Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (519 page)

“Idle Ideas” was published in 1905. This book contains twenty-one articles on miscellaneous subjects—”Should Women be Beautiful?”

“How to be Happy though Little”, “How to Solve the Servant Problem”, “How Many Charms Hath Music Would You Say?” etc., etc.

To appreciate the humour of any one article, the whole of it must be read. The following is only an abbreviation of the latter article.

At a Wagner Grand Opera a Wagnerian enthusiast whispers “the cornet now has the Brunnhilda motive”. It seemed to me, in my then state of depravity, as if the cornet had even worse than that the matter with him. “The second violins,” continued the enthusiast, “are carrying on the Wotan theme.” That they are carrying on goes without saying; the players’ faces are streaming with perspiration. “The brass,” explains my friend, “is accompanying the singers.” I should have said drowning them.

A lone, lorn woman stands upon the stage, opening and shutting her mouth, getting redder and redder in the face. She is singing, one feels sure of it; one could hear her if only those one hundred and forty men would ease up for a minute. My instinct was to leap the barrier, hurl the bald-headed chief of her enemies from his high chair, and lay about him with a trombone or a clarionet. I wanted to say: “You cowardly lot of bullies, are you not ashamed of yourselves? A hundred and forty of you against one, and that one still beautiful and comparatively young. Be quiet a minute — can’t you? Give the poor girl a chance.”

“They and I” was published in 1909. This book has been spoken of as “a cheerful companion to take with you when you go for a holiday to get cured of the hump”. It was read by the soldiers in France during the War.

Lieut. Kenneth Restall, 1915-1916, with the 12th Middlesex Regiment, wrote from the trenches: “N... I’ve struck some good books since I’ve been here, nnnn..NNN... Jerome’s ‘They and I’.”

“Tommy and Co.” was published in 1904. This book reveals much literary merit. Its humour is less boisterous than that of Jerome’s earlier books. “Tommy” is a waif, and is generally referred to as “it”, because at the age of twelve it does not know whether it is a boy or a girl, and knows nothing whatever about its parents. It is very ignorant, but at the same time is extremely practical and sagacious. When its sex is pronounced to be female, “Tommy” becomes the adopted daughter of an eccentric journalist, and eventually makes good as a lady sub-editor, and becomes the central figure in a very interesting romance.

The people that constitute the “Co.” are all connected with journalism. Mrs. Ramsbotham is a very life-like character, and is most skilfully drawn.

Here are a few brief extracts:

One cannot reform the world and human nature all at once. You must appeal to people’s folly in order to get them to listen to your wisdom.

There’s nothing given away free, gratis, for nothing, except misfortune.

Humbug is the sweet oil that helps this whirling world of ours to spin round smoothly; too much of it clogs; we drop it very gently.

It is hardly the function of a biographer to explore the details of an author’s technique, but a brief examination of the various methods by which Jerome makes his point and creates laughter may be of interest.

By a sudden and unexpected climax, and giving a comical twist at the end of a story, he achieves surprise at which the reader must laugh. Two illustrations of this are quoted:

(a) Philosophy, it had been said, is the art of bearing one’s troubles. The truest philosopher I ever heard of was a woman. She was brought into a London hospital suffering from a poisoned leg. The house-surgeon made a hurried examination. He was a man of blunt speech.

“It will have to come off,” he told her.

“What, not all of it?”

“The whole of it, I am sorry to say,” growled the house-surgeon.

“Nothing else for it?”

“No chance for it whatever,” explained the house-surgeon.

“Ah, well, thank Gawd it’s not me ‘ead,” observed the lady.

(“The Angel and the Author.”)

(b)
I have lived to see our stage-manager snubbed — sat upon — crushed. He has been carrying on down here and swelling around to that extent you’d have thought him a stationmaster at the very least. Now he’s like a bladder with the air let out. His wife’s come.

(“On the Stage and Off.”)

I.          
By turning the joke against himself.

When returning home one evening, after a pipe-party at my friend Jephson’s, I informed my wife that I was going to write a novel; she expressed herself as pleased with the idea. She said that she had often wondered why I had never thought of doing so before. “Look,” she added, “how silly all the novels are nowadays; I’m sure you could write one.” My wife intended to be complimentary, I am convinced, but there is a looseness about her mode of expression which, at times, renders her meaning obscure.

(“Novel Notes.”)

This is an old method of creating laughter. Shakespeare makes use of it in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. It is, in fact, the principle on which the whole character of Falstaff is founded.

II.        
By an opposite method — indulging in a bit of conceit. In reference to an engagement in a theatrical company he wrote:

I only answered one advertisement, and was engaged at once; but this, no doubt, was owing to my having taken the precaution of enclosing my photograph.

(“On the Stage and Off.”)

III.      
By exaggeration. This, in the hands of amateur humorists, is often grotesque, but Jerome handles it so deftly that an air of reality is created.

A good example is the story of the fishermen and their yarns in “Three Men in a Boat”. This is too long to quote, and too good to mutilate.

IV.      
By giving an atmosphere of reality to the most absurd events:

(a)       
When Jerome was crossing the Atlantic, in order to go on a lecture tour, he was persistently annoyed by a fellow-passenger, who was bubbling over with information.

“Sir,” said this man one day, when Jerome was leaning over the rail, “do you know that if the earth were flattened out the sea would be two miles deep all over the world?”

“My dear sir,” exclaimed Jerome, anxiously, “if you catch anybody flattening out the earth, please shoot him on the spot. I can’t swim.”

(b)      
Montmorency has a fight with the kettle.

Throughout the trip he had manifested great curiosity concerning the kettle. He would sit and watch it, as it boiled, with a puzzled expression, and would try and rouse it every now and then by growling at it. When it began to splutter and steam he regarded it as a challenge, and would want to fight it. He advanced towards it in a threatening attitude. It was only a little kettle, but it was full of pluck, and it up and spit at him.

“Ah, would ye?” growled Montmorency, showing his teeth. “I’ll teach ye to cheek a hard-working, respectable dog, ye miserable, long-nosed, dirty looking scoundrel, ye — come on!”

He rushed at that poor little kettle and seized it by the spout.

Then, across the evening stillness, broke a bloodcurdling yelp, and Montmorency left the boat and did a constitutional three times round the island at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, stopping every now and then to bury his nose in a bit of cold mud. From that day Montmorency regarded the kettle with a mixture of awe, suspicion and hate. Whenever he saw it he would growl and back at a rapid rate, with his tail shut down, and the moment it was put upon the stove he would promptly climb out of the boat and sit on the bank till the whole tea business was over.

(“Three Men in a Boat.”)

V.        
By a judicious use of slang and colloquialisms.

The use of slang nearly always stamps a writer as third rate, but in the hands of a master it adds point to the humour.

Philologists, whose business it is to study the origin and usage of words, state that Jerome gives correct specimens of the slang and vulgarisms of the Victorian age, and that he shows a remarkable talent in rendering the characteristic talk of different classes of society. Here is one example:

I heard a lady tell how she visited a cottage during a strike, to find the baby, together with the other children, almost dying for want of food. “Dear, dear me,” she cried, taking the wee, wizened mite from the mother’s arms, “but I sent you down a quart of milk yesterday. Hasn’t the child had it?”

“Theer weer a little coom, thank’ee kindly, ma’am,” the father took upon himself to answer. “But, thee see, it weer only just enow for the poops.”

VI.      
Jerome was always himself. His humorous writings are all permeated by his own personality. He saw with his own eyes, or he did not see at all.

VII.    
Jerome never tried to provoke laughter on sacred subjects.

VIII.  
He possessed the gift of precise expression — so essential in humorous writing. The phrase always fits the thought as a glove fits the hand.

IX.      
He found his best material in the trivial things of everyday life, but his writings show that the materials are not so important as the handling of them.

The humour that Jerome has given to the world enables men and women to endure more patiently the worries of life. As a sense of humour frequently helps people to find a way out of a difficulty, it may be safely claimed that Jerome’s humour often helps men to solve their problems. Carlyle said that “he who lacks it (a sense of humour), be his other gifts what they may, has only half a mind”.

The world therefore owes gratitude to Jerome for the good cheer he has put into it, and for the happy mirth he has awakened. The Greek dramatist Æschylus speaks of the “innumerable laughter of the ocean waves”; and Keble in “The Christian Year” of the “many twinkling smiles of ocean”; but the laughter of the ocean is not more universal than the smiles created by Jerome which now brighten up the faces of humanity.

Writing in
The Idler
in 1893 on “The Compensation of all Sincere Work”, Jerome stated:

There is still a last prize in the gift of literature that needs no sentimentalist to appreciate. In a drawer of my desk lies a pile of letters, of which if I were not very proud I should be something more or less than human. They have come to me from the uttermost parts of the earth, and from the streets near at hand. Some are penned in the stiff phraseology taught when old fashions were new, some in the free and easy colloquialism of the rising generation. Some, written on sick-beds, are scrawled in pencil. Some, written by hands unfamiliar with the English language, are weirdly constructed. Some are crested, some are smeared, some are learned, some are ill-spelled. In different ways they tell me that, here and there, I have brought to someone a smile or pleasant thought; that to someone in pain and sorrow I have given a moment’s laugh.

Before Jerome’s day there was a world shortage of clean, healthful humour, and even now there are far too many long faces and far too much dejection in the world. Thousands of people muddle through life with one foot in the grave just because they fail to exercise those faculties of mind and soul which have to do with honest laughter. They nurse their troubles until they get the blues, and make everybody about them miserable; while a daily bout of good, hearty, side-aching laughter would dispel the gloom and bring sunshine and happiness into life. Laughter is as bracing to the spirit as a fresh breeze is to the body. It goes a long way towards securing a clean bill of health.

CHAPTER VIII. JEROME K. JEROME AS A SERIOUS WRITER

“All power to touch or sway another soul must be power won by our own soul out of the days and hours that are past.”

 — ANON.

WITH advancing years most literary men experience a feeling of regret in regard to their early works. They often wish they could recall them. Jerome certainly had this experience. His early books, which were mainly humorous, had brought him world-wide fame, and yet the most remarkable feature of him was his intense seriousness. He once said that the East End of London filled him with horror, and gave him his melancholy, brooding disposition. He had a haunting sense of being alone in a small boat on a stormy sea. For fame a man cares but little, if he is bent on helping the underworld to get on its feet and take its place in the march of human progress. He values it only as a means for getting himself heard.

He had proved to the world that he could make people laugh, but humour was only one of his gifts. His knowledge of the world and human nature led him to believe that he could also make them think. This was now his great ambition. He realized, however, that to do this meant beginning the task of winning the public over again, as the following letter to Mr. Coulson Kernahan shows:

Dear old Jack, Say what you like. All I say is that you must not puff me up too much. That anyone could be tried by you, old fellow, would be impossible — but I do want you to see your generous wish fulfilled. When you give your friends help, you give your whole self away, and can see no faults. I know you often make me feel a terrible fraud, and that two-thirds of the pleasant things you say and think of me are the result of friendliness, and not of any merit. Your praise always makes me feel more ashamed of myself and my work than columns of abuse could do, because I know how little I deserve it, and I feel as though I had stolen something. There is one way in which it helps me. It makes me feel that I must try and do something a little worthier....

My work for some time to come will be of a much more serious kind. The old longing
to say something
— which has not troubled me for the last few years — is growing on me again; but, of course, in this road I shall have the fight all over again.