Here is an instance in which a rudimentary sense of propriety would have saved a gentleman and a scholar from insulting the principles of good taste. It is more agreeable to contemplate the brutal crowd surrounding a baited bear than to contemplate this clergyman writing in the seclusion of his library. Religion and scholarship have their responsibilities. The German soldiers who ravaged Belgium outraged the sentiments of humanity; but the German professors who sat at their desks, alternately defending and denying these ravages, outraged, not merely humanity, but the taste and intelligence of the world. Theirs was the unpardonable sin.
Cruelty is as old as life, and will cease only when life ceases. It has passed its candid stage long, long ago. It must now be condoned for its utility, or laughed at for its fun. Our comic sense, if less full-blown than of yore, still relishes its measure of brutality. To write gaily about the infliction of pain is to win for it forgiveness. Douglas Jerrold found something infinitely amusing in the sensations of the lobster put into a pot of cold water, and boiled. His description of the perspiring crustacean, unable to understand the cause of its rapidly increasing discomfort, was thought so laughable that it was reprinted, as a happy example of the writer’s humour, in a recently published volume on Jerrold’s connection with “Punch.” The same genial spirit animated an American Senator who opposed the sentimental exclusion of egrets from commerce. It was the opinion of this gallant gentleman that the Lord created white herons to supply ornaments “for the hats of our beautiful ladies”; and having expressed his sympathy with the designs of Providence, he proposed in merry mood that we should establish foundling asylums for the nestlings deprived of their overdecorated parents,—as waggish a witticism as one would want to hear.
When an eminently respectable American newspaper can be convulsively funny, or at least can try to be convulsively funny, over the sale of a horse, twenty-seven years old, blind, rheumatic, and misshapen, to a Chicago huckster for fifteen cents, we have no need to sigh over our waning sense of humour. The happy thought of calling the horse Algernon gave a rich twang to this comic episode, and saved the cheerful reader from any intrusive sentiment of pity. When a pious periodical, published in the interests of a Christian church, can tell us in a rollicking Irish story how a farmer, speeding through the frozen night, empties a bag of kittens into the snow, and whips up his horse, pretending playfully that the “craitures” are overtaking him, we make comfortably sure that religion lends itself as deftly as journalism to the light-hearted drolleries of the cruel.
Novelists, who understand how easy a thing it is to gratify our humorous susceptibilities, venture upon doubtful jests. Mr. Tarkington knows very well that the spectacle of a boy dismembering an insect calls for reprobation; but that if the boy’s experiments can be described as “infringing upon the domain of Dr. Carrell,” they make a bid for laughter. “Penrod’s efforts—with the aid of a pin—to effect a transference of living organism were unsuccessful; but he convinced himself forever that a spider cannot walk with a beetle’s legs.” It is funny to those who relish the fun. If it does not, as Mr. Pater advises, make suffering ridiculous, it makes sympathy ridiculous, as being a thing more serious than the occasion warrants. The reader who is not amused tries to forget the incident, and hurries cheerfully on.
A more finished example of callous gaiety, and one which has been more widely appreciated, may be found in a story called “Crocker’s Hole,” by Blackmore. It tells how a young man named Pike, whom “Providence” had created for angling (the author is comfortably sure on this point), caught an old and wary trout by the help of a new and seductive bait. The over-wrought, over-coloured beauty of Blackmore’s style is in accord with his highly sophisticated sense of humour:
“The lover of the rose knows well a gay, voluptuous beetle, whose pleasure it is to lie embedded in a fount of beauty. Deep among the incurving petals of the blushing fragrance he loses himself in his joys till a breezy waft reveals him. And when the sunlight breaks upon his luscious dissipation, few would have the heart to oust such a gem from such a setting. All his back is emerald sparkles; all his front, red Indian gold, and here and there he grows white spots to save the eye from aching. Pike slipped in his finger, fetched him out, and gave him a little change of joys by putting a Limerick hook through his thorax, and bringing it out between his elytra. Cetonia aurata liked it not, but pawed the air very naturally, fluttered his wings, and trod prettily upon the water under a lively vibration. He looked quite as happy, and considerably more active than when he had been cradled in the anthers of a rose.”
The story is an angling story, and it would be unreasonable to spoil it by sympathizing with the bait. But there is something in the painting of the little beetle’s beauty, and in the amused description of its pain, which would sicken a donkey-beating costermonger, if he were cultivated enough to know what the author was driving at. It takes education and an unswerving reverence for sport to save us from the costermonger’s point of view.
There are times when it is easier to mock than to pity; there are occasions when we may be seduced from blame, even if we are not won all the way to approval. Mrs. Pennell tells us in her very interesting and very candid life of Whistler that the artist gratified a grudge against his Venetian landlady by angling for her goldfish (placed temptingly on a ledge beneath his window-sill); that he caught them, fried them, and dropped them dexterously back into their bowl. It is a highly illustrative anecdote, and we are more amused than we have any business to be. Mr. Whistler’s method of revenge was the method of the Irish tenants who hocked their landlord’s cattle; but the adroitness of his malice, and the whimsical picture it presents, disarms sober criticism. A sympathetic setting for such an episode would have been a comedy played in the streets of Mantua, under the gay rule of Francesco Gonzaga, and before the eyes of that fair Isabella d’Este who bore tranquilly the misfortunes of others.
We hear so much about the sanitary qualities of laughter, we have been taught so seriously the gospel of amusement, that any writer, preacher, or lecturer, whose smile is broad enough to be infectious, finds himself a prophet in the market-place. Laughter, we are told, freshens our exhausted spirits and disposes us to good-will,—which is true. It is also true that laughter quiets our uneasy scruples and disposes us to simple savagery. Whatever we laugh at, we condone, and the echo of man’s malicious merriment rings pitilessly through the centuries. Humour which has no scorn, wit which has no sting, jests which have no victim, these are not the pleasantries which have provoked mirth, or fed the comic sense of a conventionalized rather than a civilized world. “Our being,” says Montaigne, “is cemented with sickly qualities; and whoever should divest man of the seeds of those qualities would destroy the fundamental conditions of life.”
THE END