Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays

by John Weiss

Sometimes the breadth of imagination produces the effect of wit by bringing two incongruous ideas under one statement. During a political procession, a remarkably dirty man, stopping in front of a small boy who was sitting on a fence, expected to have some fun with him. "Well, boy, how much do you weigh?" "As much as you would if you were washed." Such a free-soiler as that can be matched with nothing short of a line of Shakspeare:

"Lord of thy presence, and no land beside."

The American would be quite capable of composing narratives in the Eastern vein, as in that series of fables called the Hitopadesa, which attributed to animals the passions and motives of men. The famous mediæval poem of "Reynard the Fox" presumes the same intelligence. Here is a specimen, whose slight flavor of coarseness is lost and forgotten in the genius of its climax. Just as a traveller was writing his name on the register of a Leavenworth hotel, a certain insect took its way across the page. Laying down the pen, the man remarked, "I've been bled by St. Joe fleas, bitten by Kansas City spiders, and interviewed by Fort Scott gray-backs; but hang me if I was ever in a place where these critters looked over the register to take the number of your room."

A Western editor, culminating in his description of a tornado, said, "In short, it was a wind that just sat up on its hind legs and howled."

Some of the Texan cows have been lately described as so thin that it takes two men to see one of them. The men stand back to back, so that one says, "Here she comes!" and the other cries, "There she goes!" Thus between them both the cow is seen.

All these American instances are conceived in the pure Shakspearian blending of the understanding and the imagination. But one more of them, perhaps the most artistically perfect of all, must suffice. A coachman, driving up some mountains in Vermont, was asked by an outside passenger if they were as steep on the other side also. "Steep! Chain lightnin' couldn't go down 'em witheout the breechin' on!"

We have seen in what the comedy of Falstaff's character consists. Its humor lies in the tolerance which his inexhaustible wile procures for his vices. We are all the time reconciled to his behavior, though in anybody else it would be outrageous,—"most tolerable and not to be borne." But such a Noachian deluge of animal spirits would carry away a bulkier man than he. It is love of fun more than villainous inclination which leads him into many of his scrapes. When he is moralizing upon his course of life, and half-earnestly complaining that the Prince had been the ruin of him, the latter has only to interrupt this strain with, "Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack?" when he drowns his megrims in the jolliest laugh, and draws his belt another hole for an adventure. The midnight frolic, with sack and supper afterwards, attracts him quite as much as the prospect of checking the consumption of his purse. He is quite conscious of a mercurial disposition that keeps the door ajar for every temptation. There are intervals of self-upbraiding—or are they seedy forenoons before the sherris sets in to wet his coast?—when he wishes the Prince were not such a rascally, fascinating companion. And we ought to put to Falstaff's credit the fact that to be hail-fellow with a prince has unsettled many a sterner virtue; and he says flatly to him that he wishes they knew "where a commodity of good names were to be bought."

When the old lord of the council rated him, he was too proud to seem to attend, but quite aware that he had been blown up in a justifiable way. His love of mirth is a better ally than the Prince, far more sumptuous and capable; for it helps us to condone his follies, and so qualifies him to be an object of Humor.

And reflection pursues the train which Humor starts. We are charmed into admitting that there must undoubtedly be many good native qualities, still unobscured, lingering in vicious haunts and courses; and Humor has no sublimer mission than to make us tolerate that thought. She seizes the coy hand of Philanthropy, and beguiles it "with nod and beck and wreathed smile" towards its rugged purpose.

There are some places which we only venture to visit in Shakspeare's company. We have been too well bred to seek our vices in such quarters, but not so well bred as to accommodate no vice. We cannot air our intolerance before the Searcher of hearts; perhaps we are grateful to him for that gift of Shakspeare which bids the tavern and the brothel be tolerable to our conscience by the touches of nature which make the whole world kin. Our respect for mankind is increased if the men who disgrace it can still be made to appear inseparable members of it. When we see the common air pressing in to ventilate the most infected places, we admire this brave, elastic quality, and rejoice to feel it fill our lungs. But what policeman or sanitary commissioner can we trust in a tour to inspect the cesspools of the world? Only such an one who has the counterinfection of his own impartial light and air. We follow in the wake of his geniality, forget to hold disinfectants to our nose, find the air still medicinal, since it has retained qualities belonging to ourselves; and we step from ward to ward with a reconciling smile.