over would side in his heart with the
Dublin demonstrators. Murder is, after all, one of the oldest
institutions on earth. It dates from the second generation of the
human race. It is almost as venerable as a sin can be, and to treat it
flippantly is as shocking to comfortable ears as the blasphemies of a
boy. Everybody knows how Baudelaire used to shock the citizens of
Brussels by opening his conversation in cafes in a raised voice with
the words: "The night I killed my father." He has himself related how
he began the thing as a joke in order to punish the Belgians for
believing everything he said. "Exasperated by always being believed,"
he wrote, "I spread the report that I had killed my father, and that I
had eaten him, and that if I had been allowed to escape from France it
was only on account of the services I had rendered to the French
police, and I was BELIEVED!"

That is the penalty of the jester on serious subjects like murder. He
is nearly always believed. The very mention of prepense death puts a
great many people into a solemn mood that is hostile to wit and humour
and any kind of facetiousness. I have met men and women, for
instance, who were quite unable to see the entertaining side of
cannibalism. Gilbert's ballad of the _Nancy Lee_, about the cook who
gradually ate all the rest of the crew, moves them not to laughter but
to horror. When the cook, or somebody else, as he gobbles one of his
mates, enthusiastically exclaims: "Oh, how like pig!" they merely
shudder. Those of us who are amused, on the other hand, are so only
because we are not such inveterate realists as our neighbours. We
treat comic murders as Charles Lamb treated comic cuckoldries. We
regard them as happening, not in our world of realities, but in a kind
of no-man's-land of humour. If it were not so, we should probably be
as shocked as anyone else--those of us, that is, who are old-fashioned
enough to consider murder and adultery as on the whole reprehensible.
Luckily, human beings in the mass have gradually developed an artistic
sense which enables them to leave the world of serious facts for the
world of comic pretences at a moment's notice. And even the strictest
humanitarian can smile with a good conscience at the most hideous of
the tortures--"something with boiling oil in it"--discussed in the
paper-fan world of _The Mikado_. I can imagine a sensitive child's
being sharply disturbed by the punishments that at one time seem to be
in