your kind and a sober estimate of our civilized qualities. The aim

and business of the Comic poet are misunderstood, his meaning is not
seized nor his point of view taken, when he is accused of

dishonouring our nature and being hostile to sentiment, tending to
spitefulness and making an unfair use of laughter. Those who detect

irony in Comedy do so because they choose to see it in life.
Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than that

it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to Comic
perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness

in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation.
Caleb Balderstone, in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble

household in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely comic character.
In the case of 'poor relatives,' on the other hand, it is the rich,

whom they perplex, that are really comic; and to laugh at the
former, not seeing the comedy of the latter, is to betray dulness of

vision. Humourist and Satirist frequently hunt together as
Ironeists in pursuit of the grotesque, to the exclusion of the

Comic. That was an affecting moment in the history of the Prince
Regent, when the First Gentleman of Europe burst into tears at a

sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell's on the cut of his coat. Humour,
Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their common prey. The

Comic spirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into action, it would
be farcical. It is too gross for Comedy.

Incidents of a kind casting ridicule on our unfortunate nature
instead of our conventional life, provoke derisive laughter, which

thwarts the Comic idea. But derision is foiled by the play of the
intellect. Most of doubtful causes in contest are open to Comic

interpretation, and any intellectual pleading of a doubtful cause
contains germs of an Idea of Comedy.

The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face. The
laughter of Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness,

nearer a smile; often no more than a smile. It laughs through the
mind, for the mind directs it; and it might be called the humour of

the mind.
One excellent test of the civilization of a country, as I have said,

I take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the
test of true Comedy is that it shall awakenthoughtfullaughter.

If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and
it is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when

contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than
the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and

watchful; never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so
closely attached to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex,

until its features are studied. It has the sage's brows, and the
sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips

drawn in an idle wariness of half tension. That slim feasting
smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr's laugh,

that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The
laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile,

finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness
rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of

unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having
leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering

eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their
honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax

out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical,
hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees

them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries,
drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-

sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with
their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws

binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend
sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with

conceit, individually, or in the bulk--the Spirit overhead will look
humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by

volleys of silverylaughter. That is the Comic Spirit.
Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to

deny the existence of a mind of man where minds of men are in
working conjunction.

You must, as I have said, believe that our state of society is
founded in common-sense, otherwise you will not be struck by the

contrasts the Comic Spirit perceives, or have it to look to for your
consolation. You will, in fact, be standing in that peculiar

oblique beam of light, yourself illuminated to the general eye as
the very object of chase and doomed quarry of the thing obscure to

you. But to feel its presence and to see it is your assurance that
many sane and solid minds are with you in what you are experiencing:

and this of itself spares you the pain of satirical heat, and the
bitter craving to strike heavy blows. You share the sublime of

wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely demonstrate
their foolishness. Moliere was contented to revenge himself on the

critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique de l'Ecole
des Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest of studies

in criticism. A perception of the comic spirit gives high
fellowship. You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest

we know of in connection with our old world, which is not
supermundane. Look there for your unchallengeable upper class! You

feel that you are one of this our civilizedcommunity, that you
cannot escape from it, and would not if you could. Good hope

sustains you; weariness does not overwhelm you; in isolation you see
no charms for vanity; personal pride is greatly moderated. Nor

shall your title of citizenshipexclude you from worlds of
imagination or of devotion. The Comic spirit is not hostile to the

sweetest songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it: Shakespeare
overflows: there is a mild moon's ray of it (pale with super-

refinement through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in
Comus. Pope has it, and it is the daylight side of the night half

obscuring Cowper. It is only hostile to the priestly element, when
that, by baleful swelling, transcends and overlaps the bounds of its

office: and then, in extreme cases, it is too true to itself to
speak, and veils the lamp: as, for example, the spectacle of

Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere: at which the dark angels
may, but men do not laugh.