HUMOR.
If we wished to find a passage from Irony to Humor, we should have to look for it in cases where good-nature assumes the positive attribute of impartiality, because humor is a kind of disposition to adopt the whole of human nature, fuse all its distinctions, tolerate all its infirmities, and assemble vice and misery to receive rations of good cheer.
Two Jews have been elected within a few years to be Lord Mayors of London. They were members of the synagogue in full connection, and might have appointed Rabbins for chaplaincies if they had chosen. But they pursued the old custom, which was not however of legal stringency: appointed clergymen of the Church of England, and regularly made all the usual contributions for Christian purposes, including the customary one to the Society for the Conversion of the Jews. In this incident it is the element of Humor which imparts to us the pleasure we feel.
Hippolyte Taine acknowledges that the French have not the idea of Humor, nor the word for it. But we might expect from him at least a definition. He can only say, however, that humor includes a taste for contrasts, buffooneries, the mockery of Heine, starts of invention, oddities, eruption of a violent joviality that was buried under a heap of sadness, and absurd indecency. In another place he says that English humor "is the product of imaginative drollery, or of concentrated indignation."
Sir Henry Bulwer, in his book entitled "France, Social, Literary, and Political," concedes the talent of wit to the French and quotes the following instance of it: "I asked two little village boys, one seven, the other eight years old, what they meant to be when they were men? Says one, 'I shall be the doctor of the village.' 'And you, what shall you be?' said I to the other. 'Oh! if brother's a doctor, I shall be curé. He shall kill the people, and I'll bury them; so we shall have the whole village between us.'"
Bulwer appreciates this, yet Taine denies to the English the sense of wit. In fact, the quality of wit exists wherever imagination percolates through the understanding: the sediment is the grain-gold of wit. But the quality of humor, depending upon various moral traits, exists only wherever a broad imagination is combined with a sweet and tolerant moral sense that is devoid of malice and all uncharitableness, and at peace with all mankind. A petulant egotism may exist with wit, but never with humor. Sarcasm and satire are the forms which best agree with imperfect moral dispositions. A too prolonged irony has something melancholy and dyspeptic in it, and passes into the blood of a faulty temper even if there be the tonic of an upright moral sense. This moral sense may exist on every meridian of the earth, but it may not appear at literary epochs in solution with the brightest minds. Rabelais seems to be a French exception to the Gallic trait that was noticed so long ago by the great Roman: Comɶda and argute loqui,—belonging to comedy and to the ingenuities of conversation. Humor appears best in conjunction with the temper of Northern Europe, whose early races began with deep impressions of the gravity of things and broke thence into alleviating moods. If it be the primitive trait of a nation to enjoy comic gayeties and the subtle surprises of discourse, it does not readily rise to the moral earnestness which a serious world imposes, and therefore it cannot invent the relief and grave delight of humor.
Sydney Smith uses this word to cover any thing that is ridiculous and laughable. So the epithet comic is quite indiscriminately applied. But we ought not to submit to this loose application; for there are plenty of other words to make proper distinctions for us amid our pleasurable moods, and permit us to reserve humor for something which is neither punning, wit, satire, nor comedy. Humor may avail itself of all these mental exercises, but only as a manager casts his stock company to set forth the prevailing spirit of a play. Comedy, for instance, represents sorrows, passions, and annoyances, but shows them without the sombre purpose of tragedy to enforce a supreme will at any cost. All our weaknesses threaten in comedy to result in serious embarrassments, but there is such inexhaustible material for laughter in the whims and follies with which we baffle ourselves and others, that the tragic threat is collared just in time and shaken into pleasure. All kinds of details of our life are represented, which tragedy could never tolerate in its main drift towards the pathos of defeated human wills and broken hearts. Tricks, vices, fatuities, crotchets, vanities, play their game for a stake no higher than the mirth of outwitting each other; and they all pay penalties of a light kind which God exacts smilingly for the sake of keeping our disorders at a minimum. Comedy also funds a great deal of its charm in the unconsciousness of an infirmity. We exhibit ourselves unawares: each one is perfectly understood by everybody but himself; so we plot and vapor through an intrigue with placards on each back, where all but the wearers can indulge their mirth at seeing us parading so innocently with advertisements of our price and quality.
There is a comic passage in the "Inferno" of Dante, noticed by Lowell (XV. 119), "where Brunetto Latini lingers under the burning shower to recommend his Tesoro to his former pupil," Dante; "a comical touch of Nature in an author's solicitude for his little work; not, as in Fielding's case, after its, but his own damnation."
The opening verses of Canto XVI. of the "Paradiso" are also comic, "where Dante tells us how, even in heaven, he could not help glorying in being gently born,—he who had devoted a Canzone and a book of the Convito to proving that nobility consisted wholly in virtue."