A LECTURE ON Wit, Humour, and Pathos. DELIVERED AT BANSTEAD, BY CENJAMIN LAMBERT, Esq. LONDON: HENRY JAMES TRESIDDER, 17, AVE MARIA LANE, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1861. 250. M. 50. WIT, HUMOUR, AND PATHOS. WHEN I last addressed you, I spoke of the advantages of a Reading Room; and I now propose to illustrate further that part of my former lecture which related more particularly to the theme of Reading. But I intend tonight to consider the subject chiefly in its lighter and more genial aspects; and looking at it thus, it may be classed, I think, (though humour and pathos are often nearly allied,) under three separate heads, the witty, the humorous, and the pathetic. As a literary work, of whatever kind, be it a story, a poem, or a play, or even an address, of as slight and unpretending a character as mine, ought, according to a well-known rule of art, to have, like nature, light and shade; B and as my last lecture, in which I treated the matter somewhat gravely, had, perhaps, too dark a colouring, I propose to commence the present one with a little light; throwing the more serious and pathetic portions of my subject for the present into the shade, so as to form, as it were, something like the background of the picture, to diversify and, it may be, deepen the interest of the whole. Speaking generally, wit may be said to relate to things; humour to persons. In wit we have always presented to us a sudden and unexpected contrast of ideas; while ludicrous and unexpected incidents are mainly the elements of humour. We have humorous sayings and witty sayings; but wit, strictly, is confined to saying. Thus, when we call a person witty, we mean that what he says is witty; but we should hardly, perhaps, talk of a man's witty behaviour; we should more correctly speak of his humorous conduct. Wit is purely intellectual; humour thoroughly impulsive. Wit looks, as it were, within, to educe fine and nicely-drawn distinctions, and is the faculty of discerning and comparing opposite relations in words or things. Humour looks without, noting, as it does so, the contrasts in human nature itself, the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of character. Wit deals and revels in felicitous illustrations, and may be said to live in the world of fancy. Humour, more homely, trudges along through the nooks and corners, by the highways and the bye-paths of this work-day world, and lives in the sphere of action. The essence both of humour and of wit is so far similar, that either exists through the force of contrast; and the reason of that contrast being broader and more striking in humour than it ever is in wit, is, I think, because certainly in most instances, if not in all— there is either something that is ludicrous in the nature of the incidents, or something that is grotesque in the character of the situation that heightens the force of a humorous description, or gives emphasis and point to a humorous remark. We have a striking illustration of this definition of humour in the story of the Irishman who had an Englishman for his guest in an Irish hovel. The Irishman ekes out a scanty existence by keeping a pig, and he couldn't get on "at all, at all," without the pig; and, moreover, he keeps the animal in the very room (if room it can be called) where he B 2 |