which alone could cause their humorous recoil, and we know it, and only a very active humorous instinct of our own can make us enjoy that in their presence which we might well have enjoyed if they were away. Men are not so extremely avid of sudden glory, but they have a sensitive distaste for the sudden descent from glory, and this modest trait has helped much to make Hobbes's erroneous theory live after him.

We are almost as timid as we are belligerent by hereditary nature. And although our timid impulses find freer vent in the conditions of modern life than our belligerent ones, still they too are repressed and dammed up by culture and opinion, and will seek a vent with relief if occasion offers. No doubt there are people who possess a more acute military fervor than I do, but when I first heard of that brave soldier who was always to be found where the bullets are thickest-in the ammunition wagon-I can well remember how the fine march of heroic meaning and emotion was suddenly exploded, and there flowed in to fill up the vacuum another meaning and a feeling of most happy and concrete relief. It would be folly to tell me that I was scorning the soldier. I was with him in the ammunition wagon. And there are others, I venture to believe, who, no matter how heroically they may behave in the circumstances where social opinion demands it, will gladly avail themselves of the little opportunity that a joke offers to crawl into a hole and behave naturally.

CHAPTER VI

HUMOR AND SEXUALITY

It seems especially surprising that any one should have thought to identify humor with hostile and egoistic emotion, when another passion of our nature stands at least equal to these in supplying the joy ends of the most popular jokes, and that is the passion of sex. Just as Hobbes long ago drew the attention of cultivated men to that fine heritage of the bloody and barbaric in their bosoms, Sigmund Freud now compels them to confess that their bodies are great surging tanks full of lust and suppressed carnal hungers, which they draw up into their minds and transform into this strong energy of interest that plays forth upon a variety of things, but never exhausts its source. We are always ready to be happy in a taste of those poignant parts of life that for life's sake we conceal, and the swift sharp force with which these imprisoned hungers will seize upon any least gap or stumbling of speech or idea, to rush in and declare that they have been implied, is the one thing upon which every humorist in every company can rely. He can so fully and so fatuously rely upon it, that we shall have to retract here the statement that ridicule is the easiest kind of joke to create. The easiest kind of joke to create is one in which there is no crux or quality what

ever in the negation-no interesting playful recoilbut just a sniggering intimation that there might be, and that if there were, some sexual act or exhibition might come in to take the place of what had been intended. One need say nothing indeed, but merely dwell with a persistent eye, as Uncle Toby does in "Tristram Shandy," upon some feature of the chimneypiece, in order to get a witless laugh out of people who are all filled up with unsatisfied curiosity as to things of similar conformation. The Anglo-Saxons are more commonly in this condition, I think, than the southern races of Europe, and it is only among them and the Germans that the humor of the naughty kitten variety has enjoyed a very high popularity. The furtive smirk is absent from a Frenchman's enjoyment of sex wit, and playful humor the more present. Rabelais swings open the doors and marches in like an orphan giant, where Sterne sits lurking at a peephole in fear of his parents. And people of Rabelaisian license, people who feel free at least to experience in reality the things that they desire to experience, are capable of a more fastidiously humorous taste, as well as a more playful pleasure in sexual jokes, than people who are too thirsty for implications. For them it remains to hold up some standard of the real art of humor even upon this topic, and not rush like a flock of spinster hens with indiscriminate cackling after the least flicker of a sexual sensation.

There is no doubt that a great deal of our pleasure in the most casual humor is flavored with an emotion

from the sphere of sex-our conscious attention being at play with the negative, while our unconscious takes its fill of a positive satisfaction we do not attend to. Persons of very maidenly mind will often laugh loudly at a break in meaning which without its sexual implication would hardly provoke a smile, and yet if that implication were consciously apprehended would make them blush and not laugh at all. Freud likes to tell us that all the really hilarious satisfactions in humor, even those of the sudden glory kind, can be induced by his science of psychoanalysis to come in and declare themselves fundamentally sexual. But this does not seem very generous toward the companionable variety of nature. Like the statement of Hobbes, instead of defining the general character of humor, it seems to define the sphere of his paramount interest in it. Freud has made himself a wise and wonderful scientist of sex, and has given a gift of illumination to the world not second to that which Hobbes gave, and so we can forgive him if he somewhat overstrains the generalization, and tends to carry us back to a contemplation of oneness almost as bad as that of the sickly mystics whom he knows how to cure. He has at least lifted a great incubus of shame from the shoulders of humanity, and given the boon of candor to a poor animal desperately endeavoring to become a man.

A little girl who was just waking to the existence of a problem in these matters composed a love-story which proceeded somewhat as follows: "Once upon a

time there was a boy and girl who loved each other, and they wanted to get married, but they couldn't afford it, so they decided to be good until he could earn some money. Well, on his way home, he found a purse containing a million dollars, and they got married, and the next day they had twins, which proves that virtue brings its own reward."

We share, of course, the conviction of this author that virtue brings its own reward-we have known at least that it gets none from any other source and we feel the same wonderful law of necessity by which the hero and heroine of every tale that is told must be good. We are naturally somewhat taken aback, therefore, to learn in the same words in which we are being told of the goodness of these two, that they were not good. It is a shock to our sensibilities, but then, after all, we are not sorry-we have been good ourselves, or tried to, and that is enough! And so our laughter is a little more joyful than seems appropriate to the author even in so extraordinary a triumph of what is right. It is a joy of released impulse from the unconscious, blowing up from that cavern to swell the sails of a laugh that is already on its way. That is the fact which Freud has so well compelled us to understand.