so, who could bear to read a tragedy? Yet no one after reading 'King Lear' ever puts on mourning. On the contrary, the day after we have read King Lear' we mourn only that there is not a tragedy on earth to surpass it. Thus it is clear that our sensibilities in literature are somewhat different from our sensibilities in life. They may be founded on our sensibilities in life, but in literature an element of play-is not even 'Hamlet called a 'play'?—of make-believe, enters into them, and enables us to enjoy many things that, if they actually took place in our presence, would make us miserable.

On the whole, then, we need not feel too sensitive to charges of cruelty in our laughter at pain and accident in comic literature. There may be a spice of cruelty in our amusement as in our amusement at a member of Parliament who sits down on his hat, but it is an innocent cruelty, not an efficient cruelty, and that is all that matters. Comedy, indeed, maps out certain fields of human life-our fears, our embarrassments, our misfortunes, our hypocrisies, our rascalities-and makes them squares in a new and delightful game. Part of the game is that some one must have a rather bad time whether Malvolio or Falstaff or Falstaff's ragged regiment. There is usually suffering going on somewhere in comedy, if it is only the suffering of being baited or guyed. We see this even if we turn to the children's comic literature of our time. How many painful accidents happen in 'Shock-headed Peter,' in Uncle Remus,' in the Cautionary Tales' of Mr Belloc! Even in Alice,' the most charitable of all comic masterpieces, the 'off with his head' motif suggests terrible possibilities. In the 'Alice' books and the rhymes of Lear it might be thought that nonsense had triumphed over accident as the inspiration of comic literature; but is not nonsense itself a kind of accident, rearranging life into unexpected and incongruous patterns?

I do not know, indeed, whether modern humour can be shown to differ in any important degree from the humour of other times. We have, no doubt, becomein our writing and reading, at least-less Rabelaisian, less capable of pleasure in the merely lewd or malodorous word-it is our solemn writers nowadays who are most lewd and malodorous-but I doubt if our laughter

is less dependent than it used to be on the pain and embarrassment of human beings. Mr Max Beerbohm has in Seven Men' a story of an author with social aspirations and of his embarrassments at a house-party which is at once an agony and a delight to read. It is as cruel as anything in Chaucer, and yet Mr Beerbohm, like Chaucer, compels us to believe in him as an exceptionally good-natured human being. Search modern

comic literature, from Mr Dooley to the works of Mr P. G. Wodehouse, and you will always find the same love of the painful situation. Look at the dialogues of Mr Dooley, and you will be surprised to find in how many of them some one is hit on the head with a brick or a crowbar or a piece of lead piping. Mr Wodehouse again, though in 'The Inimitable Jeeves' he depends for his fun largely on dialogue and on the slang of a modern dude, does not spare us many an incident such as that of the boy being pushed into the water or of the real oranges being substituted for the paper ones to be flung at the audience during the amateur theatricals in the village hall. Mr. Wodehouse may not be a writer of immortal literature, but he is an extremely amusing farce-writer for our time, and, apart from the humour of phrase, his humour is largely the humour of the embarrassing situation and the practical joke.

If modern humour differs from the humour of other times at all in its attitude to the painful or embarrassing situation, it is mainly, I think, in this respect that, whereas earlier writers like to picture an extraordinary man in a painful situation, the modern writer more often takes an ordinary man as the victim of his comic mischiefs. I do not know who was the first modern writer to make fun of the ordinary man, but the earliest comic classic of the ordinary man that I can think of is F. C. Burnand's 'Happy Thoughts.' It is strange that this extraordinarily amusing book should have been allowed to sink into neglect. It is, perhaps, not quite well enough written to be sure of immortality, but it has every other quality except perfect style to delight generations of men and children. Nowhere else have the little fears, the little vanities, the little crossnesses, the little egotisms, the little embarrassments in the life of a little man been so funnily set down. Lord Rosebery and

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other good judges have praised enthusiastically The Diary of a Nobody.' But to my mind 'Happy Thoughts is worth a dozen Diaries of a Nobody.' Farcical though it is in some of its pages, it is in others a masterpiece of comic psychology. It, more than any other book, I think, is the beginning of the admirable Punch' we know and the forerunner of the work of all those excellent writers, Mr E. V. Lucas, Mr A. A. Milne, Mr E. V. Knox, and Mr A. P. Herbert, who have contributed to 'Punch' in recent years. You can read of Panurge or Don Quixote or Uncle Toby without saying to yourself: 'Yes, I have often felt like that'; but if you are an ordinary modern man, you cannot read 'Happy Thoughts' without sometimes saying to yourself: 'Yes, it's a little farcical, but one does often think or feel more or less like that.' I am convinced that in another generation a civilised home will feel as incomplete without a copy of Happy Thoughts' as a civilised home would feel to-day without the two volumes of Alice.' Burnand himself in his preface warned his readers of the essential ordinariness of his book. He wrote:

'Nor, my dear sir, must you, as a new acquaintance expect to find any new Pensées among these pages: assuredly you will be disappointed. I do not put them down as Deep Thoughts; nor Right Thoughts. They are, assuming such situations as Jotter finds himself placed in, just such thoughts as would happily occur to ninety-nine out of a hundred of us when acting upon the impulse of the moment. For instance, suppose Jones and Robinson go over a gate into a field, when they suddenly come upon a mad bull also suddenly coming upon them. They escape. Let us examine their separate jottings in their minds' note-books: don't you think they would run thus ?—

'Jones's Note. Saw mad bull. Happy Thought. back over the gate again.

