Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 650
Set alongside of such a scene its winter counterpart, round the great fires of Dingley Dell at Christmas! No one ever did this like Dickens. Shakespeare might talk of “this royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle . . . this England.” Dickens just lighted up the fires of Dingley Dell, got Sam Weller drinking ale and old Wardle pulling corks, and there was England itself!
In Tartarin of Tarascon, who first appeared before the world in 1872, Alphonse Daudet created a character of first rank in the world’s humor. The translation of humor, as has been said, is an almost impossible feat and so Tartarin can hardly be appreciated at his full value by English-speaking people.
Nor has the recent presentation of Tartarin in the films much improved the case. Motion pictures applied to the world’s masterpieces produce not the thing they start from but something else. It may be something worse, or something better. But it is always something different. The inner light of our mind, illumined from the printed page, reaches where the shadow picture of the screen cannot fall. “A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope,” said Bentley the classical scholar, “but not Homer.” Many have had the same feeling in looking at the Tartarins and the Micawbers of the cinematograph.
The Moving Picture, be it said by way of digression, is instantaneous and it suffers from its very ‘instantaneousness.’ It cannot dwell on anything: or only in the artificial and purely conventional way of pausing in the narrative to present a ‘cut-in’ of a huge face (four feet long, though the audience doesn’t realize it) with a wet tear, five inches, about to fall. Hence for the purpose of humor of character it is dependent on jumps, jerks and spasms of action to replace pauses of reflection. As has been the practice in this book, let us proceed by an illustration. We are desirous of presenting, let us say, a film of Barnaby Rudge, and we have in it the beautiful character study, humorous in the highest sense, of Gabriel Varden the Locksmith. Here is how Charles Dickens introduces him as we first see him, on a wild March evening of rain and wind, anno domini 1775, in his gig on the highway, some twelve miles out of London. Gabriel Varden appears as “a round, red-faced, sturdy yeoman with a double chin, and a voice husky with good living, good sleeping, good humour, and good health. He was past the prime of life, but Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow’s hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.”
Anybody with an instinctive feeling for literature should read that passage with a sort of rapture. Anybody with a feeling for humor can feel, as it were, the atmosphere of it. But can the moving picture reproduce it? Not within a mile. They can get Gabriel Varden’s clothes correct to 1775 without a button wrong or a frog missing. They can reproduce his gig so that he himself wouldn’t know the difference. What next? He will be seen for perhaps one quarter of a second and then a voice will shout “Yoho! Who goes there?” and the action of the piece goes on. Varden is just a couple of clicks. The thing that breathed life into him, the beautiful paragraph above, is gone, was never there. The ‘reflection’ is missing. The onlooker is supposed to bring his own reflections, as he might buy his own sandwiches.
Let it be repeated, the point involved is not to decry moving pictures but to say that what they do is not what the written word does, and that when it comes to humor they are from nature compelled to overstress action, to run to pantomime rather than reflection. The results in some cases are marvellous: the ‘pictures’ can show the wild tumult of a battle where no one had time for reflection anyway. They can’t show the humor of a Locksmith sitting in a gig.
But we were speaking of Daudet’s Tartarin and of the unsatisfactory medium of translation when applied to humor. Yet in spite of the difficulty of a medium the extraordinary resemblance of the mould and manner of Daudet’s writing to that of Charles Dickens creates a basis of sympathetic understanding which goes a long way. This is not to say that Daudet imitated Dickens. He was already writing like Dickens before he ever heard of him; and Dickens wrote just like Daudet before Daudet was born. As a consequence Tartarin, like a lot of other people in Daudet’s books, is a regular Dickens character; though he differs from every one of them. Tartarin is not Pickwick: there is no ‘elderly man’ stuff about him. He could have thrown all four Pickwickians out of the window. In fact, Tartarin stands among others things for the glory and exuberance of health and strength; so glorious that it ‘goes to his head’; Tartarin, so to speak, is drunk all the time. His is the over-exuberant life of Southern France, all grapes and sunshine, where the mind gets too overheated for truth and lives in a warm mist of unreality and exaggerations. Hence the expansion, the hugeness of Tartarin: he stands in appropriate costume de chasse, dreaming of Numidian lions, conscious of his great purpose — and in reality he’d be afraid of a goat. Or he stands as a mountain climber posed like a statue with folded arms looking at the Alps, as if challenging them to a struggle to the death.
Reduced to a simple formula, as it often is, Daudet’s picture of the ‘midi’ is made to read that in Southern France all the people lie and exaggerate and bluff. That isn’t it at all. Like all formulas it perverts truth by condensation. What Daudet meant was that in the South they live in a super-world, like children playing games: a world where they can believe anything they want to believe, and where emphasis lies not on actuality but on appearance: not on whether a thing is or is not so (a matter of no consequence), but on how it sounds. Take as an example the famous scene of Tartarin giving evidence in a court as to the authenticity of a letter, said to have been written by him —
“Did you write this letter?” asks the judge. Tartarin, with an uplifted hand and the firmness of a Marcus Brutus, says: “Before God and before men I did not write that letter!”
His lawyer nudges his elbow and whispers. Tartarin realizes that he’s got it wrong; that’s not the answer he was to give. He strikes another pose, equally noble — the pose registering the contribution of a noble mind.
“Pardon,” he says, “I did write it.”
We can imagine the applause of the courtroom in instant response to such nobility of manner: the fact that his oath before “God and men” was all off didn’t make any difference.
The humor of the Tartarin books and the Tartarin environment is indeed superb. It combines many elements. It has in it the primitive delight of exaggeration. It has a large element of the attractiveness of humbug, of the clever crook, as discussed in an earlier chapter. But the best of it is the broad way in which whole villages of people are satirized all at once. The Tartarin people live on delusions of greatness: on the least pretext they send delegations of congratulations, read addresses to one another, hold celebrations, fire off guns, and set up floral arches of welcome. They live among the grapes and flowers in a sort of permanent armistice night. There is a contrast between the luxuriant beauty of their home and the fact that they refuse to keep still in it. This riot of the mind, this exuberant fancy, this victory over truth finds its summation in Tartarin.
One figure yet remains of those selected as the world’s known and accepted characters of humor — the smallest, the humblest and yet the greatest — the figure of little Huckleberry Finn floating down the Mississippi on his raft. But there the pathos enters in to create the highest humor, the humor of sublimity which I reserve for the concluding chapter. Let Huck sleep a little longer under his ragged coverlet on the raft: it is not yet sun-up on the Illinois side.
Chapter VI. COMIC VERSE: THE LIGHTER NOTES
THERE IS A wide domain where humor is expressed in forms that belong to poetry and verse. Here, as usual, the field is so rich and so little worked as yet that the various blossoms in it toss and mingle in confusion, unnamed or called at random. These are not flowers that blush unseen, but seen so often as to be lost from view. What horticultural show, excited over Brazilian orchids, ever finds a place for a Ragged Robin, or a Wild Cucumber? What literary critic, analysing the genius of Shakespeare, ever pauses to work out the fine distinction between super-comic verse written by a village idiot who might have been a poet laureate, and super-serious verse written to order by a poet laureate himself? Yet there is to the trained eye and ear an evident and interesting difference. How many people can distinguish between poetry that is Execrable, as much in Wordsworth (see The Stuffed Owl) and poetry that is merely Deplorable (see the ‘free copy’ printed in the poetry column of any respectable newspaper)? Or take again the interesting distinction, as made by a trained intelligence, between a comic poem by Thomas Hood trying to be comic, and an epitaph by a mute inglorious Milton, trying not to be.
