The Humour of Homer and Other EssaysButler, Samuel
History
The Humour of Homer and Other Essays
Butler, Samuel
Essays; Greek wit and humor -- History and criticism; Homer -- Humor
What are the moles and strawberry-marks of habitual action, or
actions remembered and thus repeated? First, the more often we
repeat them the more easily and unconsciously we do them. Look at
reading, writing, walking, talking, playing the piano, etc.; the
longer we have practised any one of these acquired habits, the more
easily, automatically and unconsciously, we perform it. Look, on
the other hand, broadly, at the three points to which I called
attention in Life and Habit:--
I. That we are most conscious of and have most control over such
habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences--which
are acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after
birth, and not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not
become entirely human.
II. That we are less conscious of and have less control over eating
and drinking [provided the food be normal], swallowing, breathing,
seeing, and hearing--which were acquisitions of our prehuman
ancestry, and for which we had provided ourselves with all the
necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which are still,
geologically speaking, recent.
III. That we are most unconscious of and have least control over
our digestion and circulation--powers possessed even by our
invertebrate ancestry, and, geologically speaking, of extreme
antiquity.
I have put the foregoing very broadly, but enough is given to show
the reader the gist of the argument. Let it be noted that
disturbance and departure, to any serious extent, from normal
practice tends to induce resumption of consciousness even in the
case of such old habits as breathing, seeing, and hearing, digestion
and the circulation of the blood. So it is with habitual actions in
general. Let a player be never so proficient on any instrument, he
will be put out if the normal conditions under which he plays are
too widely departed from, and will then do consciously, if indeed he
can do it at all, what he had hitherto been doing unconsciously. It
is an axiom as regards actions acquired after birth, that we never
do them automatically save as the result of long practice; the
stages in the case of any acquired facility, the inception of which
we have been able to watch, have invariably been from a nothingness
of ignorant impotence to a little somethingness of highly self-
conscious, arduous performance, and thence to the
unselfconsciousness of easy mastery. I saw one year a poor blind
lad of about eighteen sitting on a wall by the wayside at Varese,
playing the concertina with his whole body, and snorting like a
child. The next year the boy no longer snorted, and he played with
his fingers only; the year after that he seemed hardly to know
whether he was playing or not, it came so easily to him. I know no
exception to this rule. Where is the intricate and at one time
difficult art in which perfect automatic ease has been reached
except as the result of long practice? If, then, wherever we can
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