We may not care to play the part of public jesters ourselves, but the least we can do is to be grateful to those who are willing to become absurd for our benefit. Patronize them daintily, therefore, lest they backslide into propriety; remember that there is such a thing as enjoyment without ridicule. To make fun of a person to his face is a brutal way of amusing one's self; be delicate and cunning, and keep your laugh in your sleeve, lest you frighten away your game.
But there will doubtless always be enough who are willing to play the guy, whether we encourage or condemn. The fool is a persistent factor in society, and yet the common misconception of his status and economic function is silly and unfair. With the prig and the crank, the fool has been reviled from time immemorial, and persecuted out of all reason. He is protected by no legislation; your fool is always in season, and is the target for universal contempt. Instead of this perpetual fusillade of wits, there should be a "close season" for fools to allow them to propagate and grow fearless, after which we could make game of them in safety of a full supply. Since he is, in a way, the lubricator of the wheels of life, a coiner of smiles, he should be carefully bred to give the greatest possible amount of diversion. He should be trained like an actor that his best points may be brought out; he should be paid a salary or kept in livery to amuse the public, with no need or excuse for sobriety.
But, until the fool is properly appreciated and his place assured, we must put up with the amateurs that haunt the street and drawing-room. It is too much to hope for the sight of a zany every time we go out doors, but, when we do encounter one, what a ray of sunshine gleams athwart our strict fashions--poor sober dun slaves to style and custom! If we chance upon a woman who dares perpetrate her own radical theories of dress, who combines pink with red, or commits a gay indiscretion in millinery, how superbly she is distinguished, for the moment, from the ruck and swarm of victims to good taste! She is at once an event and a portent. The afternoon is quaintly illuminated with a phenomenon, and we scan with new interest and expectation the dull and sombre throng.
How small a deviation from the mode, indeed, is necessary to provoke a revivifying smile! Every such unconscious laughing-stock is a true benefactor, ministering to our sense of superiority. Were we never to see the freaks, we would not know how glorious is our own uncompromising regularity. Truly, if we have sufficient conceit, every one in the world, in a way of thinking, may be considered foolish relatively to our own criterion. "All the world is queer except thee and me," said the Quaker, "and even thee is a little queer!"
Such praise of fools may seem extravagant or illogical, but if it is so, it must be not because the fool is not helpful and stimulating in society, but because, after all, he is not so easily identified as one might suppose. Celestine tells me she never calls a man a fool, but instead asks him why he does so,--and in this way she often learns something. That is the most disagreeable trait of fools; often, upon investigation, what appears to be genuine nonsense is but the consistent carrying out of a clever and original idea, whose novelty alone excites amusement. The fool thus cheats us of our due enjoyment by being in the right. It seems dishonest of a fool to instruct; it is beside the mark, and outside his proper sphere, and yet even Confucius is said to have learned politeness from the impolite. To see one's own faults and weaknesses caricatured spoils the laugh that should testify to the folly.
We cannot be sure, either, that the ass who amuses us by his eccentric absurdities may not eventually cheat us of the final victory by proving to be but the vanguard of a new custom to which we or our children must, perforce, in time succumb, and fall into line with him far behind, only then to count our present attitude foolish and old-fashioned. Let us therefore laugh while we may, for your fool is but a chameleon who refuses to change colour. What today is arrant silliness may tomorrow be good horse-sense, wherefore it is wise to watch fools carefully when you find them, lest the sport spoil overnight, and you yourself become ridiculous, while the fool takes your place as the amused philosopher.
The word "fad," they say, was derived from the initial letters of the phrase "for a day." So we, the followers of the latest mode and mood, are, it would seem, the true ephemera, and the fools who defy the local custom are immortal. The fool is merely an anachronism. All inventors, most poets, and some statesmen have been honoured with the title, since we laugh chiefly at what we do not understand. There are more synonyms for "fool" than for any other word in the language!
So we must take our chances and smile at all and sundry, at men of one idea, hobby riders, cranks, poseurs, managing mammas and antic youths, blushing brides and fond parents, bounders, pedants, bigots and hens with their heads cut off. Laugh at them, the character parts in the comedy of life, for the show is amusing, but be not resentful if you find the privilege of laughing is a common right, and you in your turn become a victim. For, strange as it may seem, many of these actors may be so foolish as to think you the fool yourself!
Absolute Age
When I was a child, I invented a game so simple and so passive, that its enjoyment was permitted even on the rigorous Sundays of my youth. Upon a slate I ruled vertical columns, and at the head of these I wrote: "Men, women, boys, girls, babies, horses, dogs." Then, seated at a window commanding the street, I made note of the passers-by, and as fast as they appeared in sight I made a mark for each in the appropriate column. The compilation of this petty census was a pleasing pastime, and, moreover, it seemed to me that my categories were obviously complete. There were, in my world, but men and women, boys, girls and babies--what else, indeed?