More than half a dozen years have passed since Mr. Andrew Lang,
startled for once out of his customary light-heartedness, asked
himself, and his readers, and the ghost of Charles Dickens--all three
powerless to answer--whether the dismal seriousness of the present
day was going to last forever; or whether, when the great wave of
earnestness had rippled over our heads, we would pluck up heart to be
merry and, if needs be, foolish once again. Not that mirth and folly
are in any degree synonymous, as of old; for the merry fool, too
scarce, alas, even in the times when Jacke of Dover hunted for him in
the highways, has since then grown to be rarer than a phœnix. He has
carried his cap and bells, and jests and laughter, elsewhere, and has
left us to the mercies of the serious fool, who is by no means so
seductive a companion. If the Cocquecigruës are in possession of the
land, and if they are tenants exceedingly hard to evict, it is because
of the connivance and encouragement they receive from those to whom we
innocently turn for help: from the poets, and novelists, and men of
letters, whose plain duty it is to brighten and make glad our days.
“It is obvious,” sighs Mr. Birrell dejectedly, “that many people
appear to like a drab-colored world, hung around with dusky shreds of
philosophy;” but it is more obvious still that, whether they like it
or not, the drapings grow a trifle dingier every year, and that no
one seems to have the courage to tack up something gay. What is much
worse, even those bits of wanton color which have rested generations
of weary eyes are being rapidly obscured by sombre and intricate
scroll-work, warranted to oppress and fatigue. The great masterpieces
of humor, which have kept men young by laughter, are being tried in
the courts of an orthodox morality, and found lamentably wanting; or
else, by way of giving them another chance, they are being subjected
to the _peine forte et dure_ of modern analysis, and are revealing
hideous and melancholy meanings in the process. I have always believed
that Hudibras owes its chilly treatment at the hands of critics--with
the single and most genial exception of Sainte-Beuve--to the absolute
impossibility of twisting it into something serious. Strive as we
may, we cannot put a new construction on those vigorous old jokes,
and to be simply and barefacedly amusing is no longer considered a
sufficient _raison d’être_. It is the most significant token of our
ever-increasing “sense of moral responsibility in literature” that
we should be always trying to graft our own conscientious purposes
upon those authors who, happily for themselves, lived and died before
virtue, colliding desperately with cakes and ale, had imposed such
depressing obligations.
“Don Quixote,” says Mr. Shorthouse with unctuous gravity, “will come
in time to be recognized as one of the saddest books ever written;”
and, if the critics keep on expounding it much longer, I truly fear it
will. It may be urged that Cervantes himself was low enough to think
it exceedingly funny; but then one advantage of our new and keener
insight into literature is to prove to us how indifferently great
authors understood their own masterpieces. Shakespeare, we are told,
knew comparatively little about Hamlet, and he is to be congratulated
on his limitations. Defoe would hardly recognize Robinson Crusoe as
“a picture of civilization,” having innocently supposed it to be
quite the reverse; and he would be as amazed as we are to learn from
Mr. Frederic Harrison that his book contains “more psychology, more
political economy, and more anthropology than are to be found in many
elaborate treatises on these especial subjects,”--blighting words which
I would not even venture to quote if I thought that any boy would
chance to read them, and so have one of the pleasures of his young life
destroyed. As for Don Quixote, which its author persisted in regarding
with such misplaced levity, it has passed through many bewildering
vicissitudes. It has figured bravely as a satire on the Duke of
Lerma, on Charles V., on Philip II., on Ignatius Loyola,--Cervantes
was the most devout of Catholics,--and on the Inquisition, which,
fortunately, did not think so. In fact, there is little or nothing
which it has not meant in its time; and now, having attained that
deep spiritual inwardness which we have been recently told is lacking
in poor Goldsmith, we are requested by Mr. Shorthouse to refrain
from all brutal laughter, but, with a shadowy smile and a profound
seriousness, to attune ourselves to the proper state of receptivity.
Old-fashioned, coarse-minded people may perhaps ask, “But if we are not
to laugh at Don Quixote, at whom are we, please, to laugh?”--a question
which I, for one, would hardly dare to answer. Only, after reading
the following curious sentence, extracted from a lately published
volume of criticism, I confess to finding myself in a state of mental
perplexity, utterly alien to mirth. “How much happier,” its author
sternly reminds us, “was poor Don Quixote in his energetic career, in
his earnest redress of wrong, and in his ultimate triumph over self,
than he could have been in the gnawing reproach and spiritual stigma
which a yielding to weakness never failingly entails!” Beyond this
point it would be hard to go. Were these things really spoken of the
“ingenious gentleman” of La Mancha, or of John Howard, or George
Peabody, or perhaps Elizabeth Fry,--or is there no longer such a thing
as a recognized absurdity in the world?
Another gloomy indication of the departure of humor from our midst is
the tendency of philosophical writers to prove by analysis that, if
they are not familiar with the thing itself, they at least know of what
it should consist. Mr. Shorthouse’s depressing views about Don Quixote
are merely introduced as illustrating a very scholarly and comfortless
paper on the subtle qualities of mirth. No one could deal more
gracefully and less humorously with his topic than does Mr. Shorthouse,
and we are compelled to pause every now and then and reassure ourselves
as to the subject matter of his eloquence. Professor Everett has more
recently and more cheerfully defined for us the Philosophy of the
Comic, in a way which, if it does not add to our gayety, cannot be
accused of plunging us deliberately into gloom. He thinks, indeed,--and
small wonder,--that there is “a genuine difficulty in distinguishing
between the comic and the tragic,” and that what we need is some
formula which shall accurately interpret the precise qualities of each;
and he is disposed to illustrate his theory by dwelling on the tragic
side of Falstaff, which is, of all injuries, the grimmest and hardest
to forgive. Falstaff is now the forlorn hope of those who love to
laugh, and when he is taken away from us, as soon, alas! he will be,
and sleeps with Don Quixote in the “dull cold marble” of an orthodox
sobriety, how shall we make merry our souls? Mr. George Radford, who
enriched the first volume of “Obiter Dicta” with such a loving study of
the fat-witted old knight, tells us reassuringly that by laughter man
is distinguished from the beasts, though the cares and sorrows of life
have all but deprived him of this elevating grace, and degraded him
into a brutal solemnity. Then comes along a rare genius like Falstaff,
who restores the power of laughter, and transforms the stolid brute
once more into a man, and who accordingly has the highest claim to our
grateful and affectionate regard. That there are those who persist
in looking upon him as a selfish and worthless fellow is, from Mr.
Radford’s point of view, a sorrowful instance of human thanklessness
and perversity. But this I take to be the enamored and exaggerated
language of a too faithful partisan. Morally speaking, Falstaff has not
a leg to stand upon, and there _is_ a tragic element lurking always
amid the fun. But, seen in the broad sunlight of his transcendent
humor, this shadow is as the half-pennyworth of bread to his own noble
ocean of sack, and why should we be forever trying to force it into
prominence? When Charlotte Brontë advised her friend, Ellen Nussey,
to read none of Shakespeare’s comedies, she was not beguiled for a
moment into regarding them as serious and melancholy lessons of life;
but with uncompromising directness put them down as mere improper
plays, the amusing qualities of which were insufficient to excuse their
coarseness, and which were manifestly unfit for the “gentle Ellen’s”
eyes.
In fact, humor would at all times have been the poorest excuse to
offer to Miss Brontë for any form of moral dereliction, for it was
the one quality she lacked herself, and failed to tolerate in others.
Sam Weller was apparently as obnoxious to her as was Falstaff,
for she would not even consent to meet Dickens, when she was being
lionized in London society,--a degree of abstemiousness on her part
which it is disheartening to contemplate. It does not seem too
much to say that every shortcoming in Charlotte Brontë’s admirable
work, every limitation of her splendid genius, arose primarily from
her want of humor. Her severities of judgment--and who more severe
than she?--were due to the same melancholy cause; for humor is the
kindliest thing alive. Compare the harshness with which she handles
her hapless curates, and the comparative crudity of her treatment,
with the surpassing lightness of Miss Austen’s touch as she rounds
and completes her immortal clerical portraits. Miss Brontë tells us,
in one of her letters, that she regarded _all_ curates as “highly
uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex,”
just as she found _all_ the Belgian school-girls “cold, selfish,
animal, and inferior.” But to Miss Austen’s keen and friendly eye the
narrowest of clergymen was not wholly uninteresting, the most inferior
of school-girls not without some claim to our consideration; even the
coarseness of the male sex was far from vexing her maidenly serenity,
probably because she was unacquainted with the Rochester type. Mr.
Elton is certainly narrow, Mary Bennet extremely inferior; but their
authoress only laughs at them softly, with a quiet tolerance, and
a good-natured sense of amusement at their follies. It was little
wonder that Charlotte Brontë, who had at all times the courage of her
convictions, could not, and would not, read Jane Austen’s novels. “They
have not got story enough for me,” she boldly affirmed. “I don’t want
my blood curdled, but I like to have it stirred. Miss Austen strikes
me as milk-and-watery, and, to say truth, as dull.” Of course she
did! How was a woman, whose ideas of after-dinner conversation are
embodied in the amazing language of Baroness Ingram and her titled
friends, to appreciate the delicious, sleepy small talk, in “Sense
and Sensibility,” about the respective heights of the respective
grandchildren? It is to Miss Brontë’s abiding lack of humor that we
owe such stately caricatures as Blanche Ingram, and all the high-born,
ill-bred company who gather in Thornfield Hall, like a group fresh
from Madame Tussaud’s ingenious workshop, and against whose waxen
unreality Jane Eyre and Rochester, alive to their very finger-tips,
contrast like twin sparks of fire. It was her lack of humor, too, which
beguiled her into asserting that the forty “wicked, sophistical, and
immoral French novels,” which found their way down to lonely Haworth,
gave her “a thorough idea of France and Paris,”--alas, poor misjudged
France!--and which made her think Thackeray very nearly as wicked,
sophistical, and immoral as the French novels. Even her dislike for
children was probably due to the same irremediable misfortune; for the
humors of children are the only redeeming points amid their general
naughtiness, and vexing misbehavior. Mr. Swinburne, guiltless himself
of any jocose tendencies, has made the unique discovery that Charlotte
Brontë strongly resembles Cervantes, and that Paul Emanuel is a modern
counterpart of Don Quixote; and well it is for our poet that the
irascible little professor never heard him hint at such a similarity.
Surely, to use one of Mr. Swinburne’s own incomparable expressions,
the parallel is no better than a “subsimious absurdity.”
