FullReads

Another gloomy indication of the departure of humor from our midst is the tendency of philosophical writers to prove by analysis that, if they are not familiar with the thing itself, they at least know of what it should consist. Mr. Shorthouse’s depressing views about “Don Quixote” are merely introduced as illustrating a very scholarly and comfortless paper on the subtle qualities of mirth. No one could deal more gracefully and less humorously with his topic than does Mr. Shorthouse, and we are compelled to pause every now and then and reassure ourselves as to the subject matter of his eloquence. Professor Everett has more recently and more cheerfully defined for us the Philosophy of the Comic, in a way which, if it does not add to our gaiety, cannot be accused of plunging us deliberately into gloom. He thinks, indeed–and small wonder–that there is “a genuine difficulty in distinguishing between the comic and the tragic,” and that what we need is some formula which shall accurately interpret the precise qualities of each, and he is disposed to illustrate his theory by dwelling on the tragic side of Falstaff, which is, of all injuries, the grimmest and hardest to forgive. Falstaff is now the forlorn hope of those who love to laugh, and when he is taken away from us, as soon, alas! he will be, and sleeps with Don Quixote in the “dull cold marble” of an orthodox sobriety, how shall we make merry our souls? Mr. George Radford, who enriched the first volume of “Obiter dicta” with such a loving study of the fat-witted old knight, tells us reassuringly that by laughter man is distinguished from the beasts, though the cares and sorrows of life have all but deprived him of this elevating grace and degraded him into a brutal solemnity. Then comes along a rare genius like Falstaff, who restores the power of laughter, and transforms the stolid brute once more into a man, and who accordingly has the highest claim to our grateful and affectionate regard. That there are those who persist in looking upon him as a selfish and worthless fellow is, from Mr. Radford’s point of view, a sorrowful instance of human thanklessness and perversity. But this I take to be the enamored and exaggerated language of a too faithful partizan. Morally speaking, Falstaff has not a leg to stand upon, and there is a tragic element lurking always amid the fun. But, seen in the broad sunlight of his transcendent humor, this shadow is as the halfpennyworth of bread to his own noble ocean of sack, and why should we be forever trying to force it into prominence? When Charlotte Bronte advised her friend Ellen Nussey to read none of Shakespeare’s comedies, she was not beguiled for a moment into regarding them as serious and melancholy lessons of life; but with uncompromising directness put them down as mere improper plays, the amusing qualities of which were insufficient to excuse their coarseness, and which were manifestly unfit for the “gentle Ellen’s” eyes.

In fact, humor would at all times have been the poorest excuse to offer to Miss Bronte for any form of moral dereliction, for it was the one quality she lacked herself and failed to tolerate in others. Sam Weller was apparently as obnoxious to her as was Falstaff, for she would not even consent to meet Dickens when she was being lionized in London society–a degree of abstemiousness on her part which it is disheartening to contemplate. It does not seem too much to say that every shortcoming in Charlotte Bronte’s admirable work, every limitation in her splendid genius, arose primarily from her want of humor. Her severities of judgment–and who more severe than she?–were due to the same melancholy cause; for humor is the kindliest thing alive. Compare the harshness with which she handles her hapless curates and the comparative crudity of her treatment, with the surprising lightness of Miss Austen’s touch as she rounds and completes her immortal clerical portraits. Miss Bronte tells us, in one of her letters, that she regarded all curates as “highly uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex,” just as she found all the Belgian schoolgirls “cold, selfish, animal and inferior.” But to Miss Austen’s keen and friendly eye the narrowest of clergymen was not wholly uninteresting, the most inferior of schoolgirls not without some claim to our consideration; even the coarseness of the male sex was far from vexing her maidenly serenity, probably because she was unacquainted with the Rochester type. Mr. Elton is certainly narrow, Mary Bennet extremely inferior; but their authoress only laughs at them softly, with a quiet tolerance and a good-natured sense of amusement at their follies. It was little wonder that Charlotte Bronte, who had at all times the courage of her convictions, could not and would not read Jane Austen’s novels. “They have not got story enough for me,” she boldly affirmed. “I don’t want my blood curdled, but I like to have it stirred. Miss Austen strikes me as milk-and-watery and, to say truth, dull.” Of course she did! How was a woman, whose ideas of after-dinner conversation are embodied in the amazing language of Baroness Ingram and her titled friends to appreciate the delicious, sleepy small-talk in “Sense and Sensibility,” about the respective heights of the respective grandchildren? It is to Miss Bronte’s abiding lack of humor that we owe such stately caricatures as Blanche Ingram and all the high-born, ill-bred company who gather in Thornfield Hall, like a group fresh from Madame Tussaud’s ingenious workshop, and against whose waxen unreality Jane Eyre and Rochester, alive to their very finger-tips, contrast like twin sparks of fire. It was her lack of humor, too, which beguiled her into asserting that the forty “wicked, sophistical and immoral French novels” which found their way down to lonely Haworth gave her “a thorough idea of France and Paris”–alas! poor, misjudged France!–and which made her think Thackeray very nearly as wicked, sophistical and immoral as the French novels. Even her dislike for children was probably due to the same irremediable misfortune; for the humors of children are the only redeeming points amid their general naughtiness and vexing misbehavior. Mr. Swinburne, guiltless himself of any jocose tendencies, has made the unique discovery that Charlotte Bronte strongly resembles Cervantes, and that Paul Emanuel is a modern counterpart of Don Quixote; and well it is for our poet that the irascible little professor never heard him hint at such a similarity. Surely, to use one of Mr. Swinburne’s own incomparable expressions, the parallel is no better than a “subsimious absurdity.”