ea 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 awaken thoughtful laughter.

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 silvery laughter. That is the
Comic Spirit.

Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to
deny the exis