en
intellect given to scrutiny and analysis. From the buoyancy of the
Jewish disposition, and out of the force of Jewish subjectivity, arose
Jewish wit, whose first manifestations can be traced in the Talmud and
the Midrash. Its appeals are directed to both fancy and heart. It
delights in antithesis, and, as was said above, is intimately connected
with Jewish subjectivity. Its distinguishing characteristic is the
desire to have its superiority acknowledged without wounding the
feelings of the sensitive, and an explanation of its peculiarity can be
found in the sad fate of the Jews. The heroes of Shakespere's tragedies
are full of irony. Frenzy at its maddest pitch breaks out into merry
witticisms and scornful laughter. So it was with the Jews. The waves of
oppression, forever dashing over them, strung their nerves to the point
of reaction. The world was closed to them in hostility. There was
nothing for them to do but laugh--laugh with forced merriment from
behind prison bars, and out of the depths of their heartrending
resignation. Complaints it was possible to suppress, but no one could
forbid their laughter, ghastly though it was. M. G. Saphir, one of the
best exponents of Jewish wit, justly said: "The Jews seized the weapon
of wit, since they were interdicted the use of every other sort of
weapon." Whatever humdrum life during the middle ages offered them, had
to submit to the scalpel of their wit.

As a rule, Jewish wit springs from a lively appreciation of what is
ingenious. A serious beginning suddenly and unexpectedly takes a merry,
jocose turn, producing in Heine's elegiac passages the discordant
endings so shocking to sensitive natures. But it is an injustice to the
poet to attribute these rapid transitions to an artist's vain fancy. His
satire is directed against the ideals of his generation, not against the
ideal. Harsh, discordant notes do not express the poet's real
disposition. They are exaggerated, romantic feeling, for which he
himself, led by an instinctively pure conception of the good and the
beautiful, which is opposed alike to sickly sentimentality and jarring
dissonance, sought the outlet of irony.

Heine's humor, as I intimated above, springs from his recognition of the
tragedy of life. It is an expression of the irreconcilable difference
between the real and the ideal, of the perception that the world,
despite its grandeur and its beauty, is a world of folly and
contradictions; that whatever e