[In the following essay, Masson praises Cobb's work and solicits from Cobb an overview of his career.]

Irvin Cobb has written things about himself, I was about to add, "in a quite impersonal way," when I remembered that he had written about his being fat and had referred to the fact that he was homely, whereas he is nothing of the sort. Also, other people have written about him, but neither he, nor anyone else, has ever done him justice, not even Bob Davis, or Grant Overton.

Cobb is wrong about himself and others are wrong about him. I am the only one who really understands him, and yet to save me I cannot explain him in just the way that I should like.

I have said that Cobb is impersonal when writing about himself; what follows this brief introduction to him will emphasize what I mean. He does not take himself seriously but he does take his work seriously. This difference is very important, because it lies at the heart of most of our human relationships. Cobb has what I call literary integrity, but it is purely impersonal. The honesty of some people is so offensive that we wish the world were inhabited by more interesting criminals; not that the world isn't, but merely that even they try to be too honest about it.

Perhaps I can put it in another way by saying that Cobb is a natural man. And he is a natural workman. I have no doubt that he thinks he is homely. On the contrary, he is handsome. Handsome does not express just how Cobb looks, but if it did express it, that is the way Cobb would look. That is to say, he is very satisfactory to look at. I don't know of any man that I would rather look at than Irvin Cobb, and I am not joking about this. He has all the human qualities. And when he talks I could listen to him all the time. I might want to stop for meals, but if I did, I should want him sitting next to me.

The conversations of so many men have been so overrated. All through literature you read about what wonderful talkers some men were. There was Swinburne; there was Macaulay; there was Tennyson; there was Oscar Wilde. I have always believed that these men were overrated. I read once of how Swinburne (I remember now, it was in a book called The Education of Henry Adams) kept a whole company of people up until very late talking wonderful talk and reciting poetry. I don't believe it. He must have been a deadly bore. Indeed, Max Beerbohm indicates this. Few of us are honest when it comes to our literary opinions. The memory of some evening in which we drank too much hangs over us like a beautiful rainbow; stripped of its colors it is only Scotch and soda. When I say that I would rather listen to Cobb talk than to anybody else I know, I mean it in the right sense. Cobb is human. He is not thinking about himself except in the right way. He is sympathetic. He is broad-souled. His book Speaking of Operations is funny because, in reality—although it may seem quite the opposite—it is impersonal. I remember when it first came out in the Saturday Evening Post. A number of people spoke to me about it. "Have you seen that thing of Irvin Cobb's? It's immense." And so on. You see, they were all taking it to themselves. They thought it had happened to them. And that, I take it, is one of the tests of real humor.

Another test of humor is its popularity. If a lot of people read it, that shows that it has something to it. I heard this story, which may or not be true, but it is such a satisfactory story that I must tell it. It is about Mr. Cobb and Mr. Lorimer, the editor of the Saturday Evening Post. One day Mr. Lorimer went out to a newsdealer nearby to see how his paper was selling. And the newsdealer said:

"They ask me if there is anything in it by Cobb. If there is, they buy it. If there isn't, they don't."

Thereupon Mr. Lorimer said, "I must cut out Cobb."

I don't believe this story. But it is a good one. That is the main difficulty about the best stories. They are probably not true.

I was highly amused one day to pick up a book by Mr. H. L. Mencken, and read what he had to say about Cobb. He didn't like him. He said so. Mencken, so far as I have been able to discover in his writings, doesn't like anybody. Maybe he is right. Not to like anybody at all may be a creditable object for any man's ambition. It is a large undertaking. I have tried to dislike certain people at intervals, but in most cases have had to give it up. After pursuing the objects of my wrath persistently, I got tired out and ended by liking them, finding them in the long run much like myself. Even Mr. Mencken is under this handicap. After several pages in which he explains at some length why Cobb is not a humorist, or at least not a good humorist—in which he refers to the Cobb whisker motif, the Cobb wheeze, and the Cobb publisher, he winds up with:

Nevertheless, even so laboriously flabby a farceur has his moments. I turn to Frank J. Wilstach's Dictionary of Similes and find this credited to him "No more privacy than a goldfish." Here, at last, is something genuinely humorous. Here, moreover, is something apparently new.

To have Mr. Mencken admit that Cobb has been guilty of something genuinely humorous and apparently new is certainly going some. But that shows what can happen even to a man like Mencken if he reads Irvin Cobb.

Cobb, in common with Abraham Lincoln, was born in Kentucky (in 1876). This—I regret to say I remember it—was the year of the great Centennial. The Centennial, as doubtless nobody but myself remembers, took place chiefly in Philadelphia. Cobb little knew in that year that he was destined in time to keep Philadelphia before the people by his later contributions in the Saturday Evening Post.

There is, however, one stain on his career—a dark spot that I hope he will have removed as soon as possible. He has permitted the publishers of Who's Who in America to state that he was a "staff humorist." We have all of us, at one time or another, been staff humorists. If you are any sort of a man when your first baby is born (and also subsequently), you become a staff humorist to that child by imitating the ribald antics of the common or garden horse. But to have this put down in cold print is quite another thing. That Cobb has permitted this to be done to him is another evidence of his humility, of the impersonal manner in which he regards himself. That man would let anything be said about him. After being born, he attended private schools, from which he recovered sufficiently to get into Dartmouth College, which honored him with a degree in 1918. Let me now, with the permission of the polite publishers of Who's Who, quote from that indispensable household adjunct:

Shorthand reporter, contbr. to comic weeklies, reporter on local paper up to 17; editor Paducah Daily News at 19; staff corr. and writer "Sour Mash" column Louisville (Ky.) Evening Post 1898-1901 . . . represented Saturday Evening Post as war corr. in Europe; lectured throughout U. S. on "What I saw at the Front." Apptd. col. on staff gov. of Ky. 1918; Chevalier Legion of Honor (France) 1918.

As for Cobb's books, they are quite numerous, and many of them highly amusing. Personally, if I may be allowed, I like "The Escape of Mr. Trimm" best. His story of "The Belled Buzzard" is a masterpiece. There are highly distinguished critics in England who think he is the best short-story writer in America. As for his work as a humorist, he has written to me by request, as follows:

Almost as far back as I distinctly can remember I tried to write funny stuff. At the grammar school I wrote alleged verses to accompany the pictures I drew. At that time my main ambition was to be a caricaturist. I had a small gift that way. My mother says I tried to draw pictures before I could walk, and, among her possessions, she treasures some drawings in color, terribly crude things, that I did before I was four years old.

The first three things of mine that were ever published in a magazine were alleged comics—pen-and-ink drawings—which I sent to Texas Siftings when I was about fourteen years old. Texas Siftings printed them but forgot to pay me for them. However, I didn't crave any pay. Merely to see them printed was reward enough for me. In a scrap-book which I compiled when I was about fifteen—the only scrap-book, by the way, I ever made, and which I still have—two of the pictures from Texas Siftings are pasted. The third clipping got lost and I have forgotten its subject.

I suppose, except for a bad turn in the family fortunes, I should to-day be a cartoonist, or a caricaturist, or an illustrator—probably a very bad one. I had grown through boyhood with the expectation of studying art and afterward taking it up as a profession. But, when I was sixteen years old, my father's very modest source of obtaining a livelihood failed him and it became necessary for me, a few months later, to leave school—which was no grief to me—and to go to work in order to help out with my earnings the family exchequer. I had grown up with the smell of printer's ink in my snoot. My favorite uncle, for whom I was named, was a country editor and one of the best paragraphers, I think, of the old school of Southern paragraphers founded by George D. Prentiss. My favorite play-place had been the cluttered editorial room of a little daily where this uncle of mine encouraged me to draw and try to write. A little further along I had carried papers over a route and on Saturdays I would hang about the newspaper shop and get pleasure out of the pretense that I was actually helping to get out the paper.

So it was natural, I suppose, when it became incumbent upon me to get a job, that I should seek one in a newspaper office. I became a "prentice reporter," so-called, at a salary of $1.75 a week. I expect I was about the rawest cub that ever lived, but I had my share of energy if I had no other equipment. When I wasn't hustling after local items I was working over an old-fashioned chalk-plate trying to draw illustrations for news stories, and cartoons on local topics. Presently, though, my reportorial duties so broadened that I no longer found time for the picture-making end of the game, and with a few inconspicuous exceptions I have never tried to draw for publication since. Long ago I ceased to draw for my own amusement, and, with disuse, I have almost altogether lost the knack of it and the inclination for it.

