XXXVI.

HUMOUR IN ITS RELATION TO THE POET.

HE word itself has come to us from the old physicians, with whom, to take Burton's definition of it, "Humour is a liquid or fluent part of the body, comprehended in it, for the preservation of it." They referred each man's idiosyncracy or constitution to the disposition of these fluids in his body or the predominance of one of them. And, as this differenced one individual from another, it came to mean character. So that a man's humour expressed the ensemble of his qualities and temperament, that distinguished him from others. The early dramatists would seem to have worked this notion pretty hard, and indeed overworked it. And we see characters in their plays turning entirely on it, where the personage does and says things, with more or less of vivacity and eccentricity, but of which no better account can be given than that it is his humour. C'est qu'il était fait comme cela. The tendency was to the artificial and arbitrary and affected.

Shakespeare, who mirrors every feature of his time, reflects this also, but in his own sweet way. His dramatic instinct, that never failed him, felt that at bottom this was but a poor source to draw upon. Its essence is individuality linking with no class, while dramatic power deals with Unlike Ben Jonson, therefore, in "Every Man in his Humour," Shakespeare was shy of working a whole play with such characters, though giving it a place in several of his plays.

individuals of class qualities.

He would seem to have ridiculed the thing in its affected phase, by its ridiculous presentment in the person of Pistol; to have sneered at it through the cynical Shylock, when urged to explain his preference of the penalty of the bond to its payment

"I'll not answer that,

But say it is my humour."

In the melancholy Jacques we have a humour played out to the full, and con amore on the poet's part, who yet gives it pretty rebuke from Rosalind. Neither will he allow it advantage in presence of one of those humourists, that are especially Shakespeare's delight, and which in their very essence were individual, and sui generis, the clowns. Jacques, who lectures everybody, is content to listen to and be instructed by Touchstone.

In this idea of humour it is plain that mirth does not enter. It may be sad, or mirthful, or choleric, or, indeed, of any mood, but it must be sui generis and peculiar, not far removed from our notion of wilful, odd, and eccentric. There is another and more popular sense, expressive of a good-humoured and kindly faculty of seeing the laughable side of things. It is in this sense it is taken here, and the poet's relation to it considered.

The more a poet hath of what goes to make up the complete man the better poet he will be; and, although he lack somewhat, he may not lack that which would be defect in the common run of men to want. A shrewd common-sense is among the indispensable ingredients of a great poet. The quality will not make him a poet, but he cannot be great in his art without it. The highest poets had it in perfection. You see it in Homer, you see it in Dante, you see it transcendently in Shakespeare, and you see it in Milton.

There is another quality also, which, if not indispensable to the great poet, yet is the want of it a very serious

drawback on his working, viz. the one which is the subject of this essay, humour and a keen kindly sense of the ridiculous. A sense of the ridiculous will not make a poet, and is rather one of those perilous gifts which prove fatal to a small nature, by creating a habit and a liking for taking everything by its wrong or ridiculous side, and ends in losing that reverence for the good, and the beautiful, and the true, in whatever form, without which no worthy work, poetic or otherwise, is possible.

It

But, although this faculty be the plague of a small nature, it is the crown and finish of a noble one. enables it to see a thing on all its sides, and not merely in the favourite aspect, and is but an ingredient of thorough insight. And in this world of good and bad, of mirth and tears, the master-worker must have his eyes open, and his soul must vibrate to every pulse of humanity, or he will be marred in delivering to men the reflex of themselves. A complete poet must have the faculty of seeing everything with the eyes of every class in the community to which he belongs. He must see everything as they see it from their point of view, though his conclusions concerning them may differ from and transcend theirs, nay, probably will, but yet, in some way, include or account for them, and so his composite presentment reflect back, and be accepted by them as the larger view, correcting some error or exaggeration in the particular of each.

But, while the poet's age is the circle which his capabilities are required to fill, it is also that which must circumscribe his performance, whatever be his capabilities beyond. It is therefore no impeachment of the breadth and completeness of poetic nature in an ancient poet, that his poetry fails to indicate some quality that counts in the sum of poetic perfection, and which we find in a modern, if that quality be one of no prominence among the people the ancient poet addressed. Class qualities, and class

apprehension were what the early poet of every nation had to deal with, and he was consequently precluded from obtruding what the many would not have relished, however prized by himself and a scattered few. We must not, therefore, infer absence of the quality, in such case, from absence of its expression. We must not, for example, suppose that Homer lacked wit or humour because of his poems giving no indication of them, but rather charge it upon his audience, who would have been indifferent to the liveliest exhibition of either.

I say this because I am not prepared to put Homer's claim to the quality on exhibited instances, and have failed to perceive humour in all the cases that able writers have found in the Iliad and Odyssey. The tone of both poems has always appeared to me to have been too earnest and serious to admit of humour in some of the instances pointed out by Colonel Mure and others. I see, for instance, no persiflage in what Odysseus addresses to Alcinous. Occasional humour in both poems there certainly is, but, I think, restricted to the sudden occurrence of something unexpected, and eccentric, as, for instance, the sudden assumption of the office of cup-bearer by the limping Hephaistus at the gods' banquet, in the first book of the Iliad, and the sudden punishment of Thersites by Odysseus, in the second. But the ordinary, and normal course of life, however familiar, and in our eyes mean, is never, I think, a subject of jest or merriment in Iliad or Odyssey. Such modern merriment, indeed, as we can draw from the menial offices of life, could scarcely have been available, inasmuch as the poem was addressed to an audience composed of those who saw nothing risible in the matter, and who had to perform those offices themif of ordinary rank; and, if not, were too liable, by

of war and violence, to be reduced to it for them e topic in a mirthful light. And these offices,

moreover, it was no disgrace, in those simple days, to perform, and only grew to hardship when they became compulsory and for another; and then it was less a matter for mirth than commiseration. The Nemesis of the ancients was too generally dreaded for much unwholesome hilarity on such grounds. Hector, in that affecting prognostic of the evils to which Andromache would be exposed at his death, instances, not her having to draw water, for that were no hardship, and she had probably often done so, but having to draw it "unwillingly and on sore compulsion." Waiting on one's self, or family and friends, was no disgrace in those patriarchal times. Hence one element of the better condition of slaves in those days than in later times. They had to do what their masters and mistresses would not have considered derogatory to perform themselves.

Another important element in ancient Greek life, at least in the patriarchal period to which the Homeric poems belong, and which must have lasted indefinitely down into the civilized ages of Greece, was the nature of their religion. This, from its entering into all the details of ordinary life, gave every act a quasi religious character, and put it under divine sanction of one or other of the deities, as in the case of the household gods. And, although it would be absurd to suppose them always acting under much more present conviction of their faith than we find ourselves doing in regard to our own, yet enough of it would operate to redeem those details from the ludicrous, and prevent them in the mass from relishing, or even perceiving the point of any jest that turned upon these. And to the mass, be it remembered, these, the most popular poems of antiquity, could alone have been addressed; men to whom Aristophanes would have been unintelligible, and Lucian simply profane.

I feel that this is put at the lightest, and that it might