e, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to
an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the
audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the
grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something more
significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of
rhetoric; he is perdurable because he is not completed. His humours are
strangely matched with perpetuity. But, indeed, he is not worthy to die;
for there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be
mortal. I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world. I thank
my fellow mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that the
French so pleasantly call _une joyeusete_; these are to smile at. But
the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the man or woman in a
book, in fiction, or on the stage in a play.

That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living windows.
Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyes
that are apt to express none but common things. There are allusions
unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me and
from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain
of our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish
and the stolid--"wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?"

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in
union or in antithesis. They assuredly have an inseverable union in the
art of literature. The songs of Innocence and Experience are for each
poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the
cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of the
virginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly consent to take them
for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs--is to forgo
Innocence and Experience at once and together. Obviously, Experience can
be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly
solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men's
histories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of other
men's summaries and conclusions. Therefore I bind Innocence and
Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble
isolation of man from man--of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind to
forgo that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of
others, I t