CHAPTER XII. ULTIMATE VALUE AND LIMITATIONS OF LAUGHTER.
Our study has taken us through various regions of research. In looking for the germ of laughter we found ourselves in the wide and misty plains of biological speculation. In tracing its development we took a dip into the pleasant vales of child-psychology and anthropology, and then tried to climb the winding paths of social evolution. Having reached in this way the heights of modern civilisation, we made a special investigation into the social organisation of laughter, as represented in the art of comedy, and into the gradual appearance of a new type of laughter, essentially individual and independent of the social standard, to which is given the name of humour. Throughout this voyage of discovery we have kept in view the question of the function of the laughing spirit in the life of the individual and of the community. It remains to determine this function more precisely.
In order to assign its proper place and its value to a large spiritual tendency such as runs through human mirth, we must for a moment push our investigation into a yet more difficult and obscure region, that of philosophy. This is necessary for more than one reason. To begin, we can hardly hope to reach a clear view of the worth of the laughing impulse without the help of some clearly thought view of life as a whole; and such a “Weltanschauung” {393} seems only to be attainable at the level of philosophic reflection. There is, however, a second reason for entering this more remote and private domain of knowledge. Philosophy is a carrying forward to its highest point of development of that individual criticism of life, with which, as we have seen, the quieter tones of laughter associate themselves. It would thus seem to be desirable to inquire how far along the road of philosophic speculation this companionship of the mirthful spirit in her quieter mood is possible. This inquiry may conveniently be pursued at once as supplementary to our discussion of humour.
As pointed out in the chapter on the subject, reflective humour grows out of a mutual approximation of two tendencies which seem to the unexamining person to be directly antagonistic, namely, the wholly serious turn for wise reflection and the playful bent towards laughter. In philosophic humour, touched on in our survey of the laughable in literature, this antagonism seems at first sight to be particularly sharp. The plain man, to whom philosophic speculation presents itself as something remote from all human interests as he conceives of them, may well receive a shock when he hears that it holds potentialities of a smile at least, if not of a laugh—for the person who engages in the occupation, that is to say, and not merely for him who looks on. It seems to be incumbent on us, therefore, to try to make this drawing together of impulses which look so hostile a little more intelligible.
The humorist, as we have viewed him, is able through the development of his individuality to detach himself from many of the common judgments and much of the common laughter of the particular community of which he is a member. He develops his own amusing mode of contemplation, which involves a large substitution for the standards {394} of custom and “common-sense,” of the ideal standards of reason. The habit of philosophic thought may be said to complete this uplifting of the individual to ideal heights, and its concomitant process, the expansion of the view of the irrational, the essentially unfitting, the amusing. A word must suffice to indicate the way in which it does this.
Philosophy, as we know, going boldly beyond the special sciences, pushes on to a deeper knowledge of things, and of these in their totality, of what we call the universe. In this effort it has to envisage things in a way essentially different from that of everyday observation. The modern philosopher may do his best to reach his conception of the reality of things by a careful analysis of experience; yet in the end his theory seems to have transformed our familiar world beyond the possibility of recognition.
In this philosophic re-construction of the real world, man, his relation to nature, and his history have to be re-considered. It illustrates a powerful tendency to view human life and experience as a phase of a larger cosmic movement determined by an ideal end. The introduction of ideal conceptions, by lifting us above the actual, seems to throw upon the latter an aspect of littleness, of futility, of something like the dishonour of failure. The ideal requirement proves hopelessly inapplicable to much, at least, of our everyday world; so that, as long as we remain at its point of view, familiar things—say the persons we happen to be thrown with, and a good deal in ourselves, social experiments growing out of some passing trend of “popular thought,” and even long periods of history—take on the aspect of contradictions, of futile things that at least do not count, if they do not actually delay the fruition of the ideal.
So, too, when philosophy becomes distinctly practical. {395} Whether we take happiness or moral perfection or self-realisation as the ideal end of men’s conduct, a large part of the conduct which unfolds itself under our eyes, including much of our own, begins to look sadly poor and shabby, as soon as we venture seriously to apply an ideal as test. Much at least of what men praise as virtue shows itself to be of doubtful value, and at any rate to have received a laudation quite disproportionate to its true worth.
Lastly, this belittling effect of ideas on everyday realities is seen when philosophy constructs for us the ideal type of human society, and of that confederacy of civilised states of which, now and again, it has had its dream. Under the searching rays of these ideal conceptions even the “common-sense” to which “advanced” communities hold so tenaciously may begin to look something compacted rather of darkness than of light.
The situation would seem to offer room for some of those modes of transforming the aspects of things which we have found to be excitants of laughter. If philosophic contemplation effects a reduction of great things to littleness, of substances to illusory shadows, of the elevated glories of men to the level of barely passable dignities, it should, one may reason, help men to laugh. Yet the fact that a philosopher has been known to the ages as the laughing one suggests that mirth has not been a common characteristic of his kind.
In order to understand this, we must recall one or two facts. For one thing, though seriousness may combine with a taste for the laughable, it is and remains fundamentally opposed to the playfulness of mirth. Philosophers are serious persons: their constructive thought is of the most arduous of human activities, and imposes on those who {396} undertake it an exceptional amount of serious concentration. Little wonder, then, if we so rarely find in them a marked fondness for the playful. The great and ineradicable gravity of the philosopher has been sufficiently illustrated in his theoretic treatment of our subject.
In addition to this general reason, there are others and variable ones, differing with the kind of philosophic creed adopted, and with the temperamental attitude of the individual towards it. To begin with differences of creed, we must remember that a philosopher’s doctrine, while it may invest our common world and our common life with an aspect of indignity, may at the same time reduce these to mere semblances by setting them in contrast to the ideal region which it regards as the sphere of the veritable realities. In this way, as in Plato’s Idealism, we may see a quasi-religious tendency to lift men above the follies, deceptions and seeming evils of the world to the sublime verities. Such a doctrine, if consistently held, reserves but a small place for laughter—save perhaps for the happy smile of release or escape. Plato, the thinker of many moods, was able to adapt his doctrine to attitudes widely different from the half-poetic, half-religious one to which on the whole he leaned; and some of these proved to be compatible with a delicate vein of mirth. Perhaps one may find in Plato a reflection of the different attitudes of the gods—to communion with whom his spirit aspired—towards luckless and erring mortals: the serene indifference of those on the height, and a mild good-natured interest in what is seen below, which lends itself to the softer kind of ironical banter. What is told us of the laughter of the deities is always, perhaps, a little difficult to reconcile with their remote altitude and the detachment of spirit which seems proper to this; being, either in its mocking virulence, or {397} in its good-natured familiarity, rather too suggestive of a close attachment to our race; for which reason, by the way, philosophers, if they wish to soar god-wards and still to keep a laughing down-glance on their fellows, should beware lest they soar too high.
How high-pitched speculation tends to silence laughter by withdrawing the philosopher too far from the human scene may easily be seen by a glance at the historical schools. The Stoic and the Epicurean alike, widely dissimilar as were their views of the good and their moral tempers, took into seclusion the philosophic life which Aristotle had bidden them combine with a discreet participation in the social life about them; seeking, each in his own manner, to realise its self-sufficiency and its consolations. There, no doubt, they reflected much on the follies of the unwise who remained in the crowd. Yet the Stoical temper, with its striving after a passionless imperturbability, excluded the idea of a laughing, quite as much as of a pitying, survey. On the other hand, the Epicurean, though his theory of life accentuated the value of the tranquil pleasures, did not apparently find in his Garden a corner for the quiet amusement of a laughter-bringing contemplation.
In this way philosophy, by substituting a new and ideal mode of thought and life for the common mode, is apt to dismiss it as void of significance and unreal, and so to be unable to laugh at ordinary humanity just because it has ceased to be interested in it. Yet all philosophising does not thus belittle the realm of reality, as common men regard it. Philosophers have been known to regard as realities the same particular things that Plato contemned as mere shadows, and to reconstruct and to justify as rational what the plain man accepts as his world. When {398} this goes so far as to insist on the goodness of things human, and to say that the world as a whole is as perfect as it can be, and thus in a new way, as it would seem, to break away from the common view, it seriously threatens the locus standi of the laugher. Nothing, indeed, in the way of a theory of life would appear to be more fatal to a mirthful temper of the mind than an out-and-out optimism. At most, laughter would take on the aspect of the serene gaiety of a happy and thoughtless girl; as it does, I suspect, in the case of Abraham Tucker, for whom Sir Leslie Stephen claims the character of a “metaphysical humorist”.[326] It is true, as I have elsewhere shown,[327] that a genial and tolerant laughter may predispose a man, should he begin to philosophise, to adopt an optimistic theory of the world. Nevertheless, I believe that a firm grasp of such a theory would tend to reduce very considerably the scope of his laughter. It is just as well, perhaps, that R. L. Stevenson—whose predominant inclination to a hopeful and cheerful view of things is clearly shown in his idea that every man carries his ideal hidden away, as the Scotch boys used to carry lanterns in a silent ecstasy—did not go farther than his letters show him to have gone, along the path of philosophic construction.
If, on the other hand, the manner of philosophic speculation at once accepts the common facts of life as real, and yet as inherently and hopelessly bad, laughter is even more effectually excluded. There may, it is true, be room in the pessimist’s creed for a grim irony, of which, indeed, we find a trace now and again in the writings of Schopenhauer and his followers; but for laughter pure and simple, or even for laughter mellowed by the compassion which the {399} pessimist bids us cultivate, there seems to be no breathing-space. The state of things is too tragic to allow even of a smile.
It remains to determine the relation of one other tendency in this high thinking to the possibilities of laughter. In philosophic scepticism, with its insistence on the relativity of our knowledge and on the impossibility of attaining to rational certainty, we seem to find a denial of all philosophy rather than a particular species of it; nevertheless, as the history of the subject shows, it is the outcome of a distinct and recurrent attitude of the philosophic mind. Now scepticism does undoubtedly seem to wear a rather malicious smile. This smile may be said to express an amusement at the spectacle of illusions pricked, which tells at least as much against the high-soaring thinker as against the man of common day who relies on the intuitions of his “common-sense”. The sceptic’s attitude leans, indeed, more towards that of common-sense, in so far that, while destroying the hope of absolute knowledge, it urges the practical sufficiency of such conjectural opinion as we are able to reach.
Scepticism thus introduces another standpoint for the laugher and adds to the sum of laughable things. This is the standpoint of the practical man and of what we call common-sense, so far as this is knowledge shaped for the guidance of men in the ordinary affairs of life. This common-sense, as its name plainly tells us, is essentially a social phenomenon. Here, then, within the group of tendencies underlying reflection—that is to say, the kind of intellectual activity which marks the highest development of the individual point of view—we encounter the contrast between this and the social point of view. So far as we are able in our philosophic moments to “see the fun of it,” as R. {400} L. Stevenson says apropos of a modern philosopher, we join the choir of common-sense laughers—the laughing realists as distinguished from the laughing idealists.[328] From their point of view, as the history of comedy plainly illustrates, all highly abstract speculation looks amusing because of its quaint remoteness from their familiar realities and interests; because, too, of a keen suspicion of its being a vain attempt to soar above the heads of common mortals. To pull down the speculative soarer to his proper footing on our humble earthcrust is always a gratifying occupation to the lovers of mirth. Even the soarers themselves will sometimes give one another a kick downwards, the man of science loving to have his joke at the expense of the unverifiable conceptions of the metaphysician, and the latter being sometimes lucky enough to turn the tables by showing how physical science itself may, by its abstract methods, manage to strip material things, the properties and laws of which it sets out to explain, of the last shreds of reality.[329]
A word may serve to define the relation of philosophic humour to the tendencies just indicated. Humour, we have found, is characterised by an inclination to reflect, and to take the large views of things which embrace relations; further, by a mirthful caprice of fancy in choosing for play-ground the confines of issues felt all the time to be serious. It grows distinctly philosophic when, as in Jean Paul or his disciple, Carlyle, the contemplation of things breaks through the limitations of the viewer’s particular world-corner, surmounts “relative” points of view, and regards humanity as a whole, with oneself projected into the spectacle, as nearly as possible as disinterested spectator. {401}
We need not look for the philosophic humorist among zealous adherents of the schools. In these, as elsewhere, a fervid devotion tends, through its narrowing effect on ideas and its rigid fixation of the point of view, to shut out humour, which even in its most serious vein loves an ample reserve of space for free wanderings in search of new aspects of things. The humorist is much more likely to be found among students of philosophy who retain a measure of scholarly impartiality in relation to the competing creeds.
A full development of humour in the philosopher seems to be impossible, save where the amusing aspects of speculative soaring are dimly recognised. This may come through a study of the history of the subject; for it is hard not to smile at the spectacle of a man refurbishing and possibly adding a new handle to one of the “systems” which have had their day (and more, perhaps) and undertaking once more to use it as a deadly weapon against the adversary. A dash of the sceptical spirit, also an ability now and again to see the pretentiousness of it all, would appear to be needful for a large humorous enjoyment. One should have, too, at least a side-glance for the fun of the proceeding when the human pygmy tries the giant’s stride by offering us a definition of the absolute.
It would seem, then, as if the philosophic humorist needed to combine two opposed points of view; that of the thinker who criticises actual life in the light of ideas, and that of the practical man who takes his stand on the fact of primal human needs and seeks an interpretation of things which will satisfy these. He should be able to soar with the Platonist to the realm of Ideas, so as to enjoy the droll aspect which men’s behaviour assumes as soon as a glimmer of light is made to fall on it from the Universal Forms; {402} and he should be no less capable of taking up the standpoint of everyday reality and common-sense, so far as to discern the element of a practical irrationality which lurks in any undue insistence on these Ideas.
This combination in philosophic humour of two opposed tendencies is illustrated in its attitude towards the question of the worth of life. Since a humorist is characterised by a certain depth and range of sympathy, he is not likely to accept the optimist’s easy way of getting rid of the sufferings of humanity. At this point, at least, he will be alive to the obstinate and inexpugnable reality of our concrete experiences. Yet, just because he insists on never losing his hold on his buoyant laughter, he will not sink into the pessimists depths of complaint. He will see that even the large spectacle of human struggle, in which there is much to sadden a compassionate heart, begins to wear the shimmer of a smile as soon as we envisage it as a sort of game played by destiny against our race. Just as a glimpse of the provoking, almost malicious aspects of the circumstances which irritate us in our smaller world may stifle the rising imprecation, by bringing up a smile or even a sotto voce laugh; so, when a philosophic humorist looks out upon the larger human scene, he may find the starting sigh checked by a glance at the playful irony of things. The reflective mind will indeed readily find in the scheme of the world traces of an impish spirit that must have its practical joke, cost what it may. With a fair appearance of wise purpose, the destinies have contrived to combine just the amount of bungling needed to convey an intention of playful though slightly malicious teasing.
Thus, in the final evaluation of the world, humour may find its place. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the {403} last word on man and his destiny leaves an opening for the humorous smile. So quaintly do the rational and the irrational elements seem to be interwoven in the structure of our world, that a humorist, for whom, as we have seen, the spectacle must always count as much, might almost construct a new Theodicy and say: “The world is at least the best possible for amusing contemplation”.[330]
We have spoken of philosophy as hovering aloof from our common life, and this idea might seem to exclude all possibility of a utility in the exercise of a philosophic humour. Yet even when men philosophise and so appear to erect about them a new cosmos, they remain in their human world and are doing something towards shaping their relations to it; so that, after all, we may not unreasonably look here, too, for some self-corrective function in laughter, some aid rendered by it to that adjustment of the self to its surroundings, which is enforced on us all—the exalted thinker no less, let us say, than his faithful quadruped, whose world his master’s strange habits make sadly complex.
The first service of such a philosophic humour is to complete the process of a laughing self-correction. It is only when we rise to the higher point of view of a philosophic reflection and see our own figure projected into the larger whole, that we are able to estimate ourselves and our concerns with some approximation to justness. As we look down the vast time perspective we first fully discern our flitting part in the world. And the glimpse of the dwarfed figure we cut in the vast assemblage of things, followed by the reflection how well it can work out its {404} hidden purpose whether or not we happen to be on the scene, may suffice fully to reveal to us the absurdity in the crude exaggerations of our dignity, of our usefulness and of our troubles, and bring to the lips the corrective smile, even if it fail to evoke the yet more valuable self-purifying laugh.
A like helpfulness is brought us by philosophic humour when we contemplate the whole human lot. In estimating our world as a dwelling-place for man, there is surely room for the exaggeration which comes from a natural indignation at what hurts us, or from a natural impatience at being able to do so little to better our estate. Similarly, when we undertake to pronounce on the moral worth of our species. It is, after all, our world, and, so far as we know, our only one; and a side-glance at the requirements of a practical wisdom may suffice to bring the smile which instantly corrects a disposition to decry it overmuch. Such a glance may save us alike from the sentimentalities of the cultivator of Weltschmerz, from the foolish bitterness of the misanthrope, and from the sadly unbecoming vanity of the “philosopher” who teaches that the world and the institutions of human society exist for the sake of the man of genius. A friend of Carlyle tells me that the gloomy sage would sometimes, after pouring out one of his long and savage tirades against things in general, suddenly hold breath, and then let himself be swiftly borne downwards to more familiar levels on the rapid of a huge laugh, almost as voluminous, perhaps, as that of Teufelsdröckh, which he has so vividly described for us. In this way, one conjectures, there came to him a moment of perfect lucidity, in which he saw the absurdity of the overstrained attitude likely to be produced by undue violence of emotion, aided by an irrepressible turn for preaching to one’s fellows; {405} a moment when, perhaps, the stubborn realities, which his words had made a show of demolishing, were seen securely standing and ironically smiling at his impotent rage.
In the foregoing account of laughter and its uses, we have sharply separated the individual from the social point of view. Fifty years ago, such a distinction would have required no justification. It seems, however, just now to be the fashion to think of the individual as merely an anatomical detail, too small to be really distinguished, of the “social organism,” and of his part on the earthly scene as consisting merely in making a small contribution, which at its best is a negligible quantity, to the efficiency of this organism.
This is not the place to argue so serious a matter. At the risk of appearing unfashionable, one may venture to keep to the old notion that in counting human values we must assign a high one to individuality; that, for the sake of the community itself, a proper freedom for the full development of a man’s own mind, tastes, and character, is something which should be secured even at great cost; and that, were this not so, society’s claims on the individual have well-defined limits, beyond which every man has the right, and owes it to himself as a primal duty, to develop himself in the way which his natural inclinations enlightened by reflection may suggest to him. To insist further on this point would almost be to cast a slur on our literature, which contains some of the masterly pleadings for individual liberty.
This freedom for individual self-development clearly includes a perfect right to form one’s own view of one’s world, and to derive as much amusement as one can from a humorous contemplation of it. It could only be something akin to an awe-struck flunkeyism which would make a {406} person hesitate here. To one who has cultivated the requisite observation and taste in the fellowship of one or two congenial friends, the following of the tortuous movements of the laughable in all domains of human industry and of human indolence is one of the crowning felicities of life: the fun is always old in its essence, wherefore we respond so quickly; yet it is always new in its embodiments, wherefore we go on relishing it with an unabated keenness.
The indulgence in this mode of amusing contemplation is, I readily grant, in a sense anti-social, that is to say, opposed to what the laugher’s community at the moment accepts as fitting and as good. When a tranquil observer of his social world laughs at the pretences, at the futilities, or it may be at the vagaries of its high dignitaries, he may not improbably feel half-terrified at the sound of his laugh; so firmly has our early schooling set in us a tendency to regard as insolent upstarts all small things when they challenge big ones: whether a “cheeky” schoolboy standing up to his big senior, or a small country confronting a big one, or a “petty” anti-war minority facing a “practically unanimous” people. Insolence it may be, yet perhaps to the eye of reason not more contemptible than the genuine ὕβρις in which great things are wont to indulge freely as well within their right. It is indisputable, as urged above, that the verdicts of the many, when they appear to fix the permanent demands of social life, or to store away some of the precious fruit of experience slowly maturing with the ages, are entitled to respect; and a wise man will not hastily dismiss any popular opinion which promises to have persistence. On the other hand, it is no less clear that the views of minorities—whether singular or plural in number—are exposed to special risks of their own. Yet this, and more, does not affect the contention that popular opinion, just because it is {407} popular, is almost completely relieved of that necessity of finding reasons for its assertions which presses heavily upon a minority; and, what is more serious, is subject to various and potent influences which are just as likely to lead to error as to truth. An opinion which may be seen to result from a mental process palpably warped by prejudice does not grow valid merely by multiplying the number of those who adopt it; for the increase may easily be the result, either of the simultaneous working of a like prejudice, or of the contagion which propagates psychical states, as well as physical, among perfectly inert members of a crowd.
