THE DISUSE OF LAUGHTER IN SOCIETY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XX, Issue X, 5 March 1898, Page 298

THE DISUSE OF LAUGHTER IN SOCIETY.

Has laughter gone out ? asks Sir Lewis Morris in an article in the ‘Forum’ for November. Are we never to have the honest guffaw—the loud laugh, which, as the poet says, bespeaks the vacant mind? Is this really a true account of the rationale of cachinnation? If so, probably it has gone out, at any rate in polite circles. Because we are nothing now, if we are not cultured and refined; and to be vulgar and to be ignorant are worse offences than any more explicitly forbidden in the decalogue. And’- yet it almost seems a pity too. It is not well, surely, to lose any innocent, and happily, infectious expression of pleasure in a world so bedeviled as ours. Alas, I fear there is no doubt that the power or irrepressible laughter is the gift of youth, and youth only, whether in nations or in individuals. Passing the drawing-room door the other afternoon I could hear inside peal after peal of silvery, girlish laughter. It was Miss Ethel, who was entertaining her school friends with tea and bread and butter and jokes. That is the time of life for laughter. I dare say the jokes would not have made me smile. But when the springtide is blossoming, and the sap is running upward in the trees, and the vernal woods are bursting into leaf and echoing with song, and, wherever you look, all is verdure and joy, almost anything can move quick laughter. Or there is an earlier stage, when baby is being tickled by mamma and crows with delight. Or, though this, it is true, is often silent, there is that most beautiful of all sights—the little blue-eyed boy or girl, who lies in the white cot at dawn and smiles, and ripples with laughter at some innocent, childish thought. It is good to hear happy laughter, it is good to watch these baby smiles.

But laughter can be not only grotesque, but very dreadful as well. To hear a maniac laugh is one of the most terrible experiences. To heer a hundred laugh, as one does in nearing the Isola dei Pazzi at Venice, is a foretaste of the lower regions. Farther on in the downward path of life, when the end is very near, the failure of the mind is often proclaimed by violent laughter. The old man is back again in the scenes of boyhood, and is going over in a dream the days of long ago. I remember well, lying awake in London lodgings, through an otherwise still June night, unable to sleep for the loud, incessant laughter pealing from the room above, where the old man of the house lay dying. When it ended, just before dawn, the old life ended with it; and in the morning his daughter came in to announce the fact and to express the hope that I had not been much disturbed. The old man, she assured me, had been in no pain, but had been going over his boyish days again; the old brothers, long years dead and forgotten, were with him; and they were cricketing, or gathering apples, or swingng, or swimming together across the old brook, all that sleepless night. One was glad it was so; but the laughter had an awful sound.