rtness furnishes sufficient excuse for the impertinence of
children, and with purposeless satire the daily papers deride the
highest dignitaries of the land.

Yet while always to be reckoned with in life and letters, American
humour is not a powerful and consistent factor either for destruction
or for reform. It lacks, for the most part, a logical basis, and the
dignity of a supreme aim. Moliere's humour amounted to a philosophy
of life. He was wont to say that it was a difficult task to make
gentlefolk laugh; but he succeeded in making them laugh at that which
was laughable in themselves. He aimed his shafts at the fallacies
and the duplicities which his countrymen ardently cherished, and he
scorned the cheaper wit which contents itself with mocking at idols
already discredited. As a result, he purged society, not of the
follies that consumed it, but of the illusion that these follies were
noble, graceful, and wise. "We do not plough or sow for fools," says
a Russian proverb, "they grow of themselves"; but humour has
accomplished a mighty work if it helps us to see that a fool is a
fool, and not a prophet in the market-place. And if the man in the
market-place chances to be a prophet, his message is safe from
assault. No laughter can silence him, no ridicule weaken his words.

Carlyle's grim humour was also drilled into efficacy. He used it in
orderly fashion; he gave it force by a stern principle of repression.
He had (what wise man has not?) an honest respect for dulness, knowing
that a strong and free people argues best--as Mr. Bagehot puts
it--"in platoons." He had some measure of mercy for folly. But
against the whole complicated business of pretence, against the
pious, and respectable, and patriotic hypocrisies of a successful
civilization, he hurled his taunts with such true aim that it is not
too much to say there has been less real comfort and safety in lying
ever since.

These are victories worth recording, and there is a big battlefield
for American humour when it finds itself ready for the fray, when
it leaves off firing squibs, and settles down to a compelling
cannonade, when it aims less at the superficial incongruities of life,
and more at the deep-rooted delusions which rob us of fair fame. It
has done its best work in the field of political satire, where the
"Biglow Papers" hit hard in their day, where Nast's cartoons helped
to overthrow the Tweed dynasty, and where the indolent and luminous
genius