FOOTNOTES:
[21] Servile State, p. 3.
[22] Servile State, p. 140.
[23] The reader should take care to distinguish between the phrase "politically unfree," as connoting the lack of constitutional power, and the phrase "politically unfree," used by Mr. Belloc in The Servile State as connoting the lack of a free status in positive law, and therefore the presence of servile conditions.
CHAPTER XII
THE HUMORIST
Humour is the instrument of the critic. If the psychological explanation of laughter be, as some have supposed, the sight of "a teleological being suddenly behaving in an ateleological manner," then the mere act of laughter is in itself an act of comparison and of criticism. The true castigator of morals has never striven to make his subjects appear disgraceful, but to make them appear ridiculous. Except in the case of positive crime, for example, murder or treason, the true instrument of the censor is burlesque. It fails him only when his subject is consciously and deliberately breaking a moral law: it is irresistible when its target is a false moral law or convention of morals set up to protect anti-social practices. Among these we may reckon bribery of politicians, oppression of the poor, vulgar ostentation, the habit of adultery and the writing of bad verse. Aristophanes, Molière, Byron, and Dickens—these attempted to correct the social vices of their times by laughter.
But humorous literature is not wholly confined to such practical ends. We may derive pleasure from reading literary criticism for its own sake and not for the purpose of knowing what books to read: we also gain and require a pure pleasure from that constant criticism of human things which we call humour. It remains a function of criticism, as may be seen from the simple fact that no man was ever a good critic of anything under the sun who had not a sense of humour. It is a perpetual commentary on life, a constant guide to sanity. And a good joke, like a good poem, enlarges the boundaries of the spirit and puts us in touch with infinity. But too much abstract disquisition on the subject of humour is a frequent cause of the lack of it.
Mr. Belloc's first essays in humour were not of the satirical or purposeful sort: unless we consider an obscure volume called Lambkin's Remains to be of this nature. The author has kept in affection, it would seem, only one of these compositions sufficiently to reprint it out of a volume which can hardly now be obtained. Mr. Lambkin's poem, written for the Newdigate Prize in 1893 on the prescribed theme for that year, "The Benefits of the Electric Light," might fairly be considered a warning to the examiners to set their subject with care.