Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

For person, parts, address and beard.

Butler died poor, but not in want, on the 25th of September, 1680, in his sixty-eighth year.

Butler’s poem is commonly considered the type of the burlesque—that is, as the representative of the gravely ludicrous, which seems to occupy a kind of neutral ground between the witty and the humorous. But this is true of the form rather than the matter of the poem. Burlesque appears to be wit infused with animal spirits—satire for the mere fun of the thing, without any suggestion of intellectual disapproval, or moral indignation. True wit is a kind of instantaneous logic which gives us the quod erat demonstrandum without the intermediate steps of the syllogism. Coleridge, with admirable acuteness, has said that “there is such a thing as scientific wit.” Therefore pure wit sometimes gives an intellectual pleasure without making us laugh. The wit that makes us laugh most freely is that which instantly accepts another man’s premises, and draws a conclusion from them in its own favor. A country gentleman was once showing his improvements to the Prince de Ligne, and, among other things, pointed out to him a muddy spot which he called his lake. “It is rather shallow, is it not?” said the Prince. “I assure you, Prince, a man drowned himself in it.” “Ah, he must have been a flatterer, then,” answered De Ligne. Of the same kind is the story told of one of our old Massachusetts clergymen, Dr. Morse. At an association dinner a debate arose as to the benefit of whipping in bringing up children. The doctor took the affirmative, and his chief opponent was a young minister whose reputation for veracity was not very high. He affirmed that parents often did harm to their children by unjust punishment from not knowing the facts in the case. “Why,” said he, “the only time my father ever whipped me was for telling the truth.” “Well,” retorted the doctor, “it cured you of it, didn’t it?” In wit of this sort, there is always a latent syllogism.

Then there is the wit which detects an unintentional bit of satire in a word of double meaning; as where Sir Henry Wotton takes advantage of the phrase commonly used in his day to imply merely residence, and finds an under meaning in it, saying that “ambassadors were persons sent to lie abroad for the service of their prince.”

On the other hand I think unconsciousness and want of intention, or at least the pretense of it, is more or less essential to the ludicrous. For this reason what may be called the wit of events is always ludicrous. Nothing can be more so, for example, than the Pope’s sending a Cardinal’s hat to John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, which arrived in England after Henry VIII had taken off that prelate’s head. So, when Dr. Johnson said very gravely one day, that he had often thought that if he had a harem he would dress all the ladies in white linen, the unintentional incongruity of the speech with the character of the great moralist threw Boswell into an ecstasy of laughter. Like this is the ludicrousness of Pope Paul III writing to the Council of Trent “that they should begin with original sin, observing yet a due respect unto the Emperor.”

Captain Basil Hall, when he traveled in this country, found the Yankees a people entirely destitute of wit and humor. Perhaps our gravity, which ought to have put him on the right scent, deceived him. I do not know a more perfect example of wit than something which, as I have heard, was said to the captain himself. Stopping at a village inn there came up a thunderstorm, and Captain Hall, surprised that a new country should have reached such perfection in these meteorological manufactures, said to a bystander, “Why, you have very heavy thunder here.” “Well, yes,” replied the man, “we du, considerin’ the number of inhabitants.” Here is another story which a stage-driver told me once. A wag on the outside of the coach called to a man by the roadside who was fencing some very poor land: “I say, mister, what are you fencing that pasture for? It would take forty acres on’t to starve a middle-sized cow.” “Jesso; and I’m a-fencing of it to keep eour kettle eout.”

Now in the “forty acre” part of this story we have an instance of what is called American exaggeration, and which I take to be the symptom of most promise in Yankee fun. For it marks that desire for intensity of expression which is one phase of imagination. Indeed many of these sayings are purely imaginative; as where a man said of a painter he knew, that “he painted a shingle so exactly like marble that when it fell into the river it sunk.” A man told me once that the people of a certain town were so universally dishonest that “they had to take in their stone walls at night.” In some of these stories imagination appears yet more strongly, and in that contradictory union with the understanding lies at the root of highest humor. For example, a coachman driving up some steep mountains in Vermont was asked if they were as steep on the other side also. “Steep! chain-lightnin’ couldn’t go down ’em without the breechin’ on.” I believe that there is more latent humor among the American people than in any other, and that it will one day develop itself and find expression through Art.

If we apply the definitions we have made to Butler’s poem, we shall find that it is not properly humorous at all; that the nearest approach to the humorous is burlesque. Irony is Butler’s favorite weapon. But he always has an ulterior object. His characters do not live at all, but are only caricatured effigies of political enemies stuffed with bran and set up as targets for his wit. He never lets us forget for a moment that Presbyterian and Independent are primarily knaves and secondarily men. The personality never by accident expands into humanity. There is not a trace of imagination or of sympathy in his poem. It is pure satire, and intellectual satire only. There is as much creativeness in Trumbull’s “McFingal,” or Fessenden’s “Terrible Tractoration” as in “Hudibras.” Butler never works from within, but stands spectator covering his victims with merciless ridicule; and we enjoy the fun because his figures are as mere nobodies as Punch and Judy, whose misfortunes are meant to amuse us, and whose unreality is part of the sport. The characters of truly humorous writers are as real to us as any of our acquaintances. We no more doubt the existence of the Wife of Bath, of Don Quixote and Sancho, of Falstaff, Sir Roger de Coverley, Parson Adams, the Vicar, Uncle Toby, Pickwick or Major Pendennis, than we do our own. They are the contemporaries of every generation forever. They are our immortal friends whose epitaph no man shall ever write. The only incantation needed to summon them is the taking of a book from our shelf, and they are with us with their wisdom, their wit, their courtesy, their humanity, and (dearer than all) their weaknesses.

But the figures of Butler are wholly contemporaneous with himself. They are dead things nailed to his age, like crows to a barn-door, for an immediate in terrorem purpose, to waste and blow away with time and weather. The Guy Fawkes of a Fifth of November procession has as much manhood in it.

Butler, then, is a wit—in the strictest sense of the word—with only such far-off hints at humor as lie in a sense of the odd, the droll, or the ludicrous. But in wit he is supreme. “Hudibras” is as full of point as a paper of pins; it sparkles like a phosphorescent sea, every separate drop of which contains half a dozen little fiery lives. Indeed, the fault of the poem (if it can be called a fault) is that it has too much wit to be easy reading.