From this frank acceptance of others’ overtures of a friendly laughter to the practice of a humorous self-criticism, there would seem to be but a step. If humour always involves some degree of sympathetic self-projection into the object of contemplation, it should not be difficult to turn the humorous glance upon one’s own foibles. Self-inspection is a thing of various kinds, and there are varieties of it (for example, the performances of the “moi spectateur” in the case of that curious young lady, Marie Bashkirtseff) which are removed by the amplitude of the sky from humorous self-quizzing. The last is perhaps the most rarely practised. Before he can accomplish it, a person must not only have developed a “higher ego” capable of criticism in the light of ideas, but have learned to see himself as others—especially humorous onlookers—see him, a feat hardly less difficult than that of getting a glimpse of the crown of one’s head. That the doings of the lower ego, or rather cluster of egos, are fitted to afford an ample supply of the amusing goes without saying. Human nature is so oddly compounded, even in the best of us, that it only needs the clear vision to detect incongruity and the masking of the real. Thus, it is frequently easy to spy the stealthy advances of rudimentary tendencies which seem hardly to belong to us, and which we are disposed to disown; still more frequently, to light on a whole crop of little inconsequences which are due to the complexity of our soul’s workings, and to the irremovable circumstance that, however predominant some better part of us seems to be for the moment, the suppressed forces turn out to be only half-suppressed. It is well when such {322} self-scrutiny can be carried on without any risk of encountering forms of ugliness and of ill omen, which would make speedy end of the amusing exercise. The quiet fun that may be enjoyed by occasional glances at ourselves is so palpable, that it hardly seems conceivable how any true humorist should fail to pluck the tempting fruit. Yet when one finds a man who is wholly incapable of accepting another’s playful laughter, it seems a fair inference that he will be found lacking in the disposition to amuse himself with conning his own doings. The resentment which a distinguished purveyor of mirthful entertainment will sometimes exhibit at being treated with a humorous freedom, say by a lady interviewer whose overtures have been rejected with needless emphasis, suggests that a mind may train itself in the detection of the ludicrous in the larger show outside, and yet remain blind to all the comic aspects of the microcosm within. Perhaps every humorous contemplator of things has some “blind spot,” of the existence of which he is just as ignorant as of his retinal blind-spot; and if this failure of sensibility chances to render invisible the whole of the humorist’s own behaviour, the contraction of the field of vision is certainly a considerable one.