accordance with its provisions, as one who disrupts any strong trend of action or thought or feeling, without offering in its place a profound, wise, beautiful, or exciting comment, or idea, or vision of life, or even a sincere and contagious contempt of life. He is a light nut whose thoughts have no momentum. His feelings have no depth. He thinks he can skate like a water-bug with the same silly whims over shallow and deep. And when this habit is thoroughly settled upon him, and we observe that everything which comes under his ken is given a turn supposed to interrupt our contemplation of it with some microscopic pleasure, usually the pleasure of admiring his wits, we call such a person facetious. Those to whom the death penalty may seem a little extreme even for these chronic offenders-those who never despair of reforming their kind— will find a sentence pronounced against one of them by William Shakespeare, which has a remedial appropriateness not common in courts of less poetic justice. He tells him to "Go and jest a twelve-month in a hospital." There, if anywhere, he will learn the simple truth upon which the law he violates was founded. There are moods and passages in this battle of heartbeats in which, although humor may be possible, it is not easy, and for the playful reception of a gratuitous pain we demand with all right and justice a substantial and a quick reward. It is not only because we are practical, and wish to be serious in the pursuit of our happy ends, that we make this demand, but also because we are poetic and desire the privilege of tasting our sorrows. We should not always choose to perceive humorously, even if we could, those pains and sweet losses that belong to us. We have so strong an impulse to experience life that we enjoy suffering. And since the suffering that is caused to us by our own afflictions is too cleaving and shocking to our equilibrium to be always welcome, we turn often to that milder pain which comes to us by sympathy when we behold the misfortunes and the sad expressions of others. We let them bear the organic shock, and also the practical consequences, while we drink off the pure flavor of sorrow. And this experience still more enjoyable when we know that those others are not now alive, or that the misfortunes which give rise to their expressions are only simulated -this experience we call pathos. Pathos is a name for any arrangement of things, deliberate or accidental, which permits the tender and sympathetic enjoyment of sorrow. And because the occasions which permit this enjoyment, the slight remoteness or moderation of the misfortunes involved, are similar to the occasions which produce humorous pleasure, it is the most difficult of all values to defend against "fresh" or flippant jokers. Pathos is impossible to the flippant; in their very presence its color blanches like the petals of a flower in chlorine gas. Both for the purposes of joy and sorrow, therefore, we resist them. But the proximity of humor and pathos, although laying us open to these insipid depredations of the Smart Aleck, offers to the humorist whose jokes are rich and human in their positive values a unique and poignant avenue of art. For his humor is not so far out of key with pathos as to be destroyed by their modulation the one into the other. It is a modulation between serious and playful pain-a thing which seems to enhance, almost as though with a tremor of peril, our enjoyment of them both. I do not know any book in which this experience was ever made more beautiful than it is in "Sentimental Tommy." Tommy ran away, you remember, on that night after the birth of Elspeth-an accident which he had tried so hard but ignominiously failed to prevent. He fell asleep on a distant stair, and woke up in the very early hours of morning, clammy and cold and quaking-"and he was a very little boy, so he ran to his mother. "Such a shabby dark room it was, but it was home, such a weary worn woman in the bed, but he was her son, and she had been wringing her hands because he was so long in coming, and do you think he hurt her when he pressed his head on her poor breast, and do you think she grudged the heat his cold hands drew from her warm face? He squeezed her with a violence that put more heat into her blood than he took out of it. "And he was very considerate, too: not a word of reproach in him, though he knew very well what that bundle in the back of the bed was." Our hearts are quickened by this swift and gentle change, and their smiling laughter shines out both humbled a little and refreshed, like the blossoms in a meadow after the passage of a shower. And they are quickened in the same way when the shower does not pass at all, but the sun just comes and shines incontinently right in the middle of it. It was so when Tommy after a period of selfish hesitation decided to spend the whole of a God-given shilling to buy his destitute and hungry mother a useful present. "He devoted much thought to what she was most in need of, and at last he bought her a colored picture of Lord Byron swimming the Hellespont." That was one of those trembling moments-frequent enough in our own lives too-of which we say, "I did not know whether to laugh or cry!" They reveal to us better than any discourse can what humor is, and why it is. And they give also a kind of poem-portrait of its nature. For there is a tincture of pathos, as well as of comedy, in the very existence of this instinct as a glance in the eyes of any great humorist can tell you. Humor is a most adroit and exquisite device by which our nerves outwit the stings and paltry bitterness of life, but it is after all only a device. It cannot be substituted for life. Like Pagliacci we can only up to a certain point recite our lines in play. The serious purposes of nature throb up into our heads, and we find ourselves living the tragedy to its depth. It is not play. Or if perhaps it is, then the game is too rough for this frail-hearted child of his mother, man, who has strayed into it. His sense of humor is more rich than consolation, but it is not victory. |