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32 THE GREAT GOD PAN
pots for the naked obscenities which are the most comic of all. These mediaeval fetes were essentially bourgeois; it is unthinkable that the same fetes were performed in the villages.
To understand Charlie we must follow the clues wherever we can find them. They must lead us inevitably into some of the remote places of the human spirit, among the towers of pride and the valleys of human misery. We cannot isolate the comic spirit and hold it up to the light. We cannot pin it into a museum case. But it is possible that if we could see it steadily for a moment, or thrust through some of the veils where it hides, we might find some of the reasons why it is worth while to be alive, for tragedy offers only the most excellent reasons why it would be better to be dead. There is a sense in which the genuine spirit of comedy is the lightningflash which alone illuminates our down-at-heels world. "A joke, sometimes even a bad joke," said Christopher Fry recently, "can reflect the astonishing light that we live in. Indeed, laughter itself is a great mystery of the flesh, as though flesh were entertaining something other than itself; something vociferous but inarticulate."
The philosophers, of course, have set their hearts at contriving a solution to the enigma, and Chaplin has remarked, with some authority, that since philosophers are usually unable to distinguish between a good joke and a bad one, they are in no position to pass judgment. "In laughter," according to Bergson, "we always find an avowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbor." Bergson's theory has a respectable ancestry. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan: "The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminence in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly." It would have been simpler and more accurate if he had said only: "The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory."
Mr Al Capp, in discussing Chaplin, has recently revived