And it was the same anonymous observer who pointed out the difference between two contemporary British authors, insisting that “Mr. George Bernard Shaw always writes with his tongue in his cheek, whereas when Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton is writing he keeps thrusting his tongue out at the public.” Now, are these remarks, strictly speaking, puns? They conform at least to one of Lamb’s definitions that a pun “is a pistol let off at the end, not a feather to tickle the intellect,” and that it is “not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit.” He warns us that “a pun may be easily too curious and artificial”; and he held that a pun, at least in actual conversation, ought to stand alone and not be followed by another. “When a man has said a good thing it is seldom politic to follow it up.” This is true enough of conversation; but it does not apply to literature. The spoken word and the written have different rules. A large part of the humorous effect of the trumpet-peddler’s eulogy of the wares he is vending is due to the heaping-up of the puns, one tumbling over another, like salmon flashing swiftly in the sunshine as they follow each other up the falls. Here our pleasure is akin to that we take at the circus as we behold the acrobats going on from one impossible stunt to its equally impossible successor and accomplishing these feats as if each was the easiest thing in the world.
There is in many passages of that rollicking satire, “A Fable for Critics,” wise as it is in its author’s acute valuation of his contemporaries, a riot of complicated riming and of unexpected punning,--passages which impress us with an abiding sense of spontaneous humor and good humor. These passages overflow with fun, and we are carried along by Lowell’s delight in displaying his verbal dexterity. For once he appears before us dancing on a metrical tight-rope and setting off iridescent fireworks at the ends of his balancing-pole. Consider, for example, these lines at the very beginning, where Apollo is discussing his plight after he had pursued Daphne and she had turned into a tree:
“‘My case is like Dido’s,’ he sometimes remarked; ‘When I last saw my love she was fairly embarked In a laurel, as _she_ thought--but (ah, how fate mocks!) She has found it by this time a very bad box; Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it-- You’re not always sure of your game when you’ve treed it. Just conceive such a change taking place in one’s mistress! What romance would be left?--who can flatter or kiss trees? And for mercy’s sake, how could one keep up a dialogue With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,-- Not to say that the thought would forever intrude That you’ve less chance to win her the more she is wood? Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves, To see those loved graces all taking their leaves; Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting, but now, As they left me forever, each making its bough! If her tongue _had_ a tang sometimes more than was right, Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’”