M. Bergson, in his well-known essay on this theme, says...well, he
says many things; but none of these, though I have just read them, do I
clearly remember, nor am I sure that in the act of reading I understood
any of them. That is the worst of these fashionable philosophers--or
rather, the worst of me. Somehow I never manage to read them till they
are just going out of fashion, and even then I don’t seem able to cope
with them. About twelve years ago, when every one suddenly talked to me
about Pragmatism and William James, I found myself moved by a dull but
irresistible impulse to try Schopenhauer, of whom, years before that,
I had heard that he was the easiest reading in the world, and the most
exciting and amusing. I wrestled with Schopenhauer for a day or so, in
vain. Time passed; M. Bergson appeared ‘and for his hour was lord of
the ascendant;’ I tardily tackled William James. I bore in mind, as I
approached him, the testimonials that had been lavished on him by all my
friends. Alas, I was insensible to his thrillingness. His gaiety did not
make me gay. His crystal clarity confused me dreadfully. I could make
nothing of William James. And now, in the fullness of time, I have been
floored by M. Bergson.
It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought
as they pass into oblivion. It makes me wonder whether I am, after all,
an absolute fool. Yet surely I am not that. Tell me of a man or a woman,
a place or an event, real or fictitious: surely you will find me a
fairly intelligent listener. Any such narrative will present to me some
image, and will stir me to not altogether fatuous thoughts. Come to me
in some grievous difficulty: I will talk to you like a father, even like
a lawyer. I’ll be hanged if I haven’t a certain mellow wisdom. But
if you are by way of weaving theories as to the nature of things in
general, and if you want to try those theories on some one who will
luminously confirm them or powerfully rend them, I must, with a hang-dog
air, warn you that I am not your man. I suffer from a strong suspicion
that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula
or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is
no better than another. That is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I
suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the
only one I can make head or tail of. If you try to expound any other
philosophic system to me, you will find not merely that I can detect no
flaw in it (except the one great flaw just suggested), but also that
I haven’t, after a minute or two, the vaguest notion of what you are
driving at. ‘Very well,’ you say, ‘instead of trying to explain all
things all at once, I will explain some little, simple, single thing.’
It was for sake of such shorn lambs as myself, doubtless, that M.
Bergson sat down and wrote about--Laughter. But I have profited by his
kindness no more than if he had been treating of the Cosmos. I cannot
tread even a limited space of air. I have a gross satisfaction in the
crude fact of being on hard ground again, and I utter a coarse peal
of--Laughter.
At least, I say I do so. In point of fact, I have merely smiled. Twenty
years ago, ten years ago, I should have laughed, and have professed to
you that I had merely smiled. A very young man is not content to be very
young, nor even a young man to be young: he wants to share the dignity
of his elders. There is no dignity in laughter, there is much of it in
smiles. Laughter is but a joyous surrender, smiles give token of mature
criticism. It may be that in the early ages of this world there was far
more laughter than is to be heard now, and that aeons hence laughter
will be obsolete, and smiles universal--every one, always, mildly,
slightly, smiling. But it is less useful to speculate as to mankind’s
past and future than to observe men. And you will have observed with me
in the club-room that young men at most times look solemn, whereas old
men or men of middle age mostly smile; and also that those young men do
often laugh loud and long among themselves, while we others--the gayest
and best of us in the most favourable circumstances--seldom achieve more
than our habitual act of smiling. Does the sound of that laughter jar on
us? Do we liken it to the crackling of thorns under a pot? Let us do so.
There is no cheerier sound. But let us not assume it to be the laughter
of fools because we sit quiet. It is absurd to disapprove of what one
envies, or to wish a good thing were no more because it has passed out
of our possession.
But (it seems that I must begin every paragraph by questioning the
sincerity of what I have just said) has the gift of laughter been
withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven,
laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud
and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of
laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad
sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course. I realise, even
after reading M. Bergson on it, how good a thing it is. I am qualified
to praise it.