On the other hand, we are told that Miss Austen owed her lively sense
of humor to her habit of dissociating the follies of mankind from
any rigid standard of right and wrong; which means, I suppose, that
she never dreamed she had a mission. Nowadays, indeed, no writer is
without one. We cannot even read a paper upon gypsies, and not become
aware that its author is deeply imbued with a sense of his personal
responsibility for these agreeable rascals, whom he insists upon our
taking seriously,--as if we wanted to have anything to do with them on
such terms! “Since the time of Carlyle,” says Mr. Bagehot, “earnestness
has been a favorite virtue in literature;” but Carlyle, though sharing
largely in that profound melancholy which he declared to be the
basis of every English soul, and though he was unfortunate enough to
think Pickwick sad trash, had nevertheless a grim and eloquent humor
of his own. With him, at least, earnestness never degenerated into
dullness; and while dullness may be, as he unhesitatingly affirmed,
the first requisite for a great and free people, yet a too heavy
percentage of this valuable quality is fatal to the sprightly grace
of literature. “In our times,” said an old Scotchwoman, “there’s
fully mony modern principles,” and the first of these seems to be
the substitution of a serious and critical discernment for the
light-hearted sympathy of former days. Our grandfathers cried a
little and laughed a good deal over their books, without the smallest
sense of anxiety or responsibility in the matter; but we are called
on repeatedly to face problems which we would rather let alone, to
dive dismally into motives, to trace subtle connections, to analyze
uncomfortable sensations, and to exercise in all cases a discreet and
conscientious severity, when what we really want and need is half
an hour’s amusement. There is no stronger proof of the great change
that has swept over mankind than the sight of a nation which used to
chuckle over “Tom Jones” absorbing a few years ago countless editions
of “Robert Elsmere.” What is droller still is that the people who read
“Robert Elsmere” would think it wrong to enjoy “Tom Jones,” and that
the people who enjoyed “Tom Jones” would have thought it wrong to read
“Robert Elsmere;” and that the people who, wishing to be on the safe
side of virtue, think it wrong to read either, are scorned greatly as
lacking true moral discrimination.
Now he would be a brave man who would undertake to defend the utterly
indefensible literature of the past. Where it was most humorous it
was also most coarse, wanton, and cruel; but, in banishing these
objectionable qualities, we have effectually contrived to rid ourselves
of the humor as well, and with it we have lost one of the safest
instincts of our souls. Any book which serves to lower the sum of
human gayety is a moral delinquent; and instead of coddling it into
universal notice, and growing owlish in its gloom, we should put it
briskly aside in favor of brighter and pleasanter things. When Father
Faber said that there was no greater help to a religious life than a
keen sense of the ridiculous, he startled a number of pious people,
yet what a luminous and cordial message it was to help us on our way!
Mr. Birrell has recorded the extraordinary delight with which he came
across some after-dinner sally of the Rev. Henry Martyn’s; for the
very thought of that ardent and fiery spirit relaxing into pleasantries
over the nuts and wine made him appear like an actual fellow-being of
our own. It is with the same feeling intensified, as I have already
noted, that we read some of the letters of the early fathers,--those
grave and hallowed figures seen through a mist of centuries,--and find
them jesting at one another in the gayest and least sacerdotal manner
imaginable. “Who could tell a story with more wit, who could joke so
pleasantly?” sighs St. Gregory of Nazienzen of his friend St. Basil,
remembering doubtless with a heavy heart the shafts of good-humored
raillery that had brightened their lifelong intercourse. With what
kindly and loving zest does Gregory, himself the most austere of men,
mock at Basil’s asceticism,--at those “sad and hungry banquets” of
which he was invited to partake, those “ungarden-like gardens, void
of pot-herbs,” in which he was expected to dig! With what delightful
alacrity does Basil vindicate his reputation for humor by making a
most excellent joke in court, for the benefit of a brutal magistrate
who fiercely threatened to tear out his liver! “Your intention is a
benevolent one,” said the saint, who had been for years a confirmed
invalid. “Where it is now located, it has given me nothing but
trouble.” Surely, as we read such an anecdote as this, we share in the
curious sensation experienced by little Tom Tulliver, when, by dint of
Maggie’s repeated questions, he began slowly to understand that the
Romans had once been real men, who were happy enough to speak their
own language without any previous introduction to the Eton grammar. In
like manner, when we come to realize that the fathers of the primitive
Church enjoyed their quips and cranks and jests as much as do Mr.
Trollope’s jolly deans or vicars, we feel we have at last grasped the
secret of their identity, and we appreciate the force of Father Faber’s
appeal to the frank spirit of a wholesome mirth.
