Part 4

If irony does not forget good nature in its indignation at discovered shams, it can impart the exhilaration of wit. In a late novel, entitled the "Maid of Sker," there is a fishmonger who says that, "when the eyes of a fish begin to fail him through long retirement from the water," he has means of setting up their aspect; "and I called" my patrons "generous gentlemen and Christian-minded ladies every time they wanted to smell my fish, which is not right before payment. What right has another man to disparage the property of another? When you have bought him, he is your own; but, when he is put in the scales, remember 'nothing but good of the dead,' if you remember any thing."

This recalls Hamlet's irony, when he said that he knew Polonius excellent well,--he was a fishmonger! "Not I, my lord." "Then I would you were so honest a man." Poor, stale Polonius! He was not as fresh as the fish which Shakspeare used to scent at Billingsgate, and knavery in the wind besides.

The cynicism of irony can be illustrated by the character of Jaques in "As You Like It," as the character of Apemantus in "Timon of Athens" will serve to show us a cynicism that has grown so ferocious as almost to beat irony from the field.

JAQUES.

There is not a spark of unkindly feeling in Puck when he says to Oberon, concerning the lovers,--

"Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

But when we overhear Jaques telling Orlando, "By my troth, I was seeking for a fool, when I found you," there is a tang of seedy beer in the speech. We suspect his common-sense of having soured: so that when he says to Orlando, "The worst fault you have is to be in love," we relish the estimate of Orlando's reply, "'Tis a fault I will not change for your best virtue."

The melancholy of Jaques is the cynicism of a man who is _blasé_ with the convictions as well as the manners of society. He enjoys his vein too well to be melancholy in the modern sense of that word, for being something more than satirical he is something less than morose, and we feel that he is secretly pleased with his ability to be displeasing. Every vice lends a man a feeling of superiority in being different from other men: he broke through some bounds to acquire it, and this action contains some spice of originality and independence. He transgresses in a temper of pity for the less audacious and unchartered souls. So the cynic who makes his whole vicinity uncomfortable is pleasant company for himself because he has no mawkishness; you cannot cheat him with superfine emotions, he happens to have seen the world.

Jaques characterizes the use of the word "melancholy" as applied to himself, when he says: "It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness." He has also gained his experience at the expense of having tried various vices of high life, as the Duke hints: "For thou thyself hast been a libertine." So the arsenic eaters of the Styrian Alps take the natural poison in small successive doses which give them a bloated aspect of florid health, but they so affect the action of the heart that it stops quite suddenly.

The famous speech beginning with, "All the world's a stage," is purely cynical, and assumes the futility of the parts which the necessity of living compels us to play. It might be spoken by one who believes that our little life is rounded by a sleep whose pure oblivion swallows up our striving.

When Jaques calls for more singing, and is told that it will make him melancholy, he replies, "I thank it: I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs." We may infer that he sucks music with the notion of the weasel, who probably regards eggs as being laid on purpose for his sucking. There is nothing more ferrety than your cynic, to whom all objects are game for observation. When he hears that Duke Frederic, the usurper, has restored the kingdom and "put on a religious life," he goes to find him for the purpose of critical inspection; for "out of these convertites there is much matter to be heard and learned." So Jaques surmising that every hole leads to a rat does not leave one unexplored. In the matter of music Jaques only cares for his sad reverie, not for the names of the songs. He will thank nobody. "When a man thanks me heartily, methinks I have given him a penny, and he renders me the beggarly thanks." So, sing, if you choose to: the song tracks me to that rat behind the arras.

Compare his scirrhous habit of assimilating music with that of the Duke in "Twelfth Night." Love has an appetite for music: give me excess of it to kill the love. Enough: it is not so sweet as before; for love is like the sea, as vast, as real, as domineering. When the brooks of music fall into it, sweet as they are, genuine as love, yet the great sea subdues them to a greater disposition, even in a minute; and my fancy for Olivia is alone "high-fantastical." Jaques would have sneered at this Duke for not extracting from the music a suspicion of the frailty of his love. No matter what a man's gifts may be, this "vicious mole of nature" that pretends to spread over all surfaces discolors only the gifts: all virtues, "in the general censure, take corruption from that particular fault," and to its own scandal; because the world is a flower that nods upon the stock of reality, and the particles of its aroma, though invisible, set in motion the nerves of a corresponding reality, and man does not put his nose to an illusion. But your debauchee, like Jaques, has scorched and tanned his senses with misuse, and his abortive sniffing at the roses sours into a sneer.

Still, Jaques in defending himself makes disclaimers of ill-nature: as thus, Who is hit by my speech? It means so and so. If the coat does not fit, who is wronged? If a man be above my estimate, "why, then, my taxing like a wild goose flies, unclaimed of any man."

Yes, but he really delights himself with the conviction that every man is a wild goose upon the wing, and that virtue is the last game that ventures to alight and feed on the wild celery of our ponds.

