It is much the same with the small vexations inflicted by our social world. We may no doubt feel hurt just for a moment when, at a concert, we see a big hat thrust itself betwixt our eyes and a face which has held them captive, wearing a look of the tragic muse as it leans yearningly over the violin from which it seems, like a mother’s face, to draw the sobbing tones. Yet, even as the nerve smarts, we may half-seize the glorious absurdity of the hat and its bobbings. Or, again, when an untimely call interrupts some bit of nice thinking and leaves the nerves tingling, we may smile for a moment as we catch a glimpse of the simple faith of the visitor in the supreme importance of the cause he pleads, a glimpse sufficient to make us half-aware of a like “subjectivity” in our own estimation of selected tasks. Social bores are vexations which, perhaps, ought not to be called petty. Humorous persons, one suspects, are specially exposed to their attacks, since they are a tolerant folk, preferring on the whole to suffer rather than to hurt others. {328} But here, also, the humorous have their remedies. It suffices, for example, to reflect for a short moment on the droll pathos of the circumstance that persons, between whom and ourselves we find no attaching sympathies, should select us for their importunate attentions. Even when the destinies throw us together with men and women from whom we instinctively recoil, as from creatures of a species at once closely akin to ours yet sundered from us by impassable boundaries, a reflective humour may devise alleviations. The aggressive self-assertion of a plutocrat, with his “buy-you-up” sort of stare, and the rest, may wound for half a moment; but a laughing solace comes on the heels of worry; for there is a quiet pleasure in looking back and discovering the clumsy construction of the vulgar “snub;” and in any case a playful half-glance at higher measures of worth restores the equanimity.
Even greater troubles may, to the trained humorist, disclose amusing aspects or accompaniments, so that refreshment reaches us even while the blow still hurts. The relieving smile may come by way of a playful contemplation of ourselves as pitted against our mighty superior, circumstance; for it is possible to find something amusing, as well as irritating, in the ironies of destiny. The idea of a struggle with fate, which gives the zest of life to brave hearts, helps, too, to bring the reflective mind back to the play-mood. The readers of Miss Kingsley’s Travels need not to be reminded of the fecundity of amusing reflection which her humour showed in circumstances which would have depressed many a man.[278] It was with a like readiness to smile that Goldsmith’s genial spirit faced the blows of destiny, giving back, as his biographer has it, in cheerful {329} humour or whimsical warning what it received in mortification or grief. In his celebrated character, Mark Tapley, Dickens has no doubt illustrated how in the rough waters of his youth he learned to draw humorous entertainment from massive troubles. It is this playful shimmer of a light thrown by an entertaining idea on the surface of a misfortune which rids it of the worst of its gloom.
By a line of humorous reflection already suggested, we may in all cases of worry and moral disturbance reach the consolatory idea that the trouble has, in the first view of it, been grossly exaggerated. At the moment when the sensitive tissue is lacerated the shock of pain blinds us to dimensions; our disappointment fills the outlook, like a thunder-storm. The healthy nervous organism will show its vitality in the rapidity of the recuperative process; and this is often effected by a quick turning of the thoughts to other and brighter parts of the scene which the trouble has for a moment blotted out, and to the proportions of the one to the other. A trouble—like the all-enveloping thunder-storm—begins to retire almost smilingly as soon as we discern its boundaries.
In much of this alleviating service of humour the laugh which liberates us from the thraldom of the momentary is a laugh at ourselves. Indeed, one may safely say that the benefits here alluded to presuppose a habit of reflective self-quizzing. The blessed relief comes from the discernment of a preposterousness in the forcing of our claims, of a folly in yielding to the currents of sentiment which diffuse their mists over the realm of reality. The coming of the smile announces a shifting of the point of view; the mal-adjustment, which a moment ago seemed to be wholly on the side of our world, showing itself now to be on our side as well. {330}
How far humour will help a man in throwing off troubles one cannot say. Even when the flash of bright reflection fails to dispel the darkness, it may secure a valuable moment of respite. When the trouble has real magnitude, the dismissive smile grows hard for all save the elect. Few of us, perhaps, could rise to the height of serene irony attained by a German musician whose wife had eloped with his master.[279] Many might be disposed to think that the woman who, after nursing her husband through a fatal illness, remarked that it was only a sense of humour which had kept her from failing, was less than human. Yet it is highly risky to infer, from the fact of an intrusion of the humorous temper into calamity, the existence of a low degree of moral sensibility. It may rather be that those who suffer most are beholden in an exceptional degree to this kind solacer of men’s woes.
This service of humour, at once consolatory to suffering and corrective of one-sidedness of view, is perfected by a development of that larger comprehensive vision which is reached when the standpoint of egoism is transcended. Even the beginning of humour implies some getting away from the point of view of the individual, so far as to gain a momentary comprehension of others’ points of view. The great educative value of being laughed at is that it compels attention to the fact of a multiplicity of such points. How good a lesson, one thinks, it must have been for the Scotch professor to hear his disgusted caddie remark: “Anybody can teach Greek, but gowf needs a heid”.
There remains for brief illustration another service which humour renders its possessor, though in truth it may turn out to be only a further development of the one just dealt {331} with. Laughter at things, being primarily an accompaniment of observation, remains in its highest forms chiefly an amusement at outside spectacles. The resources of a mature faculty of humour may lend themselves to the end of an enjoyable contemplation of one’s social world, both in its parts and as a whole. The value of humour to the individual can, indeed, only be rightly measured when the large possibilities of entertainment which lie in criticising one’s surroundings are borne in mind.
The enjoyment which a humorous observer is able to gather from the contemplation of the social scene implies that he make his own standpoint, that he avoid the more turbulent part of the social world and seek the quiet backwaters where he can survey things in the calm light of ideas. One who lives wholly in the giddy throng will never be able to see things in the perspective which humorous appreciation requires. Nor is this all; if he live, move and have his being in the commotion, he will be forced to repress mirthful impulses and to show the hurrying figures about him a certain respect, since any generous indulgence in the joys of laughter would be likely to bring him into unpleasant collisions.
That there is much in the social spectacle which falls only to the eye of one half-retired is certain. The vagaries of “society,” in the conventional sense of the term, are one of the traditional matters of laughter; our comic journals have enlightened even dull minds on this point. It is pleasant to a humorous contemplation to note the high pretensions of the “fine world”; how naïvely, for instance, it assumes that it holds all the men of brains and all the good talkers in its service;[280] pleasant, that is {332} to say, to one who bears in mind some of the characteristics of this world, such as a certain emptiness in the matter of ideas, together with something of the readiness of a certain kind of dog to follow any self-appointed leader, and an amiable impartiality in crowning any sort of “hero” that happens to be trumpeted, whether potentate from the East or showman from the West. It is entertaining, too, to note how enclosed it remains within its purely arbitrary standards, being rather shocked, for example, to find when it travels that there can be such a thing as “society” in Italy which is not a “dining society”. This, and much more, will often draw the eye of humour, oddly enough, in the same direction as that of an awe-struck flunkeyism.
It is an agreeable pastime, too, for our half-retired observer to watch the fierce struggles of men and women in these days to gain a footing within the charmed circle. Here, surely, the gyrations of the moral figure reach the height of absurdity. Nowhere does there seem to reflection to be quite such a disproportion between effort and its doubtful reward as in these labours of the hot and panting to win a footing on the fashionable terrain.