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GOOD HUMOUR AND ILL HUMOUR.
(Daily Press, September 16th.) The writer of "Musings without Method in Blackwood's Magazine appears to have felt greatly discouraged by the honours lately showered upon Dr. MARK TWAIN. He has been moved to lament that humour should have become a lucrative trade. His dear ancients well knew that the effect of humour was au effect of light and shade; they, he tells us, were humorous in flashes, and their humour was infinitely enhanced because it was set against a background of gravity something like the casual sparkles, we suppose, visible in
"Musings without Method." He would have people laugh in moderation, which, doubtless, is an in- junction obeyed without conscious effort by his readers. Speaking of bygone humourists like RABELAIS, SHAKESPEARE, and FIELDING, he tells us they kept their humour in its proper place; "they used it for a wise purpose; they did not degrade it to catch an easy round of applause; and, fortunately for them, they are to-day refused the august title of humourist, which sits so appositely upon the shoulders of MARK TWAIN." The mere words "Mark Twain " appear to act upon this disgruntled censor as a red rag is supposed to influence a bull. He complains that the great American, whose literary honours have just evoked the practically unanimous applause of the English-reading world, beats the drum from the moment at which he appears upon the stage.
He does not cease to beat it until he quits the stage for the last time, His mouth is always awry, as though he fed upon sour apples, and he demands that his auditors also should twist their lips. From morning till night he grins through a horse collar, and is surprised if all the world does not applaud his grimaces." We like that reference to sour apples. It is such a magnificent excuse for coupling with it an implication of sour grapes. Really, the brilliant compiler of musings without method, which are sometimes tuusings with, out mind and without matter, has been misled by a hackneyed but inaccurate definition. The essence of humour is that it should be unexpected, he says, plagiarising ZANGWILL, who, it may be remembered, said that was probably why the humorous weeklies sometimes make us laugh, because never really expect to find a joke in them. SWIFT has said that
we
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THE HONGKONG WEEKLY PRESS AND
[September 2', 1907.
wood's writer would sourly tell us he is. | very similar footing. Reasoning from move- He seethes with convictions, is a moral ments occurring under our eyes, and which crusader and a deep philosopher. Humour must, unless we believe in a complete can exist in forms other than corrective satire. It may be as purposeless as the melody of the lark or the sporting of the lamb, and when, as in Dr. CLEMENS' occasional jeux d'esprit, it has no didactic end, the cause is neither flippancy nor scorn for the ideal, but light-heartedness and enjoyment of the pure and uncorrupted comic sense, sometimes low, sometimes high, but seldom false. People talk a great deal about the weather," he once said, simply, but nothing is ever done." That had no sneer or sting in it, no didactic purpose, but we regard it as true humour of MARK TWAIN'S Own peculiar vein, and we shall never be able to see or hear it repeated without feeling the better for it. He is an old man now, and the spring of his humour may not well up as abundantly as hitherto. We did, in his reported utterances in England, see traces that it was becoming a little forced; but that was mere post-prandial froth, given out as such, and it was certainly no sufficient reason for such
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an ill-natured and ill-informed tirade as the
one to which we have called attention. MARK TWAIN is a dear, loveable man; long may he reign; his critic is a-a curmudgeon.
THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION.
(Daily Press, 17th September.) The recent Meeting of the British As- sociation at Leicester, though it was not marked by the announcement of any start- ling discovery, varied from its recent predecessors in that its proceedings were of unusual interest and value-more especially those connected with the physics of the stellar universe and the figure and internal condition of the earth. It might be thought
that two topics wider apart could scarcely be seriously brought together, yet, as the only means we have of accommodating our conclusions as to the movements and com-
destruction and re-formation of the entire universe in the meanwhile, have been going on for ages, we can form a conception that for eons before these commenced, the same laws and the same materials must have been in existence. Take one of the simplest of these movements-the precession of the equinoxes: It must have been going on at its present rate for at least twenty-five thousand years. We can trace it in human records for at least a quarter of that period. Sir DAVID GILL spoke of the evidence of the Book of Job as to the former visibility in the northern hemisphere of the great southern constellation of the Cross; but we can go back still further; to ancient Persia, where the disappearance must have occurred at a much earlier date, but where the Zoroastrian scriptures unmistakeably point to these constellatious But the causes which produce the phenomenon were work ages before, and our Astronomy enables us to calculate the motion for some millions of years antecedently.
