“No, no, go right ahead.”

“Well, he said to the clerk, ’I want a room that looks out over the sea’—­but perhaps—­”

Now the sensible thing to do is to stop the narrator right at this point.  Say to him quietly and firmly, “Yes, I have heard that story.  I always liked it ever since it came out in Tit Bits in 1878, and I read it every time I see it.  Go on and tell it to me and I’ll sit back with my eyes closed and enjoy it.”

No doubt the story-telling habit owes much to the fact that ordinary people, quite unconsciously, rate humour very low:  I mean, they underestimate the difficulty of “making humour.”  It would never occur to them that the thing is hard, meritorious and dignified.  Because the result is gay and light, they think the process must be.  Few people would realise that it is much harder to write one of Owen Seaman’s “funny” poems in Punch than to write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermons.  Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a greater work than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Charles Dickens’s creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race—­I say it in all seriousness—­than Cardinal Newman’s Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom.  Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world.  Dickens gave it.

But the deep background that lies behind and beyond what we call humour is revealed only to the few who, by instinct or by effort, have given thought to it.  The world’s humour, in its best and greatest sense, is perhaps the highest product of our civilisation.  One thinks here not of the mere spasmodic effects of the comic artist or the blackface expert of the vaudeville show, but of the really great humour which, once or twice in a generation at best, illuminates and elevates our literature.  It is no longer dependent upon the mere trick and quibble of words, or the odd and meaningless incongruities in things that strike us as “funny.”  Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself:  the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness to-morrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels of their childhood.  And here, in its larger aspect, humour is blended with pathos till the two are one, and represent, as they have in every age, the mingled heritage of tears and laughter that is our lot on earth.

END