has its appropriate levities, its comedy side. We cannot "see it
clearly and see it whole," without recognizing a great many
absurdities which ought to be laughed at, a great deal of nonsense
which is a fair target for ridicule. The heaviest charge brought
against American humour is that it never keeps its target well in
view. We laugh, but we are not purged by laughter of our follies;
we jest, but our jests are apt to have a kitten's sportive
irresponsibility. The lawyer offers a witticism in place of an
argument, the diner-out tells an amusing story in lieu of
conversation. Even the clergyman does not disdain a joke, heedless
of Dr. Johnson's warning which should save him from that pitfall.
Smartness furnishes sufficient excuse for the impertinence of
children, and with purposeless satire the daily papers deride the
highest dignitaries of the land.
Yet while always to be reckoned with in life and letters, American
humour is not a powerful and consistent factor either for destruction
or for reform. It lacks, for the most part, a logical basis, and the
dignity of a supreme aim. Moliere's humour amounted to a philosophy
of life. He was wont to say that it was a difficult task to make
gentlefolk laugh; but he succeeded in making them laugh at that which
was laughable in themselves. He aimed his shafts at the fallacies
and the duplicities which his countrymen ardently cherished, and he
scorned the cheaper wit which contents itself with mocking at idols
already discredited. As a result, he purged society, not of the
follies that consumed it, but of the illusion that these follies were
noble, graceful, and wise. "We do not plough or sow for fools," says
a Russian proverb, "they grow of themselves"; but humour has
accomplished a mighty work if it helps us to see that a fool is a
fool, and not a prophet in the market-place. And if the man in the
market-place chances to be a prophet, his message is safe from
assault. No laughter can silence him, no ridicule weaken his words.
Carlyle's grim humour was also drilled into efficacy. He used it in
orderly fashion; he gave it force by a stern principle of repression.
He had (what wise man has not?) an honest respect for dulness, knowing
that a strong and free people argues best--as Mr. Bagehot puts
it--"in platoons." He had some measure of mercy for folly. But
against the whole complicated business of pretence, against the
pious, and respectable, and patriotic hypocrisies of a successful
civilization, he hurled his taunts with such true aim that it is not
too much to say there has been less real comfort and safety in lying
ever since.
These are victories worth recording, and there is a big battlefield
for American humour when it finds itself ready for the fray, when
it leaves off firing squibs, and settles down to a compelling
cannonade, when it aims less at the superficial incongruities of life,
and more at the deep-rooted delusions which rob us of fair fame. It
has done its best work in the field of political satire, where the
"Biglow Papers" hit hard in their day, where Nast's cartoons helped
to overthrow the Tweed dynasty, and where the indolent and luminous
genius of Mr. Dooley has widened our mental horizon. Mr. Dooley is
a philosopher, but his is the philosophy of the looker-on, of that
genuine unconcern which finds Saint George and the dragon to be both
a trifle ridiculous. He is always undisturbed, always illuminating,
and not infrequently amusing; but he anticipates the smiling
indifference with which those who come after us will look back upon
our enthusiasms and absurdities. Humour, as he sees it, is that
thrice blessed quality which enables us to laugh, when otherwise we
should be in danger of weeping. "We are ridiculous animals," observes
Horace Walpole unsympathetically, "and if angels have any fun in
their hearts, how we must divert them."
It is this clear-sighted, non-combative humour which Americans love
and prize, and the absence of which they reckon a heavy loss. Nor
do they always ask, "a loss to whom?" Charles Lamb said it was no
misfortune for a man to have a sulky temper. It was his friends who
were unfortunate. And so with the man who has no sense of humour.
He gets along very well without it. He is not aware that anything
is lacking. He is not mourning his lot. What loss there is, his
friends and neighbours bear. A man destitute of humour is apt to be
a formidable person, not subject to sudden deviations from his chosen
path, and incapable of frittering away his elementary forces by
pottering over both sides of a question. He is often to be respected,
sometimes to be feared, and always--if possible--to be avoided. His
are the qualities which distance enables us to recognize and value
at their worth. He fills his place in the scheme of creation; but
it is for us to see that his place is not next to ours at table, where
his unresponsiveness narrows the conversational area, and dulls the
contagious ardour of speech. He may add to the wisdom of the ages,
but he lessens the gayety of life.
