well-known critic, himself a Pole, makes a suggestive
comparison between the Polish and the Russian natures. The Pole, he
says, is quicker, wittier, more imaginative, more studious of beauty,
less absorbed in the material world than the Russian--in a word,
infinitely more gifted with the artistic temperament; and yet in every
art the Russian has immeasurably outstripped the Pole. His explanation,
if not wholly convincing, is at least suggestive. The Poles are a race
of dreamers, and the dreamer finds his reward in himself. He does not
seek to conquer the world with arms or with commerce, with tears or with
laughter; neither money tempts him nor fame, and the strenuous,
unremitting application which success demands, whether in war, business,
or the arts, is alien to his being.

The same observation and the same reasoning apply with equal force to
the English and the Irish. No one who has lived in the two countries
will deny that the Irish are apparently the more gifted race; no one can
deny, if he has knowledge and candour, that the English have
accomplished a great deal more, the Irish a great deal less. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the productions of that faculty which Irishmen
have always been reputed, and justly reputed, to possess in peculiar
measure--the faculty of humour. Compare Lever, who for a long time
passed as the typical Irish humorist, with his contemporaries Thackeray
and Dickens. The comparison is not fair, but it suggests the central
fact that the humour of Irish literature is deficient in depth, in
intellectual quality, or, to put it after an Irish fashion, in gravity.

'Humorous' is a word as question-begging as 'artistic,' and he would be
a rash man who should try to define either. But so much as this will
readily be admitted, that humour is a habit of mind essentially complex,
involving always a double vision--a reference from the public or normal
standard of proportion to one that is private and personal. The humorist
refuses to part with any atom of his own personality, he stamps it on
whatever comes from him. "If reasons were as plenty as blackberries,"
says Falstaff, achieving individuality by the same kind of odd
picturesque comparison as every witty Irish peasant uses in talk, to the
delight of himself and his hearers. But the individuality lies deeper
than phrases: Falstaff takes his private standard into battle with him.
There is nothing more obviously funny than the short paunchy ma