Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 205, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1916 — POWER OF THE HUMORIST [ARTICLE]

POWER OF THE HUMORIST

Tircentenary of Cervantes Recalls t# Reader* of Hietory Memory of Other Satirist*. The British are not the only people who this yeur may celebrate the tercentenary of a great writer. Madrid is erecting a monument to the author of “Don Quixote.” Cervantes was more than a man of letters; he wus more than a great humorist; he was an epoch. Master of ridicule, he laughed the defunct age of chivalry out of existence. People often forget the social function of the humorist, a New York. Tribune writer states. He restores sanity. He clears the atmosphere of extravagance and humbug. Bergson says that luughter has “survival value” as a corrective of social abuses. Certainly some of the world’s most effective reformers have been its masters of ridicule and satire. There are humorists, like Mark Twain, in whose laughter there is no sting, and there have been bitter satirists, like Jonathan Swift and La Rochefoucauld, who have simply mocked the “all too humanness” of mankind at Its noblest. But in almost every age there has been some bold nonconformist spirit whose laughter in the face of some •Wadltlonal scarecrow has ended the tyranny of a truth which had outlived its usefulness and become a lie. Knighthood in the days of Chaucer had still its noble aspects, but knighthood after Cervantes wrote “Don Quixote" could never quite escape a touch of the burlesque. Therefore, men turned to less antiquated and morn real avenues of human service. Similarly, the laughter of Aristophanes wrought confusion among the ancient Greek sophists. Lucian’s mockery corrected much of the sentimentalism of the effete Greco-Roman society. The sound laughter of Erasmus, the humanist, spread the influence of the Renaissance in northern Europe. Butler’s “Hudibras” helped correct the extravagances of early English Puritanism. Voltaire laughed the last remnants of medievalism out of the eighteenth-century France and cleared the. ground for modern democracy. Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” made nineteenth century romanticism ridiculous. The sly humor of Thackeray brought common sense into early Victorianism, and the sardonic spirit of Bernard Shaw in these times has left little in modern commercial society unchallenged. May the Cervantes monument stand as a reminder to moderns that there have been reformers with a sense of humor!