At the risk of appearing insolent, then, one must urge that the individual and the society have their reciprocal claims. The most extravagant adulator of his community would, perhaps, allow that she has her favourites, and that some of the obscure “Judes” have no particular reason for bearing her affection. The limbs of the body politic which find themselves emaciated by under-feeding, while the belly is bloated with over-feeding, may perhaps be forgiven for not joining in the pæans on the glories of the social organism. Yet one need not urge this line of remark. Little chance, alas, of our Judes or our starvelings betaking themselves to a laughter which even approaches that with which we are now dealing. Those who would enter the gateway of this haunt of quiet amusement must leave outside all grudging and sense of failure. Happy he who having played the social game and lost can, with a merry shrug of the shoulders, and at least half a laugh, betake himself to such a calm retreat. He will find one into which the garden of Epicurus may be said to open, where he can gather about him, at any rate, the congenial friends who are always ready to hold sweet discourse with him through their books; patient friends whom he cannot offend by an {408} unwise interruption, though unhappily they are out of reach of the gratitude which he would fain tender them. Here he may now and again glance through the loopholes in the wall and see each new day enough of the drolleries of the social scene to deepen his content.
The evolutionist has accustomed us to the idea of the survival of the socially fit, and the elimination of the socially unfit sort of person. But more forces are at work in the world than our men of science dream of. There is, oddly enough, a force which favours the survival of the unfit, widely different from that supplied by others’ preservative benevolence: the impulse to adapt one’s environment to the peculiarities of one’s organism by turning the world into a plaything. How many men in one of the highly civilised communities of to-day may have learned to keep their heads above the water by the practice of a gentle laughter, no one knows or will ever know. It is enough to say that there are such, and that after fully cultivating their gift of humour they have found a world worth coming back to, with their part in which they will be perfectly contented. Some of these, who would probably be called social failures by the faithful adherent to conventional standards, have been known to me, and have been reckoned among the most delightful of my companions and most valued of my friends. Society’s neglect of them, or their neglect of society, has at least permitted them to develop the gift of a wise and entertaining discourse.
I am far from suggesting, however, that this gay solitude—à deux, or à peu de gens—is only for the social failure. Even in our much-extolled age a philosopher will sometimes be found who is perverse enough to hold with Plato that the mass of society are wrongheaded, and that he will best consult his well-being by seeking a wall for shelter from the {409} hurricane of wind and dust. Such an one may do worse than betake himself to our retreat. And a wise man who, like Montaigne, feels that he has lived “enough for others” and desires to “live out the small remnant of life” for himself may appropriately draw towards its entrance, not minding the shouts of “Old fogey!” which come from behind. Nay, more, as already hinted, a man who feels that his place is in the world may be advised now and again to enter the retreat, if haply he may find admission as a guest.
It may, however, be objected that even when a man thus detaches himself as spectator from his society he perforce remains at the social point of view in this sense, that the critical inspection which brings the coveted laugh involves a reference to an ideal community. The objector might find colour for his statement in the fact that it is Frenchmen, that is to say, members of the most sociable of modern races, who have chiefly dwelt on the delights of retirement from the crowd. I am not greatly concerned to dispute with such an objector; it is enough for my purpose to say that the point of view of our supposed contemplator is far-removed from that habitually adopted in any community which one could instance. As such, it stands clearly enough marked off as individualistic. To this it may be added that in that kind of laughter at the social spectacle which presupposes philosophic reflection, the point of view is no longer in any sense that of a particular community: it has become that of a human being, and so a citizen of that system of communities which composes the civilised world.
I do not doubt that during this laughing contemplation of the social whole, of which at the moment he is not serious enough to regard himself as a part, the individual will feel society pulling at his heels. The detachment {410} from his community, though it fall far short of the abandonment of the recluse, will, as already hinted, be felt to be a revolt. When, glancing back at the crowd wreathing itself in a dust-cloud, he laughs with his large laugh free from rancour, he may catch a glimpse of the absurdity of his critical performances. Here, again, we meet the final contradiction between ideal conceptions and obdurate everyday facts. It is a droll encounter when the foot of pure intellect, just as it is parting from the solid earth, strikes against the sturdy frame of philistine common-sense, of “that which subdues us all,” philosophers included. The individualism of the point of view in a laughing contemplation of one’s social world is only surmounted when a large philosophic humour thus draws the laughers self into the amusing scene.
We may now better define the attitude of the humorist in its relation to that of the comedian and of the satirist. The comic spirit, placing itself at the social point of view, projects as laughable show an eccentric individual, or group of individuals. Satire, when it attacks the manners of an age, may be said to project the society, turning it into an object of derision. Humour, as we have seen, sometimes does the like, though in its laughter at the social scene it is neither passionately vindictive nor concerned with the practical problem of reforming a world. To this may be now added that as a sentiment nourished by sympathy it tends, when something of philosophic width of contemplation is reached, to combine the social and the individual mode of projection by taking up the self into the spectacle of the whole.
Enough has been said, perhaps, on the developments of individual laughter. Its point of view seems on inquiry {411} to justify itself as a distinct and a legitimate one. With some idea of the ways of this, as well as of the larger laughter of societies and groups, we should be able to form an estimate of the final significance and utility of the laughing impulse.
Laughter, born of play, has been seen above to possess a social character. Throughout the evolution of communities, from the first savage-like tribes upwards, we have observed it taking a considerable part in the common life, helping to smooth over difficulties of intercourse, to maintain what is valued, and to correct defects. It remains to ask under this head, what is its whole value to-day as a social force, and what indications of the future can be discovered in the tendencies which we note in its later social developments.
These questions appear to be best approached by a reference to the results of our study of comedy. This, in its higher forms, has shown itself to be the clear expression of the attitude of a community, when it would laugh away something in its members which it sees to be unfitting, though it may not regard it as serious enough to call for a more violent mode of ejection. That which is thus lightly dismissed is always something which looks anti-social, whether or not it takes on for moral reflection the aspect of a vice.
A common tendency among writers on comedy is to claim for it the value of a moral purgative, to attribute to it the power of effecting directly a process of self-correction in the spectator. Even Congreve and Vanbrugh, in their defence of their plays against Jeremy Collier, pretended that they were reformers of the world.
This agreeable supposition will not, one fears, bear critical inspection. One objection, just touched on, is that comedy {412} does not deal a blow straight at the immoral, as the language of Aristotle and of some of his citers appears to suggest. This circumstance seems to stand seriously in the way of its effecting a moral purification. Nor does the holding up to merry contemplation of the tendency of men to stray too far from the customary social type, imply a serious purpose of correction behind. Though she may wear a shrewishly corrective expression, the Comic Muse is at heart too gay to insist on any direct instruction of her audience. A glance at her stern-eyed sister, Satire, will convince us of this. On the other side, we meet with another and more fatal objection: the mental pose of the spectator at the comic show makes it extremely unlikely that he should at the moment apply the object-lesson so as to discern the laughable side of his own shortcomings. One remembers here that a man is all too slow in making such a self-application even in the serious surroundings of a church, where a remark, pointed perhaps with a significant turn of the finger (I speak of ruder times), is recognised by all but himself as specially aimed at him; and if so, how can we expect a spectator at a comedy, in the playful mood which has no room for any serious thought, to rub in the moral medicament supplied him?
Such purification as is possible can, it is plain, be only indirect. When Lessing writes “the whole of morality has no more powerful and effective preservative than the laughable” he seems to imply this indirectness. So far as the provocative lurks in the immoral, we can say that our laughter at the comic exhibition may serve as a useful prophylactic. By tracing out, with the guidance of the comic poet, the unsuspected developments and effects of a failing, we may be furthering our moral salvation through the setting up of a new internal safeguard. If the tendencies should {413} later on thrust up their ugly forms in ourselves, the fact of our having laughed at them may make a considerable difference in the swiftness and energy of the movement of repression. The fear of becoming ridiculous, which grows better defined and so more serviceable in one who has made acquaintance with comedy, is a valuable side-support of what we call moderation and reasonableness in men; and comedy is entitled to her modest meed as one of our health-preservers.
Yet we may easily go wrong here, doing an offence to our gay enchantress by taking her words too seriously. She looks, at any rate, as if she wanted much more to please us than to improve us. In considering her aim one is reminded, through a relation of contrast, of what Aristotle said about the connection between pleasure and virtue. The good man, he tells us, though aiming at virtue, will be the more satisfied if pleasure comes by the way, giving a kind of unexpected finish to the virtuous achievement. The art of comedy merely reverses the order: she aims directly at pleasure, but is far too good-natured and too wise to object to furthering virtue if this comes as a collateral result of her entertainment.[331]
The comedy, at once wise and gay, of a past age seems to have parted from us; and one would look in vain to newer developments of the art for any considerable instruction in the lesser social obligations. Nor is the corrective function of a large communal laughter likely to be carried on by such new forms of art as our “social satire,” in so far as these can be said to keep at the point of view of the good sense of a community. The tendency to-day seems to be rather to force a laugh from us at some bizarre extravagance of manners, which we could never {414} think of as a possibility for ourselves; or, on the other hand, to bring us near a cynical point of view, at which the current of our laughter becomes shallow and slightly acidulated, a point of view which has little, if any, promise of a moral stiffening of the self against insidious attack.
In spite of this, laughter, or the potentiality of it, remains a social force. A measure of faith enables one to believe that even a political leader is sometimes checked by the fear of laughter—on the other side. It is probable that the men of good sense in every community are kept right more than they know by the faintly heard echo of the “dread laugh”. If there is a danger just now of a conspiracy between a half-affected over-seriousness on the one side and an ignorant pretentiousness on the other, in order to banish the full genial laugh of other days, we may be allowed to pray fervently for its failure.
We have seen a tendency to claim too much in the way of serious function for the laughter of comedy. This desire to emphasise its practical utility, which is to be looked for perhaps in a people too pragmatic to seize the value of light things, is illustrated in a curious and mostly forgotten dispute as to the fitness of ridicule to be a test of truth. The debate was opened by Shaftesbury, who maintained its fitness, and was carried on by Warburton, Karnes and others. Much of it reads quaintly naïve to-day. Shaftesbury’s paradox almost sounds like a malicious attempt to caricature the theory of Prof. W. James, referred to in an earlier chapter of this work. To suggest that we know a piece of folly, say that of Malvolio, to be folly because we laugh at it, is surely to be thrusting on our laughter a dignity which is quite unmerited, and, one may add, does not become it. This point was not held to in the discussion, which, as I have {415} shown elsewhere, soon became a contest about the rights and the restraints of laughter.[332]
There is a like risk of exaggerating the useful function in estimating the service of laughter to the individual. No deep penetration of mind is needed for perceiving that a lively sensibility to the touch of the ludicrous will expose a man to considerable loss. To all of us, so far as we have to live in the world and consort with those who, being both solemn and dull, are likely to take offence, if not with those who, like Mr. Meredith’s entertaining ladies, cultivate the fine shades, a quick eye for drolleries is likely to bring situations of danger. This drawback must be considered in appraising the total value of laughter to a man.
With respect to its function as aiding the individual in a healthy self-correction, enough has been said. It is, in truth, no small advantage to be able to blow away some carking care with a good explosion of mirth. And if the world is much with us, we shall be likely to need laughter now and again as a protection from contact with much that is silly and much that is unwholesome. Yet, in this case, too, the chief value seems to reside in its immediate result, the gladdening and refreshing influence on the laugher, which has in it a virtue at once conciliatory and consolatory. This it is which makes it so good to step aside now and again from the throng, in which we too may have to “wink and sweat,” so as to secure the gleeful pastime of turning our tiresome world for the nonce into an entertaining spectacle; amusing ourselves, not merely as {416} Aristotle teaches,[333] in order that we may be serious, but because our chosen form of amusement has its own value and excellence.
It is one thing to assign to laughter a definite ethical or logical function, another to ask whether it has its place among the worthier human qualities. We have seen how some have denounced it, indiscriminately as it would seem, as a thing irreverent if not unclean. That view does not come further into the present discussion. We have only to ask what kind of dignity it has.
It is assumed here that we exclude the more malignant and the coarser sorts of laughter. A considerable capacity for the pure mirth which the child loves—and comedy may be said to provide for the man who keeps something of the child in him—supplemented by a turn for the humorous contemplation of things is, I venture to think, not merely compatible with the recognised virtues, but, in itself and in the tendencies which it implies, among the human excellences. This is certainly suggested by the saying of Carlyle: “No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad”.[334] We may not be able to rise to the point of view of R. L. Stevenson, when he wrote, “As laborare so joculari est orare;”[335] yet we may be inclined to think that it is impossible to construct the idea of a man who can be described as decently complete without endowing him with a measure of humour. Whatever our view of the “Good,” reasonable men of all schools appear to allow some value to a capacity for pleasure, especially the social pleasures, among which laughter, even when it seems to retire into solitude, always keeps a high place. On its intellectual side, again, as the {417} play of mind, the mirthful disposition has an intimate relation to such valuable qualities as quickness of insight and versatility.[336] In the light entertaining form of witty talk it takes on a social quality of no mean value.
Best of all, laughter of the genial sort carries with it, and helps to develop, kindly feeling and the desire to please. It is too often forgotten that a mirthful spirit, though it may offend, is a large source of joy to others. He who produces a laugh of pure gladness brightens the world for those who hear him. Fertility in jests may qualify a man to become one of the human benefactors; and it has been claimed for Falstaff, with some reason, that he “has done an immense deal to alleviate misery and promote positive happiness”.[337] It is this implied wish to entertain which gives to laughter much of its value as an educator of the sympathies. Nothing, indeed, seems to promote sympathy more than the practice of laughing together. Family affection grows in a new way when a reasonable freedom is allowed to laugh at one another’s mishaps and blunders. One reason for this, perhaps, is that the consciousness of our having laughed at our friends and been laughed at by them, without injury to friendship, gives us the highest sense of the security of our attachments. When a friend laughs “as love does laugh”—to quote Mr. Meredith’s Rosamund—with the laugh which only half-hides a kindly sentiment, say, a wish to help you to laugh away what will vex or harm you, it binds hearts yet more securely. Even our comparatively solitary laughter at things, when no appreciative sharer is at hand, {418} may, if only it has the tolerant good-natured tone, connect itself with and bring into play the sympathetic side of us.
