and because of it we emulate them.  We are influenced, not by the man who always wants to preach a sermon at us, but by the one with whom we go for a holiday.  Our history-makers were great, joyous men, of fine spirit, fine imagination, fine sensibility, and fine humour.  They loved life; they loved their fellow man; they loved all the beautiful, brave things of earth.  When you know them you can picture them scaling high mountains and singing from the summits, or boating on fine rivers in the sunlight, or walking about in the dawn, to the music of Creation, evolving the philosophy of revolutions and building beautiful worlds.  You get no hint of this from the absurd propagandist play, yet this is what the heart of man craves.  When he does not get it, he cannot explain what he wants; but he knows what he does not want, and he goes away and keeps his distance.  The play has missed fire, and the playwright and his hero are ridiculous.  Let us understand one thing:  if we want to make men dutiful we must make them joyous.

IV

It is because we must talk of grave things that we must preserve our gaiety; otherwise we could not preserve our balance.  By some freak of nature, the average man strikes attitudes as readily as the average boy whistles.  We know how the poseur works mischief to every cause, and we can see the poseur on every side.  In politics, he has made the platform contemptible, which is a danger to the nation, needing the right use of platform; in literature—­well, we all know bourgeois, but who has done justice to the artist who gets on a platform to talk about the bourgeois?—­in religion, the poseur is more likely to make agnostics than all the Rationalist Press; and the agnostic poseur in turn is very funny.  Now all these are an affliction, a collection of absurdities of which we must cure the nation.  If we cannot cure the nation of absurdity we cannot set her free.  Let it be our rule to combine gaiety with gravity and we will acquire a saving sense of proportion.  Only the solemn man is dull; the serious man has a natural fund of gaiety:  we need only be natural to bring back joy to serious endeavour.  Then we shall begin to move.  Let us remember a revolution will surely fail when its leaders have no sense of humour.

V

But our humour will not be a saving humour unless it is of high order.  A great humorist is as rare as a great poet or a great philosopher.  Though ours may not be great we must keep it in the line of greatness.  Remember, great humour must be made out of ourselves rather than out of others.  The fine humorist is delightfully courteous; the commonplace wit, invariably insulting.  We must keep two things in mind, that in laughter at our own folly is the beginning of wisdom; and the keenest wit is pure fun, never coarse fun.  We start a laugh at others by