If ever the day should come when men and women shall be content to signal their perception of humour by the natural smile, and shall keep the laugh for its own unpremeditated act, shall laugh seldom, and simply, and not thrice at the same thing—­once for foolish surprise, and twice for tardy intelligence, and thrice to let it be known that they are amused—­then it may be time to persuade this laughing nation not to laugh so loud as it is wont in public.  The theatre audiences of louder-speaking nations laugh lower than ours.  The laugh that is chiefly a signal of the laugher’s sense of the ridiculous is necessarily loud; and it has the disadvantage of covering what we may perhaps wish to hear from the actors.  It is a public laugh, and no ordinary citizen is called upon for a public laugh.  He may laugh in public, but let it be with private laughter there.

Let us, if anything like a general reform be possible in these times of dispersion and of scattering, keep henceforth our sense of humour in a place better guarded, as something worth a measure of seclusion.  It should not loiter in wait for the alms of a joke in adventurous places.  For the sense of humour has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.  It has negative tasks of valid virtue; for example, the standing and waiting within call of tragedy itself, where, excluded, it may keep guard.

No reasonable man will aver that the Oriental manners are best.  This would be to deny Shakespeare as his comrades knew him, where the wit “out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine,” and to deny Ben Jonson’s “tart Aristophanes, neat Terence, witty Plautus,” and the rest.  Doubtless Greece determined the custom for all our Occident; but none the less might the modern world grow more sensible of the value of composure.

To none other of the several powers of our souls do we so give rein as to this of humour, and none other do we indulge with so little fastidiousness.  It is as though there were honour in governing the other senses, and honour in refusing to govern this.  It is as though we were ashamed of reason here, and shy of dignity, and suspicious of temperance, and diffident of moderation, and too eager to thrust forward that which loses nothing by seclusion.

HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO

The first time that Mercutio fell upon the English stage, there fell with him a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally, for English drama.  That manner of man—­Arlecchino, or Harlequin—­had outlived his playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and the Clown.  A little of Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little in the father of the Shrew, but the life of Mercutio in the one play, and of the subordinate Tranio in the other, is less quickly spent, less easily put out, than the smouldering of the old man.  Arlecchino frolics in and out of the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare, until he thus dies in his lightest, his brightest, his most vital shape.