If there is in laughter this element of a deeper humanity, we shall do well to view jealously any undue imposition of restraints. The history of popular mirth points to the dangers of this.
That some regulation of the impulse, both external by social pressure and internal by a man’s own self-restraint, is required, does not need to be argued. The laughing impulse, when unchecked, has taken on ugly and deadly forms. If men have endowed their deities with mirth they have also endowed their fiends. Society is right in her intuitive feeling that an unbridled laughter threatens her order and her laws. Specific injuries done by ribald jests, e.g., to religious convictions, may have to be dealt with by the magistrate. This all men know, as also that society acts wisely when she seeks to maintain the dignity of social converse by putting down with a gentler hand all unworthy and unbecoming laughter, and to observe vigilantly the “hypergelast”—a species that includes others besides Aristotle’s low jesters (βωμόλοχοι)—who, if he does not, either maliciously, or through sheer heaviness and awkwardness of gait, kick sharply against some sensitive place, will at least weary decent men with all the weariness of the bore and something more.
Yet it is well to bear in mind that such imposition of restraint by external authority should be also self-restraining. If laughter has its uses, not only for him who laughs but for him who is laughed at, these should be borne in mind in determining the amount of restriction desirable. This wise caution is especially needed when the laughter which authority seeks to repress is likely to be directed against itself. It would never do, for example, if the fine world {419} were at liberty to put down satires on its vulnerable manners. Divines of the solemnity of Barrow and Warburton might do much harm, if they could succeed in silencing the ridicule of the half-believers and the sceptics. Those in authority have a special reason for remembering here the maxim “noblesse oblige”; and even should they be lacking in a wise care for the well-being of the commonwealth, a measure of shrewdness will advise them that they will do well to pass a self-denying ordinance. Let them not be more afraid of laughter than their predecessors, but rather welcome it, not merely as a symptom of vitality in those who indulge in it, but as a sign of alertness in citizens against surprise by stealthy-footed evil. Perhaps when the story of the modern “emancipation of women” comes to be written, it will be found that the most helpful feature of the movement was the laughing criticism poured upon it; a criticism which seems not unnatural when one remembers how many times before men have laughed at something like it; and not so unreasonable to one who perceives the droll aspects of the spectacle of a sex setting about to assert itself chiefly by aping the ways of the rival sex. A statesman, having a large majority behind him, would probably best show his wisdom by discouraging the laughter of his own side and instructing it how to welcome that of the despised minority. Yet the quaint look of such a suggestion reminds one that the idea of adding wisdom to statesmanship is as far from realisation to-day as in the time of the Greek philosophers.
I have spoken of a community’s self-restraint in relation to the laughter of its individual members. Of the duty of controlling its own mirth in view of the feelings of other peoples who seem to have a right to their slices of the planet there should be no need to speak. It may be enough to hint {420} that a comic journal will do well, when touching on international matters of some delicacy, to exclude from its drawings irritating details, such as the figure of a monkey; not only lest the foreigner consider himself to be insulted, but lest one of the very gentlemen for whom it writes, stung in some old-fashioned impulse of chivalry, feel tempted to give a too violent expression to his indignation.
Of the control of laughter as a part of the self-government of a wise man, little need be said. A keen relish for jokes, especially one’s own, may entangle the feet even of a kind-hearted man in a mesh of cruel consequences. The witty have been found to be trying to their families, so importunate is the appetite of wit in its demand for regularity of meals. There are the duplicities of laughter which may sometimes impose even on one who is in general a kindly laugher, the note of malice stealing in unnoticed. It is only when the lively tendency to mirthful utterance is found in a sympathetic nature, side by side with a cultured susceptibility to the pain of giving pain, that an adequate self-regulation may be counted on. Each of us, perhaps, has known of one man, at least, deserving to be called a laugher in whose mirthful utterances one would look in vain for a trace of malice, and who seemed never to be surprised by the temptation to risk a touch on sore places. I cannot but recall here one already alluded to—one who seemed to embody the ideal of his teacher Aristotle not only as the just man, who of set purpose acts justly, but as the refined and gentlemanly man who regulates his wit, being as it were a law to himself—from behind whose wistful eyes a laugh seemed always ready to break. If one knows of no such kindly laugher, one may study the characteristics of the species in the Essays of Elia.
A perfect self-control in the matter of laughter {421} pre-supposes much more than a dread of inflicting pain upon the hearer, whether he be the object of the laughter or ready to identify himself with that object. It calls for a fine sense of the seemly, of what is fair. It is not too much to ask of one whose rôle is the detection of the unseemly in others that he should himself avoid unseemliness. He will do well to remember that nothing is worse than a jibe at the wrong moment:—
Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est.
When serious things are being discussed the attempt to hide poverty of argument under what might flatteringly be called an “argumentum ad risum” is one of the actions which belittle men.
The wariness proper to one who bears so keen-edged a weapon will go farther and prompt him to ask whether the thing which entertains the eye is meet for laughter. For example, our poor language being what it is, the use of a form of words which may be shown by another’s elaborate dissection to hide under its plain meaning a second meaning derogatory to the speaker, does not, perhaps, make the latter quite legitimate quarry for the former’s ridicule. It needs a fine sense of justice to detect the line which divides what is fair from what is unfair in such a case.
A perfectly wise direction of laughter will call for other fine discriminations. A word or action may be quite proper game for laughter when it smacks of conceit, though but for this it should have been passed by. So rampant indeed is conceit among men, so noxious is it, and so low a degree of sensitiveness in the moral integument does it connote, that even the discreet laugher may allow himself unstinted indulgence in view of one of its unmistakable eruptions. On the other hand, a sense of the true values of things will {422} lead the wise to abstain from laughter where some manifestation of the beast in man obtrudes itself and requires a less gentle mode of expulsion.
Nor will a good man’s self-regulation cease when there are no hearers. He will see how the habit of a reckless mirth may have a bad reflex effect on his own nature; how, for example, it may rob him in one moment of the perfection of an old reverence for something beautiful; how, instead of sweetening the fountains of affection, it may introduce a drop of bitterness; how it may smuggle in something of that pride and that contempt which dissociate men.
I have here emphasised the higher moral reasons which will urge the good man to restrain his laughter. One might add certain prudential reasons. If, as has been maintained here, laughter is an escape from the normal, serious attitude which living well imposes on us, its wise cultivation means that we keep it within limits. Only where there is a real earnestness and good feeling at bottom, will our laughter be in the full sense that of the mind and the heart. To laugh in this full way at a collapse of dignity means that we retain a respect for the true dignities. If the laugh grows too frequent and habitual this respect will be undermined, and, as one result of this moral loss, our laughter itself will shrink into something void of meaning and mechanical. The perpetual giggler, to whom nothing is sacred, never knows the flavour of a good laugh.