Perhaps one reason for the scanty tolerance that humor receives at the
hands of the disaffected is because of the rather selfish way in which
the initiated enjoy their fun; for there is always a secret irritation
about a laugh in which we cannot join. Mr. George Saintsbury is plainly
of this way of thinking, and, being blessed beyond his fellows with
a love for all that is jovial, he speaks from out of the richness of
his experience. “Those who have a sense of humor,” he says, “instead
of being quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a little too apt to
celebrate their joy in the face of the afflicted ones who have it not;
and the afflicted ones only follow a general law in protesting that
it is a very worthless thing, if not a complete humbug.” This spirit
of exclusiveness on the one side and of irascibility on the other
may be greatly deplored, but who is there among us, I wonder, wholly
innocent of blame? Mr. Saintsbury himself confesses to a silent chuckle
of delight when he thinks of the dimly veiled censoriousness with
which Peacock’s inimitable humor has been received by one half of the
reading world. In other words, his enjoyment of the Rev. Drs. Folliott
and Opimian is sensibly increased by the reflection that a great
many worthy people, even among his own acquaintances, are, by some
mysterious law of their being, debarred from any share in his pleasure.
Yet surely we need not be so niggardly in this matter. There is wit
enough in those two reverend gentlemen to go all around the living
earth, and leave plenty for generations now unborn. Each might say with
Juliet,--
“The more I give to thee,
The more I have;”
for wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its
qualities. When Peacock describes a country gentleman’s range of ideas
as “nearly commensurate with that of the great king Nebuchadnezzar when
he was turned out to grass,” he affords us a happy illustration of the
eternal fitness of humor, for there can hardly come a time when such an
apt comparison will fail to point its meaning.
Mr. Birrell is quite as selfish in his felicity as Mr. Saintsbury, and
perfectly frank in acknowledging it. He dwells rapturously over certain
well-loved pages of “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Mansfield Park,” and
then deliberately adds, “When an admirer of Miss Austen reads these
familiar passages, the smile of satisfaction, betraying the deep inward
peace they never fail to beget, widens, like ‘a circle in the water,’
as he remembers (and he is always careful to remember) how his dearest
friend, who has been so successful in life, can no more read Miss
Austen than he can read the Moabitish Stone.” The same peculiarity is
noticeable in the more ardent lovers of Charles Lamb. They seem to want
him all to themselves, look askance upon any fellow-being who ventures
to assert a modest preference for their idol, and brighten visibly
when some ponderous critic declares the Letters to be sad stuff, and
not worth half the exasperating nonsense talked about them. Yet Lamb
flung his good things to the winds with characteristic prodigality,
little recking by whom or in what spirit they were received. How many
witticisms, I wonder, were roared into the deaf ears of old Thomas
Westwood, who heard them not, alas, but who laughed all the same, out
of pure sociability, and with a pleasant sense that something funny
had been said! And what of that ill-fated pun which Lamb, in a moment
of deplorable abstraction, let fall at a funeral, to the surprise
and consternation of the mourners? Surely a man who could joke at a
funeral never meant his pleasantries to be hoarded up for the benefit
of an initiated few, but would gladly see them the property of all
living men; ay, and of all dead men, too, were such a distribution
possible. “Damn the age! I will write for antiquity!” he exclaimed,
with not unnatural heat, when the “Gypsy’s Malison” was rejected by the
ingenious editors of the “Gem,” on the ground that it would “shock all
mothers;” and even this expression, uttered with pardonable irritation,
manifests no solicitude for a narrow and esoteric audience.
