Edwin Percy Whipple

Lectures on Subjects Connected with Literature and Life Edwin Percy Whipple

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1850 Excerpt: ...intrusion of his own indignation or approval. He sees deeply into human nature; lays open the hidden structure and most complex machinery of the mind, and understands not merely the motives which guide actions, but the processes by which they are concealed from the actors. For instance, life is filled with what is called hypocrisy,--with the assignment of false motives to actions. This is a constant source of the laughable in conduct. Wit, judging simply from the act, treats it as a vice, and holds it up to derision or execration; but Humor commonly considers it as a weakness, deluding none so much as the actor, and in that self-delusion finds food for its mirth. The character of old John Willett, in Barnaby Rudge, so delicious as a piece of humor, would be but a barren butt in the hands of Wit. Wit cannot create character. It might, for instance, cluster innumerable satirical associations around the abstract idea of gluttony, but it could not picture to the eye such a person as Don Quixote's squire. It cannot create even a purely witty character, such as Thersites, Benedict or Beatrice. In Congreve's plays, the characters are not so much men and women as epigrammatic machines, whose wit, incessant as a shower of fiery rain, still throws no light into their heads or hearts. Now Humor will have nothing to do with abstractions. It dwells snugly in concrete personal substances, having no toleration either for the unnaturally low or the factitiously sublime. It remorselessly brings down Britannia to John Bull, Caledonia to Sawney, Hibernia to Paddy, Columbia to Jonathan. It hates all generalities. A benevolent lady, in a work written to carry on a benevolent enterprise, commended the project to the humanity, the enlightened liberality, the enlarged Christian fe...