In the preceding chapter we have seen how the advance of civilisation has tended to still the louder choral voice of laughter. Yet man’s best friend is not of the sort to take an affront too seriously. Driven out from the crowd, he has known how to disguise himself and to steal back into the haunts of men, touching here and there a human spirit and moving it to a quieter and perfectly safe enjoyment of things laughable. This new endowment, this last inspiration of the mortal by the god, is what we mean by Humour.
Perhaps hardly a word in the language—and it seems to be exclusively an English word—would be harder to define with scientific precision than this familiar one. It is often used with the greatest degree of looseness, as when a man is endowed with humour because he laughs readily.[256] Yet any one who takes pains in using words knows how far this is from being accurate. A chronic garrulity of laughter, typified in what Mr. Meredith calls the “hypergelast,” stands, indeed, in marked contrast to what careful speech indicates by “humour”. As its etymology might teach us, the term connotes, not so much the common endowment of {298} “risibility,” as a certain kind of temperament, a complexion of sentiment, nay, more, a mode of psychical organisation. We cannot, therefore, think of the race as humorous, and should even find it difficult to generalise the endowment so far as to speak of humorists as a class. The humorous man or woman is so, primarily and essentially, by the unpurchasable possession of an individual mind.
This fact of a quite peculiar mixture of elements in the humorous person must never be lost sight of. It dooms this person to a comparative solitude in the vocal expression of a feeling which is primarily social and communicative. The idea of a large unison of utterance among humorous persons is not entertainable. A man who has developed his humorous bent will be thankful if he finds in his social circle one or two who can understand, and, now and again, join in his quiet chuckle.
Yet, though essentially in every individual case a unique blend of elements, humour has certain common characteristics. What sort of temperament and mind are we thinking of when we agree to call Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goldsmith, Sterne, Lamb, Dickens, and George Eliot humorists?
One thing we can say confidently, that it is wanting in certain characteristics of the more diffused laughter. It is far removed from the swift reflex gaiety of the child and the unthinking adult. Its laughter is not only quieter but has a slower movement, and it is charged with a deeper meaning. Again, its utterance differs in tone from the old brutal and contemptuous shout. It voices itself in low and almost tender tones. It is the laughter altogether farthest removed from the standpoint of the interested person: there is in it nothing of the crowing over the vanquished, hardly anything of a consciousness of the {299} superiority to which the uplifting of laughter may at the moment make valid claim. Hence, one may hesitate to apply the name humorist to a writer in whose laughter—though it is commonly spoken of as humour—a note of derisive contempt begins to grow prominent.
These contrasts point clearly enough to certain positive characteristics of the moods of humour. A quiet survey of things, at once playful and reflective; a mode of greeting amusing shows which seems in its moderation to be both an indulgence in the sense of fun and an expiation for the rudeness of such indulgence; an outward, expansive movement of the spirits met and retarded by a cross-current of something like kindly thoughtfulness; these clearly reveal themselves as some of its dominant traits.
At first it seems impossible to view this subtle and complex mental attitude as a development of the naïve and rather coarse merriment of earlier times. Yet a slight examination of the choicest examples of what the discerning call humour would suffice to show that it finds its pasturage very much where the Greek or the mediæval populace found it. Topsy-turvyness, especially when it involves the fall of things from a height; stumbling and awkwardness of all kinds; human oddities when they grow to provocative dimensions; all self-inflation with a view to force a reluctant notice; the manifold masqueradings of mortals; the unfitnesses of things to the demands of circumstances; extravagances, perversities, and the multitudinous follies of men; these which move the rough man to his unconsidered cachinnation move also the humorous man to his slower and sotto voce note.
As our great woman humorist has it: “Strange as the genealogy may seem, the original parentage of that wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy and {300} feeling, which constitutes modern humour, was probably the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy—such is the tendency of things towards the better and more beautiful!”[257]
In asserting that gentle humour has its descent from such an uncouth ancestry, we must not be supposed to imply that its genesis has been a sudden or a simple process. As has been suggested, the sentiment is highly complex. It presupposes in its possessor the presence of a particular assemblage of qualities which may be expected to be rare; and a study of the development both of the individual and of the race tells us that this grouping of qualities is, of all the products of nature’s laboratory, one of the most delicate, one exacting from her a very special effort of preparation.
Although humour is correctly described as a sentiment, its most apparent, if not most important condition, is a development of intelligence. It is plainly an example of what Mr. Meredith calls “the laughter of the mind,” an expression which makes the large presupposition that we have this mind. It thrives best at the level of ideas. Yet the element of intellect which is vital to humour does not imply subtlety of mind, still less the presence of ideas remote from the plane of ordinary men’s understanding. What is needed is a mind given to musing on what it observes—it may be that of a shrewd housewife—having a sufficient life and independence of movement to rise above the dull mechanical acceptance of things, to pierce these with the ray of a fresh criticism.