In the light of what I have said above it follows that the individuals that are findable in every English or American audience are much the same. All those who lecture or act are well aware that there are certain types of people that are always to be seen somewhere in the hall. Some of these belong to the general class of discouraging people. They listen in stolid silence. No light of intelligence ever gleams on their faces; no response comes from their eyes.

I find, for example, that wherever I go there is always seated in the audience, about three seats from the front, a silent man with a big motionless face like a melon. He is always there. I have seen that man in every town or city from Richmond, Indiana, to Bournemouth in Hampshire. He haunts me. I get to expect him. I feel like nodding to him from the platform. And I find that all other lecturers have the same experience. Wherever they go the man with the big face is always there. He never laughs; no matter if the people all round him are convulsed with laughter, he sits there like a rock-or, no, like a toad-immovable. What he thinks I don't know. Why he comes to lectures I cannot guess.

Once, and once only,

I spoke to him, or, rather, he spoke to me. I was coming out from the lecture and found myself close to him in the corridor. It had been a rather gloomy evening; the audience had hardly laughed at all; and I know nothing sadder than a humorous lecture without laughter. The man with the big face, finding himself beside me, turned and said, "Some of them people weren't getting that to-night." His tone of sympathy seemed to imply that he had got it all himself; if so, he must have swallowed it whole without a sign. But I have since thought that this man with the big face may have his own internal form of appreciation. This much, however, I know. To look at him from the platform is fatal. One sustained look

lecturer would be lost; inspiration would die upon one's lips-the basilisk isn't in it with him.

Personally, I no sooner see the man with the big face than instinctively I turn my eyes away. I look round the hall for another man that I know is always there, the opposite type, the little man with the spectacles. There he sits, good soul, about twelve rows back, his large spectacles beaming with appreciation and his quick face anticipating every point. I imagine him to be by trade a minor journalist or himself a writer of sorts, but with not enough of success to have spoiled him.

There are other people always there, too. There is the old lady who thinks the lecture improper; it doesn't matter how moral it is, she's out for impropriety and she can find it anywhere. Then there is another very terrible man against whom all American lecturers in England should be warned-the man who is leaving on the 9 P.M. train. English railways running into suburbs and near-by towns have a schedule which is expressly arranged to have the principal train leave before the lecture ends. Hence the 9-P.M.-train man. He sits right near the front, and at ten minutes to nine he gathers up his hat, coat, and umbrella very deliberately, rises with great calm, and walks firmly away. His air is that of a man who has stood all that he can and can bear no more. Till one knows about this man, and the others who rise after him, it is very disconcerting; at first I thought I must have said something to reflect upon the royal family. But presently the lecturer gets to understand that it is only the nine-o'clock train and that all the audience know about it. Then it's all right. It's just like the people rising and stretching themselves after the seventh inning in baseball.

In all that goes above I have been emphasizing the fact that the British and the American sense of humor are essentially the same thing. But there are, of course, peculiar differences of form and

peculiar preferences of material that often make them seem to diverge widely. By this I mean that each community has, within limits, its own particular ways of being funny and its own particular conception of a joke. Thus, a Scotchman likes best a joke which he has all to himself or which he shares reluctantly with a few; the thing is too rich to distribute. The American loves particularly as his line of joke an anecdote with the point all concentrated at the end and exploding in a phrase. The Englishman loves best as his joke the narration of something that actually did happen and that depends, of course, for its point on its reality.

There are plenty of minor differences, too, in point of mere form, and very naturally each community finds the particular form used by the others less pleasing than its own. In fact, for this very reason each people is apt to think its own humor the best.

