Comedy--and comedy is idleness tolerantly enjoying itself--is founded, it has been said, upon a recognition of the equality of the sexes; but it would be more just to say that it is founded upon a view of life into which the notions of equality and inequality do not enter at all, because they are unnecessary. To Congreve and Stendhal women were not the inferior sex, for, in spite of the conventions in which ostensibly they moved, they were free, and therefore interesting. And remote as these figures are from us, they demonstrate a very useful truth, that the way to get over our stupid obsession with inequality is to reach a stage where diversity will be the norm, involving disadvantage to no one. Toward that stage, which can only be made possible by a more general leisure, we are moving, if what the reformers and the scientists tell us is true. It will be a stage in which rules will have more importance than laws and spontaneous actions than obligations; and most of the things we do will be regarded as play rather than duty. Conduct will probably be about a fourth of life, instead of the three-fourths postulated by Matthew Arnold. And although this state has not come yet and may not come for a long time, it would be as sensible to found a philosophy upon it as upon a period of transition as dismal and impermanent as ours. Moreover the values of the past are against us as well as those of the future which we imagine. There is a certain ignobility in the dispute over human inequality, a failure to rise to the human level. It is not a question but a misunderstanding, which the accumulated imaginative culture of the world might have made impossible. A little sense of the richness of life would disperse it. Who would be so fantastic as to say that Falstaff is greater or less than Ophelia, or whether Uncle Toby is the exact equal of Anna Karenina? To ask the question is to evoke at once an image of the diverse riches of human nature and of the poverty of mind which can reduce it to such terms, destroying all interest and all nuance.