| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise,
as if wondering what they had found to laugh at. Dan Setchell
used it before him, Nye and Riley and others use it today.
But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub;
he shouts it at you--every time. And when he prints it,
in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it,
puts some whopping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes
explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing,
and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.
Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote
which has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: have been humiliated by the simplicity of his judgment of them, a
judgment for which the rendering was lost in the subject, quite
leaving out the element of art. He was like the innocent reader
for whom the story is "really true" and the author a negligible
quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted to purchase,
and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had never
seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him why,
for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn't be more to the
point to deal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at
this; the idea clearly alarmed him. He was an extraordinary case--
personally so modest that I could see it had never occurred to him.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: Deliver'd up again with peaceful words?
Mort Dieu!
YORK.
For Suffolk's duke, may he be suffocate,
That dims the honour of this warlike isle!
France should have torn and rent my very heart,
Before I would have yielded to this league.
I never read but England's kings have had
Large sums of gold and dowries with their wives;
And our King Henry gives away his own,
To match with her that brings no vantages.
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