It can exist independently of genius we know, but genius
is never without humor. In other words, wherever there is a work of
genius, it transpires that the author has a fund of humor with which he
occasionally enriches his work. The profoundest philosophical treatises
have it. It is a part of the stock in trade of every great novelist;
Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot, Walter Scott. It frequently comes to
the surface in Schopenhauer pessimist though he be; it pervades
Shakespeare. Few men regarded life with greater seriousness than
Thoreau, but humor sparkles all over his works. It is only where this is
in excess that it detracts from the value of the work. Not important in
itself when separated from the deeper work which it accompanies, it is
yet, all in all, one of the infallible tests, though a minor one, of the
work of any man of genius. A sense of humor exists in the man even
though he keep it out of his work, if he is good for anything.
Beethoven's humor was titanic, heroic, on a grand scale, always with
what might be called a certain seriousness about it like that of a lion
at play.
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