Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays — Story, Setting & Ideas

said of one of his acquaintances, "The man is really cracked; but I will confess that he has lucid intervals when he is only foolish." This was the same person whom Heine had in his mind when he said to a caller, "My head to-day is perfectly barren, and you will find me stupid enough; for a friend has been here, and we exchanged ideas."

The old age of Lamartine exhibited a painful decline of his truly great qualities, and an exaggeration of his foibles. A French paper concluded his obituary with the remark, "He has ceased to survive himself."

These are caustic specimens; but the last one contains a high per cent of pleasure, because we are left uncertain whether it was a serious case of wit. But none of them can scald as Douglas Jerrold did, when, meeting a man who was such an abject toady that if his friend Jones had the influenza he would contrive to get up a cold, Jerrold said to him, "Have you heard the rumor that is flying around town?" "No." "Well, they say that Jones pays the dog-tax for you."

That is bitter. But when one gentleman during a supper of sheep's heads throws down his knife and fork in rapture, and exclaims, "Well, sheep's heads for ever, say I," and Douglas Jerrold remarks, "There's egotism," we have a point tempered in the flame of fun. So, too, when a member of his club, hearing an air mentioned, said, "That always carries me away when I hear it," Jerrold, merely to seize an opportunity, said, "Then can nobody whistle it?" This kind of wit easily rankles, if there be a drop or two of suspicion in our veins; for there is nothing in the tone to announce its discrimination from ill-nature. For instance: Sheridan, soliciting the votes of the shoemakers of Stafford, exclaimed, "May the trade of Stafford be trampled under foot of all the world!" and mortally offended them.

We should like to know how the French attaché felt who, being at a soirée just after the dubious affair of the annexation of Nice and Savoy to France, met Lord Houghton, as he went towards the supper-room, and said, "_Je vais prendre quelque chose!_" "_Vous avez raison_," was the reply; "_c'est l'habitude de votre pays_."

But the French abound in the kind of wit which penetrates like a colorless North light, and sets a contrast in clearness, so that we admire its outlines, scarcely smiling; as when Hippolyte Taine said, "An Englishman would be exceedingly mortified if he had no faith in another life." When the Duke de Choiseul, who was a remarkably lean man, came to London to negotiate a peace, Charles Townsend, being asked whether the French Government had sent the preliminaries of a treaty, answered that he did not know, but they had sent the outline of an ambassador. This preserves the French flavor, which we recognize, for instance, in Ninon de l'Enclos, who, being asked one day by a Parisian lady whether she believed that St. Denys walked _all_ the way to Paris with his head under his arm, replied, "_Pourquoi pas, Mademoiselle? ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte._"

The best repartee must subsidize the pleasure of wit. When M. Scribe replied to the millionnaire who wanted him to lend the use of his genius for a consideration, that it was contrary to Scripture for a horse and an ass to plough together, the man instantly parried the snub by saying, "By what right do you call me a horse?"

Among the announcements in a French paper, we find that "a young man about to marry wants to meet a man of experience who will dissuade him." So Abraham Lincoln thought he would not marry, because "I can never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have me."

Perhaps the purest instance of thoroughly French wit is to be credited to Mr. Emerson. An amiable rustic once heard him lecture, but could make nothing of it. Turning to a friend, he said, "Darn it! I'd like to know what Emerson thinks about God. I bet I'll ask him." He did, when Mr. Emerson came down the aisle. "God," replied he, "is the _x_ of algebra,"--that is, the unknown quantity in every problem. Nothing could be more admirable.

Mr. Beecher affirms that "it is impossible to discriminate between the wit that produces only pleasure of thought and that which produces pleasure of laughter." It does not seem to me so hopeless a task to discriminate between the two kinds of wit. Where reflection predominates, and the act of wit approaches the statement of a truth, so that the surprise does not borrow any tinge from any human sentiment, the pleasure will be inaudible; and, if we produce a smile at all, it will be where the German constructed the idea of a camel,--in the depths of his consciousness; as when Voltaire said of the priests of his time, "Our credulity makes all their knowledge." But when an American poet, whose Pegasus had stepped upon his foot, said, "What a pity it is! my grandfather left to me his gout, and nothing in the cellar to keep it up with," a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind; it is so incongruously human to nurse our own infirmities.

