wer. Perhaps we take things less seriously
than they did; undoubtedly our attention is more distracted and
dissipated. At any rate, the American public finds it easier to forgive
and forget, than to nurse its wrath to keep it warm. Our characteristic
humor of understatement, and our equally characteristic humor of
overstatement, are both likely to be cheery at bottom, though the mere
wording may be grim enough. No popular saying is more genuinely
characteristic of American humor than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst
is yet to come."

Whatever else one may say or leave unsaid about American humor, every
one realizes that it is a fundamentally necessary reaction from the
pressure of our modern living. Perhaps it is a handicap. Perhaps we
joke when we should be praying. Perhaps we make fun when we ought to be
setting our shoulders to the wheel. But the deeper fact is that most
American shoulders are set to the wheel too often and too long, and if
they do not stop for the joke they are done for. I have always
suspected that Mr. Kipling was thinking of American humor when he wrote
in his well-known lines on "The American Spirit":--

"So imperturbable he rules
Unkempt, disreputable, vast--
And in the teeth of all the schools
I--I shall save him at the last."

That is the very secret of the American sense of humor: the conviction
that something is going to save us at the last. Otherwise there would
be no joke! It is no accident, surely, that the man who is
increasingly idolized as the most representative of all Americans, the
burden-bearer of his people, the man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief, should be our most inveterate humorist. Let Lincoln have his
story and his joke, for he had faith in the saving of the nation; and
while his Cabinet are waiting impatiently to listen to his Proclamation
of Emancipation, give him another five minutes to read aloud to them
that new chapter by Artemus Ward.

VI

Individualism and Fellowship

It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the old doctrine
of individualism than is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on
"The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the grim child of Calvinism as
he fires his "Annandale grapeshot" into that sophisticated London
audience: "Men speak too much about the world.... The world's being
saved will not save us; nor the world's being lost destroy us. We
should look to ourselves.... For the saving of the wo