Taste deserves its fame. I know its repute, and I have heard it called
the France of France. But the subject is so large and exigent that a few
particulars, and those the pleasures of the epicure, cannot satisfy. I
know many men of taste whose single opinions and practice would interest
much more. It should be extended to gardens and grounds, and mainly one
thing should be illustrated: that life in the country wants all things
on a low tone,--wants coarse clothes, old shoes, no fleet horse that a
man cannot hold, but an old horse that will stand tied in a pasture half
a day without risk, so allowing the picnic-party the full freedom of the
woods. Natural history is, in the country, most attractive; at once
elegant, immortal, always opening new resorts. The first care of a man
settling in the country should be to open the face of the earth to
himself, by a little knowledge of nature, or a great deal, if he can, of
birds, plants, rocks, astronomy; in short, the art of taking a walk.
This will draw the sting out of frost, dreariness out of November and
March, and the drowsiness out of August. To know the trees is, as
Spenser says of "the ash, for nothing ill." Shells, too; how hungry I
found myself, the other day, at Agassiz's Museum, for their names! But
the uses of the woods are many, and some of them for the scholar high
and peremptory. When his task requires the wiping out from memory
"all trivial fond records
That youth and observation copied there,"
he must leave the house, the streets, and the club, and go to wooded
uplands, to the clearing and the brook. Well for him if he can say with
the old minstrel, "I know where to find a new song."
If I go into the woods in winter, and am shown the thirteen or fourteen
species of willow that grow in Massachusetts, I learn that they quietly
expand in the warmer days, or when nobody is looking at them, and,
though insignificant enough in the general bareness of the forest, yet a
great change takes place in them between fall and spring; in the first
relentings of March they hasten, and long before anything else is ready,
these osiers hang out their joyful flowers in contrast to all the woods.
You cannot tell when they do bud and blossom, these vivacious trees, so
ancient, for they are almost the oldest of all. Among fossil remains,
the willow and the pine appear with the ferns. They bend all day to
every wind; the cart-wheel in the road may crush them; every passenger
may strike off a twig with his cane; every boy cuts them for a whistle;
the cow, the rabbit, the insect, bite the sweet and tender bark; yet, in
spite of accident and enemy, their gentle persistency lives when the oak
is shattered by storm, and grows in the night and snow and cold. When I
see in these brave plants this vigor and immortality in weakness, I find
a sudden relief and pleasure in observing the mighty law of vegetation,
and I think it more grateful and health-giving than any news I am likely
to find of man in the journals, and better than Washington politics.
It is easy to see that there is no limit to the chapter of Resources. I
have not, in all these rambling sketches, gone beyond the beginning of
my list. Resources of Man,--it is the inventory of the world, the roll
of arts and sciences; it is the whole of memory, the whole of invention;
it is all the power of passion, the majesty of virtue, and the
omnipotence of will.
But the one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is,
that, as is the receiver, so is the gift; that all these acquisitions
are victories of the good brain and brave heart; that the world belongs
to the energetic, belongs to the wise. It is in vain to make a paradise
but for good men. The tropics are one vast garden; yet man is more
miserably fed and conditioned there than in the cold and stingy zones.
The healthy, the civil, the industrious, the learned, the moral
race,--Nature herself only yields her secret to these. And the resources
of America and its future will be immense only to wise and virtuous men.
THE COMIC.
THE COMIC.
A TASTE for fun is all but universal in our species, which is the only
joker in nature. The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither
do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done
in their presence. And as the lower nature does not jest, neither does
the highest. The Reason pronounces its omniscient yea and nay, but
meddles never with degrees or fractions; and it is in comparing
fractions with essential integers or wholes that laughter begins.
Aristotle's definition of the ridiculous is, "what is out of time and
place, without danger." If there be pain and danger, it becomes tragic;
if not, comic. I confess, this definition, though by an admirable
definer, does not satisfy me, does not say all we know.
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or
well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be
performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of
performance. The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation,
the break of continuity in the intellect, is comedy; and it announces
itself physically in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.
With the trifling exception of the stratagems of a few beasts and birds,
there is no seeming, no halfness in nature, until the appearance of man.
Unconscious creatures do the whole will of wisdom. An oak or a chestnut
undertakes no function it cannot execute; or if there be phenomena in
botany which we call abortions, the abortion is also a function of
nature, and assumes to the intellect the like completeness with the
further function, to which in different circumstances it had attained.
The same rule holds true of the animals. Their activity is marked by
unerring good-sense. But man, through his access to Reason, is capable
of the perception of a whole and a part. Reason is the whole, and
whatsoever is not that is a part. The whole of nature is agreeable to
the whole of thought, or to the Reason; but separate any part of nature,
and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the
ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of humor is to look with
considerate good-nature at every object in existence _aloof_, as a man
might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the
figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the
unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object,
as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an
umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone,
standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful,
no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous.
In virtue of man's access to Reason or the Whole, the human form is a
pledge of wholeness, suggests to our imagination the perfection of truth
or goodness, and exposes by contrast any halfness or imperfection. We
have a primary association between perfectness and this form. But the
facts that occur when actual men enter do not make good this
anticipation; a discrepancy which is at once detected by the intellect,
and the outward sign is the muscular irritation of laughter.
Reason does not joke, and men of reason do not; a prophet, in whom the
moral sentiment predominates, or a philosopher, in whom the love of
truth predominates, these do not joke, but they bring the standard, the
ideal whole, exposing all actual defect; and hence, the best of all
jokes is the sympathetic contemplation of things by the understanding
from the philosopher's point of view. There is no joke so true and deep
in actual life, as when some pure idealist goes up and down among the
institutions of society, attended by a man who knows the world, and who,
sympathizing with the philosopher's scrutiny, sympathizes also with the
confusion and indignation of the detected skulking institutions. His
perception of disparity, his eye wandering perpetually from the rule to
the crooked, lying, thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with
laughter.
This is the radical joke of life and then of literature. The presence of
the ideal of right and of truth in all action makes the yawning
delinquencies of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the
interest, but droll to the intellect. The activity of our sympathies may
for a time hinder our perceiving the fact intellectually, and so
deriving mirth from it; but all falsehoods, all vices seen at sufficient
distance, seen from the point where our moral sympathies do not
interfere, become ludicrous. The comedy is in the intellect's perception
of discrepancy. And whilst the presence of the ideal discovers the
difference, the comedy is enhanced whenever that ideal is embodied
visibly in a man. Thus Falstaff, in Shakspeare, is a character of the
broadest comedy, giving himself unreservedly to his senses, coolly
ignoring the Reason, whilst he invokes its name, pretending to
patriotism and to parental virtues, not with any intent to deceive, but
only to make the fun perfect by enjoying the confusion betwixt reason
and the negation of reason,--in other words, the rank rascaldom he is
calling by its name. Prince Hal stands by, as the acute understanding,
who sees the Right and sympathizes with it, and in the heyday of youth
feels also the full attractions of pleasure, and is thus eminently
qualified to enjoy the joke. At the same time he is to that degree under
the Reason, that it does not amuse him as much as it amuses another
spectator.
If the essence of the comic be the contrast in the intellect between the
idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be
affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest than our integrity,
and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke, of any lie we
entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a
balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an
essential element in a fine character. Wherever the intellect is
constructive, it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a defect in
the noblest and most oracular soul. The perception of the comic is a tie
of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from
those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects
sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still
convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for
him.
It is true the sensibility to the ludicrous may run into excess. Men
celebrate their perception of halfness and a latent lie by the peculiar
explosions of laughter. So painfully susceptible are some men to these
impressions, that if a man of wit come into the room where they are, it
seems to take them out of themselves with violent convulsions of the
face and sides, and obstreperous roarings of the throat. How often and
with what unfeigned compassion we have seen such a person receiving like
a willing martyr the whispers into his ear of a man of wit. The victim
who has just received the discharge, if in a solemn company, has the air
very much of a stout vessel which has just shipped a heavy sea; and
though it does not split it, the poor bark is for the moment critically
staggered. The peace of society and the decorum of tables seem to
require that next to a notable wit should always be posted a phlegmatic
bolt-upright man, able to stand without movement of muscle whole
broadsides of this Greek fire. It is a true shaft of Apollo, and
traverses the universe, and unless it encounter a mystic or a dumpish
soul, goes everywhere heralded and harbingered by smiles and greetings.
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no
learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It
is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage, can
plead any immunity,--they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of
ice, or down they must go, dignity and all. "Dost thou think, because
thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Plutarch
happily expresses the value of the jest as a legitimate weapon of the
philosopher. "Men cannot exercise their rhetoric unless they speak, but
their philosophy even whilst they are silent or jest merrily; for as it
is the highest degree of injustice not to be just and yet seem so, so it
is the top of wisdom to philosophize yet not appear to do it, and in
mirth to do the same with those that are serious and seem in earnest;
for as in Euripides, the Bacchæ, though unprovided of iron weapons and
unarmed, wounded their invaders with the boughs of trees, which they
carried, thus the very jests and merry talk of true philosophers move
those that are not altogether insensible, and unusually reform."
In all the parts of life, the occasion of laughter is some seeming, some
keeping of the word to the ear and eye, whilst it is broken to the soul.
Thus, as the religious sentiment is the most vital and sublime of all
our sentiments, and capable of the most prodigious effects, so is it
abhorrent to our whole nature, when, in the absence of the sentiment,
the act or word or officer volunteers to stand in its stead. To the
sympathies this is shocking, and occasions grief. But to the intellect
the lack of the sentiment gives no pain; it compares incessantly the
sublime idea with the bloated nothing which pretends to be it, and the
sense of the disproportion is comedy. And as the religious sentiment is
the most real and earnest thing in nature, being a mere rapture, and
excluding, when it appears, all other considerations, the vitiating this
is the greatest lie. Therefore, the oldest gibe of literature is the
ridicule of false religion. This is the joke of jokes. In religion, the
sentiment is all; the ritual or ceremony indifferent. But the inertia of
men inclines them, when the sentiment sleeps, to imitate that thing it
did; it goes through the ceremony omitting only the will, makes the
mistake of the wig for the head, the clothes for the man. The older the
mistake and the more overgrown the particular form is, the more
ridiculous to the intellect. Captain John Smith, the discoverer of New
England, was not wanting in humor. The Society in London which had
contributed their means to convert the savages, hoping doubtless to see
the Keokuks, Black Hawks, Roaring Thunders, and Tustanuggees of that day
converted into church-wardens and deacons at least, pestered the gallant
rover with frequent solicitations out of England touching the conversion
of the Indians, and the enlargement of the Church. Smith, in his
perplexity how to satisfy the Society, sent out a party into the swamp,
caught an Indian, and sent him home in the first ship to London, telling
the Society they might convert one themselves.
The satire reaches its climax when the actual Church is set in direct
contradiction to the dictates of the religious sentiment, as in the
sketch of our Puritan politics in Hudibras:--
"Our brethren of New England use
Choice malefactors to excuse,
And hang the guiltless in their stead,
Of whom the churches have less need;
As lately happened, in a town
Where lived a cobbler, and but one,
That out of doctrine could cut use,
And mend men's lives as well as shoes.
This precious brother having slain,
In times of peace, an Indian,
Not out of malice, but mere zeal
(Because he was an infidel),
The mighty Tottipottymoy
Sent to our elders an envoy,
Complaining loudly of the breach
Of league held forth by Brother Patch,
Against the articles in force
Between both churches, his and ours,
For which he craved the saints to render
Into his hands, or hang the offender;
But they, maturely having weighed
They had no more but him o' th' trade
(A man that served them in the double
Capacity to teach and cobble),
Resolved to spare him; yet to do
The Indian Hoghan Moghan too
Impartial justice, in his stead did
Hang an old weaver that was bedrid."
In science the jest at pedantry is analogous to that in religion which
lies against superstition. A classification or nomenclature used by the
scholar only as a memorandum of his last lesson in the laws of nature,
and confessedly a makeshift, a bivouac for a night, and implying a march
and a conquest to-morrow, becomes through indolence a barrack and a
prison, in which the man sits down immovably, and wishes to detain
others. The physiologist Camper, humorously confesses the effect of his
studies in dislocating his ordinary associations. "I have been
employed," he says, "six months on the _Cetacea_; I understand the
osteology of the head of all these monsters, and have made the
combination with the human head so well, that everybody now appears to
me narwhale, porpoise, or marsouins. Women, the prettiest in society,
and those whom I find less comely, they are all either narwhales or
porpoises to my eyes." I chanced the other day to fall in with an odd
illustration of the remark I had heard, that the laws of disease are as
beautiful as the laws of health; I was hastening to visit an old and
honored friend, who, I was informed, was in a dying condition, when I
met his physician, who accosted me in great spirits, with joy sparkling
in his eyes. "And how is my friend, the reverend Doctor?" I inquired.
"O, I saw him this morning; it is the most correct apoplexy I have ever
seen: face and hands livid, breathing stertorous, all the symptoms
perfect." And he rubbed his hands with delight, for in the country we
cannot find every day a case that agrees with the diagnosis of the
books. I think there is malice in a very trifling story which goes
about, and which I should not take any notice of, did I not suspect it
to contain some satire upon my brothers of the Natural History Society.
It is of a boy who was learning his alphabet. "That letter is A," said
the teacher; "A," drawled the boy. "That is B," said the teacher; "B,"
drawled the boy, and so on. "That is W," said the teacher. "The devil!"
exclaimed the boy, "is that W?"
The pedantry of literature belongs to the same category. In both cases
there is a lie, when the mind, seizing a classification to help it to a
sincerer knowledge of the fact, stops in the classification; or learning
languages, and reading books, to the end of a better acquaintance with
man, stops in the languages and books: in both the learner seems to be
wise, and is not.
The same falsehood, the same confusion of the sympathies because a
pretension is not made good, points the perpetual satire against
poverty, since, according to Latin poetry and English doggerel,
Poverty does nothing worse
Than to make man ridiculous.
In this instance the halfness lies in the pretension of the parties to
some consideration on account of their condition. If the man is not
ashamed of his poverty, there is no joke. The poorest man who stands on
his manhood destroys the jest. The poverty of the saint, of the rapt
philosopher, of the naked Indian, is not comic. The lie is in the
surrender of the man to his appearance; as if a man should neglect
himself, and treat his shadow on the wall with marks of infinite
respect. It affects us oddly, as to see things turned upside down, or to
see a man in a high wind run after his hat, which is always droll. The
relation of the parties is inverted,--hat being for the moment master,
the by-standers cheering the hat. The multiplication of artificial wants
and expenses in civilized life, and the exaggeration of all trifling
forms, present innumerable occasions for this discrepancy to expose
itself. Such is the story told of the painter Astley, who, going out of
Rome one day with a party for a ramble in the Campagna, and the weather
proving hot, refused to take off his coat when his companions threw off
theirs, but sweltered on; which, exciting remark, his comrades playfully
forced off his coat, and behold on the back of his waistcoat a gay
cascade was thundering down the rocks with foam and rainbow, very
refreshing in so sultry a day,--a picture of his own, with which the
poor painter had been fain to repair the shortcomings of his wardrobe.
The same astonishment of the intellect at the disappearance of the man
out of nature, through some superstition of his house or equipage, as if
truth and virtue should be bowed out of creation by the clothes they
wore, is the secret of all the fun that circulates concerning eminent
fops and fashionists, and, in like manner, of the gay Rameau of Diderot,
who believes in nothing but hunger, and that the sole end of art,
virtue, and poetry is to put something for mastication between the upper
and lower mandibles.
Alike in all these cases and in the instance of cowardice or fear of any
sort, from the loss of life to the loss of spoons, the majesty of man is
violated. He, whom all things should serve, serves some one of his own
tools. In fine pictures the head sheds on the limbs the expression of
the face. In Raphael's Angel driving Heliodorus from the Temple, the
crest of the helmet is so remarkable, that but for the extraordinary
energy of the face, it would draw the eye too much; but the countenance
of the celestial messenger subordinates it, and we see it not. In poor
pictures the limbs and trunk degrade the face. So among the women in the
street: you shall see one whose bonnet and dress are one thing, and the
lady herself quite another, wearing withal an expression of meek
submission to her bonnet and dress; and another whose dress obeys and
heightens the expression of her form.
More food for the comic is afforded whenever the personal appearance,
the face, form, and manners, are subjects of thought with the man
himself. No fashion is the best fashion for those matters which will
take care of themselves. This is the butt of those jokes of the Paris
drawing-rooms, which Napoleon reckoned so formidable, and which are
copiously recounted in the French Mémoires. A lady of high rank, but of
lean figure, had given the Countess Dulauloy the nickname of "Le
Grenadier tricolore," in allusion to her tall figure, as well as to her
republican opinions; the Countess retaliated by calling Madame "the
Venus of the Père-la-Chaise," a compliment to her skeleton which did
not fail to circulate. "Lord C.," said the Countess of Gordon, "O, he is
a perfect comb, all teeth and back." The Persians have a pleasant story
of Tamerlane which relates to the same particulars: "Timur was an ugly
man; he had a blind eye and a lame foot. One day when Chodscha was with
him, Timur scratched his head, since the hour of the barber was come,
and commanded that the barber should be called. Whilst he was shaven,
the barber gave him a looking-glass in his hand. Timur saw himself in
the mirror and found his face quite too ugly. Therefore he began to
weep; Chodscha also set himself to weep, and so they wept for two hours.
On this, some courtiers began to comfort Timur, and entertained him with
strange stories in order to make him forget all about it. Timur ceased
weeping, but Chodscha ceased not, but began now first to weep amain, and
in good earnest. At last said Timur to Chodscha, 'Hearken! I have looked
in the mirror, and seen myself ugly. Thereat I grieved, because,
although I am Caliph, and have also much wealth, and many wives, yet
still I am so ugly; therefore have I wept. But thou, why weepest thou
without ceasing?' Chodscha answered, 'If thou hast only seen thy face
once, and at once seeing hast not been able to contain thyself, but hast
wept, what should we do,--we who see thy face every day and night? If we
weep not, who should weep? Therefore have I wept.' Timur almost split
his sides with laughing."
Politics also furnish the same mark for satire. What is nobler than the
expansive sentiment of patriotism, which would find brothers in a whole
nation? But when this enthusiasm is perceived to end in the very
intelligible maxims of trade, so much for so much, the intellect feels
again the half-man. Or what is fitter than that we should espouse and
carry a principle against all opposition? But when the men appear who
ask our votes as representatives of this ideal, we are sadly out of
countenance.