Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 February 1918 — EXPLAINS LAUGH OF BABIES [ARTICLE]

EXPLAINS LAUGH OF BABIES

We Come Into Thia World of Sorrows Witk* Mysterious Sense of Humor. The human love of nonsense is a divine mystery. We have often heard pessimists declare that we come into, the world weeping. It is truer, I think, .to say that we come into it laughing. For laughter in a baby seems to be its first conscious apprehension of something outside its small needs and pains. It may cry merely because a pin is sticking into it, but it laughs because already it sees something that makes it laugh, it knows not why, something that catches the eye or ear and seems irresistibly funny to it. There is nothing more mysterious than a baby’s sense, of humor. It frequently loses it as it grows up, together with the other trailing Clouds of glory, but most babies are born with it To satisfy it nursery rhymes were invented, and to satisfy the same instinct in gfbwn people “The Hunting of the Snark,” that Incomparable classic, came into being, and Caverly and Gilbert and Lear stood on their heads, so to speak, and performed such verbal antics before high heaven as must have made the very angels laugh. When the Owl and the Pussy Cat, having dined on mice and slices of quince, “hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,” “dance by the light of the moon,” there is something which, as Stevenson was fond of saying, delights the great heart of man. But, of course, with these modern artists of nonsense there is usually a deliberate attempt at the grotesque and the absurd. We know why we are laughing, but with the old-fashioned rhymes of which I am chiefly thinking, we laugh—or, for that matter, cry, perhaps—without having any reason to give.—Richard Le Gallienne, in Harper’s Magazine.