manifest trifles are
important. It is the deadly enemy of sentimentality and affectation, for
its vision is clear. Although it turns everything topsy-turvy in sport,
its world is not a chaos nor a child's play-ground, for humor is based
on keen perception of truth. There is no method--except the highest
poetic treatment--which reveals so distinctly the falsehoods and
hypocrisies of the social and economic order as the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of humor; for all human institutions have their ridiculous
sides, which astonish and amuse us when pointed out, but from viewing
which we suddenly become aware of relative values before misunderstood.
But just as poetry may degenerate into a musical collection of words and
painting into a decorative association of colors, so humor may
degenerate into the merely comic or amusing. The laugh which true humor
arouses is not far removed from tears. Humor indeed is not always
associated with kindliness, for we have the sardonic humor of Carlyle
and the savage humor of Swift; but it is naturally dissociated from
egotism, and is never more attractive than when, as in the case of
Charles Lamb and Oliver Goldsmith, it is based on a loving and generous
interest in humanity.

Humor, must rest on a broad human foundation, and cannot be narrowed to
the notions of a certain class. But in most English humor,--as indeed in
all English literature except the very highest,--the social class to
which the writer does not belong is regarded _ab extra_. In Punch, for
instance, not only are servants always given a conventional set of
features, but they are given conventional minds, and the jokes are based
on a hypothetical conception of personality. Dickens was a great
humorist, and understood the nature of the poor because he had been one
of them; but his gentlemen and ladies are lay figures. Thackeray's
studies of the flunky are capital; but he studies him _qua flunky_, as a
naturalist might study an animal, and hardly ranks him _sub specie
humanitatis_. But to the American humorist all men are primarily men.
The waiter and the prince are equally ridiculous to him, because in each
he finds similar incongruities between the man and his surroundings; but
in England there is a deep impassable gulf between the man at the table
and the man behind his chair. This democratic independence of external
and adventitious circumstance sometimes gives a tone of irreverence to
American persiflage, and the temporary char