Thus, on our side of the Atlantic, to cite our own faults first, we still cling to the supposed humor of bad spelling. We have, indeed, told ourselves a thousand times over that bad spelling is not funny, but is very tiresome. Yet it is no sooner laid aside and buried than it gets resurrected. I suppose the real reason is that it is funny, at least to our eyes. When Bill Nye spells wife with “yph” we can't help being amused. Now Bill Nye's bad spelling had absolutely no point to it except its oddity. At times it was extremely funny, but as a mode it led easily to widespread and pointless imitation. It was the kind of thinglike poetry that anybody can do badly. It was most deservedly abandoned with execration. No American editor would print it to-day. But witness the new and excellent effect produced with bad spelling by Mr. Ring W. Lardner. Here, however, the case is altered; it is not the falseness of Mr. Lardner's spelling that is the amusing feature of it, but the truth of it. When he writes "dear friend, Al, I would of rote sooner," etc., he is truer to actual sound and intonation

than the lexicon. The mode is excellent. But the imitations will soon debase it into such bad coin that it will fail to pass current. In England, however, the humor of bad spelling does not and has never, I believe, flourished. Bad spelling is only used in England as an attempt to reintroduce phonetically a dialect; it is not intended that the spelling itself should be thought funny, but the dialect that it represents. But the effect, on the whole, is tiresome. A little dose of the humor of Lancashire or Somerset or Yorkshire pronunciation may be all right, but a whole page of it looks like the gibbering of chimpanzees set down on paper.

In America also we run perpetually to the (supposed) humor of slang, a form not used in England. If we were to analyze what we mean by slang I think it would be found to consist of the introduction of new metaphors or new forms of language of a metaphorical character, strained almost to the breaking point. Sometimes we do it with a single word. Then some genius discovers that a "hat” is really only "a lid" placed on top of a human being, and straightway the word "lid" goes rippling over the continent. Similarly a woman becomes a "skirt," and so on ad infinitum.

These words presently either disappear or else retain a permanent place, being slang no longer. No doubt half our words, if not all of them, were once slang. Even within our own memory we can see the whole process carried through; "cinch" once sounded funny; it is now standard American-English. But other slang is made up of descriptive phrases. At the best, these slang phrases are—at least we think they are extremely funny. But they are funniest when newly coined, and it takes a master hand to coin them well. For a supreme example of wild vagaries of language used for humor, one might take O. Henry's "Gentle Grafter." But here the imitation is as easy as it is tiresome. The invention of pointless slang phrases without real suggestion or merit is one

of our most familiar forms of factorymade humor. Now the English people are apt to turn away from the whole field of slang. In the first place it puzzles them they don't know whether each particular sort of phrase is a sort of idiom already known to Americans, or something (as with O. Henry) never said before-and to be analyzed for its own sake. The result is that with the English public the great mass of American slang writing (genius apart) doesn't go. I have even found English people of undoubted literary taste repelled from such a master as O. Henry (now read by millions in England) because at a first sight they get the impression that it is "all American slang."

English people also find tiresome our American "anecdote"-the conversational form of humor that flourishes all over the United States and Canada. Everybody knows how much addicted we are to telling one another stories. With many people it becomes a settled idea of pleasant social intercourse. If two men meet in the train one says, "I heard a good story last week; perhaps you've heard it." And the other has to say, "No," before waiting to hear what it is, because he's going to get it, anyway. At a dinner party our people no sooner sit down than the host begins, "I heard a story the other day; perhaps you've heard it," and there is chorus of, "No, no," all round the table. I often marvel at our extraordinary tolerance and courtesy to one another in the matter of story-telling. I have never seen a bad story-teller thrown forcibly out of the room or even stopped and warned; we listen with the most wonderful patience to the worst of narration. The story is always without any interest except in the unknown point that will be brought in later. But this, until it does come, is no more interesting than to-morrow's breakfast. Yet for some reason or other we permit this story-telling habit to invade and damage our whole social life. The English always criticize this and think they are absolutely right. To my

mind in their social life they give the "funny story" its proper place and room and no more. That is to say-if ten people draw their chairs in to the dinner table and somebody really has just heard a story and wants to tell it, there is no reason against it. If he says, "Oh, by the way, I heard a good story today," it is just as if he said, "Oh, by the way, I heard a piece of news about John Smith." It is quite admissible as conversation. But he doesn't sit down to try to think, along with nine other rival thinkers, of all the stories that he had heard, and that makes all the difference.

The Scotch, by the way, resemble us in liking to tell and hear stories. But they have their own line. They like the stories to be grim, dealing in a jocose way with death and funerals. The story begins (will the reader kindly turn it into Scotch pronunciation for himself), "There was a Sandy MacDonald had died and the wife had the body all laid out for burial and dressed up very fine in his best suit," etc. Now for me that beginning is enough. To me that is not a story, but a tragedy. I am so sorry for Mrs. MacDonald that I can't think of anything else. But I think the explanation is that the Scotch are essentially such a devout people and live so closely within the shadow of death itself that they may without irreverence or pain jest where our lips would falter. Or else, perhaps they don't care a cuss whether Sandy MacDonald died or not. Take it either way.

But I am tired of talking of our faults. Let me turn to the more pleasing task of discussing those of the English. In the first place, and as a minor matter of form, I think that English humor suffers from the tolerance afforded to the pun. For some reason English people find puns funny. We don't. Here and there, no doubt, a pun may be made that for some exceptional reason becomes a matter of genuine wit. But the great mass of the English puns that disfigure the press every week are mere pointless verbalisms that to the Amer

ican mind cause nothing but weari

ness.

But even worse than the use of puns is the peculiar pedantry, not to say priggishness, that haunts the English expression of humor. To make a mistake in a Latin quotation or to stick on a wrong ending to a Latin word is not really an amusing thing. To an ancient Roman, perhaps, it might be. But then we are not ancient Romans; indeed, I imagine that if an ancient Roman could be resurrected, all the Latin that any of our classical scholars can command would be about equivalent to the French of a cockney waiter on a Channel steamer. Yet one finds even the immortal Punch citing recently as a very funny thing a newspaper misquotation of "urbis et orbis" instead of “urbi et orbos," or the other way round. I forget which. Perhaps there was some further point in it that I didn't see, but, anyway, it wasn't funny. Neither is it funny if a person, instead of saying Archimedes, says Archimeeds; why shouldn't it have been Archimeeds? The English scale of values in these things is all wrong. Very few Englishmen can pronounce Chicago properly and they think nothing of that. But if a person mispronounces the name of a Greek village of what O. Henry called "The Year B.C." it is supposed to be excruciatingly funny.

I think in reality that this is only a part of the overdone scholarship that haunts so much of English writing-not the best of it, but a lot of it. It is too full of allusions and indirect references to all sorts of extraneous facts. The English writer finds it hard to say a plain thing in a plain way. He is too anxious to show in every sentence what a fine scholar he is: He carries in his mind an accumulated treasure of quotations, allusions, and scraps and tags of history, and into this, like Jack Horner, he must needs "stick in his thumb and pull out a plum." Instead of saying, "It is a fine morning," he prefers to write, "This is a day of which one might

say with the melancholy Jacques, it is a fine morning."

Hence it is that many plain American readers find English humor "highbrow." Just as the English are apt to find our humor "slangy" and "cheap," so we find theirs academic and heavy. But the difference, after all, is of far less moment than might be supposed. It lies only on the surface. Fundamentally, as I said in starting, the humor of the two peoples is of the same kind and on an equal level.

One final judgment, however, might with due caution be hazarded. I do not think that, on the whole, the English are quite as fond of humor as we are. I mean they are not so willing to welcome at all times the humorous point of view as we are in America. The English are a serious people with many serious things to think of-football, horse racing, dogs, fish, and many other concerns that demand much national thought; they have so many national preoccupations of this kind that they have less need for jokes than we have. They have higher things to talk about, whereas on our side of the water, except when the World Series is being played, we have few, if any, truly national topics.

And yet I know that many people in England would exactly reverse this last judgment and say that the Americans are a desperately serious people. That in a sense is true. Any American who takes up with an idea such as New Thought, Psychoanalysis, or Eating Sawdust, or any "uplift" of the kind becomes desperately lopsided in his seriousness. And as a very large number of us either cultivate New Thought, or practice breathing exercises, or eat sawdust, no doubt the English visitors think us a desperate lot.

Anyway, it's an ill business to criticize another people's shortcomings. What I said at the start was that the British are just as humorous as are the Americans or the Canadians or any of us across the Atlantic. And for greater certainty I repeat it at the end.