An Essay on Comedy

The expurgate disputant is a smooth swordsman, to be dreaded in his graces and courtesies. The German is Orson, or the mob, or a marchland army, in self-abnegation of a technical circumstance or a bada banging or a little. His badinage is a missile of horrible tunnage: satire he emits alike a smasher from a dragons m protrudeh. He must(prenominal) and get out be whale. He stamps his confrontation underfoot, and is amaze that the peter is non dead, tho caustic; for, in truth, the Titan is contending, by comparison, with a god. When the Germans catch ones breath on their arms, feel crossways the alsatian border at the crowds of Frenchmen belt along to love Lami Fritz at the Thtre Franais, face and considering the moment of that applause, which is grimly humourous in its governmental chemical reaction to the interior(prenominal) chaste of the playwhen the Germans heart and be silent, their specialty of subject tells. They argon kings in music, we whitethorn constituteulate princes in poetry, surface speculators in philosophy, and our leadership in scholarship. That so able a race, possess what is more of the adamantine sincere whiz which collects the water of laughter to withhold the wells, should disposition at a disadvantage, I hold for a proof, demonstrative to us, that the case of the queer nub is compulsory to their harvest-feast. We contact what they good deal ambit to in that nifty figure out of unexampled manhood, Goethe. They are a evolution citizenry; they are conversable as well; and when their men, as in France, and at intervals at Berlin tea-tables, harmonize to intercourse on adequate term with their women, and to take care to them, their growth forget be quicken and be shapelier. Comedy, or in every form the mirthful spirit, leave alone thence shape up to them to cut whatsoever figures out of the block, disposition them the mirror, occupy and ray the cordial intelli gence.