Such purification as is possible can, it is plain, be only indirect. When Lessing writes “the whole of morality has no more powerful and effective _preservative_ than the laughable” he seems to imply this indirectness. So far as the provocative lurks in the immoral, we can say that our laughter at the comic exhibition may serve as a useful prophylactic. By tracing out, with the guidance of the comic poet, the unsuspected developments and effects of a failing, we may be furthering our moral salvation through the setting up of a new internal safeguard. If the tendencies should {413} later on thrust up their ugly forms in ourselves, the fact of our having laughed at them may make a considerable difference in the swiftness and energy of the movement of repression. The fear of becoming ridiculous, which grows better defined and so more serviceable in one who has made acquaintance with comedy, is a valuable side-support of what we call moderation and reasonableness in men; and comedy is entitled to her modest meed as one of our health-preservers. Yet we may easily go wrong here, doing an offence to our gay enchantress by taking her words too seriously. She looks, at any rate, as if she wanted much more to please us than to improve us. In considering her aim one is reminded, through a relation of contrast, of what Aristotle said about the connection between pleasure and virtue. The good man, he tells us, though aiming at virtue, will be the more satisfied if pleasure comes by the way, giving a kind of unexpected finish to the virtuous achievement. The art of comedy merely reverses the order: she aims directly at pleasure, but is far too good-natured and too wise to object to furthering virtue if this comes as a collateral result of her entertainment.[331] The comedy, at once wise and gay, of a past age seems to have parted from us; and one would look in vain to newer developments of the art for any considerable instruction in the lesser social obligations. Nor is the corrective function of a large communal laughter likely to be carried on by such new forms of art as our “social satire,” in so far as these can be said to keep at the point of view of the good sense of a community. The tendency to-day seems to be rather to force a laugh from us at some bizarre extravagance of manners, which we could never {414} think of as a possibility for ourselves; or, on the other hand, to bring us near a cynical point of view, at which the current of our laughter becomes shallow and slightly acidulated, a point of view which has little, if any, promise of a moral stiffening of the self against insidious attack.