Chapter XVI: A Humourist Upon Humour

THE reaching of a decision as to what article to select as typical of what I may call 'The Renascence of Wonder' essays gave me so much trouble that when I came to the still more difficult task of selecting an essay typical of Mr. Watts-Dunton's criticism dealing with what he calls 'the laws of cause and effect in literary art' it naturally occurred to me to write to him asking for a suggestive hint or two. In response to my letter I got a thoroughly characteristic reply, in which his affection for a friend took entire precedence of his own work:--

"MY DEAR MR. DOUGLAS,--The selections from my critiques must really
be left entirely to yourself. They are to illustrate your own
critical judgment upon my work, and not mine. Overwhelmed as I am
with avocations which I daresay you little dream of, for me to plunge
into the countless columns of the 'Athenaeum,' in quest of articles
of mine which I have quite forgotten, would be an intolerable burden
at the present moment. I can think of only one article which I
should specially like reproduced, either in its entirety or in
part--not on account of any merit in it which I can recall, but
because it was the means of bringing me into contact with one of the
most delightful men and one of the most splendidly equipped writers
of our time, whose sudden death shocked and grieved me beyond
measure. A few days after the article appeared, the then editor of
the 'Athenaeum,' Mr. MacColl, the dear friend with whom I was
associated for more than twenty years, showed me a letter that he had
received from Traill. It was an extremely kind letter. Among the
many generous things that Traill said was this--that it was just the
kind of review article which makes the author regret that he had not
seen it before his book appeared. I wrote to Traill in
acknowledgment of his kind words; but it was not until a good while
after this that we met at the Incorporated Authors' Society dinner.
At the table where I was sitting, and immediately opposite me, sat a
gentleman whose countenance, especially when it was illuminated by
conversation with his friends, perfectly charmed me. Although there
was not the smallest regularity in his features, the expression was
so genial and so winsome that I had some difficulty in persuading
myself that it was not a beautiful face after all, and his smile was
really quite irresistible. The contrast between his black eyebrows
and whiskers and the white hair upon his head gave him a peculiarly
picturesque appearance. Another thing I noticed was a boyish kind of
lisp, which somehow, I could not say why, gave to the man an added
charm. I did not know it was Traill, but after the dinner was over,
when I was saying to myself, 'That is a man I should like to know,' a
friend who sat next him--I forget who it was--brought him round to me
and introduced him as 'Mr. Traill.' 'You and I ought to know each
other,' he said, 'for, besides having many tastes in common, we live
near each other.' And then I found that he lived near the
'Northumberland Arms,' between Putney and Barnes. I think that he
must have seen how greatly I was drawn to him, for he called at The
Pines in a few days--I think, indeed, it was the very next day--and
then began a friendship the memory of which gives me intense
pleasure, and yet pleasure not unmixed with pain, when I recall his
comparatively early and sudden death. I used to go to his
gatherings, and it was there that I first met several interesting men
that I had not known before. One of them, I remember, was Mr. Sidney
Low, then the editor of the 'St. James's Gazette.' And I also used
to meet there interesting men whom I had known before, such as the
late Sir Edwin Arnold, whose 'Light of Asia,' and other such works, I
had reviewed in the 'Athenaeum.' I do not hesitate for a moment to
say that Traill was a man of genius. Had he lived fifty years
earlier, such a writer as he who wrote 'The New Lucian,' 'Recaptured
Rhymes,' 'Saturday Songs,' 'The Canaanitish Press' and 'Israelitish
Questions,' 'the Life of Sterne,' and the brilliant articles in the
'Saturday Review' and the 'Pall Mall Gazette,' would have made an
unforgettable mark in literature. But there is no room for anybody
now--no room for anybody but the very, very few. When he was about
starting 'Literature,' he wrote to me, and a gratifying letter it
was. He said that, although he had no desire to wean me from the
'Athenaeum,' he should be delighted to receive anything from me when
I chanced to be able to spare him something. It was always an
aspiration of mine to send something to a paper edited by so
important a literary figure--a paper, let me say, that had a finer,
sweeter tone than any other paper of my time--I mean, that tone of
fine geniality upon which I have often commented, that tone without
which, 'there can be no true criticism.' A certain statesman of our
own period, who had pursued literature with success, used to say
(alluding to a paper of a very different kind, now dead), that the
besetting sin of the literary class is that lack of gentlemanlike
feeling one towards another which is to be seen in all the other
educated classes. This might have been so then, but, through the
influence mainly of 'Literature' and H. D. Traill, it is not so now.
Many people have speculated as to why a literary journal, edited by
such a man, and borne into the literary arena on the doughty back of
the 'Times,' did not succeed. I have a theory of my own upon that
subject. Although Traill's hands were so full of all kinds of
journalistic and magazine work in other quarters, it is a mistake to
suppose that his own journal was badly edited. It was well edited,
and it had a splendid staff, but several things were against it. It
confined itself to literature, and did not, as far as I remember,
give its attention to much else. Its price was sixpence; but its
chief cause of failure was what I may call its 'personal appearance.'
If personal appearance is an enormously powerful factor at the
beginning of the great human struggle for life, it is at the first
quite as important a factor in the life struggle of a newspaper or a
magazine. When the 'Saturday Review' was started, its personal
appearance--something quite new then--did almost as much for it as
the brilliant writing. It was the same with the 'Pall Mall Gazette'
when it started. Carlyle was quite right in thinking that there is a
great deal in clothes. Now, as I told Traill when we were talking
about this, 'Literature' in appearance seemed an uninviting cross
between the 'Law Times' and 'The Lancet'--it seemed difficult to
connect the unbusiness-like genius of literature with such a
business-like looking sheet as that. Traill laughed, but ended by
saying that he believed there was a great deal in that notion of
mine. Some one was telling me the other day that Traill, who died
only about four years ago, was beginning to be forgotten. I should
be sorry indeed to think that. All that I can say is that for a book
such as yours to be written about me, and no book to be written about
Traill, presents itself to my mind as being as grotesque an idea as
any that Traill's own delightful whimsical imagination could have
pictured."

