WHY THE WORLD GRINS

BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL

To the older generation, few things are more puzzling than the new vogue for the perpetual grin. In actual life it is not unreasonably disturbing. Friends at home are not forever smiling in each other's faces; in public, people, if nobody is looking, have intervals when their mouths are in repose. But this reticence makes it more difficult to understand why in photographs, in pictorial supplements, in advertisements, men, women and children now appear to meet every event, every emergency, every minute of the day, with a grin.

Not so many years since a sterner breed of Americans would have frowned upon the fashion as a sign of levity, and probably would have thought the pillory or stocks not an unfitting fate for the offender. In lands and centuries where laughter was held in higher repute than by our Puritan ancestors, it was kept within limits of time and place. The Greek had his tragic as well as his comic mask, and the conventionalized smile was with him the symbol of a passing mood rather than the record of an expression habitual to rational human beings. For long painters made laughter on canvas the special privilege of satyrs and bacchantes, revellers and Pierrots, and a smile as faint even as the Mona Lisa's was so rare in serious portraiture that volumes have been written to explain it. Grinning matches were once popular in England, but only at country fairs and for a prize. Now, the tragic mask is banished to the storeroom of ancient modes and manners, Mona Lisa would be smiling with the crowd, and prizes are not needed to draw everybody into the universal grinning match.

All the world laughs all the time, as if at the photographer's classic command: "Keep smiling!" until tears would be a welcome innovation. It is like a horrible contagion spreading from country to country, worse than the dancing craze that scourged medi

æval Europe. All nations, all classes, all ages, however violently they disagree otherwise, agree in their willingness to fling dignity to the winds and to grin for the camera. Royalty, though, or perhaps because, fallen on evil days, grins with the proletariat, nor can exile discourage it. The clergy have borrowed the trick and mastered it so well that grey-haired prelates may be seen stretching their mouths from ear to ear as they wave a farewell from the deck of an ocean liner. Statesmen must conform and an unfortunate President smiles until the muscles of one's mouth ache in sympathy, and a legislator as venerable as Lord Balfour exchanges the seriousness of youth for unceasing elderly mirth. People cannot start on a journey or arrive at the end of it, cannot expose their nakedness on the sands of Palm Beach or Coney Island, cannot get married, cannot assist in any ceremony, cannot perform any duty, without showing their teeth and rivalling the Cheshire cat's abandonment. Actors, prize fighters, Congressmen, football players, novelists, painters, travelers, clergymen, film favourites, society leaders, nobodiesall are alike in their appreciation of an apparently inexhaustible joke. And the same outward expression has become the beginning and the end of the abomination of advertising. Chewing gum, liniment, union suits, pancakes, cocoa, shoe polish, shaving soap, pepsin, hair tonic, patent heels, chocolate, cereals, all the things we wear, all the things we eat, all the noxious things we drink in our dryness, all the things that come into our houses, all the things that beguile us out of them-all and everything must be approved with a grin. Some may call for a broader grin than others. It would take a wiser woman than I to say why bread should open the mouth until a fraction of an inch more and it would split, why coffee should call for a mere society smile, while collars demand unmitigated gloom. But collars are the rare exception. For most things, advertisements without some sort of a grin would miss their appeal and lose their punch. Posters by the wayside, in the subway, on the housetop, would have us believe that the whole population of our country gets out of bed grinning, spends the day grinning, goes to bed grinning. It seems almost impossible for the camera or the poster man to catch anybody who is not grinning. And the few who,

like myself, are so behind the times as to feel no particular desire to join in the grinning, cannot read their papers and magazines, cannot take their walks or drives abroad, without being rebuked for their old-fashioned solemnity by the standardized spectacle of the standardized grin of the age.

To share in the grin is probably not to ask why but to accept it as no less a matter of course than each day's rising and going down of the sun. Not to share in it, however, is to wonder if with years one has dropped out of the race, or if the fault lies in one's own deficient sense of humour. Surely, if all the world is grinning, it must be for some reason, good or bad, and it is not mere idle curiosity to try to find out what this reason is. There was a philosopher who laughed—who believed laughter better than sorrow—as well as a philosopher who wept. Tell me what a man laughs at, the moralist has said, and I will tell you what that man is. To discover the secret of the present universal grin might therefore help one to understand one's fellow mortals and, incidentally, lighten the gloom for those who are more inclined to tears. Certainly, when I consider dispassionately conditions, either at home or abroad, I get no glimpse anywhere of comedy or farce. Europe on the verge of financial bankruptcy and moral collapse, threatened with a period of darkness by comparison with which the Ages we call Dark were Light itself— Europe in the throes of tragedy does not strike me exactly as a joke. Having no clue to the fun of it, I turn from France to England, from Germany to Austria, from Russia to the new Balkan shuffle, from Italy to Belgium, hunting for comedy in vain, unless the spectacle of Europe in ruins is comic, and jazz, the music for a new rollicking Dance of Death. The East, Near or Far, does not provide me with amusement on a less niggardly scale, and I am so dull as to think that none save the cynic or the madman in his cell could smile over the triumph of the Unspeakable Turk whose final banishment from Europe was to be the supreme achievement of the war. I could not honestly say that mirth is the harvest to be reaped in Soviet-pursued India, in Japan armed to the teeth, in China, forced to barter the ancient civilization that belongs to it for Western complications and turmoil and uplifting little to its taste.

