The lecture on “Wit and Humor” is, perhaps, the most brilliant of all; but, though the definitions are keenly stated and the distinctions nicely drawn, we suppose that even Sidney Smith, fine wit and humorist as he is, has not settled the matter. It appears to us that the difficulty consists in considering wit and humor as distinct powers, instead of viewing them as modifications of other powers. The mental peculiarities which distinguish wit and humor are qualities equally of fancy and imagination. The difference is emotional, not intellectual; in sentiment, not in faculty. A man whose sentiment and feeling of the ludicrous is predominant, will naturally make his intellectual powers serve his mirthful tendencies. If he has a lively fancy he will be a wit; if he has a creative imagination he will be a humorist. We should say, generally, that wit was fancy and understanding, directed by the sentiment of mirth; and that humor was imagination and understanding, directed by the same sentiment. It will be found, we think, in all ingenious and creative minds, that their peculiar direction depends altogether on sentiment. Sometimes imagination is exercised in a department of thought or action so far removed from the fine arts, that we can hardly recognize the power in its direction. In metaphysics, in mathematics, in government, war and commerce, we often come in contact with thinkers of vast imaginations, who still may despise poets and artists, and be heartily despised by them. If a change in the form and purpose of imagination thus appears, to many minds, to change its qualities, and to demand new definitions, we need not wonder at the popular reluctance to admit wits and humorists into the band of poets, though fancy and imagination be equally their characteristics.
Although our notice of this delightful volume has extended beyond the space we can properly allow it, we take leave of its wise and witty pages with regret, heartily commending it to the leisure hours of every man who can relish vivid argument and brilliant good sense.
_Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Suspiria de Profundis. By Thomas De Quincy, Boston: Wm. D. Ticknor & Co. 1 vol. 12mo._
Thomas de Quincy has been well known during the last twenty years, not only as the author of “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”, but as a prominent contributor of able, thoughtful, and eloquent articles to Blackwood’s Magazine, and other British periodicals. The publishers of the present volume intend to follow it up with others, containing the best of his many remarkable historical, biographical, and critical papers. When completed, the series will constitute a body of thought which no student’s library can well be without, for the author’s learning extends over widely separated departments of literature and science, and in each he has proved himself capable of throwing out those suggestive thoughts which take root in the reader’s mind, and bear fruit. A resolute, inquisitive, and reflective student, richly dowered with understanding and imagination, and exercising great dominion over the harmonies and subtilties of expression, De Quincy has been prevented from producing little more than colossal fragments of thought, by the mastery obtained over his will by opium, and the contemptuousness of disposition which that habit provokes for calm, orderly, systematic works. He is dogmatic, negatively as well as positively. It is natural that a man who obtains glimpses of grand truths and magnificent systems, through artificial stimulants, should disdain the sober realizations of consecutive and industrious thought, wanting all that misty magnificence which clothes things viewed in the waking dreams of the opium eater. But egotist and dogmatist as he is, he is still a resolute thinker, whose mind, busy with all the problems of society and philosophy, is continually startling us with novel thoughts and splendid rhetoric.