Kitabı oku: «Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic», sayfa 14

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 ‘Athenæum,’ 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 ‘Athenæum,’ 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 ‘Athenæum.’ 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 ‘Athenæum,’ 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 ‘Athenæum’ 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 ‘Athenæum’ articles, and to quote from the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ a few sentences upon wit, and upon the distinction between comedy and farce. For the obvious reason that the ‘Athenæum’ articles are buried in oblivion, and the ‘Encyclopædia 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 ‘Encyclopædia 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 ‘Encyclopædia’ 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 encyclopædia. 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 ‘Encyclopædia’ 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 ‘Cyclopædia 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 Encyclopædia. 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 ‘Encyclopædia 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 Encyclopædia may be true, but they seem to lighten and alleviate it and to shed his fascinating idiosyncrasy upon their coldly impersonal environment.