Art. 4.-HUMOUR.

1. Memories of the Future, 1915-1972. Edited by Ronald A. Knox. Methuen, 1923.

2. Mystery at Geneva. By Rose Macaulay. Collins, 1923. 3. Over the Footlights. By Stephen Leacock. Lane, 1923. 4. The Inimitable Jeeves. By P. G. Wodehouse. Jenkins, 1923.

Ar the first glance, this seems to be an age of little enough humour. It was never easier to succeed in literature without the possession of any humour whatsoever. Among the younger authors, the god of the much too intellectual at the moment is a writer almost without a smile. The moderately intellectual also reserve their most dithyrambic praises for a novelist who has many gifts but not the gift of making us laugh. As for those who boast that they have no intellect at all, do they not struggle at the libraries and in the bookshops for the latest writings of a lady who, in her preoccupation with the more serious side of melodrama, has no time to waste on joking? A pessimist might conclude that, as the world gets older and more democratic, its sense of humour is gradually diminishing. We take seriously to-day books at which the 18th century would have laughed all the more on account of their air of solemnity. We are more willing, it seems at times, to be imposed upon than any previous generation.

Now, if humour serves any useful purpose besides that of cheering us up, it is that it helps to prevent men and women from being imposed upon. Aristophanes may have been mistaken in his attitude to some of the great men of his time; but at least he compelled great men and small alike to submit themselves to ordeal by laughter; and it is the test of the truly great man that he can survive that ordeal. Even the prince of comic writers could not laugh Euripides out of existence; the wit and the humorist, however, serve us by passing honest and base reputations equally through the fires of their laughter: there is no surer means of separating the one from the other. Molière in France, and, on a lower level, Addison in England, laughed at the little rather than at the great, but it has been claimed for

each of them that he served his age by subjecting its follies to ordeal by laughter. I do not know how far it is true that Molière actually decreased the sum of hypocrisy and quackery and intellectual charlatanry in the France of his time. I cannot help believing, however, that the world is a little less likely to fall a prey to the hypocrite and the charlatan as a result of his having written. It is possible that the battle between the false and the true must go on upon earth till the last man has breathed his last breath; but, at least, Molière by having written his comedies will have made it easier for the last man with his last breath to talk

common sense.

Sainte-Beuve declared of Molière that to love him

'is to have a guarantee against many a defect and many a fault; . . . it is to love common sense in others as well as in yourself; it is to be assured against the dangers of overestimating our common humanity, or of under-estimating it; it is to be cured for ever of fanaticism and intolerance.'

If humour in the great tradition deserves praise so high, how apprehensive we must feel if the taste for humour is declining, or even if it is declining relatively to the taste for the laughterless kinds of literature! I am not positive that there is any cause for such apprehension; but the pessimist will have it that the taste for humour is a taste of educated and simple people, and that never in history has the world been so full of halfeducated or nearly-educated people, and, therefore, of people who are afraid to be simple as it is at the present time. He points out, not only that the agelasts have triumphed in the circulating libraries, but that never before has it been possible to win a reputation in two continents with verse or prose that, when it means anything at all, means nonsense and means it seriously. It is a remarkable fact that even men of genius and men of taste are among the readers who are imposed upon nowadays by poetry and prose that do not touch the heart at all and that scarcely touch the mind, save as puzzles. Critics for whom one has very great respect are constantly praising, and praising with superlatives, authors for whom one has very little respect. This is almost as alarming a comment on the times as it would

have been if, in the eighteen-nineties, Mr Beerbohm had secretly admired the verse, say, of Enoch Soames.

There is still plenty of disparagement in the world of letters, but a good writer is as likely to be the object of the disparagement as a pretentious or an absurd one. Some people say that what has happened is that critics have become so frightened of missing a new star that they hail as a star every match-light in the dark night of our time. Of old, genius of a novel kind had to struggle for the notice of a derisive world. In these days, mediocrity of a novel kind finds the world struggling to crown it as genius almost as soon as it is able to write a sentence with or without a verb in it.

A more likely explanation seems to me to be that, in the arts as in politics, many of the old standards have disappeared in recent years, and thousands of people are uncertain under what banner they are serving or ought to serve. In their pathetic helplessness, they will rally to any banner that is held up by a man who looks sufficiently self-confident. It is one of the functions of wit and humour in such circumstances to put selfconfidence to the severest tests and to make it justify itself in the courts of laughter. Be sure that the men at whom Molière and Pope laughed were self-confident men. It was their very self-confidence to which the common sense of Molière and the common sense of Pope held up the slightly distorting mirror of comedy. There is no other remedy against imposture except time.

