WIT, HUMOUR, AND THE TRADITION OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

The English sense of humour has become such a common-place that one tends to forget that it has a beginning and perhaps even an end. Sir Harold Nicolson observed that "the English sense of humour was not generally recognised until the last half of the nineteenth century.  And Stephen Potter complained thirty years ago that "The day of English Humour is declining." For both writers English Humour is largely the ability to laugh with somebody, not at him. Even though the word humour in modern English usage is applied to "everything that appeals to man's disposition towards comic laughter", the particular species here called English humour is the outcome of 18th century English literature where it was first applied "to distinguish the genial and affirmative forms of comic writing" from satire, mockery and ridicule.

These rather more offensive and aggressive forms of comic writing were a literary vehicle for what was then called "wit". Wit originally meant a man's mind, in particular his reasoning faculties, his intellect. In the Leviathan Hobbes had defined "Natural Witte" as the opposite of stupidity, observing that it consisted "principally in two things; Celerity of Imagining, (that is swift succession of one thought to another;) and steddy direction to some approved end." Aristotle in his Rhetoric had, however, already defined wit as the ability to make apt comparisons (for which Hobbes preferred to say "Good Fancy"), and also as "well-bred insolence". Wit defined by these terms became a social and literary accomplishment intimately connected with a superior command of language. During the Renaissance the term was used in this sense with a special emphasis "on ingenuity and the ability to create the bizarre, the extraordinary, and the unique." The concetti of the Italian marinists, the precious conceits of the school of 17th c. English poets called "metaphysicals", as well as much of the incessant play on words in Shalespeare's plays are instances of the application of wit to literature. In writing as in the social context of conversation wit was the faculty to sparkle with brilliant metaphor, with irony, parody, puns, and antitheses. Pope's well-known lines from his Essay on Criticism define this aspect of wit well:

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed -

This rather "good-natured" kind of wit which Pope has in mind, had a more sharp and cutting counterpart in the so-called "malignant wit" of backbiting and insulting affrontery or satire for which Swift's "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public" may serve as an example. In this satirical essay the persona informs the reader "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, basked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout." If wit thus took a turn at a ludicrous the outcome was ridicule and satire. In the Restoration comedy virginity, matrimony and religion were most often object of ridicule. In an assembly of wits, behaviour of appearance unsanctioned by the ruling class would become the but for sharp-tongued ladies or gentlemen, eager to point out incongruities and to ridicule the offender. The courtly Augustan Age, highly conscious of what was appropriate and what not, was for very good reasons a period in which wit flourished and was used to such an excess that it brought on a reaction led by the journalists Addison and Steele, who used their papers to reform and channel the malignant and unsavioury uses to which wit had been put after the Restoration by distinguishing "true" from "false" wit and "good" from "false humour".

The use of the word humour in connection with comic writing was not new, but it had so far been used in a quite different sense from the one it acquired in the first decades of the 18th century. "Humour" derived from Latin, originally meant any moisture or liquid. In this sense it was used by the medieval physiologists in the wake of Galen who employed it for the cardinal or primary humours supposed to determine "a person's physical and mental qualities and disposition" by their relative proportions. Robert Burton in his curiously learned treatise on the Anatomy of Melancholy defined: "A humour is a liquid or fluent part of the body, comprehended in it, for the preservation of it, and is either innate or born with us, or adventitious and acquisite." Only an exact balance of the four primary humours blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy made the justly constituted man. odd humours suffered from the overproduction or lack of one or several of the cardinal humours, causing eccentricity in the individual suffering from such imbalance. The resultant habitual mood of a person, his "ruling passion" as it was called in a later age, but also some temporary whim was then referred to as a person's "humour", as for instance for the first time in 1598. By way of introduction the author lets Asper say at the beginning:

"Why, humour, as 'tis end, we thus define it,

To be a quality of air, of water,

And in itself holds these two properties,

Moisture and fluxure: as, for demonstration,

Pour water on this floor, 'twill wet and run:

Likewise the air, forced through a horn or trumpet,

Flows instantly away, and leaves behind

A kind of dew; and hence we do conclude,

That whatsoe'ver hath fluxure and humidity,

As wanting power to contain itself,

Is humour. So in every human body,

The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,

By reason that they flow continually

In some one part, are not continent,

Receive the name of humours. Now thus far

Unto the general disposition:

As when someone peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw

All his effects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to run one way,

this may be truly said to be a humour."

Already here the quality of something peculiar, uncommon, odd and eccentric or incongruous the psychological make-up of a person is connected with the concept of humour. Yet a "humour" in Jonson's bitingly satirical comedies is something to be laughed at, not yet to laugh with: - a "humour" for Jonson is an object of ridicule to be attacked by wit. Eventually not only the supposed physiological cause and its result, but also the "faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing, or of expressing it" were called humour. The characters of the Jonsonian 'comedy of humours' as well as the portraits of odd types, created by some of the 'character'-writers of the 17th century, would cause laughter by the "Sudden Glory" described by Hobbes in the Leviathan (1651), "by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves." This derision of the "imperfections of other men", considered "as a signe of Pusillanimity" by Hobbes in real life, appeared permissible in literature and has been one of the chief sources of comic effects in literature. To become more pleasant it had, however, first to be tempered by 'good nature'.

