Another charge which has been brought against the comic is that it is unsympathetic. Its attitude, it is said, is one of externality, opposed therefore to the intimacy necessary for the complete aesthetic reaction. Whereas simple aesthetic representation places us within the object itself, comical representation only exhibits a relation between it and an idea. We judge it from our point of view, not from its own. The pleasure in pride and superiority which we feel towards the comical object seems also inconsistent with sympathy; for sympathy would create a fellow feeling with it, and place us not above, but on a level with it. If we do sympathize, the comic object ceases to be comical and becomes pathetic. We can find the follies and sins of men comical just so long as we do not sympathize with the sufferings which they entail. There is nothing comical that may not also become pathetic; and the difference depends exactly on the presence or absence of sympathy. Nothing, for example, is more pathetic than death; yet if you keep yourself free of its sorrow, there is nothing more comical--that man, a little lower in his own estimation than the angels, should come to this, a lump of clay. It is unquestionably true that a free, disinterested attitude is essential to comedy. You must not let yourself be carried away by any feeling; if you are over-serious you cannot laugh; you must keep to reflection and comparison. Yet this attitude is not utterly destructive of all feeling. Man is complex enough at once to feel and to reflect. He can pity as well as laugh. The pathetic and the comic are constantly conjoined--witness our feeling towards Don Quixote or towards any of the great characters of Thackeray--we do not know whether to laugh or to cry. And in the most effective comedy, the standard applied to the comical object is not foreign, but rather, as we have observed, the implicit standard of the object itself, discernible only by the most intimate acquaintance with it. The sting of laughter comes from our acceptance of it as valid for ourselves; we blush and join in the laugh at ourselves. The mischievous-comic, moreover, depends directly upon sympathy; for it requires that we take the point of view of the funny thing; our pleasure in it implies a secret sympathy for it--we hold it up to a standard, yet all the time are in sympathy with its rebellion. When we laugh at the prank of the child, love is mixed with the laugh. The dual nature of man as at once a partisan of convention and of the impulses that it seeks to regulate, is nowhere better illustrated than in the comic. Finally, disinterestedness is not peculiar to comedy; for it pervades all art. Feeling must be dominated by reflection; even pathos demands this, for, if we lose ourselves in sorrowful feeling, no fair image can arise and steady us.