if graced with an undertone of philosophic irony, is the
only kind of humour which is really permanent. To give permanence
to any human quality in literature, there must be an appeal to
something which is beyond the power of time and change and
fashion and custom and circumstance. And, as a matter of fact,
nothing in the world except sex itself answers this requirement.

The absurdities of men are infinite, but they alter with every
generation. What never alters or can alter, is the absurdity of being a
man at all.

Where Shakespeare's humour still touches us most nearly is
precisely in those scenes which the superficial custom of our age
finds least endurable. It is not in his Gobbos or in his frolicsome
boy-girls, that his essential spirit must be looked for; but in his
Falstaffs and Mercutios.

But Shakespeare's humour is largely, after all, a lovely, dreamy,
poetical thing. I doubt if it has the weight or the massive solidity of
the humour of Rabelais. I think the humour of Charles Lamb wears
well; but that is probably because it has a most indisputable flavour
of Rabelaisian roguery underlying its whimsical grace. Anatole
France has the true classic spirit. His humour will remain fresh
forever, because it is the humour of the eternal absurdity of sexual
desire. Heine can never lose the sharpness of his bite, for his
irreverence is the eternal irreverence of the soul that neither man nor
God can scourge into solemn submission.

Humour to be really permanent and to outlast the changes of fashion
must go plummet-like to the basic root of things. It is nothing less
than extraordinary that Voltaire, living in the age of all ages the
most obsessed with the modishness of the hour, should have written
"Candide," a book full of the old unalterable laughter. For "Candide"
is not only a clever book, a witty book, a wise book. It is a book
preposterously and outrageously funny. It tickles one's liver and
one's gall; it relaxes one's nerves; it vents the suppressed spleen of
years in a shout of irrepressible amusement. Certain passages in
it--and, as one would have suspected they are precisely the passages
that cannot be quoted in a modern book--compel one to laugh aloud
as one thinks of them.

Personally I hold the opinion that "Candide" is the most humorous
piece of human writing in the world. And yet its ribaldry, its
irreverence, is unbounded. It sticks at nothing. It says everything. It
wags the philosophic tongue a