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Title: The Cornac and his Wife
   [The fourth story in Lewis's 1927 collection The Wild Body:
   A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories]
Author: Lewis, Percy Wyndham (1882-1957)
Date of first publication: 1927
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928
Date first posted: 11 March 2011
Date last updated: 11 March 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #745

This ebook was produced by Barbara Watson
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This ebook was produced from images generously made
available by the Internet Archive






THE CORNAC AND HIS WIFE

by Wyndham Lewis



I met in the evening, not far from the last inn of the town, a cart
containing the rough professional properties, the haggard offspring, of
a strolling circus troupe from Arles, which I had already seen. The
cornac and his wife tramped along beside it. Their talk ran on the
people of the town they had just left. They both scowled. They recalled
the inhabitants of the last town with nothing but bitterness.

Against the people to whom they played they had an implacable grudge.
With the man, obsessed by ill-health, the grievance against fortune was
associated with the more brutal hatred that almost choked him every time
he appeared professionally.

With their children the couple were very demonstrative. Mournful
caresses were showered upon them: it was a manner of conspicuously
pitying themselves. As a fierce reproach to the onlooker these
unhandsome gytes were publicly petted. Bitter kisses rained upon their
heads. The action implied blows and ill-treatment at the hands of an
anonymous adversary; in fact, the world at large. The children avoided
the kisses as though they had been blows, wailing and contorting
themselves. The animosity in the brutal lips thrust down upon their
faces was felt by them, but the cause remained hidden for their
inexperience. Terror, however, they learnt to interpret on all hands;
even to particularly associate it with love towards the offspring. When
the clown made a wild grimace in their blubbering faces, they would
sometimes howl with alarm. This was it, perhaps! They concluded that
this must be the sign and beginning of the terrible thing that had so
long been covertly menacing them; their hearts nearly hopped out of
their throats, although what occurred passed off in a somersault and a
gush of dust as the clown hurled his white face against the earth, and
got up rubbing his sides to assure the spectators that he was hurt.

Setting up their little tent in a country town this man and his wife
felt their anger gnawing through their reserve, like a dog under lock
and key. It was maddened by this other animal presence, the perspiring
mastodon that roared at it with cheap luxurious superiority. Their long
pilgrimage through this world inhabited by 'the Public' (from which they
could never escape) might be interpreted by a nightmare image. This was
a human family, we could say, lost in a land peopled by sodden mammoths
possessed of a deeply-rooted taste for outdoor performances of a
particularly depressing and disagreeable nature. These displays
involved the insane contortions of an indignant man and his dirty,
breathless wife, of whose ugly misery it was required that a daily
mournful exhibition should be made of her shrivelled legs, in pantomime
hose. She must crucify herself with a scarecrow abandon, this iron and
blood automaton, and affect to represent the factor of sex in a
geometrical posturing. These spells were all related in some way to
physical suffering. Whenever one of these monsters was met with, which
on an average was twice a day, the only means of escape for the
unfortunate family was to charm it. Conduct involving that never failed
to render the monster harmless and satisfied. They then would hurry on,
until they met another. Then they would repeat just the same thing over
again, and once more hasten away, boiling with resentment.

The first time I saw them, the proprietress stood straddling on a raised
platform, in loose flesh-tights with brown wrinkled knee-caps,
_espadrilles_, brandy-green feathers arching over her almost naked head;
while clutched in her hands aloft she supported a rigid child of about
six. Upon this child stood three others, each provided with a flag. The
proprietor stood some distance away and observed this event as one of
the public. I leant on the barrier near him, and wondered if he ever
willed his family to fall. I was soon persuaded, on observing him for a
short while, that he could never be visited by such a mild domestic
sensation. He wished steadily and all the time, it was quite certain,
that the earth would open with a frantic avulsion, roaring as it parted,
decorated with heavy flames, across the middle of the space set aside
for his performance; that everybody there would immediately be hurled
into this chasm, and be crushed flat as it closed up. The Public on its
side, of course, merely wished that the entire family might break their
necks one after the other, the clown smash his face every time he fell,
and so on.

To some extent Public and Showman understood each other. There was this
amount of give and take, that they both snarled over the money that
passed between them, or if they did not snarl it was all the worse.
There was a unanimity of brutal hatred about that. Producer and consumer
both were bestially conscious of the passage of coppers from one pocket
to another. The public lay back and enjoyed itself hardly, closely, and
savagely. The showman contorted himself madly in response. His bilious
eye surveyed its grinning face, his brow sweated for its money, his
ill-kept body ached. He made it a painful spectacle; he knew how to make
it painful. He had the art of insisting on the effort, that foolish
effort. The public took it in the contrary spirit, as _he_ felt, on
purpose. It was on purpose, as he saw it, that it took its recreation,
which was coarse. It deliberately promoted his misery and affected to
consider him a droll gay bird.

So this by no means exceptional family took its lot: it dressed itself
up, its members knocked each other about, tied their bodies in
diabolical knots before a congregation of Hodges, who could not even
express themselves in the metropolitan tongue, but gibbered in breton,
day in, day out. That was the situation. Intimately, both Showman and
Public understood it, and were in touch more than, from the outside,
would be at once understood. Each performance always threatened to end
in the explosion of this increasing volume of rage. (This especially
applied to its fermentation within the walls of the acrobatic vessel
known as the 'patron,' who was Monsieur Jules Montort.) Within, it
flashed and rumbled all the time: but I never heard of its bursting its
continent, and it even seemed of use as a stimulus to gymnastics after
the manner of Beethoven with a fiery composition.

So there those daily crowds collected, squatted and watched, 'above the
mle,' like _aristos_ or gentlepeople. But they did pay for their
pleasure (and such pleasure!): they were made to part with their sous,
strictly for nothing, from the performers' standpoint. That would be the
solitary bright spot for the outraged nomad. At least to that extent
they were being got the better of. Had you suggested to the Showman that
the Public paid for an idea, something it drew out of itself, that would
have been a particularly repugnant thought. The Public depends upon him,
that the primitive performer cannot question. And if women for instance
find it hard to look on their own beauty as their admirer does (so that
a great number of their actions might be traced to a contempt for men,
who become so passionate about what they know themselves to be such an
ordinary matter--namely themselves), so it was perhaps their contempt
that enabled this fierce couple to continue as they did.

This background of experience was there to swell out my perception of
what I now saw--the advancing caravan, with the familiar forms of its
owners approaching one of their most hated haunts, but their heads as
yet still full of the fury aroused by the last mid-day encounter. I
followed them, attempting to catch what they were saying: but what with
the rumbling of the carriages and the thick surge of the proprietor's
voice, I could not make out much except expletives. His eye, too, rolled
at me so darkly that I fell behind. I reflected that his incessant
exercise in holding up his family ranged along his extended arm, though
insipid to watch, must cause him to be respected on a lonely road, and
his desperate nature and undying resentment would give his ferocity an
impact that no feeling I then experienced could match. So I kept my eyes
to myself for the time and closed down my ears, and entered the town in
the dust of his wagons.

But after my evening meal I strolled over the hill bisected by the main
street, and found him in his usual place on a sort of square, one side
of which was formed by a stony breton brook, across which went a bridge.
Drawn up under the beeches stood the brake. Near it in the open space
the troupe had erected the trapeze, lighted several lamps (it was after
dark already), and placed three or four benches in a narrow semicircle.
When I arrived, a large crowd already pressed round them. 'Fournissons
les bancs, Messieurs et M'dames! fournissons les bancs, et alors nous
commenons!' the proprietor was crying.

