However free in its purely literary aspect humour may be from all ulterior purpose and aim, the tale of its growth with us is largely interwoven with impulses received from outside sources and sources didactic and philosophical. Outwitting the devil, the theme that recurs again and again as the oldest form of farcical expression in mediæval Germany, meant dealing with the stresses of adverse circumstance. This was the first step taken on the road to humour in Germany. The Powers of Evil had all the brute force upon their side; there was no coping with them, except by sharpening one’s wits and irritating them by practical jokes until they might yield. The laugh that followed had all the hard ring of the victor’s triumphant scorn. Early satirical writings were imbued with a like spirit. There was the lash to be swung at some enemy, and derision at his downfall was tempered by no kindlier emotion. There was a grim attitude of self-defence throughout it all. Indeed, it is only in going back painfully step by step that one is enabled to discern in this early literature the germs of humour at all.
The farces and puppet-shows at country fairs and the burlesques at the early theatre began to make room for the idea of retaliation. It became a question of clown against clown. The supremacy was never yielded long to one side. Laying aside all personal interest in the matter for the time being, there was an impartial shout of laughter at him who got the most kicks and cuffs. The popular mind began to rise above the situation, to put itself in the position of an unbiassed spectator, and to take delight in merely putting down whatever asserted itself. As an instance of this may be counted the practice of granting the devil, or a person disguised as such, a hearing in church on certain days of the year instead of the parish priest.
Then the sense of discrepancy between things great and small, things important and unimportant, the world of the senses and the world of the spirit, began to enter the popular perception, the impossibility of reconciliation, and, as a consequence, the pleasure of turning this world topsy-turvy, and so demonstrating the supremacy of the individual.
Side by side with this development, or partly perhaps based upon it, went the philosophic development. Thinkers, dreamers, and philosophers went on constructing a universe according to the laws of their individual minds, a universe containing nothing at all to be laughed at, and for many decades scholars were deeply buried in obstruse problems and finely-spun theories and systems, the lighter muse of poetry and art for the most part following but humbly and timorously from afar. But when philosophy and theology had spoken at large, and the mystery and fatal contradiction at the heart of things had not been unravelled, the pale brooding of some turned to melancholy, with others it turned to boisterous living and philosophic indifferentism.
Then it was that irony, directed upon the inordinate intellectual ambitions of man, removed him half imperceptibly into the sphere of the ludicrous. Self-irony may be the result of misanthropy, but it is certainly the beginning of a cure. One finds oneself to be made up of two absurdly contradicting hemispheres, as well as the rest of the world; the sense of the universal incongruity seems to make the case less tragic. To pass through this stage into the clearer atmosphere of conscious reconciliation with the actuality of things, of placid acceptance of the ups and downs, the shortcomings inherent in things, and in human nature withal,—into the atmosphere of pure humour, unperturbed by the possibility of personal disappointment, is a long step, easy to some, to others impossible. And it would seem that German Humour—taking the term in its widest sense as signifying subjective apprehension on the one hand and artistic expression on the other—is less the result of a temperamental predisposition than the culmination of a development. With a turn for flaccid sentimentalism, and by nature inclined to take themselves very seriously, it was a reaction, a bankruptcy in metaphysical methods that inaugurated and established something of a humorous Weltanschauung. The often oppressively heavy Zeitgeist has borne along its own corrective in the literature of two centuries as on an ever-strengthening under-current. There have been silent forces at play working imperceptibly through the innate robustness of the national character. It was this undeniable robustness which could not for long brook the extravagancies of weak emotionalism. Revolt was opened upon it on the one hand by the spirit of exact science, on the other by the need of æsthetic equilibrium. These two tendencies, the æsthetic and the scientific, are still contending for the field with much ado and bustle in some quarters.
Though a nation counting Heine and Lichtenberg among its own, it is not in the spielende Urtheil, as Jean Paul has called inspired sallies of wit, that German humour specially distinguishes itself; now and again there it has its moods of riotous absurdity; but where it is most characteristic is in the telling of the humorous tale, lovingly handled in its details, the pathetic verging very near upon the comic, finally succumbing in a ripple of good-natured laughter at somebody or other who is really not so very bad, but only very human, and for whose misfortunes—poor devil!—we may have a kindly feeling. Then we have a mastership in spectral stories, uncanny and imaginative, leaving the reader’s mind in a delightful condition of doubt as to their actual meaning and significance; and we have also the expression of the spirit of poetic adventure,—a determination to have fun at all hazards, either with the public or else at the public, if perchance it should prove too dull to be taken into partnership. There is much of this in Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, which, in the face of many dizzy structures of elucidation that have been based upon it, remains so truly humorous and so profoundly touching.
It is by no means always the funny element that predominates in German writings of a humorous tendency. Their office seems to be more to suggest the effect which these lighter moods of fancy have upon the serious affairs of life, and in studying the humour of Germany in a spirit of literary criticism it is indispensable to take these two aspects in their action and reaction upon each other. There is a psychical development of the individual which runs parallel to that of the nation. In confirmation of the theory of humorous development here faintly outlined, it may be said that in Germany, humorous perception is for the most part not the possession of youth. It is not until the need of a corrective to a habit of speculative brooding has been felt that imperceptibly and unconsciously healthful minds rise to those dispassionate heights whence the Occidental Brahmin gazes upon a motley world.
HANS MÜLLER-CASENOV.
[For Acknowledgments to Authors and Publishers, see page [430].]
THE HUMOUR OF GERMANY.