Do you remember Lydia Maria Child’s reply to her husband when he wished he was as rich as Croesus: “At any rate, you are King of Lydia;” and Lucretia Mott’s humorous comment when she entered a room where her husband and his brother Richard were sitting, both of them remarkable for their taciturnity and reticence: “I thought you must both be here—it was so still!”
In my own home I recall a sensible old maid of Scotch descent with her cosey cottage and the dear old-fashioned garden where she loved to work. Our physician, a man of infinite humor, who honestly admired her sterling worth, and was attracted by her individuality, leaned over her fence one bright spring morning, with the direct question: “Miss Sharp, why did you never get married?”
She looked up from her weeding, rested on her hoe-handle, and looking steadily at his hair, which was of a sandy hue, answered: “I’ll tell you all about it, Doctor. I made up my mind, when I was a girl, that, come what would, I would never marry a red-headed man, and none but men with red hair have ever offered themselves.”
We all know women whose capacity for monologue exhausts all around them. So that the remark will be appreciated of a lady to whom I said, alluding to such a talker: “Have you seen Mrs. –- lately?”
“No, I really had to give up her acquaintance in despair, for I had been trying two years to tell her something in particular.”
A lady once told me she could always know when she had taken too much wine at dinner—her husband’s jokes began to seem funny!
Lastly and—_finally_, there is a reason for our apparent lack of humor, which it may seem ungracious to mention. Women do not find it politic to cultivate or express their wit. No man likes to have his story capped by a better and fresher from a lady’s lips. What woman does not risk being called sarcastic and hateful if she throws back the merry dart, or indulges in a little sharp-shooting? No, no, it’s dangerous—if not fatal.
“Though you’re bright, and though you’re pretty,
They’ll not love you if you’re witty.”
Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier are good illustrations of this point. The former, by her fearless expressions of wit, exposed herself to the detestation of the majority of mankind. “She has shafts,” said Napoleon, “which would hit a man if he were seated on a rainbow.”
But the sweetly fawning, almost servile adulation of the listening beauty brought her a corresponding throng of admirers. It sometimes seems that what is pronounced wit, if uttered by a distinguished man, would be considered commonplace if expressed by a woman.
Parker’s illustration of Choate’s rare humor never struck me as felicitous. “Thus, a friend meeting him one ten-degrees-below-zero morning in the winter, said: ‘How cold it is, Mr. Choate.’ ‘Well, it is not absolutely tropical,’ he replied, with a most mirthful emphasis.”
And do you recollect the only time that Wordsworth was really witty? He told the story himself at a dinner. “Gentlemen, I never was really witty but once in my life.” Of course there was a general call for the bright but solitary instance. And the contemplative bard continued: “Well, gentlemen, I was standing at the door of my cottage on Rydal Mount, one fine summer morning, and a laborer said to me: ‘Sir, have you seen my wife go by this way?’ And I replied: ‘My good man, I did not know until this moment that you had a wife!’”
He paused; the company waited for the promised witticism, but discovering that he had finished, burst into a long and hearty roar, which the old gentleman accepted complacently as a tribute to his brilliancy.
The wit of women is like the airy froth of champagne, or the witching iridescence of the soap-bubble, blown for a moment’s sport. The sparkle, the life, the fascinating foam, the gay tints vanish with the occasion, because there is no listening Boswell with unfailing memory and capacious note-book to preserve them.
Then, unlike men, women do not write out their impromptus beforehand and carefully hoard them for the publisher—and posterity!
And now, dear friends, a cordial au revoir.
My heartiest thanks to the women who have so generously allowed me to ransack their treasuries, filching here and there as I chose, always modestly declaiming against the existence of wit in what they had written.
To various publishers in New York and Boston, who have been most courteous and liberal, credit is given elsewhere.
Touched by the occasion, I “drop into” doggereclass="underline"
If you pronounce this book not funny,
And wish you hadn’t spent your money,
There soon will be a general rumor
That you’re no judge of Wit or Humor.
INDEX.
PAGE.
INTRODUCTION iii.
CONTENTS v.
DEDICATION vii.
ARGUMENT ix.
PROEM xi.
CHAP. PAGE.
Alcott, Louisa: “Transcendental Wild Oats” IV. 68
American Early Writers: Some of them who were thought
Witty—Anne Bradstreet; Mercy Warren; Tabitha Tenney III. 47
Satirical Poem, by Mercy Warren III. 47
Mrs. Sigourney’s Johnsonese Humor; Extracts from her
Note-Book III. 48
Miss Sedgwick’s Witty Imagination, III. 49
Mrs. Caroline Gilman’s humorous Poem, “Joshua’s
Courtship” III. 49
Andersen, Hans, Reference to Woman Dramatist in his
Autobiography X. 196
Aphorisms by the Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva) I. 24
“Auction Extraordinary” VIII. 176
“Aunty Doleful’s Visit,” by M.K.D.—”If I can’t do
anything else, I can cheer you up a little” VI. 118
Barnum and Phoebe Cary V. 102
Bates, Charlotte Fiske: “Hat, Ulster and All,” Satirical
Poem, Quatrain and Epigram VIII. 175
“Beechers,” Old Family Epigram applied to the I. 22
Behn, Aphra: Wrote Comedies; her unsavory Wit X. 195
Bellows, Isabel Frances: “A Fatal Reputation” (for
wit)—”A picnic, that most ghastly device of the human
mind” VII. 129
Bremer, Frederika, her genuine Humor; First Quarrel with
her “Bear” II. 41
Brine, Mary D.: Poems, “Kiss Pretty Poll” VIII. 158
” ” “Thanksgiving Day—Then and Now” VIII. 159
Burleigh, Pun on, by Queen Elizabeth I. 16
Butter, Punning Poem on, by Caroline B. Le Row I. 18
Cary, Phoebe, “The wittiest woman in America”: Her
quick retorts and merry repartees; her parodies and
humorous poems V. 101
Champney, Lizzie W.: “An Unruffled Bosom”—a Tragical
Tale of a Negress who “knew Washington” VIII. 171
Clarke, Lady, and her Irish Songs II. 44
Cleveland’s, Elizabeth Rose, Pun I. 21
Cleaveland’s, Mrs., “No Sects in Heaven” IV. 69
Clemmer, Mary: Her Life of Phoebe Cary V. 102
Comedies—Few written by Women; Five Englishwomen
produced successful; Susanna Centlivre wrote nearly
a score—contain some wit, but old-fashioned; Aphra
Behn wrote several comedies, witty but coarse X. 195
Cooke’s, Rose Terry, “Knoware” IV. 68