We also consider that the mendicant deserved a coin, who, knowing the love of wit in Louis XIV., complained sadly to him, Ton image est partout—excepté dans ma poche. In such cases the pun is sometimes transformed, for it only invariably exists where the words are equivocal and where the allusion is peculiarly applicable to the double meaning the falsity vanishes, and the verbal coincidence becomes an effective ornament of style. It has been so used by the most successful writers, and it is still under certain conditions approved; but more discrimination is required in such embellishments than was anciently necessary. And when the allusion becomes not only elegant but iridescent, reflecting beautiful and changing lights, it rises into poetical metaphor.
Falsity is necessary to constitute a pun; if no great identity is assumed between the two words, and they are not introduced in a somewhat strained manner, we do not consider the term applicable. If the use of merely similar words in sentences were to be so viewed, we should be constantly guilty of punning. Wordsworth was not guilty of a pun on that hot day in Germany when, his friends having given him some hock, a wine he detested, he exclaimed:
"In Spain, that land of priests and apes
The thing called wine doth come from grapes,
But where flows down the lordly Rhine
The thing called gripes doth come from wine."
No doubt he intended to show a coincidence in coupling together two words of nearly the same sound, but he represented the two things signified as cause and effect, not as identical, so as to form a pun.
The difference between poetical and humorous comparisons may be generally stated to be that the former are upward towards something superior, the latter downwards towards something inferior. Tennyson calls Maud a "queen rose," and when we sing—
"Happy fair,
Thine eyes are load stars, and thy tongue sweet air,"
the comparison is inspiring, but, when Washington Irving speaks of a "vinegar-faced woman," we feel inclined to laugh. There are, however, exceptions to this rule. Socrates says that to compare a man to everything excellent is to insult him. Sometimes also a dwarf is compared to a giant for the purpose of calling attention to his insignificance. This is often seen in irony. So also, we at times laugh at the sagacity shown by the lower animals, which seems not so much to raise them in our estimation as to lower them by occasioning a comparison with the superior powers of man.
Sometimes in comparisons between things very different, we cannot say one thing is not as good as another, but, with regard to a certain use, purpose, or design, there may be an evident inferiority. Thus comparisons are so often odious, that Wordsworth speaks of the blessing of being able to look at the world without making them. We may observe generally that when an idea is brought before us, which, instead of elevating and enlarging our previous conception, clashes and jangles with it, there is an approach towards the laughable.
We cannot say that enthusiasm in Art or Science should not exist, and yet a manifestation of it seems absurd when we do not sympathise in it. The most amiable and beneficent of men, it has been remarked, "have always been a favourite subject of ridicule for the satirist and jester." Personal deformities seem absurd to some, but those who have made them their study see nothing extraordinary in them. Sometimes our laughter shows us that something seems wrong, which our highest ideal would approve. I remember seeing an aged man tottering along a rough road in France, with a heavy bag of geese on his back. One of his countrymen, who by the way have not too much reverence for age, came behind him and jovially exclaimed, "Courage, mon ami, vous êtes sur le chemin de Paradis." The old man ought to have been glad to have been on the road to heaven, but our laughter reminds us that most would prefer to stay on earth.
It must be admitted that our feelings with regard to right and wrong are very shifting and changeable, and that we condemn others for doing what we should ourselves have done under the same circumstances. We have also an especial tendency to adopt the view that what we are accustomed to is right. We sometimes observe this in morals, where it causes a considerable amount of confusion, but it holds greater sway over such light matters as awaken the sense of the ludicrous. When anything is presented to us different from what we have been long accustomed to, unless it is evidently better, we are inclined to consider it worse. In the same way, things which at first we consider wrong, we finally come to think unobjectionable.