Not only so, but in much of a people’s laughter at what it deems the “absurd”—the laughter of “common-sense,” as we may call it—it is the point of view of the tribe or society which is still adopted: and this holds good of the larger part, at least, of a community in the van of the march of civilisation. When we smile at what appears to us a far-fetched view, or a quaint habit of life, we are really guided by the standard, “what people round about us say and do and expect us to say and do”. This contented reference to a vaguely formulated custom, without any scrutiny of its inherent reasonableness, holds good, indeed, of the judgments passed by ordinary men on the laughable aspects of the immoral. Promptness in paying one’s debts, for example, will for most men wear a reasonable or a foolish aspect according to the custom of their tribe—though here two class-standards make themselves distinctly felt; and so the laugh may be turned, as the custom changes, from him whose tardiness in discharging liabilities suggests straitened means otherwise carefully concealed, to him who displays an ungentlemanly haste in matters of a contemptible smallness.
It seems to follow that the adjustments of laughter to more universal norms, to ideas of an inherent fitness in things, are a kind of artificial addition to deeper and more instinctive tendencies. The ordinary man, even when he enjoys the spectacle of some laughable folly or vice, {295} hardly transcends the point of view of custom, from which what all men do is seen to be right. It is only when a higher culture has made apparent the universality of the laughable, as of its opposite the reasonable, that a conscious resort to ideas becomes frequent. This clarifying of our laughter by the infusion of ideas is, in a special manner, the work of experts, namely, the moralist, the literary critic, and, most of all, the artist whose business it is to illumine the domain of the ludicrous. This function of art will form the subject of a later chapter.
In this chapter we have dealt merely with what I have called choral laughter, that of groups, smaller or larger. There is, however, another kind, the private laughter of the individual when alone, or in the company of sympathetic friends. This also has its pre-conditions in the processes of social evolution just touched upon.
Such independent laughter would, it is evident, be impossible in the lowest stages of this evolution. In the savage or quasi-savage state an oddly constituted member of a tribe—if such a being were possible—liable to be seized with a spasm of ridicule at the absurdities of tribal ceremonies would certainly encounter serious risks. It has needed ages of social progress to establish the conditions of a safe individual liberty in the indulgence of the jocose temper.
This freedom in choosing one’s own modes of laughter has gradually asserted itself as a part of all that we mean by individual liberty. Perhaps, indeed, it may be regarded as the highest phase and completion of this liberty.
This is not the place for a full inquiry into the complex conditions on which the development of a freer individual laughter depends. It may be enough to point to the need {296} of an advance in ideas and the capability, among the few at least, to form individual judgments, which this advance implies. A man who would laugh his own laugh must begin by developing his own perceptions and ideas.
A fuller understanding of the pre-conditions of an independent laughter will only be possible to one who has carefully examined its characteristics. In the following chapter I propose to analyse that variety of the laughing temper which seems in a peculiar way to be an attribute of the developed individual. This attribute is what is specially designated in these days by the term humour.
