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The Doctor’s Wife

By

Brian Moore

Farrar, Straus and Giroux • New York

Copyright © 1976 by Brian Moore
All rights reserved
First printing, 1976
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Cynthia Krupat
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Moore, Brian. / The doctor’s wife. / I. Title.
PZ4.M81QDOC3 / [PR6063.06] / 813’.5’4
76-21294
isbn:9781408827024
For Jean
The Doctor’s Wife
Prelude

The plane from Belfast arrived on time, but when the passengers
disembarked there was a long wait for baggage. “This plane is full
seven days a week,” said a chap who stood beside Dr. Deane
watching the first suitcases jiggle down the conveyor belt. “It’s the
best-paying run in the whole of the British Isles,” the chap said. Dr.
Deane nodded: he was not a great one for conversation with
strangers. He saw his soft canvas bag come down the ramp looking
a bit worn at the edges, and no wonder. It had been a wedding
present from his fellow interns twenty years ago. He picked up the
bag, went outside, and took the bus to Terminal II to catch the
twelve o’clock flight to Paris. It was raining here in London. It had
been very blustery when he left home this morning, but the weather
forecast had predicted clear skies over the southeastern part of the
British Isles. In the airport lounge, after being ticketed and cleared,
he decided to have a small whiskey. It was early in the day, but he
thought of the old Irish licensing law. A bona fide traveler is entitled
to a drink outside normal hours.
On his way to the bar, Dr. Deane stopped at the newsstand and,
after browsing, bought the Guardian and a copy of Time magazine.
He then went and stood, a tall lonely figure, at the long modern bar.
“John Jameson you said, sir?” the barman asked, and found the
bottle. When Dr. Deane saw the amount of liquid poured in the
glass, he remembered that he was in England. “Better make that a
double,” he said.
“A double, very good, sir.”
He tasted the whiskey. Over the intercom a voice announced
flights to Stockholm, Prague, and Moscow. He still found it odd to
think that people could walk out of this lounge and get on planes for
places which, to him, were just names in the newspaper. When he
had finished his whiskey, he took two Gelusil tablets. He had ulcers,
a family ailment, had had two bleeds over the years, and was
supposed to be careful. Lately, he had been the opposite. Of course
everyone at home drank more these days. It was to be expected.
When his flight was called, he was one of the first to board the
bus that took the passengers out to the waiting aircraft. On the bus,
he unbuttoned his fly-front raincoat, revealing a green tweed suit, a
yellow shirt, and a green tie. The colors made his face seem failed
and gray. His wife liked to choose his clothes for him. She had no
taste. He knew this, but did not argue with her. He was fonder of
peace than she.
Ahead, like wound-up toys, a line of planes crawled toward the
takeoff point. Dr. Deane watched a huge American jet begin its lift-
off into the rain-filled sky and wondered if he himself were taking off
in the wrong direction. And then, with a rush of engines, his own
plane was airborne and he was watching the English countryside
below. If you could call it countryside. So many more houses and
roads and people than at home. Fifty million on this island and less
than five million in all of Ireland.
The plane came through rain and cloud to the clear skies
predicted in that morning’s forecast and, after a while, the
stewardesses came around selling cigarettes and drinks. He ordered
a Haig and noted that, duty free, it cost a quarter of what he had
paid for the Jameson in the airport bar. Unbuckling his seat belt, he
lifted the glass, looking at the pale yellow of the Scotch. His wife
was dead against his making this trip, needle in a haystack, wild-
goose chase, all the clichés she had in that head of hers. He had
warned her to tell nobody, but perhaps that was asking more than
she had in her. He looked down, saw that the plane was already over
water, and craned his head back trying to catch a glimpse of the
white cliffs of Dover. The stewardesses were coming up the aisle
again, bringing trays of cold lunch. He thought of the letter that had
turned up in Paris two days ago, a letter from the American,
addressed to Sheila, in care of Peg Conway. His tachycardia began.
It’s just nerves, my heart’s all right. I’m all right. I’m going over to
see Peg and to talk to that priest. To see what I can find out.
The stewardess leaned in from the aisle holding a plastic tray on
which were a plate of cold meat, a cream puff, and a green salad.
“Are you having luncheon, sir?”
Dr. Deane did not feel hungry but there was his ulcer to be fed.
He accepted the tray.

Peg Conway, a small woman, came in again from the front hall of
her flat to stand like a child before Dr. Deane’s lonely height. Old-
fashioned, he had risen from the sofa as she re-entered the living
room. “Please don’t get up,” she reassured him. “Here it is.”
Dr. Deane turned the letter over in his hands, noting the
American airmail stamps, the address to which it had been sent:
MME SHEILA REDDEN
C/O CONWAY
29 QUAI SAINT-MICHEL
PARIS, 75005
FRANCE
Faire suivre, s.v.p.—
Urgent. Please forward
And the address from which it had been sent:
T. LOWRY
PINE LODGE
RUTLAND, VERMONT 05701
U.S.A.
“You’ll see that it was posted in Vermont on the second. That’s
four days after they were supposed to leave Paris.”
Dr. Deane lowered himself back down on the worn brown velvet
sofa. He tapped the envelope on his knee.
“Why don’t you open it?” Peg said.
He smiled nervously, and looked at the letter again. “Ah, no, I
don’t think I should do that. It wouldn’t be right.”
“It’s an emergency, after all.”
“I know.”
“Look,” Peg said. “She’s supposed to be in America. Well, is she?
Look at the date on the envelope. If he wrote her that letter, it
means they’re no longer together.”
“Not necessarily.” Dr. Deane lit a Gauloise from a crumpled pack.
“She might have got cold feet that night, then joined him later.”
“After the letter was posted?”
“Exactly.” He inhaled and blew smoke through his nose.
“I thought doctors didn’t smoke nowadays.”
“I backslid.”
“So, what’s your next move?”
“I was thinking,” Dr. Deane said. “It’s just possible she’s with him
now, at that address in Vermont. I might try ringing her up.”
“You mean, ring up America? That Pine Lodge place?”
“Yes.”
“You’d rather do that than open the letter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, all right, then,” Peg said. “It’s an idea. Look, I’ll go and get
supper started. That way you won’t be disturbed if you do reach
Sheila. The phone’s over there.”
“I’ll find out the charges on the call, of course.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
He stood up as she left, then heard her shut the kitchen door
with a loud noise, indicating that he would not be overheard. A big
tabby cat came stalking in from the hall, arching its back, then
leaning against his trouser leg. He looked again at the address on
the envelope, and went to the desk where the phone was. Through
Peg’s French windows he could see the Seine far below, winding
through the city; to his left, the floodlit spire of the Sainte-Chapelle
behind the law courts, and, downriver, the awesome, sepulchral
façade of Notre-Dame. To look out at a view like this, so different
from any view at home, to pick up the telephone and speak words
which would be carried by undersea cable to that huge continent he
had never seen. It was as though he were not living his own life but
acting in some film, a detective hunting for a missing person or,
more likely, a criminal seeking to make amends to his victim. And
now, dialing, and talking to an international operator, within a
minute he heard a number ring, far away, clear and casual as
though he were phoning someone just down the street.
“Pine Lodge,” an American voice said.
“I have a person-to-person call from Paris, France,” the operator
said. “For a Mrs. Sheila Redden.”
“I’m sorry, we don’t have anyone registered by that name.”
Dr. Deane cut in. “Do you have a Mr. Tom Lowry there?”
“Sir, hold on, do you want to make that person-to-person to Mr.
Lowry instead?” his operator asked.
“Yes, please.”
“Thank you. Hello, Vermont? Do you have a Mr. Tom Lowry there,
please?”
“Okay, hold on,” the American voice said. “Tom? Paris! Take it on
two.”
“Hello”—a voice, young, very excited.
“Mr. Lowry, I’m Sheila’s brother and I’m calling from Peg
Conway’s flat in Paris. My name is Owen Deane.”
“Oh.” The voice went cold. “Yes?”
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with Sheila. I want to talk to her
about some money I’m supposed to send her. Is she there?”
There was a moment’s hesitation. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
“I’m calling because there’s a letter here from you, addressed to
Sheila. We thought she was with you. Naturally, we’re worried about
her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, look, if you know where she is, would you please pass a
message on to her? Would you tell her to ring me collect in Paris at
the Hôtel Angleterre? I’ll give you the number.”
“I’m sorry. Goodbye,” the boy’s voice said. The receiver clicked.
Dr. Deane stood, holding the phone, his heart starting up with
the tachycardia that had affected him ever since this business had
started. He put down the receiver, saw his pale face in the mirror,
and, again, thought of what she had said to him that day. Forget
me. I’m like the man in the newspaper story, the ordinary man who
goes down to the corner to buy cigarettes and is never heard from
again. To think it was only four weeks since she came here to Paris
to start a perfectly ordinary summer holiday. She came to this flat,
she stood in this very room. His eyes searched the mirror as though,
behind him, his sister might reappear. But the mirror room gave him
back only his own reflection, his Judas face.
Part 1
Chapter 1

Put your things in the spare room, Peg had written, and make
yourself at home, because I won’t be back till six. Sheila Redden let
down her heavy suitcase and felt under the carpet runner on the top
step of the stairs where Peg’s letter said it would be. She pulled the
key out, put it in the lock, and the door opened inward with a groan
of its hinges. As she bent again to pick up the suitcase, a big tabby
cat bounded past her, skipping into the flat. Would that be Peg’s cat?
Mrs. Redden went inside, calling “Puss, Puss,” although Puss
wouldn’t mean much to a French cat, she supposed. Weren’t French
cats called Minou? She went into the front hall, still calling “Puss,
Puss,” damned cat, but then she saw it, very much at home, lapping
water from a cat dish in the kitchen. So that was all right. She took
off her coat.
It was quiet here: this far up, the street noises blurred to a
distant monotone. In the living room, thinking of the great view
there must be, she unlocked the middle set of French windows and
stepped out onto the narrow balcony. Below her, the Seine wound
among streets filled with history no Irish city ever knew and, as she
looked down, from the shadowed underside of the Pont Saint-Michel
a sightseeing boat slid into sunlight, tourists massed on its broad
deck staring up in her direction. If they saw her, she would seem to
them to be some rich French woman living here in luxury, right
opposite the Ile Saint-Louis. The sightseeing boat slid sideways, as
though it had lost its rudder, but then, righting itself, went off toward
Notre-Dame in a churn of dirty brown water. Mrs. Redden leaned out
over the iron railing to look down six floors to the street, where
white-aproned waiters, tiny as the bridegroom figurines on a
wedding cake, hurried in and out among sidewalk tables. Into her
mind came the view from her living room at home. The garden:
brick covered with English ivy, Belfast’s mountain, Cave Hill, looming
over the top of the garden wall, its promontories like the profile of a
sleeping giant, face upward to the gray skies. Right opposite her
house was the highest point of the mountain, the peak called
Napoleon’s Nose. She thought of that now, staring out at Napoleon’s
own city. L’Empereur on his white charger Marengo, riding into the
Place des Invalides, triumphant after Austerlitz; clatter of hoofbeats
on cobblestones, silken pennants, braided gold lanyards, fur shakos,
the Old Guard. Napoleon’s Nose. And this. She stepped inside again,
closing the big windows, going to the front hall to get her suitcase.
But then—it put the heart across her—heard someone moving about
inside the flat.
Burglars. Or worse? Ever since the bomb in the Aber-corn,
anything at all made her jump. She stood mouse quiet, listening,
until, oh, God, thank God, she saw who it was. A girl moving about
in the spare room.
“Did I scare you?” the girl asked, discovering Mrs. Redden and
the look on Mrs. Redden’s face.
“No, not at all.”
The girl, a Yank by the sound of her, had on blue jeans and a
peasant blouse you could see through. A big backpack sat open in
the middle of the spare room. The girl picked up a comb, a
hairbrush, and some makeup things. “I was supposed to be out of
here an hour ago, but I got tied up on the phone. You’re Peg’s friend
from Belfast, right?”
“That’s right, yes.”
“I’m Debbie Rush.”
“Sheila Redden,” Mrs. Redden said, and there was one of those
pauses.
“So,” the girl said. “How are things in Belfast?”
“Oh, the usual.”
“It must be rough, right? Are they ever going to settle that
mess?”
Mrs. Redden smiled what she hoped was a friendly smile. Yanks.
Kevin had an American aunt who was over on a visit from Boston
last summer: she would wear you, that one. Of course, this girl
probably worked with Peg. That would be it.
“I guess you’ve just got to get the British out of there,” the girl
said.
Mrs. Redden did not honor this with an answer. “Do you work in
the office with Peg?” she asked.
“At Radio Free Europe?” The girl began to laugh. “No way. I’m a
friend of Tom Lowry’s. He’s a friend of Peg’s and, when there was a
foul-up on my charter flight home, he spoke to her and—she’s really
nice—she let me crash here until you came.”
At once Mrs. Redden felt guilty. “I’m putting you out, then?”
“No, no, it’s all right. I’m going to a hotel tonight and tomorrow I
get a flight, I hope.” The girl hoisted the backpack, wrestling it onto
her back. Her breasts stood out under the sheer blouse. Mrs.
Redden helped straighten the backpack on the girl’s shoulders.
“Oh, thanks,” the girl said. “I’m glad I’m going downstairs, not
up. How about those stairs?”
“Good for the figure,” Mrs. Redden said.
“Yes, right.” The girl, gripping her backpack straps, turned and
marched like a soldier into the hall. Mrs. Redden hurried to open the
front door. “Well, it was nice meeting you,” the girl decided.
“I’m sorry to be putting you out like this.”
“No, no, have a nice vacation. See you.”
Mrs. Redden, holding the door open—she didn’t want to close it
until the girl had gone, it would seem rude— watched the blond
head bobbing down and around and down and around, until the
staircase was empty.
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new and unheard of; something too of the child’s gay
responsiveness to a play-challenge; often something also of the
glorious sense of expansion after compression which gives the large
mobility to freshly freed limbs of young animals and children.