But the seats remained unoccupied. A boy in tights, with his coat drawn
round him, shivered at one corner of the ring. Into the middle of this
the Showman several times advanced, exhorting the coy Public to make up
its mind and commit itself to the extent of sitting down on one of his
seats. Every now and then a couple would. Then he would walk back, and
stand near his cart, muttering to himself. His eyebrows were hidden in a
dishevelled frond of hair. The only thing he could look at without
effort was the ground, and there his eyes were usually directed. When he
looked up they were heavy--vacillating painfully beneath the weight of
their lids. The action of speech with him resembled that of swallowing:
the dreary pipe from which he drew so many distressful sounds seemed to
stiffen and swell, and his head to strain forward like a rooster about
to crow. His heavy under-lip went in and out in sombre activity as he
articulated. The fine natural resources of his face for inspiring a
feeling of gloom in his fellows, one would have judged irresistible on
that particular night. The bitterest disgust disfigured it to a high
degree.

But _they_ watched this despondent and unpromising figure with a glee
and keen anticipation. This incongruity of appearance and calling was
never patent to them at all, of course. That they had no wish to
understand. When the furious man scowled they gaped delightedly; when
he coaxed they became grave and sympathetic. All his movements were
followed with minute attention. When he called upon them to occupy their
seats, with an expressive gesture, they riveted their eyes on his hand,
as though expecting a pack of cards to suddenly appear there. They made
no move at all to take their places. Also, as this had already lasted a
considerable time, the man who was fuming to entertain them--they just
as incomprehensible to him as he was to them from that point of
view--allowed the outraged expression that was the expression of his
soul to appear more and more in his face.

Doubtless they had an inspired presentiment of what might shortly be
expected of the morose figure before them. The chuckling exultation with
which an amateur of athletics or fight-fan would examine some athlete
with whose prowess he was acquainted, yet whose sickly appearance gives
no hint of what is to be expected of him, it was with that sort of
enlightened and hilarious knowingness that they responded to his
melancholy appeals.

His cheerless voice, like the moaning bay of solitary dogs, conjured
them to occupy the seats.

'Fournissons les bancs!' he exhorted them again and again. Each time
he retired to the position he had selected to watch them from, far
enough off for them to be able to say that he had withdrawn his
influence, and had no further wish to interfere. Then, again, he stalked
forward. This time the exhortation was pitched in as formal and
matter-of-fact a key as his anatomy would permit, as though this were
the first appeal of the evening. Now he seemed merely waiting, without
discreetly withdrawing--without even troubling to glance in their
direction any more, until the audience should have had time to seat
themselves,--absorbed in briefly rehearsing to himself, just before
beginning, the part he was to play. These tactics did not alter things
in the least. Finally, he was compelled to take note of his failure. No
words more issued from his mouth. He glared stupidly for some moments
at the circle of people, and they, blandly alert, gazed back at him.

Then unexpectedly, from outside the periphery of the potential audience,
elbowing his way familiarly through the wall of people, burst in the
clown. Whether sent for to save the situation, or whether his toilet
were only just completed, was not revealed.

'B-o-n-soir, M'sieurs et M'dames,' he chirruped and yodeled, waved his
hand, tumbled over his employer's foot. The benches filled as if by
magic. But the most surprising thing was the change in the proprietor.
No sooner had the clown made his entrance, and, with his assurance of
success as the people's favourite, and comic familiarity, told the
hangers-back to take their seats, than a brisk dialogue sprang up
between him and his melancholy master. It was punctuated with resounding
slaps at each fresh impertinence of the clown. The proprietor was
astonishing. I rubbed my eyes. This lugubrious personage had woken to
the sudden violence of a cheerful automaton. In administering the
chastisement his irrepressible friend perpetually invited, he sprang
nimbly backwards and forwards as though engaged in a boxing match,
while he grinned appreciatively at the clown's wit, as though in spite
of himself, nearly knocking his teeth out with delighted blows. The
audience howled with delight, and every one seemed really happy for the
moment, except the clown. The clown every day must have received, I saw,
a little of the _trop-plein_ of the proprietor.

In the tradition of the circus it is a very distinct figure, the part
having a psychology of its own--that of the man who invents posers for
the clown, wrangles with him, and against whom the laugh is always
turned. One of the conventions of the circus is, of course, that the
physical superiority of this personage should be legendary and
indisputable. For however numerous the clowns may be, they never attack
him, despite the brutal measures he adopts to cover his confusion and
meet their ridicule. He seems to be a man with a marked predilection for
evening dress. As a result he is a far more absurd figure than his
painted and degenerate opponent. It may be the clown's superstitious
respect for rank, and this emblem of it, despite his consciousness of
intellectual superiority, that causes this ruffianly dolt to remain
immune.

