asts does. It is--at least, I
suppose it is--merely a statement of fact, but it amuses us because
it introduces an inappropriate and unexpected element into our
consideration of cannibalism.

Perhaps Sir James Barrie would prefer to defend the humour of _The
Adored One_ on the ground, not that it is the humour of unreality, but
that, like the examples I have quoted, it is the humour of
incongruity. And, indeed, we only laugh at Leonora's murder in the
train because the reason for it was so disproportionate to the crime.
It is not funny for a woman to kill a man because he has beaten her
black and blue. It is not funny for her to kill him for his money, or
for any other reasonable motive. On the other hand, it would be funny
if she killed him for smoking a pipe while wearing a tall hat, or
because he said "lay" instead of "lie." It is the unreason of the
thing that appeals to us, and no amount of theorising about the
immorality of murder can deprive us of our joke. At the same time one
is willing to admit the excellence of those people who are so
overwhelmed by the exceeding sinfulness of sin that they cannot raise
a smile over even the most ridiculous scenes of murder and marital
infidelity. I know a great many people who can see nothing comic in
the upside-down antics of the drunken; they feel as if in laughing at
the absurdities of vice they would be acquiescing in vice. Perhaps
they would. Perhaps laughter is given to sinners as a compensation
for sins. It makes us tolerant by making us cheerful, and if we could
really laugh at murders and all indecencies, we should possibly end in
thinking that they are far less black than they are painted. So, I
imagine, the unlaughing saints reason. They always visualise sin in
its horror in a way that is beyond most of us, and we can respect
their gloom. But we who are more complex than the saints--we know well
enough that so paradoxical an affair is the human soul that a man may
laugh and laugh and keep the Ten Commandments; and we claim the right,
on the plea that "my mind to me a kingdom is," of maintaining a court
fool in our hearts to parody our royal existence, and so keep it from
going stale. In any case, we can no more help laughing than we can
help the colour of our hair. That is why we shall go on laughing at
the humours of the seven deadly sins, and why old scoundrels like Nero
and Gilles de Retz and Henry VIII are likely to remain favourite
characters in the comic ch