So when Frederic the Great said spitefully to Minister Elliot, on occasion of the Te Deums over the reverses of Hyder Ali in India, "I never knew that Providence was one of your allies," and Elliot replied, "The only one, sire, whom we do not pay," both the remark and the retort involve the mind in a momentary adjustment of its ideas to the new suggestion; and the wit is thus restrained from sallying into laughter. We have to reflect that Elliot's repartee is a hit at all subsidized powers, including Prussia, and also at his own nation for its trick of futile gratitude and ascription of praise. But if any movement of sympathy prevents the act of wit from settling upon the internal organs, and bids it escape by every pore, we feel the dew of laughter on the face; as when Falstaff whimsically apologizes for himself, "Thou knowest, in the state of innocency, Adam fell; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do, in the days of villany?"--or when, at a meeting in London to hear a report from some missionaries who had been sent to discover the lost tribes of Israel, the chairman opened the business by saying, "I take a great interest in your researches, gentlemen. The fact is, I have borrowed money from all the Jews now known; and, if you can find a new set, you'll do me a favor."

It is witty when the author of the "Maid of Sker," describing a dinner, makes the mouth water with smiles when he particularizes "a little pig for roasting, too young to object to it, yet with his character formed enough to make his brains delicious."

Wit can depend, like punning, upon the felicitous use of some well-known verse or sentiment, which suddenly is made to adapt itself to a new idea; as when Henry Clapp, speaking of an intolerable bore, inverted the famous sentence which is associated with Shakspeare, and said, "He is not for a time, but for all day."

In the same vein, on the strength of Laurence Sterne's[2] assertion that "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," a Boston wit, finding himself in the powerful blast which sweeps across the Common and makes a tunnel of Winter Street, remarked that he wished there was a shorn lamb tied at the head of that street.

Walter Scott tells an anecdote of the same special character. "So deep was the thirst of vengeance impressed on the minds of the Highlanders that, when a clergyman informed a dying chief of the unlawfulness of the sentiment, urged the necessity of forgiving an inveterate enemy, and quoted, 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,' the acquiescing penitent said, with a deep sigh, 'To be sure! it is too sweet a morsel for a mortal.'"

Wit can be blundered into as well as a pun. The unmerited praise of it can be earned by mental awkwardness and want of tact. A widower, who had loved a lady previous to his marriage to another, approached his first love after the death of his wife, and sought to renew the old attachment. After he had made his offer, at a juncture more critical than the turning-point of Waterloo, he was permitted to add, "And I know that all my children will follow you to the grave with the same affection that they showed when their mother died." This is certainly the _pallida mors_ of Horace beating _æquo pede_ at the door.

Wit can also be enhanced by a droll incompetence of understanding on the part of the listener. Sydney Smith, complaining of the heat, told a lady that he wished he could take off his flesh and sit in his bones. The wit consists in extending the congruity of taking clothes off to the flesh, and there is an electric instant of mental possibility. But it is enhanced to us when we recollect the shocked and puzzled look of the lady, who saw only an indelicacy in a remark which was really delicate to the pitch of ghastliness,--stripped, in fact, of every rag of that most indelicate of all things, prudery. Thus the raillery of Falstaff owes half its excellence to Dame Quickly's consistent misinterpretation, for this reflects back upon it the color of wit. She is a duenna who blunders into being a go-between and making a capital match. "Go to! you are a woman: go." "Who, I? No! I defy thee. God's light! I was never called so in mine own house before." "You are a thing to thank God on." "I am no thing to thank God on, I would thou should'st know it." And the grim irony of Hamlet, who, after killing Polonius, replies to the king that the old man is at supper, has grown upon us through the slow perception of the courtiers, who know he is killed as well as we do, and have been sent to find the body, but cannot take the point of Hamlet's answers.