Jaques reserves his last and cruelest thrust for Touchstone, to whom he predicts a marriage victualled for two months, and wrangling ever after; which is hard on the wise fool, who has taken up with Audrey as if to show the under side of court manners and the comparative cheapness of mere breeding. This ought to have endeared him to the heart of the cynic.

APEMANTUS.

Apemantus, in "Timon of Athens," is a cynic of a different breed, and his temper is so acid that, as was once said of Douglas Jerrold, he must have been suckled on a lemon. There is spleen in it when he says: "Would I had a rod in my mouth, that I might answer thee profitably." The cynicism of Apemantus is partly justified by the generous folly of Timon: "Now, Apemantus, if thou wert not sullen, I'd be good to thee." "No, I'll nothing: for if I should be bribed too, there would be none left to rail upon thee, and then thou would'st sin the faster." Shakspeare seems to indicate how a virtue, pushed to excess, provokes excessive criticism. We are continually generating these extremes, when our social virtue piques some social fault into parading itself. Money maxims and manners are good things, but they may all be strained to bankruptcy. So when Timon becomes a fanatic of good-nature we see him developing a monstrous Apemantus: his virtue, like an overgrown fruit, becomes stringy and deprived of proper flavor. We taste its coarseness in the colossal spleen of the cynic who says, as Timon turns away from the repulsive tone which was really sired by himself:--

"Thou wilt not hear me now: thou shalt not then, _I'll lock Thy heaven from thee_."

So it will always be: if the kingdom of heaven is claimed by one violence, it will be competed for by another.

Apemantus is specially reared to be this bitter foil to Timon's profuseness. He leads an isolated life, and thus like all solitaries acquires the vice of exaggerating his own opinions. They have never passed between the fine emery of social contact. So he is a caltrop in men's path, with a spike always uppermost to impale the over-hasty feet. Poverty drives Timon directly upon it, to wince at every step he takes on such a bristly virtue, till he matches his smart with curses quite as pointed; and Shakspeare shows us the two fanatics of two virtues exhausting the vituperations of the English tongue to banish each other into an oblivion, "where the light foam of the sea may beat" their gravestones daily with a bitter lip.

TIM. When there is nothing living but thee, thou shalt be welcome. I had rather be a beggar's dog, than Apemantus.

APEM. Thou art the cap of all the fools alive.

TIM. Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon.

APEM. A plague on thee, thou art too bad to curse.

TIM. Away, thou issue of a mangy dog! Choler does kill me, that thou art alive; I swoon to see thee.

APEM. Beast!

TIM. Slave!

APEM. Toad!

TIM. Rogue, rogue, rogue!

So people who never know "the middle of humanity," but "the extremity of both ends," batter each other's virtue out of shape and capacity to be recognized.

Julian Hawthorne likens the cynic to a chimney-sweeper, "that eccentric misanthrope who vents his spite against the race by plucking defilement from the very flame which makes bright the household hearth."

But Jaques was expressly plunged into social estimates and manners that he may be withdrawn from them in a less splenetic temper. The wild crab has sunned itself in orchards, and, nodding among mellower branches, is not all flavored with their rottenness. So far from secluding himself in the conceited fashion of all hermits from the manifold culture of life, he has expended himself upon every phase of it, and withdraws with the pensiveness of satiety toning the sharpness of experience in his speech. Some men turn cynics when the first serious disappointment of their lives drifts over them. Of a sudden the whole, nature is drenched from the leaden cloud. The revulsion from a sunny day to this pitiless blackening of heaven chills the very marrow of their common-sense. Then they rail at the sky which is but for a while retired, and insist that its old grace and clearness were a subterfuge. So when the accursed plot of Iachimo to make the chastity of Imogen a naughty thing has its effect, her husband, Posthumus, sets the key for all the woman-haters since:--

"Could I find out The woman's part in me! For there's no motion That tends to vice in man, but I affirm It is the woman's part: Be it lying, note it, The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers; Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers; Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, Nice longings, slanders, mutability, All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows, Why, hers, in part, or all; but, rather, all; For ev'n to vice They are not constant, but are changing still One vice, but of a minute old, for one Not half so old as that. _I'll write against them._"

HUMOR.

If we wished to find a passage from Irony to Humor, we should have to look for it in cases where good-nature assumes the positive attribute of impartiality, because humor is a kind of disposition to adopt the whole of human nature, fuse all its distinctions, tolerate all its infirmities, and assemble vice and misery to receive rations of good cheer.

Two Jews have been elected within a few years to be Lord Mayors of London. They were members of the synagogue in full connection, and might have appointed Rabbins for chaplaincies if they had chosen. But they pursued the old custom, which was not however of legal stringency: appointed clergymen of the Church of England, and regularly made all the usual contributions for Christian purposes, including the customary one to the Society for the Conversion of the Jews. In this incident it is the element of Humor which imparts to us the pleasure we feel.

