HUMOUR AND PAM.
Q OME striking verses in another column on the death of
Artemus Ward, present forcibly the difficulty we are all apt to feel in finding a place for humour and laughter in the world of religious belief. The difficulty naturally springs from the fact that we know God only through the gravest and most reverential side of human nature, and that just as we are always, even in human relations, in earnest when striving to enter into the nature of those who are greatly above us, it is difficult to recognize the pre- sence of the divine will even for a moment, without being filled with the sense of an Infinite failure that banishes all the tendency to mirth. We cannot realize the room for laughter in a world where God 'shall be all in all,' for the same reason for which we should not be able to speculate calmly on the interior con- stitution of the Sun, if we were falling rapidly into it, like those meteoric bodies whose successive collisions with it are described by astronomers. We know God through our conscience only, and the revelation which our conscience has received ; and on that side we know only what fills us indeed with awe and love, but drives out all that sense of measure, all that power of estimating proportion and disproportion on which humour and the power of laughter depend. There is a laughter which is simply happy exultation in the abundance of life, and energy, and that which " maketh glad the heart of man," like the full joyous laughter of children in a summer's day. But this. expression of overflowing sweetness and energy is necessarily felt chiefly by those who have never yet realized how infinitely short they fall of what they feel that God meant them and invited them to be. It is the expression of a state of mind from which all sense of striving and failure and repentance and hope deferred, is absent. And yet it is probably the only sort of laughter which we habitually anticipate for a world in which the half satisfied longings of man might be, sometimes at least, laid to rest, where the wilderness should blossom as the rose, and "instead of the thorn should come up the fir tree, and instead of the briar should come up the myrtle tree, and should be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign, that shall not be cut off." Although the presence of God naturally banishes mirth from those who feel how little like they are to His children, all may, anticipate a time when they might feel in relation to Him what happy children feel here in homes they love. But this is not in any sense laughter such as is excited by the humourist. Nothing is more curious than the variety of feelings which we express by what is in some sense the same commotion of the nerves. The hoarse insolent laughter with which a Lon- don rough sees the painful fall of the child whom he trips up, is not more different from the laughter caused by true humour, than is the laughter caused by true humour from the soft laughter of overflowing happiness. The former,--cruel and wanton laughter, —is of course utterly inconsistent with the conception of life with God, because its essence is moral evil ; and even satire has in it an intellectual preparation of the same poison. But not so the laughter of true humour, which is often richest in the finest and most melancholy natures,—natures never basking like children's in a satisfying sunlight, and yet quite free from any disposition to find enjoyment in the sight of pain. Yet it is not easy to reconcile the full growth even of a kindly humourist's genius, say that of Lamb or Dickens, or lesser men like Artemus Ward, with the conditions of a world in which the great characteristic of our life should be the fuller and ever growing presence of God.
Yet is it at all more difficult than to reconcile a delicate philo, logical, or mathematical, or mechanical, or rhetorical genius with the same absorbing and overmastering thought? It would seem at first that in a world where thought could communicate without language, the peculiar genius which discriminates the shades of ex- pression in language would be wasted ; that in a world where quan- titative measures sink into insignificance beside qualitative testa, the genius of the mathematician mightbe thrown away; that rhetori- cal gifts could scarcely be needful where you could touch directly the chords of the inward life, and that fertility in mechanical con- trivances would not be of the greatest possible use, if the difficulties which mechanical contrivances are needed to overcome no longer exist. Yet we can scarcely doubt that all these intellectual powers represent some discipline in the mind which will remain, even if,—or when,—the special subject-matter on which it has been exercised has disappeared. In all worlds, whether there be languages or not, there must be a language of thought and feeling,—signs of the dif- ference between one state of mind and another, so long as there are different states of mind at all,—that is, so long as there is life, for an unbroken identity of one state of mind would not be life, but death. It is conceivable indeed, nay, probable, that many of the states of mind which we can only have in succession now, owing to the smallness of the area of thought, we may have contem- poraneously in one act of thought in a larger and freer life. In- deed, we must believe that God comprehends an infinite range of houghts and feelings, —which if we could ascribe them at all tofinite beings, we should necessarily spread over an eternal duration,—in every instant of His life, and if we grow, however slowly, towards Him, we must grow in the grasp as well as in the goodness of our natures. Still, whether thoughts and feelings be contemporaneous which are now only successive, or not, they must be distinguished to be apprehended ; and can we doubt that those who have mastered most subtly in this world the delicacies of discrimination between the different modes of expressing human thought here, will not have gained a discipline which will be useful to them there, even in dis- criminating quite different modes of expressing the advancing life of men? And so, even as to rhetoric, or mathematical, or even mechanical science, there must be something gained by every true art and science, some inward sense of harmony, some new reserve of intellectual patience and sagacity, some fresh sympathy with the divine laws of the universe, which will be gain for the other life, no less than this, though it may be the starting-point of a quite new application of it. And is not the same to be said even of the faculty which excites our laughter, the faculty of the humourist ? If we concentrate our thoughts only on the central facts of the spiritual life, all the minutim of that life disappear at once. In prayer we can no more realize the worth of geo- metrical study, or a political campaign, or a delicate literary genius, than we can at one and the same moment concentrate our mind on the greatness of the Heavens, on the sweep of the telescope over innumerable worlds, and also on the minuteness of the life with- in each particle that we put under the object-glass of the microscope. For finite beings there must be one set of attitudes of mind in which we apprehend the central life, the moral and spiritual life which is the key to the universe, and another set of attitudes of mind in which we apprehend the minute details—the relations of those petty facts of life which are the scaffolding on which the moral and spiritual life is built up. But this once admitted, why should .there be anything more inconsistent between the growth of the divine life in us and a keen sense of moral and intellectual disproportions,—which gives humour,—than between the growth of the divine life in us and a keen sense of moral and intellectual proportions, —which gives science and art ? The scientific and the artistic minds naturally bring together the facts and forms which tend to explain, to complete, to set off each other in the most striking light. The mind of the humourist has the same sense of proportion—only in the inverted form of an intense appreciation of the disproportion between those facts and forms which render each other mutually inexplicable, or sometimes incredible. When Charles Lamb saw the widow, whom he took in her first profound grief to a proctor to receive or give instructions as to the probate of her husband's will, smile, in spite of her- self, when his sister tumbled through the proctor's crazy chair, and said, "then I knew she was not inconsolable,"—he expressed that humourist's sense of the moral disproportions of life which really implied the keenest possible feeling for its true propor- tions. He meant that a mind which was enough open to external minutiae to be occupied with little ridiculous events, was not fixed in that single-thoughted stupor which alone presents a hopeless prospect for the future. This keen sense of dispropor- tion between grief and a ludicrous tumble, implied in a high degree at least the keen sense of proportion. No one could feel so keenly the apparent reversal of laws, who had not a fine insight into their natural operation.
But then the difficulty usually occurs in this form :—" Can we conceive any of those whose hearts are in the closest communion with God, deeply imbued with a sense of those small disproportions
which stand outside the intense centre of religious life?" Yes, easily, if we could only conceive a mind altogether large enough to comprehend both the deepest religious life, and the minutest apprehension of those fringes of life which lie outside it in- deed, but still within the range of a character somewhat wider than the human character usually is. Practically th& highest human beings have hitherto been only religious men, with but a comparatively small reserve of force left for any- life outside the religious. And men who, like Shakespeare, have had the largest grasp of life as a whole, have shown a de- ficiency in the intensity of this central fire. But there seems to us absolutely no contradiction between the two. St. Paul at least had a certain acute sense of political tact and skill which- must have almost amounted to humour, and this in connection- with the most intense central fire of religious devotion. Even our Lord used at times a chastened and pathetic irony which implied. a keen feeling of the moral disproportions of human feelings. We have often thought there must have been a sad smile on his face as He said to James and John when they told Him, in- their eagerness to sit on his right and left band, in his kingdom, that they could drink of the cup which He drank of, and be baptized with the baptism with which He was baptized, "Ye shall, indeed, drink of the cup which I shall drink of, and with the baptism with which I am baptized shall ye be baptized, but to sit on my right hand and on my left is not mine to give." No doubt it would have- been fatal to the purpose of our Lord's life to have entered deeply into the petty unmoral side of the life of man which had so much. too high an importance already. But there were the germs of a divine humour even in His manhood, and though the humourist can scarcely be the highest of human characters here, where- life is so petty, and a great development of the marginal elements of character is generally attained at the expense of the central- heat,—we do not see why humour should not have its place in a fuller life, in which it would not displace the moral and spiritual. nature, but serve as its framework and its foil.
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