The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-11-01
The Brute in Laughter.


 tribe of woodland men was found who never laughed; never laughed, not be- cause they were too proud. as certain tribes among ourselves are, but be- cause they had never known how. So the travellers convinced themselves who employed train of these laughter1ess people as guides through the forests they were found in. All sorts of tricks were tried to move them to mirth, and all failed. They gazed upon the most screaming practical jokes in silence and with unaltered countenances. Their mirth, if aroused to any, was an inter- for tickle quite. For laughter they seemed entirely without the wherewith- al; much to the travellers amazement and more to their pity.
 I wonder whether the commiseration was mutual. Not to be able to laugh seems a dreadful thing to those who make that noise, but to men incapable of making the noise how sad 1t must seem, and how strangely resembling their fellow creatures to the beasts of the field! To be sure, we who laugh are proud of the gift because we fancy it one of the half-devine things which the beasts have not. But this is the fancy of people who do laugh and who, 9,999 times out of 10000, have never listened to the sound of laughter as so much noise; mere noise, dissociated from all idea and preconception. But that is how this outlandish folk did lis- ten when the travellers were exploding over their own so-well-got-up practical jokes. It would be entirely unphilo- sophical to assume that the forest peo- pie couldn't see the fun of those humor- ous contrivances of the western world For if one sort of savage tribe can edu- cate themselves to suffer the most ex- cruciating pain without moving a mus Gle, why should not another be brought up to enjoy the most extraordinary jokes with the same dignity? Surely they might, if conscious of the same motive-the Red Indians disdain of ut tering unseemly cries and making ugly faces. Well, then, if that were the case, these secluded woodlanders, while they saw the fun just as the Red h. dian feels the pain, heard laughter for the first lime. And if so. how should it sound to them, this noise? Like something half-divine as we fondly i'm agine it's quality? The voice of some thing that no mammal save man can express? Something which the brutes have no throat for? By no means. What they heard was an animal noise, pure and simple; and since a forest folk has finer ears for such voices than other men, we may believe that laugh terless tribe more grave than ever while the European larks were going on, and that they parted from the travellers pitying them as much as they them selves were pitied.
 But is there, then, no such thing as musical laughrer-pleasant laughter? To that question how unexpected and unkind an answer No" would be! Per haps, also, impossible, except from the l mouth of philosopher of the laughter less tribe. When you hear some un- known voice laughing without Cat night for preference)-only the laugh audible and the utterer of 1t unseen-listen for the next peal with mind discharged of everything but attention to the mere quality of the sound. That 1t is the utterance of any human feeling is to be cast out of consciousness; that it comes from human throat Is to be excluded from presumption. Do this, and what you hear will be chatter of sound like many things more than the expression of human voice. It may even sound mechanical, as if proceeding from some wood fashioning machine. More proba- ply, however, it will strike the ear as a succession of barbarois percussive notes, either resembling the cry of some known animal-a quacking animal-or suggestive of some forest creature whose voice you are hearing for the first time. And yet, however rudely a man may shout or scream (shouting and screaming being so much less di- vine than laughter), the human quality remains. Yet joy is joy, and laaighter is the voice of it; and little less is left of the worship of the old earth gods Frederick Greenwood in Illustrated l London News.