These questions appear to be best approached by a reference to the results of our study of comedy. This, in its higher forms, has shown itself to be the clear expression of the attitude of a community, when it would laugh away something in its members which it sees to be unfitting, though it may not regard it as serious enough to call for a more violent mode of ejection. That which is thus lightly dismissed is always something which looks anti-social, whether or not it takes on for moral reflection the aspect of a vice. A common tendency among writers on comedy is to claim for it the value of a moral purgative, to attribute to it the power of effecting directly a process of self-correction in the spectator. Even Congreve and Vanbrugh, in their defence of their plays against Jeremy Collier, pretended that they were reformers of the world. This agreeable supposition will not, one fears, bear critical inspection. One objection, just touched on, is that comedy {412} does not deal a blow straight at the immoral, as the language of Aristotle and of some of his citers appears to suggest. This circumstance seems to stand seriously in the way of its effecting a moral purification. Nor does the holding up to merry contemplation of the tendency of men to stray too far from the customary social type, imply a serious purpose of correction behind. Though she may wear a shrewishly corrective expression, the Comic Muse is at heart too gay to insist on any direct instruction of her audience. A glance at her stern-eyed sister, Satire, will convince us of this. On the other side, we meet with another and more fatal objection: the mental pose of the spectator at the comic show makes it extremely unlikely that he should at the moment apply the object-lesson so as to discern the laughable side of his own shortcomings. One remembers here that a man is all too slow in making such a self-application even in the serious surroundings of a church, where a remark, pointed perhaps with a significant turn of the finger (I speak of ruder times), is recognised by all but himself as specially aimed at him; and if so, how can we expect a spectator at a comedy, in the playful mood which has no room for any serious thought, to rub in the moral medicament supplied him?