'Happily Also They Are Silly'

“Men, that is, are selfish. Happily also they are silly . . .”

In 1903, Leslie Stephen delivered the Ford Lectures and the following year published them in a slender volume as English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. It was his final book and his final year. Stephen is most interesting when writing about literature and avoiding society. With books he’s likelier to stick to the topic at hand and write aphoristically. The passage at the top amused me. It reflects a mature person’s understanding that our species is reliably flawed and ridiculous. We are worthy of neither undiluted praise nor abject condemnation. Stephen is writing about the Earl of Chesterfield, whose favorite author is La Rochefoucauld. Chesterfield expects his son to read the Frenchman’s Maximes daily. The reference to silliness follows.

Stephen is fond of silly. By my count he uses the word four times in his little book. Its frequent use may be distinctly English, dismissive but not vicious. Americans use it less often. Stephen describes antiquarianism as “a silly crochet.” When dealing with Pope he writes: “The serious aim of the poet is to give a philosophy of human nature; and the mere description of natural objects strikes him as silly unless tacked to a moral.” He writes of Swift:

“His blows, as it seemed to the archbishops, struck theology in general; he put that right by pouring out scorn upon Deists and all who were silly enough to believe that the vulgar could reason . . .”

Best of all, Stephen endorses with qualifications Charles Lamb’s criticism of Congreve and the comedy of manners, and writes:

“Life is not made up of dodges worthy of card-sharpers—and the whole mechanism becomes silly and disgusting. If comedy is to represent a full and fair portrait of life, the dramatist ought surely, in spite of Lamb, to find some space for generous and refined feeling. There, indeed, is a difficulty. The easiest way to be witty is to be cynical. It is difficult, though desirable, to combine good feeling with the comic spirit.”

Difficult, indeed. Another English writer, Max Beerbohm, memorably uses silly in an essay which begins and ends with the author of “The Vanity of Human Wishes”:

“Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past favors, and would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity if by so doing he could insure that future generations would preserve a correct attitude towards him forever. This is very natural and human, but, like so many very natural and human things, very silly.”