As to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun,—for as Shakspeare words it, “How many things by season seasoned are to their right praise and true perfection!”—be sure that the Wise King includes laughter and weeping in the list. “A time to weep, and a time to laugh.” Acquainted with grief, he had also been familiar with merriment. He had said in his heart, Go to, now, I will prove thee with mirth; but the result was that he said of laughter, It is mad; and of mirth, What doeth it?—For all this, he freely recognises a time to laugh, so that one keep to the time. So much depends, here, on the due observance of times and seasons. It is with the frivolous habit of laughing out of season, and at all seasons, that the following notes are concerned.

The laureate’s is a good keynote to begin with:—

So with Barry Cornwall and his Hermione:—

Such a conjunction as the courtier records of Cordelia in “King Lear”—sunshine and rain at once: “her smiles and tears were like a better day: those happy smiles that played on her ripe lip, seemed not to know what guests were in her eyes:” “in brief, sorrow would be a rarity most beloved, if all could so become it.” Nothing, we often hear it said, is so tedious as uniformity; and under the bright sky of Italy one sometimes sighs for a cloud. “A gay writer, who,” says Horace Walpole, “should only express satisfaction without variety, would soon be nauseous.” Johnson’s Papilius winds up his confession, in the “Rambler,” with a whine on the melancholy necessity of supporting that character by study, which he gained by levity; having learned too late that gaiety must be recommended by higher qualities, and that mirth can never please long but as the efflorescence of a mind loved for its luxuriance, but esteemed for its usefulness. There must be fruitage as well as blossomy “efflorescence;” as Cowper is fain to enforce, when in the closing lines of the “Task,” he records how he once, when called to dress a sofa with the flowers of verse, played awhile with that light task, obedient to the fair:—

Mark Mrs. Browning’s picture of the Lady Geraldine:—

So with Lord Lytton’s Helen Mainwaring, the sunny gladness of whose nature must have vent like a bird’s, though he forbids us to fancy that that gladness speaks the levity which comes from the absence of thought: “it is rather from the depth of thought that it springs, as from the depth of a sea comes its music.” Well and wisely Molière’s Cléonte exclaims, “Veux-tu de ces enjouements épanouis, de ces joies toujours ouvertes? et vois tu rien de plus impertinent que des femmes qui rient à tout propos?” Such a femme as the same author’s Zerbinette, a self-convicted giggler in and out of season, yet whose confession may be twisted into an example the other way, when she says, “J’ai l’humeur enjouée, et sans cesse je ris: mais, tout en riant, je suis sérieuse sur de certains chapitres.”

Among the writings of M. de St. Evremond there is an essay on the Idea of a Woman that never was, nor ever will be found. Emilia he calls this all too perfect, impossible she. And amongst the foremost of Emilia’s fine qualities he reckons the co-existence of seriousness au fond with vivacity of mien. “For we find that the gayest humour doth, at length, become tiresome; ... the most effervescent liveliness either disgusts or wearies you.” In the case of the celebrated Duchesse de Longueville, De Retz notices the exquisite effect of the sudden bursts of gaiety which would at times dispel her habitual but not inexpressive languor. Mdlle. de Scudéry, in her “Clélie,” was painting a well-known, perhaps too well-known, contemporary in the person of Clarice, when, “parmi toute cette disposition qu’elle a pour la joie,” she ascribes to this charmer, qui rit si aisément, a facile faculty of tear-shedding: elle sait pleurer, whenever occasion justifies weeping. As Lady Eastlake says, in her little treatise on Music, a change of key is the most powerful engine in the hands of a musician: we cannot bear the monotony of one key long, even the most joyful: “Gaiety without eclipse wearieth me, May Lilian.” We long for “a mournful muse, soft pity to infuse.” The Hon. Miss Byron takes the liberty of telling the sister of Sir Charles Grandison that “Your brother has hinted, Charlotte, that he loves you for your vivacity, and should still more, if you consulted time and occasion.” The affections are justly said to be more readily called into play by a mixture of mirth and melancholy; ours being a twofold life, the union of mortal with immortal, we covet happiness, yet turn back anon to the more majestic form of sorrow. There is a form of cheerfulness which, we are assured, nobody can stand:—

people ostentatiously and pretentiously cheerful being not unfrequently foolish people: their spirits of a brisk but thin quality—nothing about them in good working order. “For, in truth, the most fortunate existence has cares enough to make gravity our normal condition.” Roland Graeme, in the “Abbot,” earnestly assures his vivacious companion, “Ay, but, fair Catherine, there are moments of deep and true feeling, which are worth ten thousand years of liveliest mirth.” Melancholy Minna is a fine relief by contrast to laughter-loving Brenda; and it is suggestively told us of the old Udaller, their sire, that he liked his graver damsel better in the walk without doors, and his merry maiden better by the fireside; and that if he preferred Brenda after the glass circulated in the evening, he gave the preference to Minna before noon. So with Molly and Cynthia in “Wives and Daughters:” Molly always gentle, but very grave and silent; Cynthia merry, full of pretty mockeries, and hardly ever silent—only this constant brilliancy became a little tiresome in everyday life, being not the sunshiny rest of a placid lake, so much as the “glitter of the pieces of a broken mirror, which confuses and bewilders.” The union of what can be harmonized of the two distinctive characters, is sure to be engaging in no ordinary degree. As in the Beryl of “George Geith.” “You imagine,” says Beryl, on one occasion, “because it is necessary to my existence to laugh at people’s oddities, that I never feel for their woes. You think, because I have a quick sense of the ludicrous, that I have no eyes for grief. And there you do me an injustice.” Such as Beryl will be found to take exception to predominant levity in the masculine gender, after the manner of the fair tenant of Wildfell Hall: “I do wish he would be sometimes serious,” she writes of her endeared Arthur: “I cannot get him to write or speak in real, solid earnest. I don’t mind it now, but if it be always so, what shall I do with the serious part of myself?” Tired out with such companionship, a complainant in one of Lovell Beddoes’ tragedies exclaims,—

Rather than have her uniformly saccharine and smiling, Ben Jonson’s Curius avowedly would have his mistress “angry sometimes, to sweeten off the rest of her behaviour.”

Sir Walter Scott, in one page of his Diary, noting the break-up of a hilarious group of guests at Abbotsford, adds the avowal, “I am not sorry, being one of those whom too much mirth always inclines to sadness.” Even the bright extremes of joy, as Thomas Hood the elder words it, bring on conclusions of disgust:—

Leigh Hunt tenderly tells one of his grandchildren how, when he was a child, and in excessive spirits, his dear mother would sometimes say to him, “Leigh, come and sit down here by me, and let us try to think a little.” Better that than riant sans cesse, even for a child. When I was a child, says the apostle, I thought as a child. Thinking was not out of the question even then, though it might, and by comparison with the man’s it must, be childish thinking. For children as for men, a time to laugh and a time to weep. True, there are differences of gifts and temperaments:—