ign and cast an
oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. 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 civilized community, 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 citizenship exclude 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.

We have had comic