Were you the female of Moran (the first Innkeeper) and beneath the counterpane with him, you would be just below the surface of life, in touch with a nasty and tragic organism. The first indications of the proximity of the real soul would be apparent. You would be for hours beside a filmy crocodile, conscious of it like a bone in an Ex-Ray, and for minutes in the midst of a tragic wallowing. The soul lives in a cadaverous activity; its dramatic corruption thumps us like a racing engine in the body of a car. The finest humour is the great Play-Shapes blown up or given off by the tragic corpse of Life underneath the world of the Camera. This futile, grotesque and sometimes pretty spawn, is what in this book is Kodacked by the Imagination. Any great humourist is an artist; Dickens as an example. It is just this character of uselessness and impersonality in Laughter, the fibre of anarchy in the comic habit of mind, that makes a man an artist in spite of himself when he begins living on his laughter. Laughter is the arch-luxury that is as simple as bread. VI In this objective Play-World, corresponding to our social consciousness as opposed to our solitude, no final issue is decided. You may blow away a Man-of-bubbles with a Burgundian gust of laughter, but that is not a personality, it is an apparition of no importance. Its awkwardness, or prettiness is accidental. But so much correspondence it has with its original that if the cadaveric travail beneath is vigorous and bitter, the mask and figurehead will be of a more original and intense grotesqueness. The opposing armies in Flanders stick up dummy men on poles for their enemies to pot at, in a spirit of fierce friendliness. It is only a dummy of this sort that is engaged in the sphere of laughter. But the real men are in the trenches underneath all the time, and are there on a more “decisive” affair. In our rather drab Revel there is a certain category of spirit that is not quite anaemic, and yet not very funny. It consists of those who take, at the Clarkson’s[2] situated at the opening of their lives, some conventional Pierrot costume, with a minimum of inverted vigour and the assurance of superior insignificance. The King of Play is not a phantom corresponding to the Sovereign force beneath the surface. The latter must always be accepted as the skeleton at the Feast. That soul or dominant corruption is so real that he cannot rise up and take part in man’s festival as a Falstaff of unwieldy spume; if he comes at all it must be as he is, the skeleton or bogey of True Life, stuck over with corruptions and vices. He may have a certain “succès d’hystérie”. VII