Chapter 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”.