Laughter, though never censured yet as sin,
* * * * *
Is half immoral, be it much indulged;
By venting spleen, or dissipating thought,
It shows a scorner, or it makes a fool;
And sins, as hurting others or ourselves.
* * * * *
Yet would'st thou laugh (but at thine own expense),
This counsel strange should I presume to give--
"Retire, and read thy Bible, to be gay."
With shame I confess it, Dr. Young's "Night Thoughts" have given me as
many hearty laughs as any humorous book I ever read.
Men of one idea,--that is, who have one idea at a time,--men who
accomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, are
inevitably destitute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be
great and noble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversity
of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a
single idea, and that a small and rickety one--some seven months' child
of thought--that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to
the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no
satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if
Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For
example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy
to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two
hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick
Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great
antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in
Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person
who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm,
the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine
to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm
likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would
have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the
spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an
epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"
exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's
axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable
satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I
have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks,
Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never
succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the
collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus
unconsciously by our passive enthusiast?
I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see
certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of
the comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without
laughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the _haruspex haruspicem_)
and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secret
I will keep yours." In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be
implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body
and soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm
would lead us an endless dance.
The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of one
idea--for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two. He is the
universal disenchanter. He makes himself quite as much the subject of
ironical study as his neighbor. Is he inclined to fancy himself a great
poet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sit
down because a certain part of him was made of glass, and muses
smilingly, "There are many forms of hypochondria." This duality in his
mind which constitutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of his
character. He is futile in action because in every path he is confronted
by the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusion
that nothing is very much worth the while. If he be independent of
exertion, his life commonly runs to waste. If he turn author, it is
commonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and "Don Quixote" was
the fruit of a debtors' prison.
It seems to be an instinct of human nature to analyze, to define, and to
classify. We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away in
the mind, and feel as if we knew them better when we have named them.
And so to a certain extent we do. The mere naming of things by their
appearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom;
and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combines
appearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the senses
by impression, is poetry. A great part of criticism is scientific, but
as the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possible
in this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far as
that, at some kind of classification that may help us toward that
excellent property--compactness of mind.
Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodness
produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say that
this was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is there
in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne,
Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic of
all of them. Ben Jonson says that
When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
In their constructions all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humor.
But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,--of a good
subject for the humorist,--such as Don Quixote, for example.
Humor--taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous,
and to give it expression--seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.
Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused
through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great
comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their
faces, or before they have spoken a word.
The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the
understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the
English, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let us
not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take
the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.
Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which
arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the
impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great
humorist, defines it thus:
Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to
set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it
beside the great--that it may annihilate both, because in the
presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal,
only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality,
the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance
of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of
little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the
Scoffer.
We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor,
while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of
lightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without our
being able to put our finger on any passage, and say, "It is here." Wit
must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wise
deacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of human
natur' in man," he might have added that there was a good deal more in
some men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may be
humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence
of mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase,
this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be
instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and its
impression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. As Galiani said of
Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes
every time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime
oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art of
saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where
it is forbidden to say anything." Wit must also have the quality of
unexpectedness. "Sometimes," says Barrow, "an affected simplicity,
sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it rises
only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty
wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one
knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are
unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless
rovings of fancy and windings of language."
That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected
likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at
what is called a _conceit_, which has all the qualities of wit--except
wit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long
poem called "Albion's England," which had an immense contemporary
popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of
language. In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.
Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled.[1]
[Footnote 1: This, and one or two of the following illustrations, were
used again by Mr. Lowell in his "Shakespeare Once More": _Works_
(Riverside edition), III, 53.]
This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good
as a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a
pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have
been,--to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,--it
should read:
Hard was the _hand_ that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled,
for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word "hard" as
applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper
logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which
belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:
Her heart and morning broke together
In tears,
which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might
almost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionally
violated in the word _broke_, and the sentence becomes absurd, though
not funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of
the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it,
though here, again, there would be no true wit:
His heart and Biddle broke together
On 'change.
Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of
"Hudibras," certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose
wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost
rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a
contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject. Butler says of loyalty
that it is
True as the dial to the sun
Although it be not shined upon.
Now what is the difference between this and the examples from Warner and
Morris which I have just quoted? Simply that the comparison turning upon
the word _true_, the mind is satisfied, because the analogy between the
word as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave no
gap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over. But it is precisely this
jolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discompose
our thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the object
of a pun to give us. Wit of this kind treats logic with every possible
outward demonstration of respect--"keeps the word of promise to the ear,
and breaks it to the sense." Dean Swift's famous question to the man
carrying the hare, "Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?" is
perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an
equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood
abounds in examples of this sort of fun--only that his analogies are of
a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old sailor he
says,
His head was turned, and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died.
This is inimitable, like all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is
perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind
is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical _non sequiturs_. And
yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in
the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of his
ear-trumpet:
I don't pretend with horns of mine,
Like some in the advertising line,
To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales
That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale's.
There was Mrs. F. so very deaf
That she might have worn a percussion cap
And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.
Again, his definition of deafness: