![]() ![]() ![]() You cannot think a witty thought, even, without thinking in words. Latin, of all languages, is the best vehicle of wit, the worst of humour. For wit is first and last a matter of expression. Easy enough to distinguish it from its neighbours in the scale of values: with wit, for example, it has nothing to do. Chesterton’s book, The Napoleon of Netting Hill. Humour has been treated, perhaps, twice in literature once in the preface to Meredith’s Egoist, and once in Mr. Enough to say that if I had the writing of an encyclopaedia the humming-birds should be made to look foolish. I could become lyrical, if I had time, over the sense of humour, what it does for men and how it undoes them, what comfort lies in its companionship, and what menace. Do you go to Church? He will patter up the aisle alongside of you, never more at home, never more alert, than when the spacious silences of worship and the solemn purple of prelates enjoins reverence. In crowded railway-carriages, in the lonely watches of a sleepless night, even in the dentist’s chair, the sense of humour is at your side, full of elfin suggestions. More, even, than this the sense of humour is a man’s inseparable playmate, allowing him, for better or worse, no solitude anywhere. If a man awoke to it of a sudden, it would be an enlightenment of his vision no less real than if a man who had hitherto seen life only in black and grey should be suddenly gifted with the experience of colour. It is a plate-glass window, which turns all our earnest, toiling fellow-mortals into figures of fun. Through that window we see, not indeed a different world, but the familiar world of our experience distorted as if by the magic of some tricksy sprite. For humour, frown upon it as you will, is nothing less than a fresh window of the soul. Arnold Bennett?Īssuredly this neglect is not due to any want of intrinsic importance. And at the same time it is an uncommonly awkward and elusive subject to tackle, or why have we no up-to-date guide to it from the hand of Mr. It means, in the first place, that humour, in our sense of the word, is a relatively modem phenomenon the idea of submitting it to exhaustive analysis did not, for example, present itself to the patient genius of John Stuart Mill. And that fact, in its turn, is doubly significant. The great history of Humour in three volumes, dedicated by permission to the Bishop of Much Wenlock, still remains to be written. Humour, for the encyclopaedist, is non-existent and that means that no book has ever been written on the subject of humour else the ingenious Caledonian who retails culture to us at the rate of five guineas a column would inevitably have boiled it down for us ere this. What will excite his speculation is, of course, the fact that no attempt is made by his author to deal with humour. He will find that the succeeding paragraph deals with the geological formation known as a humus or if his encyclopaedia be somewhat more exhaustive, with the quaintly-named genius of Humperdinck. Whoever shall tum up in a modern encyclopaedia the article on hummingbirds-whether from a disinterested curiosity about these brightly-coloured creatures, or from the more commonplace motive of identifying a clue in a crossword-will find a curious surprise awaiting him at the end of it. ![]() This broadcast became the model for Orson Wells’ no-less famous “ War of the Worlds.” He also famously wrote crime fiction and began the Sherlockian tradition of the “Grand Game,” with the publication of, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” in 1911, when he was 23 years old and still a student at Oxford, and which we have also now published.įamously, on January 16th, 1926, he presented Broadcasting the Barricades, which we have republished, which was a “live” radio coverage of a supposed a revolution in London, with an attack on the Houses of Parliament the destruction of Big Ben, and the hanging of the Minister of Traffic as well as other mayhe, m. Among his many contributions to knowledge and the world of ideas is his translation of the entire Bible (known as the Knox Bible ). Monsignor Knox (888-1957) was a widely respected English Catholic theologian, writer, thinker, and radio broadcaster. This excerpt is from Essays in Satire, by Ronald A. ![]()
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