educated appreciation of humour is there--away down. Generally, if
one attempts to amuse a highbrow he will resent it as if the process
were beneath him; or perhaps the intellectual jealousy and touchiness
with which he is always overcharged will lead him to retaliate with
a pointless story from Plato. But if the highbrow is right off his
guard and has no jealousy in his mind, you may find him roaring
with laughter and wiping his spectacles, with his sides shaking,
and see him converted as by magic into the merry, clever little
school-boy that he was thirty years ago, before his education
ossified him.

But with the illiterate and the rustic no such process is possible.
His sense of humour may be there as a sense, but the mechanism for
setting it in operation is limited and rudimentary. Only the broadest
and most elementary forms of joke can reach him. The magnificent
mechanism of the art of words is, quite literally, a sealed book
to him. Here and there, indeed, a form of fun is found so elementary
in its nature and yet so excellent in execution that it appeals to
all alike, to the illiterate and to the highbrow, to the peasant
and the professor. Such, for example, are the antics of Mr. Charles
Chaplin or the depiction of Mr. Jiggs by the pencil of George
McManus. But such cases are rare. As a rule the cheap fun that
excites the rustic to laughter is execrable to the man of education.

In the light of what I have said before it follows that the
individuals that are findable in every English or American audience
are much the same. All those who lecture or act are well aware that
there are certain types of people that are always to be seen
somewhere in the hall. Some of these belong to the general class of
discouraging people. They listen in stolid silence. No light of