Natural Comedy

FOR a world sicklied over with a host of apprehensions and complaints, and hard enough put to it to maintain honest cheerfulness in its proper ascendant, the genius of comedy is unfailingly to be found in one pleasant quarter. Let inflammations, pangs, and regrets make what havoc they will with the sad face of daily affairs, its contusions and furrows, its visible nostalgia, do not want for a balm rich in efficacy. A source of refreshment lives which has never been quenched, and the world provides none more constant or more delightful. It lies about us in the comedies inadvertently enacted by the familiar creatures of the woods and pastures, whose world is so close, yet so deeply alien, to our own. No entertainment is more healthful to soul and body, for none is more innocent, spontaneous, or whole-hearted, and none presents a more inimitable refinement of humor, to an eye, at least, philosophic in habit and accustomed to seek its pleasures in the green places of the earth, an eye opening on the hinterland of imagination.

Nor is this a pleasure to be sought only upon exotic savannahs and in remote jungles where apes and birds of unwonted plumage mock the traveler from temperate zones. If it is forbidden to the city’s heart, it may be found wherever a field, a stone wall, and a wood lot remain in homely naturalness. One need only stand a few moments to watch a red squirrel on the topmost bar of a pasture gate. I remember a beast little bigger than my thumb that eyed me from such a vantage. The rough boards of the gate were still resinous, the edge on which the squirrel crouched hardly wider than a finger. Inflamed, as I should be glad to believe, by the outline of my approach projected on the orb of his minute, glittering eye, he vented a stream of that Gallic expostulation and excitement which so often rings from the tree tops of the northern forests, a sound imperishably comic and refreshing in the charmed spaces of the woods. Of a sudden he was off in a frenzy of agitation along the top of the gate, and I looked for his early disappearance. But in mid-flight, by a feat of agility and physical tension too astounding and instantaneous for my dull eye to follow, he reversed the direction of his headlong career, and dashed with equal velocity toward the opposite end of the gate. Still reluctant to vanish, he bewildered my vision with repetitions of his skill, so that it was impossible to say at the extremes of his course in which direction he was facing. Fortunately it was possible to laugh, for great was the need of some response to a performance which had set my veins flowing with delight.

Attempts have been made to substantiate the laughter inseparable from such adventures by insisting that animals themselves have humor, as though it were intentionally that they provoked our amusement, or as though, at least, our enjoyment were not so foreign to their own impulses as to be wholly gratuitous. These attempts, I have somewhat regretfully concluded, are mistaken. It would be pleasant to believe that animals have at least the rudiments of that whimsicality which would seem to us indispensable to some of the episodes of their behavior which we are fortunate enough to observe. Otherwise the humor with which we view them is an impertinence. It is improper mockery from without of a world which, seen from within, may be intensely serious and important.

And such in sober truth is the fact. For animals are serious. Their busyness shames our mortal craving for distraction. Their earnest attention to the necessaries of existence rebukes our frivolity. The squirrel on the gate had certainly an overplus of energy which resulted in anything but economy of movement. His kind is the most electric of all the creatures of the wood, and a little eccentricity can be forgiven a frame of such exquisite tension. But that his madness was deliberate gayety I cannot assure my doubting heart, though I should be glad enough to believe that he enjoyed moments of wantonness and irresponsibility, which might be made a sympathetic excuse for my own. Even the flutings of his tail, motions more delicate and swift than winds ever gave to tossed spray or rippled fields of barley, are ecstatic only to the observer. His anxiously twitching nostril, when a glance at it can be snatched, forbids any other conclusion. It might, indeed, suggest the truth, that curiosity is a great part of his excitement, curiosity apprehensive and ready to strike an instant bargain with flight.

Animals are engaged in continual alertness and industry, in peril, escape, and thrift. The trim and admirably tailored atom that descends with a brisk flutter on a branch before my face is not bent upon the pursuit of pleasure. Birds, I believe, have much less time to give to this canonized vocation than human beings. The one before me has a penny whistle which he blows occasionally with a sweet, wistful sharpness, but its note escapes almost unconsciously, and is but a contraction of his small frame suddenly released, and its music a part of the economy of spring and of migration by which his vernal impulse toward a mate sitting on an ingenious basket of eggs is fulfilled. His bright and intent little eye, casually discerned, seems to shine with comradely good nature, as if he acknowledged in the sunlight a cosmic cheerfulness which we shared together. But this is an effusion of my own sensibility, which, if I were as practically employed as he, might be as commendably oblivious of poetic untruths. As I look more closely at that penetrating eye, it plainly does not envisage my existence at all — my existence, at least, as it appears to me, in its autonomy and power so much greater than his own. I scarcely seem to be distinguished from the foliage, trunks, and other conformations of the thicket where we both happen to be present. If I moved, the bright eye would report a sudden and menacing upheaval of surroundings expected to be stationary and secure. Wings quicker than thought would whisk my visitor away. But as long as I sit still, that tiny, humorless orb will continue to devote itself to entomological studies, which it takes as earnestly as any researcher in his laboratory.

