ith so
much scientific assurance involuntarily prompts questioning and
investigation.

In such cases the Jews invariably resort to their first text-book, the
Bible, whose pages seem to sustain M. Renan. In the Bible laughing is
mentioned only twice, when the angel promises a son to Sarah, and again
in the history of Samson, judge in Israel, who used foxes' tails as
weapons against the Philistines. These are the only passages in which
the Bible departs from its serious tone.

But classical antiquity was equally ignorant of humor as a distinct
branch of art, as a peculiar attitude of the mind towards the problems
of life. Aristophanes lived and could have written only in the days when
Athenian institutions began to decay. It is personal discomfort and the
trials and harassments of life that drive men to the ever serene, pure
regions of humor for balm and healing. Fun and comedy men have at all
times understood--the history of Samson contains the germs of a
mock-heroic poem--while it was impossible for humor, genuine humor, to
find appreciation in the youth of mankind.

In those days of healthy reliance upon the senses, poetic spirits could
obtain satisfaction only in love and in the praise of the good world and
its Maker. The sombre line of division had not yet been introduced
between the physical and the spiritual world, debasing this earth to a
vale of tears, and consoling sinful man by the promise of a better land,
whose manifold delights were described, but about which there was no
precise knowledge, no traveller, as the Talmud aptly puts it, having
ever returned to give us information about it. Those were the days of
perfect harmony, when man crept close to nature to be taught untroubled
joy in living. In such days, despite the storms assailing the young
Israelitish nation, a poet, his heart filled with the sunshine of joy,
his mind receptive, his eyes open wide to see the flowers unfold, the
buds of the fig tree swell, the vine put forth leaves, and the
pomegranate blossom unfurl its glowing petals, could carol forth the
"Song of Songs," the most perfect, the most beautiful, the purest
creation of Hebrew literature and the erotic poetry of all
literatures--the song of songs of stormy passion, bidding defiance to
ecclesiastical fetters, at once an epic and a drama, full of childlike
tenderness and grace of feeling. Neither Greece, nor the rest of the
Orient has produced anything to compare with its marvellous unio