irreverent story about an
organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the
parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great
spirit, "We'll all get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home."
The best way of distinguishing Bret Harte from the rest of American
humour is to say that if Bret Harte had described that scene, it would
in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the
incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the theme. You
would have felt that the organist's tune was funny, but not that the
Prodigal Son was funny. But America is under a kind of despotism of
humour. Everyone is afraid of humour: the meanest of human nightmares.
Bret Harte had, to express the matter briefly but more or less
essentially, the power of laughing not only at things, but also with
them. America has laughed at things magnificently, with Gargantuan
reverberations of laughter. But she has not even begun to learn the
richer lesson of laughing with them.

The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of
reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist.
This may have the appearance of being a paradox, but, as in the case of
many other paradoxes, it is not so important whether it is a paradox as
whether it is not obviously true. Mere derision, mere contempt, never
produced or could produce parody. A man who simply despises Paderewski
for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable
imitation of his particular touch on the piano. If a man wishes to
parody Paderewski's style of execution, he must emphatically go through
one process first: he must admire it, and even reverence it. Bret Harte
had a real power of imitating great authors, as in his parodies on
Dumas, on Victor Hugo, on Charlotte Bronte. This means, and can only
mean, that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas
and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Bronte. To take an example, Bret Harte has
in his imitation of Hugo a passage like this:

"M. Madeline was, if possible, better than M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an
angel. M. Madeline was a good man." I do not know whether Victor Hugo
ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that he would have used it
and thanked his stars if he had thought of it. This is real parody,
inseparable from admiration. It is the same in the parody of Dumas,
which is arranged on the system of "Aramis killed three of the