HUMOUR AND FRIENDSHIP. H OWEVER precious a gift the sense of
humour may be," says " John Oliver Hobbes" in her last novel, "it is a question whether those who possess it love the best or make the truest friends." "Terror of the laugh," she thinks, often forbids confidence, and oftener still a sense of humour " adds an ironical sting to sympathy." Are these things so ? Is the sense of humour really a bar to friendship P If so, it is a curse rather than a gift. But we doubt the premises ; we do not think that it is a bar. Something, of course, depends on what we mean by humour and what we want of friendship. Humour is a difficult quality to define; it is almost impossible to say what is essential to it ; easier perhaps to say what is unessential. Certainly it does not consist in a sharp tongue, nor in the talent of the caricaturist. To be never serious does not make a man humorous, neither does that mixture of sensitiveness and savagery producing a certain sour mental modesty which leads some men not only to hide their own deeper feelings but to be rather shocked by the sight of other people's. Such persons defend themselves and assault their friends with the fiery darts of ridicule, but they are not humorous. Humour is not simply wit and water,—the quality of those who, while they perceive "the lighter relations of words," bare not brains enough to put them into concise form. Humour, according to the dictionary, "differs from wit as being less pmely intellectual, and as having a sympathetic quality, in virtue of which it is often allied to pathos." This is an admirable statement of a difference, but it is not exactly a definition. Two things are, we take it, essential to true humour,—the power to perceive the comedy of life, and that sense of what painters call composition which turns the chaos of circumstance into a succession of pictures. Out of these two things springs a keen sense of proportion, proportion necessitates comparison, and comparison suggests incon- gruity. The attitude of mind we have indicated is, we believe, the humorous attitude, and as such it maintain, advantageous to friendship. For friendship does not consist wholly of love, nor will it flourish exclu- sively upon confidence. We must not, however, make too little of the desire to confide. It is a very strong desire in some natures, and to receive confidence rightly is certainly one of the first duties of a friend. Let us put ourselves in the position of some one who is seized with an irresistible wish to "tell." To whom shall we turn ? Surely not in most cases to a man or woman without humour. Confidence is, of course, an elastic term. We may be seeking sympathy, or desiring absolution, or simply longing to rehearse our woes in detail. In the last case we had better avoid the humourist. He will be bored, and he may show it. On the other band, if we want to confess, we had better steer clear of the person with- out humour. He will be slow to understand, and for that very reason quick to condemn. We shall almost certainly have cause to regret our expansiveness, feeling that, though we could not make him comprehend, we have, alas ! let hint know. Supposing, however, that we want to make a far com- moner confidence, that we want to say that we have been hurt, that some person or some unexpected contrariety has given us a blow which has stunned our sense of proportion altogether, so that we can attend to nothing but our pain, shall we reveal our suffering to the humorous or to the matter-of-fact man ? The latter may very well be sympathetic, especially (our readers must pardon the "bull") if he is a woman, and by the time we have finished our story will probably be as miserable as we are ourselves. We shall go away feeling no better, with no increase of courage, perhaps with a little sense of humiliation at having been openly pitied. If, on the contrary, we go to the humorous friend and tell our story, it may, indeed, lose a little importance in the telling; but is not that, after all, just what we want ? Sympathy allied to humour never cloys. We do not believe in the ironical sting; rather we would say with Barrow: the humorous man "knows bow to season matter otherwise insipid with an unusual, and therefore grateful, tang." He asks no thanks for his offering, and we do not know at the moment that we have accepted anything. We think we have been diverted by a jest, and not till long after will memory reveal to us that our distorted vision was in reality set right by a caress.
While, however, we believe a sense of humour to be all but essential to a thoroughly delightful character, we cannot but admit that it is a good thing of which a man may have too much. Most stimulants and most antiseptics become poisonous in large quantities, and humour should never be allowed to absorb an undue amount of what we may call character-space. Take Miss Austen's Mr. Bennet as an instance of what we mean. Mr. Bennet's sense of burnout. was almost the whole of him, it had entered into his
soul; and though he was fond of Elizabeth, we imagine that an overplus of humour had materially injured his power of affection. He is, however, an extreme instance, which we do not think militates against our argument, for extremes must be compared with extremes, and Mrs. Bennet, who had no sense of the ridiculous at all, was a far more unfriendly person than her husband. The worst that can be said of the sense of humour is that it is sadly liable to parasitic growths of cruelty, which destroy sometimes the sympathy by which in a normal and healthy condition it is accom- panied. Humorous people are almost always dexterous in the use of words, and now and then use them as missiles with dangerous effect. They are not naturally more unkind than their duller neighbours, but when they want to hurt they know how, and do not give themselves a chance to repent of their intention while they search for something to throw. Again, they sometimes yield to the temptation of a verbal practical joke, only second to a real practical joke in its anger-producing power. Its perpetrators do not recognise the enormity of their own conduct because their sally is occasionally well received by its victims. Some men will put up with anything in order to laugh. "Human nature is various," said a former Lord Hertford, and "there is no knowing bow much melted butter any given gentleman will stand in his pocket without quarrelling." There is no doubt that the instinctive judgment of cultivated man has given a sense of humour a very high place among desirable qualities. Everybody covets it, almost no one admits that he is without it. The present writer cannot remember ever to have known more than one man who believed himself destitute of humour, and he, oddly enough, had a good deal. The world is prone to take people at their own valuation, and all sorts of opposite qualities are mistaken by their possessors for humour from sheer brutality to that delicate perception of, and delight in, the happiness of others which creates, especially in the mind of a woman, a confusion between cheerfulness and comedy.
What it seems to us that "John Oliver Hobbes" ignores when she writes of humour and friendship is the element of com- panionableness which is almost necessary to the latter. We cannot define a friend, but "he loveth at all times," not only in fair weather, and not only in foul. There are some people who have no sympathy except for suffering ; they are often very good people, but they are not fitted by nature to be friends. We all value them immensely at a pinch, but luckily life is not made up entirely of pinches. We may owe them eternal gratitude, but we cannot desire their constant society. To have some one of whom we can say, "I will tell So-and- so; he will be sorry," is to have a friend in need, even if he forgets us in our intervals of happiness ; but if we are to have a friend indeed we must be able to say also, "I will tell So-and-so ; he will be amused." Such a friend is always with us, even if he sojourns in another country, bound to our hearts by the thousand threads of circumstance. Two little streams of hearing and telling keep fresh the fields of every day and prevent the arid monotony of the weeks, months, and years. If these streams contain no humour, their waters seldom remain healthy. The analyst will find them full of gossip and spite and morbid growths of hatred and offence. There is only one substitute for humour as an antiseptic, and that is perpetual earnestness ; and this, we must admit, while it keeps the waters of friendship pure, is apt to give them a flat taste. Should the sense of humour be dignified by the name of a virtue ? We are inclined to think that it should, in that it makes for justice, courage, and good-fellowship. But it differs from all other good qualities in two particulars : it is the only one excessive indulgence in which is morally dangerous, and after which no man who is without it should ever strive.
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