PREFACE.

It has come to pass, I know not how, that what is accepted as American humor has largely become the prey of specialists. When we see the signature of Mark Twain, Bill Nye, Artemus Ward, Bob Burdette, Bret Harte, or any one of a dozen more, we know what kind of humor will accompany the name. Each man has his particular and familiar line, and never diverges from it. But there is something wrong about this. Humor—whatever it used to mean in Ben Jonson’s days—now means something more than the comic eccentricity of an individual. It means the arch smile, half quizzical and half tender, that glimmers upon the countenance of human nature when contemplating its own follies and perversities.

The name of Eugene Field, of the Chicago “Daily News,” though heard for the first time only a few years ago, is already a famous and a favorite name in journalism. He, too, bears the reputation of a humorist: but his humor is not of the conventional order; it has a wider and a loftier scope. He has a gentle yet intrepid heart, a penetrating but broad viiiintellect, and a pen that is at once trenchant and kindly, sensible and imaginative. He is the author of some of the purest and most charming fairy-tales that have been written since Hans Christian Andersen’s time. He has produced poems whose effortless art and tender pathos have brought them to the knowledge of perhaps half the newspaper readers of America; and, withal, he has poured out genuine and spontaneous fun enough to restore that gayety of nations which the death of a certain renowned comedian was said to have eclipsed. Yet, in all his jesting, he has never jested heedlessly or cruelly. If he has laughed at what is foolish, he has honored what is good: if he has unsparingly satirized what is absurd or unworthy in our civilization, he has always reverenced what is sacred and holy in our nature. His is no common mind, and we have as yet seen but a small arc of its complete circle. No man born on this continent is a more robust American than he; no man scents a sham more unerringly, or abominates it more effectively; no man’s ideal of American literature is higher or sounder. And though circumstances have hitherto confined his contributions to that literature within comparatively narrow limits, yet he has given ample indications of vigorous powers and a catholic range. He is sometimes as homely and pithy as a New-England farmer; sometimes as refined and subtle as a French epigrammatist; now he chuckles like a Gargantuan, and again he ixevinces the artistic grace of a trained poet or romancer. But above all and beneath all he is a man, full of the strength and the richness of human nature, and loving human nature with all his heart, as only a man can.

The present little volume comprises mainly a bubbling-forth of delightful badinage and mischievous raillery, directed at some of the foibles and pretensions of his enterprising fellow-townsmen; who, however, can by no means be allowed to claim a monopoly of either the pretensions or the foibles herein exploited. Laugh, but look to yourself: mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur. It is a book which should, and doubtless will, attain a national popularity; but admirable, and indeed irresistible, though it be in its way, it represents a very inconsiderable fraction of the author’s real capacity. We shall hear of Eugene Field in regions of literature far above the aim and scope of these witty and waggish sketches. But, as the wise orator wins his audience at the outset of his speech by the human sympathy of a smile, so does our author, in these smiling pages, establish genial relations with us, before betaking himself to more ambitious flights. If he have half the confidence that his friends have in his power of wing, he will be far aloft ere long; and then, as now, we shall all wish him heartily God-speed!

JULIAN HAWTHORNE.

June, 1887.

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