Chapter X: Laughter of the Individual: Humour (2)

It is much the same with the small vexations inflicted by our social world. We may no doubt feel hurt just for a moment when, at a concert, we see a big hat thrust itself betwixt our eyes and a face which has held them captive, wearing a look of the tragic muse as it leans yearningly over the violin from which it seems, like a mother’s face, to draw the sobbing tones. Yet, even as the nerve smarts, we may half-seize the glorious absurdity of the hat and its bobbings. Or, again, when an untimely call interrupts some bit of nice thinking and leaves the nerves tingling, we may smile for a moment as we catch a glimpse of the simple faith of the visitor in the supreme importance of the cause he pleads, a glimpse sufficient to make us half-aware of a like “subjectivity” in our own estimation of selected tasks. Social bores are vexations which, perhaps, ought not to be called petty. Humorous persons, one suspects, are specially exposed to their attacks, since they are a tolerant folk, preferring on the whole to suffer rather than to hurt others. {328} But here, also, the humorous have their remedies. It suffices, for example, to reflect for a short moment on the droll pathos of the circumstance that persons, between whom and ourselves we find no attaching sympathies, should select us for their importunate attentions. Even when the destinies throw us together with men and women from whom we instinctively recoil, as from creatures of a species at once closely akin to ours yet sundered from us by impassable boundaries, a reflective humour may devise alleviations. The aggressive self-assertion of a plutocrat, with his “buy-you-up” sort of stare, and the rest, may wound for half a moment; but a laughing solace comes on the heels of worry; for there is a quiet pleasure in looking back and discovering the clumsy construction of the vulgar “snub;” and in any case a playful half-glance at higher measures of worth restores the equanimity.

Even greater troubles may, to the trained humorist, disclose amusing aspects or accompaniments, so that refreshment reaches us even while the blow still hurts. The relieving smile may come by way of a playful contemplation of ourselves as pitted against our mighty superior, circumstance; for it is possible to find something amusing, as well as irritating, in the ironies of destiny. The idea of a struggle with fate, which gives the zest of life to brave hearts, helps, too, to bring the reflective mind back to the play-mood. The readers of Miss Kingsley’s _Travels_ need not to be reminded of the fecundity of amusing reflection which her humour showed in circumstances which would have depressed many a man.[278] It was with a like readiness to smile that Goldsmith’s genial spirit faced the blows of destiny, giving back, as his biographer has it, in cheerful {329} humour or whimsical warning what it received in mortification or grief. In his celebrated character, Mark Tapley, Dickens has no doubt illustrated how in the rough waters of his youth he learned to draw humorous entertainment from massive troubles. It is this playful shimmer of a light thrown by an entertaining idea on the surface of a misfortune which rids it of the worst of its gloom.

By a line of humorous reflection already suggested, we may in all cases of worry and moral disturbance reach the consolatory idea that the trouble has, in the first view of it, been grossly exaggerated. At the moment when the sensitive tissue is lacerated the shock of pain blinds us to dimensions; our disappointment fills the outlook, like a thunder-storm. The healthy nervous organism will show its vitality in the rapidity of the recuperative process; and this is often effected by a quick turning of the thoughts to other and brighter parts of the scene which the trouble has for a moment blotted out, and to the proportions of the one to the other. A trouble—like the all-enveloping thunder-storm—begins to retire almost smilingly as soon as we discern its boundaries.

In much of this alleviating service of humour the laugh which liberates us from the thraldom of the momentary is a laugh at ourselves. Indeed, one may safely say that the benefits here alluded to presuppose a habit of reflective self-quizzing. The blessed relief comes from the discernment of a preposterousness in the forcing of our claims, of a folly in yielding to the currents of sentiment which diffuse their mists over the realm of reality. The coming of the smile announces a shifting of the point of view; the mal-adjustment, which a moment ago seemed to be wholly on the side of our world, showing itself now to be on our side as well. {330}

How far humour will help a man in throwing off troubles one cannot say. Even when the flash of bright reflection fails to dispel the darkness, it may secure a valuable moment of respite. When the trouble has real magnitude, the dismissive smile grows hard for all save the elect. Few of us, perhaps, could rise to the height of serene irony attained by a German musician whose wife had eloped with his master.[279] Many might be disposed to think that the woman who, after nursing her husband through a fatal illness, remarked that it was only a sense of humour which had kept her from failing, was less than human. Yet it is highly risky to infer, from the fact of an intrusion of the humorous temper into calamity, the existence of a low degree of moral sensibility. It may rather be that those who suffer most are beholden in an exceptional degree to this kind solacer of men’s woes.

This service of humour, at once consolatory to suffering and corrective of one-sidedness of view, is perfected by a development of that larger comprehensive vision which is reached when the standpoint of egoism is transcended. Even the beginning of humour implies some getting away from the point of view of the individual, so far as to gain a momentary comprehension of others’ points of view. The great educative value of being laughed at is that it compels attention to the fact of a multiplicity of such points. How good a lesson, one thinks, it must have been for the Scotch professor to hear his disgusted caddie remark: “Anybody can teach Greek, but gowf needs a heid”.

There remains for brief illustration another service which humour renders its possessor, though in truth it may turn out to be only a further development of the one just dealt {331} with. Laughter at things, being primarily an accompaniment of observation, remains in its highest forms chiefly an amusement at outside spectacles. The resources of a mature faculty of humour may lend themselves to the end of an enjoyable contemplation of one’s social world, both in its parts and as a whole. The value of humour to the individual can, indeed, only be rightly measured when the large possibilities of entertainment which lie in criticising one’s surroundings are borne in mind.

The enjoyment which a humorous observer is able to gather from the contemplation of the social scene implies that he make his own standpoint, that he avoid the more turbulent part of the social world and seek the quiet backwaters where he can survey things in the calm light of ideas. One who lives wholly in the giddy throng will never be able to see things in the perspective which humorous appreciation requires. Nor is this all; if he live, move and have his being in the commotion, he will be forced to repress mirthful impulses and to show the hurrying figures about him a certain respect, since any generous indulgence in the joys of laughter would be likely to bring him into unpleasant collisions.

That there is much in the social spectacle which falls only to the eye of one half-retired is certain. The vagaries of “society,” in the conventional sense of the term, are one of the traditional matters of laughter; our comic journals have enlightened even dull minds on this point. It is pleasant to a humorous contemplation to note the high pretensions of the “fine world”; how naïvely, for instance, it assumes that it holds all the men of brains and all the good talkers in its service;[280] pleasant, that is {332} to say, to one who bears in mind some of the characteristics of this world, such as a certain emptiness in the matter of ideas, together with something of the readiness of a certain kind of dog to follow any self-appointed leader, and an amiable impartiality in crowning any sort of “hero” that happens to be trumpeted, whether potentate from the East or showman from the West. It is entertaining, too, to note how enclosed it remains within its purely arbitrary standards, being rather shocked, for example, to find when it travels that there can be such a thing as “society” in Italy which is not a “dining society”. This, and much more, will often draw the eye of humour, oddly enough, in the same direction as that of an awe-struck flunkeyism.

It is an agreeable pastime, too, for our half-retired observer to watch the fierce struggles of men and women in these days to gain a footing within the charmed circle. Here, surely, the gyrations of the moral figure reach the height of absurdity. Nowhere does there seem to reflection to be quite such a disproportion between effort and its doubtful reward as in these labours of the hot and panting to win a footing on the fashionable terrain.

What makes the scene the more pathetically droll is that success never seems to satisfy; the necessity of getting in is followed by a no less dire necessity of keeping oneself visible in the tightly-packed crowd. The sensitiveness of men of high position to the least sign of neglect in their goddess is something that cannot fail to tickle a humorous fancy. It is said that high officials once passed unhappy days and nights waiting for an invitation to dinner. The occasion was a national festival, when some inventive dames, taking themselves apparently quite seriously as representative women of the age, proceeded each to invite a representative male. So do the gods give {333} us harvest of laughter by sowing vanity with its small spitefulnesses in the minds of men, and setting “society” to lure them to her thraldom.

To the dispassionate eye of reason, no “society” which is founded on birth or on a mixed basis of birth and wealth has seemed quite worthy of this servile attitude. Certainly in these days, when, as the Berlin Hofschneider is said to have observed to Prince Bismarck at the Opera Ball, society is rather mixed (_ein bischen gemischt_), rational men might be expected to leave this kind of homage to the weak-minded. No doubt men of mind caught in the snare have been ready to admit this; yet it may be questioned whether, when they set down their endurance of the boredom of the diner-out to the social ambition of their wives, they evade the laughter of the gods.

Pity may find a place at the side of laughter when she visits these absurd scenes. A peep behind the masks will, it has been said, show here, too, the thinnest pretence of gaiety. Dull with something of the dulness of death are many of the older faces, even when they force themselves to produce grimaces and spasmodic cacklings, thin and anæmic like themselves. It looks as if it were a dram of excitement, and not pleasure, which these loyal worshippers of society are seeking; only to find, perhaps, that the hope of excitement itself has grown illusory.

