the new kind of pedagogue, the new kind of healer, the new kind of slang, the new kind of painter, the new kind of anthropologist, the new kind of vehicle, the new kind of cinema, the new kind of Press, the new kind of politician, the new kind of preacher, and makes the procession of the follies of our day pass before us as they will appear to an old lady who looks back on them from a time fifty years hence. By using this form of reminiscence, Mr Knox gets the fads of our time in comic perspective, and we see the noisy and successful charlatans in our midst as old-fashioned oddities scarcely less strange than bustles or the ring in a savage's nose. The comic spirit is the sense of the permanent expressing itself in laughter. Not always so, perhaps, but at least when it is satirical and critical. Comedy, no less than poetry, has standards remote from the passing hour, and puts the advertised successes of to-day in comparison with the settled achievements of mankind. Such a writer as Mr Knox says very little in his comedy about the tradition that he reverences, but the reverence for tradition is implicit in his work, and it is the ludicrous disparity between the great tradition and the upstart impudence that has challenged it-it is this disparity that is the eminent cause of his laughter. I am not one of those who hold that tradition should go unchallenged or that the backward-looking satirists are right in their belief that, though there may have been a Golden Age in the past, there is no hope of a Golden Age in the future. Tradition itself may come into conflict with human nature and common sense, and so fall under the satirical lash of a Swift or a Voltaire. There is not much more virtue in a thing's being very old than in a thing's being very new. All that we can say on behalf of the former is that, having lasted so long, it must to some extent have fitted in with the facts of human nature. Let an institution have outlived its time, however, and become a mere survival without value to the social life of human beings, and the comic spirit will appear with its dangerous trumpets and blow a blast that will set the ancient walls toppling. Were it not so, comedy would be a mere literary House of Lords for the retardation of change.

Comedy, indeed, though it is predisposed to laugh at

novelty, is but a dubious friend to antiquity. Kings have been laughed at as well as reformers. Ancient religions have been a theme for mockery no less than creeds in which nobody could have believed the day before yesterday. The permanent standards of comedy, I fancy, are in the reason, and the unreasonable animal called man may as easily be absurd in his inheritance as in his inventions. The bitter laughter of 'Troilus and Cressida' is directed, not against man as he is according to the latest fashion, but against man as he has always been. The men whom Swift satirises in the fourth book of 'Gulliver's Travels' are the men who have made the world's history, and the glories of our blood and state are revealed to us through his eyes as an indecency under the sun. Comedy, indeed, is an appeal to reason against old things and new alike. That is why, in comic literature, a conservative writer is often revolutionary in his laughter, and a revolutionary writer is often conservative in his laughter. Even Mr Shaw cannot help mocking the new world as W. S. Gilbert could not help mocking the old. Mr Shaw laughs at the Harley Street specialist with the latest cure; at the free lover with the latest theory of sex-relations-nay, he laughs at the very Ibsenites and Shavians whom he helped to bring into existence. For the comic spirit is an impartial spirit, even when it is in the keeping of a propagandist. We often hear people complaining that wit and humour are regarded with suspicion in English public life and that it is only by a miracle that a witty man can ever hope to become Prime Minister. As a matter of fact, there is a good deal to be said for the attitude of the politicians to the wits. The spirit of comedy spares neither enemy nor friend, and, indeed, owes no fealty to any party but the party of reason. If you can imagine a Cabinet in which there would be no humbugs, no little men pretending to be great ones, no self-seekers, and whose consistent policy would be a policy of perfect reasonableness, then you can imagine a Molière sitting on the Front Bench as Prime Minister. We are still too far from Utopia, however, for it to be safe to put the comic spirit at the head of any of the political parties. Politicians believe that they distrust the comic spirit because it is not sufficiently serious. May it not

be, however, that they distrust it because it is the most serious of all critics of the make-believe so indispensable to the propagandist and the partisan?

Samuel Butler in the Note-Books' described himself as an enfant terrible. 'I am,' he declared, 'the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.' Perhaps there is an element of the enfant terrible in every comic writer, and the 'bigwigs' are naturally disturbed by the fact that they never know what mischief he may be 'up to' next. Thus, we find Dean Swift a sound Tory in politics, but an extreme pacificist in comedy. Gilbert, I suppose, was as orthodox a Conservative, but he could not indulge his comic genius in 'Iolanthe' without mischievously lampooning the House of Lords:

"The House of Lords throughout the war
Did nothing in particular

And did it very well.'

