. It fosters it, and at the same moment it laughs
at it. It decides that such characters are "humorous." As the social
conditions of such a country change, the old pioneer instinct for
humor, and the pioneer forms of humor, may endure, though the actual
frontier may have moved far westward.

There is another conception of humor scarcely less famous than the
notion of incongruity. It is the conception associated with the name of
the English philosopher Hobbes, who thought that humor turned upon a
sense of superiority. "The passion of laughter," said Hobbes, "is
nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of
some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of
others, or with our own formerly." Too cynical a view, declare many
critics, but they usually end by admitting that there is a good deal in
it after all. I am inclined to think that Hobbes's famous definition is
more applicable to wit than it is to humor. Wit is more purely
intellectual than humor. It rejoices in its little triumphs. It
requires, as has been remarked, a good head, while humor takes a good
heart, and fun good spirits. If you take Carlyle literally when he says
that humor is love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's conviction that
laughter turns upon a sense of superiority, and yet surely we all
experience a sense of kindly amusement which turns upon the fact that
we, the initiated, are superior, for the moment, to the unlucky person
who is just having his turn in being hazed. It may be the play of
intellect or the coarser play of animal spirits. One might venture to
make a distinction between the low comedy of the Latin races and the
low comedy of the Germanic races by pointing out that the superiority
in the Latin comedy usually turns upon quicker wits, whereas the
superiority in the Germanic farce is likely to turn upon stouter
muscles. But whether it be a play of wits or of actual cudgelling, the
element of superiority and inferiority is almost always there.

I remember that some German, I dare say in a forgotten lecture-room,
once illustrated the humor of superiority in this way. A company of
strolling players sets up its tent in a country village. On the front
seat is a peasant, laughing at the antics of the clown. The peasant
flatters himself that he sees through those practical jokes on the
stage; the clown ought to have seen that he was about to be tripped up,
but he was too stupid. But the peasant saw that it