by F L Lucas
Yet give Democritus welcome, as he comes, Persephone,
Though dead, still gaily laughing. Laughter alone did lighten
Even thy mother’s burden, what time she mourned for thee. [170]
I will admit that much ancient gaiety, except the best of Aristophanes, is apt to leave modern minds not much amused. Often it rings as thin as the laughter of ghosts. For though laughter is (fortunately) imperishable, men’s ideas of the laughable are very perishable indeed. But in the modern world I think the French have realized better than the Germans or ourselves the value of gaiety, both in life and in that art of persuasion which is so large a part of style. No one has put this truth more vividly and vigorously than my beloved Montaigne, when he says of melancholy seriousness: ‘Ie suis des plus exempts de cette passion, et ne l’ayme ny l’estime; quoy que le monde ayt entreprins, comme à prix faict, de l’honnorer de faveur particuliere: ils en habillent la sagesse, la vertu, la conscience; sot et vilain ornement!’ [171] And again, of philosophic wisdom: ‘On a grand tort de la peindre inaccessible aux enfants, et d’un visage renfrogné, sourcilleux et terrible: qui me l’a masqueé de ce fauls visage, pasle et hideux? Il n’est rien plus gay, plus gaillard, plus enioué, et à peu que ie ne die folastre.’ [172]
The Gil Blas of the less subtle Lesage learns in his adventures a similar lesson: ‘L’avarice et l’ambition qui me possédaient, changèrent entièrement mon humeur. Je perdis toute ma gaieté; je devins triste et rêveur, en un mot, un sot animal.’ [173] And, on a higher level, Renan remains in the same wise and sane tradition when he observes that, with all his melancholy merits, Marcus Aurelius lacked one vital thing – the kiss of a fairy at his birth; or again that excellent critic Faguet, when he finds a like deficiency in Calvin: ‘Une qualité manque à ce grand style sévère, c’est la grâce, le sourire, tous les sourires. Il y en a un qui est de gaîté, il y en a un qui est d’indulgence, il y en a un qui est de sensibilité doucement émue, il y en a un qui est d’imagination brillante qui se plaît à ses découvertes et ses jeux.’ [174]
And so, in practice, it was typically French that even in the twelfth century the serious voice of Guillaume de Lorris in the first part of the Roman de la Rose should be succeeded by the gaulois mockeries of Jean de Meung; that again at the Renaissance the nearest French counterpart to More’s serious Utopia should be the Gargantuan laughter of Rabelais.
Mieux est de ris que de larmes escripre,
Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme. [175]
Swift might cry ‘Vive la bagatelle!’; but it was Voltaire, not Swift, who practised it in his writing. And when the year 1759 produced those strange twins Rasselas and Candide, the two were as different in tone as Heraclitus and Democritus. Yet in eighteenth-century Europe the laughing Voltaire produced far more practical effect than Swift or Johnson. And even today more men read Candide than Rasselas; excellent though Rasselas is.
It is not, I think, that the English are fundamentally graver. If foreigners have accused us of taking our pleasures sadly, I suspect it is partly that we are apt to be stiffer and shyer than some other races when we spy strangers. But there is also among the educated English a tendency, as Scott complained, to a certain ‘hypocrisy in business’ – a certain distrust of public jest or irony on serious subjects; so that Lord Peterborough, it was said, was recalled from Spain because his despatches were wittier than became a general. Hence that grotesque aspiration in Gladstone’s Journal: ‘May we live as by the side of a grave, and looking in.’ Hence, too, that astonishing accusation of frivolity brought against Chaucer by Matthew Arnold (whom others found at times too frivolous himself). For Chaucer, though one of the most English of our great writers, is perhaps also the most French.
I do not think Arnold would have much liked this typically French passage from Renan on the danger that German might perhaps become the universal language before the Day of Judgement.
If German is spoken on that day, there will be confusion and many errors. I receive so many letters informing me of my eternal damnation that I have finished by regarding it as a matter of course. … I am confident, however, that I shall ameliorate the situation if I can converse with the good God in French. In my sleepless hours of the night I compose petitions. … I try nearly always to prove to Him that He is to some extent the cause of our perdition and that there are certain things that ought to have been more clearly explained. Some of my petitions, I think, are sufficiently piquant to make the Eternal smile; but it is very evident that they would lose all their salt if I were obliged to translate them into German. Let French be kept alive until the Day of Judgement. Without it I am lost.
But though this may be frivolous, I find it charming.
The practical conclusion? That must remain, I think a question of temperament and of tact. There are some people with as little gift for gaiety as Milton’s elephant trying to amuse Adam and Eve by twisting his ‘lithe proboscis’ – or as Milton himself. Heaven forbid that I should tempt any such into the quicksands of facetiousness. Better I were taken by the neck and cast into the Cam.
On the other hand, what life and lightness a graceful gaiety can give! In this tragic farce of a world I do not know of any virtue so underestimated. Johnson has summed up in two words that charm of Falstaff which covers (on the stage at least) all his sins – ‘perpetual gaiety’. Or consider this passage from Gibbon on the two Gordians: ‘With the venerable pro-consul, his son, who had accompanied him into Africa as his lieutenant, was likewise declared emperor. His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than ostentation.’ ‘Is not this pleasant reading?’ observed FitzGerald. It is. But you will not find much like it in most modern histories. Because they are written by greater men than Gibbon?
Or again, to take an example from our own field, no history of English literature in the Middle Ages and Renaissance has left such an impression on me as Jusserand’s; for Jusserand not only contrived to combine the gifts of scholar and diplomat, but added to both the grace and gaiety of France.
Therefore, if you have the gift of gaiety, thank Heaven and do not be too afraid to use it, like those of whom Fuller speaks: ‘some, for fear their orations should giggle, will not let them smile.’ Dear Fuller! – as full of conceits as Donne and of quaintness as Sir Thomas Browne, but so much more human and humorous than either – he too got into trouble, like Sterne, for his frivolity; [176] yet it is his jests, not his serious erudition nor his portentous memory, that have kept his own memory alive.
But of course gaiety is dangerous in this country, where the owls nest thick. You must consider your subject, and your hearers. Only experience can show how they will take it. As a civil servant I have found that with one department it was possible to get attention paid to important material by making it amusing; while another department would complain that the important material could not be shown to very important persons because it was mixed with unseemly levity. [A reference to the intelligence-reports that Hut 3 sent from Bletchley Park to the War Office. The reports, based on decrypted wireless intercepts, had to be disguised as the work of agents improbably close to Axis high command. (Ed.)]
You never know.
So Boswell found, when solemn persons took amiss some passages of Johnson’s wit in the Tour to the Hebrides. And he aptly comments, in dedicating his Johnson to Reynolds: ‘It is related of the great Dr. Clarke, that when in one of his leisure hours he was unbending himself with a few friends in the most playful and frolicksome manner, he observed Beau Nash approaching; upon which he suddenly stopped – “My boys (said he), let us be grave: here comes a fool.” ’
Again, gaiety of treatment can easily be overdone. Irony is safer than face
tiousness; but, for me, it should be an irony that is kindly rather than cruel. A constant grin can make in the end, as with Voltaire, an unpleasant wrinkle. This is partly, I think, why Strachey’s Queen Victoria is far better than his Eminent Victorians. With the Queen he came, perhaps, to mock; but he learnt in the end to respect her, even to admire. Again, with the brilliant critical essays of Virginia Woolf, I feel that her amused passion for the fantastic became itself too fantastic; she had to heighten the oddities even of real life, as if her pen were a hypodermic syringe injecting yet more alcohol into the reeling drunkenness of reality. Nothing too much.
You may find this praise of gaiety very odd. There is not much about it in most works on rhetoric since Aristotle. Yet I take comfort in the advice of Sir Henry Sidney to his famous son, Philip: ‘Give yourself to be merry, for you degenerate from your father if you find not yourself most able in wit and body and to do anything when you be most merry.’