Yet all of these efforts or achievements in a way are connected with laughter. Like all that goes under humor, they rise to superior forms where mere merriment is lifted into reflection, sharpened into satire or saddened into pathos. I have elsewhere, in a larger work on the Theory of Humour, endeavored to grasp all the forms indicated under a chapter heading of Comic and Super-comic Verse. But the title is not very satisfactory as the word ‘comic’ falls short in its reach and misleads in its direction.
One can realize the width and variety of the field by consulting such an anthology as the admirable compendium made by Carolyn Wells (1920 and 1936) as The Book of Humorous Verse. For complete extracts and a complete survey of authors and works, it is to such a compendium that I must refer the reader: or rather let me call him the ‘student’ since he is supposed to be studying this book and not reading it to enjoy it. In any case the limitation of space entirely forbids the mention of names and the citation of extracts except as illustrations of theory. Authors are quoted just as the Latin grammar quotes Cicero, but are not enumerated. There is an admirable French quotation J’en passe et des meilleurs, conveying as it were a wistful regret which exactly suits the situation. It is the difficulty of anyone composing such a book as the present volume that the absence of reference to a particular name or a particular book may seem a careless oversight, an evidence of ignorance or a malicious omission. The French covers it all.
Poetry in the full and proper sense means the creation of things by the human imagination, making something out of nothing, or as children say, out of one’s own head. We have come to restrict it to written literature, and to that part of it only where something in the form of expression separates it from common speech. There is no doubt of the superiority of its reach. Poetry can say in a word what prose must say in a page: poetry can convey in a flash what prose loses in a fog. Poetry can breathe life and color and pathos into the texture of words, where prose fails to animate. Words alone will not convey thought. You can say in prose “Macbeth was weary of existence,” and nothing much ‘gets over.’ You can say in slang “McBeth was pretty well fed up,” and a certain impression is created. But when you say “Out, out, brief candle,” the veil between your mind and that of Macbeth has fallen.
But there is a converse of this. Poetry, let us put it very clearly, in order to be poetry must be really poetry. Now most of it isn’t. Prose has to say something or say nothing. Prose wears a plain suit of language — of subjects, adjectives and predicates. But poetry goes in a fine fashion of adornment with rhymes and tropes and metres all a-jingle. So these fine feathers may be used to make a fine bird, when there is nothing really underneath but a frame of sticks. Thus people can write what they think to be poetry and there is nothing in it but rhymed words and matched metres: it conveys no thought of consequence or beauty but only covers up the absence of it.
Hence the poetic form lends itself easily to the fun of the humorist. Much of our poetry is ‘so darned silly’ that by making it a little sillier still we reveal its silliness. This is, in its proper sense, parody. Much of it that is meant to be majestic or heroic misses its mark so completely in trying to present a mighty theme of tragedy or magnificence, that we can get a glorious effect by applying the same heroic measures to a mimic theme of not great consequence. This is mock-heroic poetry. Close beside it is the merry re-editing as fun of a theme already written seriously. This is burlesque.
Again, as there is a certain ripple and merriment in the music of good verse, we can turn it to narrative and tell with it a whole merry story of a John Gilpin or a Tam O’Shanter. Such is narrative light verse. Or again, since poetic forms can say much in little, we turn it into the short explosions of epigrammatic verse. Or again, if we are born with more poetic feeling than our limited education can properly express, we write the poetry of good intentions that is meant to be exalted and becomes super-comic. Something of the same mingled pity and reverence is extended towards this as surrounds, in the camps of savages, the exalted features of the idiot.
But quite apart from inspired idiocy, there are various other forms of super-comic to be carefully distinguished and classified as deplorable, execrable and unpardonable. Reference has already been made to the Deplorable Poetry of the poetry column of the Sunday newspaper. This, like the sermon of the Arkansas farmer in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, is given for nothing and is well worth it. Such are the poems on spring, and early daffodils. Execrable Poetry differs from Deplorable in that it is written by persons who ought to know better, by real poets over-encouraged and gone silly. Here pity is swallowed up by indignation. Unpardonable Poetry is written by Laureates and academicians under a forced draft.