In a play of Douglas Jerrold, an old sailor gets a box on the ear while trying to snatch a kiss. "There," cries he, "like my luck! always wrecked on the coral reefs." When the manager heard the play read he could not see the point, and increased the wit for us by making Jerrold strike it out.

Perhaps the best modern instance of this kind is the colossal stupidity of some foreign critics, who gave such an exquisite flavor to Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" by blaming his ignorance and misapprehension of places, pictures, and traditions.

The Beaufort negroes are unconsciously witty when, perceiving that an idea is dawning upon them, they say they feel their head "growing thinner." A premium for involuntary wit must be conferred upon the old lady in New Bedford, who heard about the cheapness of the manufactured oils and the great increase in the use of them, which threatened to drive sperm-oil out of the market: "Dear me, the poor whales! What will they do?"

There must also be complete unconsciousness in the perpetrator of a bull. "The pleasure," says Sydney Smith, "arising from bulls proceeds from our surprise at suddenly discovering two things to be dissimilar in which a resemblance might have been suspected;" but ordinary wit creates a sudden surprise at a resemblance which could not have been suspected between two things. Perhaps the best bull was practically perpetrated by the old lady in Middlebury, Wis., who crossed over a bridge that was marked "Dangerous" without seeing the sign. On being informed of the fact on the other side, she instantly turned in great alarm and re-crossed it.

The wit which produces laughter cannot be analyzed without a mental process: but that is an after-thought and laughter anticipates it; as when Mark Twain, writing upon Franklin, says, "He was twins, having been born simultaneously in two houses in Boston." There is an unconscious organic assumption that both houses, since people insist upon both, must have been the spots of his birth. If so, the births in two houses must have been simultaneous, but the two Franklins not identical. Of course, then, they must have been twins. At least, this is the best that can be done with the historical material. But I am reminded of a famous wit, who, after viewing the Siamese Twins for a while, quietly remarked, "Brothers, I suppose."

If wit ever unmasks a moral feeling it performs its noblest function and imparts a complicated pleasure; as when Abraham Lincoln, in defending a fugitive slave before a court, said, "It is singular that the courts will hold that a man never loses his right to his property that has been stolen from him, but that he instantly lost the right to himself if he was stolen."

When wit creates a temporary congruity between an idea and an object which are essentially incongruous on all points, the shock dissolves in pleasure, because the oppressiveness of life results from its ideas; and yet one of them opens to us an escape from it. We find a way of eluding for a moment a task-master, and it makes us smile. It is not a moral revolt, for that would be a deepening of the seriousness till it became too pathetic; but it is a momentary beguilement, and we are cheated into the presumption that there is no care in the world. We return to the care refreshed by this electric bath of wit, which has a tonic quality and saves us from despair.

[Footnote 1: Ninth Eclogue of Virgil, 28th line.]

[Footnote 2: Sterne may have picked up this sentiment during his journey in France, when the donkey was bewept. At any rate, it is found in literature as early as 1594, when Henri Estienne wrote his "Prémices:" "_Dieu mesure le froid à la brebis tondue._"]

The similes of poetry which select natural objects and fit human thoughts and emotions to them have the movement which belongs to wit. They suddenly take things which we have been in the habit of seeing all our lives without after-thought, just as we see a brick or a house; but, when thus taken, they become involved in sentiments which are also customary, and indulged by us without after-thought. We are surprised and charmed to notice what an apt comradeship springs up between the object and the sentiment.

"Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy."

