Humor

in literature, that quality of a composition which tends to excite mirth. Mirth is aroused primarily by that which surprises us, which is to a greater or less extent incongruous and therefore unexpected. There would be no humor in Dickens' description of the forlorn breakfast of the pupils at Dotheboys Hall if he had likened Mrs. Squeers' porridge to sawdust and water. But when he says that it "looked like diluted pin-cushions without the covers" the figure surprises us and makes us smile. Aldrich's story of Marjory Daw is a simple and entertaining love story until the climax--which not one reader in a hundred anticipates--is reached, then we are constrained to laugh not only at the hero's surprise, but at our own.

To a child, a man with a wooden leg, a boy with a hump upon his back, the foolish, the drunken, the insane, are laughable sights. The incongruity of these figures with his preconceived notions of the human form and of human conduct excite his mirth. When he has learned that misery accompanies such conditions they cease to be funny. So primitive people might find amusement in occurrences which would be repulsive sights to the more refined sensibilities of a civilized age. In the modern editions of many early English books portions which once caused laughter are omitted now as coarse, vulgar, and even brutal.

Humor in its higher and more delicate forms is closely akin to pathos. The writer who can successfully give a humorous touch to something which has stirred our sympathies or a pathetic turn in the midst of a laugh is the one who pleases us best. In Myra Kelly's A Christmas Present for a Lady, she draws a comical picture of a little boy who, lacking means for another Christmas gift, brings his teacher the receipt for a month's rent of a humble tenement. Then with a swift and delicate touch she makes us see that the bit of soiled paper meant home to father, mother, and child. The reader must needs laugh and cry together. Annie Trumbull Slosson combines humor and pathos in her story of Rebecca Mary, the patient, obedient little girl who refused to take the "hundred and oneth" stitch. In an altogether different way, but none the less truly, are humor and pathos mingled in Mary Wilkins' A Conflict Ended. The picture of a man sitting on the church steps during service every Sunday for ten years because he wasn't "made strong enough to give in" is ridiculous, and grows laughable when his little old bride, in all the brave array of her "coming out" Sunday, is about to sit down beside him; but something else stirs us when the man gets the better of his prejudices and marches down the aisle with "almost the mien of a conqueror." In Kate Douglas Wiggin's Timothy's Quest we have a pathetic story told largely in humorous language; in The Necklace by Maupassant, an incident simply told, but in itself combining elements of both humor and pathos. Examples of this kinship between the humorous and the pathetic might be multiplied indefinitely.

Humor may be found in all forms of literature. To realize that the inclination to laugh is universal, one need but consider the columns of our daily papers and the pages of Sunday issues given over entirely to this sort of writing. Nearly all magazines have their humorous departments, and many books are written whose sole purpose is to arouse laughter, although humor is more pleasing when it appears as a seasoning to something else. A comedy, though entirely of a light character, arouses laughter by the display of contrasts--the holding up of the peculiarities of men and manners against a background which sets them off. This gives more pleasure to a cultivated taste than does a farce which is made up wholly of monstrosities and extravagances.

Those varieties of composition in which some form of humor seems especially acceptable are the novel and the drama. As an individual who has a sense of humor is more popular than one without it, so these forms of literature whose province is to picture human life are generally more pleasing if the humorous element is present. Shakespeare would cease to be Shakespeare were his humor eliminated. Dickens' exposition of the sufferings of children in schools, poorhouses, debtors' prisons, and living amid sin and poverty would be too heartrending to read, but for the saving grace of the smiles he is able to call forth.

Humor may be introduced in many ways. A writer may have an idea or incident to relate which is in itself laughable. When Octave Thanet tells us of a woman who went to church fully determined to commit suicide on her return, and had her attention diverted and her intention changed by seeing the entire congregation stick to the newly varnished pews, she has a really funny incident, and could hardly tell it so that it would fail of being humorous. But when Holmes writes that "Life is a fatal complaint and an eminently contagious one," he has found simply a new and humorous way of saying something that is not funny and is known to everybody. Other writers adopt a facetious style, savoring perhaps of bombast or sarcasm, or simply a style a little more dignified and involved than the subject warrants. If not overdone, this is truly humorous.

A critical distinction is made often between wit and humor, although the general word, humor, includes all forms that excite mirth. Wit appeals to the intellect; humor to the feelings, the emotions, the sympathies. Wit lies in the words--either in the expression of some point of similarity between ideas hitherto unrelated or in the discovery that some word bears a double significance to the subject in hand. Josh Billings' statement, "It is better to know less than to know so much that ain't so," is wit. Saxe's poems are examples of wit rather than of humor. Humor depends on the mood the author is able to put the reader into--on leading the reader to behold the situation through his eyes. Wit may appear suddenly in some one sentence of a discourse otherwise serious. Humor pervades a composition and affects its every part as salt savors food, or, to use a higher figure, as a striking personality characterizes every act of an individual possessing it. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Lamb's Essays of Elia, Addison's Spectator, and Frank Stockton's stories are examples of humor as distinguished from wit. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and notably Shakespeare's works, give us examples where both wit and humor are displayed.

Frequently what is in the first instance a blunder may become a conscious form of wit. For instance, what is known as an Irish bull is but a ludicrous inconsistency. It is said, by the way, that the word Irish is applied to the bull, not because the Irish make more, but because they make better bulls. "I couldn't have been in two places at once, barrin' I was a bird." "'Tis a strange world, few of us get out of it alive," "Here's to our native land, everybody loves it whether he was born there or not," are instances of this form of wit.

As wit depends largely upon the significance of words, it is possible to learn to observe double meanings and unusual applications so as to acquire a habit of witty expression. Humor, however, is thoroughly one's own. A man is born with humor or he never has it. Each has his own particular variety, as little likely to be mistaken for another's as is the expression of his face.

Returning to the more general signification of the word humor we may note that satire in its milder forms is a variety of humor. When satire becomes so bitter as to cease to be pleasing it is invective. The Voyage to Lilliput in Swift's Gulliver's Travels is decidedly humorous, but, in the later parts of the same work; the quality of humor gives way to bitterness. The satire of Thackeray and sometimes that of Byron is humorous. The Spanish writer Cervantes is looked upon as a master of satire. His Don Quixote, a burlesque on the popular tales of chivalry, is probably the greatest distinctively humorous work ever written. Among English writers who are known first and best for their humor, the names of Hood and Lamb are foremost. Hood's wit earned him his living, although his serious productions are those which have brought him fame.

In America, from Poor Richard's Almanac and Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York to the present day, our literature has been characterized by humor. We have writers who, like Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, or Josh Billings, always write as "funny as they can." Others, like Bret Harte, Aldrich, and Howells, are writers of both serious and humorous productions. If Holmes and Lowell are read more often than Longfellow or Whittier or Emerson, it is because they make us smile more. It has been said that women writers are without humor, and the greatest of England's women authors, Mrs. Browning and George Eliot, would seem to bear out this statement. Many American women writers, especially those of the present day, display both wit and humor in a marked degree. Among them may be mentioned Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mrs. Deland, Marietta Holley, Octave Thanet, and Carolyn Wells.--MARY BLANCHARD MURPHY.

Wit vibrates and spirts; humor springs up exuberantly as from of a fountain and runs on. In Congreve you wonder what he will say next; in Addison you repose on what is said, listening with assured expectation of something congenial and pertinent.--Landor.

I am not speaking of the fun of the book (Don Quixote), of which there is plenty, and sometimes boisterous enough, but of that deeper and more delicate quality, suggestive of remote analogies and essential incongruities, which alone deserves the name of humor.--Lowell.

When Wit and Humor are commingled, the result is a genial sharpness, dealing with its objects somewhat as old Izaak Walton dealt with the frog he used for bait--running the hook neatly through his mouth and out at his gills, and in so doing "using him as though he loved him."--Whipple.