BOOKS
No Laughing Matter
By KINGSLEY AMIS there anyone to touch him, it appears, at churning out 'perfect' writer. and—almost equally creditable in my own view—has fic'ing to tell me about the Health of Authors, Tennyson's Two prose. (Mr. Angus Wilson. I see, has dubbed it 'nearly perfect' Instead, which makes me laugh a fair-amount.) But I reflected that Sir Harold has often been on the point of relinquishing nrbanity and perfection in the interests of being a really funny been effectively nasty about Jane Austen. So when I saw that ',If Harold was going to tell me about the English Sense of Humour, his discussion of which is merely a sixty-page title- P!ece. Then, when I gave the Humour thing the reviewer's. IWAS really looking forward to getting my hands on this Ilumour, I was naturally all agog.
Nature in Greek Poetry as well as about the English Sense of (IV-through, that half-minute process which sets phlegm. Alexander the Great (reprinted from Life magazine) and rothers.Swinburne and Baudelaire,the Practice of Biography, MY spirits went down a point or two when I saw that he was 'urbane' by reviewers than Sir Harold Nicolson, nor is one.* Admittedly, no writer is more often stigmatised as this and melancholy at war With pne another, I realised that Lillis was not the short anthology-with-commentary I had been half-consciously looking forward to, but a sober, erudite and generalising thesis with a trio of instances thrown in at the end. I may as well discuss these instances straight away.
First came Punch. Disillusionments were crowding upon me unregenerate and the next one was that I was being told about the old rregenerate Punch that people were supposed to read at the eta fist's. Sir Harold, it was now clear, had reprinted without evident revision his essay of 1946, only available formerly in a Wren. , nigh irreducibly limited edition. 1 should like him to have t,Kn time off from reviewing a travel-book, or perhaps a biography, to bring this essay up to date, for the contrast' between Punch in its years of collective leadership and Punch ,t1 the grip of the cult of personality is promising material. As ■ !t.is. the periodical is briefly saluted, in the idiom of what dInIght be called copywriter's domestic, as 'a welcome Wednes- ,4,3! visitor in countless English homes.' and then its former attitudes are rehearsed in tabular form. Much of this—'Punch forS always pleased his readers by deriding intellectuals,' or are represented as volatile, boastful, frivolous and liti,sturdy'—strikes me as more familiar from what people have ,said about Punch than from any remembered perusal of its ,Iges. and although there are post-war references a great deal "ref that Sir Harold says applies chiefly,' I feel, to the still more w r). te Punch of his earlier years. Anyway: was dentist's- tear;t11.1g-room Punch ever funny? Never mind, it was charac- -stic of the English sense of humour. There is an unstated e,Yage here which elsewhere yawns widely. 'Next came Edward Lear and C. L. Dodgson Dodgson is I5 HI; L.NGLI511SLNSI: UI. Flumuutt, By Hatold packed off in short order after it has been divulged that he wrote under the pseudonym of 'Lewis Carroll,' but Lear is detained for admiring inspection. Now it is better for me just to say that 'I do not like' Lear than to take up space by rationalising. Nobody who thinks, as I do, that coming to the last line of a Lear limerick resembles finding there is no more sausage in the butt of a sausage-roll, is going to get a hearing from those who would reject this analogy. I would not deny that Lear's pobbles and jumblies, even his young persons of Smyrna and elsewhere, can have a sort of thin and wan poetry about them, but I do feel that the Lear-cult is a prime example of that dismaying streak of whimsy which has cluttered up English humour ever since the days of—the old horror I will deal with in a minute. Anyway : was Lear funny? And was Sir Harold's third instance, about which I should prefer not to speak—was Irma funny? Ah, but the English sense of humour. . . .
* * *
Early in his essay Sir Harold remarks, rather debatably. that his purpose requires him to examine 'the nature of laughter and the main theories which have been advanced as explanations of the laughable.' He takes some time over the subsequent philosophisings, which, though commendably free from facetiousness, would, I think, have been better handled by a philosopher. Then he begins to pull together his portrait of the ideal or quintessential English sense of humour. In doing so he falls into the trap that awaits all amateur framers of definitions, that of producing an unsatisfactory one. Sir Harold's is unsatisfactory by being over-exclusive : irony. especially 'English proletarian irony,' is not to be allowed into the club. This manoeuvre ignores usage, for insensitivity to irony, or to the ironical attitude, is what we most often refer to when we say that a man has no sense of humour. Sir Harold is con' structing, not analysing. But this is a valid enough activity. The interesting thing is what, or who, his ideal portrait is a portrait of.
As I read through the list of 'the specific components of the English sense of humour' (for about the eighth time, since I am not as quick at these things as some of my colleagues) an image began to form in my mind. 'Kindliness; sentimentality, and pathos; a common basis of sense and tradition; fancy. • • • Yes, the features were emerging. 'Childishness self• protection against the unfamiliar . . . laughing at erudition and scholarship . . . nonsense . . . the desire for pleasant' ness.' Of course! Elia, the old horror! And then, quite excited by now, I turned up Mr. Stephen Potter's remarks in Sense of Humour on the first completely conscious humorist, the first real English Sense of Humour man, Charles Lamb. The delicate and separate flame of Charles Lamb is indistinct now in the bar' light of a thousand Lamb imitators. Yet to what extent the idea of humorousness is tinged by his influence is obvious when we reflect that even now traits of Lamb which are not themselves necessarily humorous at all, such as a more (,)I. less pleasingly sentimental attitude to children, or a perfectl, serious treatment of a trivial subject, or puns, are regarded as a kind of necessary accompaniment to humour, which nicely reinforces my point about the funniness of Sir Harold's instances. However : the delicate flame of Charles Lamb has never warmed me, but Mr. Potter is right about the imitators. I remember them at school from two little books called Essays by Modern Masters and More Essays by Modern Masters: Belloc, Chesterton, Robert Lynd, Mr. Priestley and A. A. Milne, the last of whom Sir Harold does mention, though oddly enough without anywhere mentioning Lamb himself. The subjective essay was, indeed, the chosen vehicle of the English sense of humour in this aspect, and its virtual disappearance has coincided with a greatly diminished incidence of the vein of sub-Elian whimsy which it nourished. This decline has often cheered me, but I should be unfair to Sir Harold if I omitted to mention the skill with which he has isolated this ingredient in certain English attitudes.
The figure of Lamb casts its shadow over other parts of this book. Lamb, as Mr. Potter has pointed out elsewhere, was influential in the formation of the Eng. Lit. man, the humane; sensitive academic who has been pretty well booted out 01 Cambridge, but who still manages to cling on here and there, in Oxford. One of his leading characteristics is a stoical refusal to be intimidated by the obvious. Ten years ago, at any rate! it was still possible to announce in an Oxford lecture that,. Wordsworth got away from that old poetic diction, that Dickens was 'in some sort' a caricaturist, that Pope and SO!' were friends, without getting a laugh. And here we find Sit Harold announcing that a biographer does well to know sonic: thing about his subject, to refrain from preaching, to use tact . and skill. 'He should constantly remind himself that it is not an autobiography he is composing, but a life of someone else.. Well, whatever next ! Sir Harold often reviews the odd biography, when he is not reviewing a travel-book, and 1 can: not help thinking that he must know more about the subject than he has chosen to confide to us here. But his motto, I am afraid, is one that might stand equally well at the head of an , essay of Elia or the published lectures of some superannuated Oxonian. though actually it comes in his own essay on TenuYi; son's brothers : 'There are few pastimes more agreeable than that of strolling through the byways of literature.' Fair enough; but even a stroll should lead somewhere.
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