But though gaiety can be perilous, or misplaced, good humour seldom is. At least, I suggest, we can avoid in writing that dreary and portentous solemnity which I often find so oppressive in undergraduate essays, or in ‘intellectual’ journals, or in ‘serious’ books. Most that is said, most that is written, most that is done, will be dust within ten years; most of our efforts are the drums and tramplings of a nursery; I do not like nurseries that never laugh. Therefore I would dissuade you, when you write, from resembling that shepherd in Addison who had learnt to keep four eggs in the air at once, and thereby acquired ‘the seriousness and gravity of a privy councellor’.
Endnotes
163 ‘Caress your phrase a long while – in the end it will smile.’ [return to text]
164 ‘He has had the bloom well knocked off his snout.’ [return to text]
165 An irrational ‘and’; but the writer was doubtless too angry to notice such trifles amid his orgy of alliteration. [return to text]
166 Swinburne, Letter to Emerson. [return to text]
167 All? [return to text]
168 D. H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, in Scrutinies, ed. Edgell Rickword, 1928. One might have thought it impossible to be vulgarer than Swinburne to Emerson; but this, I think, succeeds. [return to text]
169 (Juvenal’s writing) ‘overhung the Roman Empire like the vast flapping of the lammergeier above the nest of serpents.’ [return to text]
170 Julianus, Prefect of Egypt; Anth. Pal. VII, 58. [return to text]
171 ‘I am among those most exempt from this kind of feeling, and I neither like nor respect it; although the world in general has set itself, as if paid, to honour it with special favour; with this gloom they invest wisdom, virtue, conscience – a mean and stupid form of adornment.’ [return to text]
172 ‘People are very wrong to paint her’ (Wisdom) ‘to children as inaccessible, with a countenance gruff, frowning and terrible: who, I would ask, has masked her with this false face, pale and hideous? There is nothing gayer than true wisdom, nothing jollier, more playful, or – I could almost say – more madcap.’ [return to text]
173 ‘The avarice and ambition that possessed me, completely changed my disposition. I lost all my gaiety; I became morose and meditative – in a word, a stupid animal.’ [return to text]
174 ‘One quality is lacking in this great, severe style – that is, grace, a smile, all the different kinds of smile. For there is the smile of gaiety; the smile of indulgence; the smile of feelings gently touched; the smile of a brilliant imagination delighting in its own inventions and its own play.’ [return to text]
175 ‘Better to write of laughter than of tears, For laughter is the special quality of man.’
[return to text]
176 ‘Trencher-jests’ (Dr. Heylin); ‘style of buffoon pleasantry’ (Bishop Warburton). [return to text]
CHAPTER 7: Good Sense and Sincerity
For I hold that man as hateful as the very gates of Hell,
Who says one thing, while another in his heart lies hidden well.
– Homer
SINCERITY, CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, seems one of the subjects on which it is hardest to be sincere. And it grows no easier in an age when, among the glib charges which critics fling at authors, two of the commonest are ‘insincerity’ and ‘sentimentality’.
The veriest fool nowadays, when he happens to dislike a book, is apt to reach out for these two pet missiles.
But what precisely do they mean? In practice, just as Wilde once said vulgarity was other people’s manners, so ‘insincerity’ becomes often a mere term of abuse for other people’s beliefs, ‘sentimentality’ for other people’s feelings. We may pique ourselves on being a tough-minded generation, with no illusions left; or we may lament it; but I think it would be better if we indulged in less cant about ‘sincerity’.
It is commonly taken for granted that all good work must be sincere. It may be so; but I do not know how one is to prove it. We cannot really read the hearts of the living whom we know: how should we be so sure about the hearts of the dead we have never known? Mark Antony’s speech in the Forum does not strike me as wholly sincere; but it is a marvellous speech. No, I am not prepared to assume that all good writing has seemed to the writer the truth and nothing but the truth.