Of course I comply with Mr. Watts-Dunton's wishes, and I do this with the more alacrity because there is this connection between the essay on Sterne and the imaginative work--the theory of absolute humour exemplified in Mrs. Gudgeon is very brilliantly expounded in the article. It was a review of Traill's 'Sterne,' in the 'English Men of Letters,' and it appeared in the 'Athenaeum' of November 18, 1882. I will quote the greater part of it:--

"Contemporary humour, for the most part, even among cultivated
writers, is in temper either cockney or Yankee, and both Sterne and
Cervantes are necessarily more talked about than studied, while
Addison as a humorist is not even talked about. In gauging the
quality of poetry--in finding for any poet his proper place in the
poetic heavens--there is always uncertainty and difficulty. With
humour, however, this difficulty does not exist, if we bear steadily
in mind that all humour is based upon a simple sense of incongruous
relations, and that the quality of every man's humour depends upon
the kind of incongruity which he recognizes and finds laughable. If,
for instance, he shows himself to have no sense of any incongruities
deeper than those disclosed by the parodist and the punster, his
relation to the real humourist and the real wit is that of a monkey
to a man; for although the real humourist may descend to parody, and
the real wit may descend to punning, as Aristophanes did, the pun and
the parody are charged with some deeper and richer intent. Again, if
a man's sense of humour, like that of the painter of society, is
confined to a sense of the incongruous relations existing between
individual eccentricity and the social conventions by which it is
surrounded, he may be a humourist no doubt--according, at least, to
the general acceptation of that word, though a caricaturist according
to a definition of humour and caricature which we once ventured upon
in these columns; but his humour is jejune, and delightful to the
Philistine only. If, like that of Cervantes and (in a lower degree)
Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens, a writer's sense of the incongruous
is deeper than this, but is confined nevertheless to what Mr. Traill
calls 'the irony of human intercourse,' he is indeed a humourist, and
in the case of Cervantes a very great humourist, yet not necessarily
of the greatest; for just as the greatest poet must have a sense of
the highest and deepest harmonies possible for the soul of man to
apprehend, so the greatest humourist must have a sense of the highest
and deepest incongruities possible. And it will be found that these
harmonies and these incongruities lie between the very 'order of the
universe' itself and the mind of man. In certain temperaments the
eternal incongruities between man's mind and the scheme of the
universe produce, no doubt, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and
Novalis; but to other temperaments--to a Rabelais or Sterne, for
instance--the apprehension of them turns the cosmos into disorder,
turns it into something like that boisterous joke which to most
temperaments is only possible under the excitement of some 'paradis
artificiel.' Great as may be the humourist whose sense of irony is
that of 'human intercourse,' if he has no sense of this much deeper
irony--the irony of man's intercourse with the universal harmony
itself--he cannot be ranked with the very greatest. Of this irony in
the order of things Aristophanes and Rabelais had an instinctive,
while Richter had an intellectual enjoyment. Of Swift and Carlyle it
might be said that they had not so much an enjoyment as a terrible
apprehension of it. And if we should find that this quality exists
in 'Tristram Shandy,' how high, then, must we not place Sterne! And
if we should find that Cervantes deals with the 'irony of human
intercourse' merely, and that his humour is, with all its profundity,
terrene, what right have critics to set Cervantes above Sterne? Why
is the sense of incongruity upon which the humour of Cervantes is
based so melancholy? Because it only sees the farce from the human
point of view. The sad smile of Cervantes is the tearful humour of a
soul deeply conscious of man's ludicrous futility in his relations to
his fellow-man. But while the futilities of 'Don Quixote' are tragic
because terrene, the futilities of 'Tristram Shandy' are comic
because they are derived from the order of things. It is the great
humourist Circumstance who causes Mrs. Shandy to think of the clock
at the most inopportune moment, and who, stooping down from above the
constellations, interferes to flatten Tristram's nose. And if
Circumstance proves to be so fond of fun, he must be found in the end
a benevolent king; and hence all is well.

While, however, it is, as we say, easy in a general way to gauge a
humourist and find his proper place, it is not easy to bring Sterne
under a classification. In Sterne's writings every kind of humour is
to be found, from a style of farce which even at Crazy Castle must
have been pronounced too wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as
Addison's, and as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare's. In loving
sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is outdone by
Sterne in his 'fat, foolish scullion.' Lower than the Dogberry type
there is a type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to
whom the mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph. While
the news of Bobby's death, announced by Obadiah in the kitchen,
suggests to Susannah the various acquisitions to herself that must
follow such a sad calamity to the 'fat, foolish scullion,' scrubbing
her pans on the floor, it merely recalls the great triumphant fact of
her own life, and consequently to the wail that 'Bobby is certainly
dead' her soul merely answers as she scrubs, 'So am not I.' In four
words that scullion lives for ever.

Sterne's humour, in short, is Shakespearean and Rabelaisian,
Cervantic and Addisonian too; how, then, shall we find a place for
such a Proteus? So great is the plasticity of genius, so readily at
first does it answer to impressions from without, that in criticizing
its work it is always necessary carefully to pierce through the
method and seek the essential life by force of which methods can
work. Sterne having, as a student of humourous literature, enjoyed
the mirthful abandon of Rabelais no less than the pensive irony of
Cervantes, it was inevitable that his methods should oscillate
between that of Rabelais on the one hand, and that of Cervantes on
the other, and that at first this would be so without Sterne's
natural endowment of humour being necessarily either Rabelaisian or
Cervantic, that is to say, either lyric or dramatic, either the
humour of animal mirth or the humour of philosophic meditation. But
the more deeply we pierce underneath his methods, the more certainly
shall we find that he was by nature the very Proteus of humour which
he pretended to be. And after all this is the important question as
regards Sterne. Lamb's critical acuteness is nowhere more clearly
seen than in that sentence where he speaks of his own 'self-pleasing
quaintness.' When any form of art departs in any way from
symmetrical and normal lines, the first question to ask concerning it
is this: Is it self-pleasing or is it artificial and histrionic?
That which pleases the producer may perhaps not please us; but if we
feel that it does not really and truly please the artist himself, the
artist becomes a mountebank, and we turn away in disgust. In the
humourous portions of Sterne's work there is, probably, not a page,
however nonsensical, which he did not write with gusto, and
therefore, bad as some of it may be, it is not to the true critic an
offence. . . .

'Yorickism' is, there is scarcely need to say, the very opposite of
the humour of Swift. One recognizes that the universe is rich in
things to laugh at and to love; the other recognizes that the
universe is rich in things to laugh at and to hate. One recognizes
that among these absurd things there is nothing else so absurd and
(because so absurd) so lovable as a man; the other recognizes that
there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so hateful as
a man. The intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in
the temperament--the temperament of Jaques and the temperament of
Apemantus. And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is difficult to
say which fate is more terrible, Swift's or Carlyle's--that of the
man whose heart must needs yearn towards a race which his piercing
intellect bids him hate, or that of the man, religious,
conscientious, and good, who would fain love his fellows and cannot.
It is idle for men of this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick.
It needs the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in
a roar, or of him who, in the words of the 'cadet of the house of
Keppoch,' was 'sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick,
a very great favourite of the gentlemen.' Sterne, like Jaques and
Hamlet, deals with 'the irony of human intercourse,' but what he
specially recognizes is a deeper irony still--the irony of man's
intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony of the
intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the physical
being--the irony, in short, of man's position amid these natural
conditions of life and death. It is in the apprehension of this
anomaly--a spiritual nature enclosed in a physical nature--that
Sterne's strength lies.

Man, the 'fool of nature,' prouder than Lucifer himself, yet 'bounded
in a nutshell,' brother to the panniered donkey, and held of no more
account by the winds and rains of heaven than the poor little
'beastie' whose house is ruined by the ploughshare--here is, indeed,
a creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at
and to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter! There is
nothing incongruous in the condition of the lower animals, because
they are in entire harmony with their natural surroundings; there is
nothing more absurd in the existence and the natural functions of a
horse or a cow than in the existence and the natural functions of the
grass upon which they feed; but imagine a spiritual being so placed,
so surrounded, and so functioned, and you get an absurdity compared
with which all other absurdities are non-existent, or, at least, are
fit quarry for the satirist, but hardly for the humourist. That
Sterne's donkey should owe his existence to the exercise of certain
natural functions on the part of his unconscious progenitors, that he
should continue to hold his place by the exercise on his own part of
certain other natural functions, is in no way absurd, and contains in
it no material for humoristic treatment. To render him absurd you
must bring him into relation with man; you must clap upon his back
panniers of human devising or give him macaroons kneaded by a human
cook. Then to the general observer he becomes absurd, for he is
tried by human standards. But to Yorick it is not so much the donkey
who is absurd as the fantastic creature who made the panniers and
cooked the macaroons. All other humour is thin compared with this.
Besides, it never grows old. It is difficult, no doubt, to think
that the humour of Cervantes will ever lose its freshness; but the
kind of humour we have called Yorickism will be immortal, for no
advance in human knowledge can dim its lustre. Certainly up to the
present moment the anomaly of man's position upon the planet is not
lessened by the revelations of science as to his origin and
development. On the contrary, it is increased, as we hinted in
speaking of Thoreau. If man was a strange and anomalous 'piece of
work' as Hamlet knew him under the old cosmogony, what a 'piece of
work' does he appear now! He has the knack of advancing and leaving
the woodchucks behind, but how has he done it? By the fact of his
being the only creature out of harmony with surrounding conditions.
A contented conservatism is the primary instinct of the entire animal
kingdom, and if any species should change, it is not (as Lamarck once
supposed) from any 'inner yearning' for progress, but because it was
pushed on by overmastering circumstances. An ungulate becomes the
giraffe, not because it is uncomfortable in its old condition and
yearns for giraffe-hood, but because, being driven from grass to
leaves by natural causes, it must elongate its neck or starve. But
man really has this yearning for progress, and, because he is out of
harmony with everything, he advances till at last he turns all the
other creatures into food or else into weight-carriers, and outstrips
them so completely that he forgets he is one of them. If Uncle
Toby's progenitors were once as low down in the scale of life as the
fly that buzzed about his nose, the fly had certainly more right to
buzz than had that over-developed, incongruous creature, Captain
Shandy, to be disturbed at its buzzing, and the patronizing speech of
the captain as he opens the window gains an added humour, for it is
the fly that should patronize and take pity upon the man.

And while Sterne's abiding sense of the struggle between man's
spiritual nature and the conditions of his physical nature accounts
for the metaphysical depth of some of his humour, it greatly accounts
for his indecencies too. Sterne had that instinct for idealizing
women, and the entire relations between the sexes which accompanies
the poetic temperament. To such natures the spiritual side of sexual
relations is ever present; and as a consequence of this the animal
side never loses with them the atmosphere of wonder with which it was
enveloped in their boyish days. Not that we are going to justify
Sterne's indecencies. Coleridge's remark that the pleasure Sterne
got from his double entendre was akin to 'that trembling daring with
which a child touches a hot teapot because it has been forbidden,'
partly explains, but it does not excuse, Sterne's transgressions
herein. The fact seems to be that if we divide love into the passion
of love, the sentiment of love, and the appetite of love, and inquire
which of these was really known to Sterne, we shall come to what will
seem to most readers the paradoxical conclusion that it was the
sentiment only. There is abundant proof of this. In the 'Letter to
the Earl of --,' printed by his daughter, after dilating upon the
manner in which the writing of the 'Sentimental Journey' has worn out
both his spirits and body, he says: 'I might indeed solace myself
with my wife (who is come to France), but, in fact, I have long been
a sentimental being, whatever your lordship may think to the
contrary. The world has imagined because I wrote "Tristram Shandy"
that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was.' Upon this
passage Mr. Traill has the pertinent remark: 'The connubial
affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently,
opposed to the sentimental emotions--as the lower to the higher. To
indulge the former is to be "Shandian," that is to say, coarse and
carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend
one's days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex
indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.' Now, to men of
this kind there is not uncommonly, perhaps, a charm in a licentious
double entendre which is quite inscrutable to those of a more animal
temperament. The incongruity between the ideal and the actual
relations brings poignant distress at first, and afterwards a sense
of irresistible absurdity. Originally the fascination of repulsion,
it becomes the fascination of attraction, and it is not at all
fanciful to say that in Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, Sterne
(quite unconsciously to himself perhaps) realized to his own mind
those two opposite sides of man's nature whose conflict in some form
or another was ever present to Sterne's mind. And, as we say, it has
a deep relation to the kind of humour with which Sterne was so richly
endowed. After one of his most sentimental flights, wherein the
spiritual side of man is absurdly exaggerated, there comes upon him a
sudden revulsion (which at first was entirely natural, if even
self-conscious afterwards). The incongruity of all this sentiment
with man's actual condition as an animal strikes him with
irresistible force, and he says to man, 'What right have you in that
galley after all--you who came into the world in this extremely
unspiritual fashion and keep in it by the agency of functions which
are if possible more unspiritual and more absurd still?'

No doubt the universal sense of shame in connection with sexual
matters, which Hartley has discussed in his subtle but rather
far-fetched fashion, arises from an acute apprehension of this great
and eternal incongruity of man's existence--the conflict of a
spiritual nature and such aspirations as man's with conditions
entirely physical. And perhaps the only truly philosophical
definition of the word 'indecency' would be this: 'A painful and
shocking contrast of man's spiritual with his physical nature.' When
Hamlet, with his finger on Yorick's skull, declares that his 'gorge
rises at it,' and asks if Alexander's skull 'smelt so,' he shocks us
as deeply in a serious way as Sterne in his allusion to the winding
up of the clock shocks us in a humourous way, and to express the
sensation they each give there is, perhaps, no word but 'indecent.'"

I have now cited the opinions of Mr. Watts-Dunton upon the metaphysical meaning of humour. In order to show what are his opinions upon wit, I think I shall do well to turn from the 'Athenaeum' articles, and to quote from the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' a few sentences upon wit, and upon the distinction between comedy and farce. For the obvious reason that the 'Athenaeum' articles are buried in oblivion, and the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' articles are certainly not so deeply buried, it is from the former that I have been mainly quoting; but some of the most important parts of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work are to be found in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica.' Perhaps, however, I had better introduce my citations by saying a few words about Mr. Watts-Dunton's connection with that work.

The story of the way in which he came to write in the 'Encyclopaedia' has been often told by Prof. Minto. At the time when the ninth edition was started, he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were living in adjoining chambers and were seeing each other constantly. When Minto was writing his articles upon Byron and Dickens, he told Mr. Watts-Dunton that Baynes would be delighted to get work from him. But at that time Mr. Watts-Dunton had got more critical work in hand than he wanted, and besides he had already a novel and a body of poetry ready for the press, and wished to confine his energies to creative work. Besides this, he felt, as he declared, that he could not do the work fitted for the compact, businesslike pedestrian style of an encyclopaedia. But when the most important treatise in the literary department of the work--the treatise on Poetry--was wanted, a peculiar difficulty in selecting the writer was felt. The article in the previous edition had been written by David Macbeth Moir, famous under the name of 'Delta' as the author of 'The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch.' Moir's article was intelligent enough, but quite inadequate to such a work as the publishers of the 'Encyclopaedia' aspired to make. A history of Poetry was, of course, quite impossible; it followed that the treatise must be an essay on the principles of poetic art in relation to all other arts, as exemplified by the poetry of the great literatures. It was decided, according to Minto's account, that there were but three men, that is to say, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and Theodore Watts, who could produce this special kind of work, the other critics being entirely given up to the historic method of criticism. The choice fell upon Watts, and Baynes went to London for the purpose of inviting him to do the work, and explaining exactly what was wanted.

I think all will agree with me that there never was a happier choice. Mr. Arthur Symons, in an article on 'The Coming of Love' in the 'Saturday Review' has written very luminously upon this subject. He tells us that, wide as is the sweep of the treatise, it is but a brilliant fragment, owing to the treatise having vastly overflowed the space that could be given to it. The truth is that the essay is but the introduction to an exhaustive discussion of what the writer believes to be the most important event in the history of all poetry--the event discussed under the name of 'The Renascence of Wonder.' The introduction to the third volume of the new edition of Chambers's 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature' is but a bare outline of Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings upon this subject. It has been said over and over again that since the best critical work of Coleridge there has been nothing in our literature to equal this treatise on Poetry. It has been exhaustively discussed in England, America, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, where it has been compared to the critical system of Goethe. Those who have not read it will be surprised to hear that it is not confined to the formulating of generalizations on poetic art; it is full of eloquent passages on human life and human conduct.

It was in an article upon a Restoration comic dramatist, Vanbrugh, that Mr. Watts-Dunton first formulated his famous distinction between comedy and farce:--

"In order to find and fix Vanbrugh's place among English comic
dramatists, an examination of the very basis of the comedy of
repartee inaugurated by Etheredge would be necessary, and, of course,
such an examination would be impossible here. It is chiefly as a
humourist, however, that he demands attention.

