he day at once, the
candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a
potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this
nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of
pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said
(with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may
be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly
symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and
architecture which characterizes pantomime and farce. If the whole
affair happened in some alien atmosphere, if a pear-tree began to grow
apples or a river to run with wine in some strange fairyland, the effect
would be quite different. The streets and shops and door-knockers of the
harlequinade, which to the vulgar aesthete make it seem commonplace, are
in truth the very essence of the aesthetic departure. It must be an
actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing
different interiors; it must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into
the air without his touching them, or else the whole internal excitement
of this elvish invasion of civilization, this abrupt entrance of Puck
into Pimlico, is lost. Some day, perhaps, when the present narrow phase
of aesthetics has ceased to monopolize the name, the glory of a farcical
art may become fashionable. Long after men have ceased to drape their
houses in green and gray and to adorn them with Japanese vases, an
aesthete may build a house on pantomime principles, in which all the
doors shall have their bells and knockers on the inside, all the
staircases be constructed to vanish on the pressing of a button, and all
the dinners (humorous dinners in themselves) come up cooked through a
trapdoor. We are very sure, at least, that it is as reasonable to
regulate one's life and lodgings by this kind of art as by any other.

The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us; but
we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of
transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men
of the day when they set about the writing of comic literature do it
under one destructive fallacy and disadvantage: the notion that comic
literature is in some sort of way superficial. They give us little
knick-knacks of the brittleness of which they positively boast, although
two thousand years have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the '