Arab's pride of
inflammability should insist on the prudery of the veil as the
civilizing medium of his race.

There has been fun in Bagdad. But there never will be civilization 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 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
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 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 readily extinguish 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 t