidents?"

2

The outrageous hyperbole and fantasy of earlier Southwestern humor and the wild verbal aorobatics of the literary comedians were largely dropped by the "crackerbox survivals," but they employed other devices of the older humorists,

Abe Martin and Will Rogers, for example,

2 Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President (New York, 1926), pp. *WUH.

169 were prono to inisspelling, end all four wore fond of homely metaphors and allusions:

Abe Martin observed:

"Givin' half the' road t* an

ortomobile is th1 hardest thing a farmer does next t' plowin',"-* and A Ade described one of his characters as ’’good as Old Wheat." frequently runs across mixed metaphors: of flatthry";-*

One also

"Larceny is th! sincerest form

"th' farmer that drives t' town t* play pool 'cause it's

too wet t' plow never gathers no moss";

misquotations of the classics:

"As Shake spore says, be thrue to ye* er silk an' ye will not thin be false o to ivry man"; and puns: "No matter how bad tilings may go at home th* Q average housewife will 'bridge' 'em over". Also like their crackerbarrel predecessors, these four writers were adept at coining aphorisms: "A Piker is one who gets into the Game on Small Capitol and Lets On to

9 be holding back a huge Reserve";

"The' feller that belittles his wife

in company is only tryin' t' pull her down t* his own size";'*’0 ivrybody— but out th1 ca-ards"

"Thrust

"A Diplomat is a fellow to keep you

3"February,11 Abe Martin1s Almanaok (Indianapolis, 190?). Tho pages in this volume arc unnumbered, ^Fred Kelly, ed,, The Permanent Ade (New York, 19^7), p. 26, ^"Casual Observations," Mr. Dooloy on Ivrything and Ivrybody (New York, 1963), p. 155* £ "May," Abe Martin's Almanaok, ^"Casual Observations," p, 153# ®"May," Abe Martin's Almanack. 9Kelly, p. 55. ^"February," Abe Martin's Almanack. ^ ’’Casual Observations," p. 15^.

170 12

from settling on a thing so everybody can understand it."

Although the jokes, anecdotes* rustic verso, mock oral tales, and burlesques that made up so much of the older crackerbox humor did not appear in the work of the four "survivals," other forms remained, Rogers was a letter writer like Jack Downing and Hosea Biglow,

13

and

both he and Dooley v.rro essentially monologuists, as the literary comedians had been,

Ade favored short stories, sketches, and essays,

forms Trhich appear in all branches of nineteenth-century American humor, Ade also revived an ancient form, the fablo, with great success;

he

described his recipe as "one portion of homely truth, one pinch of satire, a teacupful of capital letters, well spiced with up-to-date slang and garnished with drawings, The customs of How England village life and the rough raaSculino activities which had provided much of the subject matter of Down East and Southwestern humor had ceased to be the topics of popular humor by the time the literary comedians reached their ascendancy.

These humor­

ists, tihose interests were not regionalized as those of the Down East and Southwest writers had been, devoted themselves to national affairs at largo.

In this regard, the "crackerbox survivals" followed their

footsteps;

the list of topics they satirized would indeed bo vast,

including many of the same subjects that Hangs dealt tilth:

science,

the Hew Woman, progressive education, the nouveau riche, automobiles,

■^Letters of a Self-Hade Diplomat to His President, p, 20, ^ T h e volume from ■which many of the quotations in this chapter have been taken, Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President, illustrates Roger's fondness for this form. l^kiuoted in Iato3, p. 72.

171 golf, the divorce rate, movies, and sports.

In treating those and many

other topics, those four writers revealed an essentially conservative outlook based upon the "rugged individualism" ideology of tho.past, which Bangs himself largely embraced, Ade repeatedly attacked socialclimbing wives who spent their hard-working husbands' money on clothes and other luxuries and pursued titled Europeans for their daughters to marry.

One of Hubbard's main preoccupations web the changes taking

place in the homo and family}

he was alarmed about what he considered

the breakdown of the home and protested against the forces he thought were causing it, such as the automobile, movies* lipstick, and the feminist movement. sive education, ^

Mr, Do&ley also ridiculed the New Woman and progres­ and refused to take Darwin seriously,

"Most lv th 1

people iv this wurruld is a ccme-on f'r science, but I'm not.

Ye

can't convince me, me boy, that a man [Darwin^ who's so near-sighted he can't read the sign on a cable-car knows anny mor about th' formation iv th 1 earth thin Father Kelly, Thus, as those four humorists thrived well into the twentieth century (Ado died in 19^)* they perpetuated many qualities of the nineteenth ^century strain from which they descended:

they all assumed

the pose of the common sense philosophers of the nineteenth century; homely metaphors and wise saws were the mainstays of their techniques; and short forms like sketches and monologues their favorites.

Dunne

15»0n the New V/oman," "Rights and Privileges of Women," and "The Education of the Young" express Dunne's typical attitudes toward those subjects. Q u o t e d in Yates, p. 96,

and Rogers continued the homespun sage's interest in politics, and all four satirized the departures from traditional values like honesty, moderation, and independence which they observed about them.

However,

in the twenties this humor "gradually became unfashionable and tended to be replaced by [newspaper columns]] made up of serious commentary, gossip, or feature stories , . * • Writers in the older tradition in general could not attract the vast, fairly homogeneous audience which had road ninoteenth-century humorists."^

The cause of the decline in

popularity of the old school, according to Mr. Blair, may have been that by the nineteen twenties the country had become a predominantly urban society, and the typical American was more likely to live in or near a city than on a farm.

This society had bred generations who knew

nothing of country life and were likely to question the value of expe­ rience gained in a hayfleld or barnyard.

With more people graduating

from high school and continuing through college, the old time suspicion of book learning was replaced by a respect for education and culture.^® Bangs, whilo continuing to eschew the lower-class persona of the native tradition, with its concomitant devices like illiteracy and homely metaphors, addressed himself to the same twentieth-century developments as the "crackerbox survivals11 and agreed with their opinions about them, as he had often agreed with the attitudes of their pre­ decessors.

Essentially a conservative, like the four humorists discussed

above, Bangs, like them, deplored progressive education, the New V/oman, and the pretensions of the nouveau riche. And, like the humor of the

17Blair, Native American Humor, p. 166-68. l^florse Spnse in American Humor, pp. 308*10.

173 native tradition, Bangs*s genteel humor suffered a decline after the turn of the century. Proof of Bangs's fame and success as a humorist until the first decade of the twentieth contury is abundant:

the high rating-

of his

books on the best-seller lists, the laudatoi'y reviews of his works, and the respect shown him by his contemporaries,

Yet in 1925i only

three years after his death, a feature article in the National Education Association stated that his "fame rests on this one book, A Houseboat on 19 the Styx,"

It is also curious that, although Bangs remained a pro­

fessional humorist until his death, his son ontitled his biography of his father John Kendrick Bangs:

Humorist of the Nineties, Thoso and

other facts point to a truth which time has made increasingly clear: even before Bangs's death cultural changes and new currents in humor had been taking shape which made his brand of fun quaint and irrelevant. Among thoso changes was the movement of revolt— economic, social, intellectual, and artistic— which had developed toward the end of the nineteenth century and had not only carried over into tho twentieth but had also gained in momentum.

Naturalism and realism, as well as other

forms of literary experimentation, attracted more and more exponents, resulting in a period of billiant literary accomplishment wliich has since been called"the twentieth-century literary renaissance,"

The

searoh for new forms of expression so pronounced during this period was motivated in part by a sense of spiritual unrest and skepticism taward traditional boliefs,

19ib±d

The young authors of the day, observing about

17^

thom th© corruption and irresponsibility both in government and private enterprise and the hypocrisy pervading all levels of society, were repelled and dedicated themselves to depicting these conditions honestly,

World War I, rather than interrupting the ’'new literature," provided

it with new themes and intensified the disillusionment of its writers with American society and its institutions.

