FOOTNOTES:[1]Ninth Eclogue of Virgil, 28th line.[2]Sterne may have picked up this sentiment during his journey in France, when the donkey was bewept. At any rate, it is found in literature as early as 1594, when Henri Estienne wrote his "Prémices:" "Dieu mesure le froid à la brebis tondue."
FOOTNOTES:
[1]Ninth Eclogue of Virgil, 28th line.
[1]Ninth Eclogue of Virgil, 28th line.
[2]Sterne may have picked up this sentiment during his journey in France, when the donkey was bewept. At any rate, it is found in literature as early as 1594, when Henri Estienne wrote his "Prémices:" "Dieu mesure le froid à la brebis tondue."
[2]Sterne may have picked up this sentiment during his journey in France, when the donkey was bewept. At any rate, it is found in literature as early as 1594, when Henri Estienne wrote his "Prémices:" "Dieu mesure le froid à la brebis tondue."
WIT, IRONY, HUMOR.
WIT.
Thesimiles of poetry which select natural objects and fit humanthoughts and emotions to them have the movement which belongs to wit. They suddenly take things which we have been in the habit of seeing all our lives without after-thought, just as we see a brick or a house; but, when thus taken, they become involved in sentiments which are also customary, and indulged by us without after-thought. We are surprised and charmed to notice what an apt comradeship springs up between the object and the sentiment.
"Such tricks hath strong imagination,That, if it would but apprehend some joy,It comprehends some bringer of that joy."
Constantinople may be seen any day from the Bosphorus, stretching its length of domes and minarets across the sunset; but when Mr. Browning observes it he says it runs black and crooked athwart the splendor, "like a Turk verse along a scimitar." There occurs a moment of surprise; a lively shock is given to the mind, which would liberate itself into the smile of wit if we were not instantly conscious that the sudden aptness is also beautiful. All pure wit is born in the imagination, but only in that capability of it to see one point where two incongruous things may meet. But the poetic simile involves more than that: it is born of the inmostvitality which must overflow, spill itself upon Nature, appropriate her, senseless as she may seem and incapable of reflecting our subtilties of mind and heart. Often there is something very noble and tender in this process of imagination, which converts surprise into emotion: as when Coleridge says,—
"Methinks it should have been impossibleNot to love all things in a world so filled;Where the breeze warbles, and the mute, still airIs music slumbering in her instrument."
This innate nobleness of the simile checks our smile, and if we feel any hilarity it belongs to that delighted health which mantles all through us when we recognize beauty. Perhaps the mind soared,
"By means of that mere snatch, to many a hoardOf fancies: as some falling cone bears softThe eye, along the fir-tree spire, aloftTo a dove's nest."
The simile gives us such a new perception of the mysterious relations of mind and Nature that we should not be surprised if the object designated had really, in the great involvement of all things, some secret affinity with the thought; perhaps the thought has recognized the family mark and claimed kinship. This is an exalted claim because it sets free our personality. We become superior to Nature, and are made aware that we can vivify her as the Creator can; but, as we also are creatures, we admit her to a tender and refining confidence. "Daffodils, that come before the swallow dares," "take the winds of March with beauty."
"The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,And the earth changes like a human face.""Earth is a wintry clod,But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passesOver its breast to waken it.""The windsAre henceforth voices, in a wail or shout,A querulous mutter, or a quick, gay laugh,—Never a senseless gust now man is born."
The imagination thus proclaiming the banns between spirit and matter reminds us of Wordsworth's dear maiden, of whom he says,—
"She was known to every star in heaven,And every wind that blew."
The impression of surprise which a perfect simile produces is transferred from the understanding back to the imagination before the former can venture to be amused. But sometimes the surprise lingers there long enough to have a narrow escape from smiling; as when Sir Thomas Brown, finding that midnight has overtaken him at his desk, says, "To keep our eyes open longer, were toactthe antipodes." His wakefulness is not only like the antipodal day, but dramatizes it; and this is a simile that imparts the shock of wit.
Here is one from Shakspeare that approaches it, but is intercepted by a sense of beauty:—
"These violent delights have violent ends,And in their triumph die; like fire and powder,Which, as they kiss, consume."
And he says that, when the people saw Anne Boleyn at her coronation, such a noise arose "as the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest." Mr. Browning makesus smile when he paints the "poppy's red effrontery—till autumn spoils their fleering quite with rain,"
"And, turbanless, a coarse, brown, rattling craneProtrudes."
This reminds me that in the West a bald man's head is spoken of as rising above the timber-line; which is quite in the style of American similes, as when Rufus Choate, who so frequently appeared to be saying to his jury, "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now," was described to be a man who always bored for water.
Charles Lamb commenting upon the following line from Davenport's King John and Matilda,—
"And thou, Fitzwater, reflect upon thyname,And turn theSon of Tears,"—
says, "Fitzwater: son of water." A striking instance of the compatibility of theserious punwith the expression of the profoundest sorrows. Grief as well as joy finds ease in thus playing with a word. Old John of Gaunt in Shakspeare thus descants on his name: "Gaunt, and gaunt, indeed;" to a long string of conceits which no one has ever yet felt to be ridiculous. The poet Wither, thus, in a mournful review of the declining estate of his family, says with deepest nature,—
"'The very name of Wither shows decay.'"
But, in the following passage from John Fletcher's "Bonduca," pure poetry checks the laugh,—
"I have seen these Britons that you magnifyRun as they would have outrun time, and roaring,Basely for mercy, roaring; the light shadows,That in a thought scur o'er the fields of corn,Halted on crutches to them."
That is in the finest style of an exaggeration which has been inherited by Americans and is the source of much of their wit and humor. Here is a coarser specimen, but perfectly witty. A person, remarking to a famous criminal lawyer that his client would certainly go to hell, had for a reply, "Go to hell! he ought to be thankful that there is a hell hecango to."
This characteristic will recur under the head of Falstaff.
Some of the similes which Americans derive from their professions, and apply to persons, have all the character of wit. A farmer says of a meagre and unequal speech that it was "pretty scattering," alluding to ground crops that grow unevenly. An iron-founder will say of a speech that was all fusion and passion that, notwithstanding, it "didn't make a weld." Miners in the West use the word "color" for the finest gold in the ground. One of them remarked of a man who had been tried and found worthless, "I have panned him out clear down to the bed rock, but I can't even raise the color." Frequenters of the race-course mention a beaten politician as "the longest-eared horse they ever saw," as the ears hang to a jaded horse. And a Nantucket captain, when asked his opinion of a very rhetorical preacher, said, "He's a good sailor, but a bad carrier."
The poetry of Donne, Cowley, Suckling, and others of that epoch, easily furnish examples of similes which stop so far short of beauty that their aptness only serves to raise a smile. Suckling says,—
"Her feet beneath her petticoatLike little mice stole in and out."
Cowley begins his Hymn to Night,—
"First-born of chaos, who so fair didst comeFrom the old negro's darksome womb,"
and we have to deny poetic freedom to this aboriginal contraband.
How charmingly, however, did the poor woman reply to the gentleman who found her watering her webs of linen cloth. She could not tell him even the text of the last sermon. "And what good can the preaching do you, if you forget it all?" "Ah, sir, if you will look at this web on the grass, you will see that as fast as ever I put the water on it the sun dries it all up, and yet, sir, I see it gets whiter and whiter." This is pure wit from the well of imagination, and the smile is as deep in it as truth.
It would be hazardous to liken a poet to a spider, we might think; but when Mr. Browning undertakes it, this dodger of brooms spins a web all dripping with the splendor of fancy. Mr. Browning speaks of young Sordello, the poet, as he dreams in the old castle and connects the events around him by absorbing surmises of his own:—
"Thus thrall reached thrall;He o'erfestooning every interval,As the adventurous spider, making lightOf distance, sports her threads from depth to height,From barbican to battlement; so flungFantasies forth and in their centre swungOur architect,—the breezy morning freshAbove, and merry,—all his waving meshLaughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.This world of ours by tacit pact is pledgedTo laying such a spangled fabric low,Whether by gradual brush or gallant blow."
Beauty has spun the poet and the insect into a cocoon out of which the splendid wings emerge; then wit takes up the thread with the conception of the prosaic old world's hostility to flimsy poesy, and we admire the sudden congruity which is established between two such irreconcilable objects.
Outside the domain of poetry involuntary wit lurks everywhere, even in passages of history whose passion seems capable of expunging all smiles upon the face. Two contrarious ideas may blend for a moment at one point, as when King Olaf put a pan of coals upon Eyvind's naked flesh until it broiled beneath them, and then asked, without suspecting any thing incongruous, "Dost thou now, O Eyvind, believe in Christ?" Here is a momentary inclusion of an act of belief under an act of physical pain. When in the course of time the deadly earnestness of Olaf fades away for us, we perceive the incongruity, but also perceive that Olaf, in sad simplicity, imagined there was congruity; or, he reflected, a pan of coals shall compel a congruity.
This grim practice of unconscious wit is heightened when we recollect that Christ was a person who declined to call down fire upon those who did not receive him; and such an incident affords us a ready passage from Wit into the domain of Irony.
IRONY.
Nature herself practised irony long before men had suffered from it enough to endow literature with its expressive form. She has always pretended to agree with ourpenchantfor pleasant but noxious habits, and for a long time seems to be of our opinion that such ways of living are of a capital kind; but eventually she is fatigued because we misunderstand her, and exclaims by many a twinge, "You simpletons! I meant just the reverse." "Why didn't you say so at first?" we reply, as we smart to find we had been so prosaic when we thought we were so romantic; but the smart etches the shapes of tragedy upon the soul.
The mind uses irony when it gravely states an opinion or sentiment which is the opposite of its belief, with the moral purpose of showing its real dissent from the opinion. It must therefore be done with this wink from the purpose in it, so that it may not pass for an acquiescence in an opposite sentiment. It may be done so well as to deceive even the elect; and perhaps the ordinary mind complains of irony as wanting in straightforwardness. There is a moment of hesitation, when the mind stoops over this single intention with a double appearance, and doubts upon which to settle as the real prey. So that only carefully poised minds with the falcon's or the vulture's glance can always discriminate rapidly enough to seize the point. In this moment of action the pleasure of irony is developed, which arises from adiscovery of the contrast between the thing said and the thing intended. And this pleasure is heightened when we observe the contrast between the fine soul who means nobly, and his speaking as if he meant to be ignoble. Then the ignoble thing is doubly condemned, first, by having been briefly mistaken to be the real opinion of the speaker, and then by the flash of recognition of the speaker's superiority. Thackeray describes the high-minded intentions of Rebecca Sharp: "It became naturally Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, agreeable to her benefactors, and to gain their confidence to the utmost of her power. Who can but admire this quality of gratitude in an unprotected orphan? 'I am alone in the world,' said the friendless girl: 'well, let us see if my wits cannot provide me with an honorable maintenance.' Thus it was that our little romantic friend formed visions of the future for herself; nor must we be scandalized that, in all her castles in the air, a husband was the principal inhabitant. Of what else have young ladies to think but husbands? Of what else do dear mammas think? 'I must be my own mamma,' said Rebecca." Thus the great author confides to us his abhorrence of Vanity Fair.
In matters which are morally indifferent, irony is only a jesting which is disguised by gravity; as when we apparently agree with the notions of another person which are averse from our own, so that we puzzle him not only on the point of our own notion, but on the point of his own, and he begins to have a suspicion that he is not sound in the matter. This suspicion is derivedfrom the mind's instinctive feeling that irony is a trait of a superior person who can afford to have a stock of original ideas with which it tests opinion, and who holds them so securely that he can never play with them a losing game. The Bastard in King John indicates this superiority when he says,—
"Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail,And say,—there is no sin but to be rich;And being rich, my virtue then shall be,To say,—there is no vice but beggary."
A man who pretends to hold the opposite of his own belief is morally a hypocrite, until we detect that slight touch of banter which is the proof of genuine irony. Then we see that he is honest though he equivocates, for he belies himself with sincerity. A man who can afford this is to that extent superior to the man who, whether right or wrong, is hopelessly didactic, and incapable of commending his own opinions by the bold ease with which he may deplore them.
It is irony when Lowell, speaking of Dante's intimacy with the Scriptures, adds, "They do even a scholar no harm." Jaques, in "As You Like It," is ironical when he indicates men by the actions of the wounded deer which augmented with tears the stream that did not need water, as men leave their money to those who have too much already. The herd abandons him: that is right,—misery parts company. Anon, they come sweeping by, and never stay to inquire into his hurt. That is just the proper fashion, too. "Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens!" This pretence of praising the deer is a parable which arraigns mankind.
In the Old Testament there is an instance of irony, where the priests of Baal called on his name but there was no reply, and Elijah suggested that "either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked." But the priests had all the prosaic singleness of an ignorant mind, and went on scarifying themselves with knives and lancets, as if Elijah had not already let their blood.
The New Testament furnishes a more delicate specimen in the parable of the unjust steward, which has difficulties of interpretation, arising from an unwillingness, perhaps, to recognize the irony. The steward is expecting to be dismissed for malfeasance in office. In the days of parable, whitewashing committees were unknown. He then expects to ingratiate himself with his lord's debtors by reducing the amount of their bills, hoping that some of them would take him up when discarded. It is not clear what commendation to a debtor who might also be a creditor lay in this fraudulent reduction of his bill; but a parable serves only the main point, which in this case is to show how much more tact a thoroughly worldly man has than a technically spiritual man. So the lord admires the shiftiness of his steward, because it had an ulterior purpose; whereas your conventional child of light has no genuine foresight. This is done to introduce the irony of the verse: "And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations." The master'shint of the superior sagacity of the people of mammon is delightfully qualified by the irony that lurks in his use of the word "everlasting." Then the serious intent of the parable is clearly stated in the three succeeding verses.
When irony becomes persistently cynical it defeats the moral advantage which it would possess of attracting men to its serious meaning, because it then involves too large a tract of human life in its insinuation. The pretences that things are all bad may become so clamorous at the door of our faith in human nature that no good things can gain admission. In literature, an irony that is tinged a little with cynicism is a healthy recoil from sentimentalism: for an affected ideal, if too long and too floridly sustained, piques our knowledge of human nature into making inquiries; and, as it is in public affairs when people are aroused to investigate, the facts which are discovered receive too great a valuation. They seem to indicate that every thing is rotten; and while one temper denounces, another temper sneeringly inquires for virtue. In broad day, this lantern of Diogenes goes about hunting up an honest citizen. "There is nothing but roguery to be found in villanous man."
The strained and almost impossible goodness of Dickens's "Battle of Life" is punished by the cool depreciation of Thackeray's pen. When the former insists too strongly that his humble characters shall be examples of all the British beatitudes, the latter depicts too easily sharpers and nonentities for women,and well-bred, high-toned rascals for men. But when a too fluent and prolific imagination, working in the steam of a great modern centre, has its shapes distorted, and the outlines waver into caricature, a tonic breath with the taste of brine in it will always set in to temper this radiation. Then it is inevitable that we shiver and complain that the tone has been reduced too far. When a skilfully distended bubble breaks, and only a thin spat of suds is left, a cynic finger will point to it as if to say, "Here's your fine iris all gone to unserviceable soap." But there is a solider ball, the earth itself, upon which human nature paints its zones; and although life is despicable at the poles, and revolting in many a foul quarter, we know that noble landscapes stocked with graciousness and honor spread on every side. Shakspeare alone seems to have this bubble hanging securely from his pipe, where it sheds the swift glances of myriad eyes.
Thackeray says, "How can I hold out the hand of friendship, when my first impression is, 'My good sir, I strongly suspect that you were up my pear-tree last night'? It is a dreadful state of mind. The core is black; the death-stricken fruit drops on the bough, and a great worm is within,—fattening and feasting and wriggling. Who stole the pears? I say. Is it you, brother? Is it you, Madam?"
These suspicions cannot conceal their good humor: the one hand drives the railing pen; the other, behind the chair, holds the glimmer, not of steel, but of a smile.
But when Swift writes a chapter upon the use and improvement of madness in a Commonwealth, the smile which scantily flickers over the surface of it is the smile of the Spartan boy while the fox was gnawing at his vitals. Swift's pen makes the Iron Madonna's gestures of invitation,—she that stood in mediæval torture-chambers and bade the bewildered prisoner take refuge in her opening arms, where a thousand lancets pricked life, faith, and hope away.
At one time, the German Heine's irony smacks of good humor; at another, you would ask for a bumper of gall to sweeten your mouth. He represents two fat Manchester ladies at a particularly exposed ballet, murmuring to each other, "Shocking! For shame!" And he says that they were so benumbed with horror that they could not for an instant take their opera-glasses from their eyes, and consequently remained in that situation to the last moment, when the curtain fell.
By and by we hear a change of tone. "I always obeyed the one commandment, that we should love our enemies; for, ah! those persons whom I have best loved were always, without my knowing it, my worst enemies." And again: "Madame, you can readily form an idea of what life is like in heaven,—the more readily, as you are married."
This style of innuendo is always more good-natured in Thackeray; as when speaking in the character of a widower, who remembers the late Mrs. Brown, he says: "By a timely removal she was spared from the grief which her widowhood would have doubtless caused her,and I acquiesce in the decrees of Fate in this instance, and have not the least regret at not having preceded her."
Heine also can be pleasantly mischievous. When he was about to travel from Lyons to Paris in the old days of diligences, a friend commissioned him to carry one of the colossal Lyons sausages to a homœopathic doctor in the capital. But Heine and his wife were so frequently hungry, and had trespassed so often upon the length of the sausage, that a very small end remained on their arrival. Heine thereupon shaved off a transparent slice with a razor, and enclosed it in the following letter to the doctor: "My dear Sir,—Your researches have helped to establish the fact that millionths produce the greatest effects. Pray receive herewith the millionth part of a Lyons sausage, which your friend consigned to you. In case your theory be true, it will have the effect of the whole sausage upon you."
Irony employs wit to feather its purport. A Frenchman said of a man who never really did make a witty remark: "How full of wit that man must be! he never lets any escape." That, when translated, is improved because the English wordanycan refer at once to no wit and to no person's escaping the effect of wit. Thus the irony is increased.
One of the most characteristic and important specimens of irony is Thackeray's "Philip," a story of a villanous doctor who deceives a woman with a mock marriage, deserts her, and marries a lady with expectations, who has a son Philip and dies. But the traitor isendowed with an impressive amount of deportment, and his starched front and cravat seem to have been secreted by the stiffest of spotless souls, in a rapture of rigidness. This carapace of deportment is gradually worn too thin; for it has been put to rough service on all occasions to supply the place of virtue and to make its absence appear no calamity. The irony consists in accepting this deportment as if it were really put forth by an estimable man. The book is one long strain of grave assumption that Dr. Firmin is a good man and a killing physician; but the reader knows better on the first point, and enjoys tasting the man's villany through this pretence. And it is kept up long after the deportment becomes like the pantaloons of the stingy lawyer, which hung in his garret labelled thus, "Too old to wear, too good to give away." It is still good enough for Dr. Firmin; and he reaches a respectable grave in ignorance that we know him so thoroughly, and discovers rather late that he was always well known at the head-quarters of genius.
The story is a wonderfully sustained innuendo of rascality, carried on by this ironical pretence of virtue. Thackeray appears in it to be as green as Dr. Firmin's dupes; but the mask is lifted a little in every sentence, and the author and the reader peeping in at opposite sides, their eyes meet, and smiles at what they have discovered are exchanged.
Even the little sister, who becomes a living mother to the Philip of the dead lady, cannot flee from this great tide of irony, which catches her and stands up to herheart. The author is constantly deprecating her love for Philip; though he knows it is the sweet flower of her life that is fed from the ugly soil of her betrayal. Why will she go on so with that boy, and save up money for him, and extemporize little treats with brandy and waterad libitum, and believe in him when he tries to become a bad magazine writer, and believe in his fortune when he marries a beggar, and, in short, believe that she was sent into the world to be deceived, and then have a great, blundering, brave, pure, splendid Philip, as if by bequest from a legal mother? Why in Heaven's name does she not blow upon the doctor, and make a good thing out of betraying his contemptible meanness? Gracious goodness! why is she so expensively magnanimous? Would you, Madame, be so extravagant as to pinch yourself in that way to be faithful and tender to a seducer out of faith and tenderness for his wife's boy? But, there he is: God set such a pure amen to a hideous deed, and she is the woman to say, Amen, after him; for God is just and watches the index of the balance. What! shall she compete with God for retribution? So her life is a long sacrifice to the purest and most mute devotion, and our author banters her to keep the tears from obscuring the page at which he writes.
This charming insinuation of the great observer, who once said of himself that he had no head above his eyes, proves to us that he had a mighty truly-beating heart below them; and we reverently accept the little mother from his shaping hands, to place her in our Valhalla of Women, where Portia, Imogen, and Cordelia have long languished for her company.
If irony does not forget good nature in its indignation at discovered shams, it can impart the exhilaration of wit. In a late novel, entitled the "Maid of Sker," there is a fishmonger who says that, "when the eyes of a fish begin to fail him through long retirement from the water," he has means of setting up their aspect; "and I called" my patrons "generous gentlemen and Christian-minded ladies every time they wanted to smell my fish, which is not right before payment. What right has another man to disparage the property of another? When you have bought him, he is your own; but, when he is put in the scales, remember 'nothing but good of the dead,' if you remember any thing."
This recalls Hamlet's irony, when he said that he knew Polonius excellent well,—he was a fishmonger! "Not I, my lord." "Then I would you were so honest a man." Poor, stale Polonius! He was not as fresh as the fish which Shakspeare used to scent at Billingsgate, and knavery in the wind besides.
The cynicism of irony can be illustrated by the character of Jaques in "As You Like It," as the character of Apemantus in "Timon of Athens" will serve to show us a cynicism that has grown so ferocious as almost to beat irony from the field.
JAQUES.
There is not a spark of unkindly feeling in Puck when he says to Oberon, concerning the lovers,—
"Shall we their fond pageant see?Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
But when we overhear Jaques telling Orlando, "By my troth, I was seeking for a fool, when I found you," there is a tang of seedy beer in the speech. We suspect his common-sense of having soured: so that when he says to Orlando, "The worst fault you have is to be in love," we relish the estimate of Orlando's reply, "'Tis a fault I will not change for your best virtue."
