It is easy to
imagine the zest with which the chivalrous Bierce plunged into
preparations for the fight. But the struggle never came; it was
sufficient to learn that Bierce would be the Richmond; the attack upon
the stricken ex-empress was abandoned.
When he was urged in San Francisco, years afterward, to write more of
the inimitable things that filled those two volumes, he said that it was
only fun, a boy's work. Only fun! There has never been such delicious
fun since the beginning of literature, and there is nothing better than
fun. Yet it held his own peculiar quality, which is not that of American
fun, - quality of a brilliant intellectuality: the keenness of a rapier,
a teasing subtlety, a contempt for pharisaism and squeamishness, and
above all a fine philosophy. While he has never lost his sense of the
whimsical, the grotesque, the unusual, he - unfortunately, perhaps -
came oftener to give it the form of pure wit rather than of cajoling
humor. Few Americans know him as a humorist, because his humor is not
built on the broad, rough lines that are typically American.
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