Given the humorous temperament--the temperament which impels a man to
get his enjoyment by watching the harlequinade of life, and
contrasting it with his own ideal standard of good sense, which the
harlequinade seems to him to mock and challenge--given this
temperament, then the quality of its humourous growth depends of
course on the quality of the intellectual forces by means of which
the temperament gains expression. Hence it is very likely that in
original endowment of humour, as distinguished from wit, Vanbrugh was
superior to Congreve. And this is saying a great deal: for, while
Congreve's wit has always been made much of, it has, since Macaulay's
time, been the fashion among critics to do less than justice to his
humour--a humour which, in such scenes as that in 'Love for Love,'
where Sir Sampson Legend discourses upon the human appetites and
functions, moves beyond the humour of convention and passes into
natural humour. It is, however, in spontaneity, in a kind of lawless
merriment, almost Aristophanic in its verve, that Vanbrugh's humour
seems so deep and so fine, seems indeed to spring from a fountain
deeper and finer and rarer than Congreve's. A comedy of wit, like
every other drama, is a story told by action and dialogue, but to
tell a story lucidly and rapidly by means of repartee is exceedingly
difficult, not but that it is easy enough to produce repartee. But
in comic dialogue the difficulty is to move rapidly and yet keep up
the brilliant ball-throwing demanded in this form; and without
lucidity and rapidity no drama, whether of repartee or of character,
can live. Etheredge, the father of the comedy of repartee, has at
length had justice done to him by Mr. Gosse. Not only could
Etheredge tell a story by means of repartee alone: he could produce a
tableau too; so could Congreve, and so also could Vanbrugh; but
often--far too often--Vanbrugh's tableau is reached, not by fair
means, as in the tableau of Congreve, but by a surrendering of
probability, by a sacrifice of artistic fusion, by an inartistic
mingling of comedy and farce, such as Congreve never indulges in.
Jeremy Collier was perfectly right, therefore, in his strictures upon
the farcical improbabilities of the 'Relapse.' So farcical indeed
are the tableaux in that play that the broader portions of it were
(as Mr. Swinburne discovered) adapted by Voltaire and acted at Sceaux
as a farce. Had we space here to contrast the 'Relapse' with the
'Way of the World,' we should very likely come upon a distinction
between comedy and farce such as has never yet been drawn. We should
find that farce is not comedy with a broadened grin--Thalia with her
girdle loose and run wild--as the critics seem to assume. We should
find that the difference between the two is not one of degree at all,
but rather one of kind, and that mere breadth of fun has nothing to
do with the question. No doubt the fun of comedy may be as broad as
that of farce, as is shown indeed by the celebrated Dogberry scenes
in 'Much Ado about Nothing' and by the scene in 'Love for Love'
between Sir Sampson Legend and his son, alluded to above; but here,
as in every other department of art, all depends upon the quality of
the imaginative belief that the artist seeks to arrest and secure.
Of comedy the breath of life is dramatic illusion. Of farce the
breath of life is mock illusion. Comedy, whether broad or genteel,
pretends that its mimicry is real. Farce, whether broad or genteel,
makes no such pretence, but, by a thousand tricks, which it keeps up
between itself and the audience, says, 'My acting is all sham, and
you know it.' Now, while Vanbrugh was apt too often to forget this
the fundamental difference between comedy and farce, Congreve never
forgot it, Wycherly rarely. Not that there should be in any literary
form any arbitrary laws. There is no arbitrary law declaring that
comedy shall not be mingled with farce, and yet the fact is that in
vital drama they cannot be so mingled. The very laws of their
existence are in conflict with each other, so much so that where one
lives the other must die, as we see in the drama of our own day. The
fact seems to be that probability of incident, logical sequence of
cause and effect, are as necessary to comedy as they are to tragedy,
while farce would stifle in such an air. Rather, it would be
poisoned by it, just as comedy is poisoned by what farce flourishes
on; that is to say, inconsequence of reasoning--topsy-turvy logic.
Born in the fairy country of topsy-turvy, the logic of farce would be
illogical if it were not upside-down. So with coincidence, with
improbable accumulation of convenient events--farce can no more exist
without these than comedy can exist with them. Hence we affirm that
Jeremy Collier's strictures on the farcical adulterations of the
'Relapse' pierce more deeply into Vanbrugh's art than do the
criticisms of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt. In other words, perhaps the
same lack of fusion which mars Vanbrugh's architectural ideas mars
also his comedy."

Without for a moment wishing to institute comparisons between the merit of Mr. Watts-Dunton's literary articles and the merit of other literary articles by other contemporary writers, I may at least say that between his articles and theirs the difference is not one of degree, it is one of kind. Theirs are compact, business-like compressions of facts admirably fitted for an Encyclopaedia. No attempt is made to formulate generalizations upon the principles of literary art, and this must be said in their praise--they are faultless as articles in a book of reference. But no student of Mr. Watts-Dunton's work who turns over the pages of an article in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' can fail after reading a few sentences to recognize the author. Generalizations, hints of daring theories, novel and startling speculations, graze each other's heels, until one is dazzled by the display of intellectual brilliance. That his essays are out of place in an Encyclopaedia may be true, but they seem to lighten and alleviate it and to shed his fascinating idiosyncrasy upon their coldly impersonal environment.