In these crude forms of art we probably find traces of the influence of European models. There are, however, stories {251} which seem to be a perfectly spontaneous growth. Of these it is enough to refer to the originals of the delightful tales of Uncle Remus, the substance of which, as their author tells us, he obtained from the blacks in the American plantations.[221] Miss Kingsley writes to me of these: “I know the tales are not made up. I struck the Tar Baby Stories in the Lower Congo”. It may be added that the device of the tar baby is to be found in its essentials in a collection of African stories.[222]
Our study seems to tell us that savage laughter is like our own in representing different levels of refinement. Much of it is just naïve, unthinking gaiety, like that of the little girl spoken about in the preceding chapter. Co-existing with this infantile gaiety we have the coarse brutal forms of laughter which we associate with the rougher kind of schoolboy. Along with these lower forms we find higher ones, in which some amount of reference to social standards is discoverable. Lastly, we may detect here and there, as in the story of the man tickled by the idea of dead men going about sans arms, legs, etc., and of him who jocosely stripped a humbug of his disguise, germs of a more thoughtful laughter; and on the other hand, in the kindly tempering of the laughter of the girls at the Englishwoman’s inability to make mats, a movement towards sympathetic laughter. In other words, we detect the dim beginnings of that complex feeling or attitude which we call humour. It seems probable that the quality, if not also the quantity, improves as we pass from the lowest and most degraded to the higher savage tribes.[223] {252}
Hence, no doubt, the difficulty which has been felt by travellers in describing the common characteristics of the hilarity of savage tribes. Miss Kingsley writes to me with respect to the humour of the West African: “It is peculiar, it is not child-like—it is more feminine in quality, though it is very broad or coarse. It is difficult to describe. I can only say what seems to me an excellent joke seems so to him—there are many jokes neither of us can see the point of: others, we chuckle over, superior persons look down on and would call buffoonery.”[224]
One practical reflection to close with. Any civilised community which has much to do in the way of managing the “lower races” would surely be wise to take some heed of their love of fun. And this, because it has been found that appeals to this side have been more effective than the harsher measures to which even a gentle Briton may think himself sometimes driven. An African missionary, already quoted, writes that in cases where a disposition to quarrel shows itself “one joke is worth ten arguments”.[225] This is borne out by one who has not much good to tell of his savages, when he says of the East African that he delights {253} in a joke “which manages him like a Neapolitan”.[226] In a letter to me Miss Kingsley writes: “I have always found I could chaff them into doing things that other people could not get them to do, with blows—I could laugh them out of things other people would have to blow out of them with a gun”.
CHAPTER IX. LAUGHTER IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION.
In the two preceding chapters we have followed the earlier stages of the development of laughter in the individual and have glanced at its counterpart in the life of savage communities. If now we try to push the psychological inquiry farther, and ask how the mirth of the child develops into that complex sentiment which in these days we call humour, we find ourselves forced to pause. One thing is clear, however. No one of us would ever have acquired this valuable endowment but for the educative action of that advanced stage of social culture which is our intellectual and moral environment. It seems to follow that we shall need to look for a moment at the movement of social culture itself, to consider the impulse of laughter as one of the features in the life of a community, and to inquire how it has become transformed, almost beyond recognition, by the movement of social progress.
To attempt to give an exhaustive account of these social changes would clearly lead us very far. It may be argued with force that every one of the great directions of social evolution, such as that of intellectual conceptions, of moral sentiments, of political and social liberty, of wealth, of the differentiation of classes and ranks, has involved as its effect some change in the intensity, the mode of distribution, and the manner of expression in daily life and in {255} art, of the laughing impulse. But we do not need to consider so deeply. It will be enough if we briefly retrace those phases of social evolution which appear to carry with them as their immediate accompaniments considerable modifications of the mirthful spirit.
We must in this inquiry begin by defining the social aspect of laughter. This was touched on in the last chapter in connection with our study of the mirth of savages. We have now to examine it more closely.
One of its most obvious characteristics is its contagiousness, already referred to.[227] The potent appeal of laughter to a mechanical imitativeness is significant in more ways than one. It suggests how large a part of human hilarity is nothing but a kind of surface resonance, as empty of ideas as the infectious yawn or cough. But it suggests also that laughter is social in the sense that it is essentially choral and so uniting. A gathering of yokels at a fair laughing at a clown tends for the moment to become a coherent group; and the habit of laughing together will tend to consolidate the group.