HUMMOCK (of uncertain derivation; cf. hump or hillock), a boss or rounded knoll of ice rising above the general level of an ice-field, making sledge travelling in the Arctic and Antarctic region extremely difficult and unpleasant. Hummocky ice is caused by slow and unequal pressure in the main body of the packed ice, and by unequal structure and temperature at a later period.
HUMOUR (Latin humor), a word of many meanings and of strange fortune in their evolution. It began by meaning simply “liquid.” It passed through the stage of being a term of art used by the old physicians—whom we should now call physiologists—and by degrees has come to be generally understood to signify a certain “habit of the mind,” shown in speech, in literature and in action, or a quality in things and events observed by the human intelligence. The word reached its full development by slow degrees. When Dr Johnson compiled his dictionary, he gave nine definitions of, or equivalents for, “humour.” They may be conveniently quoted: “(1) Moisture. (2) The different kinds of moisture in man’s body, reckoned by the old physicians to be phlegm, blood, choler and melancholy, which as they predominate are supposed to determine the temper of mind. (3) General turn or temper of mind. (4) Present disposition. (5) Grotesque imagery, jocularity, merriment. (6) Tendency to disease, morbid disposition. (7) Petulance, peevishness. (8) A trick, a practice. (9) Caprice, whim, predominant inclination.” The list was not quite complete, even in Dr Johnson’s own time. Humour was then, as it is now, the name of the semi-fluid parts of the eye. Yet no dictionary-maker has been more successful than Johnson in giving the literary and conversational meaning of an English word, or the main lines of its history. It is therefore instructive to note that in no one of his nine clauses does humour bear the meaning it has for Thackeray or for George Meredith. “General turn or temper of mind” is at the best too vague, and has moreover another application. His list of equivalents only carries the history of the word up to the beginning of the last stage of its growth.
The limited original sense of liquid, moisture, mere wet, in which “humour” is used in Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible, continued to attach to it until the 17th century. Thus Shakespeare, in the first scene of the second act of Julius Caesar, makes Portia say to her husband:—
| “Is Brutus sick? and is it physical To walk unbraced and suck up the humours Of the dank morning?” |
In the same scene Decius employs the word in the wide metaphorical sense in which it was used, and abused, then and afterwards. “Let me work,” he says, referring to Caesar—
| “For I can give his humour the true bent, And I will bring him to the Capitol.” |
Here we have “the general turn or temper of mind,” which can be flattered, or otherwise directed to “present disposition.” We have travelled far from mere fluid, and have been led on the road by the old physiologists. We are not concerned with their science, but it is necessary to see what they mean by “primary humours,” and “second or third concoctions,” if we are to understand how it was that a name for liquid could come to mean “general turn” or “present disposition,” or “whim” or “jocularity.” Part I., Section 1, Member 2, Subsection 2, of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy will supply all that is necessary for literary purposes. “A humour is a liquid or fluent part of the body comprehended in it, and is either born with us, or is adventitious and acquisite.” The first four primary humours are—“Blood, a hot, sweet, tempered, red humour, prepared in the meseraic veins, and made of the most temperate parts of the chylus (chyle) in the liver, whose office it is to nourish the whole body, to give it strength and colour, being dispersed through every part of it. And from it spirits are first begotten in the heart, which afterwards in the arteries are communicated to the other parts. Pituita or phlegm is a cold and moist humour, begotten of the colder parts of the chylus (or white juice coming out of the meat digested in the stomach) in the liver. His office is to nourish and moisten the members of the body,” &c. “Choler is hot and dry, begotten of the hotter parts of the chylus, and gathered to the gall. It helps the natural heat and senses. Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black and sour, begotten of the more feculent part of nourishment, and purged from the spleen, is a bridle to the other two hot humours, blood and choler, preserving them in the blood, and nourishing the bones.” Mention must also be made of serum, and of “those excrementitious humours of the third concoction, sweat and tears.” An exact balance of the four primary humours makes the justly constituted man, and allows for the undisturbed production of the “concoctions”—or processes of digestion and assimilation. Literature seized upon these terms and definitions. Sometimes it applied them gravely in the moral and intellectual sphere. Thus the Jesuit Bouhours, a French critic of the 17th century, in his Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, says that in the formation of a bel esprit, “La bile donne le brillant et la pénétration, la mélancolie donne le bon sens et la solidité; le sang donne l’agrément et la délicatesse.” It was, in fact, taken for granted that the character and intellect of men were produced by—were, so to speak, concoctions dependent on—the “humours.” In the fallen state of mankind it rarely happens that an exact balance is maintained. One or other humour predominates, and thus we have the long-established doctrine of the existence of the sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric, or the melancholy temperaments. Things being so, nothing was more natural than the passage of these terms of art into common speech, and their application in a metaphorical sense, when once they had been adopted by the literary class. The process is admirably described by Asper in the introduction to Ben Jonson’s play—Every Man out of his Humour:—
| “Why humour, as it is ‘ens,’ we thus define it, To be a quality of air or water; And in itself holds these two properties Moisture and fluxure: as, for demonstration Pour water on this floor. ’Twill wet and run. Likewise the air forced through a horn or trumpet Flows instantly away, and leaves behind A kind of dew; and hence we do conclude That whatsoe’er hath fluxure and humidity As wanting power to contain itself Is humour. So in every human body The choler, melancholy, phlegm and blood By reason that they flow continually In some one part and are not continent Receive the name of humours. Now thus far It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition; As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man that it doth draw All his effects, his spirits and his powers, In their confluxion all to run one way,— This may be truly said to be a humour.” |
A humour in this sense is a “ruling passion,” and has done excellent service to English authors of “comedies of humours,” to the Spanish authors of comedias de figuron, and to the French followers of Molière. Nor is the metaphor racked out of its fair proportions if we suppose that there may be a temporary, or even an “adventitious and acquisite” “predominance of a humour,” and that “deliveries of a man’s self” to passing passion, or to imitation, are also “humours,” though not primary, but only second or third concoctions. By a natural extension, therefore, “humours” might come to mean oddities, tricks, practices, mere whims, and the aping of some model admired for the time being. “But,” as Falstaff has told us, “it was always yet the trick of our English, if they have a good thing, to make it too common.” The word “humour” was a good thing, but the Elizabethans certainly made it too common. It became a hack epithet of all work, to be used with no more discretion, though with less imbecile iteration, than the modern “awful.” Shakespeare laughed at the folly, and pinned it for ever to the ridiculous company of Corporal Nym—“I like not the humour of lying. He hath wronged me in some humours. I should have borne the humoured letter to her ... I love not the humour of bread and cheese; and there’s the humour of it.” The humour of Jonson was that he tried to clear the air of thistledown by stamping on it. Asper ends in denunciation:—