Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/42

Rh is their one escape from the awe-inspiring immensity of the imposition. The more comprehensive the mind the more kinds of relief it seeks in laughter. The young man who guys love, art, science, justice and the Bible is usually he who is most naturally gifted for pursuing ideals of affection, beauty, truth, righteousness and reverence. The middle-aged forget what they laughed at in youth: for my own part I cannot recall that there was any limit either of decency or reverence; Rabelais had not gone too far. Aristophanes proves that Athenian taste forbade no jest. And while the laugh rings in his ear no young fellow of parts is inclined to deny it a universal privilege. I have even seen one joke about toothache while writhing with it. We first discover subjects that are no laughing matter under the lash of predicted consequences, as we accept servitude to social and political ends; then we begin in revenge to outlaw indecency and irreverence. The young and gifted are right, æsthetic training and intellectual power must achieve an Attic freedom. We need not wonder then to find a young captain-poet writing in a jocular vein about his own wounds and death, and every subject that touches him with at all similar force. The quality of his laughter is all that concerns us; and this, let me hasten to assure the long faces, is irreverent rather than indecent, fantastic rather than boisterous. Now faces are long because they have not laughed enough, not because they have been wise.

The æsthetic expression of a comic sense is perhaps the most difficult problem taste has to face. The success of a jest, as Shakespeare said, "lies in the ear." Men become less ticklish and laugh less as life proceeds. A child so enjoys laughing it hardly needs a jest to set it off, and right on up to extreme old age no tears are more grateful than those squeezed out when both aching sides have to be held. But this physical enjoyment bribes the taste to be indulgent; that we have laughed rebukes all censure of a 38