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 phenix. 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 Cocquecigrues are in possession of the
land, and if they are tenants exceedingly hard to evict, it is
because of the encouragement they receive from those to whom we
innocently turn for help: from the poets, novelists and men of
letters whose 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 somber 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'etre_. 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 r
eading 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 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 gaiety, 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 partizan. 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 halfpennyworth of bread to his own noble ocean of sack, and
why should we be forever trying to force it into prominence? When
Charlotte Bronte 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 Bronte 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 Bronte's admirable work,
every limitation in 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 surprising lightness of Miss Austen's touch as she rounds
and completes her immortal clerical portraits. Miss Bronte 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 schoolgirls
"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 schoolgirls 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 Bronte, 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, 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 Bronte'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 Bronte
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 Oarlyle,
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 dulness; and while dulness 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 Elsmer
e." 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 gaiety 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 Reverend 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
Romance 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 Reverend Doctors 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 wind 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 dulness, 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 dulness, 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 dulness, 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
preeminence, 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 everyday
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 schoolgirl, when reproached for wet feet or some such youthful
indiscretion, excuse herself gaily 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 Doctor 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 Doctor 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 he 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 these
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 mirth, 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.