f
ridicule is the most dominant of our feelings, that which controls us in
most things and with the most strength. Because of this fear one does
"what one would not do for the sake of justice, scrupulousness, honor,
or good will;" one submits to an infinite number of obligations which
morality would not dare to prescribe and which are not included in the
laws. "Conscience and the written laws," says A. Michiels, "form two
lines of ramparts against evil, the ludicrous is the third line of
defense, it stops, brands, and condemns the little misdeeds which the
guards have allowed to pass."

Laughter is thus the great censor of vices, it spares none, it does not
even grant indulgence to the slightest imperfections, of whatever nature
they be. This mission, which M. Michiels attributes to laughter,
granting that it is fulfilled, instead of taking its place in the
natural or providential order of things, does it not answer simply to
those demands, whether well founded or not, which society makes upon
each of us? M. Bergson admits this, justly enough, it appears, when he
defines laughter as a social bromide. But then it is no longer mere
imperfection in general, it is not even immorality, properly speaking;
it is merely unsociability, well or badly understood, which laughter
corrects. More precisely, it is a special unsociability, one which
escapes all other penalties, which it is the function of laughter to
reach. What can this unsociability be? It is the self-love of each one
of us in so far as it has anything disagreeable to others in it, an
abstraction of every injurious or hateful element. It is the harmless
self-love, slight, powerless, which one does not fear but one scorns,
yet for all that does not pardon but on the contrary pitilessly pursues,
wounds, and galls. Self-love thus defined is vanity, and what is called
the moral correction administered by laughter is the wound to self-love.
"The specific remedy for vanity," says M. Bergson, "is laughter, and the
essentially ridiculous is vanity."

One sees in what sense laughter is a "correction." Whether one considers
the jests uttered, the feelings of the jester, or of him at whom one
jests, laughter appears from the point of view of morality as a
correction most often undeserved, unjust--or at least disproportionate
to the fault--pitiless, and cruel.

In fact, the self-love at which one laughs is, as we have said,
harmless. Besides it is often a natural failing, a we