He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised
by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the
subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither
unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and
appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of
realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination.
It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of
heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.
With this distinctively American humour Bret Harte had little or nothing
in common. The wild, sky-breaking humour of America has its fine
qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two
qualities, not only of supreme importance to life and letters, but of
supreme importance to humour--reverence and sympathy. And these two
qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte's humour.
Everyone who has read and enjoyed Mark Twain as he ought to be read and
enjoyed will remember a very funny and irreverent story about an
organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the
parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great
spirit, "We'll all get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home."
The best way of distinguishing Bret Harte from the rest of American
humour is to say that if Bret Harte had described that scene, it would
in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the
incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the theme.
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