Constantinople may be seen any day from the Bosphorus, stretching its length of domes and minarets across the sunset; but when Mr. Browning observes it he says it runs black and crooked athwart the splendor, "like a Turk verse along a scimitar." There occurs a moment of surprise; a lively shock is given to the mind, which would liberate itself into the smile of wit if we were not instantly conscious that the sudden aptness is also beautiful. All pure wit is born in the imagination, but only in that capability of it to see one point where two incongruous things may meet. But the poetic simile involves more than that: it is born of the inmost vitality which must overflow, spill itself upon Nature, appropriate her, senseless as she may seem and incapable of reflecting our subtilties of mind and heart. Often there is something very noble and tender in this process of imagination, which converts surprise into emotion: as when Coleridge says,--

"Methinks it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled; Where the breeze warbles, and the mute, still air Is music slumbering in her instrument."

This innate nobleness of the simile checks our smile, and if we feel any hilarity it belongs to that delighted health which mantles all through us when we recognize beauty. Perhaps the mind soared,

"By means of that mere snatch, to many a hoard Of fancies: as some falling cone bears soft The eye, along the fir-tree spire, aloft To a dove's nest."

The simile gives us such a new perception of the mysterious relations of mind and Nature that we should not be surprised if the object designated had really, in the great involvement of all things, some secret affinity with the thought; perhaps the thought has recognized the family mark and claimed kinship. This is an exalted claim because it sets free our personality. We become superior to Nature, and are made aware that we can vivify her as the Creator can; but, as we also are creatures, we admit her to a tender and refining confidence. "Daffodils, that come before the swallow dares," "take the winds of March with beauty."

"The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth, And the earth changes like a human face." "Earth is a wintry clod, But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes Over its breast to waken it." "The winds Are henceforth voices, in a wail or shout, A querulous mutter, or a quick, gay laugh,-- Never a senseless gust now man is born."

The imagination thus proclaiming the banns between spirit and matter reminds us of Wordsworth's dear maiden, of whom he says,--

"She was known to every star in heaven, And every wind that blew."

The impression of surprise which a perfect simile produces is transferred from the understanding back to the imagination before the former can venture to be amused. But sometimes the surprise lingers there long enough to have a narrow escape from smiling; as when Sir Thomas Brown, finding that midnight has overtaken him at his desk, says, "To keep our eyes open longer, were to _act_ the antipodes." His wakefulness is not only like the antipodal day, but dramatizes it; and this is a simile that imparts the shock of wit.

Here is one from Shakspeare that approaches it, but is intercepted by a sense of beauty:--

"These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die; like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume."

And he says that, when the people saw Anne Boleyn at her coronation, such a noise arose "as the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest." Mr. Browning makes us smile when he paints the "poppy's red effrontery--till autumn spoils their fleering quite with rain,"

"And, turbanless, a coarse, brown, rattling crane Protrudes."

This reminds me that in the West a bald man's head is spoken of as rising above the timber-line; which is quite in the style of American similes, as when Rufus Choate, who so frequently appeared to be saying to his jury, "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now," was described to be a man who always bored for water.

Charles Lamb commenting upon the following line from Davenport's King John and Matilda,--

"And thou, Fitzwater, reflect upon thy _name_, And turn the _Son of Tears_,"--

says, "Fitzwater: son of water." A striking instance of the compatibility of the _serious pun_ with the expression of the profoundest sorrows. Grief as well as joy finds ease in thus playing with a word. Old John of Gaunt in Shakspeare thus descants on his name: "Gaunt, and gaunt, indeed;" to a long string of conceits which no one has ever yet felt to be ridiculous. The poet Wither, thus, in a mournful review of the declining estate of his family, says with deepest nature,--

"'The very name of Wither shows decay.'"

But, in the following passage from John Fletcher's "Bonduca," pure poetry checks the laugh,--

"I have seen these Britons that you magnify Run as they would have outrun time, and roaring, Basely for mercy, roaring; the light shadows, That in a thought scur o'er the fields of corn, Halted on crutches to them."

That is in the finest style of an exaggeration which has been inherited by Americans and is the source of much of their wit and humor. Here is a coarser specimen, but perfectly witty. A person, remarking to a famous criminal lawyer that his client would certainly go to hell, had for a reply, "Go to hell! he ought to be thankful that there is a hell he _can_ go to."

This characteristic will recur under the head of Falstaff.