The Real Humorist.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13957, 17 July 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

The Real Humorist.

WOMAN AND HER FACULTY OF ILLUSION. (By J. A. T. Lloyd.) In spite of suffragists, suffragettes, and all the other phases in the cres;endo of feminism, the foolish genera•ality that women are without humour flourishes with the truculence of accepted jjiatitude. An English platitude is very often a French. epigram badly translated, and the French, who/ should know ever so much better, deny j to the Frenchwoman what we ourselves deny to lier Anglo-Saxon sister. But it is unjust, for women are the real humorists and have always been so from that first comedian who provoked the farce of Adam's pitiful selfpity. One must not, however, search for their humour in the master-pieces of the world's literature. They can jlaim no Shakespeare, no Moliere; either is as unimaginable'as a feminine None the less, women are humorists and even creative humorists. v It is useless to search for their creations among the dusty shelves of libraries when you can find tlieni so easily in the suburbs of every capital in the world. Are you, indeed, quite certain that you yourself have not been, are not even now, one of their masterpieces of reserved comedy? In any case, you must at some time or other have observed a young man who is utterly the invention of. a girl but recently emancipated from the preparatory guardianship of dolls ? Even before that tentative stage of 17 she was a true comedian, with the power not merely of acting, but of projecting comedy. Take Gladys, for example, at the age of 12, ignorant as a kitten and about as scrupulous. Was she not more than a match for that undergraduate fumbling complaisantly for an elusive moustache? Under the play of those babv smiles the big, loosely jointed bundle became plastic as the finest clay in deftly-fashioning hands. The little artist is like that for years before she breaks out, or, as we too mildly express it, "conies out," like another Nero, bored by the long tedium of inaction . In the heart of the town Gladys could only have done her little part in sustaining to the last nuance of untruthfulness the great enmedie de moeurS. Her influence would have been a mere ether-ripple, so to sneak, in the dense atmosphere of feminine dissimulation. Under such urban modifications she would, of course, have remained a comedian to her iinger-tips, but she would have been a mere collaborator without masterpieces of her own. Chance planted her in the country, where were endless possibilities of free character play. There she took the undergraduate in hand in all seriousness and produced ail excellent character study. It was good work and silent work. No laughter or levity beyond the mere smile of timid admiration ever marred the fashioning of the undergraduate into the finished product. Wo arc what wc think wo are, and Gladys insinuated all kinds of deviations into our. friend's head, from a preposterous orchid in his buttonhole to a medal from the Royal Humane Society. Left to himself he would have probably become a fairly successful farmer with a taste for overbred British bulldogs. As it is, he is already an accepted authority on a multitude of matters ranging from Tariff Keform to impressionistic water-colours, and from aeroplanes to the protection of the middle classes. Like a marionette, he performs gladly for her, .a Jiving portrait of creative comedy. And gradually he becomes more or less the person that he has pleased Gladys to invent for them both. And all the .time, what is he in reality to Gladys? Does she whisper this even to herself? Probably not. It is doubtful that she would permit so inartistic a scrutiny into the inner workings of her comedy. a But there must be a safety valve even to the most noiseless dissimulation, and Gladys, who cannot tell the truth about the undergraduate even to herself, permits herself a little satisfaction by way of compensation for her almost superhuman reserve. After all, there must be a quid pro quo, even m the comedies of life, and her '"quid" is the absolute invention whom me undergraduate calls Gladys. Comedian as she is, that characterstudy is ouite beyond lier, but she •is able to spur the undergraduate into inventing it with the greatest ease. And so Gladys, the alert and amiable comedian, becomes easily and naturally a romantic heroine in whose eyes the good undergraduate reads all the long, vague, half-forgotten dreams of his youth. This, too, is good sound work, and Gladys smiles at it, just as she smiles at her own direct masterpiece, the undergraduate himself. . She will spoil neither by one crude word of truthfulness, for she is an artist, first and last and always. , But ask Gladys to' put this little comedy of hers on paper, and it will become something utterly remote for the urbane dissimulation of summer days. Briefly, humour is too intimately close to her whole conception of life for her to splash it down in ink. One may betray other people's secrets in whispers, but one does not shout aloud one's own. The undergraduate in print would come out very much what she has made him appear to himself, and the Gladys of fiction would remain the routine heroine that the good fellow has been prodded into evolving for himself. It is no wonder that Gladys was a little nuzzled by the apparent lack of dissimulation in her cousin, Sadie of Oskosh, who blurted out her transparent pleasantries with all the naivete of a male humorist. It is no wonder that Gladys preferred the infinitely more subtle '"Yes, mamma,", which, incidentally, Sadie herself is beginning to accept as the newest thrill of the oldest comedy in the world. For £>adie's exuberance w.is a mere adaptation to male requirements, a wilful, generous climbing-down to the hearty standard of obvious, unmasked humour, blie and the undergraduate will go their wav hand in hand, and always the man will bow before her romantic idealism and decry, with a kind, wise smile, her lack of humour.