Hippolyte Taine acknowledges that the French have not the idea of Humor, nor the word for it. But we might expect from him at least a definition. He can only say, however, that humor includes a taste for contrasts, buffooneries, the mockery of Heine, starts of invention, oddities, eruption of a violent joviality that was buried under a heap of sadness, and absurd indecency. In another place he says that English humor "is the product of imaginative drollery, or of concentrated indignation."

Sir Henry Bulwer, in his book entitled "France, Social, Literary, and Political," concedes the talent of wit to the French and quotes the following instance of it: "I asked two little village boys, one seven, the other eight years old, what they meant to be when they were men? Says one, 'I shall be the doctor of the village.' 'And you, what shall you be?' said I to the other. 'Oh! if brother's a doctor, I shall be _curé_. He shall kill the people, and I'll bury them; so we shall have the whole village between us.'"

Bulwer appreciates this, yet Taine denies to the English the sense of wit. In fact, the quality of wit exists wherever imagination percolates through the understanding: the sediment is the grain-gold of wit. But the quality of humor, depending upon various moral traits, exists only wherever a broad imagination is combined with a sweet and tolerant moral sense that is devoid of malice and all uncharitableness, and at peace with all mankind. A petulant egotism may exist with wit, but never with humor. Sarcasm and satire are the forms which best agree with imperfect moral dispositions. A too prolonged irony has something melancholy and dyspeptic in it, and passes into the blood of a faulty temper even if there be the tonic of an upright moral sense. This moral sense may exist on every meridian of the earth, but it may not appear at literary epochs in solution with the brightest minds. Rabelais seems to be a French exception to the Gallic trait that was noticed so long ago by the great Roman: _Comɶda_ and _argute loqui_,--belonging to comedy and to the ingenuities of conversation. Humor appears best in conjunction with the temper of Northern Europe, whose early races began with deep impressions of the gravity of things and broke thence into alleviating moods. If it be the primitive trait of a nation to enjoy comic gayeties and the subtle surprises of discourse, it does not readily rise to the moral earnestness which a serious world imposes, and therefore it cannot invent the relief and grave delight of humor.

Sydney Smith uses this word to cover any thing that is ridiculous and laughable. So the epithet _comic_ is quite indiscriminately applied. But we ought not to submit to this loose application; for there are plenty of other words to make proper distinctions for us amid our pleasurable moods, and permit us to reserve humor for something which is neither punning, wit, satire, nor comedy. Humor may avail itself of all these mental exercises, but only as a manager casts his stock company to set forth the prevailing spirit of a play. Comedy, for instance, represents sorrows, passions, and annoyances, but shows them without the sombre purpose of tragedy to enforce a supreme will at any cost. All our weaknesses threaten in comedy to result in serious embarrassments, but there is such inexhaustible material for laughter in the whims and follies with which we baffle ourselves and others, that the tragic threat is collared just in time and shaken into pleasure. All kinds of details of our life are represented, which tragedy could never tolerate in its main drift towards the pathos of defeated human wills and broken hearts. Tricks, vices, fatuities, crotchets, vanities, play their game for a stake no higher than the mirth of outwitting each other; and they all pay penalties of a light kind which God exacts smilingly for the sake of keeping our disorders at a minimum. Comedy also funds a great deal of its charm in the unconsciousness of an infirmity. We exhibit ourselves unawares: each one is perfectly understood by everybody but himself; so we plot and vapor through an intrigue with placards on each back, where all but the wearers can indulge their mirth at seeing us parading so innocently with advertisements of our price and quality.

There is a comic passage in the "Inferno" of Dante, noticed by Lowell (XV. 119), "where Brunetto Latini lingers under the burning shower to recommend his _Tesoro_ to his former pupil," Dante; "a comical touch of Nature in an author's solicitude for his little work; not, as in Fielding's case, after _its_, but his own damnation."

The opening verses of Canto XVI. of the "Paradiso" are also comic, "where Dante tells us how, even in heaven, he could not help glorying in being gently born,--he who had devoted a _Canzone_ and a book of the _Convito_ to proving that nobility consisted wholly in virtue."

Humor subsidizes every vein like this to supply the great heart-beat which mantles over all human features and visits all the members of great or little honor. Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity. Humor is gravity concealed behind the jest. Our grave and noble tendencies are brought in this world of ours into contact with very ordinary styles of living, which are stubborn; they neither surrender nor give way. Humor steps in to mediate: it seeks to put in the same light and color all the parts of this incongruity, the ideal and the vulgar real; and the constant inference of humor is that all the ideals of right, honor, goodness, manly strength, are serious with a divine purpose.