By the end of World War

I: many of the powerful authors of this century [the twentieth]] had alroady created a new literature of enduring merit, character­ ised by aesthetic originality and rebellion, by the determination to shelter conventional taboos in their expression of physical and psychological actuality, by a mystical hunger for spiritual enlightenment which attracted them toward symbolic or primitiv­ istic expression, and by a growing sense of responsibility for their follow human beings, expressed in the directness of their attach upon the contemporary social order. Their target was the total society and its fundamental institutions; they were dedi­ cated to the task of confirming the dignity and value of man in the face of complex now forces and ideas that threatened to dohumaniare him. 0 Their literature was "preoccupied with the question of the oxtent of man *3 opportunity to escape the determination of his fate by blind laws of heredity, environment, and survival."

(p. 1028)

To

tho rootless, young writers of the twenties, the world war dearly reflected such a mechanistic theory of history and of human life. "The human personality was dwarfed a3 much by the dehumanizing magnitude of modern ovonts as by the obdurate tendency of natural laws to deny mankind a special destiny,

The diminishmont of individual identity has

been intensified ever since,"

(p. 1028)

Tho work of this now generation

^ Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, eds., The American Tradition in Literature, 3**d edition, (New York, 1967 ), 1027-28. Page citations in the following paragraph refer to this work.

17 5 of authors, moreover, was greeted by a larger and more critical reading public than had over before oxLstod in the country, due to tho general oxpansion in education. Bangs was not in sympathy with tho aims or methods of this young, radical generation.

It is true tliat in such works as Alice in

Blunderland and "A Glance Ahead" he expressed concern about the effect on the individual of tho growth of Big Government into Big Business, But in general ho opposed the social and economic roform movements of his day and disapproved of literary experiments like realism and natur­ alism,

lie remained to the end a defender of the established social order

and never wavered from his belief in a clearcut set of values, which included tho sanctity of home, flag, and churoh.

He made no attempt

whatovor to alter his humor in order to accommodate literary, intellec­ tual, or social developments.

If he realized that this lack of flexi­

bility xjas rendering his work obsolete, he gave no sign of it.

The

only indication Bangs gave that tho moral confusion and growing com­ plexity of life at the turn of the century affected hint was his move in 1907 from his Now York suburb to a small town in I'aine, tthere lie lived the rest of his days, making his living as a locturer and a free lance writer.

Ifthis move represented a withdrawal from an increa­

singly complicated, threatening world, it also reflected Bangs’s continuing belief in the power of the individual to control his own destiny, a conviction he shared with the native humorists. Given

the spirit of revolt during the first three decades of

tho twentiethcentury, with

its pessimism and determination to shatter

any form of reactionary sham, it is not surprising that Bangs’s bland

176 and conventional humor quickly lost favor, leaving him virtually forgotten by 1925#

Hwaver, by the mid-twenties a new crop of humorista

appeared, some eastern and some midwestern in origin but all university graduates.

Their work, published in New York magazines, was marked by

the lively stylo of the crackerbarrel tradition but at the same time retained the urbanity and cultivation of the genteel tradition.epito­ mized by Bangs.

Its main charaoter-type was an urban or suburban

citizen who belonged to a higher social and economic class than the crackerbarrel oracles, but similar to Thaddeus Perkins', but who had lost the moral and philosophical security that they and Perkins had taken for granted. Somewhat paradoxically, contributing to the emergence of this new "school" of humor was what Norris Yates calls "a quiet, steady revival of the genteel tradition in humor between 1910 and 1920, "which, although it produced no startling effects immediately, was making pro­ found changes in American humor by 1925 with tho founding of The New Yorker.

This revival was influenced by several factors, among them

H. L. Mencken's taking over The Smart Set in 191^. the daily newspaper columns of Christopher Morley in the New York Evening Kail and of "F. P. A." (Franklin P. Adams) in the New York Tribune, and the work of such bright and literate young writers as Stephen Leacock, Clarence Day, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker, all products of the "twentieth-century literary renaissance." Although Mencken repeatedly attacked certain aspects of the genteel tradition, notably its prudery and "Puritanism," at the same time ho vigorously promoted culture and literacy generally.

One

177 commentator haG said:

"No one -who was not an adult and young in the

1910's and early 1920's can understand what a tremendous influence H. L* llencken had on the more literate and articulate and especially on the literary-minded youth of the United States."^*

He and his

co-editor George Jean Nathan championed serious young authors, American and European,

Such famous literary figures as Eugene O ’Neill, F. Scott

Fitzgerald, Maxwell Anderson, Mark Van Doren, and James Joyce first appeared before the American public in the pages of The Smart Sot, Mencken also wrote a great deal of literary criticism, a sizable portion of it devoted to neglected authors like Dreiser, Conrad, and Sinclair Lewis.

In addition he continually scolded the Babbitt prototype, \hom

he dubbed "boobus Americanus," for lack of intelligence, taste, and enlightenment, and deliberately aimed his magazines at the well-informed, well-read, "civilized minority,"

Morley and Adams differed from mid-

western columnists like Dunne and Hubbard by being sophisticated and erudite as well as amusing.

(Robert Benchley once remarked of Adams:

"In F. P. A. we find a combination which makes it possible for us to admit our learning and still be held honorable men.")^

These two Mow

York columnists, along with Menckon, wrote for a diffeoent audience from both that of their midwostern predecessors and of Dangs. The "crackerbox survivals" (with the exception of Rogers) began their careers with midwestern papers which were closer than the Mew York papers to large bodies of readers with country backgrounds.

^lstanley Kunitz, ©t al., Twentieth-Century Authors (New York, 19^2), p. 9^5* ^Quotod in fates, p. 253 ,

The popularity of thoir columns derived from rural people who, although thoy had moved to the citios, had not lost their taste for folksy amusement, with all the devices that that brand of comedy entailed, nor their dislike of "culture,11 especially if itsmacked of eastern snobbery* Bangs, on the other hand, who had always stood for intelligence, taste, and literacy, and also assumed that his audience consisted of a "civi­ lized minority," did not countenance Mencken's noisy attack on genteel proprieties.

Moreover, the young writers whom The Smart Set so vigor­

ously promoted were the ones challenging the ideas which Bangs held most dear.

In effect, these young rebels had committed themselves to

criticising and, if necessary, changing the social order which Bangs had always championed.

Furthermore, Bangs dismissed as impertinent

and sometimes downright Immoral these writers' literary experimentation, the outgrowth of the search for new forms of expression discussed above.

Thus, while in sympathy with Mencken's concern for developing

a well-read, enlightened audience, Eangs objected strenuously to the daring, originality, and frankness of the material Mencken used to "civilize" his audience. However, the decline of Life and Judge by 19^5 anc^ the success of Vanity Fair and Tho Smart get, both of which aimed at bright and literate readers, indicated that the public was ready for new varieties of humorous writing and that a largo enough audience existed in Mew York and other cities to support publications devoted to such humor. At this propitious moment, Harold Ross conceived of The Hew Yorker, which, its prospectus announced, would appeal to sophisticated, urban readers and not to the "old lady in Dubuque" who presumably preferred

179 tho folksy humor of the crackerbarrel tradition: Tho New Yorker will bo a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be ono of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will bo more than jester . . . . It will be what is commonly called sophisti‘oated, in that it will assume a reasonable dogreo of enlightenment on the part of its readers . . . . X'he New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady In Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about . . . . It expects a considerable national circulation, but this will come from persons trho have a metropolitan i n t e r e s t . ^3 Although several of Ross's pronouncements would suggest that he had in mind an audience and kind of humor similar to Bangs's— urban, sophisticated, etc.--changes which had taken place between 18$KD and 1925 resulted in significant differences in style and attitudes between

the two, as the following commentary will point out. Tho Mew Yorker played an enormous role in establishing the sophisticated style and urbane tone of twentieth-century American humor. For one thing, it gave its highly literate writers their raost important outlet of publication, and it promoted "respect for competence in general and stylistio smartness without brashness in particular to an oxtremo that amounted to fetiehism concerning the right word and the preoise phrase.

Ross did more than any other editor in the twenties

and thirties to encourage compression, the mot .juste, informality, suavity, and irony in the writing of humor, and people now use the term 'Mew Yorker style* to designate any writing that shows these ^II

attributes, whether it has appeared in the magazine or not.1*

But Ross and his magazine originated neither the style nor the

\ ^3^uoted in Yates, p. 227. 2^ibld., p. 228.

180 themes and values its humor embodied.