Good-natured humour, as we see it now, was the revolt against the morose and austere, essentially humourless Puritanism of the earlier part of the 17th century on one hand and the gayness, levity and libertinage of the Restoration in its later half on the other. Already Isaac Barrow and John Hacket, influential 17th century divines, had condemned the bad-humoured irony and sarcasm of the Puritans and recommended 'innocent mirth" as the only permissable form of jesting. Addison had taken up this plea and created a good-natured and good-humoured gentleman with his Sir Roger de Coverly in the Spectator as a practical example, and furthermore, in his attempts to reform the manners of his age, distinguished between false and true humour: While 'false' humour was the "monstrous Infant" of Falsehood, Frenzy, and Folly ("commonly known by the name of Laughter"), 'true' humour would descend from Truth, Good Sense, Wit, and Mirth. In a later and justly famous paper (No. 381) he wrote in May 1712:

I have always preferred Chearfulness to Mirth. The latter I consider as an Act, the former as an Habit of the Mind. Mirth is short and transient, Chearfulness fix'd and permanent. Those are often raised into the greatest Transports of Mirth, who are subjects to the greatest Depressions of Melancholy: On the contrary, Chearfulness, tho' it does not give the Mind such an exquisite Gladness, prevents us from falling into any Depths of Sorrow. Mirth is like a Flash of Lightning, that breaks thro' a Gloom of Clouds, and glitters for a Moment; Chearfulness keeps up a kind of Day-light in the Mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual Serenity.

The passage quoted is remarkably because it shows clearly the transition from the vogue of ridicule, raillery, and satire to the good-natured smile or chuckle of benevolent humour. If mirth with other words, is the result of wit, good humour begets cheerfulness. The passage makes further evident that the cheerfulness of good humour is understood by Addison as a "habit of the mind", an acquired faculty which can be taught by example.

Even though Chaucer and Shakespeare were certainly great masters of humour in their own way - the "Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales and the figure of Falstaff alone bear ample witness to this - the real tradition of English humour, 'humour anglaise', as it was termed by the French to distinguish it from other brands, begins in the Augustan Age of English literature with Addison's and Steele's Spectator which created the first practical examples, laid the necessary theoretical foundations and found the easy conversational tone which became the distinguishing remark of comic story-telling by Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith, and finally Charles Dickens.

Amusement, frowned upon by the Puritans and practised to excess by the Restoration, now went hand in hand with instruction, as recommended by that ancient pattern of the Augustan Age, the Roman poet Horace. Addison's precept for the writer: "Amuse and instruct" became an undisputed axiom of the 18th century. What better way of amusement than to tap the domain of the laughable for the literature of the age?! It is therefore not surprising that the humorous novel in England, inspired by the Don Quixote of Cervantes, developed as it did. The long row of cheerful, amiable, lovable, more or less ridiculous characters created in the fiction of the next two centuries all take their descent from the attitudes expressed by Addison.

The humorous novel became an instrument of social reform, the author "a merciful substitute to the legislature", as Goldsmith wrote in his "Inquiry into the Present State of polite Learning in Europe", reminding his public that "However virtuous the present age, there may be still growing employment for ridicule or reproof, for persuasion or satire". Satire, therefore, could not entirely be dispensed with. According Addison and Steele did not intend to throw wit overboard, but only to temper it with 'good nature', to make it more agreeable and inoffensive. In Fielding a great deal of wit is displayed, and satire is frequently employed when the vices of vanity and hypocrisy so dear to mankind are ridiculed. Even though Lord Chesterfield warned his son that "A gentleman is often seen, but very seldom heard, to laugh" "exquisite mirth and laughter" were recommended by Fielding for their therapeutic effects on the mind of man, for, as he writes in his "Preface" to Joseph Andrews, they "conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy, and ill affections, than is generally imagined. Nay, I will appeal to common observation", he continues, "whether the same companies are not found more full of good-humour, and benevolence, after they have been sweetened for two or three hours with entertainments of this kind, than were soured by a tragedy or a grave lecture." The writer of humourous novels - Fielding used to refer to them as "comic epic poems in prose" - consequently fulfilled a very definite service to their readers and society at large by infusing good humour and benevolence in the minds and hearts of men.

