So sadly smiling, like the ghost of mirth,
That cannot quite desert its long abode.
The very sigh that lifts the weary load
Of pain, and loosens the constraining girth
Within the breast, a semi-tone of laughter.*

For in such case it may be said with Thomas Hood, who but too well knew the sensation, and winced under its cruelty, that

-inward grief is writhing o'er its task,

As heart-sick jesters weep behind the mask.†

In this way young Werther, by his own account, as recorded in his once compassionated Sorrows, declares of himself, "I affect mirth in my troubles," and "could compose a whole litany of antitheses"‡ like that between grief and gaiety, mirth and gloom, a weight at the heart and flighty fooling on the lips.

In the bitterness of his soul, Byron protested, when that soul was perhaps in its least spiritual, most spirituel mood-for he was writing Don Juan at the time,

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep.

In a later canto he harps on the same string :

When we know what all are, we must bewail us,
But, ne'er the less, I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things; for I wish to know
What, after all, are all things but a show ?||

In the ninth canto, again, he lays stress in successive stanzas on the fact that "Death laughs," -that is to say, the skeleton's lipless mouth grins without breath: "Mark how it laughs and scorns at all you are!"

And thus Death laughs, it is sad merriment,
But still it is so; and with such example
Why should not Life be equally content,
With his Superior, in a smile to trample
Upon the nothings which are daily spent
Like bubbles on an ocean, &c.

...

It was in a precursor of his great satire that Byron had said, much in the same mood, though scarcely so heavy-hearted,

I fear I have a little turn for satire,

And yet methinks the older that one grows

Inclines us more to laugh than scold, though laughter

Leaves us so doubly serious shortly after.

As usual, he was painting himself, in one of his favourite attitudes-in In his rhyming letter to Mr. Hodgson, written on board ship, dated Falmouth Roads, when he left England in 1809, occur the characteristic lines,

But, since life at most a jest is,
As philosophers allow,
Still to laugh by far the best is,
Then laugh on-as I do now.

Laugh at all things,
Great and small things,

Sick or well, at sea or shore.*

His biographer earnestly contends that Byron's vein of mockery, in the excess to which, at last, he carried it, was but a result of the shock his proud mind had received from those events which cast him off, branded and heart-stricken, from country and from home. And quoting his assertion that, if he laughed at any mortal thing (as avowedly he did at all mortal things), 'twas that he might not weep, Moore adds the comment that this laughter, which, in such temperaments, is the near neighbour of tears, served as a diversion to him from more painful vents of bitterness; and that the same philosophical calculation which made the poet of melancholy, Young, declare that he "preferred laughing at the world to being angry at it," led Lord Byron also to settle upon the same conclusion; and to feel, in the misanthropic views he was inclined to take of mankind, that mirth often saved him the pain of hate.t

Chamfort pictures, in his miscellaneous character-portraits from real life, a certain M. E., who, says he, "jouit excessivement des ridicules qu'il peut saisir et apercevoir dans le monde. Il paraît même charmé lorsqu'il voit quelque injustice absurde. D'abord j'ai cru qu'il était méchant; mais, en le fréquentant davantage, j'ai démêlé à quel principe appartient cette étrange manière de voir: c'est un sentiment honnête, une indignation vertueuse qui l'a rendu longtemps malheureux, et à laquelle il a substitué une habitude de plaisanterie, qui voudrait n'être que gaie, mais qui, devenant quelquefois amère et sarcasmatique, dénonce la source dont elle part."‡ M. de Tocqueville says, in an unfinished historical work of his§-the intended sequel to L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution that the French have a sort of joyous desperation which deceives their rulers: they laugh at their own misery, but they feel it no less.

It was of their "outrageous folly" during the Reign of Terror that Horace Walpole thus wrote to Hannah More: "You say their outrageous folly tempts you to smile-yes, yes: at times I should have laughed too, if I could have dragged my muscles at once from the zenith of horror to the nadir of contempt: but their abominations leave one [query, do not leave one?] leisure enough to leap from indignation to mirth." || To laugh that he might not weep, had, however, been a pet maxim and alleged practice of Horace Walpole's, his whole life long. His letters abound with such passages as this in one to Lord Strafford: "The world is an old acquaintance that does not improve upon one's hands; however, one must not give way to the disgust it creates. My maxim, and practice too, is to laugh, because I do not like to cry."* He could shed a pailful of tears, he protests, over recent family vexations; but to avert any such flood, he will play Democritus. If he cannot laugh outright, at least he will try to smile-in the fashion of Mr. Tennyson's cynical lover-to

-smile a hard-set smile, like a stoic, or like
A wiser epicurean, and let the world have its way.t

In one of Mr. Dickens's Christmas Stories there is a lawyer whose cue is that you mustn't laugh at life; in juxtaposition with whom, and in contradistinction from whom, there is a doctor who is always dilating on Life as a farce-the same contradictions prevailing in everything: "one must either laugh or cry at such stupendous inconsistencies; and I prefer to laugh." Coleridge was wont to say, in terms borrowed from one of the German philosophers, of whose philosophy he made so much, that every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian. In like manner might it be said, in reference to individual temperament, that every man, who thinks at all on what is passing within him and around him, is born of the stock of Heraclitus or of that of Democritus :

For some must laugh, and some must weep;
Thus runs the world away.

As regards Democritus, M. Nourisson, the French historian of the Progress of Human Thought, maintains that, in point of fact, the laughter of this so-called laughing philosopher, usually placed as it is in antithesis to the tears of Heraclitus, the crying one, was little else after all than a dissembled tear-n'était guère aussi qu'un pleur dissimulé.§ As he gazed on the follies and miseries of mankind, disdain was for ever working in the curves and corners of his lips. After having climbed, as another critic would be excused for saying of Democritus, the highest heaven of invention, there was nothing for it, of course, but to look with a semblance at least of derisive levity upon all the vicissitudes and poor struggles of humanity. It was thus, alleges an expositor of the Atomic Theory, that he won and wore the questionable honours of the Laughing Philosopher. The great majority of his spiritual posterity, it is added, down to the latest generation of them, exhibit the same divided turn of mind, solemnity before Nature, and frivolity in the presence of the destination of Man. "For our own part, we cannot but think there is more of pathos and tragedy in such Democritic laughter of the light-hearted classes of the Commonwealth of Letters, even if the laugher knows it not, than in the weepings of Heraclitus, whose too afflicted eyes could descry nothing underneath the many-coloured canopy of human existence but matter for tears."||

It has often been observed, as a Saturday Reviewer lately observed once again, that a grotesque element sometimes interposes itself before, or in the very midst of, serious action. This, we are reminded, is what Bishop

* Walpole to the Earl of Strafford, Nov. 15, 1773.

† Maud, § iv. 4.

‡ The Battle of Life, part i.

Progrès de la Pensée Humaine, ch. vi.

Westminster Review, N.S., V. 176. Art.: "The Atomic Theory."

Thirlwall has discussed in an investigation of the tragic irony of the Greek drama. Our essayist supposes it to arise from what he calls "the selfcompensating character of the human mind. Oppressed with grave thoughts and duties, a sense of relief is felt by relaxing the strain on the mind; and sport, and a gracious fooling, are not inconsistent with deeper emotion."* Ellesmere, of the Friends in Council who have made a name, assumes a levity he feels not, in telling a sad tale to one of his companions, and says, "I jest at these things, Milverton; and in truth what remains for us often in this world but to jest?" And he refers to Anne Boleyn (asking rather oddly "Which of the Queens was it, by the way?") playing on the scaffold with the sharpness of the axe, and saying something droll about her little neck.† In the prisons of Paris, during the Reign of Terror, when and where recklessness, defiant levity, as Mr. Carlyle says, the Stoicism if not of strength yet of weakness, possessed all hearts, weak women and Ci-devants used to "act the Guillotine" by way of pastime. "In fantastic mummery, with towel-turbans, blanketermine, a mock Sanhedrim of Judges sits, mock Tinville pleads; a culprit is doomed, is guillotined by the oversetting of two chairs."‡ After this sort, and sometimes with acted extravaganzas and burlesques far beyond this sort, did their misery make sport to mock-not merely a Sanhedrim of damnatory Judges, not merely an implacable prosecuting Tinville; but to mock-itself.

a

A modern French poetess delineates with some force the disposition of one of her characters to take refuge from inward wretchedness in words of piquant mockery and badinage:

Son esprit excité venge son cœur souffrant:
Le mal que l'un reçoit, c'est l'autre qui le rend.§

So Macaulay remarks of Machiavelli, that the sarcastic bitterness of his conversation disgusted those who were more inclined to accuse his licentiousness than their own degeneracy, and who were unable to conceive the strength of those emotions which are concealed by the jests of the wretched, and by the follies of the wise.||

True, that Burns does make a parade of his thoughtlessness, observes Mr. Kingsley; but why? because he gloried in it? On the contrary, any but a skin-deep critic must see that it is an inward shame and selfreproach that "wrings those poems out of him. They are the attempt of the strong man fettered to laugh at his own consciousness of slaveryto deny the existence of his chains-to pretend to himself that he likes them."

What says Moor in the great scene of Schiller's sensational, even spasmodic tragedy, just before the celebrated exclamation on the glorious sunset, So dies a hero! So stirbt ein Held! That this chequered lottery of life "is a drama, brother, enough to bring tears into your eyes, while it shakes your sides with laughter."* One might apply the lines in Wordsworth's abortive tragedy-which, by the way, utterly unlike as were the two men, is not without a certain family likeness to Schiller's

If this be not enough

To make mankind merry for evermore,
Then plain it is as day, that eyes were made
For a wise purpose-verily to weep with.†

It is to deep concern that Richardson's self-upbraiding profligate traces the levity he affects; he struggles and struggles, and tries to buffet down his cruel reflections as they arise; and "when I cannot," he says, "I am forced, as I have often said, to try to make myself laugh, that I may not cry; for one or other I must do: and is it not philosophy carried to the highest pitch, for a man to conquer such tumults of soul as I am sometimes agitated by, and, in the very height of the storm, to be able to quaver out a horse-laugh?"‡ One would almost feel sure that the passage "make myself laugh, that I may not cry," must have been in Byron's mind when he affirmed, with all the extra emphasis of metre, that if he laughed at any mortal thing, 'twas that he might not weep.

Your Senecas, your Epictetuses, and the rest of your Stoical tribe, Mr. Lovelace flatters himself, "with all their apathy nonsense," could not come to this laughing philosophy of his laughing that he may not cry. They could forbear wry faces: bodily pains they could well enough seem to support; and that was all. "The pangs of their own smitten-down souls they could not laugh over, though they could at the follies of others. They read grave lectures; but they were grave. This high point of philosophy, to laugh and be merry in the midst of the most soul-harrowing woes, when the heartstrings are just bursting asunder, was reserved for thy Lovelace." So writes that complacent libertine to his confidant Belford. And again in a later epistle, as the tragical story deepens towards a close, he inserts this parenthesis to explain the true nature of his sallies of mirth: "All gloom at heart, by Jupiter! although the pen and the countenance assume airs of levity."§ Remorse was busy with even a Lovelace; like the tyrant in Southey's poem, who,

-all impatient of the thoughts

That canker'd in his heart,
Seeks in the giddiness of boisterous sport
Short respite from the avenging power within." ||

In speaking of that huge and steadfast affliction which besieged, through life, the heart of Charles Lamb,-no "long since cancelled woe," but a two-headed snake (so the Opium-eater describes it), looking behind and before, and gnawing at his heart by the double pangs of memory, and of anxiety, gloomy and fearful, watching for the future,

* Die Raüber, III. 2.

† Wordsworth, The Borderers, Act III.

Be it remembered, in hinting a sort of affinity between this play and Schiller's, that it was expressly classified by Wordsworth himself among his Poems Written in Youth.

History of Clarissa Harlowe, vol. vii., letter lxxxiv.
Ibid., vol. viii., letter lviii.