no lack of
individuality in the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of Holmes
and Lowell, but although they are new in subject and application they are
not new in kind. Irving, as we have seen, was the literary descendant of
Addison. The character sketches in _Bracebridge Hall_ are of the same
family with Sir Roger de Coverley and the other figures of the Spectator
Club. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, though purely American in
its matter, is not distinctly American in its method, which is akin to
the mock heroic of Fielding and the irony of Swift in the _Voyage to
Lilliput_. Irving's humor, like that of all the great English humorists,
had its root in the perception of character--of the characteristic traits
of men and classes of men, as ground of amusement. It depended for its
effect, therefore, upon its truthfulness, its dramatic insight and
sympathy, as did the humor of Shakspere, of Sterne, Lamb, and Thackeray.
This perception of the characteristic, {562} when pushed to excess,
issues in grotesque and caricature, as in some of Dickens's inferior
creations, which are little more than personified single tricks of
manner, speech, feature, or dress. Hawthorne's rare humor differed from
Irving's in temper but not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, to
the English variety. Dr. Holmes's more pronouncedly comic verse does not
differ specifically from the _facetiae_ of Thomas Hood, but his prominent
trait is wit, which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the heart.
The same is true, with qualifications, of Lowell, whose _Biglow Papers_,
though humor of an original sort in their revelation of Yankee character,
are essentially satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the
hits in the _Biglow Papers_, their logical, that is, _witty_ character,
as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the attention. They
are funny, but they are not so funny as they are smart. In all these
writers humor was blent with more serious qualities, which gave fineness
and literary value to their humorous writings. Their view of life was
not exclusively comic. But there has been a class of jesters, of
professional humorists in America, whose product is so indigenous, so
different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expression, from
any European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition to the
comic literature of the world. It has been accepted as such in England,
where Artemus W