As all who read are aware, the vagaries of “society” and the drolleries of public life are no new spectacle. Other times and patterns of society have had their entertaining aspects fixed for us by the half-retired chronicler. Yet there is much to suggest that the social scene of to-day bears the palm, as illustrator of the volume and the many-sidedness of the laughable. The bigness of our social scheme, its instability and “go-aheadness,” its reckless activity—these and other features, aided by the eagerness of people to gain publicity for their doings and a corresponding readiness of journals to accord it, appear to secure for the quiet onlooker to-day the enjoyment of an exuberant crop of personal oddities, pushful pretences, disparities between position and qualification, and the other amusing features of the social scene.
Much of the drollery of the social spectacle here touched on may be enjoyed with a certain detachment, and even with a soupçon of the malice which characterises the laughter of those outside the social group, within which the merry showman is erecting his stage. The kindlier note of humour enters here only as a subordinate element, as a good-natured toleration of folly, supported by a more or less distinct comprehension of it under the head of worthy qualities sadly perverted. It must be otherwise if the bizarre and provocative spectacle of folly’s head obtrudes itself into a season of national storm and stress, say of war-commotion, {338} when the observer of things cannot, unless he be an unsocial cynic, any longer consent to be detached. The very possibility of a laugh, or even of a smile, might seem to be excluded as a desecration. If it is possible, it can only be through the discovery of a modus vivendi between the mirthful impulse and some of the deepest and most absorbing of our feelings and impulses. Our analysis of humour has prepared us for a considerable penetration of the mellowed kind of mirth into the heart of the serious, for a fine and rapid detection by the practised eye of amusing aspects of situations and experiences which appeal directly and powerfully to the acuter feelings and to the sterner attitudes. We may, perhaps, find the crowning illustration of this interpenetration of the serious and the playful in the possibility of a humorous glance at things which must stir the heart-depths of every true citizen.
The truth, that a state of war will develop in citizens much that is good and admirable, has, perhaps, been sufficiently recognised; while, on the other hand, its ravages and its sufferings have been a frequent theme of the eloquent lip and pen. Less attention has, for pretty obvious reasons, been paid to those aspects and accompaniments of the state which seem to some, when regarded from the point of view of the normal type of consciousness, to illustrate human folly in one of its larger manifestations. These aspects which, when seen if only for an instant by the qualified observer, must entertain, may be said to grow in distinctness as a community rises in the scale of civilisation. Since, moreover, the humorous person has trained himself in the swift detection of the accompaniments and the relations of the objects which he inspects, and has a habit of looking at the neglected sides of things, it may be expected that he will be found now and again among those who in the troubled {339} atmosphere preserve something of the faculty of clear observation.
The fundamental factor in the situation for a humorous observer is the temporary hypertrophy of the most powerful of man’s instincts, having its roots deeply seated in the primal impulse of self-conservation, appearing in the organic milieu of a higher type of social consciousness with its fixed habits of estimating and judging things. The state of hypertrophy gives rise to a group of extravagances which have something of the dimensions of a burlesque. The many expansions of the boastful, self-sufficing temper, the exaggerated forms of hatred, with its brood of suspicions, denunciations and vilifications, the swollen dimensions of credulity, and of a correlative incredulity, with regard to things which touch the patriotic passion—this and much more is probably an inseparable accompaniment of the national psychosis, certainly so if the dignity of “our cause” is challenged, whether from within or from without.
In these larger manifestations of the war-temper such organic milieu as the surviving normal consciousness can supply takes but a small part. What movements of intelligence are observable are pretty plainly of an intelligence subjugated by the dominant passion, and made to work for it by foraging far and wide for food-stuffs to satisfy its appetite for provocatives and solaces.
