the writer is supposed by us to assume and affect. That composition of every sort involves difficulty on the part of the composer, we know well; but we still require that the difficulty should be kept from our sight. We must not see him biting his nails, and torturing himself to give us satisfaction. His great aim accordingly is, to present to us what is excellent, but to present it, so free from any marks of the toil which it has cost, as to seem almost to have risen in the mind by the unrestrained course of spontaneous suggestion. Any appearance of constraint, therefore, presents to us a sort of incongruity, almost as striking as when the noble and the mean are blended together. Even when we think, in reading any of the extravagant conceits that abound so much in the works of our older writers, that we are smiling merely at the images which are brought together, and which nature seems to have intended never to meet, we are, in truth, smiling in part at the very feelings of the writer, when he was so labouriously and painfully absurd. If the feelings that succeed each other, in the mind even of the sublimest poet, in the weary hour of composition, could, by any process, be made distinctly visible to us, there is no small reason to apprehend, that, with all our reverence for his noble art, and for his own individual excellence in that art, our emotions would be of the ludicrous kind, or, at least, that some portion of the ludicrous would mingle with our admiration. There can be no question, that he would seem to have performed more labour, if we could be thus conscious of his feelings, before his labour was half accomplished, than if we were only to have exhibited to us the beautiful results of the whole long continued exercise of his thought. This labour, which a skilful writer knows so well how to conceal from us, a writer who is fond of astonishing us with extravagant conceits, forces constantly upon our view; and there is hence scarcely any image, which he presents to us, so ludicrous as that picture which he indirectly gives us of himself. Another set of examples, in which the consideration of the mind of the speaker forms an essential part of the ludicrousness, are those which are commonly termed bulls or blunders; in which there is no ludicrousness, unless we are able to distinguish what the speaker meant, and thus to discover some strange agreement of his real meaning, with that opposite or contradictory meaning which the words seem to convey. bull must, therefore, be genuine, or for the moment considered to be genuine, before it can divert with its incongruity. As mere nonsense, it would be as little amusing as any other We must have before us, in conception at least, nonsense. the speaker himself, and contrast the well-meaning seriousness of his affirmation with the verbal absurdity which he utters, of which we are at the same time able to discover the unsuspected tie. Such I conceive to be the chief varieties of mixed congruity and incongruity which operate in producing this emotion. But, though I have considered these varieties separately, you are not on that account to suppose, that the varieties themselves are not frequently combined in different proportions; thus heightening what would be ludicrous in one respect, by ludicrousness of another species. The images themselves,-the mind of the speaker or writer who presents them,-the disappointed expectation of the hearer or reader,-may all present to us a strange mixture of discrepancy and agreement, and afford elements, therefore, that are to be jointly taken into account in explaining the one complex emotion, which is the equal result of all. It is not, then, every newly discovered relation of objects, that excites in us emotions, of the ludicrous class, but only certain relations, which present to us peculiar incongruities. In all these, however, the unexpectedness is an important element; since, when we have become completely familiar with the relation, we cease to have the emotion which it before instantly excited. We still, however, call the objects or images ludicrous, though they excite no emotion of this sort in our mind, any more, perhaps, than the gravest reasoning; but we retain the name, because we speak of them, or think of them, in reference to other minds, in which we know that they will excite the same emotion that was originally excited by them in ourselves. In thinking of the laughter which may thus be produced in others, we are not unfrequently affected with the emotion, as before; but it is an emotion of sympathy, not of mere ludicrousness; or, if there be any thing directly ludicrous, it is in this very consideration of incongruity in the minds of others, when we think of their expectation while they read, as contrasted with the surprise that is to follow. To know the relation, in short, as far as the relation consists in the mere images themselves, is to feel, that the object of which we know the relations will be ludicrous to others,-not to feel it ludicrous to ourselves. 366 LECTURE LIX. I. IMMEDIATE EMOTIONS NOT NECESSARILY INVOLVING ANY MORAL FEELING.-USES OF LUDICROUSNESS.-GENERAL REMARKS ON CLOSING THE FIRST SUBDIVISION OF OUR EMOTIONS.-SUBDIVISION, II. IMMEDIATE EMOTIONS, IN WHICH MORAL FEELING IS NECESSARILY INVOLVED.-1. FEELINGS DISTINCTIVE OF VICE AND VIRTUE.