And Even Now
a jot. So is his syntax. Not with these will he win the heart of Mme.
Chose, not with these the esteem of M. Tel, not with these anything but
a more acrid rancour in the silly hostility of his competitors. If a
foreigner speaks English to us easily and quickly, we demand no more of
him; we are satisfied, we are delighted, and any mistakes of grammar or
pronunciation do but increase the charm, investing with more than
its intrinsic quality any good thing said--making us marvel at it and
exchange fatuous glances over it, as we do when a little child says
something sensible. But heaven protect us from the foreigner who pauses,
searches, fumbles, revises, comes to standstills, has recourse to
dumb-show! Away with him, by the first train to Dover! And this, we may
be sure, is the very train M. Tel and Mme. Chose would like to catch
whenever they meet me--or you?
LAUGHTER, 1920.
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