Against the terrors of the mob, which, intoxicated with passion, and once suffered to gain the ascend ant, is diabolic and chaos come again, good sense has many arts of prevention and of relief. Disorganiza tion it confronts with organization, with police, with military force. But in earlier stages of the disorder it applies milder and nobler remedies. The natu ral offset of terror is ridicule. And we have noted examples among our orators, who have on conspicu ous occasions handled and controlled, and, best of all, converted a malignant mob, by superior man hood, and by a wit which disconcerted, and at last delighted the ringleaders. What can a poor truck man \vho is hired to groan and to hiss do, when the orator shakes him into convulsions of laughter so RESOURCES. 131 RESOURCES. 131 that he cannot throw his egg? If a good story will not answer, still milder remedies sometimes serve to disperse a mob. Try sending round the contri bution-box. Mr. Marshall, the eminent manufac turer at Leeds, was to preside at a Free-Trade festival in that city; it was threatened that the operatives, who were in bad humor, would break up the meeting by a mob. Mr. Marshall was a man of peace; he had the pipes laid from the water works of his mill, with a stopcock by his chair from which he could discharge a stream that would knock down an ox, and sat down very peacefully to his dinner, which was not disturbed.
See the dexterity of the good aunt in keeping the young people all the weary holiday busy and diverted without knowing it: the story, the pic tures, the ballad, the game, the cuckoo-clock, the stereoscope, the rabbits, the mino bird, the pop-corn, and Christmas hemlock spurting in the fire. The children never suspect how much design goes to it, and that this unfailing fertility has been rehearsed a hundred times, when the necessity came of find ing for the little Asmodeus a rope of sand to twist. She relies on the same principle that makes the strength of Newton, — alternation of employment. See how he refreshed himself, resting from the pro found researches of the calculus by astronomy; from astronomy by optics; from optics by chronology. 'T is a law of chemistry that every gas is a vacuum 132 RESOURCES.
132 RESOURCES.
to every other gas; and when the mind has ex hausted its energies for one employment, it is still fresh and capable of a different task. We have not a toy or trinket for idle amusement, but some where it is the one thing needful for solid instruc tion or to save the ship or army. In the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the torches which each traveller carries make a dismal funeral procession, and serve no purpose but to see the ground. When now and then the vaulted roof rises high overhead, and hides all its possibilities in lofty depths, 't is but gloom on gloom. But the guide kindled a Roman candle, and held it here and there shooting its fireballs suc cessively into each crypt of the groined roof, dis closing its starry splendor, and showing for the first time what that plaything was good for.
Whether larger or less, these strokes and all ex ploits rest at last on the wonderful structure of the mind. And we learn that our doctrine of resources must be carried into higher application, namely, to the intellectual sphere. But every power in energy speedily arrives at its limits, and requires to be husbanded; the law of light, which Newton said proceeded by " fits of easy reflection and transmis sion "; the come-and-go of the pendulum is the law of mind; alternation of labors is its rest. I should like to have the statistics of bold experi menting on the husbandry of mental power.
In England men of letters drink wine; in Scot- RESOURCES. 133 land, whiskey; in France, light wines; in Germany, beer. In England everybody rides in the saddle; in France the theatre and the ball occupy the night. In this country we have not learned how to repair the exhaustions of our climate. Is not the seaside necessary in summer? Games, fishing, bowling, hunting, gymnastics, dancing, — are not these needful to you? The chapter of pastimes is very long. There are better games than billiards and whist. 'T was a pleasing trait in Goethe's romance, that Makaria retires from society "to astronomy and her correspondence."
I do not know that the treatise of Brillat Savarin on the Physiology of Taste deserves its fame. I know its repute, and I have heard it called the France of France. But the subject is so large and exigent that a few particulars, and those the pleas ures of the epicure, cannot satisfy. I know many men of taste whose single opinions and practice would interest much more. It should be extended to gardens and grounds, and mainly one thing should be illustrated: that life in the country wants all things on a low tone, — wants coarse clothes, old shoes, no fleet horse that a man can not hold, but an old horse that will stand tied in a pasture half a day without risk, so allowing the picnic-party the full freedom of the woods. Natural history is, in the country, most attractive; at once elegant, immortal, always opening new 134 -RESOURCES.'
134 -RESOURCES.'
resorts. The first care of a man settling in the country should be to open the face of the earth to himself, by a little knowledge of nature, or a great deal, if he can, of birds, plants, rocks, astronomy; in short, the art of taking a walk. This will draw the sting out of frost, dreariness out of ^Tovember and March, and the drowsiness out of August. To know the trees is, as Spenser says of " the ash, for nothing ill." Shells, too; how hungry I found my self, the other day, at Agassiz's Museum, for their names! But the uses of the woods are many, and some of them for the scholar high and peremp tory. When his task requires the wiping out from memory "all trivial fond records That youth and observation copied there," he must leave the house, the streets, and the club, and go to wooded uplands, to the clearing and the brook. Well for him if he can say with the old minstrel, " I know where to find a new song."
