editor: “Tell me my best, my almost only friend, is there any reason to
suppose that by any apprenticeship I could, without rashness, enter the
editorial field.” This from a man who had only to touch any cause to
make the world ring with it, is incredible. One cannot hope really to
understand such a character: it reminds one of the meekness of Moses.
There is a rose-leaf girlish quality about this modesty which makes it
one of the most wonderful things in nature. Few of us have ever seen
it; we have only read about it; for people are always writing about it,
and it evokes literature. No sooner does one of these modest people
appear than everyone praises him. I suppose people feel that praise
cannot injure such a nature: there is nothing for praise to stick
to. The bitter lips of malice break into eulogy before this quality,
which shrinks from commendation as most people shrink from censure.
In Dr. Howe’s case this modesty set off not only deeds of physical
prowess, but intellectual accomplishments of a most dazzling kind.
Hence the enormous number of somewhat tedious eulogies upon him. One is
obliged to approach him through a stack of funeral wreaths.
He was totally without personal thought, personal self-consciousness,
and more like a disembodied spirit than a man. This impersonal quality
gave him the power of telling home truths to people without offending
them. To strangers, to acquaintances, to intimate friends, to proud
spoiled egotists, to bad men with whom he is at odds--he can always
tell the exact truth without conveying any personal ill-feeling. He
flashes in through the walls and turrets of Charles Sumner, or of
Theodore Parker, and puts the house in order with lightning strokes of
wit, and with bold home-thrusts of spontaneous ridicule. He touches his
friend’s soul with celestial surgery, then quickly rubs salve upon the
wounds, and is back again at his desk before the patient has discovered
his visitation. To say that he is the warmest nature that ever came
out of New England would not be expressive. He is the warmest Anglo
Saxon of whom I have ever read or heard tell. Constant expressions
of love and affection flow from him, effusive, demonstrative,
emotional. It is not necessary to cite them. Open the book. The German
romanticists of whom Jean Paul Richter is a type come into one’s mind;
but there was a literary tang to their sentiment. I must, however,
quote two passages illustrative of Howe’s ordinary state of mind:--
“My Well-beloved Friend:--
“Your note from New York found me last evening, and gave me a feeling
as near akin to pure joy as I ever expect to feel on earth. Why is it
that we men are so shy about manifesting a natural feeling in a natural
way, and letting down the flood-gates of the eye to the flow of tears?
I feared to go and bid you adieu on Wednesday, lest I should not be
able to conceal my emotion, hide my tears. I succeeded, however; I wept
not until I was alone!”
Dr. Howe’s aged friend, Mr. F. W. Bird, has left an anecdote of their
last meeting which would add a beauty to Homer:
“As I rose to leave, he followed me into the hall, threw his arms
around my neck and with a beautiful smile said: ‘My dear old fellow,
let me kiss you,’ and gave me a warm kiss. Within two days the thick
curtain fell.” At the time of this parting Bird was sixty-six, and Howe
seventy-five.
Is it not evident from all that has gone before that Dr. Howe was a
saint? He constantly suggests one or other of the great saints in the
Roman Calendar. And I will predict that the world has rather begun than
finished with its interest in him. His work in charity will never be
superseded. Succeeding penologists will recur to it to save them from
the science of their times.
JESTERS.
It is right to break up old china because it is ugly; but to
destroy the china because you enjoy the sound of the crash is a
little depraved. Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton, _et id omne
genus_--the race of joyous tomboys who dash things about--have a
great charm always. The bored, cultivated, sedentary people in any old
civilization wake up more cheerfully in the morning when there is one
of these fellows at work. A new thrill comes into the journals which
the literati had grown to hate so heartily. “Ah,” cry the leisure
classes, “what has Tommy got to say this morning, I wonder.”
These two gentlemen, Shaw and Chesterton, are the Max and Moritz of the
present epoch. For this reason I have tried to like them. I have tried
to tolerate them. I have tried to believe that they are serviceable to
mankind from some point of view which is not yet revealed to me. I do
believe this; but I believe it with the head and not with the heart.
The following reflections are, after all, a mere groping toward the
light, and the tapping of the staff of a blind man.
Any one who has ever passed through London must have been struck
with the competition for notice among all classes of people whose
conspicuousness depends upon their personal activity. In England
there are such masses of any one kind of man or woman that the desire
for identification--in itself a noble desire--leads people to resort
to every expedient for attracting notice to themselves. This is the
explanation of the hyphen in names. Edward B. Jones is a name that no
one can remember; but Edward Burne-Jones is easy. In like manner ladies
turn to lion-hunting, not because they love lions but because it gives
them a status. Indeed, England has always been full of sham lions, who
spring into existence to supply the demand created by these ladies. So
of charity; so of culture; so of politics.
Now there are often intellectual men--like Beaconsfield, and Oscar
Wilde, and Whistler--who are unwilling to wait for their talents to
lift them into notice, but who resort to artificial notoriety in order
to expedite matters. They stick a feather in their cap and call it
‘maccaroni’. Their times suggest this course to them, and their times
claim them instantly when they have complied with the suggestion. In
literary England there is such an enormous and immediate acclaim for
any new cleverness, that a poor and talented young man is under strong
temptation to become surprising and brilliant in his writing. If he
will only do this he will find himself petted, fed, and proclaimed
almost at once.
This particular entry into the Temple of Fame, however, exacts a heavy
toll; for a man who has written in order to break the crust of the
public with his pungency, is not allowed ever thereafter to write
without pungency. I believe that the talent of all the men I have named
would have developed more seriously if they had not in early life given
way to the taste of the public for sensation. But they would not wait:
they must sting themselves into notice.
As for Shaw and Chesterton, they seem to have become partners in a sort
of game of buffoonery--for the world will have its jesters. They are
tumblers on a raft, floating down stream, surrounded by a whole Henley
regatta, an armada of applauding multitudes, on barges, wherries, tugs,
and ferry-boats and river-craft innumerable, whose holiday passengers
shout their admiration to the performers on the raft, and egg on the
favorites to superhuman effort. Shaw shows how far he can stick out his
tongue while continuing to stand on one leg. “Bravo! Huzzah!” roars the
audience. “Did you ever see the like? O Jesu, this is excellent sport!
Faith! How he holds his countenance! He doth it as like one of these
harlotry players as ever I see.”
Chesterton thereupon puts his wrists on the carpet and lifts his back
like a cat. “Lord save us! This was Ercles’ vein! He hath simply the
best wit of any handy-craftsman in Athens. You have not a man in all
Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he!”
There is some exaggeration in this picture; but, I think, some truth
also. The loss which Shaw and Chesterton share in common is a loss of
delicacy. They are crude: they are all edge. They are, indeed, a little
vulgar. But this is not the serious objection to them. The serious
objection to Shaw and Chesterton is that they have no intellectual
independence. They are moving with the show. It will pass, and they
with it.
THE COMIC.
I.
In the caverns of our nature lie hid various emotions, like beasts
in a lair. They are shy to the voice of question or of curiosity,
and they slink and crouch all the more, if we try to lure them out
for inspection. But they come gambolling and roaring forth at the
call of ingenuous human utterance. Any utterance that has in it no
afterthought, but is mere speech that has grown out of a need to speak,
lays a spell upon the wild things within us. Before the echo of it
has died away they are rampant in the open, ignorant of how they came
forth. Let no one then wonder at the difficulties that surround all
study of the human emotions,--blushing giants, vanishing Genii that
they are.
It is easy for us to-day to see that comedy is in its nature the same
sort of thing as tragedy. They arise out of the same need, convey the
same truth, depend upon the same talent. The English drama interwove
comedy and tragedy in the same play, and Shakespeare’s greatness in
one is of a piece with his greatness in the other. Indeed there are
scenes in Lear, Shylock, and Henry IV where tragedy and comedy are
overlaid--where the same scene is both tragic and comic and we laugh
and cry at the same time. But for a Greek to have seen this identity
is very remarkable; because Greek tragedy and Greek comedy represented
distinct professions and were totally different in their methods of
appeal. A Greek tragedy was a drama of fate, based on a familiar
bit of religious folk-lore. The plot was known, the interest lay in
the treatment. A Greek comedy, however, was a farrago of licentious
nonsense, developed in the course of a fantastic narrative-play: it was
what we should call a musical extravaganza. Greek comedy is gigantesque
buffoonery, interspersed with lyric and choral passages of divine
beauty--the whole, following a traditional model as to its arrangement.
With this machinery Aristophanes proceeds to shake the stones of the
Greek theatre with inextinguishable laughter. He will do anything to
raise a laugh. He introduces Socrates hung up in a basket and declaring
that he is flying in the air and speculating about the sun. He makes
the god Dionysus--the very god in whose honor the theatre and festival
exist--to leap from the stage in a moment of comic terror, and hide
himself under the long cloak of his own high-priest, whose chair of
state was in the front row of the pit. Is it possible to imagine what
sort of a scene in the theatre this climax must have aroused? There has
been no laughter since Aristophanes. There is something of the same
humor in Rabelais; but Rabelais is a book, and there each man laughs
alone over his book, not in company with his whole city or tribe, as in
the Greek theatre.
Now what is it they are laughing at? It is sallies of wit, personal
hits, local allusions, indecencies, philosophical cracks, everything
from refined satire to the bludgeons of abuse--and the whole thing is
proceeding in an atmosphere of fun, of wild spirits, of irrepressible
devilry. Compared to Aristophanes, Shakespeare is not funny; he lacks
size. He is a great and thoughtful person, of superabundant genius and
charm, who makes Dutch interiors, drenched in light. But Aristophanes
splits the heavens with a jest, and the rays of truth stream down
from inaccessible solitudes of speculation. He has no epigram, no
cleverness, no derivative humor. He is bald foolery. And yet he conveys
mysticism: he conveys divinity. He alone stands still while the whole
empyrean of Greek life circles about him.
From what height of suddenly assumed superiority does the race of birds
commiserate mankind:
[A]“Come now, ye men, in nature darkling, like to the race of
leaves, of little might, figures of clay, shadowy feeble tribes,
wingless creatures of a day, miserable mortals, dream-like men,
give your attention to us the immortals, the ever-existing, the
ethereal, the ageless, who meditate eternal counsels, in order
that when you have heard everything from us accurately about
sublime things, the nature of birds, and the origin of gods and
rivers, of Erebus and Chaos, you may henceforth bid Prodicus from
me go weep, when you know them accurately.”
[A] Hickie’s translation.
Into what depth of independent thought did the man dream himself, that
such fancies could take hold of him? When Aristophanes has had his
say, there is nothing left over: there is no frame nor shell: there
is no theatre nor world. Everything is exploded and scattered into
sifting, oscillating, shimmering, slowly-sinking fragments of meaning
and allusion. If anyone should think that I am going to analyze the
intellect of Aristophanes, he is in error. I wish only to make a
remark about it; namely, that his power is somehow rooted in personal
detachment, in philosophical independence.
It was the genius of Aristophanes which must have suggested to Plato
the idea which he throws out in the last paragraph of the Symposium.
That great artist, Plato, has left many luminous half-thoughts behind
him. He sets each one in a limbo--in a cocoon of its own light--and
leaves it in careless-careful fashion, as if it were hardly worth
investigation. The rascal! The setting has cost him sleepless nights
and much parchment. He has redrawn and arranged it a hundred times. He
is unable to fathom the idea, and yet it fascinates him. The setting in
which Plato has placed his suggestion about the genius of tragedy and
comedy is so very wonderful--both as a picture and as his apology for
not carrying the idea further--that I must quote it, if only as an act
of piety, and for my own pleasure.
[B]“Agathon arose in order that he might take his place on the
couch by Socrates, when suddenly a band of revellers entered,
and spoiled the order of the banquet. Someone who was going out
having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made
themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and everyone was
compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said
that Eryximachus, Phaedrus and others went away--he himself
fell asleep, and as the nights were long, took a good rest: he
was awakened toward daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he
awoke, the others were either asleep or had gone away; there
remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were
drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and
Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half
awake, and he did not hear the beginning of the discourse; the
chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other
two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with
that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an
artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent,
being drowsy and not quite following the argument. And first of
all Aristophanes dropped off; then, when the day was already
dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose
to depart, Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At
the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the
evening he retired to rest at his own home.”
[B] Jowett’s translation.
What can Plato have had in mind, that glimmers to us in the dawn as
a sort of dim, divine intimation, and is almost immediately drowned
by daylight and the market place? I suppose that Plato may have had
in mind certain moments in comedy where the self-deluded isolation of
some character is so perfectly given as to be almost sublime, and thus
to suggest tragedy; or Plato may have had the opposite experience,
and may have found himself almost ready to laugh at the fate of Ajax,
whose weaknesses of character work out so inevitably, so logically, so
beautifully in the tragedy of Sophocles. Perhaps the thought passed
through Plato’s mind: “If this were not tragedy, what wonderful comedy
it would be! If only the climax were less painful, if the mad Ajax,
instead of killing himself should merely be driven to eat grass like an
ox for a season, or put on his clothes hind-side-before--in fact, if
Ajax’s faults could only be punished quite mildly in the outcome, here
would be a comedy indeed!”
The stuff of which tragedy and comedy are made is the same stuff. The
foibles of mankind work up more easily into comedy than into tragedy;
and this is the chief difference between the two. We readily understand
the Nemesis of temperament, the fatality of character, when it is
exposed upon a small scale. This is the business of comedy; and we do
not here require the labored artifice of gods, mechanical plot, and
pointed allegory to make us realize the moral.
But in tragedy we have the large scale to deal with. A tragedy is
always the same thing. It is a world of complicated and traditional
stage devices for making us realize the helplessness of mankind
before destiny. We are told from the start to expect the worst: there
is going to be suffering, and the suffering is going to be logical,
inevitable, necessary. There is also an implication to be conveyed that
this suffering is somehow in accord with the moral constitution of the
universe. The aim of the whole thing is to teach us to submit--to fit
us for life.
There is profound truth at the bottom of these ideas; for whether you
accept this truth in the form of the Christian doctrine of humility,
or in the form of the Pagan doctrine of reverence for the gods, there
is no question that a human being who is in the state of mind of Lear
or of Ajax is in a dangerous state. He is going to be punished: he is
going to punish himself. The complexities of human life, however, make
this truth very difficult to convey upon the grand scale. It is, in
daily existence, obscured by other and more obvious truths. In order
to dig it out and present it and make it seem at all probable, every
historical device and trapping and sign-post of suggestion--every
stage tradition must be used. The aim is so exalted and sombre, and
the machinery is so ponderous that laughter is out of the question: it
is forbidden. The magnitude of the issues oppress us; and we are told
that it would be cruel to the hero and to the actor and to the author
for us to laugh. And yet we are always on the verge of laughter, and
any inattention to the rubric may bring on a fit of it. If a windlass
breaks we really laugh harder than the occasion warrants.
In reading the Book of Job, where the remoteness of the scene and
certain absurdities in the plot relieve the strain of tragedy, we laugh
inevitably; and the thing that makes us laugh is the very thing that
ought to fill us with awe--the rigor of the logic.
Thus much for the sunny side of tragedy. But let us recur to the night
side of comedy. Falstaff is a comic figure, is he not? And yet what
thoughtful man is there who has not enough of the Puritan in him to
see the tragedy of such a character as Falstaff? How must Falstaff
have appeared to Bunyan!--every stroke of genius which to us makes
for the comic, adding a phosphor-gleam of hell-fire. And Bunyan is
right: Falstaff is an awful picture; and had Shakespeare punished him
adequately he would appear awful. Let us imagine that Shakespeare had
written a play about the old age of Falstaff, picturing his decay of
intellect, his destitution, his flickering return to humor which is no
longer funny--what could have been more tragic?
* * * * *
Was it with such arguments as these that Socrates put Aristophanes
and Agathon to sleep on the famous morning which Plato chronicles? We
cannot tell. Plato has cast the magic of a falling star over the matter
and thus leaves it: his humor, his knack, his destiny compelled him to
treat subjects in this way. Something passes, and after a light has
fallen far off into the sea, we ask “What was it?” Enough for Plato’s
purpose that he has placed Comedy where, perhaps, no philosopher before
or after him ever had the vision to place it--in the heaven of man’s
highest endeavor.
II.
The divine affinities of comedy have thus been established, and we
may make some few stray observations on the nature of the comic, not
hoping to explain laughter, which must remain forever a spontaneous
mystery, but only to point out places where this mystery crosses
the other mysteries and refuses to be merged in them, keeping its
own course and intensifying the darkness of our ignorance by its
corruscations. In the first place the comic is about the most durable
vehicle that truth has ever found. It pretends to deal with momentary
interests in terms of farce and exaggeration; and yet it leaves an
image that strikes deeper and lasts longer than philosophy.
In our search for truth we are continually getting into vehicles that
break down or turn into something else, even during our transit. Let
us take, for example, the case of Plato’s dialogues. How much we have
enjoyed them, how much trusted them! And yet there comes a time when we
feel about Plato’s work that it is almost too well lighted and managed,
too filled with parlor elegance. He seems more interested in the
effects that can be got by manipulating philosophy than in any serious
truth. There is something superficial about the pictures of Greek life
that you get from Plato. The marble is too white, the philosophers
are too considerate of each other’s feelings, Socrates is too clever,
everything is a little arranged. Greek life was not quite like that,
and the way to convince yourself of this is to read Aristophanes.
In Aristophanes you have the convincing hurly-burly, the sweating,
mean, talented, scrambling, laughing life of the Mediterranean--that
same life of which you find records in the recent Cretan discoveries,
dating from 2500 B. C., or which you may observe in the market-places
of Naples to-day. Plato’s dialogues do not give this life. They give a
picture of something that never existed, something that sounds like an
enchanted picture, a picture of life as it ought to be for the leisure
classes, but as it never has been and never can be while the world
lasts, even for them.
The ideas which we carry in our minds criticize each other, despite
all we can do to keep them apart. They attack and mutilate each
other, like the monsters in a drop of muddy water, or the soldiers
of Cadmus when the stone of controversy was thrown among them. It
is as hard to preserve the _entente cordiale_ between hostile
thoughts as between hostile bull-dogs. We have no sooner patted the
head of the courtly and affable Socrates given to us by Plato--the
perfect scholar and sweet gentleman--than the vulgarian Socrates given
to us by Aristophanes--the frowzy all-nighter, the notorious enemy
to bathing--flies at the throat of Plato’s darling and leaves him
rumpled. So far as manners and customs go, nothing can rival good
comic description: it supersedes everything else. You can neither write
nor preach it down, nor put it down by law. Hogarth has depicted the
England of the early Georges in such a way as to convince us. No mortal
vehicle of expression can upset Hogarth.
When we come to pictures of life which belong to a more serious
species--to poetry, to history, to religion--we find the same conflicts
going on in our minds: one source criticizes another. One belief eats
up the next belief as the acid eats the plate. It is not merely the
outside of Socrates that Aristophanes has demolished. He has a little
damaged the philosophy of Socrates. He undermines Greek thought: he
helps and urges us not to take it seriously. He thus becomes an ally of
the whole world of later Christian thought. If I were to go to Athens
to-morrow, the first man I would seek out would be Aristophanes. He is
a modern: he is a man.
We have been speaking of Greek thought and Greek life; yet between
that life and ourselves there have intervened some centuries of
Christianity, including the Middle Ages, during which Jewish influence
pervaded and absorbed other thought. The Hebrew ruled and subdued
in philosophy, poetry, and religion. The Hebrew influence is the
most powerful influence ever let loose upon the world. Every book
written since this Hebrew domination is saturated with Hebrew. It
has thus become impossible to see the classics as they were. Between
them and us in an atmosphere of mordant, powerful, Hebraic thought,
which transmutes and fantastically recolors them. How the classics
would have laughed over our conception of them! Virgil was a witch
during the Middle Ages and now he is an acolyte, a person over whom
the modern sentimental school maunders in tears. The classics would
feel toward our notions of them somewhat as a Parisian feels toward a
French vaudeville after it has been prepared for the American stage.
Christianity is to blame.