As to what is most precious among the accessories to the world we live
in, different men hold different opinions. There are people whom the
sea depresses, whom mountains exhilarate. Personally, I want the sea
always--some not populous edge of it for choice; and with it sunshine,
and wine, and a little music. My friend on the mountain yonder is of
tougher fibre and sterner outlook, disapproves of the sea’s laxity
and instability, has no ear for music and no palate for the grape, and
regards the sun as a rather enervating institution, like central heating
in a house. What he likes is a grey day and the wind in his face; crags
at a great altitude; and a flask of whisky. Yet I think that even he, if
we were trying to determine from what inner sources mankind derives the
greatest pleasure in life, would agree with me that only the emotion of
love takes higher rank than the emotion of laughter. Both these emotions
are partly mental, partly physical. It is said that the mental symptoms
of love are wholly physical in origin. They are not the less ethereal
for that. The physical sensations of laughter, on the other hand, are
reached by a process whose starting-point is in the mind. They are not
the less ‘gloriously of our clay.’ There is laughter that goes so far
as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in
itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has
often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will
not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed
thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million
pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.
Nor does it seem to me to matter one jot how such laughter is achieved.
Humour may rollick on high planes of fantasy or in depths of silliness.
To many people it appeals only from those depths. If it appeal to them
irresistibly, they are more enviable than those who are sensitive only
to the finer kind of joke and not so sensitive as to be mastered and
dissolved by it. Laughter is a thing to be rated according to its own
intensity.
Many years ago I wrote an essay in which I poured scorn on the fun
purveyed by the music halls, and on the great public for which that fun
was quite good enough. I take that callow scorn back. I fancy that
the fun itself was better than it seemed to me, and might not have
displeased me if it had been wafted to me in private, in presence of
a few friends. A public crowd, because of a lack of broad impersonal
humanity in me, rather insulates than absorbs me. Amidst the guffaws of
a thousand strangers I become unnaturally grave. If these people were
the entertainment, and I the audience, I should be sympathetic enough.
But to be one of them is a position that drives me spiritually aloof.
Also, there is to me something rather dreary in the notion of going
anywhere for the specific purpose of being amused. I prefer that
laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.
And in this respect, at any rate, I am not peculiar. In music halls and
such places, you may hear loud laughter, but--not see silent laughter,
not see strong men weak, helpless, suffering, gradually convalescent,
dangerously relapsing. Laughter at its greatest and best is not there.
To such laughter nothing is more propitious than an occasion that
demands gravity. To have good reason for not laughing is one of the
surest aids. Laughter rejoices in bonds. If music halls were schoolrooms
for us, and the comedians were our schoolmasters, how much less talent
would be needed for giving us how much more joy! Even in private and
accidental intercourse, few are the men whose humour can reduce us, be
we never so susceptible, to paroxysms of mirth. I will wager that nine
tenths of the world’s best laughter is laughter at, not with. And it is
the people set in authority over us that touch most surely our sense of
the ridiculous. Freedom is a good thing, but we lose through it golden
moments. The schoolmaster to his pupils, the monarch to his courtiers,
the editor to his staff--how priceless they are! Reverence is a good
thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more
sharply are we struck by anything in him (and there is always much) that
is incongruous with his greatness. And herein lies one of the reasons
why as we grow older we laugh less. The men we esteemed so great are
gathered to their fathers. Some of our coevals may, for aught we know,
be very great, but good heavens! we can’t esteem them so.
Of extreme laughter I know not in any annals a more satisfying example
than one that is to be found in Moore’s Life of Byron. Both Byron and
Moore were already in high spirits when, on an evening in the spring of
1818, they went ‘from some early assembly’ to Mr. Rogers’ house in St.
James’s Place and were regaled there with an impromptu meal. But not
high spirits alone would have led the two young poets to such excess
of laughter as made the evening so very memorable. Luckily they both
venerated Rogers (strange as it may seem to us) as the greatest of
living poets. Luckily, too, Mr. Rogers was ever the kind of man,
the coldly and quietly suave kind of man, with whom you don’t take
liberties, if you can help it--with whom, if you can’t help it, to take
liberties is in itself a most exhilarating act. And he had just received
a presentation copy of Lord Thurloe’s latest book, ‘Poems on Several
Occasions.’ The two young poets found in this elder’s Muse much that
was so execrable as to be delightful. They were soon, as they turned the
pages, held in throes of laughter, laughter that was but intensified
by the endeavours of their correct and nettled host to point out the
genuine merits of his friend’s work. And then suddenly--oh joy!--‘we
lighted,’ Moore records, ‘on the discovery that our host, in addition
to his sincere approbation of some of this book’s contents, had also the
motive of gratitude for standing by its author, as one of the poems was
a warm and, I need not add, well-deserved panegyric on himself. We were,
however’--the narrative has an added charm from Tom Moore’s demure care
not to offend or compromise the still-surviving Rogers--‘too far gone in
nonsense for even this eulogy, in which we both so heartily agreed, to
stop us. The opening line of the poem was, as well as I can recollect,
“When Rogers o’er this labour bent;” and Lord Byron undertook to read
it aloud;--but he found it impossible to get beyond the first two
words. Our laughter had now increased to such a pitch that nothing could
restrain it. Two or three times he began; but no sooner had the words
“When Rogers” passed his lips, than our fit burst out afresh,--till
even Mr. Rogers himself, with all his feeling of our injustice, found
it impossible not to join us; and we were, at last, all three in such a
state of inextinguishable laughter, that, had the author himself been
of our party, I question much whether he could have resisted the
infection.’ The final fall and dissolution of Rogers, Rogers behaving
as badly as either of them, is all that was needed to give perfection
to this heart-warming scene. I like to think that on a certain night
in spring, year after year, three ghosts revisit that old room and
(without, I hope, inconvenience to Lord Northcliffe, who may happen
to be there) sit rocking and writhing in the grip of that old shared
rapture. Uncanny? Well, not more so than would have seemed to Byron and
Moore and Rogers the notion that more than a hundred years away from
them was some one joining in their laughter--as I do.
Alas, I cannot join in it more than gently. To imagine a scene, however
vividly, does not give us the sense of being, or even of having been,
present at it. Indeed, the greater the glow of the scene reflected, the
sharper is the pang of our realisation that we were not there, and of
our annoyance that we weren’t. Such a pang comes to me with special
force whenever my fancy posts itself outside the Temple’s gate in
Fleet Street, and there, at a late hour of the night of May 10th, 1773,
observes a gigantic old man laughing wildly, but having no one with him
to share and aggrandise his emotion. Not that he is alone; but the young
man beside him laughs only in politeness and is inwardly puzzled, even
shocked. Boswell has a keen, an exquisitely keen, scent for comedy,
for the fun that is latent in fine shades of character; but imaginative
burlesque, anything that borders on lovely nonsense, he was not formed
to savour. All the more does one revel in his account of what led up
to the moment when Johnson ‘to support himself, laid hold of one of the
posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud
that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple
Bar to Fleet Ditch.’
No evening ever had an unlikelier ending. The omens were all for gloom.
Johnson had gone to dine at General Paoli’s, but was so ill that he
had to leave before the meal was over. Later he managed to go to Mr.
