Chapter XXIV: The Renascence of Wonder in Humour

THE character of Mrs. Gudgeon in 'Aylwin' stands as entirely alone among humourous characters as does Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Mrs. Quickly or Mrs. Partridge. In my own review of 'Aylwin' I thus noted the entirely new kind of humour which characterizes it:--"To one aspect of this book we have not yet alluded, namely, its humour. Whimsical Mrs. Gudgeon, the drunken virago who pretends that Winnie is her daughter, is inimitable, with her quaint saying: 'I shall die a-larfin', they say in Primrose Court, and so I shall--unless I die a-crying.'" Few critics have done justice to Mrs. Gudgeon, although the 'Times' said: 'In Mrs. Gudgeon, one of his characters, the author has accomplished the feat of creating what seems to be a new comic figure,' and the 'Saturday Review' singled her out as being the triumph of the book". Could she really have been a real character? Could there ever have existed in the London of the mid-Victorian period a real flesh and blood costermonger so rich in humour that her very name sheds a glow of laughter over every page in which it appears? According to Mr. Hake, she was suggested by a real woman, and this makes me almost lament my arrival in London too late to make her acquaintance. "With regard to the most original character of the story," says Mr. Hake, "those who knew Clement's Inn, where I myself once resided, and Lincoln's Inn Fields, will be able at once to identify Mrs. Gudgeon, who lived in one of the streets running into Clare Market. Her business was that of night coffee-stall keeper. At one time, I believe--but I am not certain about this--she kept a stall on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge, and it might have been there that, as I have been told, her portrait was drawn for a specified number of early breakfasts by an unfortunate artist who sank very low, but had real ability. Her constant phrase was 'I shall die o'-laughin'--I know I shall!' On account of her extraordinary gift of repartee, and her inexhaustible fund of wit and humour, she was generally supposed to be an Irishwoman. But she was not; she was cockney to the marrow. Recluse as Rossetti was in his later years, he had at one time been very different, and could bring himself in touch with the lower orders of London in a way such as was only known to his most intimate friends. With all her impudence, and I may say insolence, Mrs. Gudgeon was a great favourite with the police, who were the constant butts of her chaff." {383} But, of course, this interesting costermonger could have only suggested our unique Mrs. Gudgeon.

She shows that it is possible to paint a low-class humourist as rich in the new cosmic humour as any one of Dickens's is rich in the old terrene humour, and yet without one Dickensian touch. The difficulty of achieving this feat is manifested every day, both in novels and on the stage. Until Mrs. Gudgeon appeared I thought that Dickens had made it as impossible for another writer to paint humourous pictures of low-class London women as Swinburne has made it impossible for another poet to write in anapaests. But there is in all that Mrs. Gudgeon says or does a profundity of humour so much deeper than the humour of Mrs. Gamp, that it wins her a separate niche in our gallery of humourous women. The chief cause of the delight which Mrs. Gudgeon gives me is that she illustrates Mr. Watts-Dunton's theory of absolute humour as distinguished from relative humour--a theory which delighted me in those boyish days in Ireland, to which I have already alluded. I have read his words on this theme so often that I think I could repeat them as fluently as a nursery rhyme. In their original form I remember that the word 'caricature' took the place of the phrase 'relative humour.' I do not think there is anything in Mr. Watts-Dunton's writings so suggestive and so profound, and to find in reading 'Aylwin' that they were suggested to him by a real living character was exhilarating indeed.

Mr. Watts-Dunton's theory of humour is one of his most original generalizations, and it is vitally related both to his theory of poetry and to his generalization of generalizations, 'The Renascence of Wonder.' I think Mrs. Gudgeon is a cockney Anacharsis in petticoats. The Scythian philosopher, it will be remembered, when jesters were taken to him, could not be made to smile, but afterwards, when a monkey was brought to him, broke out into a fit of laughter and said, 'Now this is laughable by nature, the other by art.' I will now quote the essay on absolute and relative humour:--

"Anarcharsis, who found the humour of Nature alone laughable, was the
absolute humourist as distinguished from the relative humourist, who
only finds food for laughter in the distortions of so-called
humourous art. The quality which I have called absolute humour is
popularly supposed to be the characteristic and special temper of the
English. The bustling, money grubbing, rank-worshipping British
slave of convention claims to be the absolute humourist! It is very
amusing. The temper of absolute humour, on the contrary, is the
temper of Hotei, the fat Japanese god of 'contentment with things as
they be,' who, when the children wake him up from his sleep in the
sunshine, and tickle and tease him, and climb over his 'thick
rotundity of belly,' good-naturedly bribes them to leave him in peace
by telling them fairy stories and preaching humourous homilies upon
the blessings of contentment, the richness of Nature's largess, the
exceeding cheapness of good things, such as sunshine and sweet rains
and the beautiful white cherry blossoms on the mountain side.
Between this and relative humour how wide is the gulf!

That an apprehension of incongruity is the basis of both relative and
absolute humour is no doubt true enough; but while in the case of
relative humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the
normal, in the case of absolute humour it is the sweet incongruity of
the normal itself. Relative humour laughs at the breach of the
accustomed laws of nature and the conventional laws of man, which
laws it accepts as final. Absolute humour (comparing them
unconsciously with some ideal standard of its own, or with that ideal
or noumenal or spiritual world behind the cosmic show) sees the
incongruity of those very laws themselves--laws which are the
relative humourist's standard. Absolute humour, in a word, is based
on metaphysics--relative humour on experience. A child can become a
relative humourist by adding a line or two to the nose of Wellington,
or by reversing the nose of the Venus de Medici. The absolute
humourist has so long been saying to himself, 'What a whimsical idea
is the human nose!' that he smiles the smile of Anarcharsis at the
child's laughter on seeing it turned upside down. So with convention
and its codes of etiquette--from the pompous harlequinade of
royalty--the ineffable gingerbread of an aristocracy of names without
office or culture, down to the Draconian laws of Philistia and
bourgeois respectability; whatever is a breach of the local laws of
the game of social life, whether the laws be those of a village
pothouse or of Mayfair; whether it displays an ignorance of matters
of familiar knowledge, these are the quarry of the relative
humourist. The absolute humourist, on the other hand, as we see in
the greatest masters of absolute humour, is so perpetually
overwhelmed with the irony of the entire game, cosmic and human, from
the droll little conventions of the village pothouse to those of
London, of Paris, of New York, of Pekin--up to the apparently
meaningless dance of the planets round the sun--up again to that
greater and more meaningless waltz of suns round the centre--he is so
delighted with the delicious foolishness of wisdom, the conceited
ignorance of knowledge, the grotesqueness even of the standard of
beauty itself; above all, with the whim of the absolute humourist
Nature, amusing herself, not merely with her monkeys, her flamingoes,
her penguins, her dromedaries, but with these more whimsical
creatures still--these 'bipeds' which, though 'featherless' are
proved to be not 'plucked fowls'; these proud, high-thinking
organisms--stomachs with heads, arms, and legs as useful
appendages--these countless little 'me's,' so all alike and yet so
unlike, each one feeling, knowing itself to be _the_ me, the only
true original me, round whom all other _me's_ revolve--so overwhelmed
is the absolute humourist with the whim of all this--with the
incongruity, that is, of the normal itself--with the 'almighty joke'
of the Cosmos as it is--that he sees nothing 'funny' in departures
from laws which to him are in themselves the very quintessence of
fun. And he laughs the laugh of Rabelais and of Sterne; for he feels
that behind this rich incongruous show there must be a beneficent
Showman. He knows that although at the top of the constellation sits
Circumstance, Harlequin and King, bowelless and blind, shaking his
starry cap and bells, there sits far above even Harlequin himself
another Being greater than he--a Being who because he has given us
the delight of laughter must be good, and who in the end will
somewhere set all these incongruities right--who will, some day, show
us the meaning of that which now seems so meaningless. With Charles
Lamb he feels, in short, that humour 'does not go out with life'; and
in answer to Elia's question, 'Can a ghost laugh?' he says,
'Assuredly, if there be ghosts at all,' for he is as unable as Soame
Jenyns himself to imagine that even the seraphim can be perfectly
happy without a perception of the ludicrous.

If this, then, is the absolute humourist as distinguished from the
relative humourist, his type is not Dickens or Cruikshank, but
Anacharsis, or, better still, that old Greek who died of laughter
from seeing a donkey eat, and who, perhaps, is the only man who could
have told us what the superlative feeling of absolute humour really
is, though he died of a sharp and sudden recognition of the humour of
the bodily functions merely. And naturally what is such a perennial
source of amusement to the absolute humourist he gets to love. Mere
representation, therefore, is with him the be-all and the end-all of
art. Exaggeration offends him. Nothing to him is so rich as the
real. He pronounces Tennyson's 'Northern Farmer' or the public-house
scene in 'Silas Marner' to be more humourous than the trial scene in
'Pickwick.' Wilkie's realism he finds more humourous than the
funniest cartoon in the funniest comic journal. And this mood is as
much opposed to satire as to relative humour. Of all moods the
rarest and the finest--requiring, indeed, such a 'blessed mixing of
the juices' as nature cannot every day achieve--it is the mood of
each one of those fatal 'Paradis Artificiels,' the seeking of which
has devastated the human race: the mood of Christopher Sly, of
Villon; of Walter Mapes in the following verse:--

Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori,
Deus sit propitius huic potatori."

Now it is because Mrs. Gudgeon is the very type of the absolute
humourist as defined in this magnificent fugue of prose, and the only
example of absolute humour which has appeared in prose fiction, that
she is to me a fount of esoteric and fastidious joy. If I were asked
what character in 'Aylwin' shows the most unmistakable genius, I
should reply, 'Mrs. Gudgeon! and again, Mrs. Gudgeon!'"