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MARIONETTES 33
the same dismal theory, which does not explain why we laugh when we are in bed with a girl or when we are just plain happy. Laughter, we are told, is only the extreme of smiling, and smiling is simply the baring of teeth. It may be so; but when Dante saw all the radiance of heaven flooding from Beatrice's smile, we should be under no illusions concerning Beatrice. She is divine; she is not an animal baring her teeth.
But there are some philosophers who have written well and learnedly concerning the spirit of comedy. Among them was S0ren Kierkegaard, whose sense of the urgency and anguish of being a Christian did not prevent him from enjoying comedy.
In one of those lyrical fragments of reminiscences which Kierkegaard introduced into his most prophetical works there is an account of a clown called Beckmann he was accustomed to see at the Konigstadter Theatre at Copenhagen. Beckmann was a prodigious clown who could play in the most gentle manner possible and could also give way to the most frightful rages. He was like Mediterranean weather, now wanton warmth, now the sickening storm of a sirocco. A fat man with a trailing mustache and a devil-may-care manner, he usually portrayed a travelling tinker; and the gaunt hunchbacked philosopher, sitting in his favorite seat in the royal circle, saw something of himself in the actor. Beckmann could make you see things which your reason told you could not possibly exist. He did not walk onto the boards; he seemed to have been there from the beginning of time. You would see a travelling tinker, and that was Beckmann; but the surprising, the beautiful, the inexplicable thing was that there had suddenly appeared on the empty stage a whole imaginary village, exactly as though Beckmann had tossed the village out of his cloak when he was dusting it or searching for fleas. You saw the people emerging from their houses and greeting the tinker, you saw the dust, the pathways, the river winding beside the village smithy, the crowds of children gathered at his heels, and it was all con