Once, as I lay on my back in a sensuous doze beside a stream, I heard a series of slight, irregular footfalls crisply approaching over dry leaves and dead twigs. I sat up to learn what small identity might be drawing near. He twinkled into view, a chipmunk, obviously a fellow of business with a mind single to his task. His erratic progress came to a stop near my pleasant station, and he rose on his haunches, his paws beneath his beard. The attitude was an engaging one, and I should have smiled at it in any case. But my delight knew no bounds when, one by one, half a dozen of the brightest, reddest, and roundest berries were expelled from his distended jowls by vigorous agitation of either cheek, and dropped in a little cluster on the moss where he squatted. There they lay, apples to tempt some diminutive Eve to some Lilliputian and delectable sin!

Preternaturally shining and red, that trove of bright berries made instant way to my affections. What the chipmunk meant to accomplish by them it is beyond my thought to conjecture. But whatever his intention, I am sure it was anything but comic. Some earnest preoccupation those minikin fruits must have been meant to serve, some purpose in the economy of their small possessor. But I should defend to the last my laughter at the little work of perfection which had been wrought before my eyes, although I should defend as well the just resentment with which my coarse misunderstanding was received. Uttering indignation and alarm in cries of wonderful sharpness, the chipmunk made a hurried exit from the stage where he had inadvertently donned the comic mask for my amusement. He had been serious about it all.

Whoever has nosed in a canoe about the shores of a woodland lake must frequently have come upon a small domestic flotilla, a duck and her brood of perhaps a dozen urchins, watchfully oaring about the reedy shallows of a cove. Curiosity has led him, no doubt, to thrust the bow of his canoe toward the buoyant little fleet. What will they do? Is that anxiety that shines in the mother’s eye? No disturbance or panic is evident as the craft slides nearer. It is not even clear that the approach of the canoe has been noticed at all. But a quiet webbing is taking place, a gathering to the post for a sudden and surprising dash for liberty. Now they are cornered by the impending bows. No, not quite cornered, for the mother has studied the textbooks on just this point of tactics. She knows the manœuvre which by assured precedent should free her brood from imminent annihilation. And it does. The canoe is driven by a fellow of coarse and untutored perceptions, who does not see that as he draws nearer an avenue is opened around his flanks to the broad lake behind him. The little troop waits until his very nearness prevents his moving athwart this exit. Then the signal is given. With one accord the well-marshaled brood, too young to fly, rise upon their webs, and led by the old lady, scamper over the surface of the water, churning a grotesquely tiny and furious disturbance which all but obscures the threshing paddles and frantically straining bodies from view. A dozen protective yards the desperate sprint carries them. Then they sink into an abrupt halt until strength returns for a second scamper, and if the dull fellow in the canoe persists in threatening from the rear, still further dashes. Always in the brood is one weakling, the last of the slender line, who falls a little behind in the frenzy of effort. The tempest churned by his webs is smaller, and continues longer than the others. He beats an anxious tattoo on the water when the rest of the column has subsided. And if there is a second hurly-burly he is slower to start than his unfeelingly superior family. He may even make a solitary and abandoned sprint when the ripples of their progress have vanished on the limpid emptiness of the lake.

To the observer this instructive episode is a comedy which he will be tempted to repeat. But to the frightened squadron that has eluded him it is anything but gay. Not even their triumphant escape from his obviously mortal designs evokes in them, we may be sure, that vulgar ridicule which a victorious human being might vent on his adversary in a like instance.

