“Because the first statement is only a brutal comparison,” answered Pascal. “By adding the second half of the phrase you introduce a second piece of abuse which implies a contrast, associated with the first by the connection between the ass and the horse in our minds. Wit of that kind is produced by cleverly taking advantage of your opportunities in order to illustrate some preconceived opinion. Mere brutality can never be amusing to intelligent minds.”
“Very little,” returned Heine, “and then only when it is grossly disproportioned to its object, and perfectly harmless. Now I remember in England hearing a navvy say ‘damn my eyes if I don’t have a pint with you.’ I laughed — but I did not laugh the next time I heard it. I grew sick of the exaggeration.”
“I remember a story of that kind,” said Augustus. “It was told me by an officer who commanded a corps in the American Civil War. He was in his tent one morning, when a shell fell somewhere in the camp and exploded. His quartermaster, who had never seen fire, rushed into the tent in the greatest excitement. ‘General,’ he shouted, ‘hell’s busted and there’s a mule killed!’ The story struck me as very funny; probably on account of the tremendous contrast between the picture evoked by the idea of hell bursting, and the insignificant consequence of such an explosion.”
“I think that is more humorous than witty,” remarked Gwendoline.
“It is not true wit,” assented her husband, “because there was no witty intention. The quartermaster did not mean to be funny, but we laugh at the liveliness of his imagination. It is very much the same with Irish humour. It is often unintentional. Since I am telling stories I will tell you an Irish one of that kind.
An Irish cook one day informed her mistress that she was about to be married. ‘And who is he?’ inquired the lady. ‘And I’m sure you’ll be remembering the burial in the spring,’ answered Biddy. ‘And it’s the husband of the corpse, m’m, and you’ll be sure that was the very toime he honoured me by saying that I was the light of the funeral.’ Bridget did not mean to be funny — it was pure accident. That is unintentional humour. The Irish love of putting things agreeably, too, is often very amusing. An Irishman rings at the door of a house on a snowy day and asks the housemaid to lend him a shovel to clear the pavement before the next door. She gives him what he wants — a plain shovel, just like any other. ‘And is it your spade, miss?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ says she. ‘Well, miss,’ he answers, ‘I’m tremendiously obliged to ye, and mirover I’m bound to say that you have a very pretty taste in spades’.’ He only meant to be complimentary. He was funny by accident.”
“It is easy to understand why we laugh,” remarked Pascal. “It is another matter to analyse the nature of what makes us laugh. I believe that a man who understands that, can construct witty phrases and stories at will. In the first place it is certain that wit depends chiefly upon some striking contrast and then upon the way the contrast is expressed. Then comes the question of bringing the contrast into the right part of the sentence, which is a matter of style. Wit then depends upon imagination, command of language and good taste, and those who have possessed all three in the highest degree have usually been the wittiest men. Probably Shakespeare had all three more than any other man who ever lived, and he is probably the wittiest writer who has ever been known.”
“Altogether,” said Heine. “No one man ever wrote so many witty things, and I think that your definition of the requirements of wit is a good one. Command of language and good taste may with study and judgment make an essayist, an historian, or a philosopher, fit to rank high in literature apart from their mere acquirements. A poet must have a good imagination, of the sensitive, delicate kind. But it is the man of redundant, overflowing, well-fed, sanguine imagination who is witty, and who, if he possess a command of language, can produce the works of a Rabelais, and if he have good taste besides can write the plays that Shakespeare wrote.”
“The witty man,” observed Johnson, “must command an immense variety of images, in order that he may select grave ones or laughable ones according to the dictates of his taste. Discrimination, sir, is a great element in wit. Thomas Paine was right when he said that ‘one step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.’ It is very true.”
“I always thought Napoleon said that,” remarked Lady Brenda.
“He may have said it, madam, but I do not believe he invented it. Paine wrote the book in which that sentence is contained in the year 1793, when Napoleon was nobody and Robespierre was not yet president. Paine, madam, was a bad man with too much common sense.”
