In the preceding chapter we have seen how the advance of civilisation has tended to still the louder choral voice of laughter. Yet man’s best friend is not of the sort to take an affront too seriously. Driven out from the crowd, he has known how to disguise himself and to steal back into the haunts of men, touching here and there a human spirit and moving it to a quieter and perfectly safe enjoyment of things laughable. This new endowment, this last inspiration of the mortal by the god, is what we mean by Humour. Perhaps hardly a word in the language—and it seems to be exclusively an English word—would be harder to define with scientific precision than this familiar one. It is often used with the greatest degree of looseness, as when a man is endowed with humour because he laughs readily.[256] Yet any one who takes pains in using words knows how far this is from being accurate. A chronic garrulity of laughter, typified in what Mr. Meredith calls the “hypergelast,” stands, indeed, in marked contrast to what careful speech indicates by “humour”. As its etymology might teach us, the term connotes, not so much the common endowment of {298} “risibility,” as a certain kind of temperament, a complexion of sentiment, nay, more, a mode of psychical organisation. We cannot, therefore, think of the race as humorous, and should even find it difficult to generalise the endowment so far as to speak of humorists as a class. The humorous man or woman is so, primarily and essentially, by the unpurchasable possession of an individual mind. This fact of a quite peculiar mixture of elements in the humorous person must never be lost sight of. It dooms this person to a comparative solitude in the vocal expression of a feeling which is primarily social and communicative. The idea of a large unison of utterance among humorous persons is not entertainable. A man who has developed his humorous bent will be thankful if he finds in his social circle one or two who can understand, and, now and again, join in his quiet chuckle. Yet, though essentially in every individual case a unique blend of elements, humour has certain common characteristics. What sort of temperament and mind are we thinking of when we agree to call Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goldsmith, Sterne, Lamb, Dickens, and George Eliot humorists?