Even in this new and more guarded form, however, the theory will not bear the strain put upon it. It will account fairly well for some of the forms of the laughable in our list, such as slight misfortunes or mischances, defects, moral and intellectual, which do not shock or otherwise hurt our feelings, also certain forms of make-believe which are distinctly hypocritical and so capable of being regarded at once as moral defects, and (being seen through) as discomfitures. It _may_ apply also, as has been hinted above, to the effect of the obscene; though I, at least, feel that without some forcing the effect cannot be interpreted in this way. There seems to me to lurk in our laughter here something of the joy of the child, of the Naturkind, Walt Whitman, at the sight of what is customarily hidden away.[67] Leaving this, however, as a more doubtful case, let us turn to other groups. Is it possible to regard all laughable exhibitions of incongruities as degradations? Is the {123} charming unsuitability of the “grown-up’s” coat and hat to the childish form viewed by the laughing spectator as a degradation when he “lets himself go”? Are we laughing at the clothes as degraded by being thus transformed, or at the child’s naïveté as a degradation of human intelligence? I confess that such a way of interpreting the spectacle strikes me as grotesquely forced. The look of the whole thing in the complete unfitness of its parts seems to affect one as a delicious absurdity before the sweet simplicity below the surface is detected. Our author does his best to show that mere incongruity, where nothing is degraded, does not raise the laugh. I readily grant that he has made out his case, so far as to show that in most of the pungent and potently moving examples of the incongruous an element of degradation, of malicious detraction is present. But this is not enough. The question is whether it is always present, and whether in the cases where it is present it is the sole excitant of our mirth. I believe that a finer analysis shows that this is not so. Where, for example, is “the degraded” in a child’s laughter at the sight of his nursery all topsy-turvy on a cleaning day? Does he view the nurse as put to shame by the setting of chairs on tables and so forth, instead of observing the proper local congruities? or does he think of the room as something quasi-human which takes on an improper look as he himself does when he makes himself in a glorious mess? Slight movements of fancy of this kind may be present: but do they lie at the sources of his laughter and constitute its main moving force?