It would not be hard to multiply examples of natural pathos which to the mortal onlooker are inexpressibly funny. During an evening walk in England it was once my fortune to see a half-grown bird which had been spilled from its nest and was being fed by one of the parents, who hovered near, its eye bright with solicitude and apprehension. The unlucky nestling stood at the foot of a hedge in the grass by the roadside. It was black with a scrawny covering of down, through which a few livid quills of stouter fibre protruded. At the moment it caught my eye, its whole being was distended into the shape of a sack, prodigiously open at the throat. Features it had none, all its elements uniting to form an expectant cavity. Its beak was no more than a horny lining at the mouth of this cavern. It stood upon feet, but these might as well have been attached as a frank absurdity to some object without organic pretensions. Into this sack, the personification of appetite excluding all other uses or concepts, a worm of considerable proportions was about to be dropped from the beak of the adult bird. But sad fate! At that instant the disturbed parent became aware of me. Even as the succulence of that rich, that inimitable carcass touched the organs divinely appointed to receive and give thanks for it, the delicious length was cruelly withdrawn. With a squawk of terror the parent hastily disappeared over the hedge. The disappointed sack relapsed into a fledgling with features, ungainly, to be sure, but unmistakably an eye, a paunch, and feet at last purposeful and appropriate. Timorous, but faithful, its elder returned to guide it ingeniously along the hedge to a gate which offered a refuge from my attention. I hoped that in the deepening shadows beyond this protective barrier the worm might meet the destiny I had interrupted, or that another as palatable and as substantial might take its place.

Dogs, if they have not a claim to the purely mortal prerogative of humor, the accidental discovery of which would at once plunge any animal into fantastic insanity, are at least responsive to the impulse of play. And the young of many animals are said to romp together like children. But children, who live in an animal world of sensuous color and impulse before they submit to the dull, inert categories of maturity, are intensely earnest in their play, and their imaginations are of utmost solemnity and importance. Much of their laughter is in imitation of grownups, a response to obvious adult expectations. Left to themselves, they enjoy serious pursuits. They laugh when they are tickled — a physical response to sensuous titillation; but of humor, according to the mature conception, they have little.

The colt that tries his legs in a spring pasture, though the eyes of an observer hanging over the gate may grow humid with joy, is anything but a comedy to himself. A foal of small experience in this complex world I watched once from a country road bordering the meadow where his dam peacefully cropped the grass. His dappled sides were first stretched upon the turf, warmed by the sun in its early gentleness and vigor. At length he rose, a small, round body uncertainly supported on legs that, had they acted in concert, would have served the stoutest dobbin. His long nose surveyed the ground as if from a venturesome height, as indeed it was when his security depended upon members so disproportionate and so obviously prepared to lapse uncontrollably from their proper alignment. With an unpremeditated impulse his body suddenly launched into the air, to come down with an audible shock upon all four hooves at once, erect and stiff. It was anything but an intentional gambol, and the little gallop that followed it, with its uncertain and experimental motions, was no more deliberate. The initiative came from no playfulness of brain, but from some complex of energy in the undeveloped body, and the result was a surprise to be earnestly considered and assimilated, as the plain bewilderment of that long nose testified.

The placid figure of his dam invited him with the shadow of her mature and benignant strength, and he trotted to her flank, regarding me inquisitively from her farther side, his long nose and innocent eye appearing beneath the smooth curve of her belly. This was the station from which instinct provided that he should view objects which solicited interest but which might portend danger. Running thus in the protection of the mare’s tranquil bulk, and peering out beneath it, he was a sight of exquisite pleasure; but nature had appointed him a position there in seriousness and sober foresight.

No, the endless, the imperishable humor which our fauna afford us is not their property but ours. Even the crows, whose guttural discourse over the cornfield is instinct with irony, are not mocking the world in which humanity labors and is vain. They are not even aware of it, and their sardonic croaking is the most practical and serious of speech. In the dramas of animal existence which accident brings within our scrutiny, perhaps we see small parodies of our own passions and surprises. But there is something profounder and more buoyant than any cumbersome philosophy can explicate in the humor which we derive from watching animals. It brings us near to sources of unconscious grace and health from which cities are alienating the world, to its cost. Some city dwellers snuffle cinders by preference and yearn for no green and secret places of nature. But it will be long before the gayest of the saints is forgotten, who was the same that preached to the birds. In that immortal act was the sense of community with our fellows of the woods without which the laughter they provoke in us would be impossible. This community, heaven knows, is an illusion and a deceit. The brothers of the bough whom Saint Francis exhorted had no portion in his joy or his salvation, nor could they have understood why he needed to be saved. But who does not know that it was a flowering of sweetness in himself thus to harangue them in his exuberance and his simplicity? And who does not acknowledge the justice of his act?