A consequence of this recognition of the relation of the laughable
to our laughter as a whole is that we shall need to alter our method
of treating the subject. Our problem {154} naturally transforms itself
into the question: can we trace out the organic differentiation and
integration of the several psychical tendencies which our analysis
has disclosed? In other words, we find that we must resort to the
genetic method, and try to explain the action of the ludicrous upon
us in the modest scientific fashion by retracing the stages of its
development. Such explanation may some day be crowned by a
distinctly philosophical one, if a finer logical analysis succeeds in
discovering the essence of the ludicrous; for the present it seems to
be all that is available.
It will at once be evident that a large investigation into the origin
and development of the laughing impulse will take us beyond the
limits of pure psychology. We shall have to consider how the impulse
grew up in the evolution of the race; and this will force us to adopt
the biological point of view, and ask how this special group of
movements came to be selected and fixed among the characters of
our species. On the other hand, laughter is more than a
physiological and psychological phenomenon. As hinted above, it has
a social significance, and we shall find that the higher stages of its
evolution can only be adequately dealt with in their connection with
the movement of social progress.
Lastly, it will be by tracing the evolution of laughter in the human
community that we shall best approach the problem of the ideal
which should regulate this somewhat unruly impulse of man. Such a
study would seem to promise us a disclosure of tendencies by which
laughter has been lifted and refined in the past, and by the light of
which it may consciously direct itself in the future.
CHAPTER VI.
THE ORIGIN OF LAUGHTER.

To attempt to get back to the beginnings of human laughter may

well seem to be too ambitious a proceeding. Beginnings are small
things, and may easily escape detection, even when they lie well-lit
not far from the eye. How, then, can we hope to get at them when
they are hidden in the darkness of the remote past?
It is evident that our method here can only be the modest one of
conjecture, a method which must do its best to make its conjecture
look reasonable, while it never loses sight of the fact that it is
dealing with the conjectural. Our aim is to get an intelligible
supposition, by the help of which we may explain how laughter
broke on the earthly scene, adding one more to the many strange
sounds of the animal world.
This bit of conjectural inquiry will begin by trying to answer the
question: By what process did the laugh, from being a general sign
of pleasure, become specialised into an expression of the uprising of
the mirthful, fun-loving or jocose spirit? It will then address itself to
the problem: What has been the course of development of the spirit
of fun and of its characteristic mode of utterance?
It would not, of course, be possible to attempt even a conjectural
account of these far-off and unchronicled events, but for the new
instruments of hypothetical construction {156} with which the Theory
of Evolution has furnished us. In attempting so hazardous a task we
have, at least, the example of one of the most modest of men to
draw us on. Charles Darwin has taught us how to be at once daring
and cautious in trying to penetrate the darkness of the ages behind
us; and one can wish nothing better than to be able to walk worthily
in his steps.
It will be evident that in essaying an effort which can at best end
in only a plausible guess we must use every available clue. This
means, not merely that we try to trace back the history of mirthful
utterance, alike in the evolution of the individual and of the species,
to its rude inchoate forms, but that we search for vestiges of
utterances vaguely resembling human laughter in the animal world.
This last suggestion may well seem to the reader like another
blow to man’s early pride of race. The worthy naturalist who called
his species the “laughing animal” did not probably trouble himself
about the question of the dignity of the attribute. Since laughing was
one of the things that only man could do, it served as a convenient
way of describing him. Yet, since the later evolutional psychology
has led us to be more generous in recognising in the lower animals
something closely similar to our own processes of reasoning, we
need not be greatly shocked to hear that it is actually crediting other
species than our own with a simple sense of fun, and a characteristic
manner of expressing the feeling; that is to say, an utterance
answering to our laugh.
Now here, if anywhere, we must be on our guard. In attempting
to detect traces of mirthful expression in animals we are exposed to
a two-fold danger: that common to all observation of animal ways—
a too anthropomorphic kind of interpretation; and that of mistaking
in other beings, {157} whether human or sub-human, what we
envisage as funny, for their conscious fun. It is eminently natural,
when we do not screw ourselves up to the severely scientific
attitude, to see signs of chuckling glee in animals. I remember how I
watched somewhere in Norway, in the early morning, a magpie as
he stood for some time ducking his head and throwing up his long
tail, accompanying these movements with chuckle-like sounds; and
how I found it exceedingly hard not to believe that he was having a
good laugh at something, possibly the absurd ways of the foreign
tourists who visit his coast. Yet, judged by the standard of scientific
observation, this “natural” interpretation was scarcely satisfactory.
Since our aim compels us to be scientific, we cannot accept
common modes of interpreting the “mischievous” performances of
animals. Many of a monkey’s tricks are “funny” enough; yet we may
seriously doubt whether he enjoys them as practical jokes. His
solemn mien certainly does not suggest it; but then it may be said
that human jokers have a way of keeping up an appearance of
gravity. A consideration of greater weight is that what looks to us
much like a merry joke may be a display of the teasing instinct,
when this goes beyond the playful limit, and aims at real annoyance
or mischief. The remark probably applies to some of the well-known
stories of “animal humour,” for example, that of Charles Dickens
about the raven. This bird, it may be remembered, had to share the
garden with a captive eagle. Having carefully measured the length of
this formidable creature’s chain, he turned to good account the
occasion of the giant’s sleep by stealing his dinner; and then, the
rightful owner having presumably woke up, made an impudent
display of eating the same just safely outside the {158} eagle’s
“sphere of influence”. This doubtless showed some cunning, and
something of spite; but it is not clear that it indicated an enjoyment
of the fun of the thing.
That this teasing and playing of tricks by animals may now and
again approach the human attitude of malicious mirthfulness is not
improbable. A cat that “plays” with its captive mouse, half-
pretending, as it seems, not to see the small thing’s hopeless
attempt to “bolt,” may, perhaps, be enjoying something of the
exultant chuckle of a human victor. So, too, some of the mischievous
behaviour of a lively and imperfectly domesticated monkey, which a
simple-minded sailor has brought to his mother by way of making
her happy, may disclose a germ of the spirit of fun, of a malicious
playfulness which is capable of enjoying its jokes as such.
Yet, while we may question the truth of the proposition that
these mischievous actions are enjoyed as practical jokes—in the way
in which Uncle Remus represents them—we need not hesitate to
attribute to animals a simple form of the child’s sense of fun. This
trait appears most plainly in the pastimes of the young of many
familiar species, including our two domestic pets, pastimes which are
quite correctly described as animal play. The particular forms of this
playful activity, the tusslings, the attacks and retreats on both sides,
the chasings and the rest, are pretty certainly determined by special
instincts.89 But, as play, these actions are an expression of high
spirits and of something analogous to a child’s love of “pretending”.
Is it not a bit of playful make-believe, for example, when a dog, on
seeing the approach of a canine stranger, “lies low” wearing the look
of an alert foe; yet, as soon as the stranger approaches, “gives {159}
away the show” by entering with an almost disgraceful celerity into
perfectly friendly relations with him? It is the same when a dog
teases another dog by startling him, showing signs of enjoying the
trick. H. M. Stanley writes: “My dog took the same delight in coming
up quietly behind a small dog and giving a terrifying bark as does
the child in jumping out from a corner and crying ‘boo’”.90
Owing, to no little extent, perhaps, to the fact of its education by
man, the dog gives much the clearest indications of a sense of fun.
