book in a sentence, volumes in a character; so that a fair pan of a

book outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled may be compassed

in one comic sitting.

For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the page

before us, if we would be men. One, with an index on the Book, cries

out, in a style pardonable to his fervency: The remedy of your

frightful affliction is here, through the stillatory of Comedy, and not

in Science, nor yet in Speed, whose name is but another for voracity.

Why, to be alive, to be quick in the soul, there should be diversity in

the companion throbs of your pulses. Interrogate them. They lump along

like the old loblegs of Dobbin the horse; or do their business like

cudgels of carpet-thwackers expelling dust or the cottage-clock

pendulum teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic. This

too in spite of Bacchus. And let them gallop; let them gallop with the

God bestriding them; gallop to Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike the

same note. Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the arms of

Amphitrite! We hear a shout of war for a diversion.--Comedy he

pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and comprehensively. She

it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of

dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among

us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, he

says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not

opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are

honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one

foot's length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In

Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the

stroke of honourable laughter: an Ariel released by Prospero's wand

from the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax. And this laughter of

reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the

shifty Spring deciding for Summer. You hear it giving the delicate

spirit his liberty. Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society: a

low as of the udderful cow past milking hour! O for a titled

ecclesiastic to curse to excommunication that unholy thing!--So far an

enthusiast perhaps; but he should have a hearing.

Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are

not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know

what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on

board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the

general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it

seem to sail the stiffest:--there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist

surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at

everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself

stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the

actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and

squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.

You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and

country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may

with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is

distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits

of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality,

have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in

him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the

heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as

a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that

admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to

kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover

ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism

they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim

their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that

their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game,

never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown

to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of

the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They will, it is

known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth of

all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes,

to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round

the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they

had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism

in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They

dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while

socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.

Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the House. It would appear that ever

finer essences of it are demanded to sustain the structure; but

especially would it appear that a reversion to the gross original,

beneath a mask and in a vein of fineness, is an earthquake at the

foundations of the House. Better that it should not have consented to

motion, and have held stubbornly to all ancestral ways, than have bred

that anachronic spectre. The sight, however, is one to make our

squatting imps in circle grow restless on their haunches, as they bend

eyes instantly, ears at full cock, for the commencement of the comic

drama of the suicide. If this line of verse be not yet in our

literature,

Through very love of self himself he slew,

let it be admitted for his epitaph.