The advantage of the humorist is that he cannot be a man of one idea—­for the essence of humor lies in the contrast of two.  He is the universal disenchanter.  He makes himself quite as much the subject of ironical study as his neighbor.  Is he inclined to fancy himself a great poet, or an original thinker, he remembers the man who dared not sit down because a certain part of him was made of glass, and muses smilingly, “There are many forms of hypochondria.”  This duality in his mind which constitutes his intellectual advantage is the defect of his character.  He is futile in action because in every path he is confronted by the horns of an eternal dilemma, and is apt to come to the conclusion that nothing is very much worth the while.  If he be independent of exertion, his life commonly runs to waste.  If he turn author, it is commonly from necessity; Fielding wrote for money, and “Don Quixote” was the fruit of a debtors’ prison.

It seems to be an instinct of human nature to analyze, to define, and to classify.  We like to have things conveniently labelled and laid away in the mind, and feel as if we knew them better when we have named them.  And so to a certain extent we do.  The mere naming of things by their appearance is science; the knowing them by their qualities is wisdom; and the being able to express them by some intense phrase which combines appearance and quality as they affect the imagination through the senses by impression, is poetry.  A great part of criticism is scientific, but as the laws of art are only echoes of the laws of nature, it is possible in this direction also to arrive at real knowledge, or, if not so far as that, at some kind of classification that may help us toward that excellent property—­compactness of mind.

Addison has given the pedigree of humor:  the union of truth and goodness produces wit; that of wit with wrath produces humor.  We should say that this was rather a pedigree of satire.  For what trace of wrath is there in the humor of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Fielding, or Thackeray?  The absence of wrath is the characteristic of all of them.  Ben Jonson says that

  When some one peculiar quality
  Doth so possess a man that it doth draw
  All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
  In their constructions all to run one way,
  This may be truly said to be a humor.

But this, again, is the definition of a humorous character,—­of a good subject for the humorist,—­such as Don Quixote, for example.

Humor—­taken in the sense of the faculty to perceive what is humorous, and to give it expression—­seems to be greatly a matter of temperament.  Hence, probably, its name.  It is something quite indefinable, diffused through the whole nature of the man; so that it is related of the great comic actors that the audience begin to laugh as soon as they show their faces, or before they have spoken a word.