| “But that a rook by wearing a pied feather, The sable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff, A yard of shoe tie, or the Switzer knot On his French gaiters, should affect a humour, O! it is more than most ridiculous.” |
The abuse of the word was the peculiar practice of England. The use of it was not confined wholly to English writers. The Spaniards of the 16th and 17th centuries knew humores in the same sense, and still employ the word as a name for caprices, whims and vapours. Humorada was, and is, the correct Spanish for a festive saying or writing of epigrammatic form. Martial’s immortal reply to the critic who admired only dead poets—
| Ignoscas petimus Vacerra: tanti Non est, ut placeam tibi perire,— |
is a model humorada. It would be a difficult and would certainly be a lengthy task to exhaust all the applications given to so elastic a word. We still continue to use it in widely different senses. “Good humour” or “bad humour” are simply good temper or bad temper. There is a slight archaic flavour about the phrases “grim humour,” “the humour they were in,” in the sense of suspicious, or angry or careless mood, which were favourites with Carlyle, but though somewhat antiquated they are not affected, or very unusual. With the proviso that the exceptions must always be excepted, we may say that for a long time “humour” came to connote comic matter less refined than the matter of wit. It had about it a smack of the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, and of the unyoked “humour” of the society in which Prince Henry was content to imitate the sun—
| “Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world.” |
The presence of a base contagious cloud is painfully felt in the so-called humorous literature of England till the 18th century. The reader who does not sometimes wonder whether humour in the mouths of English writers of that period did not stand for maniacal tricks, horse-play, and the foul names of foul things, material and moral, must be very determined to prove himself a whole-hearted admirer of the ancient literature. Addison, who did much to clean it of mere nastiness, gives an excellent example of the base use of the word in his day. In Number 371 of the Spectator he introduces an example of the “sort of men called Whims and Humourists.” It is the delight of this person to play practical jokes on his guests. He is proud when “he has packed together a set of oglers” who had “an unlucky cast in the eye,” or has filled his table with stammerers. The humorist, in fact, was a mere practical joker, who was very properly answered by a challenge from a military gentleman of peppery temper. Indeed, the pump and a horse-whip would appear to have been the only effective forms of criticism on the prevalent humour and humours of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. But the pump and the horse-whip were themselves humours. Carlo Buffone in Jonson’s play is put “out of his humour” by the counter humour of Signor Puntarvolo, who knocks him down and gags him with candle wax. The brutal pranks of Fanny Burney’s Captain Mirvan, who belongs to the earlier part of the 18th century, were meant for humour, and were accepted as such. Examples might easily be multiplied. A briefer and also a more convincing method of demonstration is to take the deliberate judgment of a great authority. No writer of the 18th century possessed a finer sense of humour in the noble meaning than Goldsmith. What did he understand the word to mean? Not what he himself wrote when he created Dr Primrose. We have his express testimony in the 9th chapter of The Present State of Polite Learning. Goldsmith complains that “the critic, by demanding an impossibility from the comic poet, has, in effect, banished true comedy from the stage.” This he has done by banning “low” subjects, and by proscribing “the comic or satirical muse from every walk but high life, which, though abounding in fools as well as the humbler station, is by no means so fruitful in absurdity.... Absurdity is the poet’s game, and good breeding is the nice concealment of absurdity. The truth is, the critic generally mistakes ‘humour’ for ‘wit,’ which is a very different excellence; wit raises human nature above its level; humour acts a contrary part, and equally depresses it. To expect exalted humour is a contradiction in terms.... The poet, therefore, must place the object he would have the subject of humour in a state of inferiority; in other words, the subject of humour must be low.”
That no doubt may remain in his reader’s mind, Goldsmith gives an example of true humour. It is nothing more or less than the absurdity and incongruity obvious in a man who, though “wanting a nose,” is extremely curious in the choice of his snuffbox. We applaud “the humour of it,” for “we here see him guilty of an absurdity of which we imagine it impossible for ourselves to be guilty, and therefore applaud our own good sense on the comparison.”
Nothing could be more true as an account of what the Elizabethans, the Restoration, the Queen Anne men, and the 18th century meant by “humour.” Nothing could be more false as an example of what we mean by the humour of Falstaff or of The Vicar of Wakefield.
When we pass from Goldsmith to Hazlitt—one of the greatest names in English criticism—we find that “humour” has grown in meaning, without quite reaching its full development. In the introduction to his Lectures on the English Comic Writers he attempts a classification of the comic spirit into wit and humour. “Humour,” he says, “is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. Humour, as it is shown in books, is an imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, situation and character; wit is the illustrating and heightening the sense of that absurdity by some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition of one thing to another, which sets off the quality we laugh at or despise in a still more contemptible or striking point of view.” Hazlitt’s definition will, indeed, not stand analysis. The element of comparison is surely as necessary for humour as for wit. Yet his classification is valuable as illustrating the growth of the meaning of the word. Observe that Hazlitt has transferred to wit that power of pleasing as by a flattering sense of our own superiority which Goldsmith attributed to humour. He had not thought, and had not heard, that sympathy is necessary to complete humour. He cannot have thought it needful, for if he had he would hardly have said of the Arabian Nights that they are “an inexhaustible mine of comic humour and invention,” “which from the manners of the East, which they describe, carry the principle of callous indifference in the jest as far as it can go.” He might, and probably would, have dismissed Goldsmith’s illustration as “low” in every conceivable sense. He would not have added, as we should to-day, that humour does not lie in laughter, according to the definition of Hobbes, in a “sudden glory,” in a guffaw of self-conceited triumph over the follies and deficiencies of others. If there is any place for humour in Goldsmith’s sordid example, it must be made by pity, and shown by a deft introduction of the de te fabula dear to Thackeray, by a reminder that the world is full of people, who, though wanting noses, are extremely curious in their choice of snuff-boxes, and that the more each of us thinks himself above the weakness the more likely he is to fall into it.
The critical value of Hazlitt’s examination of the differences between wit and humour lies in this, that he ignores the doctrine that the quality of humour lies in the thing or the action and not in the mind of the observer. The examples quoted above, to which any one with a moderate share of reading in English literature could add with ease, show that humour was first held to lie in the trick, the whim, the act, or the event and clash of incidents. It might even be a mere flavour, as when men spoke of the salt humour of sea-sand. Even when it stood for the “general turn or temper of mind” it was a form of the ruling passion which inspires men’s actions and words. It was used in that sense by Decius when he spoke of the humour of Caesar, which is a liability to be led by one who can play on his weakness—