A perception of the comic spirit gives high fellowship. You
become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we know of in
connection with our old world, which is not supermundane. Look there for
your unchallengeable upper class! You feel that you are one of this our
civilized community, that you cannot escape from it, and would not if you
could. Good hope sustains you; weariness does not overwhelm you; in
isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride is greatly
moderated. Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you from worlds of
imagination or of devotion. The Comic spirit is not hostile to the
sweetest songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it: Shakespeare
overflows: there is a mild moon's ray of it (pale with super-refinement
through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in Comus. Pope has it,
and it is the daylight side of the night half obscuring Cowper. It is
only hostile to the priestly element, when that, by baleful swelling,
transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office: and then, in extreme
cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp: as, for
example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere: at which
the dark angels may, but men do not laugh.
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