Need we, however, fall in with all the melancholy conclusions of the pessimists in regard to humour and the present age? Humorless literature may be more popular than humorous literature for the moment, and there may be no one living who has built up a fame comparable to Molière's on humour alone. But just as, a few years ago, when everybody was saying that poetry was dead, poetry under the charming auspices of Mr Edward Marsh suddenly proved itself to be wonderfully alive, so in the turning of a wrist the pessimist who complains of the dearth of humour may find himself invited to look out of the window and be confronted with the spectacle of hitherto unsuspected regiments of laughter. After all, most of the accepted writers of our time are humorists, though it may not be to their Vol. 241.-No. 478.

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humour that they have owed their greatest triumphs. Without humour, Mr Hardy and even Mr Conrad would lack an essential element of their genius. Without humour, Mr Wells would have been merely a prophet and Mr Bennett merely a realist. I do not think that 'Mr Polly' on its first publication achieved a world-wide success comparable to that of Mr Britling Sees it Through' or 'The Outline of History'; but Mr Wells now apparently agrees with many of his ablest critics that it is his masterpiece. As for Mr Bennett, if you were asked to choose his three best books, you would have to find room among them for 'The Card.' Sir James Barrie, perhaps, is alone among living writers in owing the greater part of his immense fame to the gift of humour. Mr Shaw and Mr Kipling would never have attained their present thrones if they had not been propagandists as well as humorists; but it seems likely that it will be as humorists and not as propagandists that posterity will be interested in them. Mr Belloc and Mr Chesterton, again, are propagandists and humorists in whom humour is the immortal part. It might be more difficult to discover much humour in the work of Mr Galsworthy or of Mr Masefield, but Mr Galsworthy would not be so fine a writer if it were not for a certain dry irony in his work. These, however, are writers who have already, as we say, 'arrived.' It is not against the older generation of writers but against the younger generation that the pessimist brings the charge of humorlessness. The younger generation of humorous writers is there, however, if only the younger generation of readers would realise how much more worth reading they are than their humorless rivals. Miss Rose Macaulay and Mr Ronald Knox, for instance, both subject the new age to the necessary ordeal by laughter. There may, for all I know, be the seed of something valuable to mankind in psycho-analysis and cubism and free verse and other strange novelties of opinion and practice that have made a noise in the world in the present century; but there has been enough successful charlatanry associated with them to call for a humorist to produce his testing mirror and restore the standards of common sense. Miss Macaulay's laughter is delightful because it brings the high spirits as of

Nature herself into the darkened rooms of solemn and perilous pretence. Her comedy may not have the preciseness of satire, but it has the lightness of an April wind that goes dancing here and there and brings health and exhilaration wherever it goes. Not that her laughter is without bitterness. She, more than most writers, seems to have longed that the world could have remained young and at play and at peace, and she has an angry sense of the tragedy that underlies the follies and futilities on which she expends her wit and humour. In the last analysis, indeed, it is not the cheap Press or psycho-analysis or any contemporary phenomenon that she laughs at, but the spectacle of the lives of men and women, of whom she clearly believes that, 'the more they change, the more they remain the same.' Even so. her attitude is never that of the superior person. She obviously wishes that all these people she laughs at were young and happy and sane or, if old, as happy and sane as those of the clever young who can discuss all things in heaven and on earth with freedom, fairness, and good humour. 'Mystery at Geneva' is one of the slightest of her works, and, indeed, is a mere jeu d'esprit compared with so full and human a book as 'Dangerous Ages.' But how pleasant it is to find the world of international distrusts and self-importances invaded by the spirit of irresponsible farce and good-natured derision! There are times at which one wonders whether Miss Macaulay would not go still further if she would not go quite so fast. But there is never a time when one doubts that she is helping, above most of her contemporaries, to 'assure' her generation' against the dangers of over-estimating our common humanity or of under-estimating it' and to cure it of 'fanaticism and intolerance.'

Mr Ronald Knox is a brilliant satirist who, in his fiction, is more concerned with his generation than with our common humanity. In Memories of the Future' he keeps his affections for his dedication; and, for the rest of the book, confines his vision to a world almost exclusively inhabited by the faddists. I do not think any one else has written a book so full of amusing and accusing mockery of the fashions of the hour. He burlesques the new kind of girl, the new kind of poetry,