Part 9

There is profound truth at the bottom of these ideas; for whether you accept this truth in the form of the Christian doctrine of humility, or in the form of the Pagan doctrine of reverence for the gods, there is no question that a human being who is in the state of mind of Lear or of Ajax is in a dangerous state. He is going to be punished: he is going to punish himself. The complexities of human life, however, make this truth very difficult to convey upon the grand scale. It is, in daily existence, obscured by other and more obvious truths. In order to dig it out and present it and make it seem at all probable, every historical device and trapping and sign-post of suggestion--every stage tradition must be used. The aim is so exalted and sombre, and the machinery is so ponderous that laughter is out of the question: it is forbidden. The magnitude of the issues oppress us; and we are told that it would be cruel to the hero and to the actor and to the author for us to laugh. And yet we are always on the verge of laughter, and any inattention to the rubric may bring on a fit of it. If a windlass breaks we really laugh harder than the occasion warrants.

In reading the Book of Job, where the remoteness of the scene and certain absurdities in the plot relieve the strain of tragedy, we laugh inevitably; and the thing that makes us laugh is the very thing that ought to fill us with awe--the rigor of the logic.

Thus much for the sunny side of tragedy. But let us recur to the night side of comedy. Falstaff is a comic figure, is he not? And yet what thoughtful man is there who has not enough of the Puritan in him to see the tragedy of such a character as Falstaff? How must Falstaff have appeared to Bunyan!--every stroke of genius which to us makes for the comic, adding a phosphor-gleam of hell-fire. And Bunyan is right: Falstaff is an awful picture; and had Shakespeare punished him adequately he would appear awful. Let us imagine that Shakespeare had written a play about the old age of Falstaff, picturing his decay of intellect, his destitution, his flickering return to humor which is no longer funny--what could have been more tragic?

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Was it with such arguments as these that Socrates put Aristophanes and Agathon to sleep on the famous morning which Plato chronicles? We cannot tell. Plato has cast the magic of a falling star over the matter and thus leaves it: his humor, his knack, his destiny compelled him to treat subjects in this way. Something passes, and after a light has fallen far off into the sea, we ask “What was it?” Enough for Plato’s purpose that he has placed Comedy where, perhaps, no philosopher before or after him ever had the vision to place it--in the heaven of man’s highest endeavor.

II.

The divine affinities of comedy have thus been established, and we may make some few stray observations on the nature of the comic, not hoping to explain laughter, which must remain forever a spontaneous mystery, but only to point out places where this mystery crosses the other mysteries and refuses to be merged in them, keeping its own course and intensifying the darkness of our ignorance by its corruscations. In the first place the comic is about the most durable vehicle that truth has ever found. It pretends to deal with momentary interests in terms of farce and exaggeration; and yet it leaves an image that strikes deeper and lasts longer than philosophy.

In our search for truth we are continually getting into vehicles that break down or turn into something else, even during our transit. Let us take, for example, the case of Plato’s dialogues. How much we have enjoyed them, how much trusted them! And yet there comes a time when we feel about Plato’s work that it is almost too well lighted and managed, too filled with parlor elegance. He seems more interested in the effects that can be got by manipulating philosophy than in any serious truth. There is something superficial about the pictures of Greek life that you get from Plato. The marble is too white, the philosophers are too considerate of each other’s feelings, Socrates is too clever, everything is a little arranged. Greek life was not quite like that, and the way to convince yourself of this is to read Aristophanes.

In Aristophanes you have the convincing hurly-burly, the sweating, mean, talented, scrambling, laughing life of the Mediterranean--that same life of which you find records in the recent Cretan discoveries, dating from 2500 B. C., or which you may observe in the market-places of Naples to-day. Plato’s dialogues do not give this life. They give a picture of something that never existed, something that sounds like an enchanted picture, a picture of life as it ought to be for the leisure classes, but as it never has been and never can be while the world lasts, even for them.

The ideas which we carry in our minds criticize each other, despite all we can do to keep them apart. They attack and mutilate each other, like the monsters in a drop of muddy water, or the soldiers of Cadmus when the stone of controversy was thrown among them. It is as hard to preserve the _entente cordiale_ between hostile thoughts as between hostile bull-dogs. We have no sooner patted the head of the courtly and affable Socrates given to us by Plato--the perfect scholar and sweet gentleman--than the vulgarian Socrates given to us by Aristophanes--the frowzy all-nighter, the notorious enemy to bathing--flies at the throat of Plato’s darling and leaves him rumpled. So far as manners and customs go, nothing can rival good comic description: it supersedes everything else. You can neither write nor preach it down, nor put it down by law. Hogarth has depicted the England of the early Georges in such a way as to convince us. No mortal vehicle of expression can upset Hogarth.