The melancholy of Jaques is the cynicism of a man who isblaséwith the convictions as well as the manners of society. He enjoys his vein too well to be melancholy in the modern sense of that word, for being something more than satirical he is something less than morose, and we feel that he is secretly pleased with his ability to be displeasing. Every vice lends a man a feeling of superiority in being different from other men: he broke through some bounds to acquire it, and this action contains some spice of originality and independence. He transgresses in a temper of pity for the less audacious and unchartered souls. So the cynic who makes his whole vicinity uncomfortable is pleasant company for himself because he has no mawkishness; you cannot cheat him with superfine emotions, he happens to have seen the world.
Jaques characterizes the use of the word "melancholy" as applied to himself, when he says: "It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness." He has also gained his experience at the expense of having tried various vices of high life, as the Duke hints: "For thou thyself hast been a libertine." So the arsenic eaters of the Styrian Alps take the natural poison in small successive doses which give them a bloated aspect of florid health, but they so affect the action of the heart that it stops quite suddenly.
The famous speech beginning with, "All the world's a stage," is purely cynical, and assumes the futility of the parts which the necessity of living compels us to play. It might be spoken by one who believes that our little life is rounded by a sleep whose pure oblivion swallows up our striving.
When Jaques calls for more singing, and is told that it will make him melancholy, he replies, "I thank it: I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs." We may infer that he sucks music with the notion of the weasel, who probably regards eggs as being laid on purpose for his sucking. There is nothing more ferrety than your cynic, to whom all objects are game for observation. When he hears that Duke Frederic, the usurper, has restored the kingdom and "put on a religious life," he goes to find him for the purpose of critical inspection; for "out of these convertites there is much matter to be heard and learned." So Jaques surmising that every hole leads to a rat does not leave one unexplored. In the matter of music Jaques only cares for his sad reverie, not for the names of the songs. He will thank nobody. "When a man thanks me heartily, methinks I have given him a penny, and he renders me the beggarly thanks." So, sing, if you choose to: the song tracks me to that rat behind the arras.
Compare his scirrhous habit of assimilating music with that of the Duke in "Twelfth Night." Love has an appetite for music: give me excess of it to kill the love. Enough: it is not so sweet as before; for love is like the sea, as vast, as real, as domineering. When the brooks of music fall into it, sweet as they are, genuine as love, yet the great sea subdues them to a greater disposition, even in a minute; and my fancy for Olivia is alone "high-fantastical." Jaques would have sneered at this Duke for not extracting from the music a suspicion of the frailty of his love. No matter what a man's gifts may be, this "vicious mole of nature" that pretends to spread over all surfaces discolors only the gifts: all virtues, "in the general censure, take corruption from that particular fault," and to its own scandal; because the world is a flower that nods upon the stock of reality, and the particles of its aroma, though invisible, set in motion the nerves of a corresponding reality, and man does not put his nose to an illusion. But your debauchee, like Jaques, has scorched and tanned his senses with misuse, and his abortive sniffing at the roses sours into a sneer.
Still, Jaques in defending himself makes disclaimers of ill-nature: as thus, Who is hit by my speech? It means so and so. If the coat does not fit, who is wronged? If a man be above my estimate, "why, then, my taxing like a wild goose flies, unclaimed of any man."
Yes, but he really delights himself with the conviction that every man is a wild goose upon the wing, and that virtue is the last game that ventures to alight and feed on the wild celery of our ponds.
Jaques reserves his last and cruelest thrust for Touchstone, to whom he predicts a marriage victualled for two months, and wrangling ever after; which is hard on the wise fool, who has taken up with Audrey as if to show the under side of court manners and the comparative cheapness of mere breeding. This ought to have endeared him to the heart of the cynic.
APEMANTUS.
Apemantus, in "Timon of Athens," is a cynic of a different breed, and his temper is so acid that, as was once said of Douglas Jerrold, he must have been suckled on a lemon. There is spleen in it when he says: "Would I had a rod in my mouth, that I might answer thee profitably." The cynicism of Apemantus is partly justified by the generous folly of Timon: "Now, Apemantus, if thou wert not sullen, I'd be good to thee." "No, I'll nothing: for if I should be bribed too, there would be none left to rail upon thee, and then thou would'st sinthe faster." Shakspeare seems to indicate how a virtue, pushed to excess, provokes excessive criticism. We are continually generating these extremes, when our social virtue piques some social fault into parading itself. Money maxims and manners are good things, but they may all be strained to bankruptcy. So when Timon becomes a fanatic of good-nature we see him developing a monstrous Apemantus: his virtue, like an overgrown fruit, becomes stringy and deprived of proper flavor. We taste its coarseness in the colossal spleen of the cynic who says, as Timon turns away from the repulsive tone which was really sired by himself:—
"Thou wilt not hear me now: thou shalt not then,I'll lock Thy heaven from thee."
"Thou wilt not hear me now: thou shalt not then,I'll lock Thy heaven from thee."
So it will always be: if the kingdom of heaven is claimed by one violence, it will be competed for by another.
Apemantus is specially reared to be this bitter foil to Timon's profuseness. He leads an isolated life, and thus like all solitaries acquires the vice of exaggerating his own opinions. They have never passed between the fine emery of social contact. So he is a caltrop in men's path, with a spike always uppermost to impale the over-hasty feet. Poverty drives Timon directly upon it, to wince at every step he takes on such a bristly virtue, till he matches his smart with curses quite as pointed; and Shakspeare shows us the two fanatics of two virtues exhausting the vituperations of the English tongue to banish each other into an oblivion, "where the light foam of the sea may beat" their gravestones daily with a bitter lip.
Tim.When there is nothing living but thee, thou shalt be welcome. I had rather be a beggar's dog, than Apemantus.Apem.Thou art the cap of all the fools alive.Tim.Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon.Apem.A plague on thee, thou art too bad to curse.Tim.Away, thou issue of a mangy dog!Choler does kill me, that thou art alive;I swoon to see thee.Apem.Beast!Tim.Slave!Apem.Toad!Tim.Rogue, rogue, rogue!
Tim.When there is nothing living but thee, thou shalt be welcome. I had rather be a beggar's dog, than Apemantus.
Apem.Thou art the cap of all the fools alive.
Tim.Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon.
Apem.A plague on thee, thou art too bad to curse.
Tim.Away, thou issue of a mangy dog!Choler does kill me, that thou art alive;I swoon to see thee.
Apem.Beast!
Tim.Slave!
Apem.Toad!
Tim.Rogue, rogue, rogue!
So people who never know "the middle of humanity," but "the extremity of both ends," batter each other's virtue out of shape and capacity to be recognized.
Julian Hawthorne likens the cynic to a chimney-sweeper, "that eccentric misanthrope who vents his spite against the race by plucking defilement from the very flame which makes bright the household hearth."
But Jaques was expressly plunged into social estimates and manners that he may be withdrawn from them in a less splenetic temper. The wild crab has sunned itself in orchards, and, nodding among mellower branches, is not all flavored with their rottenness. So far from secluding himself in the conceited fashion of all hermits from the manifold culture of life, he has expended himself upon every phase of it, and withdraws with the pensiveness of satiety toning the sharpness of experience in his speech. Some men turn cynics when the first serious disappointment of their lives drifts over them. Of a sudden the whole, nature is drenched from the leaden cloud. The revulsion from a sunny day to this pitiless blackening of heaven chills the very marrow of theircommon-sense. Then they rail at the sky which is but for a while retired, and insist that its old grace and clearness were a subterfuge. So when the accursed plot of Iachimo to make the chastity of Imogen a naughty thing has its effect, her husband, Posthumus, sets the key for all the woman-haters since:—
"Could I find outThe woman's part in me! For there's no motionThat tends to vice in man, but I affirmIt is the woman's part: Be it lying, note it,The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,Nice longings, slanders, mutability,All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows,Why, hers, in part, or all; but, rather, all;For ev'n to viceThey are not constant, but are changing stillOne vice, but of a minute old, for oneNot half so old as that.I'll write against them."
HUMOR.
If we wished to find a passage from Irony to Humor, we should have to look for it in cases where good-nature assumes the positive attribute of impartiality, because humor is a kind of disposition to adopt the whole of human nature, fuse all its distinctions, tolerate all its infirmities, and assemble vice and misery to receive rations of good cheer.
Two Jews have been elected within a few years to be Lord Mayors of London. They were members of the synagogue in full connection, and might have appointedRabbins for chaplaincies if they had chosen. But they pursued the old custom, which was not however of legal stringency: appointed clergymen of the Church of England, and regularly made all the usual contributions for Christian purposes, including the customary one to the Society for the Conversion of the Jews. In this incident it is the element of Humor which imparts to us the pleasure we feel.
Hippolyte Taine acknowledges that the French have not the idea of Humor, nor the word for it. But we might expect from him at least a definition. He can only say, however, that humor includes a taste for contrasts, buffooneries, the mockery of Heine, starts of invention, oddities, eruption of a violent joviality that was buried under a heap of sadness, and absurd indecency. In another place he says that English humor "is the product of imaginative drollery, or of concentrated indignation."
Sir Henry Bulwer, in his book entitled "France, Social, Literary, and Political," concedes the talent of wit to the French and quotes the following instance of it: "I asked two little village boys, one seven, the other eight years old, what they meant to be when they were men? Says one, 'I shall be the doctor of the village.' 'And you, what shall you be?' said I to the other. 'Oh! if brother's a doctor, I shall becuré. He shall kill the people, and I'll bury them; so we shall have the whole village between us.'"
Bulwer appreciates this, yet Taine denies to the English the sense of wit. In fact, the quality of witexists wherever imagination percolates through the understanding: the sediment is the grain-gold of wit. But the quality of humor, depending upon various moral traits, exists only wherever a broad imagination is combined with a sweet and tolerant moral sense that is devoid of malice and all uncharitableness, and at peace with all mankind. A petulant egotism may exist with wit, but never with humor. Sarcasm and satire are the forms which best agree with imperfect moral dispositions. A too prolonged irony has something melancholy and dyspeptic in it, and passes into the blood of a faulty temper even if there be the tonic of an upright moral sense. This moral sense may exist on every meridian of the earth, but it may not appear at literary epochs in solution with the brightest minds. Rabelais seems to be a French exception to the Gallic trait that was noticed so long ago by the great Roman:Comɶdaandargute loqui,—belonging to comedy and to the ingenuities of conversation. Humor appears best in conjunction with the temper of Northern Europe, whose early races began with deep impressions of the gravity of things and broke thence into alleviating moods. If it be the primitive trait of a nation to enjoy comic gayeties and the subtle surprises of discourse, it does not readily rise to the moral earnestness which a serious world imposes, and therefore it cannot invent the relief and grave delight of humor.
Sydney Smith uses this word to cover any thing that is ridiculous and laughable. So the epithetcomicis quite indiscriminately applied. But we ought not tosubmit to this loose application; for there are plenty of other words to make proper distinctions for us amid our pleasurable moods, and permit us to reserve humor for something which is neither punning, wit, satire, nor comedy. Humor may avail itself of all these mental exercises, but only as a manager casts his stock company to set forth the prevailing spirit of a play. Comedy, for instance, represents sorrows, passions, and annoyances, but shows them without the sombre purpose of tragedy to enforce a supreme will at any cost. All our weaknesses threaten in comedy to result in serious embarrassments, but there is such inexhaustible material for laughter in the whims and follies with which we baffle ourselves and others, that the tragic threat is collared just in time and shaken into pleasure. All kinds of details of our life are represented, which tragedy could never tolerate in its main drift towards the pathos of defeated human wills and broken hearts. Tricks, vices, fatuities, crotchets, vanities, play their game for a stake no higher than the mirth of outwitting each other; and they all pay penalties of a light kind which God exacts smilingly for the sake of keeping our disorders at a minimum. Comedy also funds a great deal of its charm in the unconsciousness of an infirmity. We exhibit ourselves unawares: each one is perfectly understood by everybody but himself; so we plot and vapor through an intrigue with placards on each back, where all but the wearers can indulge their mirth at seeing us parading so innocently with advertisements of our price and quality.
