TRUE A.Z1) FORCED FUN.*

AMONGST the many things of which 'demand ' raises the price, because it increases the competition while failing to cause any economy in the modes of manufacture; the raw product itself being

• Carols of Corkayne. By Henry S. Leigh. With numerous Illustrations, by Alfred Concanen and the late John Leech. London : J. C. Hotten.

The Bab Ballads : Much Sound and Little Sense. By W. S. Gilbert. With MatraCons by the author. London : J. C. Rotten.

absolutely limited in quantity, is fun. The number of comic journals which make us more melancholy than the most dismal sermons, increases year by year, though their names are always varying, because each in turn which fails to draw to it any perennial supply of humour or wit, goes out like a will o' the wisp almost as soon as it is seen. The truth is that people are apt to forget that there are two and only two genuine sources of laughter,—playfulness of heart, so far as it is really genuine,— and that much deeper faculty of the true wit or humourist, which is often in fact rooted in the most sombre temperament—one having a keen apprehension of the deepest intellectual or moral incongruities of life, and the art of grouping them in the most striking and sudden contrasts. The veriest nonsense,—if it be true sunshiny nonsense,—nonsense that springs of lightness of heart, —such nonsense as Mrs. Eliot spoke of when she said,—

" Sense may be all true and right,

But Nonsense thou art exquisite !"

will have a charm of its own, if it is, indeed, an air-bubble rising from the depths of inward gaiety. No one can help laughing at many of the bits of pure nonsense in Mr. Lear's book of nonsense, such, as for instance :—

" There was an old man of Vienna Who lived upon tincture of sauna!

When that didn't agree, he took camomile tea, That nasty old man of Vienna!"

for you can hardly conceive that coining from anything but a real depth of inward gaiety. But that is neither wit nor humour, —it is the mere cap and bells of a mind utterly careless of everything but indulging its own most extravagant freaks of Association. It is not the incongruities themselves that amuse you ; they act only indirectly, by bringing before you the buoyancy of the mind which caught so joyously at the absurdest flight of images within its reach. On the other hand, wit and humour proper, amuse not by suggesting the state of mind of which they are the index, but by the absolute force of the incongruities they start and enforce. When Charles Lamb said to the old lady who had ended her long prosing about the virtues of her favourite hero by saying, "I know him, bless him !" "Well, I don't ; but damn him at a hazard ;" or, on bearing that the sonata some young lady had been playing was a very difficult piece of music, replied, "Difficult! I wish it were impossible ;" or said to the scientific farmer who asked him how the crop of turnips was likely to turn out, that "it depended," he believed, "on the boiled legs of mutton,"—our amusement springs not from the vision of the state of mind which gave birth to these remarks, but from the depth of incongruity into the heart of which you are led so naturally. These two sources of real fun,—that which infects you with a certain joyousness and gaiety of heart, and that which leads you unawares into the depth of a profound intellectual or

moral incongruity as if you were treading the most beaten path of logic or common sense,—eorrespond, of course, to two sources of bad and unlaughable fun, the noisy nonsense which doesn't come from the heart, and the incongruities which are the result of deliberate and calculated exaggeration or disproportion,—which are mane l'actured, just as the caricature of the same type is manufactured, by deliberately making the nose very big, or the legs very thin, or

the stomach very globular, or the eyes very round, or the head very heavy, or by any other device of an equally brilliant description for distorting the figure.

Two books in satisfaction of the great demand for fun which exists here, as in most other civilized communities, lie before us, one of which seems very fairly to illustrate what the true fun is which arises from true gaiety of mind with a certain moderate share of humour, and the other what the forced fun is,—the fun totally devoid, if not of even a spark of gaiety, at least of the power of naturally expressing it,—and how vast the gulf between either wit

or humour and mere deliberately calculated disproportion and exaggeration. The Carols of Cockayne contain many pieces that

are not very good, that at best you can only smile at doubtfully, but contain also some of true lightness of heart and showing a true sense of the superficii incongruities of life. What, for instance, could be more gay and bright in its way than this on cod-liver oil?—

" On the bleak shore of Norway, I've lately been told,

Large numbers of cod-fish arc found, And the animals' livers are afterwards sold At so many ' pfenniga ' per pound ; From which is extracted, with infinite toil, A villainous fluid called cod-liver oil!

"Now, I don't mind a powder, a pill, or a draught— Though I mingle the former with jam—

And many's the mixture I've cheerfully quaff'd,

And the pill I have gulp'd like a lamb.