Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 April 1876 — Humor. [ARTICLE]

Humor.

Etbkt humorous sentiment is the embodiment of some special idiosyncrasy, or it would become commonplace. There have been modest humorists; nay, a humorist is invariably modest in one sense, for it is his cue to. laugh at all vanity as at all uncompounded emotion. Conceit implies that the world is worth taking seriously and ought to take me seriously. The most rooted conviction of the humorist is that the world is a farce —a melancholy farce, indeed, for otherwise there would be no contradiction—but a farce where the sublime must never be separated from its shadow, the ridiculous. His very egotism, in short, is itself a contradiction. It implies the two beliefs that his personality is intensely interesting and vet intensely absurd. It is the egotism of Lamb or of Montaigne, who are always dwelling fondly on their own tastes and associations and biographical reminiscences, and yet quietly railing at that fondness. Modest vanity, humble self-assertion, display of their own peculiarities as at onee the most absorbing and the most trifling of all topics of thought, are of the very essence of the genuine humorist; and yet the most dogged of political economists will be offended if you tell him he cannot relish humor. Humor, therefore—the inference is surely irresistible—is a morbid secretion. If women and children do not appreciate humor, it is because the best part of creation is the simplest in its tastes. If Frenchmen have ceased to be humorous since Rabelais and Montaigne, it is because they are the keenest ot logicians. If Germans are not humorous, it is because they love sentiment too heartily to laugh at it. If the Scotch are not humor - ous, it is because the Puritan conception of the world realizes the solemnity of life, and scorns all trifling with its awful realities. As humor is complex, the humorist is the product of conflicting forces; an occasional freak of nature, to be valued only by those who prefer oddity to beauty —a hundred-limbed Hindoo idol to a Greek statue. Had Sophocles, or Phidias, or Raphael, or Dante, or Milton, a sense of humor? Do you find humor in Thomas a Kempis, or in the Hebrew prophets? A loving apologist of the “ Biglow Papers” has tried to defend his client from a foolifh charge of profanity by discovering some touches of humor with the Athanasian Creed. Eveiything is fair in apologetic writing, as in love and war. A passing gleam of irony may tinge some Scriptural denunciations of idolatrous folly Jost enough to excuse an apologist driven to big wit’s end for an argument; bat there is not enough to excuse anybody else. The spirit of humor—the mocking goblin who sits at the elbow of some men to chill enthusiasm, to prick all the bubbles of the ideal with the needle-point of prosaic fact, to give imagination the lie, (ike the soul in Raleigh’s verses, to tell eloquence that itisbpmbast, and poetry that it is unreal, belongs to the tower earn. His master or servant—for the familiar spirit is both ruler and Slav* to the wizard—is tethered to the ground, apd can never soar without danger of h sodden collapse. And therefore, like other spirits of the earth, he rules by our baser instincts, and his rule is but for a time. How much of all that passes for humorous is simply profane, or indecent, or brutal? Half the humorous stories that pass current in the world are unfit for publicatien. The great humorists, from Rabelais to Swift or Sterne, are no longer quotable in their naked reality; and as the world becomes more decosoos humor becomes tongue-

tied and obsolete. Of the jests that survive, half again owe their merit to their inhumanity. Look at any of the current stories of Douglas Jerrold, who paused for a humorist in these later days. Every* recorded jest of his that I havvj seen is a Kas incivility made palatals by a pun. e substance of each phntae is, Yon are a fool; the art consists In so wrapping the insolence in a play of w'jrdsthat thenear, ers laugh, and the victim is deprived of J sympathy. “It was your father, then, 1

who was not so handsome?” Is one oC. Talleyrand’s brilliant retorts to a man who spoke of bis mother's beauty. What 1* this but to say, ‘‘You are an ugly beast,’*' and yet to evade the legitimate resentment of the su ttenrl—Oornhfft Magmine.