The impulse to laugh will always take its complexion from the moral nidus in which it germinates; and the good man, tender, and mindful of the dues of reverence, ennobles the mirthful temper. It seems, indeed, in such a moral milieu to become an expression, one of the most beautiful, of goodness. It assures us somehow of the genuineness of virtue, and brings it nearer to us as {423} something human to be loved. Free from all touch of pride and malice, it takes on the look of a child’s joyousness made large and beneficent by expansive sympathies.
It is to be maintained, then, not only that a full rich laughter may thrive in the soil of a good man’s soul, but that this soul will remain incompletely developed without it. This doctrine seems flatly to contradict great authorities, Pascal and the rest. Yet it may be shown that there is really no contradiction here. The laughter which Pascal, Addison, and the others denounce, is not the genial and humorous kind, but the coarse and brutal sorts, and, what is hardly a jot more sufferable, the reckless output of “the vacant mind”.
Laughter, then, may be claimed to be one of the possessions of men to which they should jealously cling. It brings gaiety into what is always tending to grow a dull world, and of which at times the onlooker is disposed to say what Walpole said of the doings of the fashionable æsthetes at Bath, “there never was anything so entertaining or so dull”. It supplies diversion in youth and still more in age, and it may with a few, as it did with Heine and R L. Stevenson, remain a bright comrade on the sick-bed. It is the manna on which good fellowship loves to feed. And, so many-sided is it, it may be recommended as a planer for moral ridges, and it may add the last touch to the character-picture which every man is engaged in painting. It will graciously accompany us when we visit the nursery and try our cumbrous hand at the art of entertaining childhood; and will not forsake us—if we care for its company—when we betake ourselves to the graver occupations.
If this is true it would seem as if, instead of trying to put it down, we should seek to promote the laughing {424} habit in ourselves and in others. Yet here one must be careful. For one thing, the man to whom it counts as a considerable ingredient of happiness can hardly be expected to assist in an effort to render all men of an equal quickness in mirthful response. He knows better than any one else that the spectacle of folly, of make-believe and of self-inflation, on which his laughter is fed, implies a lack of all the finer laughter of the mind in the great majority of his fellows. It would be an act of suicidal madness, then, on his part, to try to transform his social world into a body of laughter-loving men and women. Happily for the “gelast,” such a transformation is beyond the powers of any conceivable society of laughter-promoters. Humorous men must continue with perfect serenity of mind to put up with being a “contemptible minority”.
Not only in the interests of the lover of laughter is it well that he cannot impose his merry habit on all men alike. The wise man will remember that it takes all sorts to make our social world, and that the desirability of the laughing capacity varies greatly with a man’s disposition, habits of mind and circumstances. To those, for example, who are of sensitive feeling and keen perception, especially if called on to lead an oppressively dull life, or, like Goldsmith, to wrestle with circumstance, a broad and quick appreciation of the laughable may be a real need. Some hearts of many chords, resonant to all the notes of life’s music, might break but for the timely comings of the laughter-fay with her transforming wand. On the other hand, many worthy people not only do very well without it, but might be at a disadvantage by possessing the endowment. This seems to be true of many excellent men and women whose {425} special bent is towards a rigorous concentration of thought and moral energy on some mission. Such persons appear ever to dwell in the subduing shadow of their cause; they bear about with them a special kind of self-consciousness, a sense of their indispensableness to the world. Laughter is not for these, we say with half a sigh. Nor can it, one supposes, find the needed air and sunlight in persons who hold imposing rank or office, and have to be daily concerned with maintaining a proper awe in others; or in those who have a deep-placed and imperturbable self-complacency, or those who are solemnly preoccupied with the momentous business of raising their social dignity. Probably nobody, save perhaps a waiter, has to be set more securely above the temptation to laugh than a man qualifying for his first dinner parties.
The case of these hopelessly confirmed “agelasts” is a very strong one. Those of us who prize the free circulation of laughter as that of a sea-air, and are disposed to object to the closeness of mental atmosphere which seems to enfold the devoted, shall do well to remember how much the world owes to a lack of humour in its citizens. If Rousseau had been a great laugher we should certainly never have had his picturesque and instructive attack on civilisation and all that flowed from it. Would Dante and Milton and the other builders of the vast and sombre architecture of verse have achieved their task if the laughing imp had been pulling vigorously at their coat tails? How many of our valuable social institutions would have been built up if the beginners had been keenly alive to the absurd aspects of the bunglings which are wont to characterise first attempts? Let those who laugh, therefore, be ready, not only from an enlightened self-interest, but from a becoming {426} esteem for alien virtues, to allow the “agelasts” their place in the world.
The foregoing considerations suggest that in any effort to promote laughter we should move cautiously. A man may waste much precious time in trying the experiment on a member of his family. A waggish schoolmaster, too—and to the credit of the profession he is to be found—may, if he experiment in this direction, meet with nothing but disappointment. Perhaps some good “tests of humour” would be helpful here; but the daily papers have not yet succeeded in inventing a satisfactory one, and the psychological laboratories have, wisely perhaps, avoided the problem. Moreover, the business of testing would comprise some examination of the quality of the “humour” expressed, lest the pedagogue should be fostering in a boy a kind of growth which he is much better without. Perhaps, indeed, this testing of quality, were it possible, should be undertaken for more serious purposes: since the saying of Goethe, that the directions taken by a person’s laughter are one of the best clues to his character, may be found to apply, differences being allowed for, to the raw stripling. In undertaking any such investigation of youthful mirth, the investigator would need to note the quality of the expressive sounds themselves; for one may suspect that in these days of early sophistication a young laugh, as pure and clear of tone as it is full and unhindered, is a rarity. For a first attempt at gauging a boy’s humour the schoolmaster might, perhaps, do worse than select the following test, suggested by a remark of one of my most learned and most respected friends, that the situation referred to is the one which, in his case, excites the most hearty merriment: “Supposing you made a call, and having placed your hat on a chair inadvertently proceeded to sit on it; how would you feel?” {427}
A more manageable problem for the pedagogue would seem to be to try, now and again, to force back the bolts of discipline and approach the boy with a judicious overture of fun. It is refreshing to find that this has recently been recommended by a highly respectable journal of the profession which writes: “It is no inherent dislike to work or to the teacher, but the absolute necessity of relieving a dull lesson by a bit of fun, that is accountable for many a difficulty in discipline”.[338] Next to this, the aim would be to encourage boys to bear the discipline of others’ laughter, so that they fall not below the moral level of the estimable savage. This part of the schoolmaster’s business is certainly not neglected in our country, and perhaps has even been a little overdone.
The gift of humour will save a man from many follies, among others that of attempting the office of prophet. This has its proper domain, for example in astronomy, though even in certain ambitious departments of physical science it begins to look like presumption. To bring it into the region of human affairs smacks of a juvenile confidence which has not begun to define its logical boundaries. Hence I shall not risk the illustrating of my subject by a forecast of the future of laughter.
