Laughter by Henri Bergson (best way to read an ebook txt) 📖

>comic will be proportioned to the rigidity. We formulated this idea

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