Meanwhile, it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.  And it is in some sort a habit when it is not inevitable.  If we ask ourselves why we laugh, we must confess that we laugh oftenest because—­being amused—­we intend to show that we are amused.  We are right to make the sign, but a smile would be as sure a signal as a laugh, and more sincere; it would but be changing the convention; and the change would restore laughter itself to its own place.  We have fallen into the way of using it to prove something—­our sense of the goodness of the jest, to wit; but laughter should not thus be used, it should go free.  It is not a demonstration, whether in logic, or—­as the word demonstration is now generally used—­in emotion; and we do ill to charge it with that office.

Something of the Oriental idea of dignity might not be amiss among such a people as ourselves containing wide and numerous classes who laugh without cause:  audiences; crowds; a great many clergymen, who perhaps first fell into the habit in the intention of proving that they were not gloomy; but a vast number of laymen also who had not that excuse; and many women who laugh in their uncertainty as to what is humorous and what is not.  This last is the most harmless of all kinds of superfluous laughter.  When it carries an apology, a confession of natural and genial ignorance, and when a gentle creature laughs a laugh of hazard and experiment, she is to be more than forgiven.  What she must not do is to laugh a laugh of instruction, and as it were retrieve the jest that was never worth the taking.

There are, besides, a few women who do not disturb themselves as to a sense of humour, but who laugh from a sense of happiness.  Childish is that trick, and sweet.  For children, who always laugh because they must, and never by way of proof or sign, laugh only half their laughs out of their sense of humour; they laugh the rest under a mere stimulation:  because of abounding breath and blood; because some one runs behind them, for example, and movement does so jog their spirits that their legs fail them, for laughter, without a jest.

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.