Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certain
nevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it not for
the paradox one might say, it never was so grave. Everywhere the joke
"emerges"--as an "elegant" writer might have it--emerges to catch the
attention of the sense of humour; and everywhere the sense of humour
wanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal.
It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing. It wears (let the violent
personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in abeyance,
and an eye in suspense. It is much at the service of the vagrant
encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of the game. It
stands in untoward places, or places that were once inappropriate, and is
early at some indefinite appointment, some ubiquitous tryst, with the
compliant jest.
All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a constant
signalling, an endless recognition. Forms of approach are remitted. And
the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of meeting, or no
gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the promiscuity become, go up and
down the pages of the paper and the book. See, again, the theatre. A
somewhat easy sort of comic acting is by so much the best thing upon our
present stage that little else can claim--paradox again apart--to be
taken seriously.
There is, in a word, a determination, an increasing tendency away from
the Oriental estimate of laughter as a thing fitter for women, fittest
for children, and unfitted for the beard. Laughter is everywhere and at
every moment proclaimed to be the honourable occupation of men, and in
some degree distinctive of men, and no mean part of their prerogative and
privilege. The sense of humour is chiefly theirs, and those who are not
men are to be admitted to the jest upon their explanation. They will not
refuse explanation. And there is little upon which a man will so value
himself as upon that sense, "in England, now."
Meanwhile, it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like
rhetoric and the arts, a habit. And it is in some sort a habit when it
is not inevitable. If we ask ourselves why we laugh, we must confess
that we laugh oftenest because--being amused--we intend to show that we
are amused. We are right to make the sign, but a smile would be as sure
a signal as a laugh, and more sincere; it would but be changing the
convention; and the change would restore laughter itself to its own
place. We have fallen into the way of using it to prove something--our
sense of the goodness of the jest, to wit; but laughter should not thus
be used, it should go free. It is not a demonstration, whether in logic,
or--as the word demonstration is now generally used--in emotion; and we
do ill to charge it with that office.
Something of the Oriental idea of dignity might not be amiss among such a
people as ourselves containing wide and numerous classes who laugh
without cause: audiences; crowds; a great many clergymen, who perhaps
first fell into the habit in the intention of proving that they were not
gloomy; but a vast number of laymen also who had not that excuse; and
many women who laugh in their uncertainty as to what is humorous and what
is not. This last is the most harmless of all kinds of superfluous
laughter. When it carries an apology, a confession of natural and genial
ignorance, and when a gentle creature laughs a laugh of hazard and
experiment, she is to be more than forgiven. What she must not do is to
laugh a laugh of instruction, and as it were retrieve the jest that was
never worth the taking.
There are, besides, a few women who do not disturb themselves as to a
sense of humour, but who laugh from a sense of happiness. Childish is
that trick, and sweet. For children, who always laugh because they must,
and never by way of proof or sign, laugh only half their laughs out of
their sense of humour; they laugh the rest under a mere stimulation:
because of abounding breath and blood; because some one runs behind them,
for example, and movement does so jog their spirits that their legs fail
them, for laughter, without a jest.
If ever the day should come when men and women shall be content to signal
their perception of humour by the natural smile, and shall keep the laugh
for its own unpremeditated act, shall laugh seldom, and simply, and not
thrice at the same thing--once for foolish surprise, and twice for tardy
intelligence, and thrice to let it be known that they are amused--then it
may be time to persuade this laughing nation not to laugh so loud as it
is wont in public. The theatre audiences of louder-speaking nations
laugh lower than ours. The laugh that is chiefly a signal of the
laugher's sense of the ridiculous is necessarily loud; and it has the
disadvantage of covering what we may perhaps wish to hear from the
actors. It is a public laugh, and no ordinary citizen is called upon for
a public laugh. He may laugh in public, but let it be with private
laughter there.
Let us, if anything like a general reform be possible in these times of
dispersion and of scattering, keep henceforth our sense of humour in a
place better guarded, as something worth a measure of seclusion. It
should not loiter in wait for the alms of a joke in adventurous places.
For the sense of humour has other things to do than to make itself
conspicuous in the act of laughter. It has negative tasks of valid
virtue; for example, the standing and waiting within call of tragedy
itself, where, excluded, it may keep guard.
No reasonable man will aver that the Oriental manners are best. This
would be to deny Shakespeare as his comrades knew him, where the wit "out-
did the meat, out-did the frolic wine," and to deny Ben Jonson's "tart
Aristophanes, neat Terence, witty Plautus," and the rest. Doubtless
Greece determined the custom for all our Occident; but none the less
might the modern world grow more sensible of the value of composure.
To none other of the several powers of our souls do we so give rein as to
this of humour, and none other do we indulge with so little
fastidiousness. It is as though there were honour in governing the other
senses, and honour in refusing to govern this. It is as though we were
ashamed of reason here, and shy of dignity, and suspicious of temperance,
and diffident of moderation, and too eager to thrust forward that which
loses nothing by seclusion.