HUMOR.

If we wished to find a passage from Irony to Humor, we should have to

look for it in cases where good-nature assumes the positive attribute

of impartiality, because humor is a kind of disposition to adopt the

whole of human nature, fuse all its distinctions, tolerate all its

infirmities, and assemble vice and misery to receive rations of good

cheer.

Two Jews have been elected within a few years to be Lord Mayors of

London. They were members of the synagogue in full connection, and

might have appointed Rabbins for chaplaincies if they had chosen. But

they pursued the old custom, which was not however of legal stringency:

appointed clergymen of the Church of England, and regularly made all

the usual contributions for Christian purposes, including the customary

one to the Society for the Conversion of the Jews. In this incident it

is the element of Humor which imparts to us the pleasure we feel.

Hippolyte Taine acknowledges that the French have not the idea of

Humor, nor the word for it. But we might expect from him at least a

definition. He can only say, however, that humor includes a taste for

contrasts, buffooneries, the mockery of Heine, starts of invention,

oddities, eruption of a violent joviality that was buried under a heap

of sadness, and absurd indecency. In another place he says that English

humor "is the product of imaginative drollery, or of concentrated

indignation."

Sir Henry Bulwer, in his book entitled "France, Social, Literary, and

Political," concedes the talent of wit to the French and quotes the

following instance of it: "I asked two little village boys, one seven,

the other eight years old, what they meant to be when they were men?

Says one, 'I shall be the doctor of the village.' 'And you, what shall

you be?' said I to the other. 'Oh! if brother's a doctor, I shall be

_curé_. He shall kill the people, and I'll bury them; so we shall have

the whole village between us.'"

Bulwer appreciates this, yet Taine denies to the English the sense

of wit. In fact, the quality of wit exists wherever imagination

percolates through the understanding: the sediment is the grain-gold

of wit. But the quality of humor, depending upon various moral traits,

exists only wherever a broad imagination is combined with a sweet and

tolerant moral sense that is devoid of malice and all uncharitableness,

and at peace with all mankind. A petulant egotism may exist with wit,

but never with humor. Sarcasm and satire are the forms which best agree

with imperfect moral dispositions. A too prolonged irony has something

melancholy and dyspeptic in it, and passes into the blood of a faulty

temper even if there be the tonic of an upright moral sense. This moral

sense may exist on every meridian of the earth, but it may not appear

at literary epochs in solution with the brightest minds. Rabelais

seems to be a French exception to the Gallic trait that was noticed so

long ago by the great Roman: _Comɶda_ and _argute loqui_,--belonging

to comedy and to the ingenuities of conversation. Humor appears best

in conjunction with the temper of Northern Europe, whose early races

began with deep impressions of the gravity of things and broke thence

into alleviating moods. If it be the primitive trait of a nation to

enjoy comic gayeties and the subtle surprises of discourse, it does not

readily rise to the moral earnestness which a serious world imposes,

and therefore it cannot invent the relief and grave delight of humor.

Sydney Smith uses this word to cover any thing that is ridiculous and

laughable. So the epithet _comic_ is quite indiscriminately applied.

But we ought not to submit to this loose application; for there are

plenty of other words to make proper distinctions for us amid our

pleasurable moods, and permit us to reserve humor for something which

is neither punning, wit, satire, nor comedy. Humor may avail itself

of all these mental exercises, but only as a manager casts his stock

company to set forth the prevailing spirit of a play. Comedy, for

instance, represents sorrows, passions, and annoyances, but shows

them without the sombre purpose of tragedy to enforce a supreme will

at any cost. All our weaknesses threaten in comedy to result in

serious embarrassments, but there is such inexhaustible material for

laughter in the whims and follies with which we baffle ourselves and

others, that the tragic threat is collared just in time and shaken

into pleasure. All kinds of details of our life are represented, which

tragedy could never tolerate in its main drift towards the pathos of

defeated human wills and broken hearts. Tricks, vices, fatuities,

crotchets, vanities, play their game for a stake no higher than the

mirth of outwitting each other; and they all pay penalties of a light

kind which God exacts smilingly for the sake of keeping our disorders

at a minimum. Comedy also funds a great deal of its charm in the

unconsciousness of an infirmity. We exhibit ourselves unawares: each

one is perfectly understood by everybody but himself; so we plot and

vapor through an intrigue with placards on each back, where all but the

wearers can indulge their mirth at seeing us parading so innocently

with advertisements of our price and quality.

There is a comic passage in the "Inferno" of Dante, noticed by Lowell

(XV. 119), "where Brunetto Latini lingers under the burning shower to

recommend his _Tesoro_ to his former pupil," Dante; "a comical touch

of Nature in an author's solicitude for his little work; not, as in

Fielding's case, after _its_, but his own damnation."

The opening verses of Canto XVI. of the "Paradiso" are also comic,

"where Dante tells us how, even in heaven, he could not help glorying

in being gently born,--he who had devoted a _Canzone_ and a book of the

_Convito_ to proving that nobility consisted wholly in virtue."

Humor subsidizes every vein like this to supply the great heart-beat

which mantles over all human features and visits all the members of

great or little honor. Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity. Humor is

gravity concealed behind the jest. Our grave and noble tendencies are

brought in this world of ours into contact with very ordinary styles of

living, which are stubborn; they neither surrender nor give way. Humor

steps in to mediate: it seeks to put in the same light and color all

the parts of this incongruity, the ideal and the vulgar real; and the

constant inference of humor is that all the ideals of right, honor,

goodness, manly strength, are serious with a divine purpose.

