world, complete and perfect, was mirrored in
the Greek mind; its evolution, in the Jewish. Therefore the Jewish
conception of life is harmonious, while among the Greeks grew up the
spirit of doubt and speculation, the product of civilization, and the
soil upon which humor disports.

Israel's religion so completely satisfied every spiritual craving that
no room was left for the growth of the poetic instinct. Intellectual
life began to divide into two great streams. The Halacha continued the
instruction of the prophets, as the Haggada fostered the spirit of the
psalmists. The province of the former was to formulate the Law, of the
latter to plant a garden about the bulwark of the Law. While the one
addressed itself to reason, the other made an appeal to the heart and
the feelings. In the Haggada, a thesaurus of the national poetry by the
nameless poets of many centuries, we find epic poems and lyric
outbursts, fables, enigmas, and dramatic essays, and here and there in
this garden we chance across a little bud of humorous composition.

Of what sort was this humor? In point of fact, what is humor? We must be
able to answer the latter question before we may venture to classify the
folklore of the Haggada.

To reach the ideal, to bring harmony out of discord, is the recognized
task of all art. This is the primary principle to be borne in mind in
aesthetic criticism. Tragedy idealizes the world by annihilation,
harmonizes all contradictions by dashing them in pieces against each
other, and points the way of escape from chaos, across the bridge of
death, to the realm beyond, irradiated by the perpetual morning-dawn of
freedom and intellect.

Comedy, on the other hand, believes that the incongruities and
imperfections of life can be justified, and have their uses. Firmly
convinced of the might of truth, it holds that the folly and aberrations
of men, their shortcomings and failings, cannot impede its eventual
victory. Even in them it sees traces of an eternal, divine principle.
While tragedy precipitates the conflict of hostile forces, comedy,
rising serene above folly and all indications of transitoriness,
reconciles inconsistencies, and lovingly coaxes them into harmony with
the true and the absolute.

When man's spirit is thus made to re-enter upon the enjoyment of eternal
truth, its heritage, there is, as some one has well said, triumph akin
to the joy of the father over the home-coming of a lost son, and the
divine,