It may be enough to say that, at the fraction of a second of the cosmic clock at which we happen to live, certain tendencies are observable which appear to have some bearing on this question. The most cheerful of men would perhaps hardly call the present a mirthful moment. We seem to have travelled during a century or more very far from the serene optimism which dwelt fondly on the perfectibility {428} of mankind. If we grow enthusiastic about man’s future at all, we let our minds run on the perfectibility of his machines. This fact in itself suggests that we are not likely to find an exceptional exuberance of the mirthful spirit. Writers, too, have emphasised the fact that the age, if not dull, is certainly not gay. An essayist, not long taken from us, has written sadly about the decline of the old frank social laughter;[339] and another, writing of Falstaff says that, though by laughter man is distinguished from the beasts, the cares and sorrows of life have all but deprived him “of this distinguishing grace, degrading him to a brutal solemnity”.[340]
That the old merry laughter of the people has lost its full resonance has been remarked above, and it may be possible, while avoiding youthful dogmatism, to conjecture to some extent how this loss has come about.
To begin, it seems fairly certain that the decline of popular mirth is only a part of a larger change, the gradual disappearance of the spirit of play, of a full self-abandonment to the mood of light enjoyment. We may see this not only in the rather forced gaiety supplied by the gorgeous “up-to-date” pantomime and other shows. It is illustrated in the change that has come over our out-of-door sports. Where is the fun, where is the gaiety, in the football and the cricket matches of to-day? Could anything be less like an “amusement” than a match at Lord’s—save when for a moment an Australian team, forgetful of its surroundings, bounds into the field? Even the clapping of hands by the solemn-looking spectators sounds stiff and mechanical.
This reduction of the full stream of choral laughter of a past age to a meagre rillet may readily be supposed to be due altogether to a growing refinement of manners in all {429} classes. Leaders of the “high society” tell us, as we have seen, that loud laughter is prohibited by its code of proprieties. The middle class, in which the imitation of social superiors grows into a solemn culte, has naturally adopted this idea from the upper class: and the classes below may be disposed on public occasions to consider Mother Grundy so far as to curb the froward spirit of fun. Still, the decline seems to be much more than any such artificial restraint would account for. The evidence available certainly favours the conclusion that, even when unfettered, the people does not laugh long and loud as it once did.
This is not the place to attempt an explanation of a change which is perhaps too recent to be easily explained. Yet we may hazard the suggestion that it is connected with other recent social tendencies which seem to be still operative. It is probably one phase of a whole alteration of temper in the mass of the people. It looks as if only the more solid material interests now moved the mind, as if sport had to have its substantial bait in the shape of stakes, while comedy must angle for popularity with scenic splendours which are seen to cost money. Other forces lying equally deep may not improbably co-operate. The mirth of Merry England was the outgoing of a people welded in brotherhood. The escape from the priest, and later from his Spanish champion, had begotten a common sense of relief and joyous expansion. No such welding pressure has come in these latter days pushing all ranks into a common service of mirth. The sharp class-antagonisms of the hour, especially that of employer and employed, leave but little hope of the revival of such a choral laughter of a whole people.
This decline of the larger choral laughter, including the reciprocal laughter of social groups, appears to have for one {430} of its consequences a falling off in the part played by mirth as a tempering and conciliatory element in authority. Any gain arising from the introduction of a “humouring spirit” into our government of the young is, one fears, more than neutralised by the loss which ensues from the banishment of the cajoling laugh from the relations of master and workman and mistress and maid. Perhaps, too, in our terribly serious purpose of conferring the blessing of an incorporation into a world-wide empire upon reluctant peoples of all degrees of inferiority, we are losing sight of the conciliatory virtue of that spirit of amicable jocosity, the value of which, as we have seen, was known to some who had to do with savage peoples.
The seriousness of to-day, which looks as if it had come to pay a long visit, may be found to have its roots in the greater pushfulness of men, the fiercer eagerness to move up in the scale of wealth and comfort, together with the temper which this begets, the discontent—
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
which kill the capacity for a whole-hearted abandonment to simple pleasures.
So far as this is the case, what laughter survives may be expected to take on the tone of a forced utterance with something of a sigh of weariness behind it. It is as though men had no time to laugh. Even at a social entertainment you will find men and women who meet your playful challenge only with a niggardly giggle which they instantly suppress: poor distracted souls unable for a moment to free themselves from the chaos of social claims which haunts them.
A yet more sinister characteristic of this later social laughter, reflected more or less clearly even in much of {431} what now passes for comedy, is its cynicism. By this is meant more than the hollowness of the laughter of the world-weary: it implies a readiness to laugh at a new sort of thing, or at least at the old sorts in a new way. Thus, we may hear the unscrupulous member of a profession laughing at some “amusing” bit of conscientiousness in another member. The laughter has its readily distinguishable tones: now the thin wiry note of contempt which issues from the superior person, now the rough brazen sound burred by the bolder lips of the roué. Such laughter is in the case of an individual, of a class and of a nation alike, the revelation of the attitude of a mind which has not yet completed the process of discarding its old obligations.
The tendencies here touched on illustrate how closely the moral forces encompass our laughter, how directly they determine its key and the depth of its sincerity. They suggest, too, how much more the evil inclinations menace the healthy vigour of our mirth than the good, even though these should be cultivated up to the confines of the saintly.
These signs may well make the friend of laughter sad. There is nothing unreasonable in the idea of a death of all the more joyous and refreshing mirth. The utilities—on which, perhaps, I have insisted too much—give us no pledge of a final survival of the merry impulse. However considerable its benefit to a society, we have examples of highly efficient communities which seem to do very well without it. And the like is probably true of individual laughter. A few persons may, as I have suggested, owe to it their persistence on the human scene; yet the evolutional efficacy of this utility is probably very narrowly circumscribed.
In spite of these sinister indications, an eye patient in search may descry others which point to the persistence of a wholesome laughter. Even if comedy and satire seem {432} tired and slumbering, the humorous spirit is awake and productive. We have in the literature of more than one country the promise of a development of new tones of quiet, reflective laughter. The growth of a wider appreciation of other literatures than our own is overcoming the obstacles, already touched on, to an international appreciation of flavours, so far at least as to allow of a rapprochement of the larger-minded members of civilised nations in a reciprocal enjoyment of their humorous writings.
For the rest, we may put our trust in the growing volume of what I have called private laughter. It is not unlikely that in the future, men who think will grow at once more tenacious of their ideals, and more alive to the ludicrous consequences which these introduce. If so, they will become still less like gay-hearted children than they now are, and will have to brighten the chamber of life, as it loses the blithe morn-given light, with the genial glow of humour. They will be able to keep the flame alive with fuel drawn from the storehouse of literature. In this work of conserving human laughter they will do well, while developing the thoughtfulness of the humorist, to keep in touch with the healthiest types of social laughter, the simple mirth of the people preserved in the contes and the rest, and the enduring comedies. If a few men will cultivate their own laughter in this way and do their best to make their private amusement that of an inner circle of friends, we may hope that it will not die—though the death of what we love were less terrible to face than its debasement—but be preserved by a few faithful hands for a happier age. They will have their reward in advance, since pure and honest laughter, like mercy, blesses him that gives, and him that takes.