-2. EMOTIONS OF LOVE AND HATE. My last Lecture, Gentlemen, was devoted to the consideration of the phenomena of our emotions, of that species of which the objects are distinguished by the name of ludicrous, -emotions which we found to originate always in some mixture of congruity and incongruity, suddenly and unexpectedly perceived. In establishing this general law, I stated, at the same time, some apparent exceptions to the rise of the mirthful emotion in such cases, of the discovery of unsuspected agreement, and endeavoured, I hope successfully, to show that all these seeming anomalies are such as might naturally have been anticipated, as consequences of the operation of other well-known laws of the mind. The varieties of such mixtures of congruity and incongruity, as constitute what is termed ludicrousness, were considered by us in order; first, in the mere arbitrary signs of language, and next in the relations of thoughts and existing things,-whether in the discrepancy of the images themselves, as noble and mean,-in the disappointed anticipations of the hearer or reader, or in the difference of the obvious meaning of the expression of the speaker, or writer, or performer of some action, compared with that real meaning which we know him, in his awkward blunder, to have intended. The emotion is not a simple feeling, but the analysis of it does not seem very difficult. The necessary unexpectedness of the congruity or incongruity that is remarked, seems of itself to point out one element, in the astonishment which may naturally be supposed to arise in such a case; and the other element, which nature has made as quick to rise on the perception of the ludicrous object, as astonishment itself, is a vivid feeling of delight, one of the forms of that joy or gladness which I comprehended in my enumeration of the few primary constituents of our emotions. Astonishment, combined with this particular delight, is the mirthful emotion that has been the subject of our inquiry; and Akenside, therefore, in giving it the name of "gay surprise," "* seems to have expressed, with the analytic accuracy of a philosopher, the complex feelings which he was poetically describing. In considering the delight that is combined with astonish.ment in the mirthful emotion, we are apt to consider it as more different from other species of gladness than it truly is, because we think of more than what is strictly mental. The laughter is a phenomenon of so particular a kind, and so impressive to our senses, that we think of it as much as of the feelings which it indicates; but the laughter, it should be remembered, is a bodily convulsion, which might or might not be combined with the internal merriment, without altering the nature of the inward emotion itself. This spasmodic muscular action, therefore, however remarkable it may be as a concomitant bodily effect, and even the oppressive feeling of fatigue to which that muscular action, when long continued, gives rise, we should leave out in our analysis of the mere emotion,—that is all with which the physiologist of mind is concerned,-and leaving out what is bodily in the external signs of merriment, we discover only the two internal elements which I have mentioned; that may, in certain cases, be more complicated by a mixture of contempt, but to which as mere mirth, that third occasional element is far from being essential. The advantages which we derive from our susceptibility of this species of emotion, are, in their immediate influence on the cheerfulness, and therefore on the general happiness of society, sufficiently obvious. How many hours would pass wearily along, but for these pleasantries of wit, or of easier and less pretending gaiety, which enliven what would have been dull, and throw many bright colours on what would have been gloomy. We are not to estimate these accessions of pleasure, lightly, because they relate to objects that may seem trifling, when considered together with those more serious concerns, by which our ambition is occupied, and in relation to which, in the success or failure of our various projects, we look back on the past months or years of our life, as fortunate or unfortunate. If these serious concerns alone were to be regarded, we might often have been very fortunate and very unhappy, The expression in the original seems to be "gay contempt." See pleasures of Imagination, B. III. v. 260-and 2nd form of the poem, B. II. v. 524. as in other circumstances we might often have had much happiness in the hours and days of years, which terminated at last in the disappointment of some favourite scheme. It is good to travel with pure and balmy airs and cheerful sunshine, though we should not find, at the end of our journey, the friend whom we wished to see; and the gaieties of social converse, though they are not, in our journey of life, what we travel to obtain, are, during the continuance of our journey, at once a freshness which we breathe, and a light that gives every object to sparkle to our eye, with a radiance that is not its own. Such are the immediate and obvious influences of this emotion. But it is not of slight value in influences that are less direct; though capable of being sometimes abused, and far from being always so exactly coincident with moral impropriety, as to furnish a criterion of rectitude, it must be allowed to be, in its ordinary circumstances, favourable to virtue, presenting often a check to improprieties, on which, but for such a restraint, the heedless would rush without scruple—a check, too, which is, by its very nature, peculiarly suited to those who despise the more serious restraints of moral principle, and the opinion of the virtuous. The world's dread laugh, which even the firm philosopher is said to be scarcely able to scorn, cannot be scorned by those to whom the approbation of the world is, what conscience is to the wise and virtuous; and though that laugh is certainly not so unerring as the voice of moral judgment within the breast, it is still, as I have said in far the greater number of cases, in accordance with it; and when it differs, differs far more frequently in the degree of its censure or its praise, than in actual censure of what is praiseworthy, or praise of what is wholly censurable. It is often, too, of importance, that we should regulate our conduct with regard to relations, which all mankind cannot have leisure for analysing, and which very few, even of those who have leisure, have patience to examine. The vivid feeling of ridicule, in such cases, as more instant in its operations, may hence be considered as a glorious warning from that benignant Power, who, "conscious what a scanty pause From labours and from care, the wider lot * Pleasures of Imagination, B. II. v. 271–277. |