“Wit is useful for everything, but sufficient for nothing,” says
Amiel, who probably felt he needed some excuse for burying so much of
his Gallic sprightliness in Teutonic gloom; and dullness, it must be
admitted, has the distinct advantage of being useful for everybody,
and sufficient for nearly everybody as well. Nothing, we are told,
is more rational than _ennui_; and Mr. Bagehot, contemplating the
“grave files of speechless men” who have always represented the
English land, exults more openly and energetically even than Carlyle
in the saving dullness, the superb impenetrability, which stamps the
Englishman, as it stamped the Roman, with the sign-manual of patient
strength. Stupidity, he reminds us, is not folly, and moreover it
often insures a valuable consistency. “‘What I says is this here,
as I was a-saying yesterday,’ is the average Englishman’s notion of
historical eloquence and habitual discretion.” But Mr. Bagehot could
well afford to trifle thus coyly with dullness, because he knew it only
theoretically and as a dispassionate observer. His own roof-tree is
free from the blighting presence; his own pages are guiltless of the
leaden touch. It has been well said that an ordinary mortal might live
for a twelvemonth like a gentleman on Hazlitt’s ideas; but he might,
if he were clever, shine all his life long with the reflected splendor
of Mr. Bagehot’s wit, and be thought to give forth a very respectable
illumination. There is a telling quality in every stroke; a pitiless
dexterity that drives the weapon, like a fairy’s arrow, straight to
some vital point. When we read that “of all pursuits ever invented
by man for separating the faculty of argument from the capacity of
belief, the art of debating is probably the most effective,” we feel
that an unwelcome statement has been expressed with Mephistophelian
coolness; and remembering that these words were uttered before Mr.
Gladstone had attained his parliamentary preëminence, we have but
another proof of the imperishable accuracy of wit. Only say a clever
thing, and mankind will go on forever furnishing living illustrations
of its truth. It was Thurlow who originally remarked that “companies
have neither bodies to kick nor souls to lose,” and the jest fits in
so aptly with our every-day humors and experiences that I have heard
men attribute it casually to their friends, thinking, perhaps, that
it must have been born in these times of giant corporations, of city
railroads, and of trusts. What a gap between Queen Victoria and Queen
Bess, what a thorough and far-reaching change in everything that goes
to make up the life and habits of men; and yet Shakespeare’s fine
strokes of humor have become so fitted to our common speech that the
very unconsciousness with which we apply them proves how they tally
with our modern emotions and opportunities. Lesser lights burn quite
as steadily. Pope and Goldsmith reappear on the lips of people whose
knowledge of the “Essay on Man” is of the very haziest character,
and whose acquaintance with “She Stoops to Conquer” is confined
exclusively to Mr. Abbey’s graceful illustrations. Not very long ago
I heard a bright school-girl, when reproached for wet feet or some
such youthful indiscretion, excuse herself gayly on the plea that she
was “bullying Nature;” and, knowing that the child was but modestly
addicted to her books, I wondered how many of Dr. Holmes’s trenchant
sayings have become a heritage in our households, detached often from
their original kinship, and seeming like the rightful property of
every one who utters them. It is an amusing, barefaced, witless sort
of robbery, yet surely not without its compensations; for it must be a
pleasant thing to reflect in old age that the general murkiness of life
has been lit up here and there by sparks struck from one’s youthful
fire, and that these sparks, though they wander occasionally masterless
as will-o’-the-wisps, are destined never to go out.
