store for so many of the characters in the opera. But for the rest
of us Gilbert's Japan is as unreal as a nest of insects, where even
the crimes seem funny. In the same way we have made a child's joke of
Bluebeard, whose prototype was at least as atrocious a character as
Jack the Ripper. Perhaps, in some distant island of the South Seas,
where Europe is sufficiently remote to be unreal, the children are
already enjoying the humours of Jack the Ripper in the local
substitute for the Christmas pantomime.

Even a real murder, however, may strike one as amusing, if only it has
about it something incongruous. A thousand people have laughed for one
who has wept over Wainwright's murder of Helen Abercrombie, not
because it was not a filthy deed, but because the murderer, on being
reproached for it, uttered his famous reply: "Yes; it was a dreadful
thing to do, but she had very thick ankles." Here it is the
incongruity between the deed and the excuse for it that appeals to our
sense of humour. We laugh at it as we would laugh at Milton's Satan if
we saw him dressed in baby clothes. Similarly, when Peer Gynt and the
Cook fight after the shipwreck for possession of the place of safety
on the upturned boat, and Peer in effect murders the Cook, the
situation is comic because of the incongruity between what is said
and what is done. Take, for instance, the Lord's Prayer scene:

THE COOK (_slipping_): I'm drowning!

PEER (_seizing him_): By this wisp of hair
I'll hold you; say your Lord's Prayer, quick!

THE COOK: I can't remember; all turns black----

PEER: Come, the essentials in a word!

THE COOK: Give us this day----!

PEER: Skip that part, Cook.
You'll get all _you_ need, safe enough.

THE COOK: Give us this day----

PEER: The same old song!
'Tis plain you were a cook in life----

(THE COOK _slips from his grasp_.)

THE COOK (_sinking_): Give us this day our----
(_Disappears.)_

PEER: Amen, lad!
To the last gasp you were yourself.
(_Draws himself up on to the bottom of the boat._)
So long as there is life there's hope.

It is the paradox that delights us here--the exquisite
inappropriateness of Peer's invitation to the Cook to say a prayer
before he lets him dip under for the last time, and of the only
petition which the Cook can remember in his extremity. The latter
amuses us like Mr George Moore's story about the