If wit ever unmasks a moral feeling it performs its noblest function and imparts a complicated pleasure; as when Abraham Lincoln, in defending a fugitive slave before a court, said, "It is singular that the courts will hold that a man never loses his right to his property that has been stolen from him, but that he instantly lost the right to himself if he was stolen."
When wit creates a temporary congruity between an idea and an object which are essentially incongruous on all points, the shock dissolves in pleasure, because the oppressiveness of life results from its ideas; and yet one of them opens to us an escape from it. We find a way of eluding for a moment a task-master, and it makes us smile. It is not a moral revolt, for that would be a deepening of the seriousness till it became too pathetic; but it is a momentary beguilement, and we are cheated into the presumption that there is no care in the world. We return to the care refreshed by this electric bath of wit, which has a tonic quality and saves us from despair.
[Footnote 1: Ninth Eclogue of Virgil, 28th line.]
[Footnote 2: Sterne may have picked up this sentiment during his journey in France, when the donkey was bewept. At any rate, it is found in literature as early as 1594, when Henri Estienne wrote his "Prémices:" "_Dieu mesure le froid à la brebis tondue._"]
The similes of poetry which select natural objects and fit human thoughts and emotions to them have the movement which belongs to wit. They suddenly take things which we have been in the habit of seeing all our lives without after-thought, just as we see a brick or a house; but, when thus taken, they become involved in sentiments which are also customary, and indulged by us without after-thought. We are surprised and charmed to notice what an apt comradeship springs up between the object and the sentiment.
"Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy."
Constantinople may be seen any day from the Bosphorus, stretching its length of domes and minarets across the sunset; but when Mr. Browning observes it he says it runs black and crooked athwart the splendor, "like a Turk verse along a scimitar." There occurs a moment of surprise; a lively shock is given to the mind, which would liberate itself into the smile of wit if we were not instantly conscious that the sudden aptness is also beautiful. All pure wit is born in the imagination, but only in that capability of it to see one point where two incongruous things may meet. But the poetic simile involves more than that: it is born of the inmost vitality which must overflow, spill itself upon Nature, appropriate her, senseless as she may seem and incapable of reflecting our subtilties of mind and heart. Often there is something very noble and tender in this process of imagination, which converts surprise into emotion: as when Coleridge says,--