Part 3 (1/2)
Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall, May man undam you and G.o.d d.a.m.n you all.
Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
With them, as Juvenal said of himself, ”facit indignatio versus,” and wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a place ”ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat,” and this hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is certainly humor in ”Gulliver,” especially in the chapters about the Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him rather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an example from the ”Day of Judgment”:
With a whirl of thought oppressed I sank from reverie to rest, A horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead!
Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies, And thunder roars, and lightning flies!
Amazed, confused, its fate unknown, The world stands trembling at his throne!
While each pale sinner hung his head, Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said: ”Offending race of human kind; By nature, reason, learning, blind, You who through frailty stepped aside.
And you who never fell through pride, You who in different sects were shammed, And come to see each other d.a.m.ned (So some folks told you--but they knew No more of Jove's designs than you)-- The world's mad business now is o'er, And I resent these pranks no more-- I to such blockheads set my wit!
I d.a.m.n such fools! Go, go! you're bit!”
The unexpectedness of the conclusion here, after the somewhat solemn preface, is entirely of the essence of wit. So, too, is the sudden flirt of the scorpion's tail to sting you. It is almost the opposite of humor in one respect--namely, that it would make us think the solemnest things in life were sham, whereas it is the sham-solemn ones which humor delights in exposing. This further difference is also true: that wit makes you laugh once, and loses some of its comicality (though none of its point) with every new reading, while humor grows droller and droller the oftener we read it. If we cannot safely deny that Swift was a humorist, we may at least say that he was one in whom humor had gone through the stage of acetous fermentation and become rancid. We should never forget that he died mad. Satirists of this kind, while they have this quality of true humor, that they contrast a higher with a lower, differ from their n.o.bler brethren inasmuch as their comparison is always to the disadvantage of the higher. They purposely disenchant us--while the others rather show us how sad a thing it is to be disenchanted at all.
Ben Jonson, who had in respect of st.u.r.dy good sense very much the same sort of mind as his name-sake Samuel, and whose ”Discoveries,” as he calls them, are well worth reading for the sound criticism they contain, says:
The parts of a comedy are the same with [those of] a tragedy, and the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach: the comics are called _didaskaloi_[1] of the Greeks, no less than the tragics. Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy; that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling.
For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's nature without a disease. As a wry face moves laughter, or a deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise man. So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.
[Footnote 1: Teachers.]
He then goes on to say of Aristophanes that
he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous, oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter with that beast the mult.i.tude. They love nothing that is right and proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them the better it is.
In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a little bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructed according to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault in comedy. I like the pa.s.sage as an ill.u.s.tration of a fact undeniably true, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon the stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than as movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in limbo, qualifies him with the t.i.tle of _satiro_.
But if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?
Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor? Yes; but, as it appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree, from any other ancient. I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends, but for the fun of the thing. I am so poor a Grecian that I have no doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. But even through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out more or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was a master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands--puts forth buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.
Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true flavor of Falstaff in him--”a million a minute and your expenses paid.”
As Burns said of himself, ”The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file.” Now they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the circus, with a ”Here we are!” I can think of nothing like it but Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the _go_ out of words. They do not merely play with words; they romp with them, tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.
I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in ”The Clouds” or ”The Birds,” but neither of them seems so rich to me as ”The Frogs,” nor does the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he has nothing like the scene in ”The Frogs,” where Bacchus is terrified with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries, and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess, the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the ideal G.o.d and the G.o.d with human weaknesses and follies as he had been degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet saw in Tartary?
Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on the same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, the greatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not,--and I am inclined to believe he did,--he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human character--the imagination and understanding. There is a great deal more than this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book is often little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested. The plot is of the meagrest. A country gentleman of La Mancha, living very much by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances of chivalry, becomes at last the victim of a monomania on this one subject, and resolves to revive the order of chivalry in his own proper person.
He persuades a somewhat prosaic neighbor of his to accompany him as squire. They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting.
Now if this were all of ”Don Quixote,” it would be simply broad farce, as it becomes in Butler's parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far as mere external characteristics are concerned. The latter knight and his squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficient reason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that they furnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom. They represent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing.
I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfect character ever drawn. As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense, always a gentleman,--that is, as he is guilty of no crime that is technically held to operate in defeasance of his t.i.tle to that name as a man of the world,--so is Don Quixote, in everything that does not concern his monomania, a perfect gentleman and a good Christian besides.
He is not the merely technical gentleman of three descents--but the _true_ gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness, generosity, and fear of G.o.d can make. And with what consummate skill are the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's treatment of him in the second part--which followed the other after an interval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they delude themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castle are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.