The difference between Lamb and Holmes is that Elia is frank in declaring his delight in the ingenious dislocation of the vocabulary, whereas the Autocrat pretends to deprecate it, to depreciate it, and to disparage it as evidence in favor of the doctrine of the total depravity of man. He even invented a polysyllabic quotation from an earlier autocrat, the ponderous Doctor Johnson: “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion.”
This is an appalling overstatement of the case; and Holmes was happier in another of the remarks made in the same chapter of the book in which he expressed the utmost of his own witty wisdom: “People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight-train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” Here the doctor is on solid ground; a pun may be a good thing in itself, as good as a sonnet even, but it is only dirt--that is to say, matter in the wrong place--when it is injected into good talk only to throw the conversational locomotive off the track. Oddly enough, the Autocrat was once himself derailed by a pun a score of years after he had thus laid down the law; and, as it happens, I had the full particulars of the fatal accident from the punster who placed the penny on the track. In this case the disturber of traffic was the late Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
When Matthew Arnold paid his first visit to America thirty years ago, Aldrich gave him a dinner and invited the best that Boston and Cambridge had to show to do honor to his alien guest. He put Arnold on his right and Holmes on his left; and early in the dinner he discovered that the Autocrat was in fine form and ready to discourse in his best manner. Holmes began by suggesting that it must be amusing to meet unexpected characters, burglars, for example, and pirates, and cannibals. “What would you do,” he asked, “if you were to meet a cannibal walking down Beacon Street?” And he paused for the reply that he did not desire, whereupon Aldrich saw his chance and responded promptly, “I think I should stop to pick an acquaintance.” The rest of the company laughed at this sally, but Holmes looked at his host reproachfully and then shut up absolutely, saying scarcely a word during the rest of the dinner. The witticism, even if it was bright and not battered, had upset the freight-train of the Autocrat’s conversation. And as Aldrich asserted, in telling the sad story, the host had to repent in a sack-coat and cigarette-ashes for the rest of his life. Autocrats are autocrats, after all; and not with impunity are their unlimited expresses to be flagged by an unauthorized pun.