So, in his description of the hardships of the wild beasts in the
menagerie,
Who could not even prey
In their own way,
and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning
with the lion; but
Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
When Nero bolted him.
In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit
always suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostling
together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.
Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down in
a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but
once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn,
they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. In
the droll complaint of the lover,
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But why did you kick me down-stairs?
the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the
word "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking
downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.
Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole
sentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment of
Huon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that
makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.
Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as
distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so
full is it of quaint fancy:
Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but the offscouring of the British sand,
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
Or what by ocean's slow alluvium fell
Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
This indigestful vomit of the sea
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore
They, with mad labor, fished their land to shore,
And dived as desperately for each piece
Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less than what building swallows bear away,
Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll.
Transfusing into them their sordid soul.
How did they rivet with gigantic piles
Thorough the centre their new-catchèd miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forcèd ground!
Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid.
And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played,
As if on purpose it on land had come
To show them what's their _mare liberum_;
The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest;
And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs tan
Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban,
And, as they over the new level ranged,
For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.
Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings;
And as among the blind the blinkard reigns
So rules among the drowned he that drains;
Who best could know to pump on earth a leak,
Him they their lord and Country's Father speak.
To make a bank was a great plot of state,
Invent a shovel and be a magistrate;
Hence some small dykegrave, unperceived, invades
The power, and grows, as 't were, a king of spades.
I have cited this long passage not only because Marvell (both in his
serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is
as good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off
into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that
constitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny,
hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an
epigram of two lines:
Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
May man undam you and God damn you all.
Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the
most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus," and
wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a
place "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat," and this
hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is
certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the
Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and
disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But
commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him
rather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an example
from the "Day of Judgment":
With a whirl of thought oppressed
I sank from reverie to rest,
A horrid vision seized my head,
I saw the graves give up their dead!
Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
And thunder roars, and lightning flies!
Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
The world stands trembling at his throne!
While each pale sinner hung his head,
Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said:
"Offending race of human kind;
By nature, reason, learning, blind,
You who through frailty stepped aside.
And you who never fell through pride,
You who in different sects were shammed,
And come to see each other damned
(So some folks told you--but they knew
No more of Jove's designs than you)--
The world's mad business now is o'er,
And I resent these pranks no more--
I to such blockheads set my wit!
I damn such fools! Go, go! you're bit!"
The unexpectedness of the conclusion here, after the somewhat solemn
preface, is entirely of the essence of wit. So, too, is the sudden flirt
of the scorpion's tail to sting you. It is almost the opposite of humor
in one respect--namely, that it would make us think the solemnest things
in life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humor
delights in exposing. This further difference is also true: that wit
makes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none of
its point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and droller
the oftener we read it. If we cannot safely deny that Swift was a
humorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gone
through the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid. We should
never forget that he died mad. Satirists of this kind, while they have
this quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower,
differ from their nobler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is always
to the disadvantage of the higher. They purposely disenchant us--while
the others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted at
all.
Ben Jonson, who had in respect of sturdy good sense very much the same
sort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose "Discoveries," as he
calls them, are well worth reading for the sound criticism they contain,
says:
The parts of a comedy are the same with [those of] a tragedy, and
the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach: the
comics are called _didaskaloi_[1] of the Greeks, no less than the
tragics. Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy;
that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling.
For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in
comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's
nature without a disease. As a wry face moves laughter, or a
deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using
her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made
the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise
man. So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in
the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly
stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And
therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests
upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and
sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did
move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and
scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands
the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.
[Footnote 1: Teachers.]