The Gentle Reader Part 5

"mount to Paradise By the stairway of surprise."

The Mission of Humor

In "The Last Tournament" we are told how

"Dagonet, the fool, whom Gawain in his moods Had made mock-knight of Arthur's Table Round, At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods, Danced like a withered leaf before the hall."

That is the view which many worthy people take of the humorist. He is Sir Dagonet. Among the serious persons who are doing the useful work of the world, discovering its laws, cla.s.sifying its facts, forecasting its future, this light-minded, light-hearted creature comes with his untimely jests. In their idle moments they tolerate the mock-knight, but when important business is on hand they dismiss him, as did Sir Tristram, with

"Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?"

This half-contemptuous view is very painful to the Gentle Reader who, though he may seem to some to take his poetry too lightly, is disposed to take his humor rather seriously. Humor seems to him to belong to the higher part of our nature. It is not the enjoyment of a grotesque image in a convex mirror, but, rather, the recognition of fleeting forms of truth.

"I have brought you a funny book, Gentle Reader," says the Professional Humorist.

"Thank you," he answers, struggling against his melancholy forebodings.

"You will pardon me if I seem to take my pleasures sadly."

It is hard for him to force a smile as he watches the procession of jokes, each as broad as it is long. This ostentatious jocosity is not to his liking.

"Thackeray," he says, "defines humor as a mixture of love and wit.

Humor, therefore, being of the nature of love, should not behave itself unseemly."

He cannot bear to see it obtruding itself upon the public. Its proper habit is to hide from observation "as if the wren taught it concealment." When a Happy Thought ventures abroad it should be as a royal personage traveling _incognito_.

This is a big world, and it is serious business to live in it. It makes many demands. It requires intensity of thought and strenuousness of will and solidity of judgment. Great tasks are set before us. We catch fugitive glimpses of beauty, and try to fix them forever in perfect form,--that is the task of art. We see thousands of disconnected facts, and try to arrange them in orderly sequence,--that is the task of science. We see the ongoing of eternal force, and seek some reason for it,--that is the task of philosophy.

But when art and science and philosophy have done their best, there is a great deal of valuable material left over. There are facts that will not fit into any theory, but which keep popping up at us from the most unexpected places. n.o.body can tell where they come from or why they are here; but here they are. Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectnesses. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways. Everything is under the reign of strict law; but many queer things happen, nevertheless. What are we to do with all the waifs and strays? What are we to do with all the sudden incongruities which mock at our wisdom and destroy the symmetry of our ideas?

The solemnly logical intelligence ignores their existence. It does not trouble itself about anything which does not belong to its system. The system itself has such perfect beauty that it is its own excuse for being.

More sensitive and less self-centred natures do not find the way so easy. They allow themselves to be worried by the incongruities which they cannot ignore. It seems to them that whenever they are in earnest the world conspires to mock them. Continually they feel that intellect and conscience are insulted by whipper-snappers of facts that have no right to be in an orderly universe. They can expose a lie, and feel a certain superiority in doing it; but a little uncla.s.sified, irreconcilable truth drives them to their wit's end. There it stands in all its shameless actuality asking, "What do you make of me?"

Just here comes the beneficent mission of humor. It takes these una.s.sorted realities that are the despair of the sober intelligence, and extracts from them pure joy. If life depends on the perpetual adjustment of the organism to its environment, humor is the means by which the intellectual life is sustained on those occasions when the expected environment is not there. The adjustment must be made, without a moment's warning, to an altogether new set of conditions. We are called upon to swap horses while crossing the stream. It is a method which the serious minded person does not approve. While arguing the matter he is unhorsed, and finds himself floundering in the water. The humorist accepts the situation instantly. As he scrambles upon his new nag it is with a sense of triumph, for the moment at least, he feels that he has the best of the bargain.

One may have learned to enjoy the sublime, the beautiful, the useful, the orderly, but he has missed something if he has not also learned to enjoy the incongruous, the illusive, and the unexpected. Artistic sensibility finds its satisfaction only in the perfect. Humor is the frank enjoyment of the imperfect. Its objects are not so high,--but there are more of them.

Evolution is a cosmic game of p.u.s.s.y wants a corner. Each creature has its eye on some snug corner where it would rest in peace. Each corner is occupied by some creature that is not altogether satisfied and that is on the lookout for a larger sphere. There is much beckoning between those who are desirous of making a change. Now and then some bold spirit gives up his a.s.sured position and scrambles for something better. The chances are that the adventurer finds it harder to attain the coveted place than he had thought. For the fact is that there are not corners enough to go around. If there were enough corners, and every one were content to stay in the one where he found himself at the beginning, then the game would be impossible. It is well that this never happens. Nature looks after that. When things are too h.o.m.ogeneous she breaks them up into new and amazing kinds of heterogeneity. It is a good game, and one learns to like it after he enters into the spirit of it.

If the Universe had a place for everything and everything was in its place, there would be little demand for humor. As a matter of fact the world is full of all sorts of people, and they are not all in their proper places. There are amazing incongruities between station and character. It is not a world that has been reduced to order; it is still in the making. One may easily grow misanthropic and pessimistic by dwelling upon the misfits.

"As to behold desert a beggar born And needy nothing trimmed in jollity.

And art made tongue-tied by authority, And simple truth miscalled simplicity, And folly doctor-like, controlling skill, And captive good attending captive ill."

But fortunately these incongruities are not altogether tragical. There are certain moods when we rather enjoy seeing "needy nothing trimmed in jollity." We are pleased when Justice Shallow slaps Sir John Falstaff on the back and says, "Ha! it was a merry night, Sir John." We are not irritated beyond endurance because in this world where so many virtuous people have a hard time, such trifling fellows as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew have their cakes and ale. When folly puts on doctor-like airs it is not always disagreeable. We would not have Dogberry put off the watch to give place to some one who could pa.s.s the civil service examination.

The humorist, when asked what he thinks of the actual world, would turn upon his questioner as Touchstone turned upon Corin when he was asked how he liked the shepherd's life:--

"Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?" The world is not at all like the descriptions of it, and yet he cannot take a very gloomy view of it.

In respect to itself it is a good world, and yet in respect that it is not finished it leaves much to be desired. Yet in respect that it leaves much to be desired, and much to be done by us, it is perhaps better _for us_ than if it were finished. In respect that many things happen that are opposed to our views of the eternal fitness of things, it is a perplexing world. Yet in respect that we have a faculty for enjoying the occasional unfitness of things, it is delightful. On the whole, he sums up with Touchstone, "It suits my humor well."

Humor is impossible to the man of one idea. There must be at least two ideas moving in opposite directions, so that there may be a collision.

Such an accident does not happen in a mind under economical management that runs only one train of thought a day.

There are many ideas that have a very insecure tenure. They hold their own as squatters. By and by Science will come along and evict them, but in the mean time these homely folk make very pleasant neighbors. All they ask is that we shall not take them too seriously. That a thing is not to be taken too seriously does not imply that it is either unreal or unimportant:--it only means that it is not to be taken that way. There is, for example, a pickaninny on a Southern plantation. The anthropologist measures his skull and calls it by a long Latin name. The psychologist carefully records his nervous reactions. The pedagogical expert makes him the victim of that form of inquisition known as "child study." The missionary perplexes himself in vain attempting to get at his soul. Then there comes along a person of another sort. At the first look, a genial smile of recognition comes over the face of this new spectator. He is the first one who has seen the pickaninny. The one essential truth about a black, chubby, kinky-haired pickaninny is that, when he rolls up his eyes till only the whites are visible, he is irresistibly funny. This is what theologians term "the substance of doctrine" concerning the pickaninny.

When Charles Lamb slipped on the London pavement, he found delight in watching the chimney sweep who stood laughing at his misfortune. "There he stood irremovable, as though the jest were to last forever, with such a maximum of glee and minimum of mischief in his mirth--for the grin of a genuine sweep hath no malice in it--that I could have been content, if the honor of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his b.u.t.t and his mockery till midnight." There were many middle-aged London citizens who could no more appreciate that kind of pleasure than a Hottentot could appreciate an oratorio. That is only saying that the average citizen and the average Hottentot have, as Wordsworth mildly puts it, "faculties which they have never used."

The high place that humor holds among our mental processes is evident when we consider that it is almost the only one that requires that we shall be thoroughly awake. In our dreams we have many aesthetic enjoyments, as vague splendors pa.s.s before us. At other times there is an abnormal sensitiveness to the sovereignty, not to say the despotism of ethics. We feel burdened with the weight of unpardonable sins. We are able also in our sleep to philosophize after a fashion which is, for the time, quite satisfactory. At such times we are sure that we have made important discoveries; if we could only remember what they were. A thousand incongruities pa.s.s through our minds, but there is one thing which we cannot do. We cannot recognize that they are incongruous. Such a discovery would immediately awaken us.

Tennyson tells how

"half awake I heard The parson taking wide and wider sweeps, Now harping on the church commissioners, Now hawking at Geology and schism."

It would be possible for the parson and his congregation to keep on with that sort of thing Sunday after Sunday. They would discover nothing absurd in the performance, so long as they were in their usual semi-somnolent condition.

Humor implies mental alertness and power of discrimination. It also implies a hospitality toward all the differences that are recognized.

Psychologists speak of the a.s.sociation of Ideas. It is a pleasant thought, but it is, in reality, difficult to induce Ideas to a.s.sociate in a neighborly way. In many minds the different groups are divided by conventional lines, and there are aristocratic prejudices separating the cla.s.ses from the ma.s.ses. The Working Hypothesis, honest son of toil that he is, does not expect so much as a nod of recognition from the High Moral Principle who walks by in his Sunday clothes. The steady Habit does not a.s.sociate with the high-bred Sentiment. They do not belong to the same set. Only in the mind of the humorist is there a true democracy. Here everybody knows everybody. Even the priggish Higher Thought is not allowed to enjoy a sense of superiority. Plain Common Sense slaps him on the back, calls him by his first name, and bids him not make a fool of himself.

Of the two ingredients which Thackeray mentions, the first, love, is that which gives body; the addition of wit gives the effervescence. The pleasure of wit lies in its unexpectedness. In humor there is the added pleasure of really liking that which surprises us. It is like meeting an old friend in an unexpected place. "What, you here?" we say. This is the kind of pleasure we get from Dr. Johnson's reply to the lady who asked why he had put a certain definition in his dictionary: "Pure ignorance, madam."

The fact is that long ago we made the acquaintance of one whom Bunyan describes as "a brisk young lad named Ignorance." He is a dear friend of ours, and we are on very familiar terms with him when we are at home; but we do not expect to meet him in fine society. Suddenly we turn the corner, and we see him walking arm in arm with so great a man as Dr.

Samuel Johnson. At once we are at our ease in the presence of the great man; it seems we have a mutual acquaintance.

Another element in real humor is a certain detachment of mind. We must not be afraid, or jealous, or angry; in order to take a really humorous view of any character, we must be in a position to see all around it. If I were brought before Fielding's Squire Western on charge of poaching, and if I had a pheasant concealed under my coat, I should not be able to appreciate what an amusing person the squire is. I should be inclined to take him very seriously.

The small boy who pins a paper to the schoolmaster's coat tail imagines that he has achieved a masterpiece of humor. But he is not really in a position to reap the fruits of his perilous adventure. It is a fearful and precarious joy which he feels. What if the schoolmaster should turn around? That would be tragedy. Neither the small boy nor the schoolmaster gets the full flavor of humor. But suppose an old friend of the schoolmaster happens just then to look in at the door. His delight in the situation has a mellowness far removed from the anxious, ambiguous glee of the urchin. He knows that the small boy is not so wicked as he thinks he is, and the schoolmaster is not so terrible as he seems. He remembers the time when the schoolmaster was up to the same pranks. So, from the a.s.sured position of middle age, he looks upon the small boy that was and upon the small boy that is, and finds them both very good,--much better, indeed, than at this moment they find each other.

It is this sense of the presence of a tolerant spectator, looking upon the incidents of the pa.s.sing hour, which we recognize in the best literature. Books that are meant simply to be funny are very short-lived. The first reception of a joke awakens false expectations.

It is received with extravagant heartiness. But when, encouraged by this hospitality, it returns again and again, its welcome is worn out. There is something melancholy in a joke deserted in its old age.

The test of real literature is that it will bear repet.i.tion. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight. This bars out all mere jocosity. A certain kind of wit, which depends for its force on mere verbal brilliancy, has the same effect. The writers whom we love are those whose humor does not glare or glitter, but which has an iridescent quality. It is the perpetual play of light and color which enchants us. We are conscious all the time that the light is playing on a real thing. It is something more than a clever trick; there is an illumination.

Erasmus, in dedicating his "Praise of Folly" to Sir Thomas More, says:--

"I conceived that this would not be least approved by you, inasmuch as you are wont to be delighted with such kind of pleasantry as is neither unlearned nor altogether insipid. Such is your sweetness of temper that you can and like to carry yourself to all men a man of all hours. Unless an overweening opinion of myself may have made me blind, I have praised folly not altogether foolishly. I have moderated my style, that the understanding reader may perceive that my endeavor is to make mirth rather than to bite."

Erasmus has here described a kind of humor that is consistent with seriousness of purpose. The characteristics he notes are good temper, insight into human nature, a certain reserve, and withal a gentle irony that makes the praise of folly not unpleasing to the wise. It is a way of looking at things characteristic of men like Chaucer and Cervantes and Montaigne and Shakespeare, and Bunyan and Fielding and Addison, Goldsmith, Charles Lamb and Walter Scott. In America, we have seen it in Irving and Dr. Holmes and James Russell Lowell.

I have left out of the list one whom nature endowed for the supreme man of humor among Englishmen,--Jonathan Swift. Charles Lamb argues against the common notion that it is a misfortune to a man to have a surly disposition. He says it is not his misfortune; it is the misfortune of his neighbors. It is our misfortune that the man who might have been the English Cervantes had a surly disposition. Dean Swift's humor would have been irresistible, if it had only been good humor.

One of the best examples of humor pervading a work of the utmost seriousness of purpose is Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." The "Pilgrim's Progress" is not a funny book; the humor is not tacked on as a moral is tacked on to a fable, nor does it appear by way of an interlude to relieve the tension of the mind. It is so deeply interfused, so a part and parcel of the religious teaching, that many readers overlook it altogether. One may read the book a dozen times without a smile, and after that he may recognize the touch of the born humorist on every page. Bunyan himself recognized the quality of his work:--