Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

THE BERMONDSEY BOOK
actual and false world, a buffoon had capered, red-nosed, froth on the
stream of men. Here, in this mirror, he attained the terrifying dignity
of the Comic Spirit, his mechanic face immobile like the mask of an
actor in the theatre of Dionysus, facing now the impending tiers of
Athens, now the laurelled brows of the God. It was the Comic Spirit
which had inspired the enormous lungs of Aristophones and given to
the cheeks of Rabelais their rotund benignance. The sun was that
clown's aureole, as it had been Fielding's and Meredith's. Was it not,
indeed, sublimely comical that the blood-stream of Man should be
a vaster torrent than the Milky Way and the sword hung in the scabbard
of Orion should be a thing frailer than a penny trumpet?
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