WOMAN'S HUMOUR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12698, 29 October 1904, Page 6 (Supplement)

WOMAN'S HUMOUR.

A whiter in the August Bookman makes some temperate comments on a subject the endless . discussion of which in itself very often proves a lack of humour—that is, the humour of women.. The very dullest face darkens at the accusation of betraying no gleam of humour, and it certainly seems hard to cut off the brightest faces from the honour-roll of humorists. But that is what men have ; been doing for a long, long time. "Woman knows," says the writer of the article in the Bookman, "that she is a humorist in her own right."

Charles Reade wrote of George Eliot with brutal emphasis, " She has a little humour, whereas most women have none." The writer in the Bookman rather demurs at this judgment, but chooses Jane Austen rather than George Eliot ,as her champion among feminine humorists. Charlotte Bronte she abandons in despair:.— ' . - "We can easily imagine how Miss Bronte did not console-herself for. that "awful evening when Thackeray ran away from the very dinner-party that he had - given in:, her honour, and left the lioness, who was responsible for all the gloom of the occasion,, conversing in whispers with the' governess on the sofa. Of course we know how Thackeray would probably have appreciated the laugh on himself in a similar case. But I am afraid that when the author of " Jane Eyre" went home from the party with her headache, she consoled herself with some rather severe reflections on the emptiness of so-called 'society,' and her disappointment in the great Thackeray himself as a man."

But why, urges this writer, make so much of Charlotte Bronte? Consider for a moment Shelley proposing to Harriet to join him, and Mary on their honeymoon! lb seems that novelists are largely to blame for the popular delusion that women are naturally without humour:

"Take Thackeray's humorous women— they are of the really moving heroines of fiction, not certainly the women whom he loves ; but Becky" Sharp, or Beatrix Esmond in her old age, when she has outlived the love of men for their comradeship. I should say that the humour of Thackeray's women is* a worldly quality in them which the better man resents. It is the same with Hawthorne— although Hawthorne is nearly as moderr as Mr. Meredith himself, in his plea for the equality of tho sexes."

Browning's heroines and Hardy's heroines are also Cited as ladies who " have no disconcerting humour to spoil the romance." Defending woman's humour, she goes on to liphold her larger tolerance. " She is not interested in what Mr. Gladstone has to say," Mr. Barrie is quoted as having written of his mother; "indeed, she could never be brought to look upon politics as of serious concern for grown folk (a class in which she scarcely included man), and she gratefully gave* uf reading leaders the day I ceased tc write them. But like want of reasonableness, a love for having the last word, want of humour and the like, politics were in her opinion a. mannish attribute to be tolerated", and Gladstone, was the name of the something which makes all our sex such queer characters."