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 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.
-THE END-
Max Beerbohm's short story: Laughter (1920)
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