THE LAUGH OF ESCAPE FROM DEATH 



209 



indication of joy and kindly feeling. So universal is it 

 that this friendly display of the teeth under the name 

 " smile " is attributed to Nature, to Fortune, and to deities 

 by all races of men when those powers seem to favour 

 them. 



Laughter is, then, in its essence and origin, a communica- 

 tion or expression to others of the joyous mood of the 

 laugher. There are many and strangely varied occasions 

 when laughter seizes on man, and it is interesting to 

 see how far they can be explained by this conception of 

 the primary and essential nature of the laugh, for many of 

 them seem at first sight remote from it. There is, first 

 of all, the laughter of revivification and escape from death 

 or danger. After railway accidents, earthquakes, and 

 such terrible occurrences, those who have been in great 

 danger often burst into laughter. The nervous balance 

 has been upset by the shock (we call them "shocking 

 accidents "), and the emotional joy of escape, the joy of 

 recovered life, asserts itself in what appears to the onlooker 

 to be an unseemly, an unfeeling laugh. It is recorded 

 that one of the entombed French coal miners, who two 

 years ago were imprisoned without food or light for 

 twenty days a thousand feet below in the bowels of the 

 earth, burst into a ghastly laugh when he was rescued 

 and brought to the upper air once more. The Greeks 

 and Romans in some of their festal ceremonies made the 

 priest or actor who represented dead nature returning to 

 life in the spring, burst into a laugh a ceremonial or 

 " ritual " laugh. Our poets speak of the smiles, and even 

 of the laughter of spring, and that is why laughter is 

 appropriate to New Year's Day. It is the laughter of 

 escape from the death of winter and of return to life, for 

 the true and old-established New Year's Day was not in 

 mid-winter, but a quarter of a year later, when buds and 

 flowers are bursting into life. It is recorded by ancient 



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