[In the following essay, Rosslyn scrutinizes the evolution of the cultural significance of the term “good Humour,” tracing changes from Pope's era through the end of the eighteenth century.]

In every culture there are words so loaded with significance for their users that they seem to require no explanation. These are precisely the words that to strangers, or a later generation, require most: for where there should be quivering, vital significance there seems merely to be a hole in the page—a blank. An effect is clearly looked for, but it cannot be supplied. We feel the stress of the intention, but we do not know how to respond.

One such word in Pope's culture is “reason”. We need only to glance at the Essay on Man to see the word doing more work there than it has ever been asked to do since. Even in his translation of the Iliad, which we might expect to be free of Pope's own philosophical preoccupations, “reason” is the word he launches at Achilles as the severest rebuke for his barbaric behaviour to Hector's corpse: “Brave tho' he be, yet by no Reason aw'd, / He violates the Laws of Man and God” (24, 68-69).¹ The idea of anyone's being “awed” by Reason makes us sharply aware of the cultural gulf that divides us from this state of mind. What we are looking at is not a word denoting “the ordinary thinking capacity of the human mind in a sound condition” (OED), but the glowing centre of a whole plan of belief—two radioactive syllables.

I propose in this short paper to exhume another such term which has received less attention than “reason”, perhaps because its meaning seems not to have shifted so far: “good humour”. It deserves our scrutiny because, in spite of appearances, I do not think it means now what it meant to Pope—nor did it, even to the generation after his. It is not so much that its meaning has shifted, as that it is no longer the nexus of the same number of important thoughts; and without its radioactive charge, the term has undergone a startling diminution of significance—a fact which also throws interesting light on the general shift of sensibility after Pope that led to Romanticism, as I hope to show.

I should begin by giving you an instance of the term at its glowing best. The difficulty here is choice, for Pope uses it again and again at climactic moments; but perhaps the usage that concentrates most meaning is the famous one in the Rape of the Lock, where Pope puts it in the mouth of Clarissa. She is making the speech he deliberately inserted “to open more clearly the MORAL of the Poem” (5, 7n)—a brilliant parody of the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus in the Iliad, by which she attempts to end the unseemly wrangle between Belinda and the Baron over the lock of hair:

Then grave Clarissa graceful
wav'd her Fan;
Silence ensu'd, and thus the Nymph began.
          Say, why are Beauties prais'd and honour'd
most,
The wise Man's Passion, and the vain Man's Toast?
Why deck'd with all that Land and Sea afford,
Why Angels call'd, and Angel-like ador'd?
Why round our Coaches crowd the white-glov'd Beaus,
Why bows the Side-box from its inmost Rows?
How vain are all these Glories, all our Pains,
Unless good Sense preserve what Beauty gains:
That Men may say, when we the Front-box grace,
Behold the first in Virtue, as in Face!
Oh! if to dance all Night, and dress all Day,
Charm'd the Small-pox, or chas'd old Age away,
Who would not scorn what Huswife's Cares produce,
Or who would learn one earthly Thing of Use?
To patch, nay ogle, might become a Saint,
Nor could it sure be such a Sin to paint.
But since, alas! frail Beauty must decay,
Curl'd or uncurl'd, since Locks will turn to grey,
Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid;
What then remains, but well our Pow'r to use,
And keep good Humour still whate'er we lose?
And trust me, Dear! good Humour can prevail,
When Airs, and Flights, and Screams, and Scolding
          fail.
Beauties in vain their pretty Eyes may roll;
Charms strike the Sight, but Merit wins the Soul.

(5, 7-34)

In this comic context, where small-pox and greying locks are the worst evils Clarissa has to confront, it may not be immediately obvious that “good Humour” carries any other meaning than the modern one. Is she not saying something like, “Put a brave face on it” or, “Keep smiling through”?

I can only persuade you otherwise if you suspend for a moment the conviction that mock-epic is less serious than epic, and entertain the possibility that, like other playful forms, it can bring painful truths closer to home. If it is true, as Schiller says, that “Man is perfectly human only when he plays”, it may be equally true that Pope's intelligence is most human when he uses it in an unserious context—and it is only here that he manages to express how central he takes “good Humour” to be to human happiness. I am on the side of Dr Johnson, who would not accept that The Rape of the Lock lacked an adequate moral. On the contrary, it had a better one than Boileau's mock-epic on the French clergy, he said:

The freaks, and humours, and spleen, and vanity of women, as they embroil families in discord, and fill houses with disquiet, do more to obstruct the happiness of life in a year than the ambition of the clergy in many centuries. It has been well observed, that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of over-whelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.²

