have not within their reach the necessary data for a
comprehension of Mr. Reed, that, therefore, they do not understand a
joke. Still less because he himself falls away baffled from the Old
Cattleman does the Englishman conclude that the Wolfville books are not
funny. He merely deplores his inability to get on terms with his author.
The English public indeed is curiously ready to accept whatever is said
to be funny and comes from America as being in truth humorous even if
largely unintelligible; but few Americans would give credit for the
existence of humour in those parts of an English book outside their ken.
Yet I think, if it were possible to get the opinion of an impartial jury
on the subject, their verdict would be that the number of humorous
writers of approximately the first or second class is materially greater
in England than in the United States to-day. I am sure that the sense of
humour in the average of educated Englishmen is keener, subtler, and
eminently more catholic than it is in men of the corresponding class in
the United States. The Atlantic Ocean, if the Americans would but
believe it, washes pebbles up on the beaches of its eastern shores no
less than upon the western.[155:1]

American humour [distinctively American humour, for there are humorous
writers in America whose genius shows nothing characteristically
American; but among those who are distinctively American I should class
nearly all the writers who are best known to-day, Mr. Clemens (Mark
Twain), Mr. Dunne, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Lorimer, Mr. Ade]--this distinctively
American humour, then, stands in something the same relation to other
forms of _spirituellisme_ as the work of the poster artist occupies to
other forms of pictorial art. Poster designing may demand a very high
quality of art, and the American workmen are the Cherets, Grassets,
Muchas, of their craft. Few of them do ordinary painting, whether in oil
or water colour. Fewer still use the etcher's needle. None that I am
aware of attempts miniatures--except Mr. Henry James, who, if Americans
may be believed, is not an American, and he has invented a department of
art for himself more microscopic in detail than that of any miniaturist.
The real American humourist, however small his canvas, strives for the
same broad effects.

It is not the quality of posters to be elusive. Their appeal is to the
multitude, and it must be instantaneous. It is easily conceivable that a
person of an educated