they seem really satisfied to dwell forever in the false fronts of decorum. I suppose they cannot come down to the face of reality even alone in the bathtub. And these people are resentful of the humor that reveals, because it shakes their confidence and frightens them. They call it "levity," and wish to have it segregated and rendered irrelevant, confined to the "funny page," or the "comic paper," included in parentheses, or at least stigmatized with an exclamation-point, or a pointed voice, or something else to indicate that it is not to be taken seriously or allowed to spread. Stanton called it "levity" when Abraham Lincoln endeavored to bring a little of the light of sagacious laughter into those stern meetings of the war cabinet.

People who manifest this asperity or uncouth stupor at the play of humor through the serious enterprises of life must be either heavy of interest, so that they cannot shift within the time required from some end they were bent upon, to the new and perhaps greater one, or else they are shallow and timorous and unaccustomed to dwell with these greater ends-the passions and realities-even in their own hearts. A man whose interest is agile, and whose converse with life and death is mature, does not have to have a bell rung and a flag put up every time anything is to be taken humorously. He does not regard humor as an interlude. He is continually in hope that a bit of the framework will break back and something real look through the stucco front of our culture, and when not hoping that it will, he is contriving that it shall.

For although he may be too fond of his own comfort to attack the sham and superficialities of man with anger and riot, he could not quite endure them if they were not continually shot through with humorous acknowledgments to the source and reality of life. To him seriousness in these weak exploits and waterish matters of conversation and business is the interlude, and humor the real engagement. A true joke is a reverence that we do to nature, an expiation for having so denied and betrayed her in our lives. It is at once a glad acceptance of failure in the puny enterprise upon which our mind is bent and a grateful acknowledgment of some greater good that she was holding out in her hands.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HUMOR OF QUANTITY

SCIENCE is never so proudly happy as when it has got rid of qualities, and reduced all the enjoyable glories of this world to mere quantity and number. And we need not be surprised if our own hypothesis takes on a persuasive simplicity when we apply it to the humor that arises, and the pointed jokes that are created, by a manipulation of the mere quantity or degree of things. One need but magnify a subject plausibly enough to carry along the attention, and yet extremely enough to make belief or imagination impossible, and no matter what he is talking about-it need not be a fish that he has caught-if his hearers are in a state of playful rapport with him, their disappointment will be humorous. And one need but speak with a winning and believable manner words which are so slight and inadequate to the facts as to be of no sense or credibility whatever, and the same result will follow. We call the latter process, the humor of understatement, irony; and the humor of overstatement we call exaggeration. They are forms of humor which require no very brainy ingenuity, but only a certain agility of imagination, in their creators; and they are forms which reveal more simply than any others the perfect essence of what humor is.

It is not mere magnitude or braggadocio at which we laugh, nor is it minuteness or mere modesty of speech. Neither of these things begets humorous laughter until it goes to the point of impracticability. We laugh not at the much, but the too much, and not at the little, but the too little. We laugh, that is, in the course of a simple quantitative variation that is playful, exactly at the point where we should, if we did not laugh, experience a real balk or bewilderment of mind.

Imagine a person who has no sense of humor-and has not yet learned to relax and let pass when he sees others laughing-confronted with one of Rabelais's accounts of a drinking-bout or a light meal of victuals. Imagine him attending to Mark Twain's story of a night's effort to find his way back to bed in the dark. He will meet nothing witty here, nothing ingenious, sly, double-turned, paradoxical, or even unusual. Every inch of that night's journey he could duplicate out of his own personal recollection. And yet those inches are so wantonly multiplied, and their possibilities swelled out and extended, that by the time he reaches the conclusion-"I glanced furtively at my pedometer and found I had made 47 miles, but I did not care, for I had come out for a pedestrian tour anyway"what can he do, this person who is without benefit of humor, but cry out in a kind of weak prayerful profanity: "O Lord, this is too much!" In these cries of the unprotected is revealed the exact nature of the thing they lack.

Mark Twain would have been at home among the Gargantuans. He and Rabelais both took an almost pathological delight in mere quantity and dimension. And yet we can find no more childlike example of the humor of understatement than that chapter of the "Pantagruellian Prognostications" beginning: "This year the stone-blind shall see but very little; the deaf shall hear but scurvily; the dumb shall not speak very plain; the rich shall be in somewhat a better case than the poor. . . ." And there is hardly a more celebrated ironic joke in history than Mark Twain's message from London at the time when he was reported dead in the New York newspapers-"The reports of my death are grossly exaggerated." The reason why those eight words became immortal, is that in the first place they are so natural and familiar in their general form as to tempt our confidence, and yet in the second place they are so related to the particular situation as to be concisely and absolutely inadequate, and yet again in the third place they are made adequate— their humor acquires a point-through the fact that Mark Twain must have been alive to utter them. So much is contained in so brief an experience. But the humorous heart of that experience was his saying too little plausibly a thing at which we laughed for the same essential reason that we so often laugh at his plausible sayings of too much. Pointed and raised to a high point of distinction, it is the same kind of humor as that of the cheery passer who remarks that "It looks like rain" when the clouds have burst and the