(_c_) As a last effect needing to be emphasised here, we have underlying the laughter of a people a curiously composite attitude. By this I mean an agglomeration of mental tendencies involving different _manières de voir_, and different standards of the fit and, consequently, of the laughable. In the preceding chapter we saw how the choral laughter of the savage followed the directions of the self-conservative tendencies of his tribe. This unconscious self-adaptation of the mirthful mood to the ends of the tribal life has persisted through all the changes introduced by the play of fashion and by the movements of social evolution. We of to-day who travel so much more than our ancestors in foreign lands, and may even learn to speak their languages, retain the tendency to resist the importation of what strikes us as un-English. In certain seasons, say when the war-temper heats the blood and foreigners criticise, this feeling for what is national grows distinct and vivid, and reflects itself unmistakably in the manifestations of such mirth as seems to be compatible with the mood of the hour. This point of view of the tribe has always coexisted with {294} the narrower and more relative one of the group, illustrated above, though it has in ordinary circumstances been less prominent in men’s mirthful utterances. The mediæval laughter at the priest, one may conjecture, was now and again directed from the national or patriotic point of view, as the people began to discern in him the servant of a foreign power. Not only so, but in much of a people’s laughter at what it deems the “absurd”—the laughter of “common-sense,” as we may call it—it is the point of view of the tribe or society which is still adopted: and this holds good of the larger part, at least, of a community in the van of the march of civilisation. When we smile at what appears to us a far-fetched view, or a quaint habit of life, we are really guided by the standard, “what people round about us say and do and expect us to say and do”. This contented reference to a vaguely formulated custom, without any scrutiny of its inherent reasonableness, holds good, indeed, of the judgments passed by ordinary men on the laughable aspects of the immoral. Promptness in paying one’s debts, for example, will for most men wear a reasonable or a foolish aspect according to the custom of their tribe—though here two class-standards make themselves distinctly felt; and so the laugh may be turned, as the custom changes, from him whose tardiness in discharging liabilities suggests straitened means otherwise carefully concealed, to him who displays an ungentlemanly haste in matters of a contemptible smallness.