As the periodical essayists endeavoured to reform the value system and attitudes of early eighteenth century English society, Fielding enrolled in the same cause, by setting up examples of benevolence and good nature (notably Parson Adams Squire Allworthy and Tom Jones) of true and innocent virtue (e.G. Fanny and Sophia) and of hypocrisy and affectation (as for instance the infamous Blifil in Tom Jones). Already Ben Jonson, who, in the words of Fielding, "of all men understood the Ridiculous the best" let one of the characters in his comedy "Every Man in his Humour" (1598) answer the question "What is that humour?" with the definition "it is a gentleman-like monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time, affectation; and fed by folly." Fielding in 1742, in the preface to the first English novel in the modern sense remarks about the very same vice: "affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous". For this very reason Squire Allworthy, who is an ideal paragon of good-nature and benevolence, is one of his most boring and pale-faced characters, while a figure of comic violence, like Squire Western, once described as "a cantankerous, greedy, rampaging hog, snorting and snouting round all the graces of life, yet capable of tears and an almost poetical tenderness" is the very opposite. The newness in Fielding is that he does not go the extremes of fancy and improbability suggested by the tradition of more satire, bit limits his fictional world to the confines of reality and probability enlightened by the 'true humour' advocated by Addison. Fielding who was fully aware of the implications of the new genre which he was about to create when he wrote the History of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams,  realised that "there is one reason why a comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous." Out of this conviction and its practice in such superb examples of a balanced art of craftsmanship as Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones arose the specifically English tradition of a novel which aims at a combination of humorous presentation and realistic description of setting and society which culminates in the work of Charles Dickens.

How much Dickens felt himself part of his tradition, becomes obvious when one reminds oneself that he intended to christen one of his sons Oliver Goldsmith after the author of the celebrated Vicar of Wakefield and that he set Henry Fielding's work before him as a model when he wrote David Copperfield. Before Dickens became involved in the sordid realities of nineteenth century English slums, poverty and working class expropriation, he wrote one book which is almost humorous throughout: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club published in one volume after serialisation in 1837. Even though nearly as many as a hundred comic characters make their appearance between its pages, the essential humour of the book does not lie in character presentation, but in the very atmosphere of good spirits, good nature, cheerfulness, and benevolence which pervades it. "It is not so much a prose narrative (as, for example, David Copperfield is a prose narrative)," wrote J.B. Priestley in his English Comic Characters, "as a kind of poem, an epic of high spirits and comradeship, feasting and fun. It bathes the world in a light of its own, a rich firelight of humour and good-fellowship, that brings it near to, and gives it the appearance of, one of those ideal worlds with which the imaginations of men, the unhappy brute in them looking for consolation and the god in them reaching towards creation, have for ever played."

As is often usual with comic characters, the Wellers, Pickwicks, Jingles appear rather uninteresting when taken out of their natural clime, the context of the glorious Pickwick world. A character like Mr. Jingle becomes with subsequent re-appearance also less and less entertaining, since we know all about him there is to know and the same funny tricks and speech habits are used for characterisation in tag-fashion again and again. "He ought to be bad (E.M. Forster once wrote about Dickens). He is actually one of our big writers, and his immense success with types suggest that there  may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit." Forster's estimate is very high if seen against the tradition of the psychological novel, beginning with Richardson in the eighteenth century, and culminating with Henry James and the ensuing stream-of consciousness-novel of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in the early twentieth. It seems that the humorous 'realism' of the fictional worlds of Fielding and Dickens must be expressed through different techniques and narrative attitudes; the humorous novel in the Fielding-Dickens tradition cannot make use of the same techniques of presentation that the psychological novel employs: Character presentation in depth will rarely result in a truly humorous figure. (There is, to be sure, something like humour in Ulysses, but it is of the rather wry kind, foreshadowed in Sterne's Tristram Shandy.) Flatness of character is probably essential for comic story-telling. Therefore, Richardson, Dostojewsky, Henry James, and James Joyce have created very complicated, realistic and truthful but essentially humourless fictional worlds, while Fielding and Dickens in particular, Smollett and Sterne to a lesser degree - one is too coarse, the other too 'whimsical' - have succeeded in creating humorous and comic fictional worlds full of a wealth of realistic detail, with much attention given to the realities of everyday life: to eating, drinking, love-making, work and money.

Glancing back we realise that humour has an eminently social aspect: Addison's and Steele's creation of Sir Roger set the tone for the two centuries of English 'amiable' humorists after the less kindly satirical humour in the tradition of Jonson and Hobbes had become outdated. The odd and uncommon characters of literary imagination that had been put up for laughter in the seventeenth, become the subject of innocent mirth in the eighteenth and were fully developed and integrated in the world of Dickens in the eighteenth century. Towards the end of the Victorian era, humour of the Dickensian brand became vapid and unable to contain the complexities of a new consciousness. In the first half of the 20th century therefore the cheerfulness and innocent mirth of amiable humour gave way again to the more aggressive forms of comic writing, to the irony and social satire of Huxley and Evelyn Waugh for instance, while the humorous and immensely popular fiction of P.G. Wodehouse and J.B. Priestley was received with less critical esteem.

Literary humour is thus obviously subject to historical changes: what makes the reader laugh today, may only cause a wry grin or a shrug of non-understanding a year later. Much of the humour in Punch is of that nature. The more sophisticated the convention of humour becomes, the more does it rely on an intricate knowledge of the likes and dislikes of society at a given moment, the more it is apt to be stale and unable to revoke a response when social and political configurations have changed. Literary humour, in order to last, must be sufficiently simple, and that means of a general, humane appeal. It is therefore the great humanity of humour which we discover and rediscover in the writings of Cervantes, Fielding and Dickens, a humour which makes them even now a source of amusement, pleasure and delight, and a continuing influence on the tradition of the English novel.