to that habitual idea of fitness, or adjustment, by which the shock of the surprise is made easy. It is in these reconcilements of jars, these creations and re-adjustments of disparities, that the delightful faculty of the wit and humorist is made manifest. He at once rouses our minds to action; suggests, and saves us the trouble of a difficulty; and turns the help into a compliment, by implying our participation in the process. It does not follow that everything witty or humorous excites laughter. It may be accompanied with a sense of too many other things to do so; with too much thought, with too great a perfection even, or with pathos and sorrow. All extremes meet; excess of laughter itself runs into tears, and mirth becomes heaviness. Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise. The jests of the fool in Lear are the sighs of knowledge. But as far as Wit and Humor affect us on their own accounts, or unmodified by graver considerations, laughter is their usual result and happy ratification. The nature of Wit, therefore, has been well ascertained. It takes many forms; and the word indeed means many things, some of them very grave and important; but in the popular and prevailing sense of the term (an ascendency which it has usurped, by the help of fashion, over that of the Intellectual Faculty, or Perception itself), Wit may be defined to be the Arbitrary juxtaposition of Dissimilar Ideas, for some lively purpose of Assimilation or Contrast, generally of both. It is fancy in its most wilful, and strictly speaking, its least poetical state; that is to say, Wit does not contemplate its ideas for their own sakes in any light apart from their ordinary prosaical one, but solely for the purpose of producing an effect by their combination. Poetry may take up the combination and improve it, but it then divests it of its arbitrary character, and converts it into something better. Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities; the meeting of extremes round a corner; the flashing of an artificial light from one object to another, disclosing some unexpected resemblance or connection. It is the detection of likeness in unlikeness, of sympathy in antipathy, or of the extreme points of antipathies themselves, made friends by the very merriment of their introduction. The mode, or form, is comparatively of no consequence, provided it give no trouble to the apprehension; and you may bring as many ideas together as can pleasantly assemble. But a single one is nothing. Two ideas are as necessary to Wit, as couples are to marriages; and the union is happy in proportion to the agreeableness of the offspring. So Butler, speaking of marriage itself: -What security's too strong To guard that gentle heart from wrong, Itself away, and all it has, And like an anchorite gives over This world for the heav'n of a lover. Hudibras, Part iii., Canto 1. This is Wit, and something more. It becomes poetry by the feeling; but the ideas, or images, are as different as can be, and their juxtaposition as arbitrary. For what can be more unlike than a lover, who is the least solitary of mortals, or who desires to be so, and a hermit, to whom solitude is everything? and yet at the same time what can be more identical than their sacrifice of every worldly advantage for one blissful object? This is the clue to the recognition of Wit, through whatever form it is arrived at. The two-fold impression is not in every case equally distinct. You may have to substantiate it critically; it may be discerned only on reflection; but discernible it is always. Steele in one of the papers of the Spectator, and in the character of that delightful observer, thinks that a silent man might be supposed freer than all others from liabilities to misinterpretation; "and yet," adds he, "I remember I was once taken up for a Jesuit, for no other reason but my profound taciturnity."-No. 4. There appears in this sentence, at first sight, to be nothing but what is exclusively in character with the mute and single-minded Spectator: for even the Jesuit seems to be rendered harmless by the charge of dumbness. Yet as extremes meet, and a Jesuit is always supposed to mean something different from what he pretends, a contrast of the greatest kind is first suggested between that crafty professor and our honest countryman, and then doubly and ludicrously impressed by a sense of the unmerited, noisy, and public danger, to which the innocent essayist was subjected in being taken before a magistrate. The case, I think, is the same with Humor. Humor, considered as the object treated of by the humorous writer, and not as the power of treating it, derives its name from the prevailing quality of moisture in the bodily temperament; and is a tendency of the mind to run in particular directions of thought or feeling more amusing than accountable; at least in the opinion of