Chambers’ rooms in the Temple. ‘He continued to be very ill’ there, but
gradually felt better, and ‘talked with a noble enthusiasm of keeping
up the representation of respectable families,’ and was great on ‘the
dignity and propriety of male succession.’ Among his listeners, as it
happened, was a gentleman for whom Mr. Chambers had that day drawn up
a will devising his estate to his three sisters. The news of this might
have been expected to make Johnson violent in wrath. But no, for some
reason he grew violent only in laughter, and insisted thenceforth on
calling that gentleman The Testator and chaffing him without mercy. ‘I
daresay he thinks he has done a mighty thing. He won’t stay till he gets
home to his seat in the country, to produce this wonderful deed: he’ll
call up the landlord of the first inn on the road; and after a suitable
preface upon mortality and the uncertainty of life, will tell him that
he should not delay in making his will; and Here, Sir, will he say,
is my will, which I have just made, with the assistance of one of the
ablest lawyers in the kingdom; and he will read it to him. He believes
he has made this will; but he did not make it; you, Chambers, made it
for him. I hope you have had more conscience than to make him say “being
of sound understanding!” ha, ha, ha! I hope he has left me a legacy. I’d
have his will turned into verse, like a ballad.’ These flights annoyed
Mr. Chambers, and are recorded by Boswell with the apology that he
wishes his readers to be ‘acquainted with the slightest occasional
characteristics of so eminent a man.’ Certainly, there is nothing
ridiculous in the fact of a man making a will. But this is the measure
of Johnson’s achievement. He had created gloriously much out of nothing
at all. There he sat, old and ailing and unencouraged by the company,
but soaring higher and higher in absurdity, more and more rejoicing, and
still soaring and rejoicing after he had gone out into the night with
Boswell, till at last in Fleet Street his paroxysms were too much for
him and he could no more. Echoes of that huge laughter come ringing down
the ages. But is there also perhaps a note of sadness for us in them?
Johnson’s endless sociability came of his inherent melancholy: he could
not bear to be alone; and his very mirth was but a mode of escape from
the dark thoughts within him. Of these the thought of death was the most
dreadful to him, and the most insistent. He was for ever wondering how
death would come to him, and how he would acquit himself in the extreme
moment. A later but not less devoted Anglican, meditating on his own
end, wrote in his diary that ‘to die in church appears to be a great
euthanasia, but not,’ he quaintly and touchingly added, ‘at a time
to disturb worshippers.’ Both the sentiment here expressed and the
reservation drawn would have been as characteristic of Johnson as they
were of Gladstone. But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a
great euthanasia; and I think that for Johnson to have died thus,
that night in Fleet Street, would have been a grand ending to ‘a life
radically wretched.’ Well, he was destined to outlive another decade;
and, selfishly, who can wish such a life as his, or such a Life as
Boswell’s, one jot shorter?
Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk
who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in
history or in legend as having died of laughter. Strange, too, that not
to one of all the characters in romance has such an end been allotted.
Has it ever struck you what a chance Shakespeare missed when he was
finishing the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth? Falstaff was not the
man to stand cowed and bowed while the new young king lectured him and
cast him off. Little by little, as Hal proceeded in that portentous
allocution, the humour of the situation would have mastered old Sir
John. His face, blank with surprise at first, would presently have
glowed and widened, and his whole bulk have begun to quiver. Lest he
should miss one word, he would have mastered himself. But the final
words would have been the signal for release of all the roars pent up in
him; the welkin would have rung; the roars, belike, would have gradually
subsided in dreadful rumblings of more than utterable or conquerable
mirth. Thus and thus only might his life have been rounded off with
dramatic fitness, secundum ipsius naturam. He never should have been
left to babble of green fields and die ‘an it had been any christom
child.’
Falstaff is a triumph of comedic creation because we are kept laughing
equally at and with him. Nevertheless, if I had the choice of sitting
with him at the Boar’s Head or with Johnson at the Turk’s, I shouldn’t
hesitate for an instant. The agility of Falstaff’s mind gains much of
its effect by contrast with the massiveness of his body; but in contrast
with Johnson’s equal agility is Johnson’s moral as well as physical
bulk. His sallies ‘tell’ the more startlingly because of the noble
weight of character behind them: they are the better because he makes
them. In Falstaff there isn’t this final incongruity and element of
surprise. Falstaff is but a sublimated sample of ‘the funny man.’ We
cannot, therefore, laugh so greatly with him as with Johnson. (Nor
even at him; because we are not tickled so much by the weak points of
a character whose points are all weak ones; also because we have no
reverence trying to impose restraint upon us.) Still, Falstaff has
indubitably the power to convulse us. I don’t mean we ever are convulsed
in reading Henry the Fourth. No printed page, alas, can thrill us to
extremities of laughter. These are ours only if the mirthmaker be a
living man whose jests we hear as they come fresh from his own lips. All
I claim for Falstaff is that he would be able to convulse us if he were
alive and accessible. Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can
induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of
being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by
no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme
only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery.
Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be
able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and
that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious
things, one after another, without pause. He must have invention keeping
pace with utterance. He must be inexhaustible. Only so can he exhaust
us.
I have a friend whom I would praise. There are many other of my friends
to whom I am indebted for much laughter; but I do believe that if all of
them sent in their bills to-morrow and all of them overcharged me not a
little, the total of all those totals would be less appalling than that
which looms in my own vague estimate of what I owe to Comus. Comus I
call him here in observance of the line drawn between public and private
virtue, and in full knowledge that he would of all men be the least glad
to be quite personally thanked and laurelled in the market-place for the
hours he has made memorable among his cronies. No one is so diffident as
he, no one so self-postponing. Many people have met him again and
again without faintly suspecting ‘anything much’ in him. Many of his
acquaintances--friends, too--relatives, even--have lived and died in the
belief that he was quite ordinary. Thus is he the more greatly valued by
his cronies. Thus do we pride ourselves on possessing some curious right
quality to which alone he is responsive. But it would seem that either
this asset of ours or its effect on him is intermittent. He can be dull
and null enough with us sometimes--a mere asker of questions, or drawer
of comparisons between this and that brand of cigarettes, or full
expatiator on the merits of some new patent razor. A whole hour and more
may be wasted in such humdrum and darkness. And then--something will
have happened. There has come a spark in the murk; a flame now,
presage of a radiance: Comus has begun. His face is a great part of his
equipment. A cast of it might be somewhat akin to the comic mask of the
ancients; but no cast could be worthy of it; mobility is the essence of
it. It flickers and shifts in accord to the matter of his discourse; it
contracts and it expands; is there anything its elastic can’t express?
Comus would be eloquent even were he dumb. And he is mellifluous. His
voice, while he develops an idea or conjures up a scene, takes on a
peculiar richness and unction. If he be describing an actual scene,
voice and face are adaptable to those of the actual persons therein. But
it is not in such mimicry that he excels. As a reporter he has rivals.
For the most part, he moves on a higher plane that of mere fact: he
imagines, he creates, giving you not a person, but a type, a synthesis,
and not what anywhere has been, but what anywhere might be--what, as one
feels, for all the absurdity of it, just would be. He knows his world
well, and nothing human is alien to him, but certain skeins of life have
a special hold on him, and he on them. In his youth he wished to be
a clergyman; and over the clergy of all grades and denominations his
genius hovers and swoops and ranges with a special mastery. Lawyers he
loves less; yet the legal mind seems to lie almost as wide-open to
him as the sacerdotal; and the legal manner in all its phases he can
unerringly burlesque. In the minds of journalists, diverse journalists,
he is not less thoroughly at home, so that of the wild contingencies
imagined by him there is none about which he cannot reel off an oral
‘leader’ or ‘middle’ in the likeliest style, and with as much ease as
he can preach a High Church or Low Church sermon on it. Nor are his
improvisations limited by prose. If a theme call for nobler treatment,
he becomes an unflagging fountain of ludicrously adequate blank-verse.
Or again, he may deliver himself in rhyme. There is no form of utterance
that comes amiss to him for interpreting the human comedy, or for
broadening the farce into which that comedy is turned by him. Nothing
can stop him when once he is in the vein. No appeals move him. He goes
from strength to strength while his audience is more and more piteously
debilitated.
What a gift to have been endowed with! What a power to wield! And how
often I have envied Comus! But this envy of him has never taken root
in me. His mind laughs, doubtless, at his own conceptions; but not
his body. And if you tell him something that you have been sure will
convulse him you are likely to be rewarded with no more than a smile
betokening that he sees the point. Incomparable laughter-giver, he is
not much a laugher. He is vintner, not toper. I would therefore not
change places with him. I am well content to have been his beneficiary
during thirty years, and to be so for as many more as may be given us.