Mencken* among other contempor­

aries, was noted for his lively and informal prose* while Adams and other wits who met for lunch at the Hotel Algonqquin (e.g., George Kaufman, Heywood Broun, and Alexander Y/oollcott) were noted for their sophistication and urbanity.

Moreover, the ideas and values reflected

in the humor associated with The New Yorker are most effectively represented by tho character-type now known as the Little Man, the predominant character-typo in American humor since the 1920*s,

This

figure had made his appearance as early as the beginning of the century in cartoons and comic strips.

Norris Yates cites as one early example

the comic strip "Happy Hooligan," by Frederick Burr Opper, which featur­ ed a sad little tramp as its main character;

in 1912 Harry Hirshfield

created the comic strip "Abie the Agent," depicting a Jewish businessman who is besieged by all sorts of domestic and professional problems. In later cartoon characters like Casper Milquetoast and Dagwood Bumstead tho Little Man vias portrayed as an inept, meek, but appealing husband and father, harassed by his wife, children, and boss,

Charlie Chaplin

introduced the Little Man into the movies in the middle teens as a littlo tramp who valiantly struggles to presorve his dignity and independence from the various social forces which threaten to crush him. The Little Han and tho theme of his harassment by the modern world entered American humorous fiction during tho 1910*s in tho short stories and sketches of authors like Stephen Leacock (Literary Lapses, 1910). Thus the New Yorker writers did not originate the Little Man as a modern comic symbol;

but they developed and refined his imago and thus

accelerated his evolution.

The differences between ninoteenth-century

181 humor, including both tho native tradition and Bangs1a brand, and that of tho Now Yorker school of tho twentieth century emerge clearly when this figure is compared to exuberant frontier heroes like Davy Crockett and Bangs’s Thaddeus Perkins or the Idiot, The Little Man usually appears as a gentle, bewildered, and baffled creature who lacks confidence both in himself and in his world. He is constantly intimidated and defeated by the things around him: automobiles and every other kind of machine; and other low forms of life; life;

his job;

sales personnel;

advertising and the mass media;

and, of course, his wife.

pigeons suburban

In fact, much of little

Man humor deals with the minutiae, tho small, daily humiliations that confront the befuddled average person and diminish him.

In an article

about Robert Benchley, J, Bryan H I makes an observation that applies to Benchley1s colleagues as well:

"He sees himself , , . not as the

master of high comody, but tho victim of law tragedy. a throne;

Benchley loses a filling.

breaks his shoelace.

King Lear loses

Romeo breaks his heart;

They are annihilated;

he is humiliated.

Benchley And to

his humiliations there is no end."^

The Little Man’s reaction to these

humiliations is usually resignation;

his weapon and defense are with­

drawal and insanity.

When placed alongside Davy Crockett, the Little

Man appears puny and forlorn.

Although Crockett may soem crude and

vulgar, the tall tales about him joyously recount his triumphs— over nature, animals and other dangers of frontier life.

As Yfaltor Blair

suras it up, the "stories about him told not how little he did but how

^quoted in Blair, Native American Humor, p. 172.

182 n/ much he did.'1

Similarly, Bangs*3 heroes share the Little Man's social

and educational status but not his lack of confidence and inability to cope with mundane problems,

Perkins rises supremely to the occasion

when it is nocossory to deal with obdurate servants, and there is never any doubt about who is boss in his household.

The Idiot repeatedly

demonstrates his superior resourcefulness, whether by outwitting his foils at Mrs. Smithors* boardinghouse or by maneuvering his bo3s into mar lying his daughter.

Although much more refined than Davy Crockett,

both Perkins and the Idiot are, like him, triumphant characters. Another early comic hero, Ilosea Biglow, points up other differences between the older humor and the modern, i.e., post-eWorld War I,

During the Mexican War, Hosea, representing tho common man with

horse sense, expressed a time-honored moral code which he believed in absolutely and tried to live by.

His readers recognized the wisdom of

his opinions because they lenew he had come by them in the best possible way— by using horse sense.

Bangs's Idiot, although relying at least

as much upon education as common sense, also expressed, in his whimsical way, attitudes which Bangs was assured his readers shared.

Out several

years later, the Little Man, who is just as typical of the general run of humanity in his day as Hosea and the Idiot were in thoirs, can rely on no such certainty and consensus.

Indeed, much of the Little Man's

bungling and timidity stem from his confusion over what the true values are, and his frequent irrationality and victimization bespeak the Inadequacy of "using his o\m head" to find the answers,

V.'hat these

26gLair, "Laughter in Wartime America',1 College English.Vi (April. 19^5), 365.

183 commenta suggest about tho contrast between nineteenth and twentiethcentury humor is: that tho earlier humor was more clearly in harmony with widely accepted and socially approved standards. Davy Crockett, in his exaggerated way, was shorn achieving goals which were, to be sure, fantastic but which, by general agreement, were vrorthy. Today's humor shows no such achievements by its characters. . . . Today a failure to achieve, . . . a lack of certainty, even amorality, are portrayed as admirable or at least normal. To put the matter another way, the older humor []including Bangs' s^ was affirmative; tho modern humor is negative. Tho older humor asserted current values; the modern humor playfully attacks them. ? Tho Little Man's development, and the contrasts between him and both tho old school protagonists and thoso of Bangs, is clearly related to changes tho country underwent from its founding to the ninetoon twenties. Early humor, largely a folk expression, grew out of the exper­ iences of the pooplo settling the country, developing a sense of identity, and becoming curious about the peculiarities of their land's various regions.

Until the Civil Uar, national culture was predominantly

rural, and the farmer and frontiorsman \rare typical citizens. native tradition of humor was shaped by these conditions.

The

The shrewd

Down East Yankoo, the backwoods tall talker, and tho southwestern rogue reflected the plain folks' belief in their capacity to face life squarely, no matter how frightening or ugly it might be, and triumph. Fancy diction, clothes, manners, or family name did not help in this endeavor, so these things were ridiculed in tho early humor.

But other

qualities, like courage, industry, self-reliance, and horse sense, did

27lbid.,

pp.

366-67 .

help and hence were exalted. After the Civil War, with the rise of large scale industry and the shift of the population to tho cities, our national humor entered its second phase.

During the seventies and eighties How York became

a world metropolis, the center of the country’s greatest wealth, and the symbol of all that urban living denoted.

The new economy and tho

increase in tho city*3 population created new occupational and social classes.

Ono was tho nouveau riche. who acquired groat fortunes in a

short time, ’ Also, as people drifted from small towns and farms into How York to take jobs in its factories and offices, a new middle class arose.

The lnunor which Bangs typifies grow out of this middle class

and its search for a new creed to serve in an urban, industrial world. This class was more prosperous, bettor educated, and more interested in tho arts than the older, rural middle class of pro-Civil War tlmos. Periodicals like the ones Bangs wrote for, the comic weelclios and the general literary monthlies, were designed for tho new middlo-class audience.

The writers for these magazines, because of certain character­

istic attitudes which they shared toward the ort3 and toward society, were particularly well qualified to act as spokesmen for and to tho new middle class.

Their success in turn was due to the rise of this class,

which formed thoir primary audience.

They offered this audienco an

Idealized imago of itself, picturing its members not necessarily as they weru but as they aspired to bo; cosmopolitan.

gontool, sophisticated, and

Bangs's humor clearly embodies the qualities which this

new urban audienco prized.

His favorite personae, the Idiot and

Thoddeus Perkins, were models of good breeding and respectability.

185 tho correctness of his language, the extent and topicality of his literary satire, and the allusions, puns, and epigrams which charac­ terize his style revealed his class's concern for appearing cultivated and Troll-informed,

His political satire mirrored the urban bias and

conservatism which his readers shared with him, and his social 3atlre expressed the superiority of middle-class values at the same time that it ridiculed deviations from those values by tho lower and upper classes. However, while Bangs sedulously avoided the illiteracy, homeli­ ness, and coarse realism of the native tradition of humor, he did not abandon its idoals.

Ho just urgraded them socially and added a patina

of cultural refinement.

Both Bangs and the early writers believed that

tho world was bound by a set of absolute values, and could assume that thoir readers agreed on what those values wore: frugality, hard work, moderation, and good senso.

independence, honesty, Thus Bangs, while

differing from his old-school counterparts in style, techniques, and social attitudos, showed his affinity to thorn in his adherence to the principlos which this country has long regarded as basic to its way of life. But tho post-World VJar I and Prohibition oras witnessed a pro­ found questioning and rejection of formerly sacrod principlos and a corresponding skepticism about the old truths and virtues.

