J. C. AND A. W. HARE

(1795-1855; 1792-1834)

UESSES at Truth," a series of charming essays by Julius Charles and Augustus William Hare, was published as their joint work in 1827. The authors were brothers and both clergymen of the Church of England. Julius Charles Hare, who became Archdeacon of Lewes in 1840, was celebrated as a pulpit orator and as the author of several books on divinity and ecclesiastical subjects. His sermons often present examples of melodious "concords of sweet sounds," which make them almost unique in the pulpit oratory of the English language. "Guesses at Truth," however, is the work by which he is best remembered.

THAT IT IS BETTER TO LAUGH THAN TO CRY

RIDENTEM DENTEM dicere verum quid vetat? In the first place all the sour faces in the world, stiffening into a yet more rigid asperity at the least glimpse of a smile. I have seen faces, too, which so long as you let them lie in their sleepy torpor, unshaken and unstirred, have a creamy softness and smoothness, and might beguile you into suspecting their owners of being gentle; but if they catch the sound of a laugh, it acts on them like thunder, and they also turn sour. Nay, strange as it may seem, there have been such incarnate paradoxes as would rather see their fellow-creatures cry than smile.

But is not this in exact accordance with the spirit which pronounces a blessing on the weeper, and a woe on the laugher?

Not in the persons I have in view. That blessing and woe are pronounced in the knowledge how apt the course of this world is to run counter to the kingdom of God. They who weep are declared to be blessed, not because they weep, but because they shall laugh; and the woe threatened to the laughers is in like manner, that they shall mourn and weep. Therefore, they who have this spirit in them will endeavor to forward the blessing and to avert the woe. They will try to comfort the mourner, so

as to lead him to rejoice; and they will warn the laugher, that he may be preserved from the mourning and weeping, and may exchange his passing for lasting joy. But there are many who merely indulge in the antipathy, without opening their hearts to the sympathy. Such is the spirit found in those who have cast off the bonds of the lower earthly affections, without having risen as yet into the freedom of heavenly love-in those who have stopped short in the state of transition between the two lives, like so many skeletons stripped of their earthly, and not yet clothed with a heavenly body. It is the spirit of stoicism, for instance, in philosophy, and of vulgar fatalism, which in so many things answers to stoicism in religion. They who feel the harm they have received from worldly pleasures are prone at first to quarrel with pleasure of every kind altogether; and it is one of the strange perversities of our self-will to entertain anger, instead of pity, towards those whom we fancy to judge or act less wisely than ourselves. This, however, is only while the scaffolding is still standing around the edifice of their Christian life, so that they cannot see clearly out of the windows, and their view is broken up into disjointed parts. When the scaffolding is removed, and they look abroad without hindrance, they are readier than any to delight in all the beauty and true pleasure around them. They feel that it is their blessed calling, not only to rejoice always themselves, but likewise to rejoice with all who do rejoice in innocence of heart. They feel that this must be well-pleasing to him who has filled his universe with ever-bubbling springs of gladness; so that whithersoever we turn our eyes, through earth and sky as well as sea, we behold the ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα of nature. On the other hand, it is the harshness of an irreligious temper clothing itself in religious zeal, and not seldom exhibiting symptoms of mental disorganization, that looks scowlingly on every indication of happiness and mirth.

Moreover, there is a large class of people who deem the business of life far too weighty and momentous to be made light of; who would leave merriment to children, and laughter to idiots; and who hold that a joke would be as much out of place on their lips as on a gravestone or in a ledger. Wit and wisdom being sisters, not only are they afraid of being indicted for bigamy were they to wed them both, but they shudder at such a union as incestuous. So, to keep clear of temptation, and to preserve their faith where they have plighted it, they turn the

younger out of doors; and if they see or hear of anybody taking her in, they are positive he can know nothing of the elder. They would not be witty for the world. Now, to escape being so is not very difficult for those whom nature has so favored that wit with them is always at zero, or below it. Or, as to their wisdom, since they are careful never to overfeed her, she jogs leisurely along the turnpike road, with lank and meagre carcass, displaying all her bones, and never getting out of her own dust. She feels no inclination to be frisky, but if a coach or wagon passes her, is glad, like her rider, to run behind a thing so big. Now, all these people take grievous offense if any one comes near them better mounted, and they are in a tremor lest the neighing and snorting and prancing should be contagious.

Surely, however, ridicule implies contempt; and so the feeling must be condemnable, subversive of gentleness, incompatible with kindness?

Not necessarily so, or universally; far from it. The word ridicule, it is true, has a narrow, one-sided meaning. From our proneness to mix up personal feelings with those which are more purely objective and intellectual, we have in great measure restricted the meaning of ridicule, which would properly extend over the whole region of the ridiculous, the laughable, where we may disport ourselves innocently, without any evil emotion; and we have narrowed it, so that in common usage it mostly corresponds to derision, which does indeed involve personal and offensive feelings. As the great business of Wisdom in her speculative office is to detect and reveal the hidden harmonies of things, those harmonies which are the sources and the everflowing emanations of law, the dealings of wit, on the other hand, are with incongruities. And it is the perception of incongruity, flashing upon us, when unaccompanied, as Aristotle observes (Poet., Chap. v.), by pain, or by any predominant moral disgust, that provokes laughter and excites the feeling of the ridiculous. But it no more follows that the perception of such an incongruity must breed or foster haughtiness or disdain than that the perception of anything else that may be erroneous or wrong should do so. You might as well argue that a man must be proud and scornful because he sees that there is such a thing as sin, or such a thing as folly, in the world. Yet, unless we blind our eyes, and gag our ears, and hoodwink our minds, we shall seldom pass through a day without having some form of

evil brought in one way or other before us.

Besides, the percep

tion of incongruity may exist, and may awaken laughter, without the slightest reprobation of the object laughed at. We laugh at a pun, surely without a shade of contempt either for the words punned upon or for the punster; and if a very bad pun be the next best thing to a very good one, this is not from its flattering any feeling of superiority in us, but because the incongruity is broader and more glaring. Nor when we laugh at a droll combination of imagery do we feel any contempt, but often admiration at the ingenuity shown in it, and an almost affectionate thankfulness toward the person by whom we have been amused, such as is rarely excited by any other display of intellectual power, as those who have ever enjoyed the delight of Professor Sedgwick's society will bear witness.

It is true, an exclusive attention to the ridiculous side of things is hurtful to the character and destructive of earnestness and gravity. But no less mischievous is it to fix our attention exclusively, or even mainly, on the vices and other follies of mankind. Such contemplations, unless counteracted by wholesomer thoughts, harden or rot the heart, deaden the moral principle, and make us hopeless and reckless. The objects toward which we should turn our minds habitually are those which are great, and good, and pure; the throne of virtue, and she who sits upon it; the majesty of truth, the beauty of holiness. This is the spiritual sky through which we should strive to mount, "springing from crystal step to crystal step," and bathing our souls in its living, life-giving ether. These are the thoughts by which we should whet and polish our swords for the warfare against evil, that the vapors of the earth may not rust them. But in a warfare against evil, under one or other of its forms, we are all of us called to engage; and it is a childish dream to fancy that we can walk about among mankind without perpetual necessity of remarking that the world is full of many worse incongruities besides those which make us laugh.

Nor do I deny that a laugher may often be a scoffer and a scorner. Some jesters are fools of a worse breed than those who used to wear the cap. Sneering is commonly found along with a bitter splenetic misanthrophy; or it may be a man's mockery at his own hollow heart, venting itself in mockery at others. Cruelty will try to season or to palliate its atrocities by derision. The hyena grins in its den; most wild beasts over their prey.

But though a certain kind of wit, like other intellectual gifts, may coexist with moral depravity, there has often been a playfulness in the best and greatest men,-in Phocion, in Socrates, in Luther, in Sir Thomas More,—which, as it were, adds a bloom to the severer graces of their character, shining forth with amaranthine brightness when storms assail them, and springing up in fresh blossoms under the ax of the executioner. How much is our affection for Hector increased by his tossing his boy in his arms, and laughing at his childish fears! Smiles are the language of love; they betoken the complacency and delight of the heart in the object of its contemplation. Why are we to assume that there must needs be bitterness or contempt in them, when they enforce a truth or reprove an error? On the contrary, some of those who have been richest in wit and humor have been

among the simplest and kindest-hearted of men. I will only instance Fuller, Bishop Earle, La Fontaine, Matthias Claudius, Charles Lamb. Le méchant n'est jamais comique is wisely remarked by De Maistre, when canvassing the pretensions of Voltaire (Soirées, i. 273); and the converse is equally true: Le comique, le vrai comique, n'est jamais méchant. A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart; but without kindness there can be no true joy. And what a dull, plodding, tramping, clanking would the ordinary intercourse of society be without wit to enliven and brighten it! When two men meet they seem to be kept at bay through the estranging effects of absence, until some sportive sally opens their hearts to each other. Nor does anything spread cheerfulness so rapidly over a whole party, or an assembly of people, however large. Reason expands the soul of the philosopher; imagination glorifies the poet, and breathes a breath of spring through the young and genial; but if we take into account the numberless glances and gleams whereby wit lightens our every-day life, I hardly know what power ministers so bountifully to the innocent pleasures of mankind.

Surely, too, it cannot be requisite to a man's being in earnest that he should wear a perpetual frown. Or is there less of sincerity in Nature during her gambols in spring than during the stiffness and harshness of her wintry gloom? Does not the bird's blithe carolling come from the heart quite as much as the quadruped's monotonous cry? And is it then altogether impossible to take up one's abode with Truth, and to let all sweet homely feelings grow about it and cluster around it, and to smile