Cruelty and Humour
THE unhallowed alliance between the cruelty that we hate and the humour that we prize is a psychological problem which frets the candid mind. Hazlitt analyzed it pitilessly, but without concern, because humanity was not his playing card. No writer of the nineteenth century dared to be so clearly and consciously inhumane as was Hazlitt. Shakespeare and Scott recognized this alliance, and were equally unconcerned, because they accepted life on its own terms, and were neither the sport of illusions nor the prey of realities. It took the public—always more or less kind-hearted—two hundred years to sympathize with the wrongs of Shylock, and three hundred years to wince at the misery of Malvolio.
It was with something akin to regret
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