One of the most singular effects of this expulsion of mere symbolism was the disappearance of ridicule and jest. This disappearance was quite unexpected, and yet, when they came to reflect on the phenomenon, they saw how natural it was. The obverse of the passion for applause and influence is necessarily the desire to depreciate possible rivals, to make them seem small, and even to trample them in the dust. And the most successful and least apparently ill-natured method of fulfilling this is to get them laughed at and so contemned. With the ignoble itch for fame went the love of ridicule. The jesters, habitual as well as professional, disappeared with the priests, the soldiers, the lawyers, and the politicians. Not that the Limanorans abandoned the use of humour; they still saw too clearly the incongruities of existence, cosmic as well as human, to cease bringing them out in startling flashes of vivid expression. They never indulged in that boisterous laughter which is so often thought in the West the simplest and most primitive guaranty of enjoyment; for that is as much a waste of valuable tissue as uncontrollable grief. Their laughter was of that low, gentle, tolerant, almost inward, kind, which brightens the nature to its very heart; its only outer mark was perhaps a smile. Never indeed was I amongst a people that looked at existence so cheerfully or enjoyed its little ironies with so light-hearted a geniality. Buoyancy, joyousness, was the most constant characteristic of their spirits. Their intercourse with each other was ever sunny and pleasant-witted, though never jocular. There was no malice or false sense of superiority in their humour or laughter. But jest they came to abhor as an indignity to the human spirit which was striving to obliterate all traces of its ape-ancestry. The jester implied or produced contempt for his topic, for his victim, and generally for himself. He usually adopted mimicry as the easiest method of bringing about his effect. And so he nursed the ape in him, and pointed back to the vile type from which he had sprung. It was the other kinship of man, his divine relationship, that the Limanorans preferred to acknowledge and nurture. Never did they forget it in their conduct. It moulded their ideals, it directed their purposes, it created their instincts. And to use ridicule was to outrage it, to call up the beast in them, the element, the ancestry that they did their best to forget. Whenever the sense of mutual sympathy crept through the community, the degradation of jest and ridicule, not for the victim alone, but for the jester, became self-evident. They were felt to be inhumane, if not inhuman, and died an easy death with all the vast system of symbolism.