"First-born of chaos, who so fair didst come
From the old negro's darksome womb,"
and we have to deny poetic freedom to this aboriginal contraband.
How charmingly, however, did the poor woman reply to the gentleman who
found her watering her webs of linen cloth. She could not tell him even
the text of the last sermon. "And what good can the preaching do you,
if you forget it all?" "Ah, sir, if you will look at this web on the
grass, you will see that as fast as ever I put the water on it the sun
dries it all up, and yet, sir, I see it gets whiter and whiter." This
is pure wit from the well of imagination, and the smile is as deep in
it as truth.
It would be hazardous to liken a poet to a spider, we might think; but
when Mr. Browning undertakes it, this dodger of brooms spins a web
all dripping with the splendor of fancy. Mr. Browning speaks of young
Sordello, the poet, as he dreams in the old castle and connects the
events around him by absorbing surmises of his own:--
"Thus thrall reached thrall;
He o'erfestooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, making light
Of distance, sports her threads from depth to height,
From barbican to battlement; so flung
Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh
Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh
Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.
This world of ours by tacit pact is pledged
To laying such a spangled fabric low,
Whether by gradual brush or gallant blow."
Beauty has spun the poet and the insect into a cocoon out of which the
splendid wings emerge; then wit takes up the thread with the conception
of the prosaic old world's hostility to flimsy poesy, and we admire the
sudden congruity which is established between two such irreconcilable
objects.
Outside the domain of poetry involuntary wit lurks everywhere, even in
passages of history whose passion seems capable of expunging all smiles
upon the face. Two contrarious ideas may blend for a moment at one
point, as when King Olaf put a pan of coals upon Eyvind's naked flesh
until it broiled beneath them, and then asked, without suspecting any
thing incongruous, "Dost thou now, O Eyvind, believe in Christ?" Here
is a momentary inclusion of an act of belief under an act of physical
pain. When in the course of time the deadly earnestness of Olaf fades
away for us, we perceive the incongruity, but also perceive that Olaf,
in sad simplicity, imagined there was congruity; or, he reflected, a
pan of coals shall compel a congruity.
This grim practice of unconscious wit is heightened when we recollect
that Christ was a person who declined to call down fire upon those who
did not receive him; and such an incident affords us a ready passage
from Wit into the domain of Irony.