Get

'Robinson's Note. Saw mad bull. Happy Thought. Get back over gate again.

'Jones's Note. Happy Thought. Get over before Robinson. 'Robinson's Note. Happy Thought. Get over before Jones. 'This may not be heroic, but I fancy it's true "for a' that." Moreover, you've got the whole anecdote before you in four Happy Thoughts.

'After all, in such cases, we are not heroic. The hundredth is: not number one.'

This is a philosophy that makes admirably for comedy, and the songs of soldiers in war-time prove that even heroes like to liberate their imaginations at times into the comic world of the unheroic. Every man is probably a coward in some part of his being, and, if he is a wise man, he learns to laugh at his fears instead of fretting over them in secret shame. Certainly, this is one of the blessed services of comedy that it amuses us in a world of fears and irritations of which we should otherwise be too sensitively ashamed. There are occasions on which a humorous essay, like Mr J. B. Priestley's 'An Ill-Natured Chapter,' or an extravaganza by Mr F. W. Thomas, may afford us greater relief than a library of philosophy. Comedy reconciles us to the less glorious moments of our lives-or, at least, helps us to make light of them-by revealing to us the fact that other people-very clever and very charming people-have also experienced less glorious moments of the same kind.

Here I am, I fear, back at the point at which I was discoursing, much against my better judgment, about the uses of comedy. Is it not enough that John Jorrocks or Mr W. W. Jacobs infallibly amuses us? Is it not enough that 'Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.' would make us laugh in the middle of an illness, and that Mr Kipling's 'My Sunday at Home' would make us laugh in the middle of a general election in which all our favourite candidates were being defeated? Much of our laughter is sheer high spirits; much, I think, is sheer naughtiness. Miss Somerville has said in a recent book, 'Wheeltracks,' that she knows hardly anybody who does not boast of having been a rather naughty child, and it seems to me that most of us are once more rather naughty children as we laugh with Boccaccio and Chaucer. Moralists are sometimes perturbed by the dubious company we lightheartedly keep in our laughter. They are nervous lest we should become over-tolerant of a fat man of so deplorable morals as Falstaff, or lest Dickens should reconcile us to rogues and rascals as companionable human beings. They are even revolted by scenes of drunkenness in fiction, as in Mr Kipling's story 'Brugglesmith,' though it seems to me that drunkenness by making a man a caricature of a man is one of the natural themes of comic writers. I fancy, however, that the fears of the

reformers are groundless. Comedy might possibly do harm to the young, if it made fun of the virtues, but I doubt if it ever assisted a youth on the road to ruin by making fun of the vices. I do not mean to suggest that comic literature can never be immoral. Comic literature, like solemn literature, may be disguised propaganda, and may be very immoral indeed. But the comedy of the great writers enables us to take part in mischiefs innocently, and to sit with Falstaff through some merry conversations at the Boar's Head without waking up in the morning on the hard bed of a prison-cell. Comedy is the nursery of grown-up men and women. Within its influence our imaginations become innocently subversive and rebellious against the strict order of our lives. It provides us with a holiday, an All Fools' Day, on which the rules are suspended, and the Lord of Misrule jests in the iron throne of Duty.

Hence I trust that the pessimists are wrong who say that the sense of humour is dwindling. They base their opinion to some extent, I understand, on the fact that the reading public is now largely a public of women, and on the supposed fact that women, though often wits, are seldom humorists. Women, they say, do not like Rabelais or Falstaff or 'Tristram Shandy' or the 'Pickwick Papers.' I, for one, am content that Rabelais, or even Sterne, should remain a man's writer. But in the sacred name of Jane Austen I will defend woman against the charge of humorlessness, as long as I live. Why, we cannot even name the twelve most amusing books of our own time without including the Somerville-Ross 'Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,' and Lady Russell's 'The Caravaners.' And, after all, even with women dictating what shall be published, have not Mr Barry Pain, and Mr Pett Ridge, Mr William Caine, and Prof. Stephen Leacock, besides all the other good authors I have mentioned, and a score more whom I might mention if my right wrist were not tired, made a reasonably good name in contemporary literature? It is lamentable, I agree, that certain unamusing writers, whom I would not mention for the world, should for the moment be so greatly over-estimated. But humour will survive them.

ROBERT LYND.