: never laugh—of them, too, be sure, the story will run, that once upon a time, once at least, if only once, they laughed-laughed a portentous laugh, as anomalous as their foregoing and succeeding gravity-a laugh remembered ever since, not on the score of its singularity in point of time alone, but in point of character and significance too. Diogenes Teufelsdröckh offers, in his professorial person, a markworthy example of this. Certainly, a most involved, self-secluded, altogether enigmatic nature, that of Teufelsdröckh, exclaims his British editor; then adds"Here, however, we gladly recal to mind that once we saw him laugh; once only, perhaps it was the first and last time in his life; but then such a peal of laughter, enough to have awakened the Seven Sleepers! It was of Jean Paul's doing some single billow in that vast World-Mahlstrom of Humour, with its heaven-kissing coruscations, which is now, alas, all congealed in the frost of Death! The large-bodied Poet and the small, both large enough in soul, sat talking miscellaneously together, the present editor being privileged to listen and now Paul, in his serious way, was giving one of those inimitable Extra-harangues;' and as it chanced, On the Proposal for a Cast-metal King: gradually a light kindled in our Professor's eyes and face, a beaming, mantling, loveliest light; through those murky features, a radiant ever-young Apollo looked; and he burst forth like the neighing of all Tattersall's,-tears streaming down his cheeks, pipe held aloft, foot clutched into the air,loud, long-continuing, uncontrollable; a laugh not of the face and diaphragm only, but of the whole man from head to heel. The present Editor, who laughed indeed, yet with measure, began to fear all was not right: however, Teufelsdröckh composed himself, and sank into his old stillness; on his inscrutable countenance there was, if anything, a slight look of shame; and Richter himself could not rouse him again." This unique outburst gives occasion to Mr. Carlyle to comment, in his suggestive way, on the import and varieties of laughter. Readers who have any knowledge of Psychology, he goes on to say, know how much is to be inferred from such a phenomenon; and that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad. "How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others In our last chapter we quoted Mrs. Browning in illustration of one, and that a sad and constrained, variety of that multiform Protean thing, a smile. Her new romance in blank verse, "Aurora Leigh," is curiously rich in examples of other varieties, the number and character of which attest her close observation of this dumb language of the lips, whether in babyhood or age, joyous or triste, genial and spontaneous or artificial and untrue. Thus we hear from her of "That murmur of the outer Infinite Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep Then the mournful passage Aurora Leigh, p. 1. "Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth My father pushed down on the bed for that" (p. 6). Then the graphic detail in a graphic whole, where the maiden aunt's portrait is given "A close mild mouth, a little soured about The ends, through speaking unrequited loves, lies a cold glitter as of ice: the fewest are able to laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snigger from the throat out Or peradventure niggardly half-truths; Eyes of no colour,-once they might have smiled, In smiling" (p. 11). Then the rebuffed suitor's smile "He smiled as men smile when they will not speak Look judgment on me" (p. 88). Add the smile, in innocence and life's primavera, of poor Marian Earle"Somewhat large The mouth was, though the milky little teeth Dissolved it to so infantine a smile! For soon it smiled on me; the eyes smiled too, But 'twas as if remembering they had wept, And knowing they should, some day, weep again" (p. 118). With the contrasted falsity on the face of Lady Waldemar "She gave me such a smile, so cold and bright, As if she tried it in a 'tiring glass And liked it" (p. 217). Nor must the smile of Marian's child be forgotten, when his eyes open from dreamland to rest on Marian and Aurora beside his bed "The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide, And, staring out at us with all their blue, As half perplexed between the angelhood He saw his mother's face, accepting it In change for heaven itself, with such a smile As might have well been learnt there,-never moved, But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy, So happy (half with her and half with heaven) The same poem omits not that sad put-on smile, of a sorrowful heart, which the poetess had described so touchingly long before. Thus in Aurora's recital of her earliest days, narrating her mother's death, her father's stunned bewilder ment "And thus beloved she died. I've heard it said