its chains, and we are reconciled when a Cleopatra, hugging
the asp, whispers:

Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast
That sucks the nurse asleep?

In tragedy we are made free by being taken outside the life
of the senses into that of imaginative reality.

Comedy makes daily life livable in spite of folly and
disillusion, but its vision, though as universal, is not that
of tragedy, for it laughs at the spirit as much as at the flesh,
and will not take sides. Tragedy is all that is commonly
said of it, in depth, revelation, and grandeur; but comedy
is not its opposite. The latter is not necessarily more
distant from life, nor is it life apprehended through the
mind rather than through the emotions. Neither is it the
triumph of the angel in man over our body of the beast, as
one has said, nor, to quote another, the triumph of the beast
in man over the divine. It is nothing so fleeting as a triumph.
It is 'a recordation in man's soul' of his dual nature.

Goethe sought in art courage to face the battle of life.
But it is doubtful if life is a battle, or a game, or a chaos
through which we walk with slippery feet. And comedy
gives us courage to face life without any standpoint; we
need not regard it as a magnificent struggle nor as a puppet
play; we need not view it critically nor feel heroically.
We need only to feel humanly, for comedy shows us life,
not at such a distance that we cannot but regard it coldly,
but only so far as we may bring to it a ready sympathy
freed from terror or too overwhelming a measure of pity.

These prefatory remarks may serve as a pivot from which
to survey Restoration Comedy. ^*

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