"'The port wine business?' cried Nicholas.
"'Drinking port wine with the clown,' said the Manager; 'but he was greedy and one night bit off the bowl of the glass and choked himself, so his vulgarity was the death of him at last.'"
It is greatly to the credit of Dickens that although he wrote so much and salted so freely, he never approached any kind of impropriety. The only weak point in his humour is that he borrows too much from his imagination, and too little from reality.
I trust that those who have accompanied me through the chapters of this work, will have been able to trace a gradual amelioration in humour. We have seen it from age to age running parallel with the history, and varying with the mental development of the times, rising and falling in fables, demonology, word-coining and coarseness, and I hope we may add in practical joking and coxcombry.
The remaining chapters will draw conclusions from our general survey. There can be little doubt that humour cannot be studied in any country better than in our own. The commercial character of England, and its connection with many nations whose feelings are intermingled in our minds as their blood is in our veins, are favourable for the development of fancy and of the finest kinds of wit, while the moderate Government under which we live, tends in the same direction. Humour may have germinated in the darkness of despotism, among the discontented subjects of Dionysius or under "the tyranny tempered by epigrams," of Louis XIV., but it failed, under such conditions to obtain a full expression, and although it has revelled and run riot under republican governments, it has always tended in them to coarse and personal vituperation. The fairest blossoms of pleasantry thrive best where the sun is not strong enough to scorch, nor the soil rank enough to corrupt.
CHAPTER XIX.
Variation—Constancy—Influence of Temperament—Of Observation—Bulls—Want of Knowledge—Effects of Emotion—Unity of the Sense of the Ludicrous.
As every face in the world is different, so no two minds are exactly similar, although there is great uniformity in the perceptions of the senses and still more in our primary innate ideas. The variety lies in the one case, in the finer lines and expressions of the countenance, and in the other in those delicate shades and combinations of feeling which are influenced more or less by memory, reflection, imagination, by experience, education and temperament, by taste, morality, and religion.
It was no doubt the view of this great diversity of thought that led Quintilian to say that "the topics from which jests may be elicited are not less numerous than those from which thoughts may be derived!" Herbert writes to the same purpose—