Again, on what evidence are we to condemn a writer as ‘insincere’? Because he contradicts himself elsewhere? But we all contradict ourselves; and the man who blurts out each mood as it takes him, may be more, not less, sincere than tighter-lipped persons who keep a show of consistency. Or is a man ‘insincere’ because he does not act according to his words? But this too happens to all of us. We may say a thing in fervid good faith on Monday, and do the opposite on Tuesday. Remember what Johnson said of his own precepts and practice in the matter of early rising. [177]
Or are we to tax a writer with insincerity because he says things which we think he must himself have seen to be preposterous? We know little of human nature if we try to set limits of this sort to its powers of self-deception, of seeing only what it wants to see. The gifted Newman could believe in prodigies like the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, and the aerial transport of the Virgin’s house from Palestine to Loreto.
I would suggest, then, that we should confess a good deal more Socratic ignorance on this question of sincerity.
We may, it is true, have the strongest intuitions that a person is genuine or the reverse. But intuitions are not knowledge. It remains terribly hard to tell. When Donne writes, of Christ and His bride, the Church:
Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights,
And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove,
Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then
When she’s embrac’d and open to most men,
this stupid quip about celestial cuckoldry makes me question whether the poet, though he knew more than enough about religious terrors, really knew what religious feeling was. But one cannot be positive. Writers are creatures of mood and madness; and men may have plural personalities, so that their right hand does not know what their left is doing.
It is no doubt a strong argument for a man’s sincerity, if his conscience appears to make him speak or act against his own interests. When Zola faced obloquy and exile in defence of Dreyfus, I have no wish to question his genuine sense of justice. But even martyrs are not always what they seem; they may be men of perverse obstinacy; or they may be masochists. There have been martyrs who looked forward to the lions.
In fine, the man who seems trying to deceive others has often first deceived himself. Deliberate hypocrites may be far rarer than we think. ‘Then’, you may say, ‘such people are intellectually dishonest.’ But ‘intellectually dishonest’ seems to me a bad and superficial phrase. ‘Dishonest’ suggests deliberate cheating; but the process here may be quite unconscious.
Therefore when a man says something that he could not possibly say if he thought clearly and courageously about it, I would rather not beg the question of his intentions by talking of ‘insincerity’. I would
rather use the non-committal term ‘falsity’: for example, ‘there seems at times a falsity in the work of Sterne’. How far Sterne knew it, how far he planned it, we cannot know; and should not pretend to.
I apologize for this long proem. But sincerity is an important question; and it seemed essential to clear up the quagmire into which modern critics appear to me to have trodden it. First, then, there seems no doubt that a style which gives a strong impression of sincerity (like the best of Herbert, or Johnson, or Hardy) is, to decent readers, strongly appealing; and any suspicion of falsity, deliberate or not, correspondingly odious. The letter of Coleridge that I quoted [178] is one example. I do not believe that he ever really thought he stood to Byron as a ‘weakling cygnet’ to a swan; but whether he did or no, the effect is emetic. Or consider these two passages, spoken above the dead.
And when you shall find that hand that has signed to one of you a Patent for Title, to another for Pension, to another for Pardon, to another for Dispensation, Dead: That hand that settled Possessions by his Seale, in the Keeper, and rectified Honours by the sword, in his Marshall, and distributed relief to the Poore, in his Almoner, and Health to the Diseased, by his immediate Touch, Dead: That hand that ballanced his own three Kingdomes so equally, as that none of them complained of one another, nor of him; and carried the Keyes of all the Christian world, and locked up, and let out Armies in their due season, Dead; how poore, how faint, how pale, how momentary, how transitory, how empty, how frivolous, how Dead things, must you necessarily thinke Titles, and Possessions, and Favours, and all, when you see that Hand, which was the hand of Destinie, of Christian Destinie, of the Almighty God, lie dead! It was not so hard a hand when we touched it last, nor so cold a hand when we kissed it last: That hand which was wont to wipe all teares from all our eyes, doth now but presse and squeaze us as so many spunges, filled one with one, another with another cause of teares. Teares that can have no other banke to bound them, but the declared and manifested will of God: For, till our teares flow to that heighth, that they might be called a murmuring against the declared will of God, it is against our Allegiance, it is Disloyaltie, to give our teares any stop, any termination, any measure.
