s
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