Yet this is but a small part of the humorous aspect of the situation. It is the collision between the new temper and the habit of feeling and judging nursed into vigour and endurance by a long course of civilisation which introduces the really amusing feature. For the quaint thing is that drowsy intelligence will now and again try to sit up and give a nudge to its rather noisy bed-fellow. It is the juxtaposition and interaction of two tendencies of widely removed {340} moral levels, and quite disproportionate in their strength which supplies the rich variety of the entertaining. In this way, for example, we obtain the droll spectacle of an over-confident advocate of the cause suddenly brought to silence by a foggy suspicion that his hearer is not responsive enough, a suspicion which instantly brings to light the residuum of the normal man’s desire for others’ support. Or again, the powerful impulse to belittle the enemy—older than the age of Goliath—may, when it runs away with a patriot, carry him to the point from which he dimly discerns the edge of a dialectic precipice, the fatal concession that victory is robbed of all its glory. Or the fancy portrait of the enemy—preferred to a study from life because it is so dear to the war-temper—may bring its possessor into the quandary that he finds himself quite incapable of carrying out the necessary business of understanding that enemy’s aims and methods.
A slight examination will show that the spectacle will illustrate most of the forms of the laughable recognised in a previous chapter. The whole situation may tend to assume the look of a big “mess,” from which the participators vainly seek to extricate themselves. The high-strung emotional and conative attitude is certain to lead to futilities, as when confident predictions strike against the hard substance of fact. The situation will, further, be prolific of contradictions, including, not only the fundamental one already dealt with, but the discrepancies of statement which arise as the ratio of the intensities of the normal and the abnormal varies within the limits indicated above.
That the psychological situation will give rise to a large display of pretence, has been already suggested. The survival of a partially stupefied intelligence in the bellicose patriot will, indeed, be chiefly manifested in the somewhat {341} onerous task of covering the unsightly faces of things with veils, bespangled ones if possible, in dignifiying the aims and the methods of the war. These efforts will plainly show themselves, to calm observation, for the most part, at least, not as conscious hypocrisies, but as self-deceptions following from the interaction of the two selves so strangely forced to consort.
It is hardly needful to say that disorder, topsy-turvyness, confusions of rôle, and, generally, inversions of normal relations, form an essential feature of the spectacle. A world so altered from the normal pattern that men given to a golden silence take to a speech which is hardly silver; that “leaders” assume the droll aspect of shepherds forced onwards by unruly flocks; that a certain kind of moral inconsistency appears to have won its place among the virtues; and that those versed in the divine have to assume the inverted part of justifying the ways of men to God, cannot fail to look disordered to a calm eye trained by the orderly. There would seem to be no room in such a scene, where men are wont to divest themselves of their individual characteristics, for a display of personal oddity. Yet a closer observation will show that, in spite of the powerful tendencies which make for uniformity of behaviour, shreds of individuality survive. The prevailing temper seizes on men, as a fever seizes on them, according to their individual constitutions; and one may watch the process of assimilation of parties, sects, and individuals to the type of the hour, much as a shrewd physician might watch the quaint modifications of a malady in a case of strongly marked family or individual peculiarities.
It was said above that the possibility of this humorous observation implied the discovery of a modus vivendi with the serious and more sensitive part of us. This means that {342} the observation can be no quiet, prolonged pastime, but must rather resemble the momentary intuitions of the amusing side of things, which help us when we battle with life’s worries and encounter its greater troubles. Such appreciation of the laughable as is possible in the case is rightly called humorous when it accompanies a complex serious attitude which, on the one hand, discerns both the hurtfulness and the pitifulness of the folly that brings the smile, and on the other, makes an effort to hold fast to that which repels and to descry estimable qualities hidden away under it. The smile will bring a momentary relaxation of strain, as in other cases where mental and moral tension is high. The humorist will suffer it to steal upon him because reflection enables him, in a sense, to comprehend, by recalling, for example, what Plato, Montaigne and others tell us as to what is likely to happen when men are captured by a crowd. He will be more inclined to be tolerant, if history comes to his aid, as the history of a patient may come to that of an anxious physician, assuring him of recovery and resumption of normal functions; still more, if a time of civic division, lacerating to the social part of him, has brought him near men and women whose gentleness seems to sweeten the ferment of the hour, and whose faces will henceforth appear to him in comforting vision—earth’s angel faces whose smile comes not with the brightening morn but with the deepening blackness of night.