tence 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 pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and the
worshipful may be in alliance: I know not how far comic, or how much
assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of its
appearance: at