 | Saratoga in 1901 |  |
SARKASUM
Sarkasum is a dangerous thing.
It has gotten me in a terrible muss
this time. It is always a dangerous thing to
write ironically for the common newspaper
reader. Only the highly educated can appreciate a satire, or
understand that while a writer is saying one thing he means to
convey another and exactly an opposite idea. Irony and satire, I
am satisfied (and Mr. Saxe said the same thing to me to-day),
should be left for the Galaxy and Atlantic, magazines whose
readers are cultivated enough to understand them. “Ginx's
Baby;” the “Battle of Dorking,” and “Dame Europa's School,”
are too much for the ordinary run of readers—too much for the
superficially educated, who sometimes frequent watering-places,
and who have descended from fathers and mothers who were
matter-of-fact green-grocers, instead of from institutions of
learning.
This incapacity
of the masses to
understand satire
was appreciated
by my old friend
Artemus Ward,
(whose biography
I have written to
be published by
Carleton). Half
of the people did
Bright listened all one evening to his lecture in Egyptian Hall,
while everybody was splitting with laughter, without a smile.
London Punch found him out first; then the educated clubs got
hold of him, and a furor went over England only equalled in the
days of “Yellowplush.” Dr. Holmes has experienced just this
same difficulty. His “Autocrat at the Breakfast Table” was a
mystery to the many. Juvenal and Swift only wrote their satires
for the most cultivated.
To illustrate.—The other day, when I wrote about “Snakes in
Congress Spring,” there were any quantity of “poky,” hum-drum
people who believed it. The next day I expatriated myself over
to Ballston. They believed every word of it.
To-day when Capt. Ritchie, whom I knew as a gallant soldier
in the war, comes out with his funny editorial—what do you
think?
Why, he had a snake story on me! and lots of fashionable
people read his irony as a fact. One old lady said, as I got into
the carriage with Mr. Coe and Mr. Tuft, to ride over to the
Geyser: “Well, I should think he would go away after such an
assault as that in the newspaper.” Poor ignorant soul, she little
thought that the article was written for another atmosphere
from hers.
| Saratoga in 1901 | |