in breadth from the pulling of two square fingers at the corners of the mouth, one must have aid of ‘the good Rhine wine,’ and be of German blood unmixed besides.  This treble-Dutch lumbersomeness of the Comic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea of Comedy, and the poor voice allowed to women in German domestic life will account for the absence of comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that land.  I shall speak of it again in the second section of this lecture.

Eastward you have total silence of Comedy among a people intensely susceptible to laughter, as the Arabian Nights will testify.  Where the veil is over women’s-faces, you cannot have society, without which the senses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is driven to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst.  Arabs in this respect are worse than Italians—­much worse than Germans; just in the degree that their system of treating women is worse.

M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the excellent French essayist and master of critical style, tells of a conversation he had once with an Arab gentleman on the topic of the different management of these difficult creatures in Orient and in Occident:  and the Arab spoke in praise of many good results of the greater freedom enjoyed by Western ladies, and the charm of conversing with them.  He was questioned why his countrymen took no measures to grant them something of that kind of liberty.  He jumped out of his individuality in a twinkling, and entered into the sentiments of his race, replying, from the pinnacle of a splendid conceit, with affected humility of manner:  ’You can look on them without perturbation—­but we!’ . . .  And after this profoundly comic interjection, he added, in deep tones, ‘The very face of a woman!’ Our representative of temperate notions demurely consented that the Arab’s pride of inflammability should insist on the prudery of the veil as the civilizing medium of his race.

There has been fun in Bagdad.  But there never will be civilization where Comedy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social equality of the sexes.  I am not quoting the Arab to exhort and disturb the somnolent East; rather for cultivated women to recognize that the Comic Muse is one of their best friends.  They are blind to their interests in swelling the ranks of the sentimentalists.  Let them look with their clearest vision abroad and at home.  They will see that where they have no social freedom, Comedy is absent:  where they are household drudges, the form of Comedy is primitive:  where they are tolerably independent, but uncultivated, exciting melodrama takes its place and a sentimental version of them.  Yet the Comic will out, as they would know if they listened to some of the private conversations of men whose minds are undirected by the Comic Muse:  as the sentimental man, to his astonishment, would know likewise, if he in similar fashion could receive a lesson.  But where women are on the road to an equal footing with men, in attainments and in liberty—­in what they have won for themselves, and what has been granted them by a fair civilization—­there, and only waiting to be transplanted from life to the stage, or the novel, or the poem, pure Comedy flourishes, and is, as it would help them to be, the sweetest of diversions, the wisest of delightful companions.