Unmothered little child of four years old, His large man's hands afraid to touch my curls, As if he knew needs must, or I should die, And yet 'twas hard,-'twould almost make the stones One more, and a characteristic, fragment to the purpose "My critic Jobson recommends more mirth, And all true poets laugh unquenchably Like Shakspeare and the gods. That's very hard. The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiled With such a needy heart on two pale lips, We cry, 'Weep rather, Dante' " (p. 92). wards; or at best produce some whiffling husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool of none such comes good. The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.' " In juxta-position with this, however, we must place the author's objection, in the chapter next ensuing, to the definition of Man as a Laughing Animal. "Man is called a Laughing Animal: but do not the apes also laugh, or attempt to do it; and is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest laugher? Teufelsdröckh himself, as we said, laughed only once."+ Evidently, and naturally enough, the Professor's Able Editor prefers that only once, such as it was, to a laugh like that of their common friend, the Hofrath Heuschrecke, who played a whole laughing chorus at the Professor's table-talk: "And then, at every pause in the harangue, he [Heuschrecke, a fair German Bozzy in his way] gurgled out his pursy chuckle of a cough-laugh (for the machinery of laughter took some time to get in motion, and seemed crank and slack)."‡ The province of Laughter does certainly afford ample room for a large outlay of discriminative talent-to sunder the genuine from the factitious, the precious from the vile. Laughter may be simply a nuisance; cynical or contemptuous laughter, for instance. Disgust, contempt, and laughter have indeed been pronounced nearly akin: he who enjoys nothing and values nothing, will laugh at everything.§ There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills Love, as Charles Lamb allows, in his plea for laughter as not always of a dangerous or. soul-hardening tendency. But how genially he hastens to set over against that sneer, the cordial laughter which cherishes and implies the Love that sneer would desolate! Out, too, upon the braying peal of people all lungs, and no ears, no nerves; sometimes of the feminine gender even; for as Clerimont says, in Ben Jonson, "O, you shall have some women, when they laugh, you would think they brayed, it is so rude." How fatally a noisy laugh may tell against the laugher, when the listener is shrewd, and has an ear. Thornton's laugh, for example, in Sir Bulwer Lytton's first romance"a loud, coarse, chuckling laugh, which, more than a year's conversation would have done, let me into the secrets of his character."** Est modus in rebus. The Laughing Philosopher, as such, is no Philosopher at all; for he can have made but small way in the alphabet of the Philosophy of Life. Life is real, life is earnest: allow this, and the Laughing Philosopher may look out for a hermitage-the Chaulieus and Hamiltons of fact and fiction†† may keep their own counsel and their own "Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus." Book I. ch. iv. † Ibid. ch. vi. § Archbishop Whately. "The Silent Woman," IV. 1. Ibid. ch. iii. On the Genius of Hogarth. tt Voici a cabinet picture from another of Sir E. B. Lytton's romans : "We sat down to supper. 'Count Hamilton,' said Boulainvilliers, 'are we not a merry set for such old fellows? Why, excepting Arouet, Milord Bolingbroke, and Count Devereux, there is scarcely one of us under seventy. Where, but at Paris, would you see bons vivans of our age? Vivent la joie, la bagatelle, l'amour! "Et le vin de Champagne,' cried Chaulieu, filling his glass; but what is there strange in our merriment? Philemon, the comic poet, laughed at ninety-seven. May we all do the same!' company, their faith and practice making them an outlying population from life real and life in earnest. Not that the Crying Philosopher is the true prophet, either. Heraclitus and Democritus must meet, and compromise, and make mutual concessions, nor refuse, if a joint dynasty is impracticable, to take turn and turn about, in a world where day and night alternate, and winter is as periodical as summer, and smiles come as spontaneously as tears. "They say you are a melancholy fellow," quoth Rosalind to Jaques, in the Forest of Arden. "I am so," he answers: "I do love it better than laughing." "Those," Rosalind rejoins, "that are in extremity of either, are abominable fellows; and betray themselves to every modern censure, worse than drunkards."+ To which clear ringing voice whose every accent tells, Now are we in Arden! add, in conclusion, the mild subdued tones, yet harmonious in tendency, of the pensive Recluse of Olney:‡ "You forget,' cried Bolingbroke, that Philemon died of the laughing.' 266 'Yes,' said Hamilton; but if I remember right, it was at seeing an ass eat figs. Let us vow, therefore, never to keep company with asses.' "Bravo, Count!' said Boulainvilliers, you have put the true moral on the story. Let us swear, by the ghost of Philemon, that we will never laugh at an ass's jokes-practical or verbal.' "Then we must always be serious, except when we are with each other,' cried Chaulieu. Oh, I would sooner take my cliance of dying prematurely at ninetyseven than consent to such a vow,'" &c. &c.-Devereux, Book IV. ch. v. * That Jaques could laugh, however, and profited by any rare opportunity for it, afforded him in the woods and forests, we know by his own previous avowal. Witness his report of the rencontre with Touchstone-of which the finale is, 66 - When I did hear The motley fool thus moral on the time, An hour by his dial." † Ibid. Act IV. Sc. 1. As You Like It, Act II. Sc. 7. Melancholy man as William Cowper was, the notion that he was no laugher is an utter mistake as it generally is, perhaps, in the case of melancholy people. Not merely was it his delight, "In life's morning march, when his spirits were young," to waste his own and his fellow "students'" time in giggling and making giggle, but when his days were in the sere and yellow leaf, and himself a "poor creature," it did not take very much to set him "laughing immoderately." Reading Don Quixote in Smollett's translation made him, as his letters tell us, "laugh immoderately." And we all know the effect upon him of Lady Austen's narration of the tale of John Gilpin-that he lay awake half the night in convulsions of laughter. Or take the case of Rousseau. Him many people assume to have been as incapable of laughter as a mummy, or a man in the dentist's grasp, or an old portrait of Tribulation Comfort. But Jean Jacques even boasts of his fits of inextinguishable laughter," verging on "suffocation:" "C'étaient des rires inextinguibles; nous étouffions. Ceux qui, dans une lettre qu'il leur a plu de m'attribuer," he adds, with cordial resentment at the notion of his being supposed to have laughed only twice in all his life, “m'ont fait dire que je n'avais ri que deux fois en ma vie, ne m'ont connu dans ce temps-là, ni dans ma jeunesse; car assurément cette idée n'aurait jamais pu leur venir."-Les Confessions, Livre VIII. -Let no man charge me that I mean THE EUPHRATES AND THE WAR IN PERSIA.† THE Euphrates Valley Route appears to be fast passing from the stage of discussion into a reality. A concession has been at length granted in the face of deeply-concerted intrigues and of a violent opposition from nations inimical to the prosperity aud grandeur of Great Britain, and to which it would scarcely be credited some Englishmen, with names familiar to their own countrymen, were yet sufficiently little patriotic as to lend themselves. This concession extends to the whole line of country from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and embraces, we believe, a guarantee of six per cent. for the whole capital necessary to carry out so gigantic a project. It may be said to this that a guarantee from a power like that of Turkey does not possess the same solid basis for investment as a similar guarantee conceded by a more stable government. But with a few inconsistencies which had their origin in ministerial and party intrigues, the Ottoman government has always been found to be honest and upright in the main; the "sick man" exhibited at the onset of the late war, and throughout a very trying crisis, an amount of vigour and an extent of resources very little consistent with the moribund condition which some were pleased to apply to so vast an empire; and, lastly, suppose any unforeseen changes were to happen in future times in the countries concerned, it would always be the interest of all parties to protect such regions as were subsidised to a railway from anarchy and despoliation, and the very fact of giving to them such a protection would ensure to It is fair to own, however, that Rousseau would fain be considered as past laughing in his old days. And probably there was no affectation in that. There is a form of melancholy, more than one form indeed, to which laughter is an utter stranger. La Rochefoucauld, a sufficient contrast in character to Rousseau, was, according to Madame de Sévigné, capable of distinguished feats in the art de rire; but his account of himself in early manhood includes this avowal: "Premièrement, pour parler de mon humeur, je suis mélancolique, et je le suis à un point que depuis trois ou quatre ans à peine m'a-t-on vu rire trois ou quatre fois."Portrait du Duc de la Rochefoucauld, par lui-même. * Cowper's Poems: "Conversation." † Memoir on the Euphrates Valley Route to India. By W. P. Andrew, F.R.G.S. London: W. H. Allen and Co. 1857. |