The Function of the Poet and Other Essays Part 2

Yet would'st thou laugh (but at thine own expense), This counsel strange should I presume to give-- "Retire, and read thy Bible, to be gay."

With shame I confess it, Dr. Young's "Night Thoughts" have given me as many hearty laughs as any humorous book I ever read.

Men of one idea,--that is, who have one idea at a time,--men who accomplish great results, men of action, reformers, saints, martyrs, are inevitably dest.i.tute of humor; and if the idea that inspires them be great and n.o.ble, they are impervious to it. But through the perversity of human affairs it not infrequently happens that men are possessed by a single idea, and that a small and rickety one--some seven months' child of thought--that maintains a querulous struggle for life, sometimes to the disquieting of a whole neighborhood. These last commonly need no satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm, the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"

exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before." Could the fanaticism of the collectors of worthless rarities be more admirably caricatured than thus unconsciously by our pa.s.sive enthusiast?

I think no one can go through a museum of natural curiosities, or see certain animals, without a feeling that Nature herself has a sense of the comic. There are some donkeys that one can scarce look at without laughing (perhaps on Cicero's principle of the _haruspex haruspicem_) and feeling inclined to say, "My good fellow, if you will keep my secret I will keep yours." In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body and soul. But for this, the sorcerer Imagination or the witch Enthusiasm would lead us an endless dance.

The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of one idea--for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two. He is the universal disenchanter. He makes himself quite as much the subject of ironical study as his neighbor. Is he inclined to fancy himself a great poet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sit down because a certain part of him was made of gla.s.s, and muses smilingly, "There are many forms of hypochondria." This duality in his mind which const.i.tutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of his character. He is futile in action because in every path he is confronted by the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusion that nothing is very much worth the while. If he be independent of exertion, his life commonly runs to waste. If he turn author, it is commonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and "Don Quixote" was the fruit of a debtors' prison.

It seems to be an instinct of human nature to a.n.a.lyze, to define, and to cla.s.sify. We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away in the mind, and feel as if we knew them better when we have named them.

And so to a certain extent we do. The mere naming of things by their appearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom; and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combines appearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the senses by impression, is poetry. A great part of criticism is scientific, but as the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possible in this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far as that, at some kind of cla.s.sification that may help us toward that excellent property--compactness of mind.

Addison has given the pedigree of humor: the union of truth and goodness produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor. We should say that this was rather a pedigree of satire. For what trace of wrath is there in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Fielding, or Thackeray? The absence of wrath is the characteristic of all of them. Ben Jonson says that

When some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers In their constructions all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humor.

But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,--of a good subject for the humorist,--such as Don Quixote, for example.

Humor--taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous, and to give it expression--seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.

Hence, probably, its name. It is something quite indefinable, diffused through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their faces, or before they have spoken a word.

The sense of the humorous is certainly closely allied with the understanding, and no race has shown so much of it on the whole as the English, and next to them the Spanish--both inclined to gravity. Let us not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.

Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a great humorist, defines it thus:

Humor is the sublime reversed; it brings down the great in order to set the little beside it, and elevates the little in order to set it beside the great--that it may annihilate both, because in the presence of the infinite all are alike nothing. Only the universal, only totality, moves its deepest spring, and from this universality, the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the ma.s.s of little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the Scoffer.

We find it very natural accordingly to speak of the breadth of humor, while wit is, by the necessity of its being, as narrow as a flash of lightning, and as sudden. Humor may pervade a whole page without our being able to put our finger on any pa.s.sage, and say, "It is here." Wit must sparkle and snap in every line, or it is nothing. When the wise deacon shook his head, and said that "there was a good deal of human natur' in man," he might have added that there was a good deal more in some men than in others. Those who have the largest share of it may be humorists, but wit demands only a clear and nimble intellect, presence of mind, and a happy faculty of expression. This perfection of phrase, this neatness, is an essential of wit, because its effect must be instantaneous; whereas humor is often diffuse and roundabout, and its impression c.u.mulative, like the poison of a.r.s.enic. As Galiani said of Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes every time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art of saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where it is forbidden to say anything." Wit must also have the quality of unexpectedness. "Sometimes," says Barrow, "an affected simplicity, sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it rises only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of language."

That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at what is called a _conceit_, which has all the qualities of wit--except wit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long poem called "Albion's England," which had an immense contemporary popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of language. In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.

Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,

Hard was the heart that gave the blow, Soft were those lips that bled.[1]

[Footnote 1: This, and one or two of the following ill.u.s.trations, were used again by Mr. Lowell in his "Shakespeare Once More": _Works_ (Riverside edition), III, 53.]

This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good as a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have been,--to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,--it should read:

Hard was the _hand_ that gave the blow, Soft were those lips that bled,

for otherwise there is no ident.i.ty of meaning in the word "hard" as applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:

Her heart and morning broke together In tears,

which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might almost have laughed at it. Here again the logic is unintentionally violated in the word _broke_, and the sentence becomes absurd, though not funny. Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it, though here, again, there would be no true wit:

His heart and Biddle broke together On 'change.

Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of "Hudibras," certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject. Butler says of loyalty that it is

True as the dial to the sun Although it be not s.h.i.+ned upon.

Now what is the difference between this and the examples from Warner and Morris which I have just quoted? Simply that the comparison turning upon the word _true_, the mind is satisfied, because the a.n.a.logy between the word as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave no gap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over. But it is precisely this jolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discompose our thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the object of a pun to give us. Wit of this kind treats logic with every possible outward demonstration of respect--"keeps the word of promise to the ear, and breaks it to the sense." Dean Swift's famous question to the man carrying the hare, "Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?" is perfect in its way. Here there is an absolute ident.i.ty of sound with an equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning. Hood abounds in examples of this sort of fun--only that his a.n.a.logies are of a more subtle and perplexing kind. In his elegy on the old sailor he says,

His head was turned, and so he chewed His pigtail till he died.

This is inimitable, like all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical _non sequiturs_. And yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of his ear-trumpet:

I don't pretend with horns of mine, Like some in the advertising line, To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale's.

There was Mrs. F. so very deaf That she might have worn a percussion cap And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.

Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.

Again, his definition of deafness:

Deaf as the dog's ears in Enfield's "Speaker."

So, in his description of the hards.h.i.+ps of the wild beasts in the menagerie,

Who could not even prey In their own way,

and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning with the lion; but

Pug had only half unbolted Nero, When Nero bolted him.

In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit always suggesting the remote a.s.sociation of ideas, and the fun jostling together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.

Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down in a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn, they a.s.sume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. In the droll complaint of the lover,

Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But why did you kick me down-stairs?

the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the word "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.

Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole sentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment of Huon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.

Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so full is it of quaint fancy:

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, As but the offscouring of the British sand, And so much earth as was contributed By English pilots when they heaved the lead, Or what by ocean's slow alluvium fell Of s.h.i.+pwrecked c.o.c.kle and the muscle-sh.e.l.l; This indigestful vomit of the sea Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore They, with mad labor, fished their land to sh.o.r.e, And dived as desperately for each piece Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese Collecting anxiously small loads of clay, Less than what building swallows bear away, Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll.

Transfusing into them their sordid soul.

How did they rivet with gigantic piles Thorough the centre their new-catched miles, And to the stake a struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forced ground!

Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid.

And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played, As if on purpose it on land had come To show them what's their _mare liberum_; The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed, And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest; And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs tan Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban, And, as they over the new level ranged, For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.

Therefore necessity, that first made kings, Something like government among them brings; And as among the blind the blinkard reigns So rules among the drowned he that drains; Who best could know to pump on earth a leak, Him they their lord and Country's Father speak.

To make a bank was a great plot of state, Invent a shovel and be a magistrate; Hence some small d.y.k.egrave, unperceived, invades The power, and grows, as 't were, a king of spades.

I have cited this long pa.s.sage not only because Marvell (both in his serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is as good an ill.u.s.tration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that const.i.tute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny, hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an epigram of two lines: