Bishop Burnet, in describing Lord Halifax, tells us, with thinly
veiled disapprobation, that he was "a man of fine and ready wit, full
of life, and very pleasant, but much turned to satire. His
imagination was too hard for his judgment, and a severe jest took
more with him than all arguments whatever." Yet this was the first
statesman of his age, and one whose clear and tranquil vision
penetrated so far beyond the turbulent, troubled times he lived in
that men looked askance upon a power they but dimly understood. The
sturdy "Trimmer," who would be bullied neither by king nor commons,
who would "speak his mind and not be hanged as long as there was law
in England," must have turned with infinite relief from the horrible
medley of plots and counterplots, from the ugly images of Oates and
Dangerfield, from the scaffolds of Stafford and Russell and Sidney,
from the Bloody Circuit and the massacre of Glencoe, from the false
smiles of princes and the howling arrogance of the mob, to any jest,
however "severe," which would restore to him his cold and fastidious
serenity and keep his judgment and his good temper unimpaired.
"Ridicule is the test of truth," said Hazlitt, and it is a test which
Halifax remorselessly applied, and which would not be without its
uses to the Trimmer of to-day, in whom this adjusting sense is
lamentably lacking. For humor distorts nothing, and only false gods
are laughed off their earthly pedestals. What monstrous absurdities
and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and
then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a
laugh! What healthy exultation, what genial mirth, what loyal
brotherhood of mirth attends the friendly sound! Yet in labeling our
life and literature, as the Danes labeled their Royal Theatre in
Copenhagen, "Not for amusement merely," we have pushed one step
further, and the legend too often stands, "Not for amusement at all."