Читать книгу The Book of This and That - Robert Lynd - Страница 12

Table of Contents

Almost everyone who has committed a murder knows that the business has its tragic side. Whether it also has its comic side is a question that has been raised since the production of Sir James Barrie's play, The Adored One. This, as most people are aware, is a farce about a lady who kills a man by pushing him out of a railway carriage because he will not allow the window to be shut. Some of the critics have protested that the theme is too grim for light entertainment. They are, most of them, probably, lovers of fresh air, who foresee a new danger in railway travel if women—creatures already enjoying the possession of an extremely feeble moral sense—are taught to regard the murder of a hygienic fellow-passenger as a laughing matter. Some years ago, when The Playboy of the Western World was first put on the stage in Dublin, there were similar denunciations of the idea of making a comedy of murder. It was then considered, however, that nobody outside Ireland could take murder so seriously as to miss seeing the joke of it. As a matter of fact, I believe the average respectable man all the world over would side in his heart with the Dublin demonstrators. Murder is, after all, one of the oldest institutions on earth. It dates from the second generation of the human race. It is almost as venerable as a sin can be, and to treat it flippantly is as shocking to comfortable ears as the blasphemies of a boy. Everybody knows how Baudelaire used to shock the citizens of Brussels by opening his conversation in cafés in a raised voice with the words: "The night I killed my father." He has himself related how he began the thing as a joke in order to punish the Belgians for believing everything he said. "Exasperated by always being believed," he wrote, "I spread the report that I had killed my father, and that I had eaten him, and that if I had been allowed to escape from France it was only on account of the services I had rendered to the French police, and I was BELIEVED!"

That is the penalty of the jester on serious subjects like murder. He is nearly always believed. The very mention of prepense death puts a great many people into a solemn mood that is hostile to wit and humour and any kind of facetiousness. I have met men and women, for instance, who were quite unable to see the entertaining side of cannibalism. Gilbert's ballad of the Nancy Lee, about the cook who gradually ate all the rest of the crew, moves them not to laughter but to horror. When the cook, or somebody else, as he gobbles one of his mates, enthusiastically exclaims: "Oh, how like pig!" they merely shudder. Those of us who are amused, on the other hand, are so only because we are not such inveterate realists as our neighbours. We treat comic murders as Charles Lamb treated comic cuckoldries. We regard them as happening, not in our world of realities, but in a kind of no-man's-land of humour. If it were not so, we should probably be as shocked as anyone else—those of us, that is, who are old-fashioned enough to consider murder and adultery as on the whole reprehensible. Luckily, human beings in the mass have gradually developed an artistic sense which enables them to leave the world of serious facts for the world of comic pretences at a moment's notice. And even the strictest humanitarian can smile with a good conscience at the most hideous of the tortures—"something with boiling oil in it"—discussed in the paper-fan world of The Mikado. I can imagine a sensitive child's being sharply disturbed by the punishments that at one time seem to be in store for so many of the characters in the opera. But for the rest of us Gilbert's Japan is as unreal as a nest of insects, where even the crimes seem funny. In the same way we have made a child's joke of Bluebeard, whose prototype was at least as atrocious a character as Jack the Ripper. Perhaps, in some distant island of the South Seas, where Europe is sufficiently remote to be unreal, the children are already enjoying the humours of Jack the Ripper in the local substitute for the Christmas pantomime.

Even a real murder, however, may strike one as amusing, if only it has about it something incongruous. A thousand people have laughed for one who has wept over Wainwright's murder of Helen Abercrombie, not because it was not a filthy deed, but because the murderer, on being reproached for it, uttered his famous reply: "Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles." Here it is the incongruity between the deed and the excuse for it that appeals to our sense of humour. We laugh at it as we would laugh at Milton's Satan if we saw him dressed in baby clothes. Similarly, when Peer Gynt and the Cook fight after the shipwreck for possession of the place of safety on the upturned boat, and Peer in effect murders the Cook, the situation is comic because of the incongruity between what is said and what is done. Take, for instance, the Lord's Prayer scene: