WIT AND HUMOR
IF without the faculty of observation one could acquire a thorough knowledge of literature, the art of literature, one would be astonished to learn “by report divine” how few professional writers can distinguish between one kind of writing and another. The difference between description and narration, that between a thought and a feeling, between poetry and verse, and so forth — all this is commonly imperfectly understood, even by most of those who work fairly well by intuition.
The ignorance of this sort that is most general is that of the distinction between wit and humor, albeit a thousand times expounded by impartial observers having neither. Now, it will be found that, as a rule, a shoemaker knows calfskin from sole-leather and a blacksmith can tell you wherein forging a clevis differs from shoeing a horse. He will tell you that it is his business to know such things, so he knows them. Equally and manifestly it is a writer’s business to know the difference between one kind of writing and another kind, but to writers generally that advantage seems to be denied: they deny it to themselves.
I was once asked by a rather famous author why we laugh at wit. I replied: “We don’t — at least those of us who understand it do not.” Wit may make us smile, or make us wince, but laughter — that is the cheaper price that we pay for an inferior entertainment, namely, humor. There are persons who will laugh at anything at which they think they are expected to laugh. Having been taught that anything funny is witty, these benighted persons naturally think that anything witty is funny.
Who but a clown would laugh at the maxims of Rochefoucauld, which are as witty as anything written? Take, for example, this hackneyed epigram: “There is something in the misfortunes of our friends which we find not entirely displeasing” — I translate from memory. It is an indictment of the whole human race; not altogether true and therefore not altogether dull, with just enough of audacity to startle and just enough of paradox to charm, profoundly wise, as bleak as steel — a piece of ideal wit, as admirable as a well cut grave or the headsman’s precision of stroke, and about as funny.
Take Rabelais’ saying that an empty stomach has no ears. How pitilessly it displays the primitive beast alurk in us all and moved to activity by our elemental disorders, such as the daily stress of hunger! Who could laugh at the horrible disclosure, yet who forbear to smile approval of the deftness with which the animal is unjungled?
In a matter of this kind it is easier to illustrate than to define. Humor [(which is not inconsistent with pathos, so nearly allied are laughter and tears) is Charles Dickens; wit is Alexander Pope. Humor is Dogberry; wit is Mercutio. Humor is “Artemus Ward,” “John Phoenix,” “Josh Billings,” “Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Orpheus C. ‘Kerr,” “Bill” Nye, “Mark Twain” — their name is legion; for wit we must brave the perils of the deep: it is “made in France” and hardly bears transportation. Nearly all Americans are humorous; if any are born witty, Heaven help them to emigrate! You shall not meet an American and talk with him two minutes but he will say something humorous; in ten days he will say nothing witty; and if he did, your own, O most witty of all possible readers, would be the only ear that would give it recognition. Humor is tolerant, tender; its ridicule caresses. Wit stabs, begs pardon — and turns the weapon in the wound. Humor is a sweet wine, wit a dry; we know which is preferred by the connoisseur. They may be mixed, forming an acceptable blend. Even Dickens could on rare occasions blend them, as when he says of some solemn ass that his ears have reached a rumor.
My conviction is that while wit is a universal tongue (which few, however, can speak) humor is everywhere a patois not “understanded of the people” over the province border. The best part of it — its “essential spirit and uncarnate self,” is indigenous, and will not flourish in a foreign soil. The humor of one race is in some degree unintelligible to another race, and even in transit between two branches of the same race loses something of its flavor. To the American mind, for example, nothing can be more dreary and dejecting than an English comic paper; yet there is no reason to doubt that Punch and Judy and the rest of them have done much to dispel the gloom of the Englishman’s brumous environment and make him realize his relationship to Man.
It may be urged that the great English humorists are as much read in this country as in their own; that Dickens, for example, has long “ruled as his demesne” the country which had the unhappiness to kindle the fires of contempt in him and Rudyard Kipling; that “the excellent Mr. Twain” has a large following beyond the Atlantic. This is true enough, but I am convinced that while the American enjoys his Dickens with sincerity, the gladness of his soul is a tempered emotion compared with that which riots in the immortal part of John Bull when that singular instrument feels the touch of the same master. That a jest of Mark Twain ever got itself all inside the four corners of an English understanding is a proposition not lightly to be accepted without hearing counsel.
1903.
WORD CHANGES AND SLANG
THAT respectable words lose caste, becoming the yellow dogs and very lepers of language, is a familiar fact hospitable to abundant illustration. One of these words has just fallen from my pen; fifty or a hundred years from now it will be impossible, probably, for any writer having a decent regard to the value of words to use the word “respectable” of anything truly meriting respect. For the past half-century it has been taking on a new and opprobrious character. Already the type of the “respectable” man, for example, is the prosperous, wool-witted Philistine, who complacently interlocks his fat fingers under the overhang of his stomach, and surveying the world from the eminence of his own esteem, tries vainly to imagine what it would be without him.
The word “respectable” is indubitably doomed: etymology can not save it, any more than it could save the word “miscreant,” which means by derivation, as at one time it meant actually, infidel, unbeliever. In its present abasement we may hear a faint, far whisper of the old, old days of religious intolerance. It stands in modern speech a verbal monument to the odium theologicum reposing beneath in the sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection.
A half-century ago the word “ awful” was plumped into the mire of slang, where it has weltered ever since, without actual immersion, but apparently with no hope of extrication. The writer who would use it to-day in a serious sense has need to be well assured of his hold upon the reader’s mood. It may perchance whisk that person away from the sublime to the ridiculous, with the neathanded nimbleness of Satan snatching a soul from the straight and narrow way, to send it spinning aslant into the red-and-black billows of everlasting damnation!
There are transformations of a contrary sort — promotions and elevations of words, as from slang to poetry. Between the extremes of speech which are the extremes of thought, for speech is thought — between the upper and the lower deep, the heaven and the earth, is a Jacob’s-ladder which these winged messengers of mind ascend and descend.
Grave advocacy of slang is not lacking: Professor Manley, of Harvard, is afield in defence of it. Some slang, he justly says, is “strong and poetical.” It is “strong” because graphic and vivid, “poetical” because metaphorical; for the life and soul of poetry is metaphor.
Professor Manley thinks that the story of the Prodigal Son could have been better told this way:
The world gave him the marble heart, but his father extended the glad hand.
Yes, if those phrases had then been first used professors of literature might, as he suggests, be now expatiating on the beautiful simplicity of the diction and bewailing the inferiority of modern speech. But that is no defence of slang. It would not have been slang, any more than avowed or manifest quotations from the Scriptures as we have them are slang.
Professor Manley is especially charmed with the phrase “bats in his belfry,” and would indubitably substitute it for “possessed of a devil,” the Scriptural diagnosis of insanity. I don’t think the good man meant to be irreverent, but I should not care for his Revised Edition.
Somewhat more than a generation ago John Camden Hotten, of London, a publisher of “rare and curious books,” put out a slang dictionary. Its editor-in-chief was that accomplished scholar, George Augustus Sala. It was afterward revised by Henry Sampson, famous later as an authority in matters of sport, to whom I gave such assistance as my little learning and no sportsmanship permitted. The volume was a thick one, but contained little that in this country and period we know (and suffer) as “slang.” Slang, as the word was then used, is defined in the Century Dictionary thus: “The cant words or jargon used by thieves, peddlers, beggars, and the vagabond classes generally.”
To-day we mean by it something different and more offensive. It is no longer the argot of criminals and semi-criminals, “whom one does not meet,” and whose distance — when they keep it — lends a certain enchantment to the ear, but the intolerable diction of more or less worthy persons who obey all laws but those of taste. In its present generally accepted meaning the word is thus defined by the authority already quoted: “Colloquial words and phrases which have originated in the cant or rude speech of the vagabond or unlettered classes, or, belonging in form to standard speech, have acquired or have had given them restricted, capricious, or extravagantly metaphorical meanings, and are regarded as vulgar or inelegant.”
It is not altogether comprehensible how a sane intelligence can choose to utter itself in that kind of speech, yet speech of that kind seems almost to be driving good English out of popular use. Among large classes of our countrymen, it is held in so high esteem that whole books of it are put upon the market with profit to author and publisher. One of the most successful of these, reprinted from many of our leading newspapers, is called, I think, Fables in Slang — containing, by the way, nothing that resembles a fable. This unspeakable stuff made its author rich, and naturally he “syndicated” a second series of the same. Another was entitled Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, and contained not a line of clean English. And it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in this country the writing of humorous and satirical verse is a lost art; slang has taken the place of wit; the jest that smacks not of the slum finds no prosperity in any ear.
Slang has as many hateful qualities as a dog bad habits, but its essential vice is its hideous lack of originality; for until a word or phrase is common property it is not slang. Wherein, then, is the sense or humor of repeating it? The dullest dunce in the world may have an alert and obedient memory for current locutions. For skill in the use of slang no other mental equipment is required. However apt and picturesque a particular expression may be, the wit of it is his only who invented and first used it: in all others its use is forbidden by the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” A self-respecting writer would no more parrot a felicitous saying of unknown origin and popular currency than he would plagiarize a lively sentiment from Catullus or an epigram from Pope.
THE RAVAGES OF SHAKSPEARITIS
A FAMOUS author says that there is some kind of immoral emanation from the horse, and that it affects the character of every one who has much to do with the animal. I suppose it is something like that which suspires from the earth that is thrown out in digging a canal. Perhaps it is possible to construct a short and shallow waterway without stirring up enough of this badness to corrupt “all those in authority” along the line of it, but if the enterprise is of magnitude, like the Suez or the Panama project, results most disastrous to the morals of all engaged in the work, excepting those who do it, will certainly ensue, as we may soon have the happiness to observe.
A similar phenomenon is seen in the case of Shakspeare, whose resemblance to a horse and a canal has not, I flatter myself, been heretofore pointed out. The subtle suspiration from the work of the great dramatist, however, attacks, not the morals, but the intellect. It does not prostrate the sense of right and wrong, except in so far as this is dependent on mental health; it simply lays waste the judgment by dispersing the faculties, as the shadow of a hawk squanders a flock of feeding pigeons. Some time we shall perhaps have an English-speaking critic who will be immune to Shakspearitis, but as yet Heaven has not seen fit to “raise him up.” And when we have him his inaccessibility to the infection will do him no good, for we shall indubitably put him to death.
The temptation to these reflections is supplied by looking into Mr. Arlo Bates’s book, Talks on Writing English, where I find this passage quoted from Jeffrey:
“Everything in him (Shakspeare) is in unmeasured abundance and unequaled perfection — but everything so balanced and kept in subordination as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images and descriptions are given with such brevity and introduced with such skill as merely to adorn without loading the sense they accompany.... All his excellences, like those of Nature herself, are thrown out together; and, instead of interfering with, support and recommend each other.”
This is so fine as to be mostly false. It is true that Shakspeare throws out his excellences in unmeasured abundance and all together; and nothing else in this passage is true. His poetical conceptions, images and descriptions are not “given” at all; they are “turned loose.” They came from his brain like a swarm of bees. They race out, as shouting children from a country school. They distract, stun, confuse. So disorderly an imagination has never itself been imagined. Shakspeare had no sense of proportion, no care for the strength of restraint, no art of saying just enough, no art of any kind. He flung about him his enormous and incalculable wealth of jewels with the prodigal profusion of a drunken youth mad with the lust of spending. Only the magnificence and value of the jewels could blind us to the barbarian method of distribution. They dazzle the mind and confound all the criteria of the judgment. Small wonder that the incomparable Voltaire, French, artistic in every fiber and trained in the severe dignities of Grecian art, called this lawless and irresponsible spendthrift a drunken savage.
Of no cultivated Frenchman is the judgment on Shakspeare much milder; the man’s “art,” his “precision,” his “perfection” — these are creations of our Teutonic imaginations, heritages of the time when in the rush-strewn baronial hall our ancestors surfeited themselves on oxen roasted whole and drank to insensibility out of wooden flagons holding a gallon each.
In literature, as in all else — in work, in love, in trade, in every kind of action or acquisition the Germanic nations are gluttons and drunkards. We want everything, as we want our food and drink, in savage profusion. And, by the same token, we rule the world.
1903.
ENGLAND’S LAUREATE
DOUBTLESS there are competent critics of poetry in this country, but it is Mr. Alfred Austin’s luck not to have drawn their attention. Mr. Austin is not a great poet, but he is a poet. The head and front of his offending seems to be that he is a lesser poet than his predecessor — his immediate predecessor — for his austerest critic will hardly affirm his inferiority to the illustrious Nahum Tate. Nor is Mr. Austin the equal by much of Mr. Swinburne, who as Poet Laureate was impossible — or at least highly improbable. If he had been offered the honor Mr. Swinburne would very likely have knocked off the Prime Minister’s hat and jumped upon it. He is of a singularly facetious turn of mind, is Mr. Swinburne, and has to be approached with an orange in each hand. —
Below Swinburne the differences in mental stature among British poets are inconsiderable; none is much taller than another, though Henley only could have written the great lines beginning,
Out of the dark that covers me, —
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul —
and he is not likely to do anything like that again; on that proposition
You your existence might put to the hazard and turn of a wager.
I wonder how many of the merry gentlemen who find a pleasure in making mouths at Mr. Austin for what he does and doesn’t do have ever read, or reading, have understood, his sonnet on
LOVE’S
BLINDNESS.
Now do I know that Love is blind, for I
Can see no beauty on this beauteous earth,
No life, no light, no hopefulness, no mirth,
Pleasure nor purpose, when thou art not nigh.
Thy absence exiles sunshine from the sky,
Seres Spring’s maturity, checks Summer’s birth,
Leaves linnet’s pipe as sad as plover’s cry,
And makes me in abundance find but dearth.
But when thy feet flutter the dark, and thou
With orient eyes dawnest on my distress,
Suddenly sings a bird on every bough,
The heavens expand, the earth grows less and less,
The ground is buoyant as the ether now,
And all looks lovely in thy loveliness.
The influence of Shakspeare is altogether too apparent in this, and it has as many faults as merits; but it is admirable work, nevertheless. To a poet only come such conceptions as “orient eyes” and feet that “flutter the dark.”
Here is another sonnet in which the thought, quite as natural, is less obvious. In some of his best work Mr. Austin runs rather to love (a great fault, madam) and this is called
LOVE’S WISDOM.
Now on the summit of Love’s topmost peak
Kiss we and part; no further can we go;
And better death than we from high to low
Should dwindle, and decline from strong to weak.
We have found all, there is no more to seek;
All we have proved, no more is there to know;
And Time can only tutor us to eke
Out rapture’s warmth with custom’s afterglow.
We cannot keep at such a height as this;
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 282