The growth

of Big Business, Big Government, and Big Technology threatened to over­ whelm tho individual. ' The oxistenco of social forces too enormous and too impersonal for the individual to cope with created a belief that the world was so complex that the only thing one could be certain about

186 was uncertainty.

The typical persona of m o d e m humor was not a trium­

phant frontiersman or a complacent Victorian gentleman, but a meek, bewildered, and often neurotic Little Kan.

He reflected a hopeless

feeling that the impotent individual could do little to change the gigantic, dehumanising forces that controlled and restricted his life. In dealing with subjects like the trials of suburban living and recal­ citrant servants, modern humor did not, like Gangs's, emphasize the superiority of the urban middle olass, but rather the inability of the typical middle-class male to handle even the most oommonplace situation, Blair oltes Clarence Day (1876-1935) • Robert Benchley (1889-1945), James Thurber (1894-1961), and S. J. Perelman (1904-

) as the four

New Yorker alumni "who by general agreement have been outstanding

2Q 'modern humorists,111

Although one could easily name several others—

Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Wolcott Gibbs, and E, B, White, for instance— the following disoussion of the New Yorker humor will confine itself principally to these four writers because (1) they dearly epitomize the important qualities of modern humor, and (2) be­ cause their work reveals the parallels, both negative and positive, between Bangs's style and theirs, thus further illustrating Gangs's pivotal position in the evolution of American comic writing.

Although all four of the modem humorists used the vpersona of the Little Man in their humor, Day, interestingly enough, is best remembered for his family reminiscences (God and Hy Father, 1932, Life with Father. 1935* and Life with Mother. 1937) • which enjoyed

28Natlve American Humor, p. 169,

enormous success when released in book form (they appeared originally in magazines like Harper*8 and The New Yorker) and when adapted for the stage by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse in the early forties under the title of Life with Father.

The character of Father dominates these

works based on Day1s memories of growing up in New York at the turn of the oentury. Perkinss

Father is straight from the same Victorian mold as Bangs's

he is a self-made man who believes in honestyi frugality, hard

work, and male supremacy.

And Blair comments:

he "could have been an

old-fashioned horse-sense philosopher if he had had a rural upbringing and had learned to say wise things in a witty way."^

Like Hosea

Biglow and Thaddeus Perkins before him, Father is sure of himself and his standards, confidently pronounces them, and believes others should conform to them too.

But, unlike James Russell Lowell and Bangs, Day

does not himself agree with his character, and instead "questions his standards, laughs at his judgments, gently satirizes his outmoded w a y s . "30

Moreover, most of Day's sketches end with Father's being

defeated— not without a struggle, to be sure— bylMother and the rest of the family;

the central theme of the stage adaptation, for instance,

is Father's refusal to be baptized and Mother's skillfull wearing down of his resistance.

In poking fun at Father, Day was revealing the

modern humorist's skepticism about the values held most dear by the nineteenth and twentieth-century oraokerbox humorists and also by Bangs.

2$Ibid. 3°Ibid.. p. 170.

188 The same questioning of traditional values pervades the work of Benchley, Thurber, and Perelman, all of whom use the little Man to express their skepticism.

This figure appears in their work as a college-

trained, white-collar employee who speaks and writes informally but correctly, commutes to an office in the city from a home in the suburbs, like Perkins and the Idiot had before him, but, unlike them, worries about maintaining his status, enoounters trivial frustrations at every turn, and frequently demonstrates neurotio tendencies. In Of All Things (1921) Benchley depicts the Little Kan as a suburbanite who is stalled by the furnace, stumped by auction bridge, strapped by household expenses, and badgered by children.

To compound

his misery, mechanical things from pencil sharpeners to automobiles defy him.

In No Poems (1932) he admits that even such simple articles

as bedroom slippers conspire against him as do "the hundred and one little bits of wood and metal that go to make up the impedimenta of our daily life— the shoes and pins, the picture books and door keys, the bits of fluff and sheets of n e w s p a p e r s . T h u r b e r 1s typical protagonist is also a meek, bewildered Little Man who is harassed by "all disciplines whose names begin with 'peych11 by mechanical devices;

by the upper-middle-class ceremonies of suburbia;

by tho

deterioration of communication between man and between man and woman Like Benohley's anti-hero, Thurber *s shows signs of maladjustment in his reactions to trivial situations:

^Tates, p. 245* 32Ibid.. p. 278.

he is petrified by a bat in his

189 bedroom, terrorized by having to spend an evening alone in an isolated summer cottage, and driven insane by his wife*a persistent interruptions. In his preface to S. J, Perelman's Strictly from Hunger (1937)# Benohley dubbed Perelman "the leader in the dementia praecox field," perhaps because Perelman's Little Han is the most irrational of all those created by the Hew Yorker humorists:

"he tries to bomb a shoe-

store because its display of the skeleton of a human foot offends him, and poor service on the Santa Fe railroad's Superchief causes him to slide down an arroyo, crawl up a mesa, and hide behind a meequite bush until the train has left."^ But Perelman's persona differs from Benchley*s and Thurber's only In degree.

Like that of the other authors,

he is intelligent, sensitive, and articulate, lives in the suburbs, and is driven to the verge of a nervous breakdown by his environment. Modern humorists differ from those of the native strain in the degree of distance they establish between themselves and their assumed characters.

The disparity between Petroleum V, Nasby, for example, as

he uttered ignorant opinions in support of the South during the Civil War, and David Ross Locke, who counted on his readers' recognizing Naoby's worthlessness, was an important source of amusement, satire, and irony.

Twentieth-century humorists, by contrast, identify with

their condo protagonists, as Bangs hod, emphasizing not differences but resemblances.

"Benchley, as his son says, exaggerates}

exaggerates what he believes are his own qualities,"^

33ibid,, p. 3^6. 3^Blair, Native American Humor, p, 173*

but he

Behind this

190 identification of the writer with his narrator, Blair suggests, lies the assumption that the reader will sympathize with both because he, the reader, experiences their irritations.

This assumption differs

from that underlying the work of the old-school humorists who assumed that their readers would feel superior to their condo spokesmen, even though these characters frequently displayed horse sense, are! hence find them amusing.

Bangs also identified with his heroes and expected

his readers to do the same, but, although his characters were often amusing, he did not attempt to belittle them.

They were intended to

serve as idealized images of middle-class malehood and, accordingly, to convey a sense of self-assurance in its supremacy* Although the New Yorker writers did not use all the techniques of the crackerbox tradition, their treatment of those which they did duplicate provides further insight into contrasts in perspectives between these two schools of American humor and Bangsfs genteel comedy. Exaggeration is a case in point.

As the preceding disoussion indicates,

the oldsters exaggerated the difficulties their Big Han had to overcome and his ability to cope with them, but the new humorists exaggerate the smallness of tho difficulties the Little Mon has to overcome and his inability to cope with them, he states in the "Preface" to

Thurber is describing this practice when Life and Hard Times that the modern

humorist "talks largely about small matters and smally about large matters."

The m od e m humorist, then, uses overstatement not to demon­

strate his protagonist*s victory over superhuman odds, but to demonstrate his feeling of helplessness and loss of control over his destiny;

the

exaggeration magnifies not the greatness of the problems he faces but

191 their triviality.

Bang8 also uses exaggeration to satirize certain

social tendencies, such as materialism, but in general his employment of this device is less complex and meaningful than that of either the native or New Yorker writers.

For the most part he was content to use

overstatement to provoke a simple chuckle, such as in the Idiot1s oblique slams at the boardinghouse1s cook. In addition to exaggeration, aphorisms and comic figures of speeoh where mainstays of both native and Bangs1s humor.

The proverbial

sayings of figures like Jack Downing and Josh Billings contained what their creators regarded as gems of horse sense wisdom which their readers would immediately recognize as such and agree with}

the homely

metaphors and similes of Davy Crockett and Hosea Biglow added a touch of regional color, originality, and liveliness, while simultaneously serving to characterize the speaker.