When we come to pictures of life which belong to a more serious species--to poetry, to history, to religion--we find the same conflicts going on in our minds: one source criticizes another. One belief eats up the next belief as the acid eats the plate. It is not merely the outside of Socrates that Aristophanes has demolished. He has a little damaged the philosophy of Socrates. He undermines Greek thought: he helps and urges us not to take it seriously. He thus becomes an ally of the whole world of later Christian thought. If I were to go to Athens to-morrow, the first man I would seek out would be Aristophanes. He is a modern: he is a man.

We have been speaking of Greek thought and Greek life; yet between that life and ourselves there have intervened some centuries of Christianity, including the Middle Ages, during which Jewish influence pervaded and absorbed other thought. The Hebrew ruled and subdued in philosophy, poetry, and religion. The Hebrew influence is the most powerful influence ever let loose upon the world. Every book written since this Hebrew domination is saturated with Hebrew. It has thus become impossible to see the classics as they were. Between them and us in an atmosphere of mordant, powerful, Hebraic thought, which transmutes and fantastically recolors them. How the classics would have laughed over our conception of them! Virgil was a witch during the Middle Ages and now he is an acolyte, a person over whom the modern sentimental school maunders in tears. The classics would feel toward our notions of them somewhat as a Parisian feels toward a French vaudeville after it has been prepared for the American stage. Christianity is to blame.

I have perhaps spoken as if Christianity has blown over with the Middle Ages; but it has not. The Middle Ages have blown over; but Christianity seems, in some ways, never to have been understood before the nineteenth century. It is upon us, sevenfold strong. Its mysteries supersede the other mysteries; its rod threatens to eat up the rods of the other magicians. These tigers of Christian criticism within us attack the classics. The half-formed objections to Plato which I have mentioned are seriously reinforced by the Hebrew dispensation, which somehow reduces the philosophic speculations of Greece to the status of favors at a cotillion. It is senseless to contrast Christ with Socrates; it is unfair and even absurd to review Greek life and thought by the light of Hebrew life and thought. But to do so is inevitable. We are three parts Hebrew in our nature and we see the Mediterranean culture with Hebrew eyes. The attempts of such persons as Swinburne and Pater to writhe themselves free from the Hebrew domination always betray that profound seriousness which comes from the Jew. These men make a break for freedom--they will be joyous, antique, and irresponsible. Alas, they are sadder than the Puritans and shallower than Columbine.

It has become forever and perpetually impossible for any one to treat Greek thought on a Greek basis: the basis is gone. As I wrote the words a page or two back about “Comedy having been placed by Plato in the heaven of man’s highest endeavor,” I thought to myself, “Perhaps I ought to say highest _artistic_ endeavor.” There spoke the Jew monitor which dogs our classical studies, sniffing at them and hinting that they are trivial. In the eye of that monitor there is no room for the comic in the whole universe: there is no such thing as the comic. The comic is something outside of the Jewish dispensation, a kind of irreducible unreason, a skeptical or satanic element.

One would conclude from their records that the Jews were people who never laughed except ironically. To be sure, Michal laughed at David’s dancing, and Sara laughed at the idea of having a child, and various people in the New Testament laughed others “to scorn.” But nobody seems to have laughed heartily and innocently. One gets the impression of a race devoid of humor. This is partly because it is not the province of religious writings to record humor; but it is mainly because Jewish thought condemns humor. Wherever humor arises in a Christian civilization--as in the popular Gothic humor--it is a local race-element, an unsubdued bit of something foreign to Judah. Where the Bible triumphs utterly, as in Dante and Calvin, there is no humor.

And yet the comic survives in us. It eludes the criticism of Christianity as the sunlight eludes the net. Yes, not only our own laughter survives, but the old classic comedy still seems comic--and more truly comic than the old lyric poetry seems poetic or the drama dramatic. Ancient poesy must always be humored and nursed a little; but when the comic strikes home, it is our own comic; no allowances need be made for it.

There is a kind of laughter that makes the whole universe throb. It has in it the immediate flash of the power of God. We can no more understand it than we can understand other religious truth. It reminds us that we are not wholly Jew. There is light in the world that does not come from Israel; nevertheless, that this is a part of the same light that shines through Israel we surely know.

I have not tried to analyze laughter; but only to show the mystery that surrounds its origin. Now a certain mystery surrounds all human expression. The profoundest truths can only be expressed through the mystery of paradox--as philosophers, poets, prophets, and moralists have agreed since the dawn of time. This saying sounds hard; but its meaning is easy. The meaning is that Truth can never be exactly stated; every statement is a misfit. But truth can be alluded to. A paradox says frankly, “What I say here is not a statement of the truth, but is a mere allusion to the truth.” The comic vehicle does the same. It pretends only to allude to the truth, and by this method makes a directer appeal to experience than any attempted statement of truth can make.

There is, no doubt, some reason at the back of this strange fact, that our most expressive language is a mere series of hints and gestures--that we can only hope, whether by word or chisel, to give, as it were, a side reference to truth. To fathom this reason would be to understand the nature of life and mind.

I have often thought that the fact that life does not originate in us, but is a thing supplied to us from moment to moment--as the power of the electric current is supplied to the light--accounts for the paradoxical nature of our minds and souls. It is a commonplace that the poet is inspired--that Orpheus was carried away by the god. So also it is a commonplace that the religious person is absorbed in the will of God--as St. Paul said, his own strength was due to his weakness. So also it is a commonplace of modern scientific psychology that unconsciousness accompanies high intellectual activity. Sir Isaac Newton solved his problems by the art he had of putting them off his mind--of committing them to the unconscious.

All these are but different aspects of the same truth, and we must regard consciousness as resistance to the current of life. If this be true, it is clear that any wilful attempt to tell the truth must _pro tanto_ defeat itself, for it is only by the surrender of our will that truth becomes effective. This idea, being a universal idea, is illustrated by everything; and the less you try to understand it, the more fully will you understand it. In fact one great difficulty that a child or a man has in learning anything, comes from his trying too hard to understand.

Once imagine that our understanding of a thing comes from our ceasing to prevent ourselves from understanding it, and we have the problem in its true form. Accept once for all that all will is illusion, and that the expressive power is something that acts most fully when least impeded by will, and there remains no paradox anywhere. The things we called paradoxes become deductions. Of course St. Paul’s weakness was the foundation of his strength; of course Orpheus was irresponsible; of course the maximum of intellectual power will be the maximum of unimpeded, unconscious activity. And as for our Comic, of course--whatever laughter may be in itself--laughter will be most strongly called forth by anything that merely calls and vanishes. Such things are jokes, burlesques, humor. They state nothing: they assume inaccuracy: they cry aloud and vanish, leaving the hearer to become awakened to his own thoughts. They are mere stimuli--mere gesture and motion, and hence the very truest, very strongest form of human appeal.

THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE.[C]

[C] This was an address delivered before the graduating class at Hobart College in 1900.

If one could stand on the edge of the moon and look down through a couple of thousand years on human politics, it would be apparent that everything that happened on the earth was directly dependent on everything else that happened there. Whether the Italian peasant shall eat salt with his bread, depends upon Bismarck. Whether the prison system of Russia shall be improved, depends upon the ministry of Great Britain. If Lord Beaconsfield is in power, there is no leisure in Russia for domestic reform. The lash is everywhere lifted in a security furnished by the concurrence of all the influences upon the globe that favor coercion. In like manner, the good things that happen are each the product of all extant conditions. Constitutional government in England qualifies the whole of western Europe. Our slaves were not set free without the assistance of every liberal mind in Europe; and the thoughts which we think in our closet affect the fate of the Boer in South Africa. That Tolstoy is to-day living unmolested upon his farm instead of serving in a Siberian mine, that Dreyfus is alive and not dead, is due directly to the people in this audience and to others like them scattered over Europe and America.

The effect of enlightenment on tyranny is not merely to make the tyrant afraid to be cruel, it makes him not want to be cruel. It makes him see what cruelty is. And reciprocally the effect of cruelty on enlightenment is to make that enlightenment grow dim. It prevents men from seeing what cruelty is.

The Czar of Russia cannot get rid of your influence, nor you of his. Every ukase he signs makes allowance for you, and, on the other hand, the whole philosophy of your life is tinged by him. You believe that the abuses under the Russian government are inscrutably different from and worse than our own; whereas both sets of atrocities are identical in principle, and are more alike in fact, in taste and smell and substance than your prejudice is willing to admit. The existence of Russia narrows America’s philosophy, and misconduct by a European power may be seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on the following day. More Americans have abandoned their faith in free government since England began to play the tyrant in South Africa than there were colonists in the country in 1776.

