Part 5
This is the charm of Lamb's letter to the gentleman who inquired "whether a person at the age of sixty-three, with no more proficiency than a tolerable knowledge of most of the characters of the English alphabet amounts to, by dint of persevering application and good masters, may hope to arrive within a presumable number of years at that degree of attainment that would entitle the possessor to the character of a _learned man_." The answer is candid, serious, and exhaustive. No false hopes are encouraged. The difficulties are plainly set forth. "However," it is said, "where all cannot be compassed, much may be accomplished; but I must not, in fairness, conceal from you that you have much to do." The question is thoroughly discussed as to whether it would be well for him to enter a primary school. "You say that you stand in need of emulation; that this incitement is nowhere to be had but in the public school. But have you considered the nature of the emulation belonging to those of tender years which you would come in competition with?"
Do you think these dissertations a waste of time? If you do, it is sufficient evidence that you sadly need them; for they are the antitoxin to counteract the bacillus of pedantry. Were I appointed by the school board to consider the applicants for teachers' certificates, after they had passed the examination in the arts and sciences, I should subject them to a more rigid test. I should hand each candidate Lamb's essays on The Old and New Schoolmaster and on Imperfect Sympathies. I should make him read them to himself, while I sat by and watched. If his countenance never relaxed, as if he were inwardly saying, "That's so," I should withhold the certificate. I should not consider him a fit person to have charge of innocent youth.
Just as we naturally speak of the flavor of Charles Lamb, so we speak of the atmosphere of Cervantes or of Fielding. We are out of doors in the sunshine. All sorts of people are doing all sorts of things in all sorts of ways; and we are glad that we are there to see them. It is one of the
"charmèd days When the Genius of God doth flow; The wind may alter twenty ways But a tempest cannot blow."
On such days it doesn't matter what happens. We are not "under the weather," but consciously superior to it. We are in no mood to grumble over mishaps,--the more the merrier. The master of the revels has made the brave announcement that his programme shall be carried out "rain or shine," and henceforth we have no anxieties.
This diffused good-humor can only come from a mind which is free from any taint of morbidness. It is that merry-heartedness that "doth good like medicine." It is an overflowing friendliness, which brings a laughter that is without scorn.
This kind of humor is possible only among persons who are thoroughly congenial, and who take mutual good-will for granted. It is for this reason that it is so difficult to translate it or to carry it from one community to another. It is customary for every nation to bring the accusation against foreigners that they are destitute of the sense of humor. Even peoples so near akin as the English and Americans cherish such suspicions. The American is likely to feel that his English friends do not receive his pleasantries with that punctuality which is the politeness of kings. They are conscientious enough and eventually do the right thing; but procrastination is the thief of wit as well as of time. But we, on our side, are equally slow, and Mr. Punch often causes anxious thoughts.
The real difficulty is not in understanding what is said but in appreciating that which should be taken for granted. The stranger does not see the serious background of sober thought and genuine admiration, into which the amusing figures suddenly intrude. The frontiersman would see no point in a story that might delight a common room in Oxford. What if a bishop did act in an undignified manner or commit a blunder? Why shouldn't he--like the rest of us? To enjoy his foibles one must first have a realizing sense of what a great man a bishop is, and how surprising it is that, now and then, he should step down from his pedestal.
On the other hand, the real humor of the frontier is missed by one who has not learned to take seriously the frontiersman's life and who has not entered into his habitual point of view.
Dickens is an example of the way in which a man's humor is limited to the sphere of his sympathies. How genial is the atmosphere which surrounds Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Sam Weller! Whatever they do, they can never go wrong. But when we turn to the "American Notes" or to the American part of "Martin Chuzzlewit," we are conscious of a difference. There is no atmosphere to relieve the dreariness. Mr. Jefferson Brick is not amusing; he is odious. The people on the Ohio River steamer do not make us smile by their absurdities. Dickens lets us see how he despises them all. He is fretful and peevish. He fails utterly to catch the humor of the frontier. He is unable to follow out the hint which Mark Tapley gave when, looking over the dreary waste of Eden on the Mississippi, he said apologetically, "Eden ain't all built yet."
To an Englishman that does not mean much, but to an American it is wonderfully appealing. Martin Chuzzlewit saw only the ignominious contrast between the prospectus and the present reality. Eden was a vulgar fraud, and that was the whole of it. The American, with invincible optimism, looking upon the same scene, sees something more! He smiles, perhaps, a little cynically at the incongruity between the prospectus and the present development, and then his fancy chuckles at what his fancy sees in the future. "Eden ain't all built yet,"--that's a fact. But just think what Eden will be when it is all built!
* * * * *
By the way, there is one particularly good thing about the atmosphere; it prevents our being hit by meteors. The meteor, when it strikes the upper air, usually ignites, and that is the end of it. There are some minds that have not enough atmosphere to protect them. They are pelted continually; whatever is unpleasant comes to them in solid chunks. There are others more fortunately surrounded, who escape this impact. All that is seen is a flash in the upper air. They are none the worse for passing through a meteoric shower of petty misfortunes.
The mind that is surrounded by an atmosphere of humorous suggestiveness is also favored in its outlook upon the shortcomings of mankind. Their angularities are softened and become less uniformly unpleasing. That fine old English divine, Dr. South, has a sermon in which he defends the thesis that it is a greater guilt to enjoy the contemplation of our neighbor's sins than to commit the same offences in our proper persons. That seems to me to be very hard doctrine. I am inclined to make a distinction. There are some faults which ought to be taken seriously at all times, but there are others which the neighbors should be allowed to enjoy, if they can.
Indeed, it is the genuine reformer who is seeking to right great wrongs who most needs the capacity to distinguish between grave evils and peccadillos. A measure of good-humored tolerance for human weakness is a part of his equipment for effective work. Lacking in this, he is doomed to perpetual irritation and disappointment. He mistakes friends for foes and wages a losing battle. He is likely to be the victim of a moral egoism which distorts the facts of experience and confuses his personal whims with his disinterested purposes. His great ideal is lost sight of in some petty strife. Above all, he loses the power of endurance in the time of partial failure.
The contest of wits between the inventors of projectiles and the makers of armor plate seemed at one time settled by Harvey's process for rendering the surface of the resisting steel so hard that the missiles hurled against it were shattered. The answer of the gun-makers was made by attaching a tip of softer metal to the shell. The soft tip received the first shock of the impact, and it was found that the penetrating power of the shell was increased enormously. The scientific explanation I have forgotten. I may, however, hazard an anthropomorphic explanation. If there is any human nature in the atoms of steel, I can see a great advantage in having the softer particles go before the hard, to have a momentary yielding before the inevitable crash. When they are hurtling through the air, tense and strained by the initial velocity till it seems that they must fly apart, it is a great thing to have a group of good-humored, happy-go-lucky atoms in the front, who call out cheerily: "Come along, boys! Don't take it too hard; we're in for it." And sure enough, before they have time to fall apart they are in. Those whose thoughts and purposes have most penetrated the hard prejudices of their time have learned this lesson.
Your unhumorous reformer, with painful intensity of moral self-consciousness, cries out:--
"The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"
He takes himself and his cause always with equal seriousness. He hurls himself against the accumulated wrongs and the invincible ignorance of the world, and there is a great crash; but somehow, the world seems to survive the shock better than he does. It is a tough old world, and bears a great deal of pounding. Indeed, it has been pounded so much and so long that it has become quite solid.
Now and then, however, there comes along a reformer whose zeal is tipped with humor. His thought penetrates where another man's is only shattered. That is what made Luther so effective. He struck heavy blows at the idols men adored. But he was such a genial, whole-souled iconoclast that those who were most shocked at him could not help liking him--between times. He would give a smashing blow at the idol, and then a warm hand grasp and a hearty "God bless you" to the idolater; and then idolater and iconoclast would be down on the floor together, trying to see if there were any pieces of the idol worth saving. It was all so unexpected and so incongruous and so shocking, and yet so unaffectedly religious and so surprisingly the right thing to do, that the upshot of it all was that people went away saying, "Dr. Martin isn't such a bad fellow, after all."
Luther's "Table Talk" penetrated circles which were well protected against his theological treatises. Men were conscious of a good humor even in his invective; for he usually gave them time to see the kindly twinkle in his eye before he knocked them down.
In order to engage Karlstadt in a controversy, Luther drew out a florin from his pocket and cried heartily, "Take it! Attack me boldly!" Karlstadt took it, put it in his purse, and gave it to Luther. Luther then drank to his health. Then Karlstadt pledged Luther. Then Luther said, "The more violent your attacks, the more I shall be delighted." Then they gave each other their hands and parted. One can almost be reconciled to theological controversy, when it is conducted in a manner so truly sportsmanlike.
Luther had a way of characterizing a person in a sentence, that was much more effective than his labored vituperation (in which, it must be confessed, he was a master). Thus, speaking of the attitude of Erasmus, he said, "Erasmus stands looking at creation like a calf at a new door." It was very unjust to Erasmus, and yet the picture sticks in the mind; for it is such a perfect characterization of the kind of mind that we are all acquainted with, which looks at the marvels of creation with the wide-eyed gaze of bovine youthfulness, curious, not to know how that door came there, but only to know whether it leads to something to eat.
