ts greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome
trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Moliere; his
surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to
the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony,
turned to the sardonic bull-fiddling of the _scherzo_.
No, there is not the slightest disharmony between sense and nonsense,
humor and respectability, despite the skittish tendency to assume that
there is. But, why, then, that widespread error? What actual fact of
life lies behind it, giving it a specious appearance of reasonableness?
None other, I am convinced, than the fact that the average man is far
too stupid to make a joke. He may _see_ a joke and _love_ a joke,
particularly when it floors and flabbergasts some person he dislikes,
but the only way he can himself take part in the priming and pointing of
a new one is by acting as its target. In brief, his personal contact
with humor tends to fill him with an accumulated sense of disadvantage,
of pricked complacency, of sudden and crushing defeat; and so, by an
easy psychological process, he is led into the idea that the thing
itself is incompatible with true dignity of character and intellect.
Hence his deep suspicion of jokers, however adept their thrusts. "What a
damned fool!"--this same half-pitying tribute he pays to wit and butt
alike. He cannot separate the virtuoso of comedy from his general
concept of comedy itself, and that concept is inextricably mingled with
memories of foul ambuscades and mortifying hurts. And so it is not often
that he is willing to admit any wisdom in a humorist, or to condone
frivolity in a sage.
V
THE SAVING GRACE
Let us not burn the universities--yet. After all, the damage they do
might be worse.... Suppose Oxford had snared and disemboweled
Shakespeare! Suppose Harvard had set its stamp upon Mark Twain!
VI
MORAL INDIGNATION
The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the
republic--against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday
moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the
cigarette, against all things sinful and charming--these astounding
Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of
mobocracy. In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob
is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor
of some new and super-oppressive law is to convin
|