No one can observe a dog during a walk with his child-comrades
without noting how readily he falls in with their playful proposals.
The infectiousness of an announcement of the playful temper is
clearly illustrated here. The dog imitates the gambols, and will even
seem to respond to the vocal outbursts of his merry playmates.
Darwin has rightly recognised a germ of our “sense of humour” in a
dog’s joining in the game of stick-throwing. You throw a bit of stick
for him to fetch, and having picked it up he proceeds to carry it
away some distance and to squat down with it on the ground just
before him. You then come quite close as if to take the stick from
him, on which he seizes it and bears it off exultingly, repeating the
little make-believe with evident enjoyment.91
I have tested a dog again and again when playing with him in
this fashion, and have satisfied myself that he is in the play-mood,
and knows perfectly well that you are too; so that if you pretend to
be serious and to command him in your most magisterial voice to
give up the stick he sidles up with a hollow show of obedience which
could impose on nobody, as if to say, “I know better: you are not
really serious; so I am going on with the game”. All {160} the notes of
a true sense of fun seem to be present in this case: the gay and
festive mood, a firm resolve desipere in loco, and a strong
inclination to play at “pretending”.
Prof. Lloyd Morgan gives an example of what certainly looks like
a dog’s merry make-believe in which man’s lead takes no part. The
writer tells us that he used at one time to take an intelligent
retriever to a sandy shore, where the dog engaged spontaneously in
the following pastime. He buried a number of small crabs in the
sand, and then stood waiting till a leg or a claw appeared, “upon
which he would run backwards and forwards giving short barks of
keen enjoyment”.92
I find it hard to doubt that this was a genuine outburst of
joyousness and of something indistinguishable from a love of fun,
and that it was connected with the “coming off” of a practical joke.
The repetitions of the burial when the dog had seen that it was
ineffectual, points clearly to a consciousness of the make-believe
character of the performance.
Whatever a dog’s powers of jocosity when uninstructed by man,
it seems safe to set down a good share of his highly developed
sense of fun to his profound susceptibility to man’s educative
influence; which again (as the difference between the educability of
the dog and of the cat at once shows) implies an unusual strength of
those instincts of attachment to man which have made him almost
the type of fidelity.
How far, one wonders, will this educative influence of man be
likely to go in the case of the most companionable of our domestic
pets? W. Preyer tells us, that the dog is capable of imitating the
signs of human gaiety, that an {161} intelligent specimen, when
confronted with our laughter will draw back the corners of his mouth
and leap into the air with a bright lustre in the eye.93 Here we seem
to have a rudiment of a genuine laugh, and may perhaps cease to
speak rather confusingly of a dog’s “laughing with his tail”. G. J.
Romanes relates that he had a dog who went some way towards
qualifying himself for the office of clown. This animal would perform
a number of self-taught tricks which were clearly intended to excite
laughter. “For instance, while lying on his side and violently grinning,
he would hold one leg in his mouth.” Under these circumstances
“nothing pleased him so much as having his joke duly appreciated,
while, if no notice was taken of him, he would become sulky”.94
This animal must, one supposes, have been in an exceptional
degree a “funny dog”. It seems a pity that the observer did not take
a “snapshot” at that grin so that it might be a shade less abstract
and “in the air” than the grin of the Cheshire cat, as treated by Mr.
Lewis Carroll. What seems clear is, that the physiognomy of a dog
manages to execute a weirdly distorted semblance of our smile. With
respect to the vocal part of the expression, we must not expect too
much. The bark may not be able to adjust itself to our quick
explosions of gaiety. It is commonly said that the dog has a special
bark for expressing pleasure, and it seems likely that he employs this
when he is said to be seized by the sense of the funniness of things.
On the moral side, the possibility of the dog’s becoming a
humorous beast looks more promising. He certainly exhibits
rudiments of feelings and mental attitudes which {162} seem in man
to be closely related to a reflective humour. As the inner circle of his
human friends know, he can be terribly bored. I saw, not long since,
a small dog undergoing the process of chaining by his mistress
before she took him into a shop. He drew a long yawn, and his
appearance was eminently suggestive of a keen sense of the
absurdity of the shopping habits of ladies, a sense which only
wanted the appropriate utterance to become a mild, tolerant kind of
satire. Yet one must be mindful of one’s own warning against a too
hasty interpretation of such actions.
We may now turn to animals much nearer ourselves in the
zoological scale. Among monkeys we obtain, undoubtedly,
something more closely akin to our smile and laugh. Darwin has
made a careful inquiry into the similarities between the two. He tells
us that some of the essential features of the facial expression during
a laugh, the drawing backwards of the corners of the mouth, the
formation of wrinkles under the eyes, etc., are “characteristic and
expressive of a pleased state of mind in various kinds of monkeys”.95
With respect to laughter-like sounds, Darwin gives us several
pertinent facts. A young chimpanzee will make a kind of barking
noise when he is pleased by the return of any one to whom he is
attached, a noise which the keeper interprets as a laugh. The
correctness of this interpretation is confirmed by the fact that other
monkeys utter a kind of “tittering sound” when they see a beloved
person. A young chimpanzee when tickled under the armpits
produces a more decided chuckling or laughing sound. “Young
ourangs, also, when tickled will make a chuckling sound and put on
a grin.”
It has been found by Dr. L. Robinson that the young of {163} the
anthropoid apes are specially ticklish in the regions of the surface of
the body which correspond with the ticklish regions in the case of
the child. Not only so, a young chimpanzee will show great pleasure
when tickled, rolling over on his back and abandoning himself to the
pastime, much as a child does. When the tickling is prolonged he
resembles a child further by defending ticklish spots. So, too, does a
young ourang. It may be added that young apes, like many children,
make a pretence of biting when tickled.
To sum up: the young of the higher apes have something
resembling our smile and laugh, and produce the requisite
movements when pleased. Their attempt at laughter, as we might be
disposed to regard it, appears as a sign of sudden joy in
circumstances in which a child will laugh, e.g., on the reappearance
of a beloved companion after a considerable interval. It further
occurs when the animal is tickled, along with other manifestations
which point to the existence of a rudiment of the child’s capacity for
fun and for the make-believe of play.
One more fact should be added in order to bring out the
similarity here to the human attitude towards the laughable. It is
probable, from the testimony of several observers, that monkeys
dislike being laughed at.96 Now, it is true that the enjoyment of fun
and the dislike to being made its object are not the same thing. Nor
do they seem to vary together in the case of men; otherwise the
agelast would not be so often found among those who keenly resent
being the object of others’ laughter. Nevertheless, they may be
regarded in general as correlative traits; creatures which show a
distinct distaste for being made the objects of laughter may be
supposed to be capable of {164} the laughing attitude, so far at least
as to be able to understand it.
Turning now from sub-human kinds of laughter to the full
expression as we know it in ourselves, we may briefly trace the
history of the smile and laugh during the first years of life. Here the
question of the date of the first appearance of these expressive
movements becomes important; and happily we have more than one
set of careful observations on the point.
