In so far as it is to be expressed by a single Aristotelian word, our subject corresponds most nearly in connotation to the Greek εὐτραπελία, that intellectual elasticity and adroitness which seizes instinctively upon the right subjects on which to vent its fun, and handles them with a sure, artistic touch. It stands midway between the vulgarity of the buffoon (βωμολόχος) and the insensibility to humour of the downright boor (ἄγροικος). Indeed, in one place (Mag. Mor, i. 31, 1193) this quality of εὐτραπελία is described by the Philosopher in terms which practically identify it with our own useful phrase, “A sense of humour.” “The vulgar buffoon,” he says, “deems everybody and everything a legitimate mark for a jest, while the boor has no will to jest himself, and to be jested upon makes him angry. The witty man”—the true humorist, as we may say—“avoids both extremes. He selects his subjects—and is not a boor. On the one hand he has the capacity of jesting with decency and decorum”—his jokes do not jar on our good taste—“and on the other, he can bear good humouredly jests of which he is himself the butt.”[90]
How far Dante would satisfy the second part of this canon, may perhaps be open to discussion. But this is to anticipate. For the moment it behoves us to observe that a somewhat tedious search in the Berlin Index volume for the passage cited in the Anatomy of Melancholy reveals the fact that Burton’s “witty man” is not εὐτράπελος but εὔστοχος.[91] In other words, what Aristotle attributes to the melancholy temperament is inductive acumen, the qualification of the scientific discoverer, rather than a sense of humour. The two qualities have, however, something in common: the gift of seeing and grasping analogies not obvious to the plain man in his plain moments.[92] So this crumb of comfort may hearten us in our quest, although the path be at first sight as unpromising as were certain stages of the Poet’s mystical journey.
If then we elect to follow Aristotle, as Dante followed Virgil (and I feel sure the Divine Poet would approve our choice of guide), we may draw one more drop of comfort from a passage in the Endemian Ethics,[93] in which the Philosopher, discoursing of friendship, notes how unlike characters often pair off together, “as austere people with witty ones (εὐτράπελοι).” May we look for this friendly union of playfulness and austerity within a single personality? in the redoubtable person of Dante Alighieri?
Is it not almost as incongruous, it may be asked, to look for humour in the Divina Commedia as it would be to search for jokes in the Bible? We are prepared to maintain that even the intense seriousness of Dante—that sublime and solemn earnestness which can only be compared to the temper of Holy Writ, is not merely compatible with a playful use of the intellect, artistically restrained, but is rendered more complete and effective thereby. And what about Holy Scripture itself? I speak with all reverence.
Hebraists assure us that puns and plays on words are far from rare in the Old Testament; and there are, in the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah,[94] and elsewhere, passages of which the irony, at once keen and sublime, cannot fail to strike the English reader. Would it not be possible also to quote even from the New Testament—from the Gospels—phrases and metaphors in which the deepest and most solemn truths are cast into a form which, for want of a better word, must be described as playful or witty? The picture of the children in the market place discontented with their games; the ironical description of the “blind guides of the blind”; and of the pedants who “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel,” the still more terrible irony of the “whited sepulchres”—instances like these show that Truth and Wisdom incarnate did not disdain to use the whip wherewith the old Hebrew Prophets had scourged the idolatrous follies of their contemporaries.[95]
In the light of what has just been said, we may perhaps be justified in doubting whether the most perfect presentation of ideas—or at any rate the most surely effective—does not involve of necessity the use of those faculties with which we are at present concerned. “Without a sense of humour,” it is often said, “no man can be a perfect Saint.” Surely it is equally true to say that the same quality is essential for a really great man of letters, be he Essayist, Historian or Poet.
One more question before we come to Dante himself. What about the age and place in which the Poet lived? Were the Italians of Dante’s time devoid of the spirit of mirth and of the power to express it? Boccaccio and Sacchetti, the Novellino, nay, even the Franciscan Legend with its Jaculatores Domini, and not least the charming Fioretti, cry out with one voice against the unjust imputation. But one single name would be enough to vindicate for the Italy of Dante’s elder contemporaries, and for the men who figure largely in Dante’s writings, the possession of the sense of humour and the gift of wit. Fra Salimbene of Parma, the immortal gossip, who so dearly loves a joke, and is so ready to pardon other failings in the man who has “a pretty wit.” He peoples the world into which Dante Alighieri was born with folk whose joy of laughter and rollicking sense of fun match in their intensity the sternness, cruelty, savagery of those strange days. And to Florence he accords the palm for wit and humour,[96] though not in the strict Aristotelian sense; for Salimbene’s Florentines are far from being always seemly and decorous in their jests.
The mirthful spirit that pervades the pages of Salimbene recalls indeed most forcibly a passage of Aristotle to which we have not yet referred, and a definition of urbanitas (εὐτραπελία) which, if slightly mysterious, is the most epigrammatic and the most suggestive of all his utterances on the subject.
“The young,” he says in the second book of the Rhetoric, “are laughter-loving, and therefore witty, for wittiness is πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις....[97]” How shall we render it? “A disciplined ‘cheek,’” an “educated insolence!” The riotous, effervescent self-assertion of the Middle Ages, outcome of abundant vitality, offered splendid raw material for the manufacture of urbanitas. The uncontrollable vivacity which vented itself in the field of life sometimes in horseplay or in huge practical jokes; too often in fighting and bloodshed; which vented itself in the field of Art in the fantastically contorted and quaintly humorous subjects of the illuminations with which even sacred MSS. were adorned, and in the carving of grotesque figures in wood or stone—
Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto