Immortality, did I say?  It was immortality until Mercutio fell.  And if some claim be made to it still because Harlequin has transformed so many scenes for the pleasure of so many thousand children, since Mercutio died, I must reply that our modern Harlequin is no more than a marionnette; he has returned whence he came.  A man may play him, but he is—­as he was first of all—­a doll.  From doll-hood Arlecchino took life, and, so promoted, flitted through a thousand comedies, only to be again what he first was; save that, as once a doll played the man, so now a man plays the doll.  It is but a memory of Arlecchino that our children see, a poor statue or image endowed with mobility rather than with life.

With Mercutio, vanished the light heart that had given to the serious ages of the world an hour’s refuge from the unforgotten burden of responsible conscience; the light heart assumed, borrowed, made dramatically the spectator’s own.  We are not serious now, and no heart now is quite light, even for an hour.

LAUGHTER

Times have been, it is said, merrier than these; but it is certain nevertheless that laughter never was so honoured as now; were it not for the paradox one might say, it never was so grave.  Everywhere the joke “emerges”—­as an “elegant” writer might have it—­emerges to catch the attention of the sense of humour; and everywhere the sense of humour wanders, watches, and waits to honour the appeal.

It loiters, vaguely but perpetually willing.  It wears (let the violent personification be pardoned) a hanging lip, and a wrinkle in abeyance, and an eye in suspense.  It is much at the service of the vagrant encounterer, and may be accosted by any chance daughters of the game.  It stands in untoward places, or places that were once inappropriate, and is early at some indefinite appointment, some ubiquitous tryst, with the compliant jest.

All literature becomes a field of easy assignations; there is a constant signalling, an endless recognition.  Forms of approach are remitted.  And the joke and the sense of humour, with no surprise of meeting, or no gaiety of strangeness, so customary has the promiscuity become, go up and down the pages of the paper and the book.  See, again, the theatre.  A somewhat easy sort of comic acting is by so much the best thing upon our present stage that little else can claim—­paradox again apart—­to be taken seriously.

There is, in a word, a determination, an increasing tendency away from the Oriental estimate of laughter as a thing fitter for women, fittest for children, and unfitted for the beard.  Laughter is everywhere and at every moment proclaimed to be the honourable occupation of men, and in some degree distinctive of men, and no mean part of their prerogative and privilege.  The sense of humour is chiefly theirs, and those who are not men are to be admitted to the jest upon their explanation.  They will not refuse explanation.  And there is little upon which a man will so value himself as upon that sense, “in England, now.”