ock" of the witticism is a powerful one; while mere fun will have no
power over them if it jar on their moral taste. Hence, too, it is, that
while wit is perennial, humor is liable to become superannuated.

As is usual with definitions and classifications, however, this
distinction between wit and humor does not exactly represent the actual
fact. Like all other species, Wit and Humor overlap and blend with each
other. There are _bon mots_, like many of Charles Lamb's, which are a
sort of facetious hybrids, we hardly know whether to call them witty or
humorous; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narratives, which,
like Voltaire's "Micromegas," would be more humorous if they were not so
sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion and satire, that we
are obliged to call them witty. We rarely find wit untempered by humor,
or humor without a spice of wit; and sometimes we find them both united
in the highest degree in the same mind, as in Shakespeare and Moliere. A
happy conjunction this, for wit is apt to be cold, and thin-lipped, and
Mephistophelean in men who have no relish for humor, whose lungs do never
crow like Chanticleer at fun and drollery; and broad-faced, rollicking
humor needs the refining influence of wit. Indeed, it may be said that
there is no really fine writing in which wit has not an implicit, if not
an explicit, action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never
flame out into a witticism; but it helps to give brightness and
transparency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which verge on
the ridiculous--in every _genre_ of writing it preserves a man from
sinking into the _genre ennuyeux_. And it is eminently needed for this
office in humorous writing; for as humor has no limits imposed on it by
its material, no law but its own exuberance, it is apt to become
preposterous and wearisome unless checked by wit, which is the enemy of
all monotony, of all lengthiness, of all exaggeration.

Perhaps the nearest approach Nature has given us to a complete analysis,
in which wit is as thoroughly exhausted of humor as possible, and humor
as bare as possible of wit, is in the typical Frenchman and the typical
German. Voltaire, the intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of
his fictions from his lack of humor. "Micromegas" is a perfect tale,
because, as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas and does not touch
the marrow of human feeling and life, the writer's wit and wi