If I go into the woods in winter, and am shown the thirteen or fourteen species of willow that grow in Massachusetts, I learn that they quietly expand in the warmer days, or when nobody is looking at them, and, though insignificant enough in the general bareness of the forest, yet a great change takes place in them between fall and spring; in the first relentings of March they hasten, and long before anything else is ready, these osiers hang RESOURCES. 135 RESOURCES. 135 out their joyful flowers in contrast to all the woods. You cannot tell when they do bud and blossom, these vivacious trees, so ancient, for they are almost the oldest of all. Among fossil remains, the willow and the pine appear with the ferns. They bend all day to every wind; the cart-wheel in the road may crush them; every passenger may strike off a twig with his cane; every boy cuts them for a whistle; the cow, the rabbit, the insect, bite the sweet and tender bark; yet, in spite of accident and enemy, their gentle persistency lives when the oak is shat tered by storm, and grows in the night and snow and cold. When I see in these brave plants this vigor and immortality in weakness, I find a sudden relief and pleasure in observing the mighty law of vegetation, and I think it more grateful and health- giving than any news I am likely to find of man in the journals, and better than Washington politics.
It is easy to see that there is no limit to the chapter of Eesources. I have not, in all these rambling sketches, gone beyond the beginning of my list. Eesources of Man, — it is the inventory of the world, the roll of arts and sciences; it is the whole of memory, the whole of invention; it is all the power of passion, the majesty of virtue, and the omnipotence of will.
But the one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is, that, as is the receiver, so is RESOURCES.
the gift; that all these acquisitions are victories of the good brain and brave heart; that the world be longs to the energetic, belongs to the wise. It is in vain to make a paradise but for good men. The tropics are one vast garden; yet man is more mis erably fed and conditioned there than in the cold and stingy zones. The healthy, the civil, the in dustrious, the learned, the moral race, — Nature herself only yields her secret to these. And the resources of America and its future will be im mense only to wise and virtuous men.
THE COMIC.
THE COMIC.
A TASTE for fun is all but universal in our species, which is the only joker in nature. The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done in their presence. And as the lower nature does not jest, neither does the highest. The Eeason pronounces its omniscient yea and nay, but meddles never with degrees or fractions; and it is in comparing fractions with essential integers or wholes that laughter begins.
Aristotle's definition of the ridiculous is, " what is out of time and place, without danger." If there be pain and danger, it becomes tragic; if not, comic. I confess, this definition, though by an admirable definer, does not satisfy me, does not say all we know.
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-per formance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, the 140 THE COMIC.
frustrated expectation, the break of • continuity in the intellect, is comedy; and it announces itself physically in the pleasant spasms we call laughter. With the trifling exception of the stratagems of a few beasts and birds, there is no seeming, no half- ness in nature, until the appearance of man. Un conscious creatures do the whole will of wisdom. An oak or a chestnut undertakes no function it can not execute; or if there be phenomena in botany which we call abortions, the abortion is also a function of nature, and assumes to the intellect the like completeness with the further function, to which in different circumstances it had attained. The same rule holds true of the animals. Their ac tivity is marked by unerring good-sense. But man, through his access to Reason, is capable of the per ception of a whole and a part. Reason is the whole, and whatsoever is not that is a part. The whole of nature is agreeable to the whole of thought, or to the Eeason; but separate any part of nature, and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of humor is to look with considerate good nature at every object in existence aloof, as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eter nal Whole; enjoying the figure which each self- satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, THE COMIC. 141 a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous.
In virtue of man's access to Reason or the Whole, tHe human form is a pledge of wholeness, suggests to our imagination the perfection of truth or good ness, and exposes by contrast any halfness or im perfection. We have a primary association between perfectness and this form. But the facts that oc cur when actual men enter do not make good this anticipation; a discrepancy which is at once de tected by the intellect, and the outward sign is the muscular irritation of laughter.
Reason does not joke, and men of reason do not; a prophet, in whom the moral sentiment predomi nates, or a philosopher, in whom the love of truth predominates, these do not joke, but they bring the standard, the ideal whole, exposing all actual de fect; and hence, the best of all jokes is the sympa thetic contemplation of things by the understand ing from the philosopher's point of view. There is no joke so true and deep in actual life, as when some pure idealist goes up and down among the in stitutions of society, attended by a man who knows the world, and who, sympathizing with the philoso pher's scrutiny, sympathizes also with the confusion and indignation of the detected skulking institu- 142 THE COMIC.
tions. His perception of disparity, his eye wander ing perpetually from the rule to the crooked, lying, thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with laugh ter.
