la délicatesse.” It was, in fact, taken for granted that the
character and intellect of men were produced by—were, so to
speak, concoctions dependent on—the “humours.” In the
fallen state of mankind it rarely happens that an exact balance
is maintained. One or other humour predominates, and thus
we have the long-established doctrine of the existence of the
sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric, or the melancholy
temperaments. Things being so, nothing was more natural
than the passage of these terms of art into common speech, and
their application in a metaphorical sense, when once they had
been adopted by the literary class. The process is admirably
described by Asper in the introduction to Ben Jonson’s play—Every
Man out of his Humour:—
| “Why humour, as it is ‘ens,’ we thus define it, |
A humour in this sense is a “ruling passion,” and has done excellent service to English authors of “comedies of humours,” to the Spanish authors of comedias de figuron, and to the French followers of Molière. Nor is the metaphor racked out of its fair proportions if we suppose that there may be a temporary, or even an “adventitious and acquisite” “predominance of a humour,” and that “deliveries of a man’s self” to passing passion, or to imitation, are also “humours,” though not primary, but only second or third concoctions. By a natural extension, therefore, “humours” might come to mean oddities, tricks, practices, mere whims, and the aping of some model admired for the time being. “But,” as Falstaff has told us, “it was always yet the trick of our English, if they have a good thing, to make it too common.” The word “humour” was a good thing, but the Elizabethans certainly made it too common. It became a hack epithet of all work, to be used with no more discretion, though with less imbecile iteration, than the modern “awful.” Shakespeare laughed at the folly, and pinned it for ever to the ridiculous company of Corporal Nym—“I like not the humour of lying. He hath wronged me in some humours. I should have borne the humoured letter to her . . . I love not the humour of bread and cheese; and there’s the humour of it.” The humour of Jonson was that he tried to clear the air of thistledown by stamping on it. Asper ends in denunciation:—
“But that a rook by wearing a pied feather, |
The abuse of the word was the peculiar practice of England. The use of it was not confined wholly to English writers. The Spaniards of the 16th and 17th centuries knew humores in the same sense, and still employ the word as a name for caprices, whims and vapours. Humorada was, and is, the correct Spanish for a festive saying or writing of epigrammatic form. Martial’s immortal reply to the critic who admired only dead poets—
Ignoscas petimus Vacerra: tanti |
is a model humorada. It would be a difficult and would certainly be a lengthy task to exhaust all the applications given to so elastic a word. We still continue to use it in widely different senses. “Good humour” or “bad humour” are simply good temper or bad temper. There is a slight archaic flavour about the phrases “grim humour,” “the humour they were in,” in the sense of suspicious, or angry or careless mood, which were favourites with Carlyle, but though somewhat antiquated they are not affected, or very unusual. With the proviso that the exceptions must always be excepted, we may say that for a long time “humour” came to connote comic matter less refined than the matter of wit. It had about it a smack of the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, and of the unyoked “humour” of the society in which Prince Henry was content to imitate the sun—
“Who doth permit the base contagious clouds |
The presence of a base contagious cloud is painfully felt in the so-called humorous literature of England till the 18th century. The reader who does not sometimes wonder whether humour in the mouths of English writers of that period did not stand for maniacal tricks, horse-play, and the foul names of foul things, material and moral, must be very determined to prove himself a whole-hearted admirer of the ancient literature. Addison, who did much to clean it of mere nastiness, gives an excellent example of the base use of the word in his day. In Number 371 of the Spectator he introduces an example of the “sort of men called Whims and Humourists.” It is the delight of this person to play practical jokes on his guests. He is proud when “he has packed together a set of oglers” who had “an unlucky cast in the eye,” or has filled his table with stammerers. The humorist, in fact, was a mere practical joker, who was very properly answered by a challenge from a military gentleman of peppery temper. Indeed, the pump and a horse-whip would appear to have been the only effective forms of criticism on the prevalent humour and humours of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. But the pump and the horse-whip were themselves humours. Carlo Buffone in Jonson’s play is put “out of his humour” by the counter humour of Signor Puntarvolo, who knocks him down and gags him with candle wax. The brutal pranks of Fanny Burney’s Captain Mirvan, who belongs to the earlier part of the 18th century, were meant for humour, and were accepted as such. Examples might easily be multiplied. A briefer and also a more convincing method of demonstration is to take the deliberate judgment of a great authority. No writer of the 18th century possessed a finer sense of humour in the noble meaning than Goldsmith. What did he understand the word to mean? Not what he himself wrote when he created Dr Primrose. We have his express testimony in the 9th chapter of The Present State of Polite Learning. Goldsmith complains that “the critic, by demanding an impossibility from the comic poet, has, in effect, banished true comedy from the stage.” This he has done by banning “low” subjects, and by proscribing “the comic or satirical muse from every walk but high life, which, though abounding in fools as well as the humbler station, is by no means so fruitful in absurdity. . . . . Absurdity is the poet’s game, and good breeding is the nice concealment of absurdity. The truth is, the critic generally mistakes ‘humour’ for ‘wit,’ which is a very different excellence; wit raises human nature above its level; humour acts a contrary part, and equally depresses it. To expect exalted humour is a contradiction in terms. . . . The poet, therefore, must place the object he would have the subject of humour in a state of inferiority; in other words, the subject of humour must be low.”
That no doubt may remain in his reader’s mind, Goldsmith gives an example of true humour. It is nothing more or less than the absurdity and incongruity obvious in a man who, though “wanting a nose,” is extremely curious in the choice of his snuffbox. We applaud “the humour of it,” for “we here see him guilty of an absurdity of which we imagine it impossible for ourselves to be guilty, and therefore applaud our own good sense on the comparison.”
Nothing could be more true as an account of what the Elizabethans, the Restoration, the Queen Anne men, and the 18th century meant by “humour.” Nothing could be more false
