Wit and Humor, AMERICAN Introduction by Volume I Franklin to Beecher New York The Review of Reviews Company W67 A Word from the Publishers TH V. I HE publishers and editors of this work have set out with the deliberate plan to make it the most comprehensive anthology of wit and humor ever brought into existence: a comparison with kindred collections will show the scope of the present work to be at once national and international. In apportioning the space among the nations, we have naturally given the fullest possible representation to America. A reader of any given citizenship will prefer that humor which is nearest his own understanding and his own point of view, in other words that humor which the writers of his own country have provided. Hence out of the fifteen volumes we have devoted no less than five to the comic genius of the United States. The remaining ten are composed of specimens of wit and humor drawn from the rest of the world. A superficial glance over the table of contents will show that every age and all nationalities are included. One meets with selections from the classic Hindu fables of an author whose very name and date are matters of uncertainty, and who may have lived abou one thousand years before the birth of Christ. One also finds the latest and most distinctive efforts of George Ade and Peter Finley Dunne. Now a Brahmin of three thousand years ago must not be expected to approach the task of producing humor M870755 in just the same way as Mr. Dooley-by which we mean to suggest that as all ages and countries are represented in our collection, so are all kinds of mirth. Mark Twain, for instance, possesses a sense of humor utterly different from that of Balzac. Yet both are given. here. Molière and Homer are very far apart in their manners of thought and expression; so are Sheridan and Cervantes, Bret Harte and Aristophanes, Dickens and Juvenal, Leopardi and Rabelais, the Brothers Grimm and Omar Khayyam—but all of these are quoted, as indeed they must be-in the World's Wit and Humor. There may be readers who will find fault with the inclusion of such writers as Esop, Ibsen, Carlyle, Confucius, who are not usually regarded as uproarious by the average American. However, it is part of the mission of this anthology to show the average American what is taken for wit and humor by other minds than his. He will smile with most of them, we conjecture. Whatever is best worth knowing in foreign comic literature is represented here, so that although the educated American might be hard put to it if it were necessary for him to recollect more than two or three humorists belonging to the Iberian and Apennine Peninsulas, he would in Volume XIII discover thirty-seven. The miscellaneous department (see Volume XIV) is for lands which in this particular regard are of minor importance, yet which have humorous authors. For the Oriental division, concluding the series, a relatively small number of pages may seem to have been allotted; but the bulk of Eastern literature is little known or hardly accessible, and its spirit is farthest from the understanding and appreciation of the American reader. A perfectly regular distribution of space according to merit has been impossible. One author, owing to his succinct style |