A
sense of humour cannot be always present, it may be urged. Why, no; it
is the lack of it that is--importunate. Other absences, such as the
absence of passion, the absence of delicacy, are, if grievous negatives,
still mere negatives. These qualities may or may not be there at call,
ready for a summons; we are not obliged to know; we are not momentarily
aware, unless they ought to be in action, whether their action is
possible. But want of power and want of a sense of the ridiculous: these
are lacks wherefrom there is no escaping, deficiencies that are
all-influential, defects that assert themselves, vacancies that proclaim
themselves, absences from the presence whereof there is no flying; what
other paradoxes can I adventure? Without power--no style. Without a
possible humour,--no style. The weakling has no confidence in himself to
keep him from grasping at words that he fancies hold within them the true
passions of the race, ready for the uses of his egoism. And with a sense
of humour a man will not steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the
language and put it in his pocket.
PATHOS
A fugitive writer wrote but lately on the fugitive page of a minor
magazine: 'For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most
real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos
that is worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and
Malvolio.
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