Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/25

 pretence of it. Things that are incongruous are forced to touch at one point, and for one moment to feign congruity. The surprise to the mind is a laughable one, because it is in the habit of regarding ideas and objects as they naturally cohere or differ. Sanity and business depend upon this habit. The understanding is at home in the ordinary congruities of things, and is not prepared to admit that two things which are absolutely incongruous can be ever made for a single instant to agree. Such a result cannot be soberly contemplated: the order of the world and the mental consistency which pays the butcher for his meat and the milkman for his refreshing dash of the hydrant forbid it. It becomes laughable precisely because this gravity of order is against it. If a thing cannot be done soberly, and yet is done, the result is fatal to sobriety. This is the root of every laugh: two things which never met before, and ought not to meet, hail each other and set up a claim of relationship on this very ground,—namely, that it was always impossible that they could be related. In the farce of "Box and Cox," says one of these doubles to the other eagerly, "Have you the mark of a strawberry between your shoulders?" "No," answers the other. "Oh, then you are indeed my long-lost brother!" It is so in the relations which make laughter. There should be the mark of a strawberry; but just because there is not, the whim of fraternity is raised, and for a moment it appears as if the two things must have been twins at birth, though separated since.

Thus, to begin at the lowest degree of this subject,