[It seemed advisable to give here[122] some views on laughter, most of which were also held by Mr. R*ss*ll, though no written expression of his views has yet been found. In a review[123] of M. Bergson’s book on Laughter,[124] Mr. Russell has remarked:

“It has long been recognized by publishers that everybody desires to be a perfect lady or gentleman (as the case may be); to this fact we owe the constant stream of etiquette-books. But if there is one thing which people desire even more, it is to have a faultless sense of humour. Yet so far as I know, there is no book called ‘Jokes without Tears, by Mr. McQuedy.’ This extraordinary lacuna has now been filled. Those to whom laughter has hitherto been an unintelligible vagary, in which one must join, though one could never tell when it would break out, need only study M. Bergson’s book to acquire the finest flower of Parisian wit. By observing a very simple formula they will know infallibly what is funny and what is not; if they sometimes surprise their unlearned friends, they have only to mention their authority in order to silence doubt. ‘The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body,’ says M. Bergson, ‘are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.’ When an elderly gentleman slips on a piece of orange-peel and falls, we laugh, because his body follows the laws of dynamics instead of a human purpose. When a man falls from a scaffolding and breaks his neck on the pavement, we presumably laugh even more, since the movement is even more completely mechanical. When the clown makes a bad joke for the first time, we keep our countenance, but at the fifth repetition we smile, and at the tenth we roar with laughter, because we begin to feel him a mere automaton. We laugh at MoliÈre’s misers, misanthropists and hypocrites, because they are mere types mechanically dominated by a master impulse. Presumably we laugh at Balzac’s characters for the same reason; and presumably we never smile at Falstaff, because he is individual throughout.”

The review concludes with the reflection that “it would seem to be impossible to find any such formula as M. Bergson seeks. Every formula treats what is living as if it were mechanical, and is therefore by his own rule a fitting object of laughter.” Now, this undoubtedly true conclusion has been obtained, as is readily seen, by a vicious-circle fallacy which Mr. R*ss*ll would hardly have committed.—Ed.]

CHAPTER XLIII