e State_, p. 3.]

[Footnote 22: _Servile State_, p. 140.]

[Footnote 23: The reader should take care to distinguish between the
phrase "politically unfree," as connoting the lack of constitutional
power, and the phrase "politically unfree," used by Mr. Belloc in _The
Servile State_ as connoting the lack of a free status in positive law,
and therefore the presence of servile conditions.]

CHAPTER XII

THE HUMORIST

Humour is the instrument of the critic. If the psychological explanation
of laughter be, as some have supposed, the sight of "a teleological
being suddenly behaving in an ateleological manner," then the mere act
of laughter is in itself an act of comparison and of criticism. The true
castigator of morals has never striven to make his subjects appear
disgraceful, but to make them appear ridiculous. Except in the case of
positive crime, for example, murder or treason, the true instrument of
the censor is burlesque. It fails him only when his subject is
consciously and deliberately breaking a moral law: it is irresistible
when its target is a false moral law or convention of morals set up to
protect anti-social practices. Among these we may reckon bribery of
politicians, oppression of the poor, vulgar ostentation, the habit of
adultery and the writing of bad verse. Aristophanes, Moliere, Byron, and
Dickens--these attempted to correct the social vices of their times by
laughter.

But humorous literature is not wholly confined to such practical ends.
We may derive pleasure from reading literary criticism for its own sake
and not for the purpose of knowing what books to read: we also gain and
require a pure pleasure from that constant criticism of human things
which we call humour. It remains a function of criticism, as may be seen
from the simple fact that no man was ever a good critic of anything
under the sun who had not a sense of humour. It is a perpetual
commentary on life, a constant guide to sanity. And a good joke, like a
good poem, enlarges the boundaries of the spirit and puts us in touch
with infinity. But too much abstract disquisition on the subject of
humour is a frequent cause of the lack of it.

Mr. Belloc's first essays in humour were not of the satirical or
purposeful sort: unless we consider an obscure volume called _Lambkin's
Remains_ to be of this nature. The author has kept in affection, it
would seem, only one of these compositions sufficiently to reprint it
out of a volume w