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Now when we turn to Geology we find the same elements of an untold antiquity no less apparent. We have unmistakeable records, not in books, but in imperishable stone, reaching back to some four thousand years, at least, before Christ, when we find every. thing going on just as at present. Geology tells us in language that cannot be gainsaid of changes between ocean and continent; of elevations of the land, and depressions of the sea, of fertile lands converted whole to deserts, aud the disappearance of
farmKs, We have irrefragible evidence that these occurred since mau first inhabited the earth, yet strangely when we conie to examine even the earliest records of civilised mau in Egypt or the valley of the Euphrates, we can detect no absolute change of level; the possible eight and a half milleniums since the zodiac, e.g, was worked out are a scarcely noticeable frag-
meut of the time since man became a denizen of the earth. Yet man in his
entirety belongs to the last paragraph of the But Geology teaches us last page of the history of life on the globe.
more than the
position of inaccessible bodies is by the comparison of what we are permitted to know from experience, it will be easily understood that the association was not accidental. Recent researches, and more has existed as an entity; it teaches us of immensity of time during which the earth especially those of the spectroscope, have profound changes in its shape and conditions, revealed to us that in dealing with the and from these by slow degrees we are most remote bodies visible in our telescopes beginning to form some slight idea of the wre mret with elementary substances influences at work. It was with regard to practically identical with those with which the latest researches on these that the we are familiar on the surface of our earth. Leicester meeting was more especially The address of the Presilent, Sir DAVID remarkable. In 1876, just thirty-one years GILL, though it did not deal with the
ago, Lord KELVIN, then Sir WILLIAM chemical composition of the universe, laid THOMPSON, astonished the meeting by speak- stress on the community of all the heavenly ing of long-period tides which he showed bodies with regard to their motions, and were not marked on our tide gauges, though showed how mutually dependent all were they must in one form or other have one on another. It also showed the im-occurred. The reason given was that the mensity of time as well as space enveloping all celestial phenomena, and how much our modern astronomy depended on accurate measures of both.
It was, in fact, to the accuracy of the measurements made by BRADLEY in the middle of the eighteenth century that most of our modern advances are due and practically the furthest that the hopes
most conscientious astronomer of the day can extend, is that his successor some two or three centuries later uy be able to build from his old measurements some stately structure of research.
"What humour is, not all the triba Of logic-mongers can describe; Here Nature only acts her part, Unhelp'd by practice, books, or art; " and if Blackwood's muser knew his an- cients as well as he glibly parades their names, he might have remembered that definition of ADDISON's which shows just where he is in error. Humour," said the great essayist, "is a species of wit which flows out of the humour of a person. Wit as distinguished from humour, may consist of a single brilliant thought; but humour rans in a vein; it is not a striking, but an equable and pleasing, flow of wit." The ancients appear mostly as satirists rather than as humourists, but RABELAIS, for instance, was a most unfortunate example to hold up. While a great satirist, he was distinctly more of a humourist, and that of the most burlesque sort. His mouth is “always awry," if you like; he beats the drum of his whimsicality very loudly indeed, and roaringly invites us to laugh
In this respect that of the immensity with him for the mere sake of laughing. So of the times required, to which the life of a does MARK TWAIN, very often, because generation of unen is but as a grain of sand he believes we ought to laugh more than by the seashore to the huge cliffs impen. we do. But he is no buffoon, as Black.ding, Astronomy and Geology stand on a
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earth actually yielded. "If," he said, "the earth were composed of matter as unyielding as steel, it would give way like india-rubber to the deforming forces at work." The statement was never kindly taken to heart by the geologists, who yet in their heart of hearts dare not gainsay it, yet would not frankly acknowledge it. If the doctrine of a possibly yielding earth were permitted to make way, the great central dogma of the modern geologist,
The Glacial Epoch," must needs go by the wall, and no pious geologist dare cou- template the result; more the other abeet an- cor of the modern geologist, the presumed stability of ocean and continent, would be unable to hold the ship, which must inevit- ably be lost. Neither of these doctrines receive any support from geological pheno-
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