“‘In digging up your bones, Tom Paine, Will Cobbett has done well: You visit him on earth again, He’ll visit you in bell,’” quoted Augustus. “Byron was of your mind, sir,” be added.
“Yes, sir,” answered Johnson, with a deep laugh, “and I have no doubt he has by this time had ocular demonstration of the truth of his prophecy.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Heine.
“Well, perhaps I should not have said it. I will take it back, if you please, but I should not have liked Byron, if we had lived at the same time. He was born four years after I died, but I watched some parts of his career with interest. But to the point, sir, let us to the point. Let us consider the beginnings of humour and wit, so far as we are acquainted with them; and when we have traced the history of human merriment from its origin to its state in these present days, let us see if we cannot draw from our studies some deduction which may illuminate the subject of our discourse after exercising the faculties of our reason.”
“I am afraid that will take a long time,” suggested Gwendoline.
“Madam,” returned the sage, “time may be made for the living, but it is certainly not made for the dead. Madam, I could tuck in my legs and talk for a thousand years,”
“The subject would be exhausted by that time,” remarked Cæsar. “But there is much sense in your suggestion. A great deal of modern humour is descended from our times. The Italian Pulcinella and Stenterello with their comic masks are the great grandchildren of the masked comedies of Plautus. All that is buffoonery. There is very little real wit in it. We had witty men, and literary wits made a good living. But even their productions were very personal. I was often annoyed by them myself, and my successors found them an intolerable pest.”
“They were good at epigrams in those days,” remarked Heine.
“Unpleasantly so,” answered Cæsar, with an odd smile. “But their epigrams were constructed very much on the same principle as the modern jest. State a fact seriously in one sentence. In the first half of the second sentence make an apparently grave deduction. Then in the last half drop suddenly into some absurd bathos, or spring into some wild and fanciful exaggeration, or merely state a simple fact, known to be true, which makes all the first member of the statement appear in a ridiculous light. Take a little epigram of Martial upon Bassus. ‘Bassus,’ you are told, ‘has bought a travelling cloak for ten thousand sestertia, and has made money by the transaction.’— ‘What,’ you ask, ‘do you call that cheap?’— ‘Of course — he will never pay for it,’ answers your friend. The joke has probably been repeated several millions of times since then. ‘They told me he was a fool, and I bought him,’ complaius another; ‘give me back my money — he is wise.’ That expresses very wittily what a man feels when he discovers that he has employed a man to serve him who turns out cleverer than himself.”
“The sensations of the Directory with regard to Bonaparte,” suggested Heine. “That is a good rule for making a joke. Let me see whether one could be made off hand on that principle. Take two things which are strongly contrasted, but have a hidden resemblance. For instance, ordinary men and professors of universities. State in one sentence a fact, seriously. ‘Professors resemble men.’ Make a deduction. ‘Professors resemble men, who are two-legged animals without feathers.’ That is the definition of Plato, I believe, before Diogenes improved upon it. That is the first half. I suppose tha
t in the second member it is necessary to hit upon the main difference between professors and two-legged animals, without feathers. The main difference is that professors act as though they were not featherless animals, but feathered white birds, web-footed, prone to waddle in the mud and cackle loudly when it rains. To be short, you may say ‘Professors try to resemble men, who are two-legged animals without feathers, by tearing out their quills for pens to write down their cacklings.’ You may turn it and polish it. You may say, ‘If men are two-legged featherless animals, a professor need only make quill pens of his feathers and write himself down a man.’ That is an instance of a joke constructed on a fixed principle. You can vary it still more, changing the basis by one degree. Since professors call themselves men, you may say: ‘Professors are two-legged featherless animals. A goose need only make quills of his feathers and sign himself Professor Doctor Gans.’ But in this particular case it is unnecessary to state in concise terms a fact so universally known.”
“Why do you hate all professors so much?” asked Gwendoline.
