Other traces of a rudimentary art of the comic are to be found in the amusing songs and stories which can be traced to savage invention. The Australians had songs in which the peculiarities of Europeans were caricatured, the chorus being sung amid shouts of laughter.[219] Another comic song, heard among some of the aborigines of Australia, took off the bodily peculiarities of some men—presumably of another tribe—in the graceful lines:— Oh, what legs, oh, what legs! The Kangaroo-rumped fellows. Oh, what legs, oh, what legs![220] In these crude forms of art we probably find traces of the influence of European models. There are, however, stories {251} which seem to be a perfectly spontaneous growth. Of these it is enough to refer to the originals of the delightful tales of Uncle Remus, the substance of which, as their author tells us, he obtained from the blacks in the American plantations.[221] Miss Kingsley writes to me of these: “I know the tales are not made up. I struck the Tar Baby Stories in the Lower Congo”. It may be added that the device of the tar baby is to be found in its essentials in a collection of African stories.[222] Our study seems to tell us that savage laughter is like our own in representing different levels of refinement. Much of it is just naïve, unthinking gaiety, like that of the little girl spoken about in the preceding chapter. Co-existing with this infantile gaiety we have the coarse brutal forms of laughter which we associate with the rougher kind of schoolboy. Along with these lower forms we find higher ones, in which some amount of reference to social standards is discoverable. Lastly, we may detect here and there, as in the story of the man tickled by the idea of dead men going about _sans_ arms, legs, etc., and of him who jocosely stripped a humbug of his disguise, germs of a more thoughtful laughter; and on the other hand, in the kindly tempering of the laughter of the girls at the Englishwoman’s inability to make mats, a movement towards sympathetic laughter. In other words, we detect the dim beginnings of that complex feeling or attitude which we call humour. It seems probable that the quality, if not also the quantity, improves as we pass from the lowest and most degraded to the higher savage tribes.[223] {252} Hence, no doubt, the difficulty which has been felt by travellers in describing the common characteristics of the hilarity of savage tribes. Miss Kingsley writes to me with respect to the humour of the West African: “It is peculiar, it is not child-like—it is more feminine in quality, though it is very broad or coarse. It is difficult to describe. I can only say what seems to me an excellent joke seems so to him—there are many jokes neither of us can see the point of: others, we chuckle over, superior persons look down on and would call buffoonery.”[224]