With respect to the smile, which is commonly supposed to be the
first to show itself, we have notes made by Darwin and by Preyer.
According to the former, the first smile appeared, in the case of two
of his children, at the age of forty-five days, and, of a third, at a
somewhat earlier date.97 Not only were the corners of the mouth
drawn back, but the eyes brightened and the eyelids slightly closed.
Darwin adds that the circumstances pointed to a happy state of
mind. Preyer is much fuller here.98 He points out the difficulties of
noting the first true smile of pleasure. In the case of his own boy, it
seems, the movements of the corners of the mouth, accompanied by
the formation of dimples in the cheek, occurred in the second week,
both in the waking and in the sleeping state. The father thinks,
however, that the first smile of pleasure occurred on the twenty-sixth
day, when after a good meal the child’s eyes lighted on the mother’s
face. This early smile, he adds, was not an imitation of another’s;
nor did it imply a joyous recognition of the mother. It was just the
instinctive expression of a feeling of bodily satisfaction. {165}
Other observers differ, too, in respect of the date of the first
occurrence of the true expressive smile. For example, Dr.
Champneys puts it in the sixth, Sigismund in the seventh week,
agreeing roughly with Darwin; whereas Miss Shinn gives as the date
the latter half of the first month, and so supports Preyer’s
observations. Another lady, Mrs. K. C. Moore, would go farther than
Preyer and say that the first smile occurs on the sixth day of life.99 It
may be added that Miss Shinn is more precise than Preyer in her
account of the early development of the smile. She tells us that,
whereas the first smile of her niece—whom we will henceforth call
by her name, Ruth—(latter half of first month) was merely the
outcome of general comfort, a smile occurred in the second month
which involved an agreeable perception, namely, that of faces
bending over the child in which she took great interest. This smile of
special pleasure, expressing much gaiety, occurred when she was
lying fed, warm, and altogether comfortable.
It is fairly certain that these differences indicate some inequalities
of precocity in the children observed. At the same time, it seems
probable that the several observers are dealing with different stages
in the development of the smile. Preyer shows clearly that it
undergoes considerable expansion, involving increased complexity of
movement, and the addition of the important feature, the
brightening of the eye. Mrs. Moore gives no description of what she
saw on the sixth and seventh days, and is presumably referring to a
vague resemblance to a rudiment of a smile which had no {166}
expressive significance; and some things in Preyer’s account lead us
to infer that he is speaking of a less highly developed smile than
Darwin.100
All that can certainly be said, then, is that the movements of a
smile, as an expression of pleasure, undergo a gradual process of
development, and that an approach to a perfect smile of pleasure
occurs some time in the second month of life.
If we turn to the dates assigned to the first occurrence of a
laugh, we find the uncertainties are at least equal to those
encountered in the case of the smile. Darwin illustrates how a smile
may gradually take on an accompaniment of sound which grows
more and more laughter-like. One of his children, who, he thinks,
first smiled at the age of forty-five days, developed about eight days
later a more distinct and impressive smile, accompanied by a little
“bleating” noise, which, he adds, “perhaps represented a laugh”. It
was not, however, till much later (113th day) that the noises became
broken up into the discrete sounds of a laugh. Another child of his,
when sixty-five days old, accompanied his smile by “noises very like
laughter”. A laughter, with all the indications of genuine fun behind
it, occurred in the case of one of his children on the 110th day, when
the game was tried of throwing a pinafore over the child’s face and
then suddenly withdrawing it, this being varied by the father’s
suddenly uncovering his own face and approaching the child’s. He
adds that, some three or four weeks before this, his boy appeared to
enjoy as a good joke a little pinch on his nose and cheeks.
Preyer puts the date of the first laughter-like sounds, as {167} he
puts that of the first smile, earlier than Darwin. He says he observed
a visible and audible laugh in his boy on the twenty-third day. This
was a chuckling at the view of a rose-tinted curtain. The sounds
were repeated in the following weeks at the sight of slowly swinging
coloured objects and at new sounds, e.g., those of the piano. At the
same time he tells us that a prolonged loud laughter, recognisable as
such by a person not looking at what was going on, first occurred in
the eighth month when the boy was playing with his mother. Among
the other observers it may suffice to refer to one of the most careful,
Miss Shinn. This lady, who, it will be remembered, puts the date of
Ruth’s first smile as early as the first month, assigns the child’s first
genuine laughter to the 118th day. It was excited by the sight of the
mother making faces. It is worth adding that Ruth reached her third
performance eleven days later.101
In this case, too, it is probable that we have to do, not merely
with differences of precocity in the children observed, but with the
difficulties of determining what is a clear example of the expression
concerned.102 There is no doubt that the full reiteration of our
laughter is reached by stages. This is brought out fully by Darwin,
and is allowed by Preyer. Yet how much of the series of more or less
laughter-like sounds produced by an infant during states of pleasure
is to be regarded as entering into the development of laughter, it is
not easy to say. Miss Shinn heard Ruth give out curious little
chuckling sounds of two syllables on the 105th day, that is thirteen
days before she produced her {168} laugh. She adds under the date,
113th day, that is to say, five days before the laugh, that the child
had developed new throat sounds, crowing, croaking, etc., and
showed a strong disposition to vary sounds in a pleasurable mood. It
seems highly improbable that these sounds were not preparatory
stages in the development of the laugh.103
It is fairly certain that laughing comes after smiling. Preyer’s
words may no doubt seem to suggest that the first laugh (twenty-
third day) comes before the first smile (twenty-sixth day); but his
account of the development of the two shows plainly that this is not
his meaning. He distinctly says that laughter is only a strengthened
and audible (laut) smile; and remarks, further, that “in all (children)
alike the utterance of pleasure begins with a scarcely noticeable
smile, which quite gradually passes into laughter in the course of the
first three months”. He adds that this development depends on that
of the higher brain centres, and the capability of having
perceptions.104
The first laughter is, like the smile, an expression of pleasure. As
Preyer puts it, the laughter is a mere heightening of the look of
pleasure. It marks, however, a higher level of agreeable
consciousness. Whereas the first clumsy experiments in smiling
denote nothing but a comfortable state of repletion, the first
attempts at laughter are responses to gladdening sense-
presentations, such as swinging coloured objects, and the new
sounds of a piano. This laughter at new visual and aural
presentations was followed, according to Preyer, between the sixth
and the {169} ninth week by a laughter more distinctly joyous or
jubilant, as the child regarded his mother’s face and appeared to
recognise it. This laughter of mental gaiety seems at an early age—
about the fourth month—to ally itself with movements of the limbs
(raising and lowering of the arms, etc.) as a complex sign of high
spirits or gladness.105
How far the provocative of laughter mentioned by Darwin,
namely, suddenly uncovering the child’s head (or his own) implied a
rudiment of fun, I am not sure. It shows, however, the early
connection between laughter and agreeable surprise, that is to say,
a mild shock, which, though it borders on the alarming, is on the
whole gladdening.
One other early form of laughter, which is found also in certain
young animals, is that excited by tickling. This has been first
observed, in the case of the child, in the second or the third month.
