2 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



still to the barbarian." (And so they still are after twenty centuries in 

 spite of Plato.) "Let us ask the wits and humourists not to scoff but to 

 believe and to be converted to the newer, truer Faith, that nothing 

 can be ridiculous which is useful." 



There it lies, you perceive, the doctrine; ancient, simple, true, I 

 apprehend; that wits, satirists and humourists are usually men of 

 little faith; that they are obsessed by usage and conformity to usage; 

 that having eyes only for the incongruous and grotesque, they find the 

 grotesque and incongruous more often than not, in the crude Faith of the 

 Reformer; in the zeal without discretion of the Idealist; it is only 

 natural; the humourist does not take himself seriously; it is the first 

 condition indeed of humour; he cannot then take other men seriously; 

 and how at any rate can he take seriously those most serious moods 

 of humanity which are called Faith and Idealism ? If he took con- 

 science, etc., very seriously, the first result would surely be — as we 

 have all seen with our humourist friends when they "get religion" — 

 an immediate falling oft' of wit and humour; one would decrease as the 

 other increased; it happened conspicuously to that great and de- 

 lightful humourist, Lewis Carroll, when he grew older and more sober 

 and more serious; he exchanged the lifegiving priceless nonsense of 

 Alice for the painful moralizing of Sylvia and Bruno. So again if 

 Dickens had been more of a moralist and less of a humourist, he could 

 not have delighted in painting the brutality of Squeers and Mrs. 

 Gamp and the humbug of Pecksniff and the folly of Micawber; 

 he would have been instead depressed by the contrast between human 

 nature, as it was in these grotesque creatures and what it might be 

 and is in the saints ; but if the wit and humour in a man do not decrease 

 with age as they decreased with Lewis Carroll, why then they increase 

 and at the expense of Faith; and with them comes an ever keener 

 disgust for all Faith's foibles, an ever keener gusto in launching shafts 

 against demagogism, hysteria, sciolism and the other grotesque garbs 

 in which too often Faith is fain to masquerade; and after that it is 

 but a step to a warfare against all enthusiasm; that dubious quality, 

 that debatable land, enthusiasm: a reproach to our eighteenth cen- 

 tury ancestors, the condition of all virtue to the nineteenth century. 

 The wit and humourist, the satirist and cynic seem at last to be but 

 one man with four names, and to have little more definite to say to 

 us than — after Talleyrand I think— "Surtout point de zèle." 



This is the temperament broadly of the humourists from Aristo- 

 phanes down to Hookham Field his translator, down to Gibbon and 

 Canning (with his 'needy knife-grinder') down to the Saturday re- 

 viewers; I think there was a touch of it on this side of the Atlantic 



