PEOPLE WHO NEVER LAUGH. 415 said to have been the utmost that ever played over the lips of the "intensely melancholy" Plato; he never laughed. ("As sad as Plato," became a phrase with the comic dramatists.) Phocion was never once by the Athenians seen to laugh (or, for the matter of that, to cry either). Plutarch says of Cato, "Scarce anything could make him laugh; and it was but rarely that his countenance was softened to a smile." Yet the same biographer incidentally mentions afterwards that Cato "used always to laugh when he told the story" of his reception at Antioch. Montesquieu, in the Persian Letters, makes Usbek affirm the existence in Turkey of families where, from father to son, since the kingdom began, not a soul has ever laughed, personne n'a ri. It is an old-world story of Crassus, the grandsire of Marcus the wealthy Roman, that he never laughed but once in all his life, and that was at sight of an ass eating thistles. Julius Saturninus, son of the Emperor Philip the Arabian, is asserted never to have laughed at anything at all, asinine or what not. It was said of Philip IV. of Spain, that he never in his life laughed out, except at the recital of the story of the Queen of Spain having no legs. Lord Sandys, Sir Robert Walpole's successor as financeminister, was said by Horace to have never laughed but once, and that was when his best friend broke his thigh. A Parliamentary prig from his cradle, perhaps, after the type of that Mr. Pynsent whom Pendennis taxes with having never laughed since he was born, except three times at the same joke of his chief. Swedenborg was never seen to laugh, though he is allowed to have always had a cheerful smile on his countenance. Swift smiled seldom, laughed never. Madame de Motteville noted avec étonnement, of Lewis the Fourteenth, that even " dans ses jeux et dans ses divertissements ce prince ne riait guère." Fontenelle never laughed; and being inquir 416 NEVER SEEN TO LAUGH. ingly told so by Madame Geoffrin, "No," was his reply, "I have never uttered an Ah! ah! ah!" That was his idea of laughter: he could be moved to a faint smile indeed by choses fines, but was incapable of any lively feeling whatever. Sainte-Beuve remarks of him, that as he had never uttered an ah! ah! ah! so neither had he an oh! oh! oh!-that is to say, he had never admired. Nothing of the kind could be alleged of that predecessor and namesake of the Grand Monarque, the ninth of the name, and canonized a Saint; or again of that yet earlier one, the Debonaire, who "never raised his voice in laughing, not even on occasions of public rejoicing," when jesters set and kept his table in a roar, "he not even smiling so as to show his white teeth." La Rochefoucauld, in his Portrait fait par lui-même, was no less scrupulous to avow himself melancholy, and never laughing more than one laugh per annum, than Rousseau was to disavow a letter imputed to him which made him declare he had not laughed more than once or twice in his life; the forgers of which epistle, he averred, could not have known him in his younger days, or such a notion would never have crossed their brain. Jean-Jacques had no ambition to be taken for the sort of man mine host of Ben Jonson's New Inn is keen to practise upon, if so be he can but "spring a smile upon this brow, “That, like the rugged Roman alderman, Referring in one of his Spectators to what he calls "men of austere principles" who look upon mirth as too wanton and dissolute for a state of probation, and as filled with a certain triumph and insolence of heart, that is inconsistent with a life exposed at every moment to the greatest dangers, Addison cites the observation of NO LAUGH ON RECORD OF THE MANOF sorrows. 417 writers of this complexion," that the sacred person who was the great pattern of perfection was never seen to laugh."* The "conceit " is discussed, or rather touched upon in passing, by Sir Thomas Browne, in the seventh book of Vulgar Errors-a conceit "sometimes urged as a high example of gravity. And this is opinioned because in Holy Scripture it is recorded He' sometimes wept, but never that He laughed. Which, howsoever granted, it will be hard to conceive how He passed His younger years and childhood without a smile, if as divinity affirmeth, for the assurance of His humanity unto men, and the concealment of His divinity from the devil, he passed this age like other children, and so proceeded until He evidenced the same. And surely herein no danger there is to affirm the act or performance of that, whereof we acknowledge the power and essential property; and whereby indeed He most nearly convinced the doubt of His humanity." One of Sir Thomas Browne's commentators hereupon remarks that "the doubt of His humanity was convinced soe many other wayes (before His passion)," that "the propertye of risibilitye (which is indeed the usuall instance of the schooles) though it bee inseparable from the nature of man, and incommunicable to any other nature, yet itt does not infer the necessitye of the acte in every individuall subject or person of man." Jeremy Taylor, in his Exhortation to the Imitation of the Life of Christ, while admitting that we never read "that Jesus laughed, and but once that He rejoiced in spirit," goes on to argue that the "declensions of our natures cannot bear the weight of a perpetual grave deportment, without the intervals of refreshment and free alacrity." In the same "He would weep often, but never laugh."-Ludolphus, Vita Christi. EE 418 A TIME TO LAUGH. spirit the late Archdeacon Hare argued, that while, avowedly, we cannot follow too closely the Great Exemplar, we are not to cleave servilely to the outward form, but rather to endeavour that the principles of our actions may be the same which He manifested in His; for as He did many things which we cannot do,—as He had a power and a wisdom which lie altogether beyond our reach,-so are there many things which beseem us in our human, earthly relations, but which it did not enter into His purpose to sanction by His express example. "Else on the selfsame grounds it might be contended, that it does not befit a Christian to be a husband or a father, seeing that Jesus has set us no example of these two sacred relations." A later commentator holds it to be as certain that the Man of Sorrows smiled at the gambols of a child, and shared the joy of the good, as that He sat at a wedding feast, and turned water into wine, and entered the house of joy as well as that of mourning. Man, on the same authority, is a laughing animal; superior to the "lower" animals. in this, if in nothing else; and to be ashamed of laughter, to hold back genuine mirth, is pronounced unworthy of the good, brave man who loves sunshine, and the lark's song, and the open breezy day, and dares to enjoy the happy thoughts which his Creator has, by assumption, put into his heart, to enliven and to better it. Rigid repressers and reprovers of laughter, as in itself a thing to be rigorously and vigorously, at all seasons and for all reasons, reproved and repressed, would seem to have based their system on a literal and exclusive reading of the once-uttered woe, "Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep." Equally they would seem to have never read, or else to have clean forgotten, the benediction that by only a few verses pre A TIME TO HATE. 419 cedes that woe: "Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh." He that pronounced the blessing, recognised therefore a time to laugh; and recognised it as the good time coming, all in good time to come. S° XXXVIII. A TIME TO HATE. ECCLESIASTES iii. 8. O comprehensive is the range of the Preacher's doctrine, that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun, that he explicitly includes hate in the category-hateful a thing though unqualified hate may be. There is "a time to hate." Take hate in a malignant sense, or as the evil outcome of an unchastened nature, of unrestrained impulse, of unbridled passion; and then the time for it can scarcely be too short. We should in that case class it with the permissible anger, upon which it is not permissible to let the sun go down. The hate that is hateful absolutely, has no part or lot in the matter of times and seasons to be sanctioned by any Preacher. He that hateth his brother, is said by the Apostle of love to be in darkness, walking in it, and not knowing whither he goeth, so entirely hath darkness blinded his eyes. Nay, "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer." And, "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar." Hateful, and hating one another, is another Apostle's characterization of deeply fallen natures. But the Apostle of love himself expressly urges that we love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, and of the world, worldly; and by loving not, he im |