Laughter - Henri Bergson (books to read for self improvement txt) 📗
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at the outset of this work. We have verified it in its main results,
and have just applied it to the definition of comedy. Now we must
get to closer quarters, and show how it enables us to delimitate the
exact position comedy occupies among all the other arts. In one
sense it might be said that all character is comic, provided we mean
by character the ready-made element in our personality, that
mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork wound up
once for all and capable of working automatically. It is, if you
will, that which causes us to imitate ourselves. And it is also, for
that very reason, that which enables others to imitate us. Every
comic character is a type. Inversely, every resemblance to a type
has something comic in it. Though we may long have associated with
an individual without discovering anything about him to laugh at,
still, if advantage is t taken of some accidental analogy to dub him
with the name of a famous hero of romance or drama, he will in our
eyes border upon the ridiculous, if only for a moment. And yet this
hero of romance may not be a comic character at all. But then it is
comic to be like him. It is comic to wander out of one’s own self.
It is comic to fall into a ready-made category. And what is most
comic of all is to become a category oneself into which others will
fall, as into a ready-made frame; it is to crystallise into a stock
character.
Thus, to depict characters, that is to say, general types, is the
object of high-class comedy. This has often been said. But it is as
well to repeat it, since there could be no better definition of
comedy. Not only are we entitled to say that comedy gives us general
types, but we might add that it is the ONLY one of all the arts that
aims at the general; so that once this objective has been attributed
to it, we have said all that it is and all that the rest cannot be.
To prove that such is really the essence of comedy, and that it is
in this respect opposed to tragedy, drama and the other forms of
art, we should begin by defining art in its higher forms: then,
gradually coming down to comic poetry, we should find that this
latter is situated on the border-line between art and life, and
that, by the generality of its subject-matter, it contrasts with the
rest of the arts. We cannot here plunge into so vast a subject of
investigation; but we needs must sketch its main outlines, lest we
overlook what, to our mind, is essential on the comic stage.
What is the object of art? Could reality come into direct contact
with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate
communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be
useless, or rather we should all be artists, for then our soul would
continually vibrate in perfect accord with nature. Our eyes, aided
by memory, would carve out in space and fix in time the most
inimitable of pictures. Hewn in the living marble of the human form,
fragments of statues, beautiful as the relics of antique statuary,
would strike the passing glance. Deep in our souls we should hear
the strains of our inner life’s unbroken melody,—a music that is
ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original. All
this is around and within us, and yet no whit of it do we distinctly
perceive. Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and
our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and
opaque for the common herd,—thin, almost transparent, for the
artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil? Was it done in
malice or in friendliness? We had to live, and life demands that we
grasp things in their relations to our own needs. Life is action.
Life implies the acceptance only of the UTILITARIAN side of things
in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions: all other
impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred. I
look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine
myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But
what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a
selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct; what
I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in
my actions. My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no
more than a practical simplification of reality. In the vision they
furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless
to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are
emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance, along which my
activity is to travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has
trod before me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I
can derive from them. And it is this classification I perceive, far
more clearly than the colour and the shape of things. Doubtless man
is vastly superior to the lower animals in this respect. It is not
very likely that the eye of a wolf makes any distinction between a
kid and a lamb; both appear t o the wolf as the same identical
quarry, alike easy to pounce upon, alike good to devour. We, for our
part, make a distinction between a goat and a sheep; but can we tell
one goat from another, one sheep from another? The INDIVIDUALITY of
things or of beings escapes us, unless it is materially to our
advantage to perceive it. Even when we do take note of it—as when
we distinguish one man from another—it is not the individuality
itself that the eye grasps, i.e., an entirely original harmony of
forms and colours, but only one or two features that will make
practical recognition easier.
In short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases
we confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them. This
tendency, the result of need, has become even more pronounced under
the influence of speech; for words—with the exception of proper
nouns—all denote genera. The word, which only takes note of the
most ordinary function and commonplace aspect of the thing,
intervenes between it and ourselves, and would conceal its form from
our eyes, were that form not already masked beneath the necessities
that brought the word into existence. Not only external objects, but
even our own mental states, are screened from us in their inmost,
their personal aspect, in the original life they possess. When we
feel love or hatred, when we are gay or sad, is it really the
feeling itself that reaches our consciousness with those innumerable
fleeting shades of meaning and deep resounding echoes that make it
something altogether our own? We should all, were it so, be
novelists or poets or musicians. Mostly, however, we perceive
nothing but the outward display of our mental state. We catch only
the impersonal aspect of our feelings, that aspect which speech has
set down once for all because it is almost the same, in the same
conditions, for all men. Thus, even in our own individual,
individuality escapes our ken. We move amidst generalities and
symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively
pitted against other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by
it, for our own good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a
zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things,
externally also to ourselves. From time to time, however, in a fit
of absentmindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached
from life. Not with that intentional, logical, systematical
detachment—the result of reflection and philosophy—but rather with
natural detachment, one innate in the structure of sense or
consciousness, which at once reveals itself by a virginal manner, so
to speak, of seeing, hearing or thinking. Were this detachment
complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its
perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has
never yet seen. It would excel alike in every art at the same time;
or rather, it would fuse them all into one. It would perceive all
things in their native purity: the forms, colours, sounds of the
physical world as well as the subtlest movements of the inner life.
But this is asking too much of nature. Even for such of us as she
has made artists, it is by accident, and on one side only, that she
has lifted the veil. In one direction only has she forgotten to
rivet the perception to the need. And since each direction
corresponds to what we call a SENSE—through one of his senses, and
through that sense alone, is the artist usually wedded to art.
Hence, originally, the diversity of arts. Hence also the speciality
of predispositions. This one applies himself to colours and forms,
and since he loves colour for colour and form for form, since he
perceives them for their sake and not for his own, it is the inner
life of things that he sees appearing through their forms and
colours. Little by little he insinuates it into our own perception,
baffled though we may be at the outset. For a few moments at least,
he diverts us from the prejudices of form and colour that come
between ourselves and reality. And thus he realises the loftiest
ambition of art, which here consists in revealing to us nature.
Others, again, retire within themselves. Beneath the thousand
rudimentary actions which are the outward and visible signs of an
emotion, behind the commonplace, conventional expression that both
reveals and conceals an individual mental state, it is the emotion,
the original mood, to which they attain in its undefiled essence.
And then, to induce us to make the same effort ourselves, they
contrive to make us see something of what they have seen: by
rhythmical arrangement of words, which thus become organised and
animated with a life of their own, they tell us—or rather suggest—
things that speech was not calculated to express. Others delve yet
deeper still. Beneath these joys and sorrows which can, at a pinch,
be translated into language, they grasp something that has nothing
in common with language, certain rhythms of life and breath that.
are closer to man than his inmost feelings, being the living law—
varying with each individual—of his enthusiasm and despair, his
hopes and regrets. By setting free and emphasising this music, they
force it upon our attention; they compel us, willy-nilly, to fall in
with it, like passers-by who join in a dance. And thus they impel us
to set in motion, in the depths of our being, some secret chord
which was only waiting to thrill. So art, whether it be painting or
sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside
the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted
generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in
order to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is from a
misunderstanding on this point that the dispute between realism and
idealism in art has arisen. Art is certainly only a more direct
vision of reality. But this purity of perception implies a break
with utilitarian convention, an innate and specially localised
disinterestedness of sense or consciousness, in short, a certain
immateriality of life, which is what has always been called
idealism. So that we might say, without in any way playing upon the
meaning of the words, that realism is in the work when idealism
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