where Comedy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of

social equality of the sexes. I am not quoting the Arab to exhort
and disturb the somnolent East; rather for cultivated women to

recognize that the Comic Muse is one of their best friends. They
are blind to their interests in swelling the ranks of the

sentimental" target="_blank" title="a.感伤的；多愁善感的">sentimentalists. Let them look with their clearest vision abroad
and at home. They will see that where they have no social freedom,

Comedy is absent: where they are household drudges, the form of
Comedy is primitive: where they are tolerably independent, but

uncultivated, exciting melodrama takes its place and a sentimental" target="_blank" title="a.感伤的；多愁善感的">sentimental
version of them. Yet the Comic will out, as they would know if they

listened to some of the private conversations of men whose minds are
undirected by the Comic Muse: as the sentimental" target="_blank" title="a.感伤的；多愁善感的">sentimental man, to his

astonishment, would know likewise, if he in similar fashion could
receive a lesson. But where women are on the road to an equal

footing with men, in attainments and in liberty--in what they have
won for themselves, and what has been granted them by a fair

civilization--there, and only waiting to be transplanted from life
to the stage, or the novel, or the poem, pure Comedy flourishes, and

is, as it would help them to be, the sweetest of diversions, the
wisest of delightful companions.

Now, to look about us in the present time, I think it will be
acknowledged that in neglecting the cultivation of the Comic idea,

we are losing the aid of a powerful auxiliar. You see Folly
perpetually sliding into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth

and leisure, with many whims, many strange ailments and strange
doctors. Plenty of common-sense is in the world to thrust her back

when she pretends to empire. But the first-born of common-sense,
the vigilant Comic, which is the genius of thoughtful laughter,

which would readilyextinguish her at the outset, is not serving as
a public advocate.

You will have noticed the disposition of common-sense, under
pressure of some pertinacious piece of light-headedness, to grow

impatient and angry. That is a sign of the absence, or at least of
the dormancy, of the Comic idea. For Folly is the natural prey of

the Comic, known to it in all her transformations, in every
disguise; and it is with the springing delight of hawk over heron,

hound after fox, that it gives her chase, never fretting, never
tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no rest.

Contempt is a sentiment that cannot be entertained by comic
intelligence. What is it but an excuse to be idly minded, or

personally lofty, or comfortably narrow, not perfectlyhumane? If
we do not feign when we say that we despise Folly, we shut the

brain. There is a disdainful attitude in the presence of Folly,
partaking of the foolishness to Comic perception: and anger is not

much less foolish than disdain. The struggle we have to conduct is
essence against essence. Let no one doubt of the sequel when this

emanation of what is firmest in us is launched to strike down the
daughter of Unreason and Sentimentalism: such being Folly's

parentage, when it is respectable.
Our modern system of combating her is too long defensive, and

carried on too ploddingly with concrete engines of war in the
attack. She has time to get behind entrenchments. She is ready to

stand a siege, before the heavily armed man of science and the
writer of the leading article or elaborate essay have primed their

big guns. It should be remembered that she has charms for the
multitude; and an English multitudeseeing her make a gallant fight

of it will be half in love with her, certainly willing to lend her a
cheer. Benevolent subscriptions assist her to hire her own man of

science, her own organ in the Press. If ultimately she is cast out
and overthrown, she can stretch a finger at gaps in our ranks. She

can say that she commanded an army and seduced men, whom we thought
sober men and safe, to act as her lieutenants. We learn rather

gloomily, after she has flashed her lantern, that we have in our
midst able men and men with minds for whom there is no pole-star in

intellectual navigation. Comedy, or the Comic element, is the
specific for the poison of delusion while Folly is passing from the

state of vapour to substantial form.
O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes,

Fielding, Moliere! These are spirits that, if you know them well,
will come when you do call. You will find the very invocation of

them act on you like a renovating air--the South-west coming off the
sea, or a cry in the Alps.

No one would presume to say that we are deficient in jokers. They
abound, and the organisation directing their machinery to shoot them

in the wake of the leading article and the popular sentiment is
good.

But the Comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter;
and the sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether

in public life or private, and particularly when the feelings are
excited.

The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of
using humouristic phrase: the trick of employing Johnsonian

polysyllables to treat of the infinitely little. And it really may
be humorous, of a kind, yet it will miss the point by going too much

round about it.
A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some years back, at a very

advanced age. He had been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later
years up to the period of his death. There was a report of Duke

Pasquier that he was a man of profound egoism. Hence an argument
arose, and was warmly sustained, upon the excessiveselfishness of

those who, in a world of troubles, and calls to action, and
innumerable duties, husband their strength for the sake of living

on. Can it be possible, the argument ran, for a truly generous
heart to continue beating up to the age of a hundred? Duke Pasquier

was not without his defenders, who likened him to the oak of the
forest--a venerable comparison.

The argument was conducted on both sides with spirit and
earnestness, lightened here and there by frisky touches of the

polysyllabic playful, reminding one of the serious pursuit of their
fun by truant boys, that are assured they are out of the eye of

their master, and now and then indulge in an imitation of him. And
well might it be supposed that the Comic idea was asleep, not

overlooking them! It resolved at last to this, that either Duke
Pasquier was a scandal on our humanity in clinging to life so long,

or that he honoured it by so sturdy a resistance to the enemy. As
one who has entangled himself in a labyrinth is glad to get out

again at the entrance, the argument ran about to conclude with its
commencement.

Now, imagine a master of the Comic treating this theme, and
particularly the argument on it. Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of

THE CENTENARIAN, with choric praises of heroical early death, and
the same of a stubbornvitality, and the poet laughing at the

chorus; and the grand question for contention in dialogue, as to the
exact age when a man should die, to the identical minute, that he

may preserve the respect of his fellows, followed by a systematic
attempt to make an accuratemeasurement in parallel lines, with a

tough rope-yarn by one party, and a string of yawns by the other, of
the veteran's power of enduring life, and our capacity for enduring

HIM, with tremendous pulling on both sides.
Would not the Comic view of the discussion illumine it and the

disputants like very lightning? There are questions, as well as
persons, that only the Comic can fitly touch.

Aristophanes would probably have crowned the ancient tree, with the
consolatory observation to the haggard line of long-expectant heirs

of the Centenarian, that they live to see the blessedness of coming
of a strong stock. The shafts of his ridicule would mainly have

been aimed at the disputants. For the sole ground of the argument
was the old man's character, and sophists are not needed to

demonstrate that we can very soon have too much of a bad thing. A
Centenarian does not necessarilyprovoke the Comic idea, nor does

the corpse of a duke. It is not provoked in the order of nature,
until we draw its penetrating attentiveness to some circumstance

with which we have been mixing our private interests, or our
speculative obfuscation. Dulness, insensible to the Comic, has the

privilege of arousing it; and the laying of a dull finger on matters
of human life is the surest method of establishing electrical

communications with a battery of laughter--where the Comic idea is
prevalent.

But if the Comic idea prevailed with us, and we had an Aristophanes
to barb and wing it, we should be breathing air of Athens. Prosers

now pouring forth on us like public fountains would be cut short in
the street and left blinking, dumb as pillar-posts, with letters

thrust into their mouths. We should throw off incubus, our dreadful
familiar--by some called boredom--whom it is our present humiliation

to be just alive enough to loathe, never quick enough to foil.
There would be a bright and positive, clear Hellenic perception of