In playing this part the pompous dignity of attitude should be preserved
in the strictest integrity. The actor should seldom smile. If so, it is
only as a slight concession, a bid to induce the clown to take a more
serious view of the matter under discussion. He smiles to make it
evident that he also is furnished with this attribute of man--a
discernment of the ridiculous. Then, with renewed gusto and solemnity,
he asks the clown's _serious_ opinion of the question by which he seems
obsessed, turning his head sideways with his ear towards his droll
friend, and closing his eyes for a moment.

Or else it is the public for whom this smile is intended, and towards
whom the discomfited 'swell' in evening dress turns as towards his
peers, for sympathy and understanding, when 'scored off' anew, in, as
the smile would affirm, this low-bred and unanswerable fashion. They are
appealed to, as though it were their mind that was being represented in
the dialogue, and constantly discomfited, and he were merely their
mouthpiece.

Originally, no doubt, this throaty swell stood in some sense for the
Public. Out of compliment to the Public, of course, he would be provided
with evening dress. It would be tacitly understood by the courteous
management, that although many of those present were in billycocks,
blouses and gaiters, shawls and reach-me-downs, their native attire was
a ceremonial evening outfit.

The distinguished Public would doubtless still further appreciate the
delicacy of touch in endowing its representative with a high-born
inability to understand the jokes of his inferiors, or be a match for
them in wit. In the better sort of circus, his address is highly
genteel, throaty and unctuous.

In the little circuses, such as the one I am describing, this is a
different and a very lonely part. There are none of those appeals to the
Public--as the latter claim, not only community of mind, but of class,
with the clown. It becomes something like a dialogue between mimes,
representing employer and employee, although these original distinctions
are not very strictly observed.

A man without a sense of humour, the man in the toff's part, finds
himself with one whose mischievous spirit he is aware of, and whose
ridicule he fears. Wishing to avoid being thought a bore, and racking
his brains for a means of being entertaining, he suddenly brings to
light a host of conundrums, for which he seems endowed with a stupefying
memory. Thoroughly reassured by the finding of this powerful and
traditional aid, with an amazing persistence he presses the clown,
making use of every 'gentlemanly' subterfuge, to extract a grave answer.
'Why is a cabbage like a soul in purgatory?' or, 'If you had seven
pockets in your waistcoat, a hip pocket, five ticket-pockets, and three
other pockets, how many extra buttons would you need?' So they follow
each other. Or else some anecdote (a more unmanageable tool) is
remembered. The clown here has many opportunities of displaying his
mocking wit.

This is the rle of honour usually reserved for the head showman, of
course. The part was not played with very great consistency in the case
in question. Indeed, so irrepressible were the comedian's spirits, and
so unmanageable his vitality at times, that he seemed to be turning the
tables on the clown. In his cavernous baying voice, he drew out of his
stomach many a caustic rejoinder to the clown's pert but stock wit. The
latter's ready-made quips were often no match for his strange but
genuine hilarity. During the whole evening he was rather 'hors de son
assiette,' I thought. I was very glad I had come, for I had never seen
this side of him, and it seemed the most unaccountable freak of
personality that it was possible to imagine. Before, I had never spent
more than a few minutes watching them, and certainly never seen anything
resembling the present display.

This out-of-door audience was differently moved from the audiences I
have seen in the little circus tents of the breton fairs. The absence of
the mysterious hush of the interior seemed to release them. Also the
nearness of the performers in the tent increases the mystery. The
proximity of these bulging muscles, painted faces and novel garbs,
evidently makes a strange impression on the village clientle. These
primitive minds do not readily dissociate reality from appearance.
However well they got to know the clown, they would always think of him
the wrong way up, or on all-fours. The more humble suburban theatre-goer
would be twice as much affected at meeting the much-advertised star with
whose private life he is more familiar than with her public display, in
the wings of the theatre, as in seeing her on the stage. Indeed, it
would be rather as though at some turning of an alley at the Zoo, you
should meet a lion face to face--having gazed at it a few minutes before
behind its bars. So the theatre, the people on the stage and the plays
they play, is part of the surface of life, and is not troubling. But to
get behind the scenes and see these beings out of their parts, would be
not merely to be privy to the workings and 'dessous' of the theatre, but
of life itself.

Crowded in the narrow and twilight pavilion of the saltimbanques at the
breton Pardon, the audience will remain motionless for minutes together.
Their imagination is awakened by the sight of the flags, the tent, the
drums, and the bedizened people. Thenceforth it dominates them,
controlling their senses. They enter the tent with a mild awe, in a
suggestive trance. When a joke is made that requires a burst of
merriment, or when a turn is finished, they all begin moving
themselves, as though they had just woken up, changing their attitude,
shaking off the magnetic sleep.

Once I had seen this particular troupe in a fair with their tent up. I
had gone in for a short while, but had not paid much attention to them
individually and soon left. But the clown, I remember, conducted
everything--acting as interpreter of his own jokes, tumbling over and
getting up and leading the laugh, and explaining with real
conscientiousness and science the proprietor's more recondite
conundrums. He took up an impersonal attitude. He was a friend who had
dropped in to see the 'patron'; he appreciated quite as one of the
public the curiosities of the show. He would say, for instance: 'Now
this is very remarkable: this little girl is only eleven, and she can
put both her toes in her mouth,' etc., etc. Had it not been for his
comments, I am persuaded that the performance would have passed off in a
profound, though not unappreciative, silence.

Returning to the present occasion, some time after the initial bout
between the clown and his master, and while some chairs were being
placed in the middle of the ring, I became aware of a very grave
expression on the latter's face. He now mounted upon one of the chairs.
Having remained impressively silent till the last moment, from the edge
of the chair, as though from the brink of a precipice, he addressed the
audience in the following terms:

'Ladies and gentlemen! I have given up working for several years myself,
owing to ill-health. As far as some of my most important tricks are
concerned, my little girl has taken my place. But Monsieur le
Commissaire de Police would not give the necessary permission for her to
appear.--Then I will myself perform!'

A grievance against the police would, of course, any day of the week,
drive out everything else with any showman. The Public momentarily
benefited. At these words M. Montort jerked himself violently over the
back of the chair, the unathletic proportions of his stomach being
revealed in this movement, and touched the ground with his head. Then,
having bowed to the audience, he turned again to the chairs and grasping
them, with a gesture of the utmost recklessness, heaved his body up into
the air. This was accompanied by a startling whir proceeding from his
corduroys, and a painful crepitation of his joints. Afterwards he
accomplished a third feat, suspending himself between two chairs; and
then a fourth, in which he gracefully lay on all three, and picked up a
handkerchief with his face reversed. At this sensational finish, I
thought it appropriate to applaud: a _feu nourri_ of clapping broke from
me. Unfortunately the audience was spellbound and my demonstration
attracted attention. I was singled out by the performer for a look of
individual hatred. He treated all of us coldly: he bowed stiffly, and
walked back to the cart with the air of a man who has just received a
bullet wound in a duel, and refusing the assistance of a doctor walks to
his carriage.

He had accomplished the feats that I have just described with a bitter
dash that revealed once more the character that from former more casual
visits I recognized. He seemed courting misfortune. 'Any mortal injury
sustained by me, M. le Commissaire, during the performance, will be at
your door! The Public must be satisfied. I am the servant of the Public.
You have decreed that it shall be me (all my intestines displaced by
thirty years of contortions) that shall satisfy them. Very well! I know
my duty, if you don't know yours. Good! It shall be done as you have
ordered, M. le Commissaire!'

The drama this time was an _internal_ one, therefore. It was not a
question of baiting the public with a broken neck. We were invited to
concentrate our minