IV
I cannot agree with Dr. Japp [48] when, in the course of some laudatory remarks on De Quincey’s humour, he says: “It is precisely here that De Quincey parts company, alike from Coleridge and from Wordsworth; neither of them had humour.”
In the first place De Quincey’s humour never seems to me very genuine. He could play with ideas occasionally in a queer fantastic way, as in his elaborate gibe on Dr. Andrew Bell.
“First came Dr. Andrew Bell. We knew him. Was he dull? Is a wooden spoon dull? Fishy were his eyes, torpedinous was his manner; and his main idea, out of two which he really had, related to the moon—from which you infer, perhaps, that he was lunatic. By no means. It was no craze, under the influence of the moon, which possessed him; it was an idea of mere hostility to the moon. . . . His wrath did not pass into lunacy; it produced simple distraction; and uneasy fumbling with the idea—like that of an old superannuated dog who longs to worry, but cannot for want of teeth.”
A clever piece of analytical satire, if you like, but not humorous so much as witty. Incongruity, unexpectedness, belongs to the essence of humour. Here there is that cunning display of congruity between the old dog and the Doctor which the wit is so adroit in evolving.
Similarly in the essay on “Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts,” the style of clever extravaganza adopted in certain passages is witty, certainly, but lacks the airy irresponsibility characterizing humour. Sometimes he indulges in pure clowning, which is humorous in a heavy-handed way. But grimacing humour is surely a poor kind of humour.
Without going into any dismal academic discussion on Wit and Humour, I think it is quite possible to differentiate these two offsprings of imagination, making Wit the intellectual brother of the twain. Analytical minds naturally turn to wit, by preference: Impressionistic minds to humour. Dickens, who had no gift for analysis, and whose writings are a series of delightful unreflective, personal impressions, is always humorous, never witty. Reflective writers like George Eliot or George Meredith are more often witty than humorous.
I do not rate De Quincey’s wit very highly, though it
is agreeably diverting at times, but it was preferable to his humour.
The second point to be noted against Dr. Japp is his reference to Coleridge. No one would claim Wordsworth as a humorist, but Coleridge cannot be dismissed with this comfortable finality. Perhaps he was more witty than humorous; he also had an analytic mind of rarer quality even than De Quincey’s, and his Table Talk is full of delightful flashes. But the amusing account he gives of his early journalistic experiences and the pleasant way in which he pokes fun at himself, can scarcely be compatible with the assertion that he had “no humour.”
Indeed, it was this quality, I think, which endeared him especially to Lamb, and it was the absence of this quality which prevented Lamb from giving that personal attachment to Wordsworth which he held for both Coleridge and Hazlitt.
But the comparative absence of humour in De Quincey is another characteristic of Vagabondage. Humour is largely a product of civilization, and the Vagabond is only half-civilized. I can see little genuine humour in either Hazlitt or De Quincey. They had wit to an extent, it is true, but they had this despite, not because, of their Vagabondage. Thoreau, notwithstanding flashes of shrewd American wit, can scarcely be accounted a humorist. Whitman was entirely devoid of humour. A lack of humour is felt as a serious deficiency in reading the novels of Jefferies; and the airy wit of Stevenson is scarcely full-bodied enough to rank him among the humorists.
This deficiency of humour may be traced to the characteristic attitude of the Vagabond towards life, which is one of eager curiosity. He is inquisitive about its many issues, but with a good deal of the child’s eagerness to know how a thing happened, and who this is, and what that is. Differing in many ways, as did Borrow and De Quincey, we find the same insatiable curiosity; true, it expressed itself differently, but there is a basic similarity between the impulse that took Borrow over the English highways and gave him that zest for travel in other countries, and the impulse that sent De Quincey wandering over the various roads of intellectual and emotional inquiry. Thoreau’s main reason for his two years’ sojourn in the woods was one of curiosity. He “wanted to know” what he could find out by “fronting” for a while the essential facts of life, and he left, as he says, “for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live.” In other words, inquisitiveness inspired the experiment, and inquisitiveness as to other experiments induced him to terminate the Walden episode.
Now, in his own way, De Quincey was possibly the most inquisitive of all the Vagabonds. The complete absence of the imperative mood in his writings has moved certain moralists like Carlyle to impatience with him. There is a fine moral tone about his disposition, but his writings are engagingly unmoral (quite different, of course, from immoral). He has called himself “an intellectual creature,” and this happy epithet exactly describes him. He collected facts, as an enthusiast collects curios, for purposes of decoration. He observed them,
analysed their features, but almost always with a view to æsthetic comparisons.
And to understand De Quincey aright one must follow him in his multitudinous excursions, not merely rest content with a few fragments of “impassioned prose,” and the avowedly autobiographic writings. For the autobiography extends through the sixteen volumes of his works. The writings, no doubt, vary in quality; in many, as in the criticism of German and French writers, acute discernment and astounding prejudices jostle one another. But this is no reason for turning impatiently away. Indeed, it is an additional incentive to proceed, for they supply such splendid psychological material for illustrating the temperament and tastes of the writer. And this may confidently be said: There is “fundamental brainwork” in every article that De Quincey has written.