least they are popular, they are said to win the ear.
Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful and
the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by
the Comic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree
that it enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when
one of the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like
reassuring daylight. You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that
you take it in, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air
for food. That which you give out--the joyful roar--is not the better
part; let that go to good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs.
Aristophanes promises his auditors that if they will retain the ideas
of the comic poet carefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their
garments shall smell odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year. The
boast will not be thought an empty one by those who have choice
friends that have stocked themselves according to his directions. Such
treasuries of sparkling laughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness
to the comic laugh is a step in civilization. To shrink from being an
object of it is a step in cultivation. We know the degree of refinement
in men by the matter they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but
we know likewise that the larger natures are distinguished by the great
breadth of their power of laughter, and no one really loving Moliere is
refined by that love to despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it
may be that the lover of Aristophanes will not have risen to the height
of Moliere. Embrace them both, and you have the whole scale of laughter
in your breast. Nothing in the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene
in The Frogs, when Bacchus and Xanthias receive their thrashings from
the hands of businesslike OEacus, to discover which is the divinity
of the two, by his imperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and
each, under the obligation of not crying out, makes believe that his
horrible bellow--the god's iou--iou being the lustier--means only
the stopping of a sneeze, or horseman sighted, or the prelude to an
invocation to some deity: and the slave contrives that the god shall
get the bigger lot of blows. Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don
Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner of the Ancients, in Peregrine
Pickle, are of a similar cataract of laughter. But it is not
illuminating; it is not the laughter of t