One thing we can say confidently, that it is wanting in certain characteristics of the more diffused laughter. It is far removed from the swift reflex gaiety of the child and the unthinking adult. Its laughter is not only quieter but has a slower movement, and it is charged with a deeper meaning. Again, its utterance differs in tone from the old brutal and contemptuous shout. It voices itself in low and almost tender tones. It is the laughter altogether farthest removed from the standpoint of the interested person: there is in it nothing of the crowing over the vanquished, hardly anything of a consciousness of the {299} superiority to which the uplifting of laughter may at the moment make valid claim. Hence, one may hesitate to apply the name humorist to a writer in whose laughter—though it is commonly spoken of as humour—a note of derisive contempt begins to grow prominent. These contrasts point clearly enough to certain positive characteristics of the moods of humour. A quiet survey of things, at once playful and reflective; a mode of greeting amusing shows which seems in its moderation to be both an indulgence in the sense of fun and an expiation for the rudeness of such indulgence; an outward, expansive movement of the spirits met and retarded by a cross-current of something like kindly thoughtfulness; these clearly reveal themselves as some of its dominant traits. At first it seems impossible to view this subtle and complex mental attitude as a development of the naïve and rather coarse merriment of earlier times. Yet a slight examination of the choicest examples of what the discerning call humour would suffice to show that it finds its pasturage very much where the Greek or the mediæval populace found it. Topsy-turvyness, especially when it involves the fall of things from a height; stumbling and awkwardness of all kinds; human oddities when they grow to provocative dimensions; all self-inflation with a view to force a reluctant notice; the manifold masqueradings of mortals; the unfitnesses of things to the demands of circumstances; extravagances, perversities, and the multitudinous follies of men; these which move the rough man to his unconsidered cachinnation move also the humorous man to his slower and _sotto voce_ note. As our great woman humorist has it: “Strange as the genealogy may seem, the original parentage of that wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy and {300} feeling, which constitutes modern humour, was probably the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy—such is the tendency of things towards the better and more beautiful!”[257]