After a painting by Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A.
CHAPTER IX
LITERATURE
Wit, Humour, Romance
Whatever Disraeli wrote was always literature, and never lecture. He was a born man of letters, and Dickens once lamented that politics had so long and often deprived fiction of a master.
Disraeli is renowned for his wit; but he is not so generally famed for two qualities in which he excelled, though with limitations—his subtle sense of humour and his fine feeling for the picturesque and romantic.
Like his own “Sidonia,” Disraeli “said many things that were strange, yet they instantly appeared to be true;” like his own “Pinto,” he “had the art of viewing common things in a fanciful light.” I shall notice both these characteristics. He believed in the force of phrases as a pollen, so to speak, of ideas wafted through the air; and he believed in the perpetual miracles of existence. His favourite English authors were the romantics of Queen Elizabeth and the wits of Queen Anne and the Georges.
It was once said that wit is a point, but humour a straight line. This epigram is inadequate. Wit is no résumé of humour; the two qualities differ in kind. Wit is a department of style; and style is gesture, accent, expression. Wit is the faculty of combining the unlike, by the language of illustration, suggestion, and surprise. It sums up characters, things, and ideas. Like misery, “it yokes strange bedfellows,” but with the link of words alone. It is best when intellectually true, but its requisite is fancy, and its domain expression. Humour, on the other hand, is an exercise of perceptive sympathy; it is the faculty of discerning the incongruous, especially of human nature, in the visible alone; it “looks on this picture and on that;” it is most excellent when ethically sound, but its essence is insight, and its sphere, situation.
No one ever heard of a witty picture, or a humorous epigram. We laugh at humour, whereas at wit we smile. Wit is, as it were, Yorick with cap and bells; but humour unmasks him with a moral. Popular proverbs are the wit of the people; what the crowd laughs at is its humour, and its humour varies in different countries; but the standard of wit is the same in all civilisations. To define wit and humour would require both qualities, but, if I were to try my hand, I would venture to call wit, mirth turned philosopher—humour, philosophy at play.
Disraeli’s wit is at root arabesque. Its filagree flourishes, like the ornaments of the Alhambra, are supported by solid if slender pillars. It is fanciful grace sustained by a poised strength; but it is also tempered by the cheery, if sententious, cynicism of the eighteenth century, in which he had steeped himself from childhood. Its source was racial; but its form and colour were much influenced by Pope, Swift, and Voltaire. He was “a master of sentences.” He delighted to condense thought, as it were, in civilised proverbs, and at the same time to let his terse fancy[169] embellish it with subtle and airy flourishes. His paradoxes are almost always thought in a nutshell, and never obscure nonsense in a clever frame. Of his directer wit, a good instance is to be found in his repartee to the crowd at his early Marylebone election: “On what do you stand?” “My head.” Or his remark on the member who solemnly assured the House that he “took” his “stand” on “progress.” “It occurred to me that progress was a somewhat slippery thing to take one’s stand on.” When the late Mr. Beresford Hope’s rather turgid remark on the “golden image set up on the sands of Arabia” provoked Disraeli’s famous phrase, its accompaniment was equally good. He said that there was “a certain prudery” about the honourable member’s eloquence which never failed to fascinate.[170] The great Catholic lady who received her guests “with extreme unction” reminds one of Horace Walpole.