One excellent test of the civilization of a country, as I have said, I
take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test of
true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.

If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and it
is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when
contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the
light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful;
never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached
to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are
studied. It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks
at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half
tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a
big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted
by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of
the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness
rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous
observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on
its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon
earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present
does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected,
pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate;
whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in
idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning
short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with
their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding
them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason,
fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually,
or in the bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an
oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is