Preyer’s boy laughed in response to tickling in the second month.106
Dr. Leonard Hill tells me that his little girl, who was by-the-bye
specially sensitive to titillation, responded first by laughter in the
tenth week.
Since our analysis has led us to regard the effect of tickling as
largely mental, and as involving a playful attitude, this fact confirms
the conclusion that the specialised laughter which is the
accompaniment of play occurs in a well-defined form within the first
three months.
To sum up: We find, within the first two or three months, both
the smile and the laugh as expressions of pleasure, including
sensations of bodily comfort and gladdening sense-presentations.
We find, further, in the reflex reaction of laughter under tickling,
which is observable about the {170} end of the second month, the
germ of a sense of fun, or of mirthful play; and this is indicated too
in the laughter excited by little pinches on the cheek at the end of
the third month.
It is certain that these tendencies are not learned by imitation.
This is proved by the fact, established by Preyer, that imitative
movements do not occur in the normal child till considerably later,
and by the fact that the child, Laura Bridgman, who was shut out by
her blindness and deafness from the lead of companions, developed
these expressions. We must conclude, then, that they are inherited
tendencies.
Here the psychologist might well stop in his inquiries, if Darwin
and others had not opened up the larger vista of the evolution of the
species. Can we, by carrying the eye along this vista, conjecture how
these instinctive movements came to be acquired in the course of
animal evolution?
The first question that arises in this inquiry is whether the smile
or the laugh was the earlier to appear in the course of racial
development. The expressions of animals below man do not offer
any decisive clue here. The anthropoid apes appear both to produce
a kind of smile or grin, and to utter sounds analogous to our
laughter. It may, however, be contended that this so-called laughter
is much less like our laughter than the grin is like our smile. In the
absence of better evidence, the fact that the smile appears first in
the life of the child must, according to a well-known law of
evolution, be taken as favouring the hypothesis that man’s remote
ancestors learned to smile before they could rise to the achievement
of the laugh. This is further supported by the fact that, in the case of
the individual, the laugh when it occurs announces a higher form of
pleasurable consciousness, the level of perception {171} as
distinguished from the level of sensation which is expressed by the
first smile. Lastly, I am informed that among imbeciles the smile
persists lower down in the scale of degeneration than the laugh. Dr.
F. E. Beddard writes to me: “I remember once seeing a defective
human monster (with no frontal lobes) whose only sign of
intelligence was drawing up the lips when music was played”.107
It is commonly held that, since the expression of pain, suffering,
or apprehension of danger among animals is a much more pressing
necessity for purposes of family and tribal preservation than that of
pleasure or contentment, the former is developed considerably
earlier than the latter. According to this view, we can understand
why the adumbrations of a smile and a laugh which we find in
animals closely related to man have been so imperfectly developed
and appear only sporadically.
Supposing that the smile was the first of the two expressive
movements to appear in the evolution of the human species, can we
conjecture how it came to be the common and best-defined
expression of pleasurable states? In dealing with this point we may
derive more definite aid from Darwin’s principles.
The fact that the basis of a smile is a movement of the mouth at
once suggests a connection with the primal source of human as of
animal enjoyment; and there seems, moreover, to be some evidence
of the existence of such a connection. A baby after a good meal will,
I believe, go on performing something resembling sucking
movements. The first smiles may have arisen as a special
modification of these movements when there was a particularly lively
feeling of organic contentment or well-being. I believe, further, {172}
that an infant is apt to carry out movements of the mouth when
food is shown to it. A similar tendency seems to be illustrated by the
behaviour of a monkey which, when a choice delicacy was given it at
meal-time, slightly raised the corners of the mouth, the movement
partaking of the nature of “an incipient smile”.108 Again, our
hypothesis finds some support in the fact that, according to Preyer
and others, the first smiles of infants were noticed during a happy
condition of repletion after a good meal.109
Supposing the smile in its origin to have thus been organically
connected with the pleasurable experience of sated appetite, we can
easily see how it might get generalised into a common sign of
pleasure. Darwin and Wundt have made us familiar with the principle
that expressive movements may be transferred to states of feeling
resembling those of which they were primarily the manifestations.
The scratching of the head during a state of mental irritation is a
well-known instance of the transference.
There are, I believe, facts which go some way towards verifying
the supposition of a transference of eating-signs to states of lively
satisfaction and pleasure generally. Savages are wont to express
keen pleasure by gestures, e.g., rubbing the belly, which seem to
point to the voluminous satisfactions of the primal appetite. The
clearest evidence, however, seems to be furnished by the account of
a baboon given us by Darwin. This creature, after having been made
furiously angry by his keeper, on making friends again, “rapidly
moved up and down his jaws and lips and looked pleased”. {173}
Darwin adds that a similar movement or quiver of the jaws may be
observed in a man when he laughs heartily, though with us the
muscles of the chest rather than those of the lips and jaws are
“spasmodically affected”.110
Judging from the interval between the occurrence of the first
smile and of the first laugh in the life of the individual, we may
conjecture that laughter did not grow into a full reiterated sound in
“primitive man,” or his unknown immediate predecessor, till much
later. We should expect that a considerable development of vocal
power would be a condition of man’s taking heartily to this mode of
emotional utterance. The study of the infant certainly supports this
idea. The babble of the second and third months, which is made up
of a reiteration of many vocal and consonantal sounds, may prepare
for laughter, as it certainly does for speech. The observations of Miss
Shinn, quoted above, on the expansion of the range of vocal sound
before the occurrence of the first laugh are most significant here.
They seem to point to the fact that in the evolution of the species
the first laughter was selected from among a great variety of sounds
produced in pleasurable states.
Let us now suppose that our immediate animal ancestor has
reached the level of clear perceptions, and is given to the utterance
of certain reiterated sounds during states of pleasure. Let us further
conceive of him as having his sympathies developed up to the point
of requiring a medium for expressing not only pains but pleasures,
and more particularly for calling others’ attention to the presence of
cheering and welcome objects, e.g., of a member of the family who
has been abroad for a time. Such an animal would need to improve
on his primal smiles and grins. He would require vocal utterances of
some strength in order {174} to reach distant ears, something
answering to the cackle of the hen when she has discovered some
choice morsel and desires to bring her brood to her side. How is this
improvement to be effected?
One may hazard the guess that the process may have been
something of this kind. The position of the open mouth during a
broad smile was, we may reason, in itself favourable to the
production of vocal sounds. We may, after the analogy of positions
of the eyes, speak of it as the “primary position” of the vocal
chamber when opened. This primary position would pretty certainly
be specially favourable to the utterance of a certain kind of sound,
let us say that commonly indicated by “eh,”111 together with
something of the guttural or chuckling accompaniment of this in the
sound of laughter. We may then infer that, when some of the
reiterated babble-like sounds were produced during states of
pleasurable satisfaction, the same (primary) position would be taken
up. We should thus get, as psycho-physical concomitants of the
sensed position of the opened mouth during a broad smile or “grin,”
not only a disposition to reiterate the “eh” or some similar sound as
a completion of the whole action, of which the opening of the mouth
is the first stage, but a definite associative co-ordination between
the movement of opening the mouth and the reiterated actions of
the muscles of the respiratory and vocal apparatus. In this way we
may understand how, when the pleasurable state expressed by a
smile increased in intensity, as, for example, when the happy feeling
excited by the sight of a face passed into the joy of recognising a
member of the family, the {175} movements would widen out into
those of a laughter-like utterance.
It appears to me that, in this connection, the observed course of
development of laughter in the individual is not without its
suggestiveness. Miss Shinn remarks that Ruth’s mouth was opened
wide on the 113th day—five days before the first laugh—while the
child was tossed and tumbled. Under date of the 134th day, again,
we read of much laughter of an inaudible kind, consisting of broad
laughter-like smiles; and these observations certainly show that
about the date of the first laughter an expanded smile,
indistinguishable from a laugh save by the absence of the respiratory
and vocal adjunct, was frequent. In other words, they tell us that
about the time when she achieved her first laugh she was freely
practising the intermediate facial step between the earlier smile and
the true laugh.
This theory would plainly illustrate Mr. Herbert Spencer’s
principle, that states of feeling affect the voluntary muscles in the
order of increasing calibre, the smaller being called into play by
feelings of lower intensity, the larger by those of higher intensity. But
this theory is not enough. We must take into account also the order
of frequency of use, and of consequent liability to discharge in the
connected nerve-centres. It seems probable that the muscles
engaged in the movements of the mouth and those exercised in
phonation would, for these reasons, be specially liable to be acted
upon. These wider tendencies would, according to the above
hypothesis, be assisted by special associations. These would secure
the combination of the two groups of movements, which I have
assumed to have been employed independently as utterances of
pleasurable feeling: namely, those involved in smiling, and those
underlying the first happy reiterated sounds of a quasi-infantile
babbling. {176}
One element in the laugh, its explosive vigour, seems
unaccounted for on this hypothesis. Here, I think, the effect of relief
from strain, which is so common a factor in human laughter, may be
called in. The earliest laughter of the child seems to illustrate this
element. For example, that which occurs during tickling, in a game
of bo-peep, and at the sight of the mother making faces may be said
to arise from a serious attitude suddenly dissolved. Perhaps the first
great laugh was produced by man or by his proximate progenitor,
when relief came after fear or the strain of battle. So far as primitive
laughter was the outcome of such concentrated energy seeking
relief, this circumstance would help to account for the prolongation
as well as for the strength of the sounds.
Our conjecture cannot lay claim to be a hypothesis. It makes no
attempt to explain the precise forms of the changes which enter
both into the smile and into the laugh. At best, it is only a rough hint
as to a possible mode of genesis.
I have here treated of the genesis of laughter under its more
general aspect as an expression of pleasurable states of feeling. We
have seen, however, that within the first three months of life another
and clearly specialised variety of laughter emerges, namely, that
called forth by tickling. It follows from our analysis of the effect of
tickling that it is one of the earliest manifestations, in a clear form,
of the laughter of fun or of play. As such, it demands special
attention in any attempt to explain the development of laughter.
As a specialised reaction having a clearly marked reflex form, it is
natural to ask whether laughter in response to tickling is not
inherited, and, if so, how it arose in the evolution of the race. And
we find that suggestions have {177} been made for explaining the
genesis of this curious phenomenon. We will first glance again at the
facts, and then examine the hypotheses put forward for explaining
them.
Here, again, the question how far animals are susceptible of the
effect becomes important. I have already alluded to Darwin’s
remark, that if a young chimpanzee is tickled, more particularly
under the armpits, he responds by a kind of laughter. The sound is
of a chuckling or laughing kind. The emission of these sounds is
accompanied by retraction of the corners of the mouth, and
sometimes by a slight amount of wrinkling in the lower eyelids.112 Dr.
Louis Robinson publishes other observations of the effect of tickling
on the young of anthropoid apes. He tells us that a young
chimpanzee when tickled for some time under the armpits would roll
over on his back showing all his teeth and accompanying the simian
grin by defensive movements, just as a child does. A young ourang
at the Zoological Gardens (London) behaved in a very similar way.
The young of other animals, too, betray some degree of ticklishness.
Stanley Hall remarks that a dog will retract the corners of his mouth
and thus go some way towards smiling if tickled over the ribs.113 Dr.
Robinson finds that horses and pigs are also ticklish; and he thinks
that these animals have specially ticklish regions, which correspond
to a considerable extent to those which have been ascertained in the
case of the child.
We may now refer to the first appearances of the tickling reflex
in the child. As pointed out above, the response by defensive
movements appears shortly after birth, whereas {178} the earliest
instance of a response by laughter occurs in the second, or in the
first half of the third month. It is to be noted that this date is
distinctly later than that of the first laughter of pleasure, though it is
not far removed from that of the first clear appearance of the
laughter of gaiety or jubilation.
These chronological facts bear out the theory that the laughter of
a tickled child has a distinct psychical antecedent. On this point Dr.
L. Robinson writes to me as follows: “I have never been able to
succeed in eliciting laughter from young infants under three months
old by means of tickling, unless one also smiled and caught their
attention in some such way ”. This evidently points to the influence
of mental agencies even in the first stages of laughter from tickling.
With respect to the parts in which the tickling first excites
laughter, different observers appear to have reached dissimilar
results. Preyer distinctly speaks of the tickling of the sole of the foot
as provoking laughter in the second month. Whether he tried other
parts he does not say. Dr. Leonard Hill tells me that one of his
children first responded to tickling when the titillation attacked the
palm of the hand, or ran up the arm. Responses to the tickling of the
neck and soles of the feet came later.
The fact that the effect of tickling becomes so well defined by, or
soon after, the end of the second month, proves pretty conclusively
that it is an inherited reflex; and the evolutionist naturally asks what
it means, what its significance has been in the life of our ancestors.
Dr. Stanley Hall carries back evolutional speculation very far, and
suggests that in tickling we may have the oldest stratum of our
psychic life, that it is a survival of a process in remote animal
progenitors for which touch was the only {179} sense. He supposes
that in these circumstances even light or “minimal” touches, say
those coming from the movements of small parasites, being
unannounced by sight or other far-reaching sense, would be
accompanied by disproportionately strong reactions. He does not
attempt to explain how laughter grew out of these reactions. He
does indeed call them reactions “of escape,” but he does not follow
up the idea by hinting that the violent shakings of the body by
laughter, when it came, helped to get rid of the little pesterers. In
truth, this ingenious thinker hardly appears to make the explanation
of the laughter of tickling, as distinguished from the other reactions,
the subject of a special inquiry.114
A more serious attempt to explain the evolution of the laughter
of tickling has been made by Dr. Louis Robinson. He, too, hints at
the vestigial survival of experiences of parasites, but appears to
think that these account only for the disagreeable effects which are
brought about when the hairy orifices of the nostril and the ear are
tickled. This limitation strikes one as a little arbitrary. The reaction of
laughter, which Dr. L. Hill called forth when he made his fingers run
up the arm of his infant, is surely suggestive of a vestigial reflex
handed down from ages of parasitic pestering.115
With regard to the laughing reaction, which, as we have seen, he
considers to involve a distinct mode of stimulation, he suggests that
it is an inherited form of that common mode of play among young
animals, which consists in an exchange of good-natured and make-
believe attacks and defences, or a sort of game of sham-fight. {180}
In support of this theory he lays stress on the fact that
susceptibility to tickling is shared in by the young of a number of
species of animals standing high in point of intelligence, including
not only the higher apes, but the dog and the horse. He adds that,
in general, there is a concomitance between the degree of
playfulness of a young creature and that of its ticklishness, though
lambs and kids which are not ticklish are allowed to be an awkward
exception.
If tickling is a playing at fighting we may expect it, like other
kinds of play, to mimic serious forms of assault. Now we know that
the first rude attacks of man, so far as we can gather from the
movements of a passionate infant, took the forms of striking, tearing
with the nails and biting. Tickling may be said to be a sort of mild
pretence at clawing. Dr. Robinson tells us that about 10 per cent. of
the children he has examined pretended to bite when they were
tickled, just as a puppy will do.
Dr. Robinson goes a step farther and seeks to show that the
areas of the bodily surface which are specially ticklish in children are
those likely to be attacked in serious warfare. In nearly all of them,
he says, some important structure, such as a large artery, is close to
the surface and would be liable to injury if the skin were penetrated.
They would thus be highly vulnerable regions, and consequently
those which would be singled out for attacks by teeth or claws. He
argues that the same relation holds in the case of animals which
attack one another in the same way as man. The regions of special
ticklishness in their case, too, appear to correspond, roughly at least,
with vulnerable regions. Indeed, in the young chimpanzee and the
young ourang these ticklish areas are approximately the same as in
the child. {181}
From all this he concludes that ticklishness, being bound up with
the mimic warfare which fills so large a space in the life of many
young animals, has its utility. The strong liking to be tickled, which
children and, apparently, some other young animals express, serves,
in combination with the playful impulse to carry out this gentle mode
of attack, to develop mimic attacks and defences which are of high
value as training for the later and serious warfare.
These applications of the evolution theory are certainly
interesting and promising. I think the idea of relief from parasites
might be worked out further. May it not be that the light touches
given by the fingers of the parent, or other member of the ancestral
family when hunting for parasites on the surface of the young
animal, have, by association with the effects of relief from the
troublesome visitors, developed an agreeable feeling-tone? As we
have seen, the laughter of tickling has a distinctly mental
antecedent; it appears in the child, only when he is beginning to
enjoy laughingly little pinches on the cheek, and otherwise to show a
germ of a sense of fun. The light touches, reminiscent at once of
unpleasant settlers, and of delivering fingers, would, one imagines,
be exactly fitted to supply that dissolution into nothing of
momentary apprehension indicated by our analysis of the mental
factor in tickling.
With respect to Dr. Robinson’s hypothesis, it may be
acknowledged ungrudgingly to be a brilliant piece of hypothetical
construction. But, as the writer frankly confesses, the facts, here and
there, do not point in its direction. A very serious objection is the
fact that the sole of the foot and the palm of the hand are not taken
into account in his attempt to establish a correspondence between
the ticklish areas of {182} the surface and a high degree of
vulnerability. In Stanley Hall’s returns it is the sole of the foot which
is most frequently mentioned as a ticklish area; and, as we have
seen, it was the first to give rise to laughter in the case of one child
at least.116
There is another and more serious objection to Dr. Robinson’s
theory as an explanation of laughter. One may urge that the
occurrence of such violent movements would, by shaking the body
and by inducing fatigue much earlier than need be, pretty certainly
be detrimental to that prolonged practice of skill in attack and
defence, to which Dr. Robinson attaches so much importance.
The supposition that tickling is a variety of play developed by
natural selection among combative animals is, I think, highly
probable. The play of animals, like that of children, is largely a form
of social activity involving a playmate; and is apt, as we know, to
take the form of attack and defence, as in chasing, throwing over,
pretending to bite, etc. These playful attacks are, as we have seen,
closely related to teasing; indeed, teasing may be viewed as merely
a play-imitation of the first stage of combat, that of challenging or
exciting to contest.117 Tickling pretty obviously finds a fitting place
among the simpler forms of playful combat which have a teasing-like
character. Moreover, these forms of social play all seem to show, in a
particularly clear manner, the utility referred to in the preceding
chapter. {183}
Now, this idea will, I think, help us to understand how loud and
prolonged laughter came to join itself to the combative game of
tickling and being tickled. If play—pure, good-natured play—was to
be developed out of teasing attacks, it would become a matter of
the highest importance that it should be clearly understood to be
such. This would mean, first of all, that the assailant made it clear
that his aim was not serious attack, but its playful semblance; and
secondly, that the attacked party expressed his readiness to accept
the assault in good part as sport. It would be of the greatest
consequence to the animal that chanced to be in the play-mood and
wished to make overtures of friendly combat that he should be sure
of an equally gamesome attitude in the recipient of the challenge.
One may see this by watching what happens when a dog, unwisely
trying to force a frolic on another dog, is met by a growl and
possibly by an uncovering of the canine teeth. Now, what better sign
of good-temper, of readiness to accept the attack as pure fun, could
nature have invented than the laugh? The smile is, no doubt, a
pretty good indicator in some circumstances. Yet one must
remember that the rudimentary smile of an ape-like ancestor may,
now and again, have been misleading, as our own smiles are apt to
be. A laugh would presumably be less easy to affect in such
circumstances than a smile; and, in any case, it would be far less
liable to be overlooked.
In saying that the laughter which accompanies tickling and other
closely allied forms of play in children owes its value to its being an
admirable way of announcing the friendly playful mood, I do not
mean that other signs are absent. Dr. L. Robinson reminds us that a
tickled child will roll over on his back just like a puppy. The laughter
and the rolling over seem to be two congenitally connected {184}
modes of abandonment to the playful attack. In the young of other
ticklish animals, e.g., the puppy, the rolling over may of itself suffice
to give the friendly signal.
It seems not unlikely that this consideration, the utility of
laughter as a guarantee to a playful challenger that his overtures will
be received in the proper spirit, applies to the evolution of all
laughter which enters into such forms of social play as the pretence
to attack, to frighten, and generally what we call good-natured
teasing. It has been suggested that teasing might well be taken as
the starting-point in the evolution of play.118 By adopting this idea,
and by regarding laughter, in its elementary form, as essentially a
feature of social play, we might set out with this consideration of
utility in constructing our theory of the evolution of laughter. One is
tempted, too, to follow this course by the fact, recognised in
common language, that much, at least, of the later and more refined
laughter is analogous to the effect of tickling.119
Nevertheless, as we have seen, the best evidence attainable
points to the conclusion that this simple form of the laughter of
social play was preceded by, and grew out of, a less specialised kind
of laughter, that of sudden accession of pleasure. We may conjecture
that the laughter provoked by tickling was reached in the evolution
of our race soon after this reaction passed out of its primal and
undifferentiated form as a general sign of pleasurable excitement,
and began to be specialised as the expression of mental gaiety and
of something like our hilarity. The fact, noted above, {185} that
children only laugh in response to tickling when they are in a
pleasurable state of mind seems to confirm the hypothesis that the