Europe is all one family, and speaks, one might say, the same language. The life that has been transplanted to North America during the last three centuries, is European life. From your position on the moon you would not be able to understand what the supposed differences were between European and American things, that the Americans make so much fuss over. You would say, “I see only one people, splashed over different continents. The problems they talk about, the houses they live in, the clothes they wear, seem much alike. Their education and catchwords are identical. They are the children of the Classics, of Christianity, and of the Revival of Learning. They are homogeneous, and they are growing more homogeneous.”

The subtle influences that modern nations exert over one another illustrate the unity of life on the globe. But if we turn to ancient history we find in its bare outlines staggering proof of the interdependence of nations. The Greeks were wiped out. They could not escape their contemporaries any more than we can escape the existence of the Malays. Israel could not escape Assyria, nor Assyria Persia, nor Persia Macedonia, nor Macedonia Rome, nor Rome the Goths. Life is not a boarding-school where a bad boy can be dismissed for the benefit of the rest. He remains. He must be dealt with. He is as much here as we are ourselves. The whole of Europe and Asia and South America and every Malay and every Chinaman, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal--of such is our civilization.

Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of religion and political philosophy. Let us discard all prejudice and all love. Let us regard nothing except facts. Does not the coldest conclusion of science announce the fact that the world is peopled, and that every individual of that population has an influence as certain and far more discoverable than the influence of the weight of his body upon the solar system?

A Chinaman lands in San Francisco. The Constitution of the United States begins to rock and tremble. What shall we do with him? The deepest minds of the past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an answer. Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through a throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The same thing is true when the American lands in China. These creatures have thus begun to think of each other. It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter incessantly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. And out of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind.

We have an inherited and stupid notion that the East does not change. If Japan goes through a transformation scene under our eyes, we still hold to our prejudice as to the immutability of the Chinese. If our own people and the European nations seem to be meeting and surging and reappearing in unaccustomed rôles every ten years, till modern history looks like a fancy ball, we still go on muttering some old ignorant shibboleth about East and West, Magna Charta, the Indian Mutiny, and Mahomet. The chances are that England will be dead-letter, and Russia progressive before we have done talking. Of a truth, when we consider the rapidity of visible change and the amplitude of time--for there is plenty of time--we need not despair of progress.

The true starting-point for the world’s progress will never be reached by any nation as a whole. It exists and has been reached in the past as it will in the future by individuals scattered here and there in every nation. It is reached by those minds which insist on seeing conditions as they are, and which cannot confine their thoughts to their own kitchen, or to their own creed, or to their own nation. You will think I have in mind poets and philosophers, for these men take humanity as their subject, and deal in the general stuff of human nature. But the narrow spirit in which they often do this cuts down their influence to parish limits. I mean rather those men who in private life act out their thoughts and feelings as to the unity of human life; those same thoughts which the poets and philosophers have expressed in their plays, their sayings, and their visions. There have always been men who in their daily life have fulfilled those intimations and instincts which, if reduced to a statement, receive the names of poetry and religion. These men are the cart-horses of progress, they devote their lives to doing things which can only be justified or explained by the highest philosophy. They proceed as if all men were their brothers. These practical philanthropists go plodding on through each century and leave the bones of their character mingled with the soil of their civilization.

See how large the labors of such men look when seen in historic perspective. They have changed the world’s public opinion. They have moulded the world’s institutions into forms expressive of their will. I ask your attention to one of their achievements. We have one province of conduct in which the visions of the poets have been reduced to practice--yes, erected into a department of government--through the labors of the philanthropists. They have established the hospital and the reformatory; and these visible bastions of philosophy hold now a more unchallenged place in our civilization than the Sermon on the Mount on which they comment.

The truth which the philanthropists of all ages have felt is that the human family was a unit; and this truth, being as deep as human nature, can be expressed in every philosophy--even in the inverted utilitarianism now in vogue. The problem of how to treat insane people and criminals has been solved to this extent, that everyone agrees that nothing must be done to them which injures the survivors. That is the reason we do not kill them. It is unpleasant to have them about, and this unpleasantness can be cured only by our devotion to them. We must either help the wretched or we ourselves become degenerate. They have thus become a positive means of civilizing the modern world; for the instinct of self-preservation has led men to deal with this problem in the only practical way.