“Because they made my life a burden to me when I was taking my degree,” answered Heine, with a laugh. “A professor in his glory, bullying a miserable student in his ignorance, is a sight to rejoice the most indifferent and disillusioned fiend. He is one-eyed, but he is king among the blind; he is only one step higher than the village schoolmaster beating A, B, C, into the village fool. He produces nothing that endures, as other men do, but he deafens quiet, well-behaved people with his diabolical cackling. He is endless as his own discourse. He dies daily, like Saint Paul, at four o’clock, but he rises at lecture time like a phénix from his ashes, or like a jack-in-the-box from his wire spring, screaming the most sour and distressing rubbish at people who do not want to hear him. He is the terror of the young, the bugbear of grown men, and even old age is embittered by the memory of him. He is overbearing with his inferiors, a bore to his equals, a gadfly to his superiors. He believes in nothing, he respects nothing, and if he knows anything he has only learnt it in order to scoff at the ignorance of somebody else. Wherever two or three of his kind are gathered together there is bitterness, strife, and all uncharitableness; there young men go down to their graves, consumptive with the effort to learn, or go to the good, old-fashioned devil rather than abide in the clutches of the modern fiend, there—”
“Really,” exclaimed Lady Brenda, “you are very bitter, you know!”
“No, sir,” cried Dr. Johnson, “professors are not all alike. There are good men among them who do not despise the intelligent intercourse of their equals, any more than they trample upon their inferiors in learning or wear out the patience of those who stand above them in the scale of knowledge. A man who knows something is not necessarily a detestable fellow, a wrangler, a breeder of strife and a scoffer. The perseverance by which a man has acquired wisdom does often lead him to suppose himself endowed with some other and more brilliant qualities in a like degree; but where those higher gifts are really found, the faculty of exercising them is not often absent. A man who is endowed only with strength and determination may envy his companion who possesses besides these a quick wit and a ready tongue; and where there is envy of a superior there is very likely to be hatred of an equal and overbearing insolence to inferiors. But there are men, and many men, sir, who, although they have not attained to any high pinnacle of excellence, have acquired knowledge which they are able to impart to others, and which may benefit their pupils to whom it is imparted; and who, because they have learned much without much difficulty, do not conceive themselves vastly superior to those who have learned less, any more than they consider themselves unable to overtake those who have surpassed them, by making a reasonable effort. Teachers, tutors and all instructors are generally ill-tempered in a like ratio with the labour they have expended in acquiring their knowledge, for it is not by the knowledge itself, but by the labour it has cost to get it that men compare themselves with others. Historians, sir, whose work is very laborious and unimaginative, are often insufferably arrogant, and not unfrequently make their books unpalatable, by interlarding them with remarks depreciating other men who have chosen the same field of inquiry. Scholars, who live among the great works of imagination produced in the past are often very cheerful men, witty in themselves and ready to see wit in others.”
“They are witty because they grow imaginative,” said Pascal, “and imagination is the chief source of wit, as fact is the chief source of satire.”
“Is that true?” asked Diana. “I should think satire were merely a form of wit.”
“Satire,” answered Pascal, “is the art of detecting the absence of wit in others, so that one may seem witty by comparison. It is impossible to be satirical unless you have facts to deal with, and facts concerning persons. The most terrible satire upon a liar is the publication of the truth, but unless some one has lied the truth does not seem witty. It is impossible to be satirical in a work of pure fiction, unless the fiction be made the direct means for exposing some existing error or vice. The statement of the truth leaves the liar the alternatives of passing for a scoundrel or for a madman, but it ruins at a blow all the credit of his life and his claim to have any credit in future. Satire is not intended to evoke mirth, but disgust, its object is not to make a man ridiculous for a day, but to destroy belief in him for ever after. That is the reason why, when satire fails, it makes the satirist seem a fool. It is so serious a matter that it involves a question of life or death.”
“And what about parody?” asked Augustus. “It is a kind of satire.”