The editor of the paper on which I worked flattered my vanity and stirred my ambitions in a new direction by telling me he thought I had a turn for writing "funny stuff." Encouraged by him, I turned out bales of bum jingles and supposedly humorous comment on local subjects. And he was good enough to print the stuff; and a few subscribers were good enough to compliment it. I date the beginning of my downward career from that time.

When I was nineteen a change in ownership of the paper threw him out of a job, and for a short while I filled his place with the title of "managing editor." I had the double distinction of being the youngest managing editor of a daily paper in the United States—and the worst one. When, a few months later, the publishers of the paper found out what ailed the paper they induced the editor to come back again to his former berth and I lost my peacock feathers and became once more a plain reporter. A photograph taken of me about this time proves what a plain reporter I was.

However, I was not sorry, really, at being reduced to the ranks, because once again I had time and opportunity to write alleged funny stuff. A few of the state papers began copying my junk, and I derived considerable satisfaction thereby but no added glory, to speak of, since my copy was not signed. The paper got the credit instead.

Two or three years later I moved to Louisville and became a political reporter on the Evening Post. On this paper I wrote an occasional column under the title "Kentucky Sour Mash." The column was made up of paragraphs, short articles mainly containing supposedly whimsical digs at politicians and public characters, and verses. My poetry was so wooden that it fairly creaked at the joints, but I could turn it out by the yard. Here's a curious thing: For twenty years now I have done no versifying, and I find it almost impossible to frame lines that will scan and rhyme, whereas this used to be the easiest thing I did. My wits have rusted here just as my hand has lost the trick of making pictures.

From the time I was twenty-five until I was twenty-nine, past, I wrote scarcely a line that was designed to be humorous. During that time I was the managing editor, back in Paducah, of the same paper, the News, upon which I had made my start; only now it was the News-Democrat, with linotype machines and a brief telegraph service. I worked day and night on routine editorial duties, with no opportunity for the lighter side of journalistic writing. Here, for the first time in my life, I discovered I had things called nerves.

I threw up my job, sent my wife and my year-old baby down to Georgia to stay for a while as nonpaying guests at my father-in-law's house, and, with a hundred dollars of borrowed money in my pocket, landed in New York in the middle of the hottest summer of the Christian Era. I spent three weeks trying unsuccessfully to get a job—any kind of a job. When my money was almost gone I had an idea; born of desperation I suppose it was. I wrote out a form letter full of josh, telling how good I was and explaining that New York journalism needed me to make it brighter and better. I sent a copy of this letter to every managing editor in town. This, I suppose, might be called my first attempt at being humorous for a metropolitan audience. Inside of two days I had replies from six managing editors, including Arthur Brisbane, either offering me work right away or promising me the first available opening on their staffs. I went to work for the Evening Sun. At the outset I did reportorial work. In a few months I was writing a good half of the Evening Sun's Saturday back page of humor and, in addition, editing the page. Howsomever, what got me a job, at better pay on the Evening World, was not my humorous stuff but some straight news stories which I wrote for the Sun.

I stayed with the Evening World six years. I was a reasonably busy person. I was a reporter, a rewrite man, and at intervals a staff-correspondent on outof-town assignments. I covered the two Thaw trials and probably a dozen other big criminal cases. Between times I wrote an average of three satirical or supposedly humorous signed articles a week for the magazine page of the Evening World and contributed special articles to the Sunday World. During the last four years of the six I spent under the World dome I wrote a page of humor under the titles: "The Hotel Clerk Says" and "Live Talks With Dead Ones" for the magazine section of the Sunday edition. In four years and twelve weeks I did not, on a single Sunday, miss filling my page. These articles were syndicated over the country, but I then regarded my humorous work, as I still do to a greater or less extent, as a sort of side-line, for my energies were largely devoted to handling news stories, and I did the lighter stuff at odd intervals between murders and fires. There used to be a saying in the Evening World shop that when, in a lull in city work, I sat down at my typewriter and stuck a clean sheet of paper into the machine and looked as though I were going to burst into tears, it was a sign that I was preparing to try to write something funny. I may add that, in this regard, I have not greatly changed. 1 still regard humorous writing as about the most serious work a writing-man can do. I've never yet got a laugh out of anything I wrote in the line of humor. I trust that others have, occasionally, but I haven't.