Bangs's epigrams could also

express a wise point, but one derived from learning and sophistication, not horse sense.

His comic metaphors showed the cleverness of his

characters and provided amusement through the topical allusions they involved, which bis well-informed readers prided themselves in identi­ fying. Both aphorisms and comic figures of speech are comparatively rare in twentieth century humor, but when they do appear they servo new purposes.

For example, opposed to the downhome allusiveness of the

native strain of humor, one is more likely to enaounter in the work of the New York wits a mixed metaphor similar to this one by Perelmam "In fact, Lubitsch himself was seated on a bench across the street, smoking a cucumber and looking cool as a cigar,"

The cumulative effect

of such topsy turvy images is to create the impression of a chaotic, unpredictable world, in which tho central character has difficulty establishing contact with reality.

Furthermore, when modern comedians

fo utter aphorisms, they satirize them and the confidence in communal wisdom which thoy represent.

Eenchloy wrote:

How it is true that opposites attract each other. It is nature's.way, X guess, of making her wishes known. How it is true that opposites repel each other. I suppose it is nature's way of making her wishes known. It isn't so much what you put into a pudding as it is when you trip yourself up. X could go on looking at life like this forever, just a-sittin' and a-dreamin', with only an occasional attack of nausea. Mr. Blair attributes such antagonism toward old-fashioned common sense to the later writers' belief that no man is wise and that he who pre­ sumes to find the answers to the questions which life puts to him merely exposes his foolishness.

Mr. Blair further proposes in this regard

thatif a Davy Crockett or a Thaddeus Perkins happened to stumble into oneof Thurber's stories, ho would be ridiculed for having too high an opinion of himself .3^

All in all, it would seem that the complexity of

life after World War I caused the later cosmopolitan humorists to reject what struck them as simplemfcnded, complacent understanding.

Bangs

certainly would have been guilty in their eyes of such complacency, because his world was not tho complex, unpredictable one of the twentieth century.

However, at the same time, his treatment of devices like

epigrams and comic metaphors resembled that of the later humorists in

Blair, Horse Sense in American Humor, pp. 290-91* 36Ibid.

193 evincing cultivation and topicality and in appealing to well-read, urban readers. As a result of the heightened status of professional entertain­ ers and an expansion in audience during their time, the literary comedians concentrated less on localization and characterization than the Down East and Southwestern writers had and more on verbal tricks like misspelling, mispronunciation, molapropisms, neologisms, and puns. Because these humorists aimed to amuse their audiences continuously, with a laugh a sentence or at least a paragraph, these devices often served as humorous ends in themselves. as the following puns illustrate:

But they could also satirize,

"liy political daze is well-nigh

over,” said Petroleum V, Nasty with untypical honesty, and Artemus Ward observed that Africa has "the white rose, red rose, and Negroes," and that "Utah girls mostly marry Young,"

Both Bangs and the New

Yorker group, while avoiding illiteracies like misspelling and mis­ pronunciation, also specialized in verbal devices. example, abound in the work of the New York wits.

Coined words, for One of Perelman*s

stories is entitled,"Is there an Osteosynohrondroitrician in the House?," and Thurberfs creatures flobber, globber, zioker, flugger, and gurble. Funs wore also quite popular with all four of the urban humorists under consideration, but Perelman and Thurber excelled at them.

Just a

glance through the table of contents of a Perelman anthology reveals the author*s fondness for word play: "Stringing Up Father,"

"Boy Meets Gull," and so on,

delights in reworking titles: Gun, Will Shakespeare,"

"Physician, Steel Thyself," Thurber also

e,g,, "She Shoots to Conquer"

and "Have

Although much of this word play serves no

larger purpose, It Is much more likely than that of nineteenth joentury humor, inoluding the work of both the old school and of Bangs, to re­ inforce a serious point,

Perelman*a sketch about the osteosynchrond-

roitrioian, for instanoe, was an attack on the increasing specialization In the medical profession and the decreasing personal attention a patient receives.

The neologisms of Thurber*s characters seem to come

from minds not completely under control, and some of hia reworked titles, like “The Pie-Eyed Peeper of Hamlin," "When Girlhood WaB Deflowered," and "0 won’t you dismember Sweet Alloe, Ben Bolt?," pro­ test the trend toward morbidity and perversion in modern writing.

Certain

critics, furthermore, have suggested that Thurber *s later obsession with word play refloated the author’s despair over the breakdown in human communication, and, in his closing years, a kind of nihilistic with­ drawal from a world "in which communication would not be worth the

jp

trouble even if it were possible."^

In general, the twentieth-century humorists use verbal devices more consistently as double entendres than their nineteenth jsentury forerunners, and these dual meanings underscore prominent attitudes in their writing.

Furthermore, their verbal humor displayed more origin­

ality, variety, and all-around distinction than that of either Bangs or the traditional writers, reflecting their intense preoooupation with style, one of their outstanding characteristics from the beginning, and also the superior aesthetic discrimination of their audience. One also frequently encounters a wacky kind of nonsense in the

Bier, Rise and Fall of American Humor, p. 289.

work of these twentieth-century authors, reminiscent of the meaningless non sequiturs exploited by Artemus Word ("I know a man in Oregon once that didn’t have a tooth in hie head, but that man could play the drums better than anyone I ever know11)* or the absurd pronouncements of Joah Billings ("Lastly— i am violently opposed to arden speerits as a bevridge, but for manufactering purposes, 1 think a leetle of it tastes good*1') In a similar way, Perelman's characters are given to uttering remarks, a propos of nothing, like:

"I don't know anything about medicine, but

I know what I like," and many of Thurber's cartoons depiot improbable events which cannot be analyzed in any formal way and yet retain their humor.

For instance, there is the one in which a startled woman sits

across the do sic from a solemn rabbit who is saying:

"You said a moment

ago that everybody you look at seems to be a rabbit. you mean by that, Mrs, Sprague?"

Now just what do

And what is one to make of the kangaroo

that is brought into the courtroom to refresh the defendant's memory, or how is one to explain how the first Mrs. Harris got up on top the bookcase while the second Mrs. Harris is being introduced to some

*38

guests?-^

Such situations defy rational explanation,

noted for his zaninoss. opens with the line:

One piece in

Ten Years in a Cjuandrv (193&)

11'If we had a goat,' I said to Mr, MacGregor, 'it

would 3olve all our problems, *" MacGregor which says:

Benchley was also

The speaker later finds a note from

1111 am running away from home to go to sea,'"

Two hours later private detectives bring him back,

"'I bought a goat

on the way homo from the recruiting station,' said Mr, MacGregor, 'He's

The Thurber Carnival (New York, 1962), p, 297

196 out in the car.1

'So everything worked out all right*'11 The reasons

for these bizarre events— why having a goat would make everything all right, for example— are not at all apparent to the reader, and the author makes no attempt to provide any*

It will be remembered from

Chapter II that Bangs's Idiot was noted for occasionally proposing fanci­ ful, improbable schemes, like publishing a newspaper that prints what did not happen, for example, but never at his wildest did the Idiot depart completely from reality, as Thurber's and Benehley's creatures do* For the literary comedians, Bangs, and the Hew Yorker wits, this kind of humor may be said to characterize a speaker or to provide camio pleasure in and of itself.

But again there seems to be a difference

in the effect of this kindoof comedy in the hands of the three types of humorists,

Willard Thorp, for one, believes thatj

"Modern nonsense

humor of the Hew Yorker variety is wackier, zanier [than nineteenthcentury nonsense]], more likely to shatter the nerves of the intruder who strays inside this w o r l d . T h i s disturbing quality seems to derive from the fact that it reflects the madness and frightening irrationality in real life that often confronts the perceptive individ­ ual,

In other words, the inexplicable confusion depicted by the New

Yorker variety of nonsense provides a d u e to the predicament of the ago*

The Idiot's vhimqy reflects quite a different age# one which

may have had Its problems but none which could not have been solved by dear-sighted good sense*

The Idiot's function, in fact, was to

^American Humorists. University of Minnesota Pamphlets of

Amerioan Writers, Ho."'^2,"~p,' 39,

197 expose hypocritical small-mindedness, represent reason, moderation, and responsibility, and assure Bangs’s readers that traditional values like initiative and self-reliance still prevailed in their well-ordered world, V/ith respect to their fondness for literary allusion#, the modern humorists reveal their indebtedness to humor like Bangs's and to the "genteel revival’1 of the twentieth century.

