INTRODUCTION

The first book I remember (excepting several Dickens novels, flotsam of an abandoned attic library) is a cheap, ill-favored, coarsely printed volume of “Bill” Nye’s sketches, elegantly entitled Baled Hay. I discovered it in a corner of the village postoffice, where there were a couple of shelves of nondescript books—cheap in every sense: in price, binding and contents—which served as the sole local excuse for a bookstore. This copy of “Bill” Nye is the link between my boyish and my mature reading. Nye is the one author whom I enjoy to this day in precisely the same spirit and to the same degree that I enjoyed him as a boy. This fact indicates his limitation and his peculiar appeal. He is limited to a crude, obvious, undeveloped humor; and his appeal is to the undiscriminating childlike mirth in a man. He is juvenile in essence, in subject, in manner. I might say that “Bill” Nye was funny to me in the same way that almost any trifling break in the monotony of the schoolroom was funny—a suddenly overturned chair, a spilled bottle of ink, or an egregious blunder in recitation.

Perhaps this is not an adequate explanation. It is not every schoolboy that responds to the boisterous fun of “Bill” Nye. They prefer, as in later life, something with plenty of action—Peck’s Bad Boy, for example or the misadventures of Mr. Bowser (wasn’t this the name?). Yet I say it is to the boy in man, to the uncouth comic spirit that lurks in every age of man, that “Bill” Nye appeals. One enjoys him in the mood of a boy released from school, or, better still, in the spirit of spring-time truancy. What a book like Treasure Island is to the sense of adventure, what fairy tales are to the sense of wonder, “Bill” Nye is to the sense of humor. The enjoyment of “Bill” Nye is not found in the intellectual glow of satire, in the keen smile of wit, in the subtle thrill of epigram or paradox, but in the loud laughter of the commonest of comic things. For this reason I find in him a speedy and unfailing escape from melancholy thoughts. No matter how jaded one’s spirits, how deeply plunged in gloom, Nye’s grimacing, cavorting absurdities will surely produce the usual number of laughs. There is not demanded any delicate receptive mood, any particular conjunction of happy spirits. He is as gratuitously and independently ludicrous and laughable as a circus clown.

One could not call “Bill” Nye subtle—heavens! no—but his humor is often artificial, in that it depends not absolutely upon incidents that in themselves are humorous, but upon an odd, perverse, irrational use of words. He tells somewhere of a would-be author, who fondly anticipated, when his work should be finished, a crowd of publishers “trampling the daisies” in the front yard. After wearily writing “Finis,” he looked out of the window and was “surprised by the abrupt and pronounced manner in which they were not there.” This is absurd enough, in all conscience; and because it is absurd—unexpectedly and unreasonably absurd—I, for one, find it laughable. And who can resist a chuckle at this sort of expression: “the low rumble of the throbbing Boston brain dimly heard in the distance”? Writing of taxidermy, on which he gravely pretends to be an authority, he refers to “upholstered beasts.” Again, we have this phrase: “the still, white features of a soup-bone that has outlived its usefulness.” And this: “the death-rattle of a bathtub.” He declares that he is willing to “sit up all night to doubt” the theory of eternal damnation. Writing of the stern and hidebound Puritans who settled on the “stern and rockbound” coast of New England, he defines religious freedom as “the art of giving intolerance a little more room.” I am grateful for every blow, however light, at Puritanism and intolerance. Whether it be Voltaire or “Bill” Nye (a sufficiently grotesque comparison!) there is relish in the ironic or humorous view of the atrabilious Cotton Mathers of this world. I quote another of Nye’s amusing references to the Puritans: “Among the Puritans there were several who had enlarged consciences, and who desired to take in extra work for others who had no consciences and were busy in the fields.” The dreary economic background that perhaps had much to do with the narrowness of outlook that distinguished the Puritans is succinctly described by Nye: “The people were kept busy digging clams to sustain life in order to raise Indian corn enough to give them sufficient strength to pull clams enough the following winter to get them through till the next corn crop should give them strength to dig for clams again.” There is shrewdness, too, in this observation on the Civil War: “Most great wars are arranged by people who stay at home and sell groceries to the widow and orphan and old maids at one hundred per cent advance.”

The best of “Bill” Nye, to my notion, are his humorous historical sketches—pseudo-historical, indeed, but frequently affording glimpses of the truth that are not to be found in the sober accepted chronicles. The quality of this phase of his humor is, I think, simply explained. It consists of an irreverence that is, at bottom, touched with skepticism. Hero-worship, if it is a more or less universal instinct of human nature, is a rather stiff and uncomfortable and trying exercise. It is, too, an overestimated and overworked instinct, that has been too persistently and prodigiously appealed to in popular history. These “steel engravings,” plaster saints and wooden models of heroism are (certainly at times) an unlovable and tiresome company.

One finds a wholesome, hearty reaction from this hero-worship in “Bill” Nye’s jolly brand of history. He goes guffawing down the Hall of Fame, swatting blithely the sedate statues of the brave and good and mighty and learned. Here he is, indeed, a very schoolboy, throwing his history-book aside, and shooting paper wads at the immobile, insensibly decorous figures of Columbus and Washington and Ben Franklin and the rest. In spite of oneself, one laughs even at one’s favorite hero, and, with seeming inconsequence, regards this hero thereafter in a more human and favorable light. There is relief, there is relaxation—a healthful unbending of the faculties—in these droll, preposterous, utterly irrelevant comments. We see Columbus suffering from a period of geographical depression—nothing to discover—and being recommended to Queen Isabella as a capable man in his trade, who “is willing to let his work show for itself”; Washington as a man equally efficient in prayer and profanity, swearing with a vigor that would “break up the ice in the Delaware a week earlier than usual”; Ben Franklin as foreman, “cussing” the rival paper and yelling for more copy; Daniel Webster as “a good off-hand speaker,” who “wore the largest hat of any man then in Congress”; Noah Webster, he of the immortal dictionary, as the man who “had the best command of language of any American author prior to our day.”

Opinions may well differ regarding the humor of this sort of thing—certainly it is not profound nor subtle nor artistic humor, being more or less trifling horseplay indeed—but there is laughter in it nevertheless and it is an escape from that seriousness which often weighs too heavily on the spirit. It is good to laugh, whatever the occasion; and one who has a robust and expansive sense of humor will not fail to laugh occasionally with “Bill” Nye.

One can say, although it goes without saying, that Nye is not of the company of the world’s great humorists. One would not mention him in the same breath with Sterne, or Rabelais, or Moliere, or Dick Steele, or Oscar Wilde, or our own Mark Twain. The humor of Nye is the humor of what Nye himself called “the new and crass civilization” of his day. It is not the humor of the highest culture. It is a humor that is barely commentary—a mere pointing out of absurdities—rather than deliberately or delicately creative. “Bill” Nye is superficial; he is sophomoric; he is often somnolent; but he is funny, and indeed this word defines him exactly. He is funny rather than truly humorous in the finer sense of the word. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, “Bill” Nye grew up with the Western American frontier country, and in the midst of these raw beginnings of a new and strange and boisterously immature society, full of the most violent contrasts, he exercised his peculiar and contemporaneous humor. A very little of “Bill” Nye will suffice for the general reader. His kind of humor has its natural limits and, writing as a journalist, much of what he wrote is labored and dull. This little book contains some of the best and most characteristic of his sketches; and if it cannot quite be said that this is all of him that is worth-while or enjoyable, at least it represents the extent to which he may be read agreeably and profitably by one who desires no more than a bowing acquaintance with him; it is, truth to tell, an accurate measure of the man’s importance.