My first attempt at out-and-out fiction-writing was made nine years ago at the end of a two weeks' vacation, when I was still on the World. It was a sort of horror story without a line in it that could be called humorous. I wrote it on a bet with my ally that I could write a straight serious fiction story and sell it to a reputable magazine. I won the bet. The Saturday Evening Post bought it and printed it. It was called "The Escape of Mr. Trimm." When my contract with the World expired I was emboldened to try magazine-writing for a means of livelihood, and I have been at it ever since. Perhaps a third of my output is what my friends are kind enough to call humor; the other two-thirds is made up of serious stuff—character yarns and descriptive articles, as when I went twice to the war for the Post, and straight fiction. I find that when I have written something of the humorous order it gives me an appetite, so to speak, to turn out a nice, gruesome, gory, Edgar-Allan-Poeish kind of tale, and vice versa. Personally, I would rather do the straight fiction; at the same time, I must confess that from the standpoint of popularity and financial returns in the form of book royalties, my most successful single piece of work is Speaking of Operations, which in book form has sold upwards of 300,000 copies in five years, which still is selling at the rate of 25,000 copies a year, and which by a majority of those who read it is regarded as being humorous, although my friend Mr. H. L. Mencken does not agree with them. He thinks it's sad, not to say dreary, and perhaps he is right.

One curious thing I have discovered: A man may write serious fiction for ten years or do straight reportorial work for ten years, but let him turn out one piece of foolery that tickles the public in its short-ribs and, from that hour, he is branded as a humorist.

I have no set rule or pet formulas for writing humor. First, I get an idea. I let it churn up and down a while inside my head until the butter-fats begin to form; then I sit down and write it. Usually, but not always, I rewrite it once, touching it up and smoothing off the corners, and then I let it go. I have found that about fifty per cent, roughly, of my lines and points come to me in conversation with persons congenially inclined. The other fifty per cent, about, hop on the paper during the throes of childbirth, when I am making the first draft of the copy. I have also found out that I am decidedly a poor judge of the humor-values of my own writings. What I think is going to be funny when I set it down frequently falls flat. What I do not regard as especially funny more often goes over well with the reader.

I said just now that I had no rules in writing humor.

I take that back. I have two rules which I endeavor to follow as closely as may be. In what I write with intent to be humorous I try to avoid giving offense to any individual. To my way of thinking, a joke that hurts the feelings of some one, or that leaves a sore spot on another's pelt, or that deals with the physical infirmities of men and women, is not such a very good joke after all. My other rule is this: When I write humor I seek, between the lines, to say to the reader: "Listen, old man, I'm about to poke fun at some of the foolish things you have done and said, but understand, please, that no matter how foolish you may have been in your time I'm a bigger ass than you ever can hope to be. We're both in the same boat, so bear with me while I make confession for the two of us." I am sure that if a humorous writer assumes this attitude and adheres to it the reader subconsciously falls into a state of mental sympathy with him and is more apt to like what is written.

If I may be permitted to lecture a few of my fellowlaborers, I would like to say that, in my opinion, the mistake some really humorous writers make is in assuming, wittingly or unwittingly, an air of superiority—in other words, it is as though they sat on a high pinnacle in a rarefied atmosphere of aloofness, looking down pityingly from that great height upon the foolish, futile, scrambling little human ants far beneath them, and stirring up those ants with barbed satire and clever ridicule. I am sure the reader resents this, even though he may not exactly know what it is that irritates him, and I am sure also another result is that these writers, real humorists though they may be, rarely are publicly recognized and acknowledged as humorists. The man who aspires to be known as a humorist must constantly be saying, not, "What fools those mortals be," but "What fools all mortals be—myself prominently included." To cite a few conspicuous and justly popular examples, Mark Twain and Bill Nye had this gift, and, among the living, George Ade and Don Marquis and Ring Lardner and Ellis Parker Butler and Ed Howe and Walt Mason—may their tribe increase—likewise have it.