There must be a philosophy of clowns. I would rather find it than look up their history, which is “older than any history that is written in any book,” though the respectable compilers of Encyclopædias (I feel sure without looking) must often have written it in their books. I have, however, been reading Croce’s history of Pulcinella, because that is history written by a philosopher. It is also a work of formidable erudition, disproving, among other things, the theory of the learned Dieterich that he was a survival from the stage of ancient Rome. No, he seems to have been invented by one Silvio Fiorillo, a Neapolitan actor who flourished “negli ultimi decenni del Cinquecento e nei primi del Seicento”—in fact, was a contemporary of an English actor, one William Shakespeare. Pulcinella, you know (transmogrified, and spoiled, for us as Punch), was a sort of clown, and it is interesting to learn that he was invented by an actor all out of his own head. But I for one should be vastly more interested to know who invented Grock. For Grock also is a sort of clown. Yet no; one must distinguish. There are clowns and there is Grock. For Grock happens to be an artist, and the artist is always an individual. After all, as an individual artist, he must have invented himself. It was a remarkably happy invention. You may see that for yourselves at the Coliseum, generally, though true clown-lovers follow it about all over the map wherever it is to be seen. Victor Hugo (and the theme would not have been unworthy of that lyre) would have described it in a series of antitheses. It is genial and _macabre_, owlishly stupid and Macchiavellianly astute, platypode and feather-light, cacophonous and divinely musical. Grock’s first act is a practical antithesis. A strange creature with a very high and very bald cranium (you think of what Fitzgerald said of James Spedding’s: “No wonder no hair can grow at such an altitude”) and in very baggy breeches waddles in with an enormous portmanteau—which proves to contain a fiddle no larger than your hand. The creature looks more simian than human, but is graciously affable—another Sir Oran Haut-ton, in fact, with fiddle substituted for Sir Oran’s flute and French horn.