As already noted, the laugh, like the smile which is its beginning, is in general an expression of a pleasurable state of feeling. Among unsophisticated children and savage adults it is the common mode of expressing all considerable intensities of pleasure when they involve a sudden brightening of the pleasure-tone of consciousness, as in the overflow of gladness or good spirits. As such it stands in marked dissimilarity to the expression of opposite tones of feeling. To begin with, it presents a striking contrast to states of suffering, sorrow and low spirits in general. It illustrates the broad generalisation laid down by psychologists that a state of pleasure manifests itself in vigorous and expansive movements, whereas a state of pain involves a lowering of muscular energy and a kind of shrinking into oneself. In a more special way it forms an antithesis, in certain of its features at least, to the expression of violent {40} suffering. Darwin remarks that in the production of screams or cries of distress the expirations are prolonged and continuous and the inspirations short and interrupted; whereas in the production of laughter we have, as we have seen, the expirations short and broken and the inspirations prolonged. This is merely one case of the wider generalisation that “the whole expression of a man in good spirits is exactly the opposite of that of one suffering from sorrow”.[24]
The value of this arrangement as helping us to understand one another’s feelings is obvious. Among the many mistakes which we are wont to commit in reading our children’s minds, that of confusing their joy and grief cannot, fortunately, be a frequent one. It is only in exceptional and abnormal cases, where the extremes of boisterous mirth and grief seem to approach one another, that the language of the one can be mistaken for that of the other.
A curious point, which the ingenuities of some later psychologists compel us to consider, is whether the pleasure, of which laughter is popularly supposed to be the outcome or effect, really stands in this relation to it. According to the theory here referred to, of which Prof. W. James is the best-known advocate in our language, a blush cannot be attributed to an antecedent feeling of modesty or shamefacedness: but for the blush there would be no feeling of modesty: in truth, it is the blush, i.e., the hot sensation of it, that constitutes the feeling. The theory has done much to popularise psychology in these last days. It is, I have found, a plum in a pudding where plums are rare for many who read psychology for examinations. It seems to be {41} particularly dear to young women. It certainly has about it the charm of a lively fancy.
But science has, alas! sometimes to do battle with liveliness of fancy; and it has to do this here. By trying to get all your emotions out of the organic effects, you find yourself in the awkward situation of being unable to say how these organic effects themselves are brought about. You must have something of the emotional thrill and of the nervous thrill which this involves before you get that interference with the routine action of the muscles of the facial capillaries which brings on the blush.
Not only may the presence of an element of feeling at the very beginning of an emotional experience be thus shown to be a necessary assumption, it can, in certain cases at least, be clearly observed. This applies more particularly to such feelings as the admiration of a beautiful landscape or a fine bit of harmonised melody. In these cases it must, one would suppose, be evident to all that the pleasurable emotion is started and sustained by numerous currents of agreeable sensation pouring in by way of eye or ear, and by the agreeable perceptions which grow immediately out of these. To say that all the joyous elevation in these experiences springs out of the secondary, internally excited sensations, those which accompany the altered condition of muscle and gland, the heightened pulse-rate, the bodily thrill and the rest, is surely to inflict an undeserved indignity on “the higher senses,” and to exhibit the full depth of ludicrous paradox which lurks in this theory.[25]
The case of laughter is not quite so clear. It has, indeed, one characteristic which seems to favour the {42} view that the bodily resonance is everything, namely, that it is easily induced in a mechanical or quasi-mechanical manner. It is of all the expressive movements the one most subject to the force of imitation. Children’s laughter, and that excited by the popular game, the “laughing chorus,” clearly illustrate its contagious character.[26] Moreover, as we know, a fit of laughter may be brought on, in part at least, by actions which presumably reinstate some of the physiological elements in the process. Thus my son tells me that he was overtaken by an irresistible impulse to laugh when riding a horse without a saddle, and again when running a race; and my daughter had the same tendency at the end of her first mountain climb. It seems probable that the movements and the changed condition of the breathing function are prime causes of the irresistible tendency in such cases.
It is, however, one thing to allow the indisputable fact that laughter can be excited in this seemingly mechanical way, another thing to claim for the reaction in such cases the value of the full joyous outburst. I believe that a person who watches his mental processes can observe that a merely imitative laughter does not bring the whole delightful psychosis which arises when some agreeable impression initiates the movements.
To this it must be added that in the cases here touched on the imitation is not wholly mechanical. When we laugh because others laugh, do we not accept their laughter as a playful challenge and fall into the gay mood? And are we not, commonly at least, affected by others’ voluminous laughter as by a droll sight and sound, which directly stimulates the mirthful muscles? My son’s laughter, {43} in the circumstances just referred to, seemed to be directed to the movements of the horse’s ears, and to those of the boy running just in front of him. The movements of laughter have, in the case of some adults, come so completely under the initiative control of mental processes, that even when powerful organic forces prompt the movements, it is necessary to make a show of finding some cause of merriment.
Coming now to the ordinary case of the emotional reaction, we note first of all the swift, explosive character of the outburst. If the motor discharge follow the first swell of joyous feeling, which is popularly said to excite it, it seems to do so with such electrical rapidity as to make it impossible to detect this initial swell as distinctly preceding it. Yet this fact need not baffle our inquiry. When for example we laugh at some absurd incongruity in speech or manners, can we not see that the perception which starts the laugh is an emotional perception, one which not only directs itself to something that has emotional interest and value, namely, the incongruous features as such, but is flooded from the very first with the gladness of mirth. To say that my perception of a big woman hanging upon the arm of a small man is a purely intellectual affair, like the perception of the inequality of two lines in a geometrical figure, is, one fears, to confess either to a poverty of humorous experience or to a very scanty faculty of psychological analysis.
But perhaps the clearest disproof of this quaint paradox in the realm of laughter is supplied by the situation already referred to, that of forced abstention from a choral laugh through fatigue. When thus “doubled up” and impotent, we may be quite capable of seizing the funny turns of the good “story,” and of feeling all the {44} force of the bugle-call of the others’ laughter. In sooth it is just here that the misery of the situation lies, that the joyous sense of fun in the air is now robbed of its sturdy ally and so reduced to a state of limp inefficiency. The comicality still makes full appeal: we feel it, but the feeling is denied its full normal outflow.