The humor of the above forms is unintentional. When we find verse written intentionally, and successfully, to create laughter, then we have pure comic verse. Here belong many real treasures. When verse is not only amusing but takes on the added intention of exposing faults, not of other people’s verse, but of society at large, that is satirical light verse. When, still in a light form, verse forces laughter even in tragedy and horror, that is tragic light verse: and when we reach the highest form in which, as ever, laughter and tears join in contemplating the incongruities of life itself, that is poetic humor.
Of the varied forms that make up the broad field of humor in verse, parody and burlesque have been already treated in connection with the incongruous juxtaposition of ideas. The type of Narrative Light Verse can be illustrated by reference to such well-known poems as John Gilpin, written by William Cowper in 1785 and still going strong. The humor of the narrative is the humor of discomfiture — Gilpin sets out to ride to Edmonton for a family celebration, his horse runs away, his wig blows off, the people shout, and so on. Nothing much in it except the way it is told; the pleasant ripple of the rhyme; Gilpin’s mock-heroic figure— “a train-band, captain eke was he, of famous London town,” . . . “then over all that he might be equipped from top to toe, his long red cloak well brushed and neat he manfully did throw,” etc. There is the terrific roadside excitement— “he carries weight, he rides a race, ’tis for a thousand pounds”; and withal such mimic adventure, such a splash for nothing! Since John Gilpin first rode, the lapse of a century and a half has thrown his adventure into what is now an old-world setting of gabled inns, of cobbled streets, and the varied hues of bygone dress — all preserved for us in the art of a Caldecott. Thus as ivy gives new beauty to the walls it covers, the poem has acquired that peculiar charm of half-saddened retrospect on life that is one of the highest elements of humor.
Among the other familiar examples of Narrative Light Verse one thinks of Tam O’Shanter, of The Laird o’ Cockpen by Lady Nairne and of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Deacon’s Masterpiece (The One Horse Shay). It is difficult to say where Narrative Light Verse ends and Mock-Heroic and Comic Poetry begin. But if one can make a distinction it would be that in Narrative Light Verse there is a more or less real and possible story and in the other forms there isn’t. Gilpin did ride, the Laird o’ Cockpen did marry, and the Deacon did have a shay that collapsed in a heap. But when it comes to The Yarn of the ‘Nancy Bell’ (W. S. Gilbert), in which the narrator has eaten all his shipmates — quite frankly he didn’t. The Jackdaw of Rheims didn’t really fade under a curse and Mr. Hilaire Belloc’s Modern Traveller didn’t really undergo his terrific adventures. But the line is hard to draw.
Narrative Light Verse naturally connects with Mock-Heroic Verse inasmuch as it constantly makes use of mock-heroic language, and mock-heroic attitude. This — the mock-heroic method in prose and verse — rests for its humor on the pretence of terrific importance of things that don’t really matter, terrific dangers that are ludicrously small, and tremendous exploits that really amount to nothing. Charles Dickens’s earlier and more exuberant work runs to mock-heroic titles and mock-heroic exploits. Compare the original title, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, his relatives, friends and enemies, comprising all his wills and his ways with a historical record of what he did and what he didn’t, showing, moreover, who inherited the family plate, who came in for the silver spoons and who for the wooden ladles. This mock-heroic extension was dropped later on. Compare the ominous and sombre title of Dickens’s last book The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The mock-heroic idea naturally tends to verse since the very form of word and phrase can heighten the effect, as true poetry reaches beyond prose. Mock-heroic poetry is as old as Homer’s Battle of the Frogs and Mice, and is never lost from sight. But in the modern world of the last two centuries it perhaps flourished more when classical education filled a larger place than now. People trained to make bad Latin verses could at least make good English ones. The pedantry of heavy scholarship was relieved by the make-believe of light. Very typical examples of mock-heroic verse are found in the Bon Gaultier Ballads so popular in Victorian days: for example, the account of Philip Slingsby and the Snapping Turtle:
