Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/107

92 difficult beauty, which goes beyond what is comfortable for the indolent or timid mind, there is nothing but a “more” of the same beautiful, which we find prima facie pleasant, changed only by being intensified. But this is enough to prevent us from recognising it as beauty, except by self-education or a natural insight.

I suggested yet another dimension of the more difficult beauty, under the name of “width.”

It is a remarkable and rather startling fact that there are genuine lovers of beauty, well equipped in scholarship, who cannot really enjoy Aristophanes, or Rabelais, or the Falstaff scenes of Shakespeare. This is again, I venture to think, a “weakness of the spectator.” In strong humour or comedy you have to endure a sort of dissolution of the conventional world. All the serious accepted things are shown you topsy-turvy; beauty, in the narrow and current sense, among them. The comic spirit enjoys itself at the expense of everything; the gods are starved out and