James Sully

“ For the rest, we may put our trust in the growing volume of what I have called private laughter. It is not unlikely that in the future, men who think will grow at once more tenacious of their ideals, and more alive to the ludicrous consequences which these introduce. If so, they will become still less like gay-hearted children than they now are, and will have to brighten the chamber of life, as it loses the blithe morn-given light, with the genial glow of humour. They will be able to keep the flame alive with fuel drawn from the storehouse of literature. ”

“ To watch the small listener in its low chair, with head raised, eyes fixed, and hands clasped, drinking in every word of your story, giving sign by occasional self-cuddling and other spasmodic movements of the almost overpowering delight which fills its breast, is to be face to face with what is a mystery to most "grown-ups". Perhaps we elders, who are apt to think that we have acquired all the knowledge and to forget how much we have lost, will never understand the spell of a story for the lively impressionable brain of a child. ”

“ The phenomena of dreams may well seem at first sight to form a world of their own, having no discoverable links of connection with the other facts of human experience. First of all, there is the mystery of sleep, which quietly shuts all the avenues of sense and so isolates the mind from contact with the world outside. To gaze at the motionless face of a sleeper temporarily rapt from the life of sight, sound, and movement—which, being common to all, binds us together in mutual recognition and social action—has always something awe-inspiring. ”

“ If the laugh grows too frequent and habitual this respect will be undermined, and, as one result of this moral loss, our laughter itself will shrink into something void of meaning and mechanical. The perpetual giggler, to whom nothing is sacred, never knows the flavour of a good laugh.
The impulse to laugh will always take its complexion from the moral nidus in which it germinates; and the good man, tender, and mindful of the dues of reverence, ennobles the mirthful temper. It seems, indeed, in such a moral milieu to become an expression, one of the most beautiful, of goodness. ”

“ A child outside the temple of art hears its music before he sees its veiled beauties. I have had occasion to show how sadly new sounds may perturb the spirit of an infant. Yet these same waves of sound, which break upon and shake the young nerves, give them, too, their most delightful thrill. Nowhere in adult experience do pleasure and sadness lie so near one another as in music, and a child's contrasting responses, as he now shrinks away with trouble in his eyes, now gratefully reaches forth and falls into joyous sympathetic movement, are a striking illustration of this proximity. ”

“ In the poetic contemplation of nature, her forces, her gladness and other moods, this imaginative activity, though still deriving its material from association, takes a freer form, leading to an investment of natural objects with a new and more fanciful meaning, as when we Freer play of imagination.“apperceive” a willow drooping over a pond or the front of an old cottage under a quasi-human form, endowing it with something akin to our own feelings and memories. What, it may be asked, is the whole range of this freer play of a life-giving fancy in our aesthetic enjoyment? ”

“ He will see that even the large spectacle of human struggle, in which there is much to sadden a compassionate heart, begins to wear the shimmer of a smile as soon as we envisage it as a sort of game played by destiny against our race. Just as a glimpse of the provoking, almost malicious aspects of the circumstances which irritate us in our smaller world may stifle the rising imprecation, by bringing up a smile or even a sotto voce laugh; so, when a philosophic humorist looks out upon the larger human scene, he may find the starting sigh checked by a glance at the playful irony of things. ”

“ When the infant first steadies his eyes on a human face, it may, for aught we know, experience a feeling akin to that described above, when through a survival of dream-fancy we take some new scene to be already familiar. At the age when new emotions rapidly develop themselves, when our hearts are full of wild romantic aspirations, do there not seem to blend with the eager passion of the time deep resonances of a vast and mysterious past, and may not this feeling be a sort of reminiscence of prenatal, that is, ancestral experience? ”

“ Probably the worst moment of this trouble of the night is when the child wakes suddenly from a sleep or half-sleep with some powerful dream-image still holding him in its clutches, and when the awful struggle to wake and to be at home with the surroundings issues in the cry, "Where am I?" It is in these moments of absolute hopeless confusion that the impenetrable blackness, refusing to divulge its secret, grows insufferable. The dream-images, but slightly slackening their hold, people the blackness with nameless terrors. ”

“ When the conjoint laughter is less automatic and issues from community of ideas and sentiments, the contagious property still plays a part. It is as if the swift response of others’ laughter, the drowning of one’s own outburst in the general roar, effaced for the time the boundaries of one’s personality. To rejoice together in the full utterance of the laugh, though it moves us less deeply than to weep together, is perhaps no less potent in cementing a lasting comradeship. ”

“ I have seen a child of three or so go into a long fit of laughter at the antics of a skittish pair of horses just turned loose on a common. Did the child see anything of the mean, disgraceful, undignified in these new and lively movements? Were they not immensely, overpoweringly funny, just because they were outrageous deviations from the customary proper behaviour of horses when saddled or harnessed to a carriage? I feel the impulse to laugh at a “guy” in the street who captures my roving nonchalant eye long before I reflect on any loss of dignity which the bizarre costume may signify. ”

“ A child of six or seven, when the passion for dolls is apt to be strong, will have moments of coolness, leaving "poor dolly" lying in the most humiliating posture on the floor, or throwing it away in a sudden fit of disenchantment and disgust. Scepticism will intrude, especially when the hidden "inside" comes to view as mere emptiness, or at best as nothing but sawdust.
Children seem, as George Sand says, to oscillate between the real and the impossible. Yet the intrusion of doubt does not, in many cases at least, interfere with an enduring trust. ”

“ He will be more inclined to be tolerant, if history comes to his aid, as the history of a patient may come to that of an anxious physician, assuring him of recovery and resumption of normal functions; still more, if a time of civic division, lacerating to the social part of him, has brought him near men and women whose gentleness seems to sweeten the ferment of the hour, and whose faces will henceforth appear to him in comforting vision—earth’s angel faces whose smile comes not with the brightening morn but with the deepening blackness of night. ”

“ It is not too much, I think, to say that to many a child this dread of the black night has been the worst of his sufferings. At no time is he really so brave as when he lies still in a cold damp terror and trusts to the coming of the morning light.
I do not believe that fear of the dark is universal among young children. ”

“ Thus we leave the perceptual level and the relative point of view of comedy far behind us, reaching a standpoint near that of the thinker who embraces all particular points of view, and yet may manage to have his own laugh in the end. When, as in Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, and yet more clearly in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the contrast seems to open up the great collision in human experience between sentiment and prosaic reality, idealism and the earth-binding instincts of practical life, we stand, indeed, on the border-line between the humour of fiction and that of philosophy. ”

“ In the out-of-door scene, too, it is the glitter of the running water, or a meadow all white with daisies, which captivates the glance. Light, the symbol of life's joy, seems to be the first language in which the spirit of beauty speaks to a child. ”

“ So long as the laughter retains a distinct vibration of the old note of contempt, we must resist it; but when it grows mellow and kindly we are ready to withdraw the objection. There is nothing so terrible in having fun poked at our foibles, or even at our petty misfortunes, so long as we know that a friendly face is hiding behind the laughing mask. If a person only gives the assurance in his way of laughing that contempt is drowned in a more genial sentiment, he may laugh at his children, aye at his parents, too, even when they grow old and infirm. ”

“ To these laughter is so precious and sufficing a good in itself, that to propose to connect it with some extrinsic and serious purpose looks like robbing it of its delicious freeness and enslaving it to its traditional foe, excess of seriousness. To these objectors it may suffice to say at the present stage that their apprehension appears to me to be groundless. To laugh away the spare moments will continue to be to the laughter-loving the same delightful pastime even should we succeed in showing that it brings other blessings in its train. ”

“ Dreams, whether of the night or of the day, are not always of beautiful fairies and the like. Weird, awful-looking figures have a way of pushing themselves into the front of the scene. Especially when the "tone" of the frail young nerves runs down from poor health do these alarming shapes appear, and acquire a mighty hold on the child's imagination. Of the timidity of the early years of life I shall have more to say by-and-by. Here I want to bring out how the very vividness of children's images exposes them to what is sometimes at least their worst form of suffering. ”

“ These innocent self-revelations meet the watchful eye of the humorist everywhere in the haunts of men. They lie like hoar frost in the sun on his surroundings, on which he unwittingly casts a reflection of the habits of his mind and of the directions of his taste; as when in a large town bizarre juxtapositions of the vulgar heroic strike the observer’s eye in the names of streets, or of loose engines on a railway. ”

“ The awful delight which vents itself at once in a laugh and in a shriek and a flight is certainly of a mixed feeling-tone. The laughter is the note of a triumphant spirit, and yet of one in which, in the moment of triumph, the nascent fear leaves its trace.
In these laughing games we have clearly an element of {201} make-believe. A firm persuasion, low down in consciousness, of the harmlessness of the coming bump and of the human bear in the blackness keeps the little girl’s heart steady and turns the adventure into fun. ”

“ HUMOUR. 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. ”