"Our customers," the courteous attendant of a circulating library said to me recently, "don't like funny books and so we don't stock them." Perhaps for this reason the discouraged humourist in search of amusement, seizes rejoicing on those refreshing people who take themselves seriously. It adds indeed the last epicurean touch to his delight that they don't know how awfully funny they are.
"Soft-Soap"
It takes a great deal of heroism to tell an unpleasant truth, but it takes a great deal more of heroism to hear it. The privilege of telling an unpleasant truth is strictly confined to one's familiar friends, one's family, or one's enemies, which is probably the reason that no one is a hero to any of these, and that he sometimes likes his familiar friends and his family quite as much as he does his enemies. It is, after all, an exceptional person who has a great opinion of himself; even the most conceited has, I feel sure, his quarter hours when he sits in sackcloth and ashes and contemplates his failures. No one rises superior to a compliment, and without such and other little amenities of life how the world's machinery would creak! I admire all those Spartan souls who declare that they love the truth, and it is humiliating to confess that I don't love the truth unless it is a pleasant one.
Everybody is, I do believe, his own best critic, and there is hardly any thing unpleasant your family can tell you about yourself that you have not known long before; but it is an added humiliation to see yourself betrayed to the world. For example, it is the exception for the creator of any work which is in reality poor, but which the voice of the people acclaims (and the people are about the poorest critics going), if he does not realise down in his doubting heart, that his stuff is poor stuff. It is that which keeps the human balance, or some of our greatest ones, or rather our noisiest ones, would be inflated to the danger-point. There is a right standard in every heart, even if warped by circumstances, and the excuse, "He knew no better," hardly holds good out of a lunatic asylum.
It is always our humourists who have tackled truth, and who have shown with a laugh that touches perilously near a sob (a little way of humourists!) that a standard of pure unvarnished truth has never been popular in this erring world; at least not since some of out forefathers scalped their brother forefathers, and the ladies and gentlemen who dwelt in caves took their afternoon tea in the shape of a cosy nibble at the bones of their foes. It is not the bones of our foes we nibble in these enlightened days!
It was an immortal humourist who, having discovered that truth is not what we want,—unless like a pill in sugar,—provided the world with a substitute—soft-soap. It is really soft-soap which makes social intercourse so delightfully easy, and we therefore owe our humorous benefactor a heavy debt of gratitude.
Nothing is, however, perfect, and if this blessed discovery has one little defect, it is that, like patent medicine, the more you swallow the more you want; so it occasionally happens that the great ones of this world have finally to have it administered in buckets where once they were grateful for only a sip.
The philosophic mind will discover that society can be quite simply divided into two classes,—one soft-soaps and the other permits itself to be soft-soaped. The humourist who invented the precious substitute for truth hardly realised the value of what he did; for had he taken out a patent he would have rivalled in wealth the great Rockefeller himself, who has been so divinely blessed in that other oily article—petroleum.
When soft-soap was invented it was constructed out of the best materials of insincerity, surface enthusiasm, a touch sometimes of covert satire (or it would spoil), and just enough truth to mix the ingredients and make them digest. This is administered in all grades of society with the greatest success, and of it can be said, in the pathetic words of an American advertisement of a preparation of medicine not usually popular with childhood, castor-oil, "Even children cry for it."