“A very low kind,” replied Pascal. “Parody of a poem or of a piece of prose, means an imitation of the measure, or of the rise and fall of the sentences, often of the individual phrases, in which meaningless words or contemptible sentiments are substituted for the words and sentiments of the original. Parody may sometimes attract attention and applause, but only when the work parodied is already beneath contempt.”
“Homer,” said Johnson, “composed the lliad, but Pigres wrote the Batrachomyomachia. It may reasonably be supposed that unless the original had been so great, the parody would never have been heard of.
But it required an ingenious fancy to interline the hexameters of Homer with pentameters of Pigres’s own construction.”
“Parody is to satire,” remarked Heine, “as a harmless little house cat is to a young tiger. They are both pretty pets in their way, but you must handle them differently — in the catching.”
“Satire is certainly the dangerous one of the two,” answered Pascal. “Where there is real ground for a satire it is not so very hard to produce, either. Much may be done by holding the object of one’s attack to the absolute meaning of his words. It is very hard to satirise men who deal in very simple, plain language, where each word has but one possible meaning, and by its position stands in a clear and unmistakable relation to the other words. When men write like that it is not even easy to parody their works, because they do not strike anybody as ridiculous. It is not even easy to imitate their style. It is not every man who can write like Cæsar in describing the greatest events. Can you imagine a parody upon Caesar’s Commentaries? There is no hold for ridicule in them. But though Cæsar was never parodied he was satirised more than once, and he admits that the satires were good enough to hurt him.”
“Truly they were,” said Cæsar. “As for my style, I thank you for what you say. I tried to reduce every expression to its simplest form — as you did yourself. The chief element of success in everything is simplicity of thought. The moment you admit complication you destroy force. It is well to remember details, if you can; but it is better to forget them than to let them turn your mind for one moment from your main object. The great man is he who can choose men, for the greatest of men cannot do everything at once. It is ruin to attempt it. A ruler must depend upon his ministers for the details in carrying out his plans, though he may depend upon himself for the plans themselves. In the same way, in writing, a man should be clea
r and strong in his language, if he has anything to say; if he has not, he may divert himself as much as he likes with the elaboration of an artificial style. If he cannot make an impression on his times he may at least hope to amuse his fellow-creatures.”
“That is the rub,” said Heine. “To amuse and to be great at the same time. To be Cæsar, Rabelais, Shakespeare and oneself — one’s one detestable, delectable, contemptible, adorable self at the same moment! That would be a life worth living. Could we not conspire to possess the body of some quiet little gentleman of leisure for a year or two and see what he would do?”
“He would go mad, sir,” said Dr. Johnson.
“If he did he would only be a poet — one might do worse,” answered Heine. “One might be a sane banker. What an awful fate, judging from my uncle!”
“Envy, malice, and all uncharitableness!” muttered Dr. Johnson, rolling his head and poking his stick into the sand.
“Ah, it is easy for you to say that,” exclaimed the poet. “You never had an uncle, and if you had had one he might never have been a banker — and though you are called Samuel, your uncle’s name might not have been Solomon!”
“Sir,” cried the sage, “if your uncle had been Solomon himself, he could not have treated you more wisely. If he had given you money, sir, you would have done nothing that we should care to speak of. There are no more powerful incentives to labour than an empty stomach, a patched coat and cold fingers. You did not indeed suffer those ills in the flesh, but the prospect of being exposed to them stimulated your imagination to produce works of lasting beauty. Bless your Uncle Solomon, sir, for cutting you short. He killed the canker that eats genius.”
“I would have been willing to make nearer acquaintance with the parasite before he was killed,” answered Heine. “But we were talking of being great and amusing. Uncle Solomon was neither, though he was rich. Brevity is the soul of wit, says Polonius — I could almost believe my uncle had been witty, his communications were so very brief. But why is brevity the soul of wit? Is it? Was Polonius talking nonsense, as he often did — or was he right for once?”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 314