Sense of HUMOUR STEPHEN POTTER HENRY HOLT & COMPANY NEW YORK " College Library 14 ... d1SOn ... hurD V,rglt11a l\~rr1Son 0' First published 1954 Reprinted I954 rR q-) I I . I , F>~) AG 4 '55 Set In Bembo 12 poitlt. aHd pritlted at THE STELLAR PRESS LTD UNION STREBT BARNET HBRTS GREAT BRITAIN Contents P ART I THE THEME PAGE The English Reflex 3 Funniness by Theory 6 The Irrelevance of Laughter 8 The Great Originator 12 Humour in Three Dimensions: Shakespeare 16 The Great Age 20 S.B. and G.B.S. 29 Decline 36 Reaction 40 PART II THE THEME ILLUSTRATED Personal Choice 47 1 The Raw Material , , 8 UNCONSCIOUS HUMOUR 4 Frederick Locker-Lampson. At Her Window 52 Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Answered 53 Shakespeare. From Cymbeline 54 TAKING IT SERIOUSLY From The Isthmian Book of Croquet 57 Footnote on Henry IV, Part 2 59 THE PERFECTION OF PERIOD 60 Samuel Pepys. Pepys at the Theatre 61 Samuel Johnson. A Dissertation on the Art of Flying 62 Horace Walpole. The Frustration of Manfred 63 Horace Walpole. Theodore Revealed 64 Haynes Bayly. From She Wore a Wreath of Roses 66 Charles Mackay. Only a Passing Thought 66 E. S. Turner. The Shocking .!fistory of Advertising 67 VB VUl CONTENTS PAGE CHARACTER ON THE SLEEVE 67 Samuel Johnson. On Warburton on Shakespeare 68 James Boswell. On Goldsmith 68 William Blake. Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses 69 S. T. Coleridge. To his Wife 70 S. T. Coleridge. Advice to a Son 71 S. T. Coleridge. Thanks for a Loan 71 Arnold Bennett and Hugh Walpole. A Literary Friendship 72 The Rouse Trial. Witness for the Defence 77 Baroness Orczy. The Birth of the Scarlet Pimpernel 80 Mass Observation. Me and My Brother and My Cousin 81 2 Humour of Release 84 FROM BONDS OF WORDS AND SYNTAX 84 Tommy and Jack 84 Ted Kavanagh. Itma 85 Torquemada. Crossword Clues 85 Laurence Sterne. The Male Midwife, Dr Slop, is Urgently Wanted 87 Herbert Farjeon. Contract Bridge 89 FROM BONDS OF GRAVITY AND FORMULA 90 Anon. The Dying Aviator ~ 90 Samuel Butler. Unpleasantness of Youth 91 Samuel Butler. The Lost Chord 91 Edward Lear. Self-Portrait of the Laureate of Nonsense 91 Cockney Humour 93 3 Humour in Criticism 95 CRITICISM DIRECT 95 Francis Jeffrey. On Wordsworth's The Excursion 95 Macaulay. On the Poems of Robert Montgomery 96 George Bernard Shaw. On Irving in Waterloo 98 . CONTENTS IX CRITICISM DIRECT - continued PAGE Max Beerbohm. On Duse 100 Max Beerbohm. On The Passing of the Third Floor Back 100 H. G. Wells. On the First Night of Henry James's Guy Domville 104 James Agate. On Mozart 104 C. A. Lejeune. On ' Dietrich as an Angel' 105 C. A. Lejeune. On ' Evening Dress Compulsory' 107 Paul Jennings. On Beatrix Potter Translated 109 John Crow. On the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Second Edition I I I CRITICISM BY PARODY 113 Swift. The Verisimilitude of Travellers' Tales 114 Max Beerbohm. Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga 114 Max Beerbohm. Kipling 115 G. K. Chesterton. The Poets as they might have re-written Ole King Cole 116 J. C. Squire. G. K. Chesterton 117 W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman. A Test Paper lIB J. B. Morton. A 'Little-Known-Facts' column 120 D. B. Wyndham Lewis. A Leader-Page in a National Daily 120 Hugh Kingsmill. Lytton Strachey 121 Henry Reed. Thomas Hardy 122 Lionel Millard. Elizabethan Prose 123 Stephen Potter. Script of a BBC Regional Literary Feature, period 1940 123 Peter Ustinov. Stage Dialogue We Cannot Do f{lithout 125 Osbert Lancaster. Drayne}lete Revealed 126 4 The Humour of Satire Alexander Pope. Chloe 133 Charles Lamb. On Stage Morality 134 Charles Lamb. Suggests an Emendation 134 x CONTENTS The Humour of Satire - continued PAGE Byron. Sweetness 135 Byron. Age of Inventions 136 Charles Dickens. A Letter frorn Fanny Squeers 136 W. R. Sickert. The Royal Academicians 137 Bernard Shaw. Don Juan in Hell 142 D. H. Lawrence. Don'ts 142 D. H. Lawrence. Wellsian Futures; Talk; When I Read Shakespeare 144 Herbert Farjeon. Liberty Hall 145 Virginia Graham. A Lullaby in Poor Taste 145 Bertrand Russell. God and Bishop Berkeley 146 Henry Reed. Lessons of the War 146 J. B. Priestley. Chairmanship 149 5 The Humour of Situation 151 George Meredith. Mr Goren Brings Bad News 151 Anthony Trollope. Agonies of Barch ester 153 Harold Nicolson. The Right People in the Wrong Places, 1885 154 Jo1m Fothergill. Wit Antisociable 155 James Agate. The BBC and the Concert Grand 157 Tom Driberg. Margaret Rawlings and the Buchmanites 157 Margaret Barton. Garrick's Only Othello 161 Osbert Sitwell. Horses on Parade 161 6 Humour of Observation 164 Chaucer. The Wife of Bath 165 Chaucer. The Pardoner 166 Shakespeare. The Meeting of Beatrice and Benedick; On Achilles; On Cressida; TlVhen to Plead with Coriolanus 168 William Congreve. Reasonable Demands of a Wife to Mirabel! . 