its_ in 1878, and I read it every time
I see it. Go on and tell it to me and I'll sit back with
my eyes closed and enjoy it."

No doubt the story-telling habit owes much to the fact
that ordinary people, quite unconsciously, rate humour
very low: I mean, they underestimate the difficulty of
"making humour." It would never occur to them that the
thing is hard, meritorious and dignified. Because the
result is gay and light, they think the process must be.
Few people would realise that it is much harder to write
one of Owen Seaman's "funny" poems in _Punch_ than to
write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermons. Mark
Twain's _Huckleberry Finn_ is a greater work than Kant's
_Critique of Pure Reason_, and Charles Dickens's creation
of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human
race--I say it in all seriousness--than Cardinal Newman's
_Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom_. Newman
only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world.
Dickens gave it.

But the deep background that lies behind and beyond what
we call humour is revealed only to the few who, by instinct
or by effort, have given thought to it. The world's
humour, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the
highest product of our civilisation. One thinks here not
of the mere spasmodic effects of the comic artist or the
blackface expert of the vaudeville show, but of the really
great humour which, once or twice in a generation at
best, illuminates and elevates our literature. It is no
longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words,
or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that
strike us as "funny." Its basis lies in the deeper
contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity
between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager
and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness
to-morrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that
are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as
we look back upon the course that has been traversed we
pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old
age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry
quarrels of their childhood. And here, in its larger
aspect, humour is blended with pathos till the two are
one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled
heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.

END

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