Even the coarsest and most revolting things can be adopted by this temper and cheerfully assigned to their places in the great plan. Jamie Alexander, the old Scotch grave-digger, had the habit of carrying home fragments of old coffins, long seasoned in the earth which was turned up by his exploring spade. He used to make clocks and fiddles of them, thus coaxing time and tune out of these repulsive tokens of human infirmity. Our mouldiest accessories can furnish material for humor; since "a good wit," says Shakspeare, "will make use of any thing; it will turn diseases to commodity."

We cannot say that man derives this power to resolve contrariety into delight from the divine mind, though we have the habit of saying that every intellectual act must spring from an original source of intelligence, just as affection must have its root in the infinite love. But Deity can have no consciousness of incongruities in creation, because the whole must at every instant be comprehended in the Creator of the whole, who originates the real relation of all its parts and their mutual interdependence. Human dissatisfaction springs from want of this ability to comprehend the whole within one reconciling idea. This incompetency is felt by us because we have an instinct that all dissonant things ought to be reconciled, and can be in some way, but only can be by the finite becoming the infinite. Humor strives to bridge this gulf. It is man's device to pacify his painful sense that so many things appear wrong and evil to him, and so many circumstances inconsistent with our feeling that Deity must have framed the world in a temper of perfect goodness. We get relief by trying to discover the ideas which may effect a temporary reconcilement, to approach as far as we can to the temper of divine impartiality in which all circumstances must have been ordained. That temper passing down through our incompleteness is refracted, broken all up into a tremulousness of human smiles. Nothing that a Creator has the heart to tolerate can disturb him. But where there is no sense of incongruity there can be no sense of humor. That sense is man's expedient to make his mortality endurable. The laughter of man is the contentment of God.

Shakspeare was not preoccupied by any theory of the universe which denies the facts or tries to shut them up in a private meaning, as theology does. His creative genius reflected a Creator's mind. So he accepted all that is permitted to exist, without extenuation, instinctively acknowledging the right of God to make men as they are, if so He chose, out of complex motives and passions whose roots are hidden in each man's ancestry, and whose drift the man himself cannot anticipate, as he was not consulted. This admission of all the facts of human nature did not disable his preference for pure and honest things. All that is lovely has a good, report made of it in his lives, and all that is odious appears in its habit as it lived. Thus he moralized, as Nature does by letting all her creatures breed and show their traits. She pastes no placards upon things which advertise themselves to every observer. All our infirmities have the freedom of Shakspeare's verse to display themselves at pleasure. He is not standing by with a showman's stick to designate his creatures to us who have eyes of our own, and know what is ugly and pleasant when we see it. No perfume is added to the violet, no gilding to the rose. "The image of a wicked heinous fault" lives in its eye.

Now this impartial observation cannot shield the poet's ideal from the hurts which are inflicted by the discrepancies of life: the real seems to be no legitimate child of the ideal, but a changeling with low-born traits. The noble lover of goodness cannot help being pained at the contrast of circumstances with his thought, and there moves over his nature a deep seriousness from this cloud, beneath which his imagination broods upon the landscape. It raises a suspicion that Deity itself must find omniscience annoying and provocative of gloom; for all the worlds and the ages keep on inflicting this incongruity upon the divine source of all ideal things. The poet must manage to recover from this mood, to reassure his heart with the faith that the One who calculated and devised the aberrations which sustain His system must exist in eternal serenity.

When many human characters are contemplated by a superior observer, an impartiality kin to that of the mind who created them sets in. But it cannot remain a colorless, judicial attitude, nor can it deteriorate into indifference. Good nature is an element in the superiority of a good observer. He may make use of wit, comedy, and irony, but his essential mood can only be described by the word "humor;" that is, the quality of being reconciled with all that is observed. The poet would fain conciliate, but without complicity; for he can never give up the gravity of his ideal. Now to be perfectly impartial to all would be too great a strain for a finite mind. It would weary of the incessant balancing, of the exigency of moderation. The mind yields from this in unconscious self-defence, and passes into a mood that conciliates itself. The gravity is precipitated by the infusion of a smile. And although this lighter ingredient appears upon the surface, it is the record and announcement of the serious affair below.

In Burns's "Address to the Devil," he is of opinion that that personage cannot take much pleasure in tormenting poor devils like him. Besides, if any thing is the matter with him, it is all the fault of the devil's own trick which so nearly ruined every thing. Still, he confesses to a fellow-feeling for the devil. Why can't he mend a bit? Burns hates to think of hell for the devil's sake, as Dr. Channing once said he hoped there was no devil for the devil's own sake.

But, as Shakspeare says, "the devil knew not what he did when he made man politic; he crossed himself by it; and I cannot think, but, in the end, the villanies of man will set him clear."

The humor here is pervaded with the earnest perception that Nature contains organically the good and the evil. Both are placed in permanent juxtaposition, to result in the interaction which makes life and history possible.