and charitable, and yet leave
much to be desired. He may be useful, no doubt, with that equipment, but
he may also be both tiresome, and even absurd. The fourth quality that I
should like to see raised to the highest rank among Christian graces is
the Grace of Humour.

I do not think that Humour has ever enjoyed its due repute in the
ethical scale. The possession of it saves a man from priggishness; and
the possession of faith, hope, and charity does not. Indeed, not only
do these three virtues not save a man from priggishness--they sometimes
even plunge him in irreclaimable depths of superiority. I suppose that
when Christianity was first making itself felt in the world, the one
quality needful was a deep-seated and enthusiastic earnestness. There is
nothing that makes life so enjoyable as being in earnest. It is not
the light, laughter-loving, jocose people who have the best time in the
world. They have a chequered career. They skip at times upon the hills
of merriment, but they also descend gloomily at other times into the
valleys of dreariness. But the man who is in earnest is generally
neither merry nor dreary. He has not time to be either. The early
Christians, engaged in leavening the world, had no time for levity or
listlessness. A pioneer cannot be humorous. But now that the world is
leavened and Christian principles are theoretically, if not practically,
taken for granted, a new range of qualities comes in sight. By humour
I do not mean a taste for irresponsible merriment; for though humour is
not a necessarily melancholy thing, in this imperfect world the humorist
sighs as often as he smiles. What I mean by it is a keen perception of
the rich incongruities and absurdities of life, its undue solemnity, its
guileless pretentiousness. To be true humour, it must not be at all a
cynical thing--as soon as it becomes cynical, it loses all its natural
grace; it is an essentially tender-hearted quality, apt to find excuse,
ready to condone, eager to forgive. The possessor of it can never be
ridiculous, or heavy, or superior. Wit, of course, is a very small
province of humour: wit is to humour what lightning is to the electric
fluid--a vivid, bright, crackling symptom of it in certain conditions;
but a man may be deeply and essentially humorous, and never say a witty
thing in his life. To be witty, one has to be fanciful, intellectual,
deft, light-hearted; and the humorist need be none of these things.

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