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An Essay on comedy and the uses of the comic spirit by George Meredith
page 47 of 54 (87%)
larger natures are distinguished by the great breadth of their power of
laughter, and no one really loving Moliere is refined by that love to
despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it may be that the lover of
Aristophanes will not have risen to the height of Moliere. Embrace them
both, and you have the whole scale of laughter in your breast. Nothing
in the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene in The Frogs, when Bacchus
and Xanthias receive their thrashings from the hands of businesslike
OEacus, to discover which is the divinity of the two, by his
imperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and each, under the
obligation of not crying out, makes believe that his horrible bellow--the
god's _iou iou_ being the lustier--means only the stopping of a sneeze,
or horseman sighted, or the prelude to an invocation to some deity: and
the slave contrives that the god shall get the bigger lot of blows.
Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don Quixote, and the Supper in the
Manner of the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract of
laughter. But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of the
mind. Moliere's laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light
to our nature, as colour to our thoughts. The Misanthrope and the
Tartuffe have no audible laughter; but the characters are steeped in the
comic spirit. They quicken the mind through laughter, from coming out of
the mind; and the mind accepts them because they are clear
interpretations of certain chapters of the Book lying open before us all.
Between these two stand Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the richer laugh
of heart and mind in one; with much of the Aristophanic robustness,
something of Moliere's delicacy.

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The laughter heard in circles not pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound
harsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with a
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