"Dagonet, the fool, whom Gawain in his moods
Had made mock-knight of Arthur's Table Round,
At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods,
Danced like a withered leaf before the hall."
That is the view which many worthy people take of the humorist. He is
Sir Dagonet. Among the serious persons who are doing the useful work of
the world, discovering its laws, classifying its facts, forecasting its
future, this light-minded, light-hearted creature comes with his
untimely jests. In their idle moments they tolerate the mock-knight, but
when important business is on hand they dismiss him, as did Sir
Tristram, with
"Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?"
This half-contemptuous view is very painful to the Gentle Reader who,
though he may seem to some to take his poetry too lightly, is disposed
to take his humor rather seriously. Humor seems to him to belong to the
higher part of our nature. It is not the enjoyment of a grotesque image
in a convex mirror, but, rather, the recognition of fleeting forms of
truth.
"I have brought you a funny book, Gentle Reader," says the Professional
Humorist.
"Thank you," he answers, struggling against his melancholy forebodings.
"You will pardon me if I seem to take my pleasures sadly."
It is hard for him to force a smile as he watches the procession of
jokes, each as broad as it is long. This ostentatious jocosity is not to
his liking.
"Thackeray," he says, "defines humor as a mixture of love and wit.
Humor, therefore, being of the nature of love, should not behave itself
unseemly."
He cannot bear to see it obtruding itself upon the public. Its proper
habit is to hide from observation "as if the wren taught it
concealment." When a Happy Thought ventures abroad it should be as a
royal personage traveling _incognito_.
This is a big world, and it is serious business to live in it. It makes
many demands. It requires intensity of thought and strenuousness of will
and solidity of judgment. Great tasks are set before us. We catch
fugitive glimpses of beauty, and try to fix them forever in perfect
form,--that is the task of art. We see thousands of disconnected facts,
and try to arrange them in orderly sequence,--that is the task of
science. We see the ongoing of eternal force, and seek some reason for
it,--that is the task of philosophy.
But when art and science and philosophy have done their best, there is a
great deal of valuable material left over. There are facts that will not
fit into any theory, but which keep popping up at us from the most
unexpected places. Nobody can tell where they come from or why they are
here; but here they are. Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net
result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectnesses. We are
surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many
different ways. Everything is under the reign of strict law; but many
queer things happen, nevertheless. What are we to do with all the waifs
and strays? What are we to do with all the sudden incongruities which
mock at our wisdom and destroy the symmetry of our ideas?
The solemnly logical intelligence ignores their existence. It does not
trouble itself about anything which does not belong to its system. The
system itself has such perfect beauty that it is its own excuse for
being.
More sensitive and less self-centred natures do not find the way so
easy. They allow themselves to be worried by the incongruities which
they cannot ignore. It seems to them that whenever they are in earnest
the world conspires to mock them. Continually they feel that intellect
and conscience are insulted by whipper-snappers of facts that have no
right to be in an orderly universe. They can expose a lie, and feel a
certain superiority in doing it; but a little unclassified,
irreconcilable truth drives them to their wit's end. There it stands in
all its shameless actuality asking, "What do you make of me?"
Just here comes the beneficent mission of humor. It takes these
unassorted realities that are the despair of the sober intelligence, and
extracts from them pure joy. If life depends on the perpetual
adjustment of the organism to its environment, humor is the means by
which the intellectual life is sustained on those occasions when the
expected environment is not there. The adjustment must be made, without
a moment's warning, to an altogether new set of conditions. We are
called upon to swap horses while crossing the stream. It is a method
which the serious minded person does not approve. While arguing the
matter he is unhorsed, and finds himself floundering in the water. The
humorist accepts the situation instantly. As he scrambles upon his new
nag it is with a sense of triumph, for the moment at least, he feels
that he has the best of the bargain.
One may have learned to enjoy the sublime, the beautiful, the useful,
the orderly, but he has missed something if he has not also learned to
enjoy the incongruous, the illusive, and the unexpected. Artistic
sensibility finds its satisfaction only in the perfect. Humor is the
frank enjoyment of the imperfect. Its objects are not so high,--but
there are more of them.
Evolution is a cosmic game of Pussy wants a corner. Each creature has
its eye on some snug corner where it would rest in peace. Each corner
is occupied by some creature that is not altogether satisfied and that
is on the lookout for a larger sphere. There is much beckoning between
those who are desirous of making a change. Now and then some bold spirit
gives up his assured position and scrambles for something better. The
chances are that the adventurer finds it harder to attain the coveted
place than he had thought. For the fact is that there are not corners
enough to go around. If there were enough corners, and every one were
content to stay in the one where he found himself at the beginning, then
the game would be impossible. It is well that this never happens. Nature
looks after that. When things are too homogeneous she breaks them up
into new and amazing kinds of heterogeneity. It is a good game, and one
learns to like it after he enters into the spirit of it.
If the Universe had a place for everything and everything was in its
place, there would be little demand for humor. As a matter of fact the
world is full of all sorts of people, and they are not all in their
proper places. There are amazing incongruities between station and
character. It is not a world that has been reduced to order; it is still
in the making. One may easily grow misanthropic and pessimistic by
dwelling upon the misfits.
"As to behold desert a beggar born
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity.
* * * * *
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And folly doctor-like, controlling skill,
And captive good attending captive ill."
But fortunately these incongruities are not altogether tragical. There
are certain moods when we rather enjoy seeing "needy nothing trimmed in
jollity." We are pleased when Justice Shallow slaps Sir John Falstaff on
the back and says, "Ha! it was a merry night, Sir John." We are not
irritated beyond endurance because in this world where so many virtuous
people have a hard time, such trifling fellows as Sir Toby and Sir
Andrew have their cakes and ale. When folly puts on doctor-like airs it
is not always disagreeable. We would not have Dogberry put off the watch
to give place to some one who could pass the civil service examination.
The humorist, when asked what he thinks of the actual world, would turn
upon his questioner as Touchstone turned upon Corin when he was asked
how he liked the shepherd's life:--
"Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?" The world is not at all like
the descriptions of it, and yet he cannot take a very gloomy view of it.
In respect to itself it is a good world, and yet in respect that it is
not finished it leaves much to be desired. Yet in respect that it leaves
much to be desired, and much to be done by us, it is perhaps better _for
us_ than if it were finished. In respect that many things happen that
are opposed to our views of the eternal fitness of things, it is a
perplexing world. Yet in respect that we have a faculty for enjoying the
occasional unfitness of things, it is delightful. On the whole, he sums
up with Touchstone, "It suits my humor well."
Humor is impossible to the man of one idea. There must be at least two
ideas moving in opposite directions, so that there may be a collision.
Such an accident does not happen in a mind under economical management
that runs only one train of thought a day.
There are many ideas that have a very insecure tenure. They hold their
own as squatters. By and by Science will come along and evict them, but
in the mean time these homely folk make very pleasant neighbors. All
they ask is that we shall not take them too seriously. That a thing is
not to be taken too seriously does not imply that it is either unreal or
unimportant:--it only means that it is not to be taken that way. There
is, for example, a pickaninny on a Southern plantation. The
anthropologist measures his skull and calls it by a long Latin name. The
psychologist carefully records his nervous reactions. The pedagogical
expert makes him the victim of that form of inquisition known as "child
study." The missionary perplexes himself in vain attempting to get at
his soul. Then there comes along a person of another sort. At the first
look, a genial smile of recognition comes over the face of this new
spectator. He is the first one who has seen the pickaninny. The one
essential truth about a black, chubby, kinky-haired pickaninny is that,
when he rolls up his eyes till only the whites are visible, he is
irresistibly funny. This is what theologians term "the substance of
doctrine" concerning the pickaninny.
When Charles Lamb slipped on the London pavement, he found delight in
watching the chimney sweep who stood laughing at his misfortune. "There
he stood irremovable, as though the jest were to last forever, with such
a maximum of glee and minimum of mischief in his mirth--for the grin of
a genuine sweep hath no malice in it--that I could have been content, if
the honor of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and
his mockery till midnight." There were many middle-aged London citizens
who could no more appreciate that kind of pleasure than a Hottentot
could appreciate an oratorio. That is only saying that the average
citizen and the average Hottentot have, as Wordsworth mildly puts it,
"faculties which they have never used."
The high place that humor holds among our mental processes is evident
when we consider that it is almost the only one that requires that we
shall be thoroughly awake. In our dreams we have many aesthetic
enjoyments, as vague splendors pass before us. At other times there is
an abnormal sensitiveness to the sovereignty, not to say the despotism
of ethics. We feel burdened with the weight of unpardonable sins. We are
able also in our sleep to philosophize after a fashion which is, for the
time, quite satisfactory. At such times we are sure that we have made
important discoveries; if we could only remember what they were. A
thousand incongruities pass through our minds, but there is one thing
which we cannot do. We cannot recognize that they are incongruous. Such
a discovery would immediately awaken us.