society. It is therefore, either in reality or appearance, a thing inconsistent. It deals in incongruities of character and circumstance, as Wit does in those of arbitrary ideas. The more the incongruities the better, provided they are all in nature; but two, at any rate, are as necessary to Humor, as the two ideas are to Wit; and the more strikingly they differ yet harmonize, the more amusing the result. Such is the melting together of the propensities to love and war in the person of exquisite Uncle Toby; of the gullible and the manly in Parson Adams; of the professional and individual, or the accidental and the permanent, in the Canterbury Pilgrims; of the objectionable and the agreeable, the fat and the sharpwitted, in Falstaff; of honesty and knavery in Gil Blas; of pretension and non-performance in the Bullies of the dramatic poets; of folly and wisdom in Don Quixote; of shrewdness and doltishness in Sancho Panza; and it may be added, in the discordant yet harmonious co-operation of Don Quixote and his attendant, considered as a pair; for those two characters, by presenting themselves to the mind in combination, insensibly conspire to give us one compound idea of the whole abstract human being; divided indeed by its extreme contradictions of body and soul, but at the same time made one and indivisible by community of error and the necessities of companionship. Sancho is the flesh, looking after its homely needs; his master, who is also his dupe, is the spirit, starving on sentiment. Sancho himself, being a compound of sense and absurdity, thus heaps duality on duality, contradiction on contradiction; and the inimitable associates contrast and reflect one another. "The reason, Sancho," said his master, "why thou feelest that pain all down thy back, is, that the stick which gave it thee was of a length to that extent." "God's my life!" exclaimed Sancho, impatiently, "as if I could not guess that, of my own head! The question is, how am I to get rid of it?" I quote from memory; but this is the substance of one of their dialogues. This is a sample of Humor. Don Quixote is always refining upon the ideas of things, apart from their requirements. He is provokingly for the abstract and immaterial, while his squire is laboring under the concrete. The two-fold impression requisite to the effect of Humor is here seen in what Sancho's master says, contrasted with what he ought to say; and Sancho redoubles it by the very justice of his complaint; which, however reasonable, is at variance with the patient courage to be expected of the squire of a knight-errant. I have preceded my details on the subject of Wit by defining both Wit and Humor, not only on account of their tendency to coalesce, but because, though the one is to be found in perfection apart from the other, their richest effect is produced by the combination. Wit, apart from Humor, generally speaking, is but an element for professors to sport with. In combination with Humor it runs into the richest utility, and helps to humanize the world. In the specimens about to be quoted, I propose to bring the two streams gradually together, till nothing be wanting to their united fulness. It must be remembered at the same time (to drop this metaphor), that the mode, as before observed, is of no consequence, compared with what it conveys. The least form of Wit may contain a quintessence of it; the shallowest pun, or what the ignorant deem such, include the profoundest wisdom. The principal forms of Wit may perhaps be thus enumerated. 1st. The direct Simile, as just given; which is the readiest, most striking, and therefore most common and popular form. Thus Swift in his Rhapsody on Poetry : -Epithets you link In gaping lines to fill a chink; Like stepping stones, to save a stride A cripple with one foot too short; With savage pictures fill their gaps; Place elephants for want of towns. One of the happiest similes to be met with is in Green's poem on the Spleen. It is an allusion to the imposture practised at Naples by the exhibition of the pretended head of St. Januarius, at which a phial full of congealed blood is made to liquefy. Green applies it to the melting of Age at the sight of Beauty, and gallantly turns it into a truth. Shine but on age, you melt its snow; By heads which are ador'd while on. 2d, The Metaphor, which is but another form of the Simile, or, as Addison has defined it, "A Simile in a Word;" that is to say, an Identification instead of Comparison. Green is remarkable for his ambitious, and, generally speaking, his successful use of this figure of speech: : To cure the mind's wrong bias, Spleen, Some hilly walks-all exercise; Fling but a stone, the giant dies: Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been Has harlequin'd away the fit. So in his picture of the sourer kind of dissenters ;—a description full of wit. Nor they so pure and so precise, |