May we not presume that the comic spirit is distrusted in politics because the comic spirit cannot be relied on to back its friends? Take Mr Chesterton again. He wrote for many years as a pugnacious Liberal, but, even in the heat of propaganda, he was constantly laughing himself into a kind of Toryism. Nor was even Mr Kipling, a still more vehement propagandist, able, when once the comic spirit seized him, to remain obedient to the strict rules of propaganda. Mr Kipling is, for hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, the prophet of patriotism; but consider how comic a figure he makes of the flag-wagging patriot who comes down to address the school in 'Stalky and Co.' The comic writer, indeed, will be found again and again laughing, like an opponent, at the extravagances of his own side. It is as though the comic spirit acted as a brake to prevent him and his fellow-partisans from precipitating themselves to their ruin down the steep hill of unreason. The comic spirit, to say truth, is a spirit that enables a man to laugh occasionally, not only at his side, but at himself. Ibsen, for example, suddenly remembering the limitations of human nature, turned round and mocked himself in' The Wild Duck' for 'pestering people, in their poverty,

with the claim of the ideal.' It was not that he had become less of an idealist, but that the insistent voice of comedy had whispered to him: Do not ask too much of our common humanity. Do not, above all, allow your idealism to tempt you to become a doctrinaire, which is merely another name for a quack.' Even so, we may reasonably wonder whether a writer gains in energy as a propagandist through having seen himself comically. The comic spirit is a sceptic and must surely be a dangerous ally with whom to go into a battle. There have certainly been many great battles won without it and many noble champions of great causes who have left no reputation for humour behind them. These may be used as an argument for the view that a sense of humour is unnecessary for men who wish to leave the world better than they found it. On the other hand, there have been a sufficient number of humorists among the benefactors of mankind, from Socrates to Abraham Lincoln, to make us pause before admitting that a sense of humour is a vice or a source of weakness in a man of action. Humour may at times seem to be an enemy to that vehemence of purpose which is necessary to carry a great cause to victory; but it must be remembered that, wherever humour goes, it takes with it human nature as its fellow, and that even the sublimest cause must fail if it attempts to hurry forward where human nature either will not or cannot follow it. Even if it uses force to make human nature accompany it for the moment, it is the commands of human nature, and not of any doctrinaire prophet of the cause, that will assuredly be obeyed in the end. Hence the comic spirit may be of service to over-confident idealists, if it reminds them that, after all, they are fallible men and women living in a world of fallible fellow-creatures.

It is possible to go too far, however, in writing of humour as though it were a sort of medicine for the extravagant race of men. The comic writers, themselves, I know, make this claim for it-Rabelais and Molière and even Congreve. But I am sure the first man who laughed had no thought of doing anybody any good. There is no record of the first laugh in the histories, but I have no doubt it was caused by some one's tripping over a stone or falling into a river or

meeting with some humiliating accident. Laughter at the physical accident is the most universal of all kinds of laughter. Cervantes invites it again and again, and never without response, in 'Don Quixote.' Sterne calls for it, and not in vain, in Tristram Shandy.' Fielding revels in this kind of laughter in 'Joseph Andrews,' and Dickens in the 'Pickwick Papers.' All through comic literature we find our heroes and villains alike being cudgelled and tossed in blankets and flung into horseponds, and attacked by dogs and having their teeth knocked out, and, indeed, subjected to every kind of violence short of murder.

Modern men are sometimes shocked to find that they have been laughing at buffets and bashings administered to so lovable a lunatic as Don Quixote. I fancy, however, that men will still be laughing at the Don's disasters a thousand years hence. If we cease to laugh at the troubles of God's fools, we shall be heretics against the spirit of comedy and shall end by turning some characters, who are lovable while we laugh at them, into half-witted bores. It is arguable that the angels do not laugh, and that, as men and women become more like angels, they will cease to be amused by a good many things that have in the past made them laugh uproariously. I shall respect any man who, being a saint, cannot laugh at the sorrows of Don Quixote; but let those of us who are not yet saints beware of surrendering a pleasure that has made the Don an immortal figure in literature. Accidents even in real life amuse us when they are not too serious, and we think none the worse of those to whom they happen. In the make-believe world of literature, on the other hand, we can laugh at disasters that in real life would horrify us just as in retrospect we can laugh at accidents to ourselves that at the time of their occurrence caused us nothing but terror and pain. Literature, it seems to me, puts us in the mood of retrospect, and our attitude to a great deal of the physical pain that is dealt out so lavishly in comedy may be explained by the fact that we regard it as belonging not to the present but to the past. The illusion of literature is never a complete illusion. Even when it transports us into another world, we know in our secret imaginations that this is a world in which things have not quite the same significance as in the world that we at present inhabit. If it were not