That is
the Comic Spirit.
Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to deny
the existence 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.
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