There is a comic passage in the "Inferno" of Dante, noticed by Lowell (XV. 119), "where Brunetto Latini lingers under the burning shower to recommend hisTesoroto his former pupil," Dante; "a comical touch of Nature in an author's solicitude for his little work; not, as in Fielding's case, afterits, but his own damnation."
The opening verses of Canto XVI. of the "Paradiso" are also comic, "where Dante tells us how, even in heaven, he could not help glorying in being gently born,—he who had devoted aCanzoneand a book of theConvitoto proving that nobility consisted wholly in virtue."
Humor subsidizes every vein like this to supply the great heart-beat which mantles over all human features and visits all the members of great or little honor. Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity. Humor is gravity concealed behind the jest. Our grave and noble tendencies are brought in this world of ours into contact with very ordinary styles of living, which are stubborn; they neither surrender nor give way. Humor steps in to mediate: it seeks to put in the same light and color all the parts of this incongruity, the ideal and the vulgar real; and the constant inference of humor is that all the ideals of right, honor, goodness, manly strength, are serious with a divine purpose.
Even the coarsest and most revolting things can be adopted by this temper and cheerfully assigned to their places in the great plan. Jamie Alexander, the old Scotch grave-digger, had the habit of carrying homefragments of old coffins, long seasoned in the earth which was turned up by his exploring spade. He used to make clocks and fiddles of them, thus coaxing time and tune out of these repulsive tokens of human infirmity. Our mouldiest accessories can furnish material for humor; since "a good wit," says Shakspeare, "will make use of any thing; it will turn diseases to commodity."
We cannot say that man derives this power to resolve contrariety into delight from the divine mind, though we have the habit of saying that every intellectual act must spring from an original source of intelligence, just as affection must have its root in the infinite love. But Deity can have no consciousness of incongruities in creation, because the whole must at every instant be comprehended in the Creator of the whole, who originates the real relation of all its parts and their mutual interdependence. Human dissatisfaction springs from want of this ability to comprehend the whole within one reconciling idea. This incompetency is felt by us because we have an instinct that all dissonant things ought to be reconciled, and can be in some way, but only can be by the finite becoming the infinite. Humor strives to bridge this gulf. It is man's device to pacify his painful sense that so many things appear wrong and evil to him, and so many circumstances inconsistent with our feeling that Deity must have framed the world in a temper of perfect goodness. We get relief by trying to discover the ideas which may effect a temporary reconcilement, to approach as far as we can to the temper of divine impartiality in which all circumstances must havebeen ordained. That temper passing down through our incompleteness is refracted, broken all up into a tremulousness of human smiles. Nothing that a Creator has the heart to tolerate can disturb him. But where there is no sense of incongruity there can be no sense of humor. That sense is man's expedient to make his mortality endurable. The laughter of man is the contentment of God.
Shakspeare was not preoccupied by any theory of the universe which denies the facts or tries to shut them up in a private meaning, as theology does. His creative genius reflected a Creator's mind. So he accepted all that is permitted to exist, without extenuation, instinctively acknowledging the right of God to make men as they are, if so He chose, out of complex motives and passions whose roots are hidden in each man's ancestry, and whose drift the man himself cannot anticipate, as he was not consulted. This admission of all the facts of human nature did not disable his preference for pure and honest things. All that is lovely has a good, report made of it in his lives, and all that is odious appears in its habit as it lived. Thus he moralized, as Nature does by letting all her creatures breed and show their traits. She pastes no placards upon things which advertise themselves to every observer. All our infirmities have the freedom of Shakspeare's verse to display themselves at pleasure. He is not standing by with a showman's stick to designate his creatures to us who have eyes of our own, and know what is ugly and pleasant when we see it. No perfume is added to the violet, no gilding tothe rose. "The image of a wicked heinous fault" lives in its eye.
Now this impartial observation cannot shield the poet's ideal from the hurts which are inflicted by the discrepancies of life: the real seems to be no legitimate child of the ideal, but a changeling with low-born traits. The noble lover of goodness cannot help being pained at the contrast of circumstances with his thought, and there moves over his nature a deep seriousness from this cloud, beneath which his imagination broods upon the landscape. It raises a suspicion that Deity itself must find omniscience annoying and provocative of gloom; for all the worlds and the ages keep on inflicting this incongruity upon the divine source of all ideal things. The poet must manage to recover from this mood, to reassure his heart with the faith that the One who calculated and devised the aberrations which sustain His system must exist in eternal serenity.
When many human characters are contemplated by a superior observer, an impartiality kin to that of the mind who created them sets in. But it cannot remain a colorless, judicial attitude, nor can it deteriorate into indifference. Good nature is an element in the superiority of a good observer. He may make use of wit, comedy, and irony, but his essential mood can only be described by the word "humor;" that is, the quality of being reconciled with all that is observed. The poet would fain conciliate, but without complicity; for he can never give up the gravity of his ideal. Now to be perfectly impartial to all would be too great a strain for a finite mind. Itwould weary of the incessant balancing, of the exigency of moderation. The mind yields from this in unconscious self-defence, and passes into a mood that conciliates itself. The gravity is precipitated by the infusion of a smile. And although this lighter ingredient appears upon the surface, it is the record and announcement of the serious affair below.
In Burns's "Address to the Devil," he is of opinion that that personage cannot take much pleasure in tormenting poor devils like him. Besides, if any thing is the matter with him, it is all the fault of the devil's own trick which so nearly ruined every thing. Still, he confesses to a fellow-feeling for the devil. Why can't he mend a bit? Burns hates to think of hell for the devil's sake, as Dr. Channing once said he hoped there was no devil for the devil's own sake.
But, as Shakspeare says, "the devil knew not what he did when he made man politic; he crossed himself by it; and I cannot think, but, in the end, the villanies of man will set him clear."
The humor here is pervaded with the earnest perception that Nature contains organically the good and the evil. Both are placed in permanent juxtaposition, to result in the interaction which makes life and history possible.
We notice the same touch of humor in Goethe's Prologue to "Faust." The Lord gives full permission to Mephistopheles to try his hand at Faust:—
MEPHISTOPHELES.
Dust shall he eat for pleasure's sake,Like my old famous aunt, the snake.
THE LORD.
Just freely as you please, do I reply:I never hated people of your kind;Of all the spirits that denyThe knave is he best suits my mind.Since man soon tires and thinks that labor's evil,For unconditioned rest he sighs;And so I'm glad to pique his enterpriseBy a provoking comrade, like the devil.
The Lord has always tolerated this element on a compulsion of his own. But whenever creeping plants that have extorted bitter drops from the world around their roots climb over Shakspeare's sunny exposure, the clusters grow fit for human lips and are crushed into smiles.
The characters of humor in Shakspeare promote the business of the play, but they do it as much by being special studies of the traits of human nature as by necessary complicity with the plot. Sometimes they appear, as they would to a Frenchman like Voltaire, to be absurdities interpolated in the texture of the plot as if merely to raise a laugh and stretch the mouths of the groundlings. The notion is not uncommon, even among cultivated people, that they are drolleries contrived to suspend the strain of the more serious portions of the play; the poet assuming that the average mind cannot bear gravity for a whole evening. And doubtless great numbers of spectators find this relief in the lighter scenes into which they step down the stairs ofthe blank verse, rather tired and strained. They only notice that they are amused. But the characters of humor flow out of a natural logic that is behind the plot, which cannot be apprehended without them. They are essential to it because they are intrinsically logical, however little they may appear to be woven along with the rest of the texture. But they are in fact, as all human life is, a seamless piece constructed at a single loom.
Why for instance, in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," does Launce enter, leading his dog, just after Proteus and Julia have exchanged rings, and they part, she too much overcome to respond to his tender farewell? What an impertinent soliloquy which describes Launce's parting, too, from his family to follow Proteus, all of them dissolved in tears except Crab the dog! What does this bit of vulgar life in such a connection? It introduces the essential vulgarity of Proteus himself, who, we shall see, has the remembrance of Julia driven out of his heart by Silvia as soon as he has turned his back. To obtain her he plays a mean trick upon his dearest friend who loves her. In the midst of this Launce intrudes again; for he has fallen in love, and gives us what he calls the "cat-log" of his girl's conditions. It is as if the trivial disposition of Proteus was suddenly dumped upon its proper refuse-heap by the fine verse which held it. And we soon perceive why this dog Crab was trotted into the company; for Proteus procures a dog of gentle breed and bids Launce carry it as a present to Silvia. But it is stolen fromhim, and Launce substitutes his own vicious cur who behaves badly in Silvia's presence, and is whipped out. This is just what Proteus is doing in love. Launce's shift is the shabbiness of Proteus, and Silvia dismisses it as summarily as she disposed of Crab; for she is not "so shallow, so conceitless," as to trust such a born flirt as Proteus. Shakspeare certainly has not left a shred of sentiment hanging to the back of Proteus's meanness; for Launce, who is a kind of choragus of it, is furnished with the most vigorous vulgarity which the vernacular contains. Especially we see what a satirical dog Crab is.
"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not: and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues."[3]
With that for our text, let us approach some characters of Shakspeare.
When the requisition of the English government for the surrender of Mason and Slidell in the Trent affair was made through Lord Lyons, Judge Hoar rode out to see an old Concord farmer whom he highly respected, to tell him the news, which he did with considerable excitement. The farmer listened coolly, and said, "Well, if those fellows are really going in for the rebels and slavery, you tell Lord Lyons he may have my copy of Shakspeare."
But I suspect that New England farmers are content to be patriotic without cultivating the poet's page.Shakspeare may be everywhere extensively owned without being mentally possessed. We need a Shakspearian piety. Formerly the Bible and a copy of Josephus or some protracted commentary stood within reach of the household, and the leaves were turned by Religion herself who found her own meaning in every text and the meaning inexhaustible. If the volume of Shakspeare could attract a sympathy so loyal and grave as that, Religion would find in him, too, her counterpart. But we do not read Shakspeare yet in spiritual faith, as Bibles are pondered for their consecrated sense. Literature swarms with books of criticism which exhaust invention for theories of his life, profession, and intent; and the various editions of his works are liberally patronized. But where are the devotees whose morning orison is the wonderful liturgy of his imagination, with responses that are intoned by human nature itself, the acknowledgment that mind and heart are surprised by their own detection, yet with as little fear and as much confidence as we repay to omniscience? This is rare, this persistent recurrence of the soul to his enlightening, this praying before the shrine of every verse in which a thought, a passion, a humor, a delight, a beauty, is the saint. Must we have, then, professorships of Shakspeare to instruct the youth and inculcate this natural piety? Rather let every household accuse its own indifference, and endow its hearts to make him more widely felt and understood. For there are sweetness and light, wisdom and conscience and self-knowledge slumbering unmined below those covers.