With this distinctively American humour Bret Harte had little or nothing in common.  The wild, sky-breaking humour of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities, not only of supreme importance to life and letters, but of supreme importance to humour—­reverence and sympathy.  And these two qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte’s humour.  Everyone who has read and enjoyed Mark Twain as he ought to be read and enjoyed will remember a very funny and irreverent story about an organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great spirit, “We’ll all get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home.”  The best way of distinguishing Bret Harte from the rest of American humour is to say that if Bret Harte had described that scene, it would in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the theme.  You would have felt that the organist’s tune was funny, but not that the Prodigal Son was funny.  But America is under a kind of despotism of humour.  Everyone is afraid of humour:  the meanest of human nightmares.  Bret Harte had, to express the matter briefly but more or less essentially, the power of laughing not only at things, but also with them.  America has laughed at things magnificently, with Gargantuan reverberations of laughter.  But she has not even begun to learn the richer lesson of laughing with them.

The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist.  This may have the appearance of being a paradox, but, as in the case of many other paradoxes, it is not so important whether it is a paradox as whether it is not obviously true.  Mere derision, mere contempt, never produced or could produce parody.  A man who simply despises Paderewski for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable imitation of his particular touch on the piano.  If a man wishes to parody Paderewski’s style of execution, he must emphatically go through one process first:  he must admire it, and even reverence it.  Bret Harte had a real power of imitating great authors, as in his parodies on Dumas, on Victor Hugo, on Charlotte Bronte.  This means, and can only mean, that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Bronte.  To take an example, Bret Harte has in his imitation of Hugo a passage like this: 

“M.  Madeline was, if possible, better than M. Myriel.  M. Myriel was an angel.  M. Madeline was a good man.”  I do not know whether Victor Hugo ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that he would have used it and thanked his stars if he had thought of it.  This is real parody, inseparable from admiration.  It is the same in the parody of Dumas, which is arranged on the system of “Aramis