Humour in the Wessex novels.

What is humour? From what sources does it proceed, and what are its functions? These are questions which many philosophers and psychologists have endeavoured to answer, but with no unanimity of opinion. The history of the word shows us something of its origin and evolution, but is perhaps of not much value in an appraisal of humour in the world today. The word humour has had many meanings, and has grown by no sudden or simple process. Every student of English literature knows that the earliest use of the word was physiological, denoting one of the four bodily fluids which were supposed to determine the characters and temperaments of men. An exact balance of these four primary “humours’’ -- blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy -- made up the properly constituted man. Not always, however, an exact balance was maintained. One or other of the humours might predomdinate, in each case producing its corresponding disposition or temper of mind, the sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric, or the melancholy. Thus the word came to be applied to temperaments, being used to signify any pronounced tendency or eccentric behaviour on the part of the individual in question. This identifying of the word humour with the consistently individual or exaggerated had been reached by the time of Ben Jonson, whose Every Man in His Humour is equivalent to every man according to his peculiar personal bias. In the comedies of Ben Jonson we meet with a set of eccentrics [...