Goodness and Gayety
"Can surly Virtue hope to find a friend?"--DR. JOHNSON.
Sir Leslie Stephen has recorded his conviction that a sense of humour,
being irreconcilable with some of the cardinal virtues, is lacking
in most good men. Father Faber asserted, on the contrary, that a sense
of humour is a great help in the religious life, and emphasized this
somewhat unusual point of view with the decisive statement: "Perhaps
nature does not contribute a greater help to grace than this."
Here are conflicting verdicts to be well considered. Sir Leslie
Stephen knew more about humour than did Father Faber; Father Faber
knew more about "grace" than did Sir Leslie Stephen; and both
disputants were widely acquainted with their fellow men. Sir Leslie
Stephen had a pretty wit of his own, but it may have lacked the
qualities which make for holiness. There was in it the element of
denial. He seldom entered the shrine where we worship our ideals in
secret. He stood outside, remarks Mr. Birrell cheerily, "with a pail
of cold water." Father Faber also possessed a vein of irony which
was the outcome of a priestly experience with the cherished foibles
of the world. He entered unbidden into the shrine where we worship
our illusions in secret, and chilled us with unwelcome truths. I know
of no harder experience than this. It takes time and trouble to
persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we
ought to do. We balance our spiritual accounts with care. We insert
glib phrases about duty into all our reckonings. There is nothing,
or next to nothing, which cannot, if adroitly catalogued, be
considered a duty; and it is this delicate mental adjustment which
is disturbed by Father Faber's ridicule. "Self-deceit," he
caustically observes, "seems to thrive on prayer, and to grow fat
on contemplation."
If a sense of humour forces us to be candid with ourselves, then it
can be reconciled, not only with the cardinal virtues--which are but
a chilly quartette--but with the flaming charities which have
consumed the souls of saints. The true humourist, objects Sir Leslie
Stephen, sees the world as a tragi-comedy, a Vanity Fair, in which
enthusiasm is out of place. But if the true humourist also sees
himself presiding, in the sacred name of duty, over a booth in Vanity
Fair, he may yet reach perfection. What Father Faber opposed so
strenuously were, not the vanities of the profane, of the openly and
cheerfully unregenerate; but the vanities of a devout and
fashionable congregation, making especial terms--by virtue of its
exalted station--with Providence. These were the people whom he
regarded all his priestly life with whimsical dismay. "Their
voluntary social arrangements," he wrote in "Spiritual
Conferences," "are the tyranny of circumstance, claiming our
tenderest pity, and to be managed like the work of a Xavier, or a
Vincent of Paul, which hardly left the saints time to pray. Their
sheer worldliness is to be considered as an interior trial, with all
manner of cloudy grand things to be said about it. They must avoid
uneasiness, for such great graces as theirs can grow only in calmness
and tranquillity."
This is irony rather than humour, but it implies a capacity to see
the tragi-comedy of the world, without necessarily losing the power
of enthusiasm. It also explains why Father Faber regarded an honest
sense of the ridiculous as a help to goodness. The man or woman who
is impervious to the absurd cannot well be stripped of self-delusion.
For him, for her, there is no shaft which wounds. The admirable advice
of Thomas a Kempis to keep away from people whom we desire to please,
and the quiet perfection of his warning to the censorious, "In
judging others, a man toileth in vain; for the most part he is
mistaken, and he easily sinneth; but in judging and scrutinizing
himself, he always laboureth with profit," can make their just appeal
only to the humorous sense. So, too, the counsel of Saint Francis
de Sales to the nuns who wanted to go barefooted, "Keep your shoes
and change your brains"; the cautious query of Pope Gregory the First,
concerning John the Faster, "Does he abstain even from the truth?"
Cardinal Newman's axiom, "It is never worth while to call whity-brown
white, for the sake of avoiding scandal"; and Father Faber's own
felicitous comment on religious "hedgers," "A moderation which
consists in taking immoderate liberties with God is hardly what the
Fathers of the Desert meant when they preached their crusade in
favour of discretion";--are all spoken to those hardy and humorous
souls who can bear to be honest with themselves.
