(_a_) To begin with, the advance and wider spread of the wave of culture will clearly tend to effect a general raising {289} of the standard of taste, and to develop an appreciation of the quality of the ludicrous. This result, though effected in part by the development of art and the extension of its educative influence, is in the main the direct outcome of intellectual progress and of that increase in refinement of feeling which seems to depend on this progress. One may describe this change by saying that the standard of ideas tends gradually to gain ground, hemming in if not narrowing that of custom. The primal laugh, void of intellectual content, becomes less general, the laugh of the mind more frequent. This effect of an introduction of ideas holds good in the case of members of all classes in so far as they enter into the higher culture group. In this way particular standards of locality and of social group begin to count less in our laughter. This effect of expansion of the intellectual view is reflected in all the more refined varieties of comic art. Any manifest insistence on dignity of rank, more especially when the group is not of imposing aspect, whether the _petite noblesse_ in a small “Residency” town on the Continent or the families which compose “Society” in an obscure town in England, is felt to be on the verge of the ludicrous. On the other hand, a magnifying of the dignity of a person or a class by those below, when accompanied by a cringing demeanour, is apt to take on the amusing aspect of flunkeyism, the due appreciation of which presupposes a certain maturity of the laughter of the mind. The general tendency of this advance of ideas is as yet very imperfectly realised. The march of mind, like some military marches, is not quite so uniformly triumphant as it is wont to be represented. A considerable part of the laughter among what are called the educated classes is still {290} but little influenced by the finer and deeper perception of ludicrous quality; while, as for the uneducated majority of all social grades, it would be hard to find in their mirth any distinct traces of a deposit from the advance of the culture-stream. One might venture on the supposition that the appreciation of the ludicrous shown to-day by the frequenters of a “high class” Music Hall in London is, both as to its intellectual penetration and as to its refinement of feeling, but little, if anything, above that of a mediæval crowd which gathered to see and hear the jokes of the _jongleur_. So slow a process is the infiltration of refining influence from the higher strata of culture downwards.