The pages of the

modern authors are filled with casual references to Captain BGLigh, Thoreau, Pascal, the Marquis do dado, Acquinas, Whitehead, Spangler, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, and Hemingway,

"I should have

been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas,1* one Perelman narrator declares to his companion, and another remarks with Biblical irreverenae; created apple butter,"

"She cried for six days and on the seventh

One of Thurber’s short stories, "Something to

Say," consists of a self-styled genius’ belittling of the world's great writers— Goethe, Voltaire, Whitman, Shakespeare, Santayana, Lewis Carroll, Conrad, Crane, Meredith.

Inasmuch as the point of this pieoe

was the "genius’" arrogance and bad taste, it would seem that Thurber expcotod his readers to be familiar with the writers his character belittled.

The upshot of this rich cultural allusiveness is similar

to that of Bangs's— it shows the characters of Perelman, Thurber, et al., to be cultivated and well-read, and at the same time the assumptions which lio behind such references reveal a great deal about the kind of audience these authors believed they were writing for.

However, as in

the case of verbal devices, one again notes a difference in the degree of skill with which the modern writers handle literary allusions.

The

198 allusions are not well integrated, into most of Bangs's work; could be easily omitted for the most part.

they

This obtrusiveness gives

one the impression that ho was almost deliberately calling attention to his literary knowledge in order to establish his educational credentials* But one must remember that Bangs was writing for a new audience, the urban middle class, which was striving to develop an image of itself as urbane and oultured.

Perhaps Bangs was trying to flatter this audience

through such devices as literary allusions.

But by the time Mew Yorker

humor had taken shape, the literary renaissance had influenced a whole generation of readers, and more people were going to college and had urban perspectives than in Bangs's day.

Thus the Mew Yorker group

could take for granted a larger and more sophisticated audience than the genteel writers oould;

this faot is reflected in the casualness

and suavity, as well as in the frequency, with which its humorists used literary allusion#. Humorists writing after 19^5 continued the movement away from politics as a major preoccupation, a trend already noted in Bangs's work.

This is not to suggest that personally many of these writers

were not actively engaged in politioal activities of various sorts. Clarence Day wrote for the Mew Repubilo for several years after its founding, and Dorothy Parker and Robert Benohley spoke out in defense of Saoco and Vanzettl and of the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War,

But little of their strlotly humorous work was devoted to politioal

subjects.

Following another pie cedent established by Bangs and his

fellow genteel comedians, the Mew Yorker school excelled at sooial satire, almost exclusively of an urban-suburban nature, pointing onoe

199 again to tho growing number a of city dwellers who wore the major purchasers of magazine3 like The New Yorker, In depicting his Little Man’s maladjustment to modern society, Perelman often deals with advertising and the mass media#

In "Frou-

Frou, or, Tho Future of Vertigo," the narrator happens to peek at an issue of Harper's Bazaar while browsing through Brentano's basement and reacts so violently to the magazine1o urgings to buy "Afghan hounds, foundation garments, and bath foam," that ho runs wildly out of the store "into tho cool, sweet air of West Forty-seventh Street,"

"Nothin’ Could

Bo Finor Than to Dine from Manny’s China" satirizes the ridiculous lengths to whioh gossip columnists will go to obtain meaningless news on the private lives of celebrities,

Bonohloy, as wo have noted, con­

fines himself largely to trivia* the small, everyday dilemmas that con­ front his bumbling persona, such as how to know when to leave a party, whether or not to wear his white suit, and how to stop hiccough#

Thurber#

like Benchley, portrays his protagonist's frustration as he tries to change a tiro, lie to a customs inspector, or remember a shopping list his wife gave him#

In addition, more than any of;ithe others, Thurber

is ooncorned with the relationship between the sexes, especially marital incompatibility.

Most of Thurber* s Little Ken, especially the early

ones, lead unhappy married lives, bullied and badgered by nagging wives who demonstrate their superiority to their husbands in performing ordinary tasks#

Nr, Monroe, the main character in the collection of short stories

entitled The Owl in the Attic (1933), is an extreme specimen of the helpless, ineffectual male;

he even fails at committing adultery be­

cause he spends so much time trying to decide whether to call his

200 prospective lover that he becomes sleepy- and has to go to bed*

In

those and other stories dealing with marriage, Thurber depicts husbands and wives who are unable to converse and instead can only needle one another.

Often the causes of antagonism are trivial, but they can

nevertheless produce disaster.

In ’'The Breaking Up of the Win ships,”

for example, a divorce is precipitated by an argument on the comparative merits of Greta Garbo and Donald Duck, In writing openly about subjects like adultery and divorce, Thurber reveals tho freedom which he and hi 3 fellow humorists enjoyed in their choice of subject matter, a freedom not shared by Bangs and other genteel humorists but relished by tho crude humor of the old school, which was rolentlesaLy anti-Establishment*

In Is Sex Necessary?

( 1 9 2 9 ) written in collaboration with E. B. White, Thurber attacks the genteel code of morality, the code which Bangs consistently defended and tho old school consistently derided.

In tho first chapter, on

"Pedestalism,” Thurber satirized the repressive approach to sex pre­ valent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

He

mocks female prudery by claiming "that in speaking of birth and other natural phenomena, women seemed often to be discussing something else, such as the Sistine Madonna or the aurora borealis . . . . not go on."

(pp. 6-7)

This could

He continues to describe how "tho diversion

subterfuges," such as making fudge and playing charades, that women favored in courting led to "pedestal! sm," which represented a separation

^ N e w york.

Page citations in the text refer to this edition.

of ‘the physical and psychological nowadays would lead directly

aspects of love.

"This condition

to a neurosis," Thurbor declares, "but in

those days men were unable to develop a neurosis because they didn’t know how,"

(p* 15)

Instead

themselves to manly pursuits a direot result,"

they repressed their desires and devoted like business. "The Panic of 1907 was

The book’s prefactory statement would have proved

even more shocking to genteel writers:

"...

tho authors of this

remarkable book subscribe to the modern ideal of freedom in sex but do not believe that marriage has yet been proved a failure in every oase • • • •"

(p. xvili-xix)

Even assuming that Thurber was speaking

ironically or overstating for humorous purposes, the fact that he even dared to express such ideas indicates a freedom and frankness that Bangs’s generation of ccralc writers never dreamed of.

Following the

impact of Freud’s theories and such "liberators" as H. L. Mencken, this increased freedom meant that modern humor could treat not only more subjects than genteel humor could, but also, no longer restricted by genteel taboos, that it could face them honestly and openly.

As a

result, Mew Yorker humor was able to develop greater depth and breadth than Bangs’s ever achieved. All four of the Mew Yorker writers also depicted their Little Men’s intimidation by manual laborers— waiters, domestio servants, hired yardmen, etc,— but again Thurbor does so more frequently than the others.

In fact, Thurber uses the theme of the "difficult servant"

more often than any other noteworthy humorist since Bangs, and his modern version again serves to point up differences in the degree of certainty with which his and Bangs’s respective characters regard

themselves,

Like the servants Bangs depicted in Paste Jewels, those in

Thurbor* s stories are eccentric, impudent, and unreliable. Sequence of Servants," one of the pieces in

In "A

Life and Hard Times,

Thurber describes various maids his family endured:

Juanemma Kramer

"lived in constant dread of being hyponotized"; Dora Gedd shot her boy­ friend, "a morose garage man," in her room one night; collected pints of rye;

Gertie Straub

and Mrs, Doody went beserk one night and pushed

Thurber*s father down the back 3tairs,

But unlike Bangs's Thaddeus

Perkins, who efficiently and righteously puts each errant servant in his place, Thurbor*s "heroes" struggle not to lose face. attendant makes Halter Mi tty look foolish;

A parking lot

Mr, Monroe's indecision

causes furniture movers to stop addressing him as "chief" and "mister" and to substitute "sonny";

Harney Haller's mysterious mispronunciations

so alarm the narrator of "The Black of Barney Holler" that in despera­ tion he shrieks:

"Did you know that even when it isn't brilllg I can

produce slithy toves?

Did you happen to know that the momerath never

lived -that could outgrabe me?"

This lack of assurance in dealing with

parsons of lower educational and economic lovels, in comparison with Thaddeus Perkins1 self-righteousness toward Perkins' "paste jewels," illustrates once again the shrinkage xghioh tho humorous characters of the twentieth century have undergone. The New Yorlcor writers took a great interest in language and liteaature.

Literary satire constituted a large portion of their humor­

ous output, as it had with Bangs,

In part the modern humorists' pre­

occupation with literature reflected personal interests and a high degree of cultivation— Clarence Day began his journalistic career as a

203 book reviewer, Boncbloy at various

times ran tho theatre department in

Bookman, Life, and The Now Yorker, and Dorothy Parker wrote drama reviews for Vanity Fair and later conducted a book review column in The New Yorker— and in part an atmosphere conducive to such humor.

The popular­

ity of literary burlesque, which in their hands reached new heights of distinction, indicates a cultural "coming of age" with especial clarity, Willard Thorp, in describing the "parody renaissance" the urban *ri.ts gave rise to, declared:

", , , the groat age of parody in America is

tho period from 1925 to theppresent,1

Dwight MacDonald explains the

excellence of Tho New Yorker parodies in this way: A peculiar combination of sophistication and provinciality is needed for good parody, tho former for obvious reasons, the latter because tho audience must be homogeneous enough to get the point, The Oxford-Cambridge miliou of the last century was perfect— a compact cultural group that felt itself, ■with aome reason, at the center of things and thus able to judge what was eccentric, A similar situation has obtained in Now York City since the First World War, Before then the provinces made fun'/of the big city, from Artemus Ward and Hark Twain to tho early ring Lardnor, But with Main Street, Babbitt, and tho founding by Mencken and Nathan of The American Mercury in the early twenties, the balance of power shifted in favor of New York; tho provinces wore now the object of ridicule. The appearance of The New Yorker . • • crystallized this dominance of the urban wits.^2 Unlike the older humorists, then, the New Yorker writers could, assume a literate and well-read audience who aspired to be "at tho center of things," an assumption which Bangs shared, although his audi­ ence was smaller and, on the whole, modern writers.

I qgs

sophisticated than that of the

Parodies of well-known authors like Hemingway, Clifford

^ •American Humorists, p. 33. ^ Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Boorbohm— and After (New York, 19^0), p. 5^7#

zok Odets, T. 3, Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, Erskine Caldwell, J. M. Cain, and Henry James filled the pages of their Lbrilliant magazine. and Perelman also satirized movies.

Thurber

Valter Kitty*s daydreams, for

instance, are an unconsoious parody of the melodramatic cliohes which provide moot serene plot3, and running throughout Perelman's anthology, The Host of S. J. Perelman (1958), is a series of movie satires, entitled "Cloudland Revisited," which demolish such celluloid notables as "The Sheik," "The Kystery of Fu HanJDhu," and "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." The extensive body of literary satire produced by the Hew Yorker school reveals a concern for standards of writing which is even more inton so than that of Bangs and the literary comedians.

The reasons

underlying this concern are doubtlessly similar to those cited in con­ nection with other points, i.e., the vastly increased urbanization of tho country and the rise in the educational level of the population in general.

Thurber was especially alarmed at what he regarded as tho

deterioration of language as a result of its debasement by advertising, poltical bureaucracy, scienoe, and sociology, and expressed his resent­ ment in uncompromising terms: Hy most intense dedication is the defense of the English language against tho decline it has suffered in this century and particularly since tho end of tho last wan. Ky country has always cared little for exactnoss in language and has always depreciated good English &a "book l a m i n 1." Those of us who are dedicated to good English as tho very basis of communication and understandinghhave boon called everything from teacher*s pfct to egghead and nobody is more to blame than the members of C o n g r e s s . 3

^luoted in Robert E. Korsberger, James Thurber (Hew York, 19&), p. 190.

205 Oddly enough, however, although tho urban wits vrore extremely sonsitivo to 3tylo and as a group singularly dedicated to its perfection, their standards were moro flexible than those of either Bangs or the old-school humorists,

Tho later writers emphasized olarity, concise­

ness, and precision, but while generally favoring correct but conversa­ tional English, they folt froe to employ slang, profanity, dialect, illiteracies, or any other kind of language that suited their purposes. Although Bang3*s writing could bo described as informal, ho had to comply to the strict rules of the genteel code of propriety and thus could never exceed the bounds of "correct," standard English,

As this study

lias noted many times, Bangs avoided profanity, illiteracies, slang, or any othor deviations from correct English,

This lack of freedom caused

his prose style to bo less flexible than that of tho Now York -writers and thus limited tho range of his humor, Tho tall talos of Southvx stern humor and the newspaper columns and locturos of tho literary comedians no longer provided vehicles for the NeXT Yorkor writers, but, like the native humorists and Bangs, they preferred short forms like monologues, short stories, sketches, essays, and fables.

Thurber and Perelman also xjrote plays, a form that Bangs

had occasionally employed, such as in the four playlets comprising The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces (q,v,)

Tho twentieth-century artists,

moreover, rosorted to new media favored by their generation:

Thurber

and Day waro cartoonists as well as writers, Bonchley became a movie actor in tho later years of his career, and S, J, Perelman has written numerous movio scripts, one of which, an adaptation of Jules Verne's novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, received an Academy Award.

206 Jesse Bier, in The Rise and Fall of American Ilumoiffl'describes the -work of the "Now Yorker School1'(this category including writers whose style wa3 similar to that of Day, Bonchley, Thurber, and Perelman, regardless of whether they achieved prominence chiefly through the magazine) during the twenties and thirties as a culmination of American humor, because this intorwor period can boast of "the most rambunctious, sustained, and diversified array of comic talent wo have ever had" (p. 246) j and because it manifested a strong continuity with our native comic tradition,

(p, 209)

Although few authorities on American humor would

disagree with Mr. Bier*s appraisal of the brilliant accomplishments of the New Yorker school, most of them emphasize the disparities between that school and the native tradition of comedy.

Like this chapter,

they point out that the comic personae of tho tiro strains differ in social, economic, and educational status, and oven more significantly in their attitudes toward tho certainty of absolute values,

i/horoas

nineteenth-century humor, including Bangs1s, assumed predictability in tho world and confidence that tho protagonist was in command of the situation, modern humor reflects hopelessness, despair, and the charac­ ters1 lack of control over external reality.

In place of triumph, the

anti-heroes of Day, Benohley, et al.. are dominated and defeated by all manner of antagonists, all of them considerably less formidable than the rivers, moon, lightning, and wild beasts that Davy Crockett and Mike Fink subdued so easily, or even the servant problems and other domestic crises that Thaddeus Perkins resolved so faciloly.

^ P a g e citations in the rest of the paragraph refer to this work.

207 In explanation of this revolutionary differonce, Mr# P1.gir has advanced a theory whiah servos in part to reconcile tho inconsistency between claiming on one hand that the urban wits differ radically from tho native humorists wldlo maintaining on the other hand that both groups manifest a strong continuity.

Mr# HLair's theory holds that

humorists, unlike so-callod "serious11 writers, must depend on "wide­ spread agreements concerning standards, values, and proprieties,11 ani that tho only attitude that the modern humorists could depend on was one of doubt— "doubt concerning tho validity of old values and standards."

In this sense, then, the Mew Yorker writers were re­

maining true to their ago, expressing the beliefs of their society, just as the Dawn East and Southwestern writers and the literary oomedians and 3ang3 had in their respective ages#

Hie twentieth-century image

of common man departed radically from that of the nineteenth, to bo sure, but this imago was just as representative of the general run of human­ ity in its day as Biglow, Ward, and Perkins were in theirs#

Moreover,

tho craokorbarrel philosophers, the Idiot, and the Little Man were vehicles of criticism of what they considered wrong with their respective generations#

The little Man showed more foolishness than wisdom as

he wont about exposing the problems of his generation, but his function was essentially the same as that of the older, more confident wise fool and the whimsical Idiot* of common ground.

Norris Yates describes yet another area

In the little Kan's "embodiment of an imperfeot

being's struggle to attain and retain integrity, sincerity, reason,

^"Laughter in Wartime America," p. 367.

208 common sense, and tasto, this character resembles [that of the older _

humorist3j."

Thus as tho timorous anti-heroes of Thurber, Perelman,

and their fellow writers battle against machines, bosses, wives, and other foo3, they do so in the name of the same ideals which the comic heroes of both the native tradition and of Bangs espoused.

It is true

that tho modern characters are usually defeated, but the nature of their struggle does not differ from that of Davy Crockett or of tho Idiot. In many way3, therefore, the humor of the 19201s and 19301a resembles that of the nineteenth century, and it is these similarities which establish continuity between tho two strains. ties with both;

Bangs lias close

he reflects a continuity, not a break, in the develop­

ment of Amorican humor.

^ a t e s , p. 353.

CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION

When Bangs moved to Haino in 190? and bocamo a lecturer, his literary production dooreased.

Whereas in some of his peak years

during the nineties ho had published as many as threo books a year (in 1895 Tho Idiot, Monsieur Bonaparte, and houseboat on tho Styx appearod)f after 1907 he averaged ono.

Ho did, however, continue to

contribute short pieces regularly to magazines and newspaper syndicates, Francis Jiydo Bangs states that a lodger Bangs kept between 1909 and 1910 records ovor 1,000 acceptances.

Iluch of this material consisted of

short sentimental and inspirational verses which were later collected in such volumes as Songs of Cheer (1910), Echoes of Cheer (1912), and Foothills of Parnassus (191*0 • Francis Hyde Bangs reports that from January, 1913* to January, 1922, tho IlcCluro syndicate roloased a Bangs poem each day to tho nation fs newspapers;

two of those yearly sequence a

were published under the collective titles of A Line o f Cheer for Bach Day 0 1 the Year (1913) and The Choory Wav (1919) Bangs was as successful as a lecturer as ho had been as an author and editor,

Joseph Lewis French, editor of tho anthology Sixty

Years of American Humor (192*0, wrote:

"Of all our American humorists

*4?hose volumes were all published in New York, 209

210 John Kendrick Bangs undoubtedly had tho closest individual following* He was a gonius as a lecturer and traveled this country to its boundaries during tho last fifteen years of his life, and v/horever he went ho left a memorable personal mark.

He was one of the literary artists of his

ora— or any other— time, who dolighted in expressing himself orally— and even oratorically— and ho became the most popular and notable humorous lecturer and after-dinner speaker this country lias over known Bangs’s engagements led him to speak before varied audiences in large eastern cities and small western towns alike.

''He was a favorite at

national or local conventions of bankers, of teachers, of ironmongers, of wooldealers, of advertisers, of shoemakers, of theatrical managers, of lawyers, of publishers, of casket makers. in churches, at country fairs and in prisons.

He spoke in cemeteries and Ho spoke in the salons

of tho transatlantic liners, and once, then a train was stalled in the wilds of Nevada, he dolivered a lecture in an observation c a r I n 1916 Bangs wrote a book, From Pillnr to Post, describing his adventures in the course of his travels.

That most of these experiences had proved

rewarding affirmed Bangs’s long-held faith in ilmerica. When World War I broke out* Bangs, who was fifty-five, seised every opportunity to express his support for the country and to aid its cause.

During the firstiaonths of the United States' involvement in the

war, Bangs delivered over 200 patriotic lectures in various states re­ counting to his audiences tho noble deeds of their armed forces and

^Boston, p. 265* 3Francis Hyde Bangs, p. 27O.

211 the wartime contributions of civilians throughout the land.

On April 16,

1918* he sailed for Europe where he delivered his famous lectures before American troops stationed all the way from Paris to the front.

After

the war he served with the Red Cross in its Department of Public Infor­ mation, speaking around the country to raise funds for the American Committee for Devastated France,

While conducting his campaign for

funds he developed three emotional speeches, "Light and Shade in the Land of Valor," "America Abroad," and "In the Wake of the War," in which he told of his personal experiences abroad during the war and praised the "Spirit of France and the Allies in the darkest period of the war,"

The summer of 1921, the last of his life, Bangs spont in the

devastated regions of France, he and his wife taking charge of the Guest House of the American Committee, which was still active in rehabilitating war sufferers,

James Barnes, am.acquaintance who encountered Bangs

during this summer, wrote later:

"He was doing the work of two or

three men in the reconstruction of the war-crushed villages into which Americans were pouring their money,

lie looked old and worn, yet every

now and then the spark of his familiar humor flared, and he would lift a one eyebrow and lower the other in the old, faoinating way," When Bangs returned to America in late September he immediately set out on a strenuous tour, but fell ill and discontinued it in December.

He

died of intestinal cancer in January, 1922, The first chapter in this study ends with a statement about Bangs made fcy his son:

"Bangs stands out as a central figure in the

^Frora Then Til How- (Hew York, 193*0* PP» 171-72,

American humorous and comic tradition."

If by "central" the younger

Bangs meant "of major significance," then time has shown him to be overly optimistic.

By no recognized critical standard could John Kendriok

Bangs be rated one of America's truly important humorists, in a league with artists like Twain and Thurbor.

In point of fact, his name is not

even mentioned by the principal authorities in this1'field of litera­ ture— Rourke, Tandy, and Blair, for example.

liis sixty-odd books, if

they are even available, sit gathering dust on library shelves;

they

would no doubt strike twentieth-century audiences as bland and outdated. It seems unlikely that Bangs's polite, complacent humor will ever en­ joy a rebirth of interest, but instead it will become an increasingly dim part of America's literary history.

On the other hand, if by

"central" Francis Ilyde Bangs meant "integral," then his judgment de­ serves assent,

However tame and irrelevant John Kendrick's

variety

of fun, it is part of the overall picture, a fleeting but integral chapter in the still incomplete story of tho evolution of the American sense of humor.

In order for the achievements of the twenties and

thirties to have taken place, comedy writing had to pass through the genteel phase which Bangs represents so well and assimilate many of its qualities. In order to satisfy the demands of his eastern, urban readers, Bangs confined himself to the topics that interested them;

largely the

activities of High Society and the fads and problems that affected them as middle-class Hew Yorkers.

In dealing with these topics,

Bangs omitted the tall tales and other subject matter involving rural life.

Ho appealed to his readers' desire to elevate themselves socially

2X3 and culturally through such devices as literary allusions and elegant word ploy and avoided tho dialect, Illiteracy, and crudenoss typical of the native tradition.

His heroes embodied the qualities that his audience

admired— respectability, urbanity, learning— i,e,, those comprising the genteelccodo, and eschewed the deliberate foolishness of many oldschool personalities.

Finally, the fundamental values he espoused—

independence, honesty, moderation and good sense— were those his readers had maintained faith in.

Those same values also underlay the native

tradition of comedy, marking a point of affinity between it and Bangs’s genteel writing. However, because of changes and events which took place during tho first three decades of this century, modern humorists could no longer accept tho old bromides, as they viewed them, and devoted much of their work to satirizing them.

But if the Hew Yorker brand of humor

revealed less moral and philosophical security than Bangs’s, it was more sophisticated, cultured, and urbane than his.

The distinction of its

parodies, among other things, indicated not only how literary-minded its writers were but also how well-read and enlightened its readers were.

The preoccupation with linguistic competence in general and

stylistic smartness in particular resulted in a degree of literary excellence which has never been equaled before or since in this country’s humorour literature, with the sole exception of Twain’s work.

The live­

liness, originality, and informality of the New Yorker's prose, moreover, pointed to the liberation from the rigid genteel code which twentieth century comedians enjoyed and which contributed in no small way to their accorapliahmonts.

This same discarding of gonteel inhibitions is

reflected in their frank treatment of subjects like sax, divorce, and

214 marital problems, which gives their work an impact and trenchancy that Bangs's lacks. YJhen Bangs's humor i3 compared to that of the native tradition and tho How Yorker school, its mediocrity and lack of vitality become apparent immediately.

In speculating about the reasons for the failure

of Bangs's style of humor to endure, Norris Yates has suggested that perhaps it was "just too polite,"

Whatever the reasons and whatever

its weaknesses, this phase of comedy was just as true a reflection of the trends of its age and hence just as much a part of our national humor as the earlier and later phases.

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