The Rape of the Lock, for all its fantasy, is firmly rooted in the world of “small vexations continually repeated”. It is a world where women fritter away their happiness in habits as addictive as ratafia and opium—in obsessive vanity, and recrimination, and small-mindedness, and those hysterical joy-rides that terminate in the psychic collapse Pope calls “Spleen”. Their pleasure is not in maintaining reason and sanity, but in flouting them. In this context “good Humour” is not a matter of wearing a smile, but of something much better—the inner state of unconditional acceptance which then expresses itself in smiles. “Good Humour” is strong enough to stand up to the facts of life: deformity from small-pox, the locks that turn to grey, and the necessity to marry, or “die a Maid”. It is well acquainted with bleakness; and therefore it can be gay. It dissolves egotism, and obsession, and rage. It brings with it a perfect sense of proportion—and, since “painted or not painted, all shall fade”, it accommodates even Death. It is the practical face of goodness.

On this showing, Pope considers “good Humour” to be a mighty thing. (It would be his version, indeed, of Eliot's injunctions, “Datta. Dayadhvan. Damyata”.) But it is interesting to observe that he does not do so to the accompaniment of drums and trumpets. Just the opposite. He puts his best advice in the mouth of a coquette who would much prefer to “dance all Night, and dress all Day”, and who, far from being nobler than Belinda, is the person who lent the Baron the fatal scissors.⁴ Not only is the speaker quite unaware of the value of what she says, her audience pays it no attention at all:

          So spoke the Dame, but no Applause ensu'd;
Belinda frown'd, Thalestris call'd her Prude.

(5, 35-36)

I take it that this reflects no kind of anxiety on Pope's part—the desire to deflate the idea before anyone else does—but on the contrary, that it is the result of his best wisdom. Ideas, like all organic things, flourish only in the appropriate climate, and “good Humour” cannot flourish as part of a lecture. (It would not survive the treatment he gives “reason” in the Essay on Man, for example.) Disowned and inverted, it glows with all the more radiance—for we see that Pope himself is treating the idea with good humour, with just the kind of relaxed conviction that the idea implies. He leaves us good-humouredly free to examine the idea from all sides, to note that the speaker does not believe what she says, and to observe in the rest of the poem the consequences. We are being put in a spirit of good humour ourselves—so that the conviction, if and when it comes, will do so to minds in which it can strike root. Pope is doing here what he told Swift he was aiming to do in the Essay on Man: “to make mankind look upon this life with comfort and pleasure, and put morality in good humour” (Corr. 3, 117). And he is doing it, I would venture to say, much more successfully.

We may dwell a moment on the thought that a great poet might consider it his vocation to “put morality in good humour”, because it is an idea with a long and splendid ancestry, and because it is not an idea that lingered in English poetry after Pope: this is its swansong. This is not the occasion to offer more than a sketch, but perhaps you will follow me if I sum up the problem like this: after Pope, morality became a matter too serious to be treated with good humour (understood in the diminished sense)—while before Pope, there was an idea abroad that morality was too serious not to be so treated. In the ancient world, the standard-bearer of this idea was Horace. We can trace the same conviction in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in Montaigne's supremely good-humoured Essais, in Erasmus's Praise of Folly, in Shakespeare's early comedies, in Ben Jonson, and in John Dryden. But it is conspicuously lacking in Milton; and it is Milton, with his sense that when morality smiles it is with a very serious smile, who really colours the mainstream of English poetry after Pope. Morality embraces seriousness with fervour in Young and Thomson, Cowper and Gray. Burns and Byron fight a splendid rearguard action for good humour, but they are divided even against themselves, and the world is not with them. A Horatian individual, like Sydney Smith, may recover the force of the idea by instinct; but English poetry gives it no admittance. Morality must sound like Wordsworth in The Prelude: even-toned, reverential, and quite out of reach of Clarissa's ears.

Since one of the pleasures of conferences is to start contentious ideas, and then to make one's escape, I will acknowledge that I wanted to draw your attention to the idea of good humour because it gives us a glimpse of how much better poetry is for us than religion—and how unfortunate it was for English culture that religion overrode the wisdom of poetry in this instance. (I assume, from the preponderance of Milton in this genealogy, that the victory went to the Puritan strain in poetry, so evident in Cowper and Wordsworth.) If you are wondering quite what it is I grieve for, I can bring it better into focus by returning to Dr Johnson, who so appreciated the moral of the Rape of the Lock, you remember—but who thought, along with our other puritans, that religion and good humour could not go together. Boswell records a telling conversation in which Mr Murray, the Solicitor-General of Scotland, “praised the ancient philosophers for the candour and good humour with which those of different sects disputed with each other”. Johnson replied:

Sir, they disputed with good humour, because they were not in earnest as to religion. Had the ancients been serious in their belief, we should not have had their Gods exhibited in the manner we find them represented in the Poets. The people would not have suffered it. They disputed with good humour upon their fanciful theories, because they were not interested in the truth of them: when a man has nothing to lose, he may be in good humour with his opponent. … Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy (April 1776).

This, like everything else Johnson says about religion, is the cry of a man in pain. Religion for Johnson is a matter of attack and defence, of confidence, or anger and unease: the keynotes of his Christianity are earnestness and guilty self-recrimination. It does not take a very profound insight to observe that his earnestness and his guilt are two sides of the same coin, and both of them are induced by the stress that he associates with belief. It is because the ancients showed no signs of that stress that he cannot believe they cared about truth: “when a man has nothing to lose, he may be in good humour with his opponent”. But as we noted above, Horace might well have replied to this that morality was too serious a matter to be treated with anything else. Truth is too volatile a quantity to be beaten into our opponent with clubs. Do we not show our respect for it best by treating even error with good humour—on the same basis that the ancients offered hospitality to a beggar, that he might really be Zeus in disguise?

What I grieve for, then, is that seriousness came to be equated with solemnity in the later eighteenth century, with terrible effects both for seriousness itself, and for English poetry. Poetry begins to mope—in Gray and Cowper, Wordsworth and Coleridge, on through Tennyson and Arnold, and down (if I may say so) to Eliot. It is unhappy as Johnson is unhappy—because it can neither believe nor disbelieve, and it supposes that in the past things were otherwise:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar …

(“Dover Beach” 21-25)

What Arnold actually heard, I take it, was the low groan of a legion of Oxford undergraduates examining the Thirty Nine Articles, and realizing that they didn't believe them literally, but only poetically. Had they been members of the Orthodox Church this need not have bothered them in the least. But they were members of a schism of the Catholic Church which had not infrequently burnt heretics in the past for such difficulties; and so they wept, and called themselves unbelievers. This is why I said earlier how much better poetry is for us than religion—for no-one has ever wept (or been burnt) over not believing a poem.

But I suggested just now that the equating of seriousness and solemnity had a disastrous effect on seriousness itself; and if you will permit me one more paradoxical formulation, the seriousness that turns laughter sternly from the door is much less serious than it supposes—for it betrays by that how far it is already on the defensive, how unwilling it is to be scrutinized by a disinterested intelligence. To observe the damage this does in poetry we need look no farther than the next English poet to attempt epic and mock-epic after Pope, William Cowper, who has many of the age's virtues (and not a few of Pope's artistic powers), but is marked throughout by this kind of over-serious seriousness. You may object that no man who can begin a long Miltonic poem with the words, “I sing the Sofa”, can be wholly lacking in good humour—and indeed there are exquisite flashes of it in all his lighter works—but it is a good humour kept strictly in its place, and not allowed to irradiate any serious subject. The poem in question is called, after all, The Task,⁴ and it begins:

I sing the SOFA. I, who lately sang
Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touch'd with awe
The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand,
Escap'd with pain from that advent'rous flight,
Now seek repose upon an humbler theme …

(1, 1-5)

We might gloss this: “I sing the sofa, because when I write about more serious things I begin to feel myself going mad.” Seriousness, for Cowper as Johnson, is synonymous with a stress so intense it can hardly be borne. Good humour is only a palliative, not a solution; it has no moral prestige. The high ground is fully occupied by the truths of Christianity—truths which gave birth to that most terrible poem, “The Castaway”,⁵ in which Cowper sees the image of his own moral despair and damnation in the fate of the sailor who fell overboard:

He shouted: nor his friends had fail'd
          To check the vessel's course,
But so the furious blast prevail'd,
          That, pitiless perforce,
They left their outcast mate behind,
And scudded still before the wind.
…
At length, his transient respite past,
          His comrades, who before
Had heard his voice in ev'ry blast,
          Could catch the sound no more.
For then, by toil subdued, he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank.
…
No voice divine the storm allay'd,
          No light propitious shone;
When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,
          We perish'd each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.