This is the radical joke of life and then of litera ture. The presence of the ideal of right and of truth in all action makes the yawning delinquen cies of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the interest, but droll to the intellect. The ac tivity of our sympathies may for a time hinder our perceiving the fact intellectually, and so deriving mirth from it; but all falsehoods, all vices seen at sufficient distance, seen from the point where our moral sympathies do not interfere, become ludi crous. The comedy is in the intellect's perception of discrepancy. And whilst the presence of the ideal discovers the difference, the comedy is en hanced whenever that ideal is embodied visibly in a man. Thus Falstaff, in Shakspeare, is a character of the broadest comedy, giving himself unreservedly to his senses, coolly ignoring the Reason, whilst he invokes its name, pretending to patriotism and to parental virtues, not with any intent to deceive, but only to make the fun perfect by enjoying the con fusion betwixt reason and the negation of reason, — in other words, the rank rascaldom he is calling by its name. Prince Hal stands by, as the acute un derstanding, who sees the Eight and sympathizes with it, and in the heyday of youth feels also the THE COMIC. 143 THE COMIC. 143 full attractions of pleasure, and is thus eminently qualified to enjoy the joke. At the same time he is.to that degree under the Keason, that it does not amuse him as much as it amuses another spectator.
If the essence of the comic be the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false per formance, there is good reason why we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper in terest than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke, of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an essential element in a fine character. Wherever the intellect is constructive, it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a defect in the noblest and most oracular soul. The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
It is true the sensibility to the ludicrous may run into excess. Men celebrate their perception of half- ness and a latent lie by the peculiar explosions of laughter. So painfully susceptible are some men to these impressions, that if a man of wit come into the room where they are, it seems to take them out 144 THE COMIC.
of themselves with violent convulsions of the face and sides, and obstreperous roarings of the throat. How often and with what unfeigned compassion we have seen such a person receiving like a willing martyr the whispers into his ear of a man of wit. The victim who has just received the discharge, if in a solemn company, has the air very much of a stout vessel which has just shipped a heavy sea; and though it does not split it, the poor bark is for the moment critically staggered. The peace of so ciety and the decorum of tables seem to require that next to a notable wit should always be posted a phlegmatic bolt-upright man, able to stand without movement of muscle whole broadsides of this Greek fire. It is a true shaft of Apollo, and traverses the universe, and unless it encounter a mystic or a dump ish soul, goes everywhere heralded and harbingered by smiles and greetings. Wit makes its own wel come, and levels all distinctions. Ko dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage, can plead any im munity, — they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all. " Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? " Plutarch happily expresses the value of the jest as a legiti mate weapon of the philosopher. " Men cannot exercise their rhetoric unless they speak, but their THE COMIC. 145 philosophy even whilst they are silent or jest mer rily; for as it is the highest degree of injustice not to be just and yet seem so, so it is the top of wis dom to philosophize yet not appear to do it, and in mirth to do the same with those that are serious and seem in earnest; for as in Euripides, the Bac chic, though unprovided of iron weapons and un armed, wounded their invaders with the boughs of trees, which they carried, thus the very jests and merry talk of true philosophers move those that are not altogether insensible, and unusually reform."
In all the parts of life, the occasion of laughter is some seeming, some keeping of the word to the ear and eye, whilst it is broken to the soul. Thus, as the religious sentiment is the most vital and sub lime of all our sentiments, and capable of the most prodigious effects, so is it abhorrent to our whole nature, when, in the absence of the sentiment, the act or word or officer volunteers to stand in its stead. To the sympathies this is shocking, and oc casions grief. • But to the intellect the lack of the sentiment gives no pain; it compares incessantly the sublime idea with the bloated nothing which pretends to be it, and the sense of the disproportion is comedy. And as the religious sentiment is the most real and earnest thing in nature, being a mere rapture, and excluding, when it appears, all other considerations, the vitiating this is the greatest lie. Therefore, the oldest gibe of literature is the ridicule 146 THE COMIC.
146 THE COMIC.
of false religion. This is the joke of jokes. In re ligion, the sentiment is all; the ritual or ceremony indifferent. But the inertia of men inclines them, when the sentiment sleeps, to imitate that thing it did; it goes through the ceremony omitting only the will, makes the mistake of the wig for the head, the clothes for the man. The older the mistake and the more overgrown the particular form is, the more ridiculous to the intellect. Captain John Smith, the discoverer of New England, was not wanting in humor. The Society in London which had con tributed their means to convert the -savages, hop ing doubtless to see the Keokuks, Black Hawks, Roaring Thunders, and Tustanuggees of that day converted into church-wardens and deacons at least, pestered the gallant rover with frequent solicitations out of England touching the conversion of the In dians, and the enlargement of the Church. Smith, in his perplexity how to satisfy the Society, sent out a party into the swamp, caught an Indian, and sent him home in the first ship to London, telling the Society they might convert one themselves.
The satire reaches its climax when the actual Church is set in direct contradiction to the dictates of the religious sentiment, as in the sketch of our Puritan politics in Hudibras: — " Our brethren of Xew England use Choice malefactors to excuse, And hang the guiltless in their stead, Of whom the churches have less need; THE COMIC. 147 As lately happened, in a town "Where lived a cobbler, and but one, That out of doctrine could cut use, And mend men's lives as well as shoes. This precious brother having slain, In times of peace, an Indian, Not out of malice, but mere zeal (Because he was an infidel), The mighty Tottipottymoy Sent to our elders an envoy, Complaining loudly of the breach Of league held forth by Brother Patch, Against the articles in force Between both churches, his and ours, For which he craved the sai/nts to render Into his hands, or hang the offender; But they, maturely having weighed They hail no more but him o' th' trade (A man that served them in the double Capacity to teach and cobble), Resolved to spare him; yet to do The Indian Hoghan Moghan too Impartial justice, in his stead did Hang an old weaver that was bedrid."
In science the jest at pedantry is analogous to that in religion which lies against superstition. A classification or nomenclature used by the scholar only as a memorandum of his last lesson in the laws of nature, and confessedly a makeshift, a bivouac for a night, and implying a march and a conquest to-morrow, "becomes through indolence a barrack and a prison, in which the man sits down immov ably, and wishes to detain others. The physiolo- 148 THE COMIC.
gist Camper, humorously confesses the effect of his studies in dislocating his ordinary associations. " I have been employed," he says, " six months on the Cetacca; I linderstand the osteology of the head of all these monsters, and have made the combination with the human head so well, that everybody now appears to me narwhale, porpoise, or marsouins. Women, the prettiest in society, and those whom I find less comely, they are all either nanvhales or porpoises to my eyes." I chanced the other day to fall in with an odd illustration of the remark I had heard, that the laws of disease are as beautiful as the laws of health; I was hastening to visit an old and honored friend, who, I was informed, was in a dying condition, when I met his physician, who accosted me in great spirits, with joy sparkling in his eyes. " And how is my friend, the reverend Doctor? " I inquired. " 0, I saw him this morn ing; it is the most correct apoplexy I have ever seen: face and hands livid, breathing stertorous, all the symptoms perfect." And he rubbed his hands with delight, for in the country we cannot find every day a case that agrees with the diagnosis of the books. I think there is malice in a very trilling story which goes about, and which I should not take any notice of, did I not suspect it to con tain some satire upon my brothers of the Xatural History Society. It is of a boy who was learning his alphabet. " That letter is A," said the teacher; THE COMIC. 149 "A," drawled the boy. "That is B," said the teacher; " B," drawled the boy, and so on. " That is W," said the teacher. " The devil! " exclaimed the boy, " is that W? " The pedantry- of literature belongs to the same category. In both cases there is a lie, when the mind, seizing a classification to help it to a sincerer knowledge of the fact, stops in the classification; or learning languages, and reading books, to the end of a better acquaintance with man, stops in the languages and books: in both the learner seems to be wise, and is not.
The same falsehood, the same confusion of the sympathies because a pretension is not made good, points the perpetual satire against poverty, since, according to Latin poetry and English doggerel, Poverty does nothing worse Than to make man ridiculous.
In this instance the halfness lies in the pretension of the parties to some consideration on account of their condition. If the man is not ashamed of his poverty, there is no joke. The poorest man who stands on his manhood destroys the jest. The poverty of the saint, of the rapt philosopher, of the naked Indian, is not comic. The lie is in the sur render of the man to his appearance; as if a man should neglect himself, and treat his shadow on the wall with marks of infinite respect. It affects us 150 THE COMIC.
oddly, as to see things turned upside down, or to see a man in a high wind run after his hat, which is al ways droll. The relation of the parties is inverted, — hat being for the moment master, the by-standers cheering the hat. The multiplication of artificial wants and expenses in civilized life, and the exag geration of all trifling forms, present innumerable occasions for this discrepancy to expose itself. Such is the story told of the painter Astley, who, going out of Rome one day with a party for a ramble in the Campagna, and the weather proving hot, refused to take off his coat when his companions threw off theirs, but sweltered on; which, exciting remark, his comrades playfully forced off his coat, and behold on the back of his waistcoat a gay cascade was thun dering down the rocks with foam and rainbow, very refreshing in so sultry a day, — a picture of his own, with which the poor painter had been fain to repair the shortcomings of his wardrobe. The same aston ishment of the intellect at the disappearance of the man out of nature, through some superstition of his house or equipage, as if truth and virtue should be bowed out of creation by the clothes they wore, is the secret of all the fun that circulates concerning