SIR ALAN PATRICK HERBERT, 61, represented Oxford University as an independent Member of Parliament for 14 years,* has written more than 40 books, a dozen musical comedies, and is the mainstay of Britain's humorous weekly, Punch.

Herbert is an extremely serious man who is always making jokes, and his biggest jokes are the most serious. But to take him seriously is to make him laff. To laff, as they tell you in Dublin, is not the same thing as to laugh; Laughter is a nervous reaction. Laffing is an expression of selfcriticism, of anguish.

Herbert is a logical man. He holds to logic as a drowning man clings to a paper straw. He would have liked to join the navy, the most logical and four-square of professions, if his father had not entered him for Winchester, with an equally austere and monastic tradition, and the law.

At Oxford he took highest honors in law, and could have been a professor, but chose, rather, the more exacting career of a free-lance writer. He was attracted by its uncertainty. He hates uncertainty.

At the outbreak of World War I he joined the Naval Division, and thinking that he would probably get killed, married Gwen Quilter. This, he reasoned, gave him as much happiness as he deserved, and her a reasonable chance of escape. And he very nearly did get killed in Gallipoli by the worst of deaths, dysentery. He recorded this campaign in his lightest verse, laffing at his miseries and terrors.

He wrote, then, a novel, The Secret Battle, which was received by good critics as the first important work of a deeply serious mind. This was quite true. But Herbert, when he saw the critiques, decided he would try a musical comedy.

Herbert has a facial tic, especially when, as usual, he is worried. His eyes blink of themselves. On a park bench or in a railway train he is often startled, in the middle of agonized reflection about the insecurity of everything in the world, by the rising up of some furious young woman to call a policeman or pull the communication cord. And when he tries to explain himself, he is seized with a stammer which still further alarms the lady. The situation, as he expected from the beginning, then becomes hopeless. The lady has hysterics, and Herbert can only laff at the whole disaster.

Punch invited him to join its staff on the strength of his light verse. He gave it in closely reasoned prose a famous course of law called "Misleading Cases," intended to make the English understand their danger among the imbecilities of English law. This made the English laugh and gave Herbert his reputation as a humorist. He himself was too surprised even to laff.

HE is a man who believes, on logical grounds, that humanity should be allowed any possible escape from its misery, any feasible alleviation of despair, such as a drink. He set out, therefore, in 1934, to prevent the whole 1,500 Members of Parliament, Lords and Commons, from taking any drink at all.

His argument was:

The Drink laws of England are foolish.

The Drink laws of Parliament, where anyone can get a drink at any time, do not exist.

If Parliament is brought under the law it will look like a fool.

Therefore, the way to make Parliament reform the laws of England is to make it look like a fool.

This is logic, but it is Anglo-Irish logic. Herbert's family come from Muckross. The Herbert argument may be found in Shaw and Joyce. It may be heard in any Irish bar. The man who said, "Nobody has any sense in this world unless he hasn't and he's a fool too" was using such logic. He had just been burnt out, with apologies, by his devoted tenants.

The world was a bad joke to Shaw and he made it a worse one. This was to make people laff themselves different.

IT has been said that the Anglo-Irish are a lot of playboys.

But the Anglo-Irish are the most serious kind of people in the world. They have reason to be--they know something. They know that nobody wants sense. What people are looking for all the time is a kick. They knew it some time before the rest of the world, and the world has never caught up.

Herbert tried to laff Parliament into its senses. But the English are not a logical race. They are humorous and political and reflective and practical and poetical and reserved. They say to themselves, "A joke is a joke"--meaning that it ought to be a joke. They could not understand why Herbert should have raised a subscription and worked twelve hours a day among legal records and historic parchment to take away their right to drink whisky for 24 hours a day. They said he was a lunatic or a bolshevik. They got the Attorney-General to fight the case, and won it. But the judges would not allow their costs. The judges were logical men.

Herbert once wrote a check on a brandy bottle, stamped it and sent it to be cashed at his bank. The idea was to show what nonsense banks and checks are. And also, how difficult it is to make any law that cannot be turned to nonsense. The English banker cashed the check and, when it returned through the clearing office, the brandy was intact. The Englishman did not see the point of such a joke, but he understood his duty.

In 1934 Herbert stood for Parliament, as a candidate for Oxford University. And, to the amazement of the old party regulars, he was elected. The reason suggested is that the young bachelors of arts, who had just been given the vote, in their political enthusiasm read the address, and discovered that Herbert was a serious man.

He distinguished himself in Parliament by devising and carrying through a new divorce act, the first fundamental change in British divorce law for 81 years. People wondered that a man so happily married and surrounded by a devoted family--he has three daughters and one son--should fight so desperately for easier divorce. But of course the reason why he was so resolute was just because of the happiness of his own marriage.

THE argument was: marriage, in its happiness, is grand and simple; nothing should impair its dignity. Therefore, divorce in its unhappiness should be simple and grand. Everything should be done to support its dignity. It was an extraordinary feat for a Private Member to put such an important law on the statute book. Many look upon it as Herbert's chief success.

He was less successful in his effort to have the stars renamed so that people could remember them better. He wrote a book to urge that Betelgeuse, Bellatrix and Mintaka be called by such names as Nelson or Columbus or Magellan.

He is a sight of London, like St. Paul's, though he wears his dome at the side. He has written verse not equaled since Praed. He has graved his name into English law. He wanted only a Sullivan and a bad temper to beat Gilbert at his own game. He can navigate the Thames and work out his position from the stars, without one glance at the bank. But his real forte is for friendship. He is a remarkably good friend, even to his enemies--excepting always himself.

* Until 1948, when the Labor government abolished all university seats.

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