hostile but hilarious. The Athenians did not throng out upon that sunny hillside to enjoy the misfortunes of others, but to enjoy laughter. And they were as ready to laugh when the comedian turned his ridicule upon them as when he made himself ridiculous for their pleasure. It is still remembered how Socrates got up in his seat to make more comic the caricature of him which Aristophanes was presenting upon the stage, and I believe that incident is typical of the exuberant humor of those best days of the world.

There must have been some opposition even in Plato's mind, to the idea that comic laughter is always derisive. For in the "Symposium" he represents Aristophanes as making a distinction between the word yeλoîos, which is elsewhere Plato's name for the ridiculous, and Kaтayéλaσтоs, or as we might say, the laughable and the laugh-downable. And at the end of the "Symposium," when everybody else is drunk or asleep or gone home, and the cocks are beginning to crow, Socrates is still sitting there discoursing, and he is insisting to Aristophanes and Agathon that "the genius of comedy is the same as that of tragedy," to which statement they are compelled to assent because they are "sleepy and do not quite understand his meaning." At so great a distance we can hardly pretend to understand his meaning, either, but we can believe it involved the idea that imaginative sympathy as well as corrective hostility plays its part in the process of comic enjoyment.

In view of these facts, it is not surprising that Aris

totle's writings, besides containing the derision theory of Plato, should contain also the other great historic theory—that laughter is caused by a disappointment of the person who laughs. In his "Rhetoric," which is a more practical book than the "Poetics," a book devoted to showing people how to talk effectively in the law-courts, Aristotle speaks entirely in the language of this theory. He does what every one else has done who has ever attempted to tell any one how to make people laugh-he identifies a joke with a deceived expectation. In illustration he quotes a line of poetry which would be funny in English, too, if we wore sandals and placed our words in the same order that the Greeks do.

"He proceeded, wearing under his feet-chilblains!"

Aristotle might have observed how in this very example he was uniting a disappointment of the reader's temporary expectation with a satisfaction of his chronic hunger for the misfortunes of others. And so he might have combined Plato's definition of the comic with his own definition of a joke, and evolved a theory of humor that would have saved his successors a great deal of trouble. He would have given a real meaning to Plato's assertion that comic experience is a kind of "mixture." And that "the misfortune of others" is not an indispensable part of this mixture would soon have been evident to him-for he did actually describe a joke in which the affirmative value is not misfortune, but a simple recognition of the truth.

It was a pun made by Isocrates upon the word ȧpxý, which means both sovereignty and beginning. Isocrates said that the sovereignty of the Athenians (over the sea and the surrounding peoples) was the beginning of their troubles. And Aristotle observed that we enjoy this joke because "that is stated which we did not expect, and we acknowledge it to be true."

Thus the Greek philosophers were groping toward a real understanding of the complexities of the comic. But they did not labor long enough, and the problem was left at loose ends by them, as it has been by the moderns. There was a satisfaction theory, a disappointment theory, and a vague apprehension of the twofold character of jokes.

CHAPTER II

THE AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE

CICERO was a brilliant mocker, and he said in his dialogue "De Oratore" that it is a part of the orator's business to raise a laugh, because it "lessens, confounds, hampers, frightens, and confutes the opponent." He defined the province of the ridiculous, in accordance with Aristotle's theory, as "a certain meanness and deformity," and he enjoyed most easily, it seems, the jokes that are jokes on somebody. I can imagine the sly and urbane masculine relish with which he used to repeat that response of a certain Sicilian to some one who was lamenting because his wife had hanged herself upon a fig-tree. "My dear," he said, "I wish you would give me some slips of that same tree that I may graft them in my garden!”

But Cicero was also a genial friend, and he knew quite well that there are other kinds of humorous laughter than this. He quoted beside it the little remark of Marcus Lepidus, who stretched himself out on the grass with a sigh and said, "I wish this was working!"-a remark which while dismaying our sense of rationality and the potential in the way of wishes, yet gives an extreme pleasure of expression to our own indolence, and makes us admire Lepidus with a pious and companionable love. Thus it was natural that

Cicero should revive also the other opinion of the Greeks, and say that "the most eminent kind of the ridiculous is that in which we expect to hear one thing and another is said."

Cicero was not content, however, to leave these two ideas unrelated to each other, as Aristotle had; he did propose a plan by which they might be reconciled. We always laugh at some one, he said, but in the cases where laughter arises from a deceived expectation, "our mistake makes us laugh at ourselves." That is the way in which genial humor is still usually explained by those who insist that all laughter is but a modified contempt; it makes out of the derision theory something that at least pretends to be a complete explanation.

Aside from originating that commodious idea, Cicero added nothing to Aristotle's solution of the problem of the comic, except the valuable opinion that Aristotle did not solve it.

"What a laugh is," he said, "by what means it is raised, wherein it consists, in what manner it bursts out, and is so suddenly discharged, that though we were willing, it is out of our power to stifle it, and in what manner it all at once takes possession of our sides, of our mouth, our veins, our look, our eyes, let Democritus explain all these particulars; they are not to my present purpose, and if they were I should not at all be ashamed to say that I do not know them; for even they who pretend to account for them know nothing of the matter."

Quintilian followed Cicero in this as in most of his opinions. His book on the "Institutes of the Orator"