(19-24, 43-48, 61-66)

You may think me fit company only for Clarissa when I say that, pathetic as I find the poem, I think it is more serious from Cowper's point of view than ours. If the keynote of the kind of seriousness I am looking for is that an idea is entertained with mental freedom—that we are invited to walk round it, to scrutinize it from the back, and draw our conclusions at perfect liberty, in a spirit of good humour—then this poem has nothing to do with it. It is written from prison, by a prisoner who cannot even touch the walls confining him. Cowper's despair is too precious to him to be questioned—and therefore he never comes near the discovery of how much he himself is contributing to sustain it, how he hugs it to him even as he drowns. Of course, Cowper's fragile mental stability, his inveterate melancholia, make him a special case. But he figures in my argument as someone who was supremely in need of the notion that good humour had moral prestige, but could not make use of it. Evengelical puritanism had battened too firmly on his poetical and spiritual values. Had he ever encountered Sydney Smith, to whom evangelicism was anathema, we can only imagine him rolling his large, liquid eye in pain, as the good-humoured Reverend gave it as his considered opinion that “the luxury of false religion is to be unhappy”.

The corollary of my suggestion that this kind of solemn seriousness is not the real thing is that its polar opposite, lightness of heart, is not quite the real thing, either. As a child picking my way through Palgrave's Golden Treasury, I remember shrinking instinctively from poems that adjured me to “be gay”, because they always seemed to be winking away a tear; and it was to the late eighteenth-century sensibility which preferred its smiles to be veiled in tears that Cowper seemed to be such a great poet. When unhappiness is a sort of luxury, and happiness is a sort of woe, we cannot expect poetry to keep a grip, in any straightforward sense, on life as it is lived. And though it is more common to speak of Pope's age as the age of artificiality, and Cowper's as the age of advancing “nature” in poetry, I am inclined to think it was the other way about. When I look at The Task, for instance, I am struck by how much of it is translated Pope—Pope translated into a more natural idiom, but a more unnatural significance. You may remember Pope's elegy for the ageing Belindas and Clarissas of his society, in the Epistle to a Lady:

Beauties, like Tyrants, old and friendless grown,
Yet hate Repose, and dread to be alone,
Worn out in public, weary ev'ry eye,
Nor leave one sigh behind them when they die.
…
At last, to follies Youth could scarce defend,
It grows their Age's prudence to pretend;
Asham'd to own they gave delight before,
Reduc'd to feign it, when they give no more:
As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spight,
So these, their merry, miserable Night;
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide,
And haunt the places where their Honour dy'd.

(227-30, 235-42)⁶

In The Task Cowper also has a meditation on these card-playing, dropsical ghosts of beauty, who haunt the public assemblies:

Others are dragg'd into the crowded room
Between supporters; and, once seated, sit,
Through downright inability to rise,
Till the stout bearers lift the corpse again.
These speak a loud memento. Yet ev'n these
Themselves love life, and cling to it, as he
That overhangs a torrent to a twig.
They love it, and yet loath it; fear to die,
Yet scorn the purposes for which they live.
Then wherefore not renounce them? No—the dread,
The slavish dread of solitude, that breeds
Reflection and remorse, the fear of shame,
And their invet'rate habits, all forbid.

(1, 478-90)

There is a grotesque credibility about the old dame who cannot get up under her own bulk—but we know that we are not fully in the land of the real from that dreadfully “poetical” comment, “Yet ev'n these / Themselves love life”. And the doubt is justified by the cure Cowper proposes to these haggard victims of Spleen. Pope's cure, you recall, was good humour at its best—a blend of relaxation, intelligence, a sense of proportion, and an acceptance of death. Cowper's cure is “Flora”:

The spleen is seldom felt where Flora reigns;
The low'ring eye, the petulance, the frown,
And sullen sadness, that o'ershade, distort,
And mar the face of beauty, when no cause
For such immeasurable woe appears,
These Flora banishes, and gives the fair
Sweet smiles, and bloom less transient than her own.

(1, 455-61)

The great thing, we see, is to take country walks. It is only a short step from here to the Lake District, and Wordsworth's rapturous affirmation that “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her”; an affirmation I am inclined to reject, like others before me, when I remember that the Dorothy to whom it was addressed became a crazy old woman who muttered obscenities as she poured the tea.

My underlying thesis, you may begin to see, is that without good humour, English poetry became increasingly odd; odd in feeling and odd in philosophy. I am at one with Matthew Arnold, who heartily disliked the Victorian note of automatic melancholy, even while he was contributing to it, and felt morally bound to suppress his own poetry because he found it deleterious. When he tried to express what was lacking, he turned to German culture, and quoted Schiller:

“All Art … is dedicated to Joy, and there is no higher and no more serious problem, than how to make men happy. The right Art is that alone, which creates the highest enjoyment.”

(Preface to Poems, 1853)⁷

I see this as Arnold's attempt to work his way back to the position I found in Pope—that seriousness and joy are not incompatible, and art does not become significant by shutting the door on humour. But this is mere assertion, and I can probably make the point much better by confronting you with a stark contrast. English poetry drove Arnold into the fold of the Germans, and I am taking his hint by offering you, as proof of what I have been suggesting, a glimpse of how different things were for Goethe. It is a poem with the winds of joy blowing through it from end to end. It is ebullient with good humour—and yet its subject is really goodness, located where Cowper could not have borne to look for it, in human sexuality. It is not quite a poem of the eighteenth century—it dates from 1810—but I like to think it is a poem that the best insights of the eighteenth century made possible. It is “Das Tagebuch” (“The Diary”) and when I say that its subject is Love and Duty, you may wonder why it was that it was thought to be unpublishable and lingered in manuscript long after Goethe's death. But this is Love and Duty conceived in the most shockingly good-humoured manner.

The narrator of the poem is a happily married man who is travelling on business, and unexpectedly held up on the return journey by the breaking of his carriage axle. He is forced to take a bed for the night in a country inn, where he whiles away the time by trying to write his diary, which his wife loves to read. But he cannot concentrate. The country girl laying the table and bringing in his supper is too distractingly fresh and delightful—her deftness, her bare arms, her obedience, add up to a provocation he cannot resist. Before he knows it he has embraced her, and before she wriggles away, she whispers that she will come to him at night—as she does, full of trust and naive passion. She has never said “yes” to a man before, and she confides herself to him with a bewitching mixture of happiness and timidity. They kiss, they twine their toes—and then, nothing. The narrator finds himself entirely unmanned; while he berates himself inwardly, and temporizes by smiling and kissing, the girl (who thinks love has nothing more to offer) goes blissfully to sleep, after her hard day's work. The narrator cannot sleep at all, and as he looks down on the dreaming girl, his mind goes back to his wife, and the rapturous courtship that united them both in uninhibited passion—a passion of body and soul, the real thing. At the memory of their glorious lovemaking, he finds himself suddenly aroused, and leans over his country girl to kiss her awake. But, no—the excitement disappears as rapidly as it came and, torn between defeat and delight, he recognizes that it is his wife alone who has the power to stir his inmost passion. He sits up in bed and writes this entry in his diary:

Sitzt, schreibt: «Ich nahte mich der heimischen Pforte,
Entfernen wollten mich die letzten Stunden,
Da hab ich nun, am sonderbarsten Orte,
Mein treues Herz aufs neue dir verbunden.
Zum Schlusse findest du geheime Worte:
Die Krankheit erst bewähret den Gesunden.
Dies Büchlein soll dir manches Gute zeigen,
Das Beste nur muss ich zuletzt verschweigen.»
Da kräht der Hahn. Das Mädchen schnell entwindet
Der Decke sich und wirft sich rasch ins Mieder.
Und da sie sich so seltsam wiederfindet,
So stutzt sie, blickt und schlägt die Augen nieder;
Und da sie ihm zum letzten Mal verschwindet,
Im Auge bleiben ihm die schönen Glieder:
Das Posthorn tönt, er wirft sich in den Wagen
Und lässt getrost sich zu der Liebsten tragen.
Und weil zuletzt bei jeder Dichtungsweise
Moralien uns ernstlich fördern sollen,
So will auch ich in so beliebtem Gleise
Euch gern bekennen, was die Verse wollen:
Wir stolpern wohl auf unsrer Lebensreise,
Und doch vermögen in der Welt, der tollen,
Zwei Hebel viel aufs irdische Getriebe:
Sehr viel die Pflicht, unendlich
mehr die Liebe!

(169-92)

Now, that is what I call good humour!

Notes

1. TE VIII, 538.

2. The “Life of Pope” in Lives of the Poets, The World's Classics edn, 2, 317.

3. Or did Pope create this paradox by accident when he inserted Clarissa's speech in 1717? The question is much debated; see Howard D. Weinbrot, “The Rape of the Lock and the Contexts of Warfare” in The Enduring Legacy, eds G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, Cambridge and New York, 1988, 40-41.

4. William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. H.S. Milford, revised 4th edn, London, 1967 (Oxford Standard Authors), 127 ff.

5. Poetical Works, pp. 431-32.

6. TE III ii, 66-67.

7. Matthew Arnold, Poetical Works, eds C.B. Tinker and H.F. Lowry, London, 1950 (Oxford Standard Authors), xviii.

8. 8. The complete poem is published with an English translation in Goethe: Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Middleton, Boston, 1983, 180-89; and in Goethe: Selected Verse, ed. David Luke, Penguin, 1964, 202-211.