In my own country the prospect to me is not particularly side-splitting, unless one can laugh at the spectacle of America complacently prepared to cure all the ills the rest of the world is heir to and unable to cure any of her own-America spending her thought, ingenuity and power in dashing the wine cup, or rather the "rum" cup, from our thirsty lips. Indeed, I sometimes think the American should go clothed in sackcloth and ashes, rather than the ready-mades of the Department Store, to so pitiful a plight has America been brought by undesirable aliens and politicians and dry laws and cranks and uplifters and tyrannical minorities and cowardly majorities and timid legislation and spread of corruption through nursery government. Is it really a matter of mirth that the fine old American tradition is being rapidly forgotten, that the much boasted-of American liberty is being hedged about by petty restrictions, that the American future is being handed over to the riff-raff of Europe now crowding out the real American? I would like nothing better than to share in the laughter; I would go far to meet gaiety. But the more I reflect upon the puzzle, the more convinced I am that the cause for the universal grin cannot be discovered in the world itself, and that people who could think it was would be well qualified for Blackwell's Island or The Tombs.

Of course, an alternative is that people laugh just because they know things are desperate just because theirs is the wisdom in which is much grief, and if they did not laugh, they could but weep. Their Rome burns, set on fire by their own folly, ignorance and inefficiency, and they out with their fiddles in emulation of Nero. But then Nero, who was not grieving at all, knew that his Rome was burning, and I question whether the multitude who grin today have as much as a suspicion that anything is wrong with their Rome, that it is on the verge of a worse abyss than Nero's. Not even charity, well blindfolded, could detect a trace of thought or reflection, a hint of the slightest desire to think, in the half-naked mayors and millionaires, brides and bankers, grinning by the sea, or the fur-wrapped actors and flower-laden movie stars grinning as the steamer leaves the dock, or the grey-haired man beaming over his bottle of liniment, or the blonde beauty capturing ecstasy in her chewing gum. And yet

travelers and bathers as a rule are chosen from among our richest, or most distinguished, or most notorious citizens-the liniment man and the chewing-gum blonde are types selected as the best qualified to lure our eyes and open our purses.

The man who laughs in his sorrow is a philosopher, but his is the philosophy of laughter which is born of observation and knowledge, and neither one nor the other is required by the things which absorb the attention of most people today. If the great educated public observes and knows anything going on around it except business, sports, and so-called amusements, it is uncommonly careful to keep the fact to itself. I cannot look anywhere at our great educated public opening its morning or evening paper without my heart going out in sympathy to the editor, whose most brain-racking daily problem must be to dispose of the daily news as unobtrusively as he knows how, unless a "story" can be made out of it. It is to the sports page the great educated public instinctively turns, unless an unusually sensational murder or rape, burglary or raid on "rum", fills the first. Only when the news is sensational is it paying policy to give it precedence. Nor has the political sensation long drawn out a chance. Take recent examples. The Turks when they first went to Lausanne, and the French into the Ruhr, filled the most conspicuous columns, but they retired to a back seat, or page, as soon as likelihood dwindled of immediate war or disaster. Even the convenient discovery by the propagandist of a switch under the Poilu's coat could not whip the French occupation of the Ruhr into its original prominence again. And yet the intelligent believed and still believe that the future of Europe hangs as by a thread on what comes eventually of the Turks at Lausanne and the French in the Ruhr.

To the great educated public, news without a "kick" in it is no news at all, and the newspapers must supply the "kick" or risk the bankruptcy court. That, no matter what happens, sports unaided can supply the "kick", I have never doubted since the day the news of Antwerp's fall came to London and the posters of the newsboys I met in the streets announced only the far more important "Tsarevitch Results"; or since that other day in the spring of 1918 when I found half a dozen people before a Phila