Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

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