The humor of Luther suggests that of Abraham Lincoln. Both were men of the people, and their humor had a flavor of the soil. They were alike capable of deep dejection, but each found relief in spontaneous laughter. The surprise of the grave statesman when Lincoln would preface a discussion with a homely anecdote of the frontier was of the same kind felt by the sixteenth-century theologians when Luther turned aside from his great arguments, which startled Europe, to tell a merry tale in ridicule of the pretensions of the monks.
If I were to speak of the humorist as a philosopher, some of the gravest of the philosophers would at once protest. Humor, they say, has no place in their philosophy; and they are quite right. Indeed, it is doubtful if a humorist would ever make a good, systematic philosopher. He is a modest person. He is only a gleaner following the reapers; but he manages to pick up a great many grains of wisdom which they overlook.
Dante pictures the sages of antiquity as forever walking on a verdant mead, "with eyes slow and grave, and with great authority in their looks;" as if, in the other world, they were continually oppressed by the wisdom they had acquired in this. But I can imagine a gathering of philosophers in a different fashion. Gravely they have come, each bearing his ponderous volume, in which he has explained the universe and settled the destiny of mankind. Then, suddenly, in contrast with their theories, the reality is disclosed. The incorrigible pedants and dogmatists turn away in sullen disappointment; but from all true lovers of wisdom there arises a peal of mellow laughter, as each one realizes the enormous incongruity between what he knew and what he thought he knew.
The discovery that things are not always as they seem is one that some people make in this world. They get a glimpse of something that is going on behind the scenes, and their smile is very disconcerting to the sober spectators around them.
Sometimes it is the bitter smile of disillusion. Matthew Arnold wrote of Heine:--
"The Spirit of the world, Beholding the absurdity of men,-- Their vaunts, their feats,--let a sardonic smile, For one short moment, wander o'er his lips. That smile was Heine."
But there is another kind of smile evoked by the incongruity between the appearance and the reality. It is the smile that comes when behind some mask that had affrighted us we recognize a familiar and friendly face. There is a smile which is not one of disillusion. There is a philosophy which is dissolved in humor. The wise man sees the incongruities involved in the very nature of things. They are the result of the free play of various forces. To his quick insight the actual world is no more like the formal descriptions of it than the successive attitudes of a galloping horse are like the pose of an equestrian statue. His mind catches instantaneous views of this world as its elements are continually dissolving and recombining. It is all very surprising, and he smiles as he sees how much better they turn out than might be expected.
"Sad-eyed Fakirs swiftly say Endless dirges to decay.
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And yet it seemeth not to me That the high gods love tragedy; For Saadi sat in the sun.
* * * * *
Sunshine in his heart transferred, Lighted each transparent word.
* * * * *
And thus to Saadi said the Muse: 'Eat thou the bread which men refuse; Flee from the goods which from thee flee; Seek nothing,--Fortune seeketh thee.
* * * * *
On thine orchard's edge belong All the brags of plume and song.
* * * * *
Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind, A poet or a friend to find: Behold, he watches at the door! Behold his shadow on the floor!'"
In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom says, "I, Wisdom, dwell with Prudence." But there is another member of the household. It is Humor, sister of serene Wisdom and of the heavenly Prudence. She does not often laugh, and when she does it is mostly at her sister Wisdom, who cannot long resist the infection. There is not one set smile upon her face, as if she contemplated an altogether amusing world. The smiles that come and go are shy, elusive things, but they cannot remain long in hiding.
Wisdom, from her high house, takes wide views, and Prudence peers anxiously into the future; but gentle Humor loves to take short views; she delights in homely things, and continually finds surprises in that which is most familiar. Wisdom goes on laborious journeys, and comes home bringing her treasures from afar; and Humor matches them, every one, with what she has found in the dooryard.
Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcrafts
That was a curious state of things in Salem village. There was the Meeting-House in plain sight, with sermons every Sunday and lectures on week-days. There were gospel privileges for all, and the path of duty was evident enough for the simplest understanding. Nevertheless, certain persons who should have listened to the sermons, when they heard the sound of a trumpet hied to the rendezvous of witches. When haled before the court their only answer was that they couldn't help it.
The ministers were disturbed, but being thorough-going men, they did not rest content with academic discussion of the question of the falling-off in church attendance. They inquired into its cause, and became convinced that they were dealing with sorcery. All this is duly set down in Increase Mather's treatise on "Cases of Conscience concerning Witchcrafts."
This method of inquisition is commended to those writers who look upon the Gentle Reader's love of Romance as a deadly sin. The trouble, as I understand it, is this. A number of gentlemen devoted to literature have cultivated style till it is as near a state of utter perfection as human nature will tolerate. Indeed, they emulate that classic writer of whom Roger Ascham remarked that he labored "with uncontented care to write better than he could." They have attained such accuracy of observation and such skill in the choice of words that the man in the book is as like to the man on the street as two peas. They are also skilled in criticism and are able to prove that it is our duty not only to admire but also to read their books. The complaint is that the readers, instead of walking in the path of duty, troop off after some mere story-teller who has never passed an examination in Pathology, and who is utterly incapable of making an exhaustive analysis of motives.
The Gentle Reader when he hears the accusations of the stern realists makes no denial of the facts. He admits that he likes a good story better than an involved study of character. He listens to the reproofs with the helplessness of one who has only the frail barrier of a personal taste to shield him from the direct blow of the categorical imperative. If personal taste were to be accepted as a sufficient plea, he is aware that the most besotted inebriate would go unwhipped of justice. In this predicament he shields himself behind his favorite authors. If there be a fault it is theirs, not his. They have bewitched him by their spells. It is impossible for him to withstand the potent enchantments of these wizards.
I am inclined to think that there is much justice in this view of the matter and that the militant realists should turn their attention from the innocent reader to those who have power to bewitch him.
The accepted signs of witchcraft, as enumerated by the Mathers, are present. Thus we are told: "A famous Divine recites among other Convictions of a Witch, the Testimony of the Party bewitched, together with the joint Oaths of sufficient Persons that they have seen Prodigious Pranks or Feats wrought by the Party accused."
This was the kind of evidence relied upon in the case of G. B. in the Court of Oyer and Terminer held at Salem in 1692. "He was accused by Nine Persons for extraordinary Lifting and such Feats of Strength as could not be done without Diabolical Assistance." It was said that "though he was a Puny Man yet he had done things beyond the strength of a Giant. A Gun of about seven foot Barrel, and so heavy that strong Men could not steadily hold it out with both hands; there were several Testimonies that he made nothing of taking up such a Gun behind the Lock, with one hand, and holding it out like a Pistol at arm's end." Any readers of romance can tell of many such prodigious pranks which, while the spell was upon them, seemed altogether credible.
The test which was looked upon as infallible by those judicious judges who put little confidence in the flotation of witches on the mill pond, was that of the lack of intellectual consistency. "Faltering, faulty, inconstant, and contrary answers upon judicial and deliberate Examination are accounted unlucky symptoms of guilt."
Such inconsistencies may be found in all romantic fiction; yet the magicians seem to have the power to make all things appear probable. I might tell what a pleasant thrill is sometimes produced by these sorceries, but I had better follow the policy of Cotton Mather, who declined to tell all he knew about the Invisible World, lest he might make witchcraft too attractive. "I will not speak plainly lest I should, unaware, poison some of my Readers, as the pious Hermingius did one of his Pupils when he only by way of Diversion recited a Spell."
Cotton Mather makes a suggestion which is of value in regard to the different grades of witches and other wonder-working spirits. His remarks upon this head are so judicious that they should be quoted in full.
"Thirdly, 'tis to be supposed, that some _Devils_ are more peculiarly _Commission'd_, and perhaps _Qualify'd_, for some Countries, while others are for others. This is intimated when in _Mar_. 5. 10. The Devils _besought_ our Lord much, _that he would not send them away out of the Countrey_. Why was that? But in all probability, because _these Devils_ were more able to _do the works of the Devil_, in such a Countrey, than in another. It is not likely that every Devil does know every _Language_; or that every Devil can do every _Mischief_. 'Tis possible, that the _Experience_, or, if I may call it so, the _Education_ of all Devils is not alike, and that there may be some difference in their _Abilities_. If one might make an Inference from what the Devils _do_, to what they _are_, One cannot forbear dreaming, that there are _degrees_ of Devils. Who can allow, that such Trifling _Demons_, as that of _Mascon_, or those that once infested our New-berry, are of so much Grandeur, as those _Demons_, whose Games are mighty Kingdoms? Yea, 'tis certain, that all Devils do not make a like figure in the _Invisible World_. Nor does it look agreeably, That the _Demons_, which were Familiars of such a Man as the old _Apollonius_, differ not from those baser Goblins that chuse to Nest in the filthy and loathsome Rags of a beastly Sorceress. Accordingly, why may not some Devils be more accomplished for what is to be done in such and such places, when others must be _detach'd_ for other Territories? Each Devil, as he sees his advantage, cries out, _Let me be in this Countrey, rather than another_."
It is only on the theory of bewitchment by a trifling demon who belongs to the lower orders of the literary world that I can account for the sad fall of the reader whose confession follows. Carefully shielded in his youth from all the enticements of the imagination, he yet fell from grace. The unfortunate person seems to be lacking in strength of will, and yet to have some good in him. In my opinion he was more sinned against than sinning. But I will let him tell his story in his own way.
A CONFESSION