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 yo