| “for he loves to hear That unicorns may be betrayed with trees And bears with glasses, elephants with holes, Lions with toils, and men with flatterers; But when I tell him he hates flatterers He says he does; being then most flattered.” |
It is plain that this is not what Hazlitt meant, or we now mean, by the humour displayed in “describing the ludicrous as it is shown in itself.” Nor did he, any more than we do, suppose with Goldsmith that a “low” quality of actions and persons is inseparable from humour. It had become for Hazlitt what Addison called cheerfulness, “a habit of the mind” as distinguished from mirth, which is “an act.” If in Addison’s sentences the place of cheerfulness is taken by humour, and that of mirth by wit, we have a very fair description of the two. “I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of the mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness is fixed and permanent.” Humour is the fixed and permanent appreciation of the ludicrous, of which wit may be the short and transient expression.
If now we pass to an attempt to define “humour,” the temptation to take refuge in the use of an evasion employed by Dr Johnson is very strong. When Boswell asked him, “Then, Sir, what is poetry?” the doctor answered, “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.” But George Meredith has come to our assistance in two passages of his Essay on Comedy and the uses of the Comic Spirit. “If you laugh all round him (to wit, the ridiculous person), tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you, and yours to your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is spirit of Humour that is moving you.... The humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the feelings, and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But the humourist, if high, has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of the comic poet.” The third sentence is required to complete the first. The tumbling and rolling, the smacks and the exposure, may be out of place where there is humour of the most humorous quality. Who could associate them with Sir Walter Scott’s characters of Bradwardine or Monkbarns? Bradwardine, one feels, would have stopped them as he did the ill-timed jests of Sir Hew Halbert, “who was so unthinking as to deride my family name.” Monkbarns was a man of peace who loved the company of Sir Priest better than that of Sir Knight. But there is that in him which cows mere ridicule, be it ever so genial. He cared not who knew so much of his valour, and by that very avowal of his preference took his position sturdily in the face of the world. But Meredith has given its due prominence to the quality which, for us, distinguishes humour from pure wit and the harder forms of jocularity. It is the sympathy, the appreciation, the love, which include the follies of Don Quixote, the prosaic absurdities of Sancho Panza, the oddities of Bradwardine, Dr Primrose or Monkbarns, and the jovial animalism of Falstaff, in “an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of the comic poets.”
It is needless to insist that humour of this order is far older than the very modern application of the name. It is assuredly present in Horace. Chaucer, who knew the word only as meaning “liquid,” has left a masterpiece of humour in his prologue to the Canterbury Pilgrims. We look for the finest examples in Shakespeare. And if it is old, it is also more universal than is always allowed. National, or at least racial, partiality, has led to the unfortunate judgment that humour is a virtue of the northern peoples. Yet Rabelais came from Touraine, and if the creator of Panurge has not humour, who has? The Italians may say that umore in the English sense is unknown to them. They mean the word, not the thing, for it is in Ariosto. To claim the quality for Cervantes would indeed be to push at an open door. The humour of the Germans has been rarely indeed of so high an order as his. It has been found wherever humanity has been combined with a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. The appreciation may exist without the humanity. When Rivarol met the Chevalier Florian with a manuscript sticking out of his pocket, and said, “How rash you are! if you were not known you would be robbed,” he was making use of the comic spirit, but he was not humorous. When Rivarol himself, a man of dubious claim to nobility, was holding forth on the rights of the nobles, and calling them “our rights,” one of the company smiled. “Do you find anything singular in what I say?” asked he. “It is the plural which I find singular,” was the answer. There is certainly something humorous in the neat overthrow of an insolent wit by a rival insolence, but the humour is in the spectator, not in the answer. The spirit of humour as described by George Meredith cannot be so briefly shown as in the rapid flash of the Frenchmen’s wit. It lingers and expatiates, as in Dr Johnson’s appreciation of Bet Flint. “Oh, a fine character, Madam! She was habitually a slut and a drunkard, and occasionally a thief and a harlot. And for heaven’s sake how came you to know her? Why, Madam, she figured in the literary world too! Bet Flint wrote her own life, and called herself Cassandra, and it was in verse; it began:—
| ‘When nature first ordained my birth A diminutive I was born on earth And then I came from a dark abode Into a gay and gaudy world.’ |
“So Bet brought her verses to me to correct; but I gave her half-a-crown, and she liked it as well. Bet had a fine spirit; she advertised for a husband, but she had no success, for she told me no man aspired to her. Then she hired very handsome lodgings and a footboy, and she got a harpsichord, but Bet could not play; however, she put herself in fine attitudes and drummed. And pray what became of her, Sir? Why, Madam, she stole a quilt from the man of the house, and he had her taken up; but Bet Flint had a spirit not to be subdued, so when she found herself obliged to go to gaol, she ordered a sedan chair, and bid her footboy walk before her. However, the footboy proved refractory, for he was ashamed, though his mistress was not. And did she ever get out of gaol, Sir? Yes, Madam, when she came to her trial, the judge acquitted her. ‘So now,’ she said to me, ‘the quilt is my own, and now I’ll make a petticoat of it.’ Oh! I loved Bet Flint.”
The subject is low enough to please Goldsmith. The humour may be of that mean order which has only a refreshing laugh, and gives tone to the feelings, but it is the pure spirit of humour.
We need not labour to demonstrate that a kindly appreciation of the ludicrous may find expression in art as well as in literature. But humour in art tends so inevitably to become caricature, which can be genial as well as ferocious, that the reader must be referred to the article on Caricature for an account of its manifestations in that field.
(D. H.)