least a simple and not illogical description of the point of their agreement.

Tickling is unpleasant when we "take it seriously." And for that reason to some sober adults it is always unpleasant, and even merry children cannot enjoy tickling or respond with laughter unless they are distinctly in a mood of play. For that reason also, even where the skin is sensitive enough, we cannot very well enjoy tickling ourselves. We cannot regard our own attacks as playful. And they are not playfulfor the essence of this fighting game, if not perhaps in some degree the essence of all play, is social. But when we are attacked by a playmate, toward whom we are "in fun,” we find at just those points where we should experience a disagreeable sensation if we were serious, the experience of a peculiar and pleasant emotion. It is a true description of this fact to say that those otherwise unpleasant contacts, and those otherwise intolerable dismays and disappointments, awaken through our central nervous systems in the state of play, an instinctive laughter whose interior feeling we enjoy. And it is an explanation at least of the biological development of such laughter, to say that without it this most useful form of play could never have acquired its peculiar character-the character of mortal combat without suffering.

In common English speech we recognize this critical position of the humorous instinct in the mind's mechanics, for we are agreed now upon the word funny as a generic name for all the situations which arouse it.

And funny stands in a mid-position between play and perplexity. It appears that some northern cousin of the Gaelic word for pleasure, fonn, was so full of pure and fair delight that in the seventeenth century it was simply ravished and carried away home by these literary English-who have always been word-robbers of the most delicate and voluptuous taste and there it absorbed into its meaning, as fun, all that there is of affirmative enjoyment in the mood of play. But this enjoyment is so evidently related by proximity and dependence to a sense of humor, that within another century the word funny was found to be a name for the situations in which that instinct is appealed to. And these situations, again, are so clearly of a baffling or a lightly troubling nature, that this same word funny is now in another century employed to describe things in sober life that perplex us, and give pause, not too distressing, to our serious wills.

The development of language has thus been wiser in our time than any philosopher. But once long ago the great unharnessed eye of Rabelais perceived and named this same connection of qualities. It was in his celebration of Pantagruelism, "which you know," he said, “is a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune." That was a description of humor in its first as well as its last essence. And Rabelais is the sovereign of the world's humor, exactly because all his jests and vagaries are conceived, born, and bred to flourish in their native home and atmosphere, the attitude of play. With that gigantic mental and

poetic equipment which we attribute besides only to Plato and Shakespeare, this genius of exuberance simply romped and gambolled all over the universe. It is well that he should speak the last word here.

CHAPTER III

ELEMENTARY HUMOR

PLAY, then, is a preliminary or divertive surfacelife in which success is fun, but failure funny. And it is natural enough, and will seem entirely proper to those who have ever tasted the dregs of hard work and deep passion, that we revert to this elysian condition very frequently in the midst of our serious lives. There may be a tincture of it in the most solemn efforts.

The happy are they
Whose work is play.

And it seems certain that in any just and genially composed society a good many people will be able to be happy a good deal of the time, and there will be at least a hearty effort toward the propagation of those "jolly fools of ease and leisure," who, like Rabelais himself, could be happy all the time if they did not have to settle the account.

Even in our own fallen state of moral bondage and pecuniary anxiety there is a development of the negative or defensive side of playful happiness, the sense of humor, which alters the entire color of our lives. It goes with us into the most severe and head-weary

ing and humdrum pursuits, protecting us with its shield of fine amusement against what would otherwise be a continual series of trivial but irritating stings of disappointment. It enables us to be experimental and persistent in our efforts and perceptions. It makes our impulses elastic. It is a very inward indispensable little shock-absorber-an instinct, as we might call it, for making the best of a bad thing.

For in every case in which a man laughs humorously there is an element which, if his sensitivity were sufficiently exaggerated, would contain the possibility of tears. He is a man who has suffered or failed of something. And although in the humor of art he usually arrives at something else, and that often better than he had expected, in the humor of every-day life he frequently arrives nowhere at all. And the true agility of his comic sense is proven, not in the cleverness with which he detects the point of pleasure in a jocular confection, but in the alert twinkle of welcome with which he greets any genuine and definite void appearing where a pleasure was expected. When a man intends to drive a tack into the carpet, and drives his thumb in instead, he may be said to have failed of a pleasure, and if he is not too remote from the mood of play, and did not intend to drive the tack in too far, it should be possible for him to smile. It was upon such occasions at least that nature intended him to smile. For her purpose in making humor accessible to him in sober life was to preserve his digestion, and defend the ears and lives of his immediate family, no