LAUGHTER.
TT is no literary fiction that ascribes the shedding of tears 1_ to horses and dogs, and in the ease of the latter, sorrow, and not mere physical pain, is apparently often the predisposing cause. But laughter, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the attributes which distinguishes man from all other living creatures. Dogs appear to smile, but the resemblance is probably a chance one, and to "grin like.a dog "-was evidently synonymous in the mind of the Psalmist with a very poor form of mirth. Laughter not only distinguishes man from the animals, but man from man, and nation from nation. It meant one thing to the Hebrew and another to the Greek. One has but to recall the passages in which _laughter is men- tioned in the Bible, to be confirmed in the conviction that the Jews had little knowledge of, or sympathy for, that mirth which is the spontaneous outcome of the mere joy of living, or which is provoked by the conflict of wit or of humour. They could have had no fellow-feeling for Wordsworth's appeal,— " Thou Child of Joy, Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, Thou happy shepherd boy !"
Nor, in spite of the splendour of their poetic imagery, can we fancy one of the prophets indulging in such a fancy as that of "Ocean's innumerable smile." Laughter hardly ever occurs in the Bible as the symbol of innocent, refreshing hilarity of spirit. Aimless laughter is spoken of with a certain contempt and reprobation,—" I said of laughter, it is mad, and of mirth, what doeth it?" (Ecclesiastes.) And again,—" Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness" (Proverbs xiv., 13),—a saying which exactly sums up a nursery superstition on the subject. Two other verses in Ecclesiastes illustrate this feeling even more strongly,—" Sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better ;" and again,—" As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool." In most pinees where the word "to laugh" occurs, it is with the sense of to have in derision, to exult over, or to despise. It sometimes is associated with an attitude of incredulity, rarely if ever with one of friendly and cheerful intercourse. In the few cases where there is an underlying notion of mirth, it is generally mirth of a godless and sinful kind. Between the laughter of the Jews and that of the Greeks, as might easily be expected, there is the widest possible gulf. With all their restraint and love of the Mean, the Greeks had a passion for laughter which is reflected in their earliest literature. All the tones of human laughter are to be heard in Homer,—unquenchable, sardonic, pathetic, forced or lip-laughter. How expressive are the forms coined to imitate the various kinds of laugh ! Even the familiar modern exaggeration, "dying with laughter," is to be found in the immortal tale of Troy. Above all, there are two famous passages in which laughter is mentioned, both of them very far removed from comedy. One is-the account of that most moving of farewells,—between Hector and Andromache, a scene which no one, unless he be brazen-bowelled, can read for the twentieth time without feeling a lump rise in his throat at the lines which tell how Hector gave back his child to his mother's arms, and she took him "smiling through her tears," a phrase that no amount of repetition has had power to stale. The other passage is that wonderful scene in the twentieth book of the Odyssey, on the eve of the massacre of the suitors, where the horror of the situation is enhanced by the contrast between their unearthly laughter and their impending doom. " Je ne crois pas "—writes a French com- mentator—" qu'il existe mare dans l'Iliade une situation plus terrible et qui laisse des impressions plus pathetiques : jamais l'effroi des pressentiments ne fut exprime d'une maniere plus sublime. Ces hommes qui devorent des viandes encore toutes sanglantes, qui rient h grand bruit, et dont pourtant les yeux se remplissent de larmes ; ce prophete qui dejit les plaint et deplore leurs maux ; les tenebres dont il les voit enveloppes ; le sourd mugissement qui frappe sea oreilles ; ces ruisseanx de sang; ces ombres remplissant les portiques et les cours, et que decouvre son cell prophetique ; le soleil qui s'obscurcit dans les cieux ; in unit qui se precipite de toutes parts : ce sont l de ces beaut‘s qu'on ne trouve qne dans Homere, on dans la Bible ; et le repas de Baltazar est le seul morceau de rantiquitO qui puisse inspirer une emotion plus forte, une terreur pins profonde." Greek literature is rich in the phraseology of laughter, as befitted a race who had a keen enjoyment of fun. And by an easy transition, such phrases were habitually applied to natural phenomena in their bright or cheerful aspects. The earth " laughed " as the armour of an advancing host gleamed in the rays of the sun. Carrying this "pathetic fallacy" even further, a Roman poet writes,—" Domus jucundo risit odore." Turning from the vocabulary of mirth to the capacity for being excited to it, it is pretty plain that the Romans, whose genius lay in ruling and lawgiving, were not pre-eminently a laughter-loving people. Their comedy was, after all, but a faint echo of the spacious mirth of the Greeks. It is difficult to imagine a Roman of the palmy days of the Republic laughing otherwise than grimly. Lucretius certainly had no sense of humour; there is no mirth in Virgil; and as for the
quips of Cicero, they are among the most trying witticisms extant. We are inclined to think, then, that Roman laughter, not unlike that of the Hebrews, was seldom free from an admixture of scorn.
Whether England is a " merry " country or not, is a moot point on which some of our Continental neighbours hold pro- nounced opinions. But it is certainly the fact that there is more humour in our first-rate works than in the corresponding class of any foreign literature. It is one of the many proofs of Shakespeare's universality, that you will find in him food for laughter of all sorts. He excites us to mirth by wit, humour, and nonsense, the three great provocatives,—for what else but pure nonsense is the "Equinoctial of Quenbus," or " Pigrogromitus of the Vapians "? And he not only moves us to laughter, but he describes it in all its phases, with its physical signs and mental concomitants,—" with eyes in flood," laughter that gives one a stitch in the side, hyena-like laughter ; wild, idiotic, shallow, zealous, profound laughter; alehouse laughter; the tragic laughter which a sick heart indulges in at its own expense, and many other varieties.
Laughter, when aroused by legitimate provocation, is such a wholesome and refreshing thing, that it is melancholy to watch the gradual atrophy of the risible faculties which seems to be the inevitable result of advancing civilisation. Not many years ago, there was an undergraduate at one of our Uni- versities who was blessed with so natural and infectious a laugh, that he was regarded by the whole college with a certain degree of pride ; and the dons, when enter- taining a stranger at the high table, never failed to explain, when the familiar sound was heard,—" Oh! that's —, the man with the laugh." We are not aware that the Man with the Laugh has had a successor; and if this be so, it is a matter of unmixed regret. For one seldom hears a genuine laugh nowadays, and much of the phraseology of laughter is a mere fashion of speech. There are -many people whose sides have never ached from over-indulgence in the outward expres- sion of mirth. Indeed, we believe that just as there are cats who cannot purr, so there are unfortunate human beings who cannot laugh out loud. With some persons a wheeze or a chuckle is the utmost they can compass. Some men laugh habitually in falsetto, which, we need hardly say, is far less pleasant than a laugh in the natural voice. And then there is what may be called the " society " laugh, an artificial abomination almost as execrable as the latest fashionable monstrosity, the bent-elbow over-hand-shake. We remember once to have heard a feminine laugh so painfully and regularly tuneful that it could literally have been reduced to musical notation. There is also a coarse laugh to which we have heard the admirably expressive epithet of "square-mouthed" applied, —a Gargantuan laugh evoked by highly flavoured anecdotes of the gun or smoking room category. Love is a liberal education, as a Greek proverb, unconsciously imitated by Steele, has it, and, according to Shakespeare, one of its refining influences is shown in the matter of laughter. When a man falls in love, says Speed, he no longer laughs like a cock crowing,—and Speed was by profession a great authority on love and laughter. The abatement of open laughter amongst us is possibly due in part to the tendency of the humorous literature of a race to whom, according to Mr. Bryce, we are chiefly beholden for our food for mirth,—the Americans. The essence of the modern American humour is what Uncle Remus calls the "dry grins." It was hardly so with Artemus Ward, whose lecture, delivered with the most melancholy composure, was so agonisingly funny as to enable many of his auditors to realise what had been previously only a figure of speech. They laughed till they were perfectly ill. Of the inhabitants of Great Britain, the Anglo-Irish have probably the greatest appreciation of humour, and possess the most infectious laughs. Our cousins the Germans enjoy a joke—especially a hoax—as their phrase, Es ist mon Tode lachen, indicates, though the greatest German joker of recent times, Saphir, was a Jew. The French are too logical to appreciate nonsense. Wit rather than humour appeals to their temperament, though the instance of Rabelais proves the danger of generalisation. The Turk has a great fund of dry humour latent in him, and enjoys a sedate laugh ; but he has a poor opinion of mascaralik, or habitual fooling. At the same time, he more than tolerates the humorous and generally scandalous buffooneries of Karagueuz (= Blackfa,ce), the Turkish Puloinello. In Persia, laughter is annually evoked by the following rather cheap means. As a part of the Bairam festivities given by Persians of high standing, a number of Jews, who have been caught for the occasion, are suddenly hustled into the deep haouz or tank which is to be found in every courtyard, and left to struggle out half-drowned and bedraggled, amid the shrieks of the spectators. The Negro all the world over is reputed a laughter-loving creature, except when the outward manifestation of mirth is checked by the new-found sense of dignity which accompanies conversion to Islam. Whatever they feel, the Chinese are certainly chary of expressing amuse- ment in Occidental fashion. The Japanese, on the other hand, are an eminently cheerful and merry people.
If, however, the tendency of civilisation is rather to efface the outward and physical symbols by which the natural man expresses his mirth, against this loss may be set many countervailing advantages. On the whole, we gratify our laughter-loving propensity in a far more legitimate fashion than the generation of Theodore Hook. There is less brutal horse-play, less indecency, less of the desire to amuse our- selves at the direct expense, to the discomfort, or by the pain of other people. The old Adam causes some of us to regret the decline of the harlequinade ; but we should reconcile ourselves to its elimination by remembering that it was in great measure true to life. The days of pantomimic practical joking—as drawn in the pages of "Tom Pringle's Log "—are over; and with the disappearance of the reality we can cheerfully dis- pense with its mimic representation. If we go further back, how swinish is the fun of the Middle Ages ! What an infliction a Court fool must have been in real life, and how inhuman was the practice of making playthings of dwarfs—always notoriously sensitive to ridicule—who should have been objects of pity rather than butts of merriment ! We may laugh less loudly than our great-grandfathers, but our appreciation of a joke is not necessarily any the less keen on that account. Nor is there any loss of virility or grit involved in this purging of fun of its grosser elements. A man is never less manly for having a pure imagination.
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