One of the best examples of the combined effect of hostility and a desire to agree is to be found in the humours of the market place. The relation of buyer and seller seems to be pregnant with opportunities for merry fooling on either side. The direct and sharply felt opposition of interest is apt to beget a good deal of the rough sort of “taking down”. Not only will the tongue be stirred to derisive attack, the situation may even beget retaliations in the shape of practical jokes. The merchant, as the expert, has always had the upper hand in the contest of wits. His customer has had to find consolation in satires on the cheat, such as those which were common in the Middle Ages.[240] On the other hand, the need of coming to an agreement has served to bring into the haggling process a good deal of the conciliative kind of laughter. The vendor has always known the value of good-natured banter as an instrument {271} of persuasion. This overflow of the spirit of fun into the channels of serious business may still be seen as a faint survival in front of a cheap-Jack’s van. George Eliot has given us a charming picture of the play of this spirit in the south in her chapter on “The Peasants’ Fair” in Romola.
The same intrusion of fun as an auxiliary into the business relations of groups is seen in many other cases where opposition has to be toned down and a modus vivendi arrived at, as in that of opposed political parties, religious bodies and the like. The appearance of the laughing imp, if only he behaves himself, in these rather warm encounters of groups serves to cool the atmosphere and to temper animosity by at least a momentary experience of genial contact. It does much, indeed, to tone down the uneasy and half-suspicious attitude which members of any group are apt to take up on first having to do with those of a strange group, especially one of higher rank.
We may now summarise the chief social utilities of the reciprocal laughter of classes at the ways of other classes. In the first place, it helps, like the laughter of the savage tribe at the ways of other tribes, to counteract any tendency to imitate the manners and customs of foreign groups. What we have laughed at, we are not likely to adopt. This is the self-protective function of laughter. To laugh at the ways of another group is, moreover, in most cases at least, to indulge in a feeling of our own superiority; and this attitude would have a further conservative tendency, especially when it is the laugh of the expert in his own department at the outside ignoramus.
Let us now glance at the effect on the group whose ways are being laughed at. To be the object of another set’s ridicule, especially when we have the right of retort, so far from necessarily weakening our hold on that which is {272} ridiculed may strengthen it. When we are strongly attached, others’ laughter may make us cling the more firmly to what we cherish. Laughter in this case is, indeed, as we have seen, an excellent training in a good-natured suffering of others’ ridicule, a training which has in it the virtue of a moral tonic.
Yet this inter-groupal laughter is not wholly subservient to the maintenance of characteristic differences. In all the higher forms of society, at least, such ridicule has an assimilative action as well. It manages to some extent, by inducing self-criticism, to get rid of useless excrescences. Thus, it helps to keep down class-vanity, the professional narrowness which cries, “There’s nothing like leather!” a narrowness which is so delightfully satirised by Molière in the wranglings of M. Jourdain’s professors.
The correction of this exclusive feeling of self-importance of a group by outside laughter has always been at work, helping to keep groups in friendly touch, and hindering the sectional or professional esprit de corps from overpowering the larger social consciousness which we call national sentiment, and the common-sense of the community. Of this last more will be said presently.
So far, we have illustrated the bearing on the ways of laughter of what may be called the structural features of societies. There has been no reference to the effects of social movements, of all that is meant by the successive changes of fashion in manners, dress and so forth, and of those more persistent movements which make up what we call social progress. The least reflection will show that in this continual flux of things social, the unceasing modifications of the head-covering and the rest, and the trampling down of old beliefs and institutions by the resistless “march of intellect,” we have at least as large a field for the gambols {273} of the laughing spirit as in the distinctions and oddly combined relations of classes.
We may best begin by referring to the movements of fashion. These may be defined as changes in dress, manners and so forth, which are marked off from the improvements entering into progress by two circumstances: (1) that they are capricious, not the products of a rational choice of the best; and (2) that they are of comparatively short duration. When we call a mode of doing a thing a fashion, we imply, quite unknowingly perhaps, that it has not the cachet of a change for the better, and that as such it has no security of tenure.
A fashion differs from a custom in being essentially communicable from one group to another, and even from one nation to another. Its development thus belongs to a comparatively late period of social evolution. Its hold on men and women is explained by the fact that it appeals to two of their strongest instincts, the craving for novelty and the impulse to imitate superiors.
Keeping to the intra-national diffusion of manners, we note that the movement of fashion is normally from the highest rank or ranks downwards. This movement may well have commenced far back in the evolution of communities where class-distinctions were rigorously enforced. The attitude of reverence towards superiors has for its psychological concomitant the impulse to imitate. Just as children will copy the voice and gestures of one whom they look up to, so savages will copy the ways of Europeans who manage to make themselves respected. In the ceremonies of primitive tribes and even of highly complex societies, e.g., church ritual, a good deal of scope is offered for this flattery of imitation. We may infer, indeed, that the impulse to adopt the ways of exalted personages must always have {274} been at work. In the earlier stages of human history this impulse was checked by the force of custom and of law, e.g., sumptuary laws. This imitation from below must strike at the root of those external differences, such as style of dress, between group and group, observance of which has helped greatly to maintain class-distinctions. It could only have made way against these barriers gradually. So difficult, in sooth, does the feat appear to be, that Mr. Herbert Spencer suggests that fashion, as the imitation of those of high rank and authority, began in a change of custom; as in the rule already alluded to that when the king slipped the onlooking courtiers should at once imitate his awkwardness.