incongruity. Hazlitt begins his illuminating lectures on the Comic
Writers by declaring, "Man is the only animal that laughs or weeps; for
he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what
things are and what they ought to be." James Russell Lowell took the
same ground. "Humor," he said once, "lies in the contrast of two ideas.
It is the universal disenchanter. It is the sense of comic
contradiction which arises from the perpetual comment which the
understanding makes upon the impressions received through the
imagination." If that sentence seems too abstract, all we need do is to
think of Sancho Panza, the man of understanding, talking about Don
Quixote, the man of imagination.
We must not multiply quotations, but it is impossible not to remember
the distinction made by Carlyle in writing about Richter. "True humor,"
says Carlyle, "springs not more from the head than from the heart. It
is not contempt; its essence is love." In other words, not merely the
great humorists of the world's literature--Cervantes, Rabelais,
Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens--but the writers of comic paragraphs for
to-morrow's newspaper, all regard our human incongruities with a sort
of affection. The comic spirit is essentially a social spirit. The
great figures of tragedy are solitary. The immortal figures of comedy
belong to a social group.
No recent discussion of humor is more illuminating and more directly
applicable to the conditions of American life than that of the
contemporary French philosopher Bergson. Bergson insists throughout
his brilliant little book on _Laughter_ that laughter is a social
function. Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever is stiff, automatic,
machine-like, excites a smile. We laugh when a person gives us the
impression of being a thing,--a sort of mechanical toy. Every
inadaptation of the individual to society is potentially comic. Thus
laughter becomes a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we
visit upon one another. But we do not isolate the comic personage as we
do the solitary, tragic figure. The comic personage is usually a type;
he is one of an absurd group; he is a miser, a pedant, a pretentious
person, a doctor or a lawyer in whom the professional traits have
become automatic so that he thinks more of his professional behavior
than he does of human health and human justice. Of all these separatist
tendencies, laughter is the great corrective. When the individual
becomes set in his ways, obstinate, preoccupied, automatic, the rest of
us laugh him out of it if we can. Of course all that we are thinking
about at the moment is his ridiculousness. But nevertheless, by
laughing we become the saviors of society.
No one, I think, can help observing that this conception of humor as
incongruity is particularly applicable to a new country. On the new
soil and under the new sky, in new social groupings, all the
fundamental contrasts and absurdities of our human society assume a new
value. We see them under a fresh light. They are differently focussed.
The broad humors of the camp, its swift and picturesque play of light
and shade, its farce and caricature no less than its atmosphere of
comradeship, of sentiment, and of daring, are all transferred to the
humor of the newly settled country. The very word "humor" once meant
singularity of character, "some extravagant habit, passion, or
affection," says Dryden, "particular to some one person." Every newly
opened country encourages, for a while, this oddness and incongruity of
individual character. It fosters it, and at the same moment it laughs
at it. It decides that such characters are "humorous." As the social
conditions of such a country change, the old pioneer instinct for
humor, and the pioneer forms of humor, may endure, though the actual
frontier may have moved far westward.
There is another conception of humor scarcely less famous than the
notion of incongruity. It is the conception associated with the name of
the English philosopher Hobbes, who thought that humor turned upon a
sense of superiority. "The passion of laughter," said Hobbes, "is
nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of
some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of
others, or with our own formerly." Too cynical a view, declare many
critics, but they usually end by admitting that there is a good deal in
it after all. I am inclined to think that Hobbes's famous definition is
more applicable to wit than it is to humor. Wit is more purely
intellectual than humor. It rejoices in its little triumphs. It
requires, as has been remarked, a good head, while humor takes a good
heart, and fun good spirits. If you take Carlyle literally when he says
that humor is love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's conviction that
laughter turns upon a sense of superiority, and yet surely we all
experience a sense of kindly amusement which turns upon the fact that
we, the initiated, are superior, for the moment, to the unlucky person
who is just having his turn in being hazed. It may be the play of
intellect or the coarser play of animal spirits. One might venture to
make a distinction between the low comedy of the Latin races and the
low comedy of the Germanic races by pointing out that the superiority
in the Latin comedy usually turns upon quicker wits, whereas the
superiority in the Germanic farce is likely to turn upon stouter
muscles. But whether it be a play of wits or of actual cudgelling, the
element of superiority and inferiority is almost always there.
I remember that some German, I dare say in a forgotten lecture-room,
once illustrated the humor of superiority in this way. A company of
strolling players sets up its tent in a country village. On the front
seat is a peasant, laughing at the antics of the clown. The peasant
flatters himself that he sees through those practical jokes on the
stage; the clown ought to have seen that he was about to be tripped up,
but he was too stupid. But the peasant saw that it was coming all the
time. He laughs accordingly. Just behind the peasant sits the village
shopkeeper. He has watched stage clowns many a time and he laughs, not
at the humor of the farce, but at the naive laughter of the peasant in
front of him. He, the shopkeeper, is superior to such broad and obvious
humor as that. Behind the shopkeeper sits the schoolmaster. The
schoolmaster is a pedant; he has probably lectured to his boys on the
theory of humor, and he smiles in turn at the smile of superiority on
the face of the shopkeeper. Well, peeping in at the door of the tent is
a man of the world, who glances at the clown, then at the peasant, then
at the shopkeeper, then at the schoolmaster, each one of whom is
laughing at the others, and the man of the world laughs at them all!
Let us take an even simpler illustration. We all know the comfortable
sense of proprietorship which we experience after a few days' sojourn
at a summer hotel. We know our place at the table; we call the head
waiter by his first name; we are not even afraid of the clerk. Now into
this hotel, where we sit throned in conscious superiority, comes a new
arrival. He has not yet learned the exits and entrances. He starts for
the kitchen door inadvertently when he should be headed for the
drawing-room. We smile at him. Why? Precisely because that was what we
did on the morning of our own arrival. We have been initiated, and it
is now his turn.
If it is true that a newly settled country offers endless opportunities
for the humor which turns upon incongruity, it is also true that the
new country offers countless occasions for the humor which turns upon
the sudden glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is amusing to the man
of the settlements, and the backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share
of amusement out of watching the "tenderfoot" in the woods. It is
simply the case of the old resident versus the newcomer. The
superiority need be in no sense a cruel or taunting superiority,
although it often happens to be so. The humor of the pioneers is not
very delicately polished. The joke of the frontier tavern or grocery
store is not always adapted to a drawing-room audience, but it turns in
a surprisingly large number of instances upon exactly the same
intellectual or social superiority which gives point to the _bon mots_
of the most cultivated and artificial society in the world.
The humor arising from incongruity, then, and the humor arising from a
sense of superiority, are both of them social in their nature. No less
social, surely, is the function of satire. It is possible that satire
may be decaying, that it is becoming, if it has not already become, a
mere splendid or odious tradition. But let us call it a great tradition
and, upon the whole, a splendid one. Even when debased to purely party
or personal uses, the verse satire of a Dryden retains its magnificent
resonance; "the ring," says Saintsbury, "as of a great bronze coin
thrown down on marble." The malignant couplets of an Alexander Pope
still gleam like malevolent jewels through the dust of two hundred
years. The cynicism, the misanthropy, the mere adolescent badness of
Byron are powerless to clip the wings of the wide-ranging, far-darting
wit and humor and irony of _Don Juan_. The homely Yankee dialect, the
provinciality, the "gnarly" flavor of the _Biglow Papers_ do not
prevent our finding in that pungent and resplendent satire the powers
of Lowell at full play; and, what is more than that, the epitome of the
American spirit in a moral crisis.
I take the names of those four satirists, Dryden, Pope, Byron, and
Lowell, quite at random; but they serve to illustrate a significant
principle; namely, that great satire becomes ennobled as it touches
communal, not merely individual interests, as it voices social and not
merely individual ideals. Those four modern satirists were steeped in
the nationalistic political poetry of the Old Testament. They were
familiar with its war anthems, dirges, and prophecies, its concern for
the prosperity and adversity, the sin and the punishment, of a people.
Here the writers of the Golden Age of English satire found their
vocabulary and phrase-book, their grammar of politics and history,
their models of good and evil kings; and in that Biblical school of
political poetry, which has affected our literature from the
Reformation down to Mr. Kipling, there has always been a class in
satire! The satirical portraits, satirical lyrics, satirical parables
of the Old Testament prophets are only less noteworthy than their
audacity in striking high and hard. Their foes were the all-powerful:
Babylon and Assyria and Egypt loom vast and terrible upon the canvases
of Isaiah and Ezekiel; and poets of a later time have learned there the
secrets of social and political idealism, and the signs of national
doom.
There are two familiar types of satire associated with the names of
Horace and Juvenal. Both types are abundantly illustrated in English
and American literature. When you meet a bore or a hypocrite or a plain
rascal, is it better to chastise him with laughter or to flay him with
shining fury? I shall take both horns of the dilemma and assert that
both methods are admirable and socially useful. The minor English and
American poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were never
weary of speaking of satire as a terrific weapon which they were forced
to wield as saviors of society. But whether they belonged to the urbane
school of Horace, or to the severely moralistic school of Juvenal, they
soon found themselves falling into one or the other of two modes of
writing. They addressed either the little audience or the big audience,
and they modified their styles accordingly. The great satirists of the
Renaissance, for example, like More, Erasmus, and Rabelais, wrote
simply for the persons who were qualified to understand them. More and
Erasmus wrote their immortal satires in Latin. By so doing they
addressed themselves to cultivated Europe. They ran no risk of being
misunderstood by persons for whom the joke was not intended. All
readers of Latin were like members of one club. Of course membership
was restricted to the learned, but had not Horace talked about being
content with a few readers, and was not Voltaire coming by and by with
the advice to try for the "little public"?
The typical wit of the eighteenth century, whether in London, Paris, or
in Franklin's printing-shop in Philadelphia, had, of course, abandoned
Latin. But it still addressed itself to the "little public," to the
persons who were qualified to understand. The circulation of the
_Spectator_, which represents so perfectly the wit, humor, and satire
of the early eighteenth century in England, was only about ten thousand
copies. This limited audience smiled at the urbane delicate touches of
Mr. Steele and Mr. Addison. They understood the allusions. The fable
concerned them and not the outsiders. It was something like Oliver
Wendell Holmes reading his witty and satirical couplets to an audience
of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in the vernacular, but in a vernacular
as spoken in a certain social medium. It is all very delightful.
But there is a very different kind of audience gathering all this while
outside the Harvard gates. These two publics for the humorist we may
call the invited and the uninvited; the inner circle and the outer
circle: first, those who have tickets for the garden party, and who
stroll over the lawn, decorously gowned and properly coated, conversing
with one another in the accepted social accents and employing the
recognized social adjectives; and second, the crowd outside the
gates,--curious, satirical, good-natured in the main, straightforward
of speech and quick to applaud a ready wit or a humor-loving eye or a
telling phrase spoken straight from the heart of the mob.
Will an author choose to address the selected guests or the casual
crowd? Either way lies fame, if one does it well. Your uninvited men
find themselves talking to the uninvited crowd. Before they know it
they are famous too. They are fashioning another manner of speech.
Defoe is there, with his saucy ballads selling triumphantly under his
very pillory; with his _True-Born Englishman_ puncturing forever the
fiction of the honorable ancestry of the English aristocracy; with his
_Crusoe_ and _Moll Flanders_, written, as Lamb said long afterwards,
for the servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, with his terrific
_Drapier's Letters_, anonymous, aimed at the uneducated, with cold fury
bludgeoning a government into obedience; with his _Gulliver's Travels_,
so transparent upon the surface that a child reads the book with
delight and remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon humanity.
And then, into the London of Defoe and Swift, and into the very centre
of the middle-class mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin Franklin in
search of a style "smooth, clear, and short," and for half a century,
with consummate skill, shapes that style to his audience. His young
friend Thomas Paine takes the style and touches it with passion, until
he becomes the perfect pamphleteer, and his _Crisis_ is worth as much
to our Revolution--men said--as the sword of Washington. After another
generation the gaunt Lincoln, speaking that same plain prose of Defoe,
Swift, Franklin, and Paine,--Lincoln who began his first Douglas
debate, not like his cultivated opponent with the conventional "Ladies
and Gentlemen," but with the ominously intimate, "My Fellow
Citizens,"--Lincoln is saying, "I am not master of language; I have not
a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon
dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the
language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts
upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words. I know
what I meant, and _I will not leave this crowd in doubt_, if I can
explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph."
"_I will not leave this crowd in doubt_"; that is the final accent of
our spoken prose, the prose addressed to one's fellow citizens, to the
great public. This is the prose spoken in the humor and satire of
Dickens. Dressed in a queer dialect, and put into satirical verse, it
is the language of the _Biglow Papers_. Uttered with the accent of a
Chicago Irishman, it is the prose admired by millions of the countrymen
of "Mr. Dooley."
Satire written to the "little public" tends toward the social type;
that written to the "great public" to the political type. It is obvious
that just as a newly settled country offers constant opportunity for
the humor of incongruity and the humor arising from a sense of
superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus to the use of satire.
That moralizing Puritan strain of censure which lost none of its
harshness in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full play in the
colonial satire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the
topics for satire grew wider and more political in their scope, the
audiences increased. To-day the very oldest issues of the common life
of that queer "political animal" named man are discussed by our popular
newspaper satirists in the presence of a democratic audience that
stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Is there, then, a distinctly American type of humor and satire? I think
it would be difficult to prove that our composite American nationality
has developed a mode of humor and satire which is racially different
from the humor and satire of the Old World. All racial lines in
literature are extremely difficult to draw. If you attempt to analyze
English humor, you find that it is mostly Scotch or Irish. If you put
Scotch and Irish humor under the microscope, you discover that most of
the best Scotch and Irish jokes are as old as the Greeks and the
Egyptians. You pick up a copy of _Fliegende Blatter_ and you get keen
amusement from its revelation of German humor. But how much of this
humor, after all, is either essentially universal in its scope or else
a matter of mere stage-setting and machinery? Without the Prussian
lieutenant the _Fliegende Blatter_ would lose half its point; nor can
one imagine a _Punch_ without a picture of the English policeman. The
lieutenant and the policeman, however, are a part of the accepted
social furniture of the two countries. They belong to the decorative
background of the social drama. They heighten the effectiveness of
local humor, but it may be questioned whether they afford any evidence
of genuine racial differentiation as to the sense of the comic.
What one can abundantly prove, however, is that the United States
afford a new national field for certain types of humor and satire. Our
English friends are never weary of writing magazine articles about
Yankee humor, in which they explain the peculiarities of the American
joke with a dogmatism which has sometimes been thought to prove that
there is such a thing as national lack of humor, whether there be such
a thing as national humor or not. One such article, I remember,
endeavored to prove that the exaggeration often found in American
humor was due to the vastness of the American continent. Our geography,
that is to say, is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Birrell, an
expert judge of humor, surely, thinks that the characteristic of
American humor lies in its habit of speaking of something hideous in a
tone of levity. Many Englishmen, in fact, have been as much impressed
with this minimizing trick of American humor as with the converse trick
of magnifying. Upon the Continent the characteristic trait of American
humor has often been thought to be its exuberance of phrase. Many
shrewd judges of our newspaper humor have pointed out that one of its
most favorite methods is the suppression of one link in the chain of
logical reasoning. Such generalizations as these are always
interesting, although they may not take us very far.
Yet it is clear that certain types of humor and satire have proved to
be specially adapted to the American soil and climate. Whether or not
these types are truly indigenous one may hesitate to say, yet it
remains true that the well-known conditions of American life have
stimulated certain varieties of humor into such a richness of
manifestation as the Old World can scarcely show.
Curiously enough, one of the most perfected types of American humor is
that urbane Horatian variety which has often been held to be the
exclusive possession of the cultivated and restricted societies of
older civilization. Yet it is precisely this kind of humor which has
been the delight of some of the most typical American minds. Benjamin
Franklin, for example, modelled his style and his sense of the humorous
on the papers of the _Spectator_. He produced humorous fables and
apologues, choice little morsels of social and political persiflage,
which were perfectly suited, not merely to the taste of London in the
so-called golden age of English satire, but to the tone of the wittiest
salons of Paris in the age when the old regime went tottering, talking,
quoting, jesting to its fall. Read Franklin's charming and wise letter
to Madame Brillon about giving too much for the whistle. It is the
perfection of well-bred humor: a humor very American, very Franklinian,
although its theme and tone and phrasing might well have been envied by
Horace or Voltaire.
The gentle humor of Irving is marked by precisely those traits of
urbanity and restraint which characterize the parables of Franklin.
Does not the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ itself presuppose the
existence of a truly cultivated society? Its tone--"As I was saying
when I was interrupted"--is the tone of the intimate circle. There was
so much genuine humanity in the gay little doctor that persons born
outside the circle of Harvard College and the North Shore and Boston
felt themselves at once initiated by the touch of his merry wand into a
humanized, kindly theory of life. The humor of George William Curtis
had a similarly mellow and ripened quality. It is a curious comment
upon that theory of Americans which represents us primarily as a
loud-voiced, assertive, headstrong people, to be thus made aware that
many of the humorists whom we have loved best are precisely those whose
writing has been marked by the most delicate restraint, whose theory of
life has been the most highly urbane and civilized, whose work is
indistinguishable in tone--though its materials are so different--from
that of other humorous writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On
its social side all this is a fresh proof of the extraordinary
adaptability of the American mind. On the literary side it is one more
evidence of the national fondness for neatness and perfection of
workmanship.
But we are something other than a nation of mere lovers and would-be
imitators of Charles Lamb. The moralistic type of humor, the crack of
Juvenal's whip, as well as the delicate Horatian playing around the
heart-strings, has characterized our humor and satire from the
beginning. At bottom the American is serious. Beneath the surface of
his jokes there is moral earnestness, there is ethical passion. Take,
for example, some of the apothegms of "Josh Billings." He failed with
the public until he took up the trick of misspelling his words. When he
had once gained his public he sometimes delighted them with sheer
whimsical incongruity, like this:--
"There iz 2 things in this life for which we are never fully
prepared, and that iz twins."
But more often the tone is really grave. It is only the spelling that
is queer. The moralizing might be by La Bruyere or La Rochefoucauld.
Take this:--
"Life iz short, but it iz long enuff to ruin enny man who
wants tew be ruined."
Or this:--
"When a feller gits a goin doun hill, it dus seem as tho evry
thing had bin greased for the okashun." That is what writers
of tragedy have been showing, ever since the Greeks!
Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone of the great French
moralists:--
"It iz a verry delicate job to forgive a man without lowering
him in his own estimashun, and yures too."