It was difficult to irritate Satan, but that accomplished it.

“What an ass you are!” he said.  “Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?  No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.  Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those.  The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane.  Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases.  I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result—­and you criticize!  I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it.  I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race—­and you are not satisfied!” He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, “It seems to me that this race is hard to please.”

There it was, you see.  He didn’t seem to know any way to do a person a favor except by killing him or making a lunatic out of him.  I apologized, as well as I could; but privately I did not think much of his processes—­at that time.

Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-deception.  It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a sham.  Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one.  It regarded itself as gold, and was only brass.  One day when he was in this vein he mentioned a detail—­the sense of humor.  I cheered up then, and took issue.  I said we possessed it.

“There spoke the race!” he said; “always ready to claim what it hasn’t got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust.  You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that.  This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things—­broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh.  The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision.  Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—­and by laughing at them destroy them?  For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—­laughter.  Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution —­these can lift at a colossal humbug—­push it a little—­weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.  Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.  You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons.  Do you ever use that one?  No; you leave it lying rusting.  As a race, do you ever use it at all?  No; you lack sense and the courage.”