Are destined never to go out! In its vitality lies the supreme
excellence of humor. Whatever has “wit enough to keep it sweet” defies
corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward
and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at
our hands. It is an old trick with dull novelists to describe their
characters as being exceptionally brilliant people, and to trust that
we will take their word for it, and ask no further proof. Every one
remembers how Lord Beaconsfield would tell us that a cardinal could
“sparkle with anecdote and blaze with repartee;” and how utterly
destitute of sparkle or blaze were the specimens of his eminence’s
conversation with which we were subsequently favored. Those “lively
dinners” in “Endymion” and “Lothair,” at which we were assured the
brightest minds in England loved to gather, became mere Barmecide
feasts when reported to us without a single amusing remark; such
waifs and strays of conversation as reached our ears being of the
dreariest and most fatuous description. It is not so with the real
masters of their craft. Mr. Peacock does not stop to explain to us
that Dr. Folliott is witty. The reverend gentleman opens his mouth
and acquaints us with the fact himself. There is no need for George
Eliot to expatiate on Mrs. Poyser’s humor. Five minutes of that lady’s
society is amply sufficient for the revelation. We do not even hear
Mr. Poyser and the rest of the family enlarging delightedly on the
subject, as do all of Lawyer Putney’s friends, in Mr. Howells’s story,
“Annie Kilburn;” and yet even the united testimony of Hatboro’ fails
to clear up our lingering doubts concerning Mr. Putney’s wit. The dull
people of that soporific town are really and truly and realistically
dull. There is no mistaking them. The stamp of veracity is upon every
brow. They pay morning calls, and we listen to their conversation
with a dreamy impression that we have heard it all many times before,
and that the ghosts of our own morning calls are revisiting us, not
in the glimpses of the moon, but in Mr. Howells’s decorous and quiet
pages. That curious conviction that we have formerly passed through a
precisely similar experience is strong upon us as we read, and it is
the most emphatic testimony to the novelist’s peculiar skill. But there
is none of this instantaneous acquiescence in Mr. Putney’s wit; for
although he does make one very nice little joke, it is hardly enough
to flavor all his conversation, which is for the most part rather
unwholesome than humorous. The only way to elucidate him is to suppose
that Mr. Howells, in sardonic mood, wishes to show us that if a man
be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his
general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him
with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand,
lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness. How many of
us know these exceptionally brilliant lawyers, doctors, politicians,
and journalists, who bear a charmed reputation, based exclusively upon
their inebriety, and who take good care not to imperil it by too long
a relapse into the mortifying self-revelations of soberness! And what
wrong has been done to the honored name of humor by these pretentious
rascals! We do not love Falstaff because he is drunk; we do not admire
Becky Sharp because she is wicked. Drunkenness and wickedness are
things easy of imitation; yet all the sack in Christendom could not
beget us another Falstaff,--though Seithenyn ap Seithyn comes very near
to the incomparable model,--and all the wickedness in the world could
not fashion us a second Becky Sharp. There are too many dull topers
and stupid sinners among mankind to admit of any uncertainty on those
points.
Bishop Burnet, in describing Lord Halifax, tells us, with thinly veiled
disapprobation, that he was “a man of fine and ready wit, full of life,
and very pleasant, but much turned to satire. His imagination was too
hard for his judgment, and a severe jest took more with him than all
arguments whatever.” Yet this was the first statesman of his age,
and one whose clear and tranquil vision penetrated so far beyond the
turbulent, troubled times he lived in, that men looked askance upon a
power they but dimly understood. The sturdy “Trimmer,” who would be
bullied neither by king nor commons, who would “speak his mind and not
be hanged as long as there was law in England,” must have turned with
infinite relief from the horrible medley of plots and counterplots,
from the ugly images of Oates and Dangerfield, from the scaffolds
of Stafford and Russell and Sidney, from the Bloody Circuit and the
massacre of Glencoe, from the false smiles of princes and the howling
arrogance of the mob, to any jest, however “severe,” which would
restore to him his cold and fastidious serenity, and keep his judgment
and his good temper unimpaired. “Ridicule is the test of truth,”
said Hazlitt, and it is a test which Halifax remorselessly applied,
and which would not be without its uses to the Trimmer of to-day, in
whom this adjusting sense is lamentably lacking. For humor distorts
nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.
What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries
of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the
ringing death-knell of a laugh! What healthy exultation, what genial
warmth, what loyal brotherhood of mirth, attends the friendly sound!
Yet in labeling our life and literature, as the Danes labeled their
Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, “Not for amusement merely,” we have pushed
one step further, and the legend too often stands, “Not for amusement
at all.” Life is no laughing matter, we are told, which is true;
and, what is still more dismal to contemplate, books are no laughing
matters, either. Only now and then some gay, defiant rebel, like Mr.
Saintsbury, flaunts the old flag, hums a bar of “Blue Bonnets over
the Border,” and ruffles the quiet waters of our souls by hinting that
this age of Apollinaris and of lectures is at fault, and that it has
produced nothing which can vie as literature with the products of the
ages of wine and song.