as an example of what we mean by the humour of Falstaff or
of The Vicar of Wakefield.
When we pass from Goldsmith to Hazlitt—one of the greatest names in English criticism—we find that “humour” has grown in meaning, without quite reaching its full development. In the introduction to his Lectures on the English Comic Writers he attempts a classification of the comic spirit into wit and humour. “Humour,” he says, “is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. Humour, as it is shown in books, is an imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, situation and character; wit is the illustrating and heightening the sense of that absurdity by some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition of one thing to another, which sets off the quality we laugh at or despise in a still more contemptible or striking point of view.” Hazlitt’s definition will, indeed, not stand analysis. The element of comparison is surely as necessary for humour as for wit. Yet his classification is valuable as illustrating the growth of the meaning of the word. Observe that Hazlitt has transferred to wit that power of pleasing as by a flattering sense of our own superiority which Goldsmith attributed to humour. He had not thought, and had not heard, that sympathy is necessary to complete humour. He cannot have thought it needful, for if he had he would hardly have said of the Arabian Nights that they are “an inexhaustible mine of comic humour and invention,” “which from the manners of the East, which they describe, carry the principle of callous indifference in the jest as far as it can go.” He might, and probably would, have dismissed Goldsmith’s illustration as “low” in every conceivable sense. He would not have added, as we should to-day, that humour does not lie in laughter, according to the definition of Hobbes, in a “sudden glory,” in a guffaw of self-conceited triumph over the follies and deficiencies of others. If there is any place for humour in Goldsmith’s sordid example, it must be made by pity, and shown by a deft introduction of the de te fabula dear to Thackeray, by a reminder that the world is full of people, who, though wanting noses, are extremely curious in their choice of snuff-boxes, and that the more each of us thinks himself above the weakness the more likely he is to fall into it.
The critical value of Hazlitt’s examination of the differences between wit and humour lies in this, that he ignores the doctrine that the quality of humour lies in the thing or the action and not in the mind of the observer. The examples quoted above, to which any one with a moderate share of reading in English literature could add with ease, show that humour was first held to lie in the trick, the whim, the act, or the event and clash of incidents. It might even be a mere flavour, as when men spoke of the salt humour of sea-sand. Even when it stood for the “general turn or temper of mind” it was a form of the ruling passion which inspires men’s actions and words. It was used in that sense by Decius when he spoke of the humour of Caesar, which is a liability to be led by one who can play on his weakness—
| “for he loves to hear |
It is plain that this is not what Hazlitt meant, or we now mean, by the humour displayed in “describing the ludicrous as it is shown in itself.” Nor did he, any more than we do, suppose with Goldsmith that a “low” quality of actions and persons is inseparable from humour. It had become for Hazlitt what Addison called cheerfulness, “a habit of the mind” as distinguished from mirth, which is “an act.” If in Addison’s sentences the place of cheerfulness is taken by humour, and that of mirth by wit, we have a very fair description of the two. “I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of the mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness is fixed and permanent.” Humour is the fixed and permanent appreciation of the ludicrous, of which wit may be the short and transient expression.
If now we pass to an attempt to define “humour,” the temptation to take refuge in the use of an evasion employed by Dr Johnson is very strong. When Boswell asked him, “Then, Sir, what is poetry?” the doctor answered, “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.” But George Meredith has come to our assistance in two passages of his Essay on Comedy and the uses of the Comic Spirit. “If you laugh all round him (to wit, the ridiculous person), tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you, and yours to your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is spirit of Humour that is moving you.... The humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the feelings, and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But the humourist, if high, has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of the comic poet.” The third sentence is required to complete the first. The tumbling and rolling, the smacks and the exposure, may be out of place where there is humour of the most humorous quality. Who could associate them with Sir Walter Scott’s characters of Bradwardine or Monkbarns? Bradwardine, one feels, would have stopped them as he did the ill-timed jests of Sir Hew Halbert, “who was so unthinking as to deride my family name.” Monkbarns was a man of peace who loved the company of Sir Priest better than that of Sir Knight. But there is that in him which cows mere ridicule, be it ever so genial. He cared not who knew so much of his valour, and by that very avowal of his preference took his position sturdily in the face of the world. But Meredith has given its due prominence to the quality which, for us, distinguishes humour from pure wit and the harder forms of jocularity. It is the sympathy, the appreciation, the love, which include the follies of Don Quixote, the prosaic absurdities of Sancho Panza, the oddities of Bradwardine, Dr Primrose or Monkbarns, and the jovial animalism of Falstaff, in “an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of the comic poets.”
It is needless to insist that humour of this order is far older than the very modern application of the name. It is assuredly present in Horace. Chaucer, who knew the word only as meaning “liquid,” has left a masterpiece of humour in his prologue to the Canterbury Pilgrims. We look for the finest examples in Shakespeare. And if it is old, it is also more universal than is always allowed. National, or at least racial, partiality, has led to the unfortunate judgment that humour is a virtue of the northern peoples. Yet Rabelais came from Touraine, and if the creator of Panurge has not humour, who has? The Italians may say that umore in the English sense is unknown to them. They mean the word, not the thing, for it is in Ariosto. To claim the quality for Cervantes would indeed be to push at an open door. The humour of the Germans has been rarely indeed of so high an order as his. It has been found wherever humanity has been combined with a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. The appreciation may exist without the humanity. When Rivarol met the Chevalier Florian with a manuscript sticking out of his pocket, and said, “How rash you are! if you were not known you would be robbed,” he was making use of the comic spirit, but he was not humorous. When Rivarol himself, a man of dubious claim to nobility, was holding forth on the rights of the nobles, and calling them “our rights,” one of the company smiled. “Do you find anything singular in what I say?” asked he. “It is the plural which I find singular,” was the answer. There is certainly something humorous in the neat overthrow of an insolent wit by a rival insolence, but the humour is in the spectator, not in the answer. The spirit of humour as described by George Meredith cannot be so briefly shown as in the rapid flash of the Frenchmen’s wit. It lingers and expatiates, as in Dr Johnson’s appreciation of Bet Flint. “Oh, a fine character, Madam! She was habitually a slut and a drunkard, and occasionally a thief and a harlot. And for heaven’s