The ardent reformer, intolerant of the ordinary processes of life,
the ardent philanthropist, intolerant of an imperfect civilization,
the ardent zealot, intolerant of man's unspiritual nature, are
seldom disposed to gayety. A noble impatience of spirit inclines them
to anger or to sadness. John Wesley, reformer, philanthropist,
zealot, and surpassingly great in all three characters, strangled
within his own breast the simple desire to be gay. He was a young
man when he formed the resolution, "to labour after continual
seriousness, not willingly indulging myself in the least levity of
behaviour, or in laughter,--no, not for a moment"; and for more than
fifty years he kept--probably with no great difficulty--this stern
resolve. The mediaeval saying, that laughter has sin for a father
and folly for a mother, would have meant to Wesley more than a figure
of speech. Nothing could rob him of a dry and bitter humour ("They
won't let me go to Bedlam," he wrote, "because they say I make the
inmates mad, nor into Newgate, because I make them wicked"); but
there was little in his creed or in the scenes of his labours to
promote cheerfulness of spirit.
This disciplining of nature, honest, erring human nature, which
could, if permitted, make out a fair case for itself, is not an
essential element of the evangelist's code. In the hands of men less
great than Wesley, it has been known to nullify the work of a lifetime.
The Lincolnshire farmer who, after listening to a sermon on Hell,
said to his wife, "Noa, Sally, it woant do. Noa constitootion could
stand it," expressed in his own fashion the healthy limit of
endurance. Our spiritual constitutions break under a pitiless strain.
When we read in the diary of Henry Alline, quoted by Dr. William James
in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," "On Wednesday the
twelfth I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to
be the means of excluding carnal mirth," we are not merely sorry for
the wedding guests, but beset by doubts as to their moral gain.
Why should Henry Martyn, that fervent young missionary who gave his
life for his cause with the straight-forward simplicity of a soldier,
have regretted so bitterly an occasional lapse into good spirits?
He was inhumanly serious, and he prayed by night and day to be saved
from his "besetting sin" of levity. He was consumed by the flame of
religious zeal, and he bewailed at grievous length, in his diary,
his "light, worldly spirit." He toiled unrestingly, taking no heed
of his own physical weakness, and he asked himself (when he had a
minute to spare) what would become of his soul, should he be struck
dead in a "careless mood." We have Mr. Birrell's word for it that
once, in an old book about India, he came across an after-dinner jest
of Henry Martyn's; but the idea was so incongruous that the startled
essayist was disposed to doubt the evidence of his senses. "There
must have been a mistake somewhere."
To such a man the world is not, and never can be, a tragi-comedy,
and laughter seems forever out of place. When a Madeira negress, a
good Christian after her benighted fashion, asked Martyn if the
English were ever baptized, he did not think the innocent question
funny, he thought it horrible. He found Saint Basil's writings
unsatisfactory, as lacking "evangelical truth"; and, could he have
heard this great doctor of the Church fling back a witticism in the
court of an angry magistrate, he would probably have felt more
doubtful than ever concerning the status of the early Fathers. It
is a relief to turn from the letters of Martyn, with their aloofness
from the cheerful currents of earth, to the letters of Bishop Heber,
who, albeit a missionary and a keen one, had always a laugh for the
absurdities which beset his wandering life. He could even tell with
relish the story of the drunken pedlar whom he met in Wales, and who
confided to him that, having sold all his wares, he was trying to
drink up the proceeds before he got home, lest his wife should take
the money away from him. Heber, using the argument which he felt would
be of most avail, tried to frighten the man into soberness by
picturing his wife's wrath; whereupon the adroit scamp replied that
he knew what _that_ would be, and had taken the precaution to have
his hair cut short, so that she could not get a grip on it. Martyn
could no more have chuckled over this depravity than he could have
chuckled over the fallen angels; but Saint Teresa could have laughed
outright, her wonderful, merry, infectious laugh; and have then
proceeded to plead, to scold, to threaten, to persuade, until a
chastened and repentant pedlar, money in hand, and some dim
promptings to goodness tugging at his heart, would have tramped
bravely and soberly home.
