Some Puzzling Laughter

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

SINCE it is impossible to know exactly what any other person thinks, knowledge of human nature can be little else than self-knowledge acting under the direction of imagination, which enables a person to see that motives and passions which he has but slightly felt may, under some circumstances, dominate and control other people. He who most perfectly understands himself will generally best understand human character, if he has sufficient imaginative power to apply to the study. But at times that force seems to fail, and then self-knowledge becomes a hindrance rather than a help to the comprehension of minds not our own. We grow stupidly sure, in such hours, that what we would not hold it rational to think or do no one could reasonably think or do. The clue to the labyrinth falls from our fingers, and the secret motive, the Rosamond whom in our Eleanor-like jealousy we seek, stays hidden and safe in the inner circle. Lately, something of that sort happened to me, and I should like to take counsel with the wise about the matter. There is a kind of humor and a sense of the ridiculous which, though always grotesque and often repulsive in its manifestation, is also very pathetic, and has always been very comprehensible to me. It has its birth in the vivid realization of a violent contrast between one’s hopes, desires, or expectations and some painful reality. A few rhymes were published soon after the downfall of the Paris Commune, in which occurred a touching specimen of the ghastly mirth that comes when lips quiver through a smile. The lines were supposed to be spoken by a girl, as she went with her lover to the place where they were to be executed together. The time was May, and she and he were to have been married in June. " Droll,” she says, and one fancies the convulsive shrug of her shoulders, — " droll to be dead, this bright weather.”

My notion has been that only the subject of such experience perceives its drollness. I have thought the outsider could see only the tragedy and feel the pain, but that the sufferer’s vision was sharpened by agony till he could recognize the grin with which fate defeated his desires. His laugh and jest appeared to me a defiant answer in kind to this ill-timed merriment on the part of destiny. With this theory still intact in my mind, I went, the other day, to see Verestschagin’s pictures. They reminded me that some critic has said that the Russian does not argue nor moralize about wrong or injustice : he merely tells the facts, relying for impressiveness on his marvelous capacity for stating things just as they happen. Verestschagin’s paintings incarnate this principle of action. The canvases are crowded with silent forms, each one of which depicts an agony more awful than that shown in Doré’s illustrations of hell, because the pain here expressed is that which real beings on this solid earth have been forced to endure. Nor is there in the work of this artist anywhere an alleviating hint that divine justice is inflicting the suffering which his hand has so unrelentingly drawn.

While I was in the gallery, Verestschagin was showing the pictures to the crowd, talking about them in quietly spoken broken English. He paused before one in which the foreground was filled with the figures of men recently slain in battle, and lying on the ground where they had died. In the background, the general, accompanied by officers, was represented riding in front of his victorious army, to whom he was addressing words of triumphant congratulation. The soldiers were tossing their caps in air, and cheering. They were all seen to be excited with delight. The painter described their wild joy, and added, " I was there myself at the time. I was riding just behind the general. I, too, was very much elated at the victory we had won. But I observed that the dead men on the field were not elated.”

This speech seemed to me pregnant with terribly ethical suggestions. It was calmly delivered, and the crowd of hearers broke into a general chuckle, as if it had been a pleasant bit of wit. I went away pondering, seeking to discover the motive of the laughter. Was it due to the persistent levity of that social habit which tries to make of all events, ideas, and human characteristics material for repartee and occasion for a mirth that masks as cleverness,—the habit which induces such constant expectation of epigrams and humorous expressions that men are sometimes led thereby to slip in their understanding, and to laugh at a sentence that has the sound of wit without perceiving that its significance is serious or sad.''

Soon after this morning, I chanced to be in the company of some ladies and gentlemen who were discussing Verestschagin’s pictures, and his purpose in painting them. I told them what I had heard him say about the corpses that did not share in the triumphant glee of the living soldiers, and when I repeated his words my listeners also laughed. Then I cast about anew for the cause of this phenomenon of amusement. I thought that perhaps it did not, as I had at first deemed, result from the conversational custom of giving a frivolous interpretation to all matters, but that possibly the bare phrases conveyed such images of horror that even though those who heard them could hardly have been translated by the hearing into that inner sense which elevates humor to the side of tragedy, still their minds were so shocked as to recoil backward with nervous shudders that had the appearance only of mirthful movements.

Later yet I turned on myself accusingly, and wondered if I did not present the most ludicrously inappropriate mental condition of anybody concerned, since I had taken the thing so seriously, and then, because of my own narrowness of imagination, had been unable to feel that, laughter was the proper tribute to Verestschagin’s deft phrase. I pass the question on to my readers.