Yet, in speaking of the entertaining aspects of the social spectacle, one need not confine oneself to the fashionable scene. “Society,” charmingly irrational as she is, has no monopoly in the matter of the incongruities. The doings of the Great Middle Class and even of the Masses have their amusing aspects for the unprejudiced eye. All phases of social life, indeed, may yield rich entertainment to one who has the mental vision justly accommodated. {334}

What first strikes the eye here, perhaps, is the fine display of human oddities. The newspaper, fully alive to the value of things new, gives welcome to the self-revelations of human folly, perverted ingenuity, and uncontrollable vanity. The struggle for its coveted column seems hardly less violent than that for the fashionable gathering. Apparently, the supreme necessity is to show yourself, to win the pestered and rather jaded eye of a crowd, if only for an instant. Many and wonderful are the movements and sounds to which children, feeling themselves overlooked, have been known to resort in order to compel notice: yet the frantic efforts of men and women to advertise themselves to the public eye are, surely, not less numerous or less strange. Even when they have left the social scene these self-advertisers will sometimes still try to seize your eye by sending you an autobiography, consisting largely, it may be, of an account of all the dinner parties attended—a priceless thing for the historian, perhaps, if only the writer had happened to be a politician.

The vanity in this self-advertisement does not always lie on the surface, a partial self-blinding being of the humour of it. A person may be pushed on to the advocacy of a bottomless craze by a belief in a special mission so earnest, as completely to hide from him the inflated self-estimation which lurks in the attitude; and the recognition, by the quiet onlooker, of this malicious way of Nature’s, in hiding from men so large a part of their own motives, draws back the corners of the mouth yet farther.

The absurdity of this forcing of oneself on the notice of the public, like that of pushing one’s way into “society,” grows clearer when we reflect on the real value of the object of pursuit. It is the fashion just now to deify public opinion. Yet spite of the classical dictum, it is not always {335} flattering to the deity to identify the two voices. A modern democratic society is apt to exhibit very much the same plasticity to the hand of the crafty moulder as that on which the wise Greek sprinkled his dainty irony. To be able to see through the pretty pretence that the demos “forms” its opinions, and that its verdicts on statesmen, generals and other notabilities are consequently sacred, is to have one chief qualification for enjoying the fun of the show. How entertaining, for instance, is the proceeding when an editor invites a census of opinion on books, or other things which postulate some discernment. In this case, too, the humour of it lies in the circumstance that the good people who are lured into the trap honestly think that they are giving their own individual judgments. Still more delightful do these performances become when an editor, with his sense of the value of names fully awake, applies to celebrities, and entertains us, say, with a church dignitary’s conception of the ideal Music Hall, or with a popular jockey’s views on the proper dimensions of a scientific manual.

These exhibitions of authority for the guidance of the public sufficiently testify to its docility before any kind of proffered leadership. The very bigness of the modern demos, assisted by its “holy simplicity” of mind, lays it open to the wiles of the charlatan. How can one expect the worthy tradesman reading in the solitude of his back parlour to gauge the authority of his newspaper guide? It is more than he can do, perhaps, to take the measure of his Sunday instructor. He who reflects thus will find much to entertain him in the way of make-believe, when he examines the foundations of imposing reputations, or of the proud boast of political leaders that they carry “the Country” with them.

The newspaper, highly respectable institution as it {336} undoubtedly is, entertains those in search of humorous enjoyment in other ways too. Its very standpoint as issuer of news leads to an amusing exaggeration of the importance of anything which happens to thrust its head up at the moment. An idea, aye and a fallacy too, old as the ages, will secure attention if only somebody with a name happen to bring it up anew. Whence comes the neomania which we see on all hands, the absurd exaltation of the latest novel and the rest. Yet more exhilarating to humorous inspection is the naïve assumption of the newspaper and its clients that everything happens in order to furnish them with news. I remember a paper, not of a low class, seriously contending, when a disagreeable _cause célèbre_ had to be re-tried, that, since everybody had made up his mind on the case, a new trial was most regrettable. The frank suggestion that the proceedings of our law courts have their final cause in the satisfaction of a craving for news in readers of journals was, doubtless, an editorial slip; yet the assumption is often discoverable to a penetrating eye. The point of view reminds one of the joyous antics of the Italian children who follow the cavalcade of the diligence and its “supplements” as it descends southwards to the level of the olive-groves, sure in their glee that the rattling procession, and the “soldi” too, have come for their delight. In view of the entertainment afforded by the press in these days, one may sometimes wonder whether the expression “comic journal” is not growing into a pleonasm.

Humour will keep at our elbow, too, if we push deeper, and, lifting the wrappings of convention, insist on seeing the realities. The involutions of public utterance when, say, a dubious appointment has to be defended, are in themselves no less entertaining an exhibition of naïveté disclosed through elaborate wrappings than the romancings of a {337} naughty child beating about for an excuse. No kind of spectacle, perhaps, is more uplifting to a spirit given to the right sort of reflection, none too which has a larger promise of unwearying variation, than the wrigglings of the human mind when tangled in awkward appearances, and forced to find something which looks like a way of logical escape.

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.

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