In the older world literature
tended to be rather a serious, pensive, stately thing, concerned
with human destiny and artistic beauty. One searches in vain for
humour in the energetic and ardent Roman mind. Their very comedies
were mostly adaptations from the Greek. I have never myself been
able to discern the humour of Terence or Plautus to any great
extent. The humour of the latter is of a brutal and harsh kind; and
it has always been a marvel to me that Luther said that the two
books he would take to be his companions on a desert island would
be Plautus and the Bible. Horace and Martial have a certain deft
appreciation of human weakness, but it is of the nature of
smartness rather than of true humour--the wit of the satirist
rather; and then the curtain falls on the older world. When humour
next makes its appearance, in France and England pre-eminently, we
realise that we are in the presence of a far larger and finer
quality; and now we have, so to speak, whole bins full of liquors,
of various brands and qualities, from the mirthful absurdities of
the English, the pawky gravity of the Scotch, to the dry and
sparkling beverage of the American.
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