Even the coarsest and most revolting things can be adopted by this

temper and cheerfully assigned to their places in the great plan. Jamie

Alexander, the old Scotch grave-digger, had the habit of carrying home

fragments of old coffins, long seasoned in the earth which was turned

up by his exploring spade. He used to make clocks and fiddles of them,

thus coaxing time and tune out of these repulsive tokens of human

infirmity. Our mouldiest accessories can furnish material for humor;

since "a good wit," says Shakspeare, "will make use of any thing; it

will turn diseases to commodity."

We cannot say that man derives this power to resolve contrariety into

delight from the divine mind, though we have the habit of saying

that every intellectual act must spring from an original source of

intelligence, just as affection must have its root in the infinite

love. But Deity can have no consciousness of incongruities in creation,

because the whole must at every instant be comprehended in the Creator

of the whole, who originates the real relation of all its parts and

their mutual interdependence. Human dissatisfaction springs from want

of this ability to comprehend the whole within one reconciling idea.

This incompetency is felt by us because we have an instinct that all

dissonant things ought to be reconciled, and can be in some way, but

only can be by the finite becoming the infinite. Humor strives to

bridge this gulf. It is man's device to pacify his painful sense that

so many things appear wrong and evil to him, and so many circumstances

inconsistent with our feeling that Deity must have framed the world in

a temper of perfect goodness. We get relief by trying to discover the

ideas which may effect a temporary reconcilement, to approach as far as

we can to the temper of divine impartiality in which all circumstances

must have been ordained. That temper passing down through our

incompleteness is refracted, broken all up into a tremulousness of

human smiles. Nothing that a Creator has the heart to tolerate can

disturb him. But where there is no sense of incongruity there can be

no sense of humor. That sense is man's expedient to make his mortality

endurable. The laughter of man is the contentment of God.

Shakspeare was not preoccupied by any theory of the universe which

denies the facts or tries to shut them up in a private meaning, as

theology does. His creative genius reflected a Creator's mind. So

he accepted all that is permitted to exist, without extenuation,

instinctively acknowledging the right of God to make men as they are,

if so He chose, out of complex motives and passions whose roots are

hidden in each man's ancestry, and whose drift the man himself cannot

anticipate, as he was not consulted. This admission of all the facts of

human nature did not disable his preference for pure and honest things.

All that is lovely has a good, report made of it in his lives, and all

that is odious appears in its habit as it lived. Thus he moralized, as

Nature does by letting all her creatures breed and show their traits.

She pastes no placards upon things which advertise themselves to every

observer. All our infirmities have the freedom of Shakspeare's verse to

display themselves at pleasure. He is not standing by with a showman's

stick to designate his creatures to us who have eyes of our own, and

know what is ugly and pleasant when we see it. No perfume is added to

the violet, no gilding to the rose. "The image of a wicked heinous

fault" lives in its eye.

Now this impartial observation cannot shield the poet's ideal from

the hurts which are inflicted by the discrepancies of life: the real

seems to be no legitimate child of the ideal, but a changeling with

low-born traits. The noble lover of goodness cannot help being pained

at the contrast of circumstances with his thought, and there moves

over his nature a deep seriousness from this cloud, beneath which his

imagination broods upon the landscape. It raises a suspicion that Deity

itself must find omniscience annoying and provocative of gloom; for

all the worlds and the ages keep on inflicting this incongruity upon

the divine source of all ideal things. The poet must manage to recover

from this mood, to reassure his heart with the faith that the One who

calculated and devised the aberrations which sustain His system must

exist in eternal serenity.

When many human characters are contemplated by a superior observer, an

impartiality kin to that of the mind who created them sets in. But it

cannot remain a colorless, judicial attitude, nor can it deteriorate

into indifference. Good nature is an element in the superiority of

a good observer. He may make use of wit, comedy, and irony, but his

essential mood can only be described by the word "humor;" that is, the

quality of being reconciled with all that is observed. The poet would

fain conciliate, but without complicity; for he can never give up the

gravity of his ideal. Now to be perfectly impartial to all would be

too great a strain for a finite mind. It would weary of the incessant

balancing, of the exigency of moderation. The mind yields from this

in unconscious self-defence, and passes into a mood that conciliates

itself. The gravity is precipitated by the infusion of a smile. And

although this lighter ingredient appears upon the surface, it is the

record and announcement of the serious affair below.

In Burns's "Address to the Devil," he is of opinion that that personage

cannot take much pleasure in tormenting poor devils like him. Besides,

if any thing is the matter with him, it is all the fault of the devil's

own trick which so nearly ruined every thing. Still, he confesses to a

fellow-feeling for the devil. Why can't he mend a bit? Burns hates to

think of hell for the devil's sake, as Dr. Channing once said he hoped

there was no devil for the devil's own sake.

But, as Shakspeare says, "the devil knew not what he did when he made

man politic; he crossed himself by it; and I cannot think, but, in the

end, the villanies of man will set him clear."

The humor here is pervaded with the earnest perception that Nature

contains organically the good and the evil. Both are placed in

permanent juxtaposition, to result in the interaction which makes life

and history possible.

We notice the same touch of humor in Goethe's Prologue to "Faust."

The Lord gives full permission to Mephistopheles to try his hand at

Faust:--