169 . Tobias Smollett. Preparations for the Commodore's ~~~ 1p James Boswell. Dr Johnson 175 . CONTENTS Xl Humour of Observation - continued PAGE Oliver Goldsmith. Tony Lumpkin 177 Creevey. Mrs Creevey writes of News from Trafalgar 178 Charles Lamb. On Coleridge to Wordsworth 179 John Keats. To Mrs Reynolds's Cat 179 Charles Dickens. The Boarding-I-Iouse 180 George Eliot. The Tullivers are Allowed to See Aunt Pullet's Bonnet 186 Charles Dickens. Mr Podsnap and the Foreign Gentleman 190 Sarlluel Butler. The Courting of Christina 193 George and Weedon Grossmith. The Diary of a Nobody 195 Thomas Hardy. Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir 199 Eden Phillpotts. Gideon's Front Tooth 202 Harold Nicolson. Tennyson Reads his Poems: 1831j 207 Tennyson Reads his Poems: 1860 208 Aldous Huxley. Illidge Joins the Reception Downstairs 210 Terence Rattigan. Impressing Diana 213 Nigel Balchin. The New Gun 213 Bernard Darwin. Walter Hagen: The 1922 Open 220 Patrick Hamilton. Dawn over the Boarding HOHse 224 J01m Betjernan. Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Gardenj 226 Margate, 1940 227 Hunlphrey Hare. Swinburne and Watts-Dunton at , The Pines' 228 Angus Wilson. A First in English Literature 229 Hesketh Pearson. Whistler on the Academicians 231 7 Self-Portrait 234 William Cowper. Letter to the Rev. William Unwin 234 S. T. Coleridge. Letter to John H. Morgan 234 Harriette Wilson. A Visit front the Duke of Wellingtorl 234 H. G. Wells. Surrender at Keston Fish Ponds 239 Eric Linklater. 85831 Pte. Linklater, The Black Watch 240 Janles Agate. On Hardly Using Any French)' 244 James Agate. Correcting Proofs 245 .. xu CO NTENTS Self-Portrait - continued PAGE C. E. M. Joad. Joad and the Dragon 245 J. B. Priestley. My Tastes 249 8 The Age of Humour 251 Sir John Squire. The Godalming Museum 251 E. V. Lucas and George Morrow. Experiment in Autobiography 252 Professor Walter Raleigh. Poem 255 Logan Pearsall Smith. The Authorj The Shrouded Ilou~ 255 Harold Nicolson. Peacemaking 256 Terence Rattigan. Exposition Without Tears 256 9 Tragic Humour Graham Greene. Scobie Reads to the Boy 260 10 The End Byron. A Fragment Acknowledgements 266 Index ED ITO R 's NOT E. In the body of the text, titles printed within brackets are the editor's, not the author's. THE LINCOLN IMP Hidden among the angelic faces of the sacred images carved above the columns of Lincoln Cathedral is this figure of a kindly but impertinent devil or imp - symbol perhaps of the intrusion of humour into even the serious moments of English life. PART I THE THEME The English Reflex The day of English Humour is declining. I am not suggesting that Punch is less what it was than tradition demands, nor that at the other end, the acid end, of the scale (towards which Punch 'incidentally has begun to shift after eighty years of alkali), our Barren Leaves and Vile Bodies are pulverised less efficiently by the novelists of 1953 than they were by the Waughs and Huxleys of a quarter of a century ago. It is simply that times have changed. A sub-era in the evolution of Englishness, in which humour has been regarded as an essential part of the Good, as a graceful and necessary congruity of social life, as something to be taken for granted as right, is beginning to pass away. For many occasions the humorous approach is still the safest diagnostic proof of the Englishness in our blood. 'How are you,' There, at the bar, is Iny solid friend G., the ornithologist. 'Jolly D.' he says. ' Well played,' I say. No smile, of course: it is something less than being facetious, even. This exhausted parody of prep-school slang is one of our traditional methods of starting a conversation. We shake jokes, as it were, instead of shaking hands, to show that there is no hostility. It is as automatic as the cough reflex for clearing the throat. True, the' humour' need not necessarily be so worn out and automatic as this. On the other hand it may be worse, taking the shape of the comic story - ' stop Ine if you've heard it,' (for it is part of the tribal custonl never to ' stop me " but to listen helplessly and wait for . the point, get the feel and inflexion of the place where the laugh should come, in the story, and then laugh in unison with the teller). 3 SENSE OF HUMOUR It is true that most of these preliminary parries, these chew­ ings of a worn-out old cud, are a symptom of a decadent ten­ dency to live-off-the-Iand in the world of humour, without putting anything back. And it is true that nlost people who deliberately make humorous remarks have no humour in the special English sense which this essay tries to define.