(_g_) The great amusement and pastime of feeding has, no doubt, descended to us in unbroken tradition, through harvest and vintage festivals, from the unbridled indulgence that followed a successful hunt. And I offer the conjecture that the origin of laughter and the enjoyment of broad humour (so often discussed) may be traced to these occasions of riotous exhilaration and licence. We may suppose, indeed, that these conditions began to prevail not in the earliest days of the ravenous pack, but after some advance had been made in the customs of eating. Savages usually cram to repletion when possible, and with huge gusto, for there may not soon be another opportunity. If uproarious feasting was advantageous physically and socially (as till recently we all thought it was), addiction to the practice was a ground of survival; and laughter (a discharge of undirected energy, as Spencer says), being its natural expression and enhancement, shared in its perpetuation. This social origin agrees with the infectiousness of laughter, with its connection with triumph and cruelty, and with the quality of the jokes that still throughout the world excite most merriment—practical jokes and allusions to drunkenness, the indecorous, the obscene. Sir Robert Walpole preferred such humour as the most sociable; because in that everybody could take part. Many refinements have been introduced in polite circles; but it is in vain that one begins a theory of laughter with an analysis of the genius of Molière.
Similarly, I suppose that weeping, lamentation and the facial and bodily expressions of grief were developed by the social utility of common mourning in tribal defeat and bereavement.
We are left to speculate about the earliest growth of magnanimity, friendliness, compassion, general benevolence and other virtues. They cannot be explained merely by the hunting-life, which so easily accounts for greed, cruelty, pride and every sort of aggressiveness. Robert Hartmann writes: “It is well known that both rude and civilised peoples are capable of showing unspeakable and, as it is erroneously termed, inhuman cruelty towards each other. These acts of cruelty, murder and rapine are often the result of the inexorable logic of national characteristics and, unhappily, are truly human, since nothing like them can be traced in the animal world. It would, for instance, be a grave mistake to compare a tiger with a bloodthirsty executioner of the Reign of Terror, since the former only satisfies his natural appetite in preying on other animals. The atrocities of the trials for witchcraft, the indiscriminate slaughter committed by the Negroes on the coast of Guinea, the sacrifice of human victims by the Khonds, the dismemberment of living men by the Battus, find no parallel in the habits of animals in their savage state. And such a comparison is, above all, impossible in the case of anthropoids, which display no hostility toward men or other animals unless they are first attacked. In this respect the anthropoid ape stands upon a higher plane than many men.”[77] Are we, then, to explain the more amiable side of human nature, partly at least, by derivation from the frugivorous Primates, extensively modified by our wolfish adaptation, but surviving as latent character?