“A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.” —Anthony Hecht

Dare I confess how gratified I have been with my blog’s traffic since it began a week ago today?  Well, I am!

• 446 views (including 1 from the United Kingdom!)
• 38 followers

Not bad stats for my first week.  Now bad at all for a first-time blogger.  Thank you!

And since I am confessing, let me confess something else:  I’ve shared my joy—and my amazement—with a handful of folks in my close circle, and, over and over again, they have replied enthusiastically with the likes of:

“WOW!  Doesn’t surprise me a BIT!!!!!  Everybody wants to know who wrote those essays!”

Some of your comments affirm:

“Ahhh…everyone loves a good mystery!” 

“Oooh, I love a good mystery! … I look forward to watching you unravel this centuries old mystery.”

To be certain, I’m hooked on the mystery, too:  who was The Humourist?  Preparing a critical edition of his essays will be straightforward—well, to the extent that scholarly research is ever straightforward.  On the other hand, identifying the author will require keen analysis and extensive research in order to make a conclusive (and, if not conclusive, then convincing) case that will stand up to scrutiny and review.

Solving the mystery hinges to a large degree on internal clues to be extracted from the essays.  Looking at the Humourist’s November 26, 1753, essay, we find three clues already.

Clue One: One of my followers—soyfig, in fact—picked up on this one by writing:  “I had to read the Humourist’s first essay three times before I began to understand it!  They certainly wrote on a higher plane then than now!”

Indeed.  Whoever he is, the Humourist is erudite.  In one short essay, he provides a sweeping overview of literary tastes, going all the way back to “Days of monkish Ignorance” and continuing on up to novel writing that reigned in his own time.  

Clue Two:  Whoever he is, the Humourist seems fascinated by the past.  He opens his first essay with a quote from Horace, and he refers to the past several times in that essay:  “If we make a Retrospect into past Times” and “various Tastes of Mankind in the former ages.”

Clue Three:  Whoever he is, the Humourist seems to have an intense interest in painting:  “as an inducement to the World to read my Paper, they may shortly expect a Present of my Picture.”  However, as we shall discover next week in his December 10, 1753, essay, “as it is impossible to procure it [the painting] in any reasonable time, if the painter be allowed to shew his skill or do justice to my person, I shall therefore beg my readers patience, and present them with a true sketch of my figure in print.”

What a mystery!  What a puzzle!

As I move ahead with my efforts to solve the mystery, I have another confession to make:  I love the task of transcribing the Humourist essays—of sitting at my computer, typing away on the keyboard.

Typing.  I love it:  typing!  It’s not nearly as poetic as the suggestion that Anthony Hecht offers up for penetrating a mystery:  “saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.”  

Typing.  It’s probably more akin to what Carl Jung says about mysteries:

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”

In that sense, then, as I transcribe the Humourist’s essays—as I type them—my hands are helping me become familiar with the essence of his literary outpourings, character by character, letter by letter, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, essay by essay.  My hands are helping me become familiar with his style.  My hands are helping me see what he put in—and what he left out!

After I have typed one of his essays once or twice—actually, I typed his November 26, 1753, essay three times—I can say with some degree of certainty:  I know that essay well.

I know that essay even better because I have done what I always do with documents:  I checked the Readability Statistics.  So, here’s Clue Four.  Whoever he is, the readability statistics for the Humourist’s November 26, 1753, essay are as follows:

Counts

• Words:  444
• Characters:  2181
• Paragraphs:  20
• Sentences:  13

Averages

• Sentences per Paragraph:  1.3
• Words per Sentence:  24.6
• Characters per Word:  4.6

Readability

• Passive Sentences:  15%
• Flesch Reading Ease: 56.7
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level:  10.3

Admittedly, these readability statistics are skewed because the Humourist quotes other writers rather extensively in his first essay.  Nonetheless, it is a beginning.

As we move to future essays—and as I continue doing what I have begun doing—all the clues will converge, and I am certain that the Humourist himself will lead me to discovering who he is.

But I digress.  My scheme for sharing Humourist essays with you will be in the same fashion that he shared them with the world:  weekly.  This week, however, he did not publish an essay.  (His next one will appear on December 10.)

Therefore, as I contemplated my post for this week, I was intrigued by how intrigued my readers were by the mystery—by my efforts to solve this literary whodunit—and I was particularly smitten by “soyfig’s” comment:

“A different mystery has been solved.”

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