It is so much the custom to obliterate from religious memoirs all
vigorous human traits, all incidents which do not tend to edification,
and all contemporary criticism which cannot be smoothed into praise,
that what is left seems to the disheartened reader only a pale shadow
of life. It is hard to make any biography illustrate a theme, or prove
an argument; and the process by which such results are obtained is
so artificial as to be open to the charge of untruth. Because General
Havelock was a good Baptist as well as a good soldier, because he
expressed a belief in the efficacy of prayer (like Cromwell's "Trust
in God, and keep your powder dry "), and because he wrote to his wife,
when sent to the relief of Lucknow, "May God give me wisdom and
strength for the work!"--which, after all, was a natural enough thing
for any man to say,--he was made the subject of a memoir determinedly
and depressingly devout, in which his family letters were annotated
as though they were the epistles of Saint Paul. Yet this was the man
who, when Lucknow _was_ relieved, behaved as if nothing out of the
ordinary had happened to besiegers or besieged. "He shook hands with
me," wrote Lady Inglis in her journal, "and observed that he feared
we had suffered a great deal." That was all. He might have said as
much had the little garrison been incommoded by a spell of unusual
heat, or by an epidemic of measles.
As a matter of fact, piety is a by no means uncommon attribute of
soldiers, and there was no need on the part of the Reverend Mr. Brock,
who compiled these shadowy pages, to write as though General Havelock
had been a rare species of the genius military. We know that what
the English Puritans especially resented in Prince Rupert was his
insistence on regimental prayers. They could pardon his raids, his
breathless charges, his bewildering habit of appearing where he was
least expected or desired; but that he should usurp their own
especial prerogative of piety was more than they could bear. It is
probable that Rupert's own private petitions resembled the memorable
prayer offered by Sir Jacob Astley (a hardy old Cavalier who was both
devout and humorous) before the battle of Edgehill: "Oh, Lord, Thou
knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou
forget me. March on, boys!"
If it were not for a few illuminating anecdotes, and the thrice
blessed custom of letter writing, we should never know what manner
of thing human goodness, exalted human goodness, is; and so acquiesce
ignorantly in Sir Leslie Stephen's judgment. The sinners of the world
stand out clear and distinct, full of vitality, and of an engaging
candour. The saints of Heaven shine dimly through a nebulous haze
of hagiology. They are embodiments of inaccessible virtues, as
remote from us and from our neighbours as if they had lived on another
planet. There is no more use in asking us to imitate these
incomprehensible creatures than there would be in asking us to climb
by easy stages to the moon. Without some common denominator, sinner
and saint are as aloof from each other as sinner and archangel.
Without some clue to the saint's spiritual identity, the record of
his labours and hardships, fasts, visions, and miracles, offers
nothing more helpful than bewilderment. We may be edified or we may
be sceptical, according to our temperament and training; but a
profound unconcern devitalizes both scepticism and edification.
What have we mortals in common with these perfected prodigies of
grace?
It was Cardinal Newman who first entered a protest against "minced"
saints, against the pious and popular custom of chopping up human
records into lessons for the devout. He took exception to the
hagiological licence which assigns lofty motives to trivial actions.
"The saint from humility made no reply." "The saint was silent out
of compassion for the ignorance of the speaker." He invited us to
approach the Fathers of the Church in their unguarded moments, in
their ordinary avocations, in their moods of gayety and depression;
and, when we accepted the invitation, these figures, lofty and remote,
became imbued with life. It is one thing to know that Saint Chrysostom
retired at twenty-three to a monastery near Antioch, and there spent
six years in seclusion and study. It is another and more enlightening
thing to be made aware, through the medium of his own letters, that
he took this step with reasonable doubts and misgivings,--doubts
which extended to the freshness of the monastery bread, misgivings
which concerned themselves with the sweetness of the monastery oil.
