of their
Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather
monstrous--never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes of
unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar
humours of their little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yet
attained to: sentimentalism waylays them in the flight. Here and there
a Volkslied or Marchen shows a national aptitude for stout animal
laughter; and we see that the literature is built on it, which is
hopeful so far; but to enjoy it, to enter into the philosophy of the
Broad Grin, that seems to hesitate between the skull and the embryo, and
reaches its perfection in breadth from the pulling of two square fingers
at the corners of the mouth, one must have aid of 'the good Rhine wine,'
and be of German blood unmixed besides. This treble-Dutch lumbersomeness
of the Comic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea of Comedy, and
the poor voice allowed to women in German domestic life will account
for the absence of comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that land. I
shall speak of it again in the second section of this lecture.

Eastward you have total silence of Comedy among a people intensely
susceptible to laughter, as the Arabian Nights will testify. Where the
veil is over women's-faces, you cannot have society, without which the
senses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is driven to the gutters of
grossness to slake its thirst. Arabs in this respect are worse than
Italians--much worse than Germans; just in the degree that their system
of treating women is worse.

M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the excellent French essayist and master
of critical style, tells of a conversation he had once with an Arab
gentleman on the topic of the different management of these difficult
creatures in Orient and in Occident: and the Arab spoke in praise of
many good results of the greater freedom enjoyed by Western ladies, and
the charm of conversing with them. He was questioned why his countrymen
took no measures to grant them something of that kind of liberty. He
jumped out of his individuality in a twinkling, and entered into the
sentiments of his race, replying, from the pinnacle of a splendid
conceit, with affected humility of manner: 'YOU can look on them without
perturbation--but WE!'... And after this profoundly comic interjection,
he added, in deep tones, 'The very face of a woman!' Our representative
of temperate notions demurely consented that the