Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/71

 exists wherever imagination percolates through the understanding: the sediment is the grain-gold of wit. But the quality of humor, depending upon various moral traits, exists only wherever a broad imagination is combined with a sweet and tolerant moral sense that is devoid of malice and all uncharitableness, and at peace with all mankind. A petulant egotism may exist with wit, but never with humor. Sarcasm and satire are the forms which best agree with imperfect moral dispositions. A too prolonged irony has something melancholy and dyspeptic in it, and passes into the blood of a faulty temper even if there be the tonic of an upright moral sense. This moral sense may exist on every meridian of the earth, but it may not appear at literary epochs in solution with the brightest minds. Rabelais seems to be a French exception yo the Gallic trait that was noticed so long ago by the great Roman: Comœda and argute loqui,—belonging to comedy and to the ingenuities of conversation. Humor appears best in conjunction with the temper of Northern Europe, whose early races began with deep impressions of the gravity of things and broke thence into alleviating moods. If it be the primitive trait of a nation to enjoy comic gayeties and the subtle surprises of discourse, it does not readily rise to the moral earnestness which a serious world imposes, and therefore it cannot invent the relief and grave delight of humor.

Sydney Smith uses this word to cover any thing that is ridiculous and laughable. So the epithet comic is quite indiscriminately applied. But we ought not to