And when we read these candid expressions of anxiety, Saint
Chrysostom, by virtue of his healthy young appetite, and his distaste
(which any poor sinner can share) for rancid oil, becomes a man and
a brother. It is yet more consoling to know that when well advanced
in sainthood, when old, austere, exiled, and suffering many
privations for conscience' sake, Chrysostom was still disposed to
be a trifle fastidious about his bread. He writes from Caesarea to
Theodora that he has at last found clean water to drink, and bread
which can be chewed. "Moreover, I no longer wash myself in broken
crockery, but have contrived some sort of bath; also I have a bed
to which I can confine myself."
If Saint Chrysostom possessed, according to Newman, a cheerful
temper, and "a sunniness of mind all his own," Saint Gregory of
Nazianzus was a fair humourist, and Saint Basil was a wit. "Pensive
playfulness" is Newman's phrase for Basil, but there was a speed
about his retorts which did not always savour of pensiveness. When
the furious governor of Pontus threatened to tear out his liver,
Basil, a confirmed invalid, replied suavely, "It is a kind intention.
My liver, as at present located, has given me nothing but
uneasiness."
To Gregory, Basil was not only guide, philosopher, and friend; but
also a cherished target for his jests. It has been wisely said that
we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh. Gregory loved
Basil, revered him, and laughed at him. Does Basil complain, not
unnaturally, that Tiberina is cold, damp, and muddy, Gregory writes
to him unsympathetically that he is a "clean-footed, tip-toeing,
capering man." Does Basil promise a visit, Gregory sends word to
Amphilochus that he must have some fine pot-herbs, "lest Basil should
be hungry and cross." Does Gregory visit Basil in his solitude at
Pontus, he expresses in no measured terms his sense of the discomfort
he endures. It would be hard to find, in all the annals of
correspondence, a letter written with a more laudable and
well-defined intention of teasing its recipient, than the one
dispatched to Basil by Gregory after he has made good his escape from
the austerities of his friend's housekeeping.
"I have remembrance of the bread and of the broth,--so they were
named,--and shall remember them; how my teeth stuck in your hunches,
and lifted and heaved themselves as out of paste. You, indeed, will
set it out in tragic style, taking a sublime tone from your own
sufferings; but for me, unless that true Lady Bountiful, your mother,
had rescued me quickly, showing herself in my need like a haven to
the tempest-tossed, I had been dead long ago, getting myself little
honour, though much pity, from Pontic hospitality."
This is not precisely the tone in which the lives of the saints (of
any saints of any creeds) are written. Therefore is it better to read
what the saints say for themselves than what has been said about them.
This is not precisely the point of view which is presented unctuously
for our consideration, yet it makes all other points of view
intelligible. It is contrary to human nature to court privations.
We know that the saints did court them, and valued them as avenues
to grace. It is in accord with human nature to meet privations
cheerfully, and with a whimsical sense of discomfiture. When we hear
the echo of a saint's laughter ringing down the centuries, we have
a clue to his identity; not to his whole and heroic self, but to that
portion of him which we can best understand, and with which we claim
some humble brotherhood. We ourselves are not hunting assiduously
for hardships; but which one of us has not summoned up courage enough
to laugh in the face of disaster?
There is no reading less conducive to good spirits than the recitals
of missionaries, or than such pitiless records as those compiled by
Dr. Thomas William Marshall in his two portly volumes on "Christian
Missions." The heathen, as portrayed by Dr. Marshall, do not in the
least resemble the heathen made familiar to us by the hymns and tracts
of our infancy. So far from calling on us to deliver their land "from
error's chain," they mete out prompt and cruel death to their
deliverers. So far from thirsting for Gospel truths, they thirst for
the blood of the intruders. This is frankly discouraging, and we
could never read so many pages of disagreeable happenings, were it
not for the gayety of the letters which Dr. Marshall quotes, and which
deal less in heroics than in pleasantries. Such men as Bishop Berneux,
the Abbe Retord, and Father Feron, missionaries in Cochin-China and
Corea, all possessed that protective sense of humour which kept up
their spirits and their enthusiasms. Father Feron, for example,
hidden away in the "Valley of the Pines," six hundred miles from
safety, writes to his sister in the autumn of 1858:--