I believe that most people find it repulsive to look at someone who laughs. Most often, something mundane is revealed in people's laughter, something that is humiliating to the laugher, even though the laughing one usually has no idea. Just as he or she doesn't know, as nobody generally knows, what their face looks like when they're asleep. Some people have intelligent-looking faces even when they sleep, while others have faces that look quite stupid in sleep and become ridiculous as a result. I don't know what causes that to happen; all I want to say is that a man who is laughing, like a sleeping man, is usually unaware of his face. A great many people don't know how to laugh at all. However, there's nothing to know here: it's a gift, and it can't be faked. It can only be developed through re-education, self-improvement, and conquering the bad parts of one's personality; then the laughter of such a person might quite possibly change for the better.
A person's laughter can give away everything about them so that you suddenly know all of their innermost secrets. Undeniably intelligent laughter can sometimes be repulsive. Laughter first and foremost requires sincerity, but where is there any sincerity in people? Laughter demands a lack of spite, but people usually laugh spitefully. Genuine and unspiteful laughter is mirth, but is there any mirth in our time, and do people even know how to be mirthful? (About mirth in our time—that was Versilov's observation, and I remembered it.) A person's mirth is a characteristic that reveals the whole person, from head to foot. Someone's character won't be cracked for a long time, then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I'm not speaking of his mental development but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how he weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he's a good man. Note at the same time all the nuances: for instance, a man's laughter must in no case seem stupid to you, however merry and simplehearted it may be.
The second you detect even the faintest hint of stupidity in someone's laughter, it undoubtedly means that the person is of limited intelligence, even if all they do is pour out ideas. Or, if their laughter isn't stupid, but the person themselves, for some reason, suddenly seems ridiculous to you when they laugh—even just slightly—know, then, that the person has no real sense of dignity, not fully in any case. Or, finally, if their laughter is contagious, but, for some reason, still seems banal to you, know, then, that the person's nature is on the banal side as well, and all the noble and lofty traits you noticed in them before are either deliberately affected or unconsciously borrowed. Later on, the person is certain to change for the worse, to take up what's "useful" and cast their noble ideas away without regret, as the errors and infatuations of youth are replaced with age and experience. Remember that laughter is the surest test of a soul. Look at a child: only children know how to laugh perfectly—that's what makes them seductive. A crying child is repulsive to me, but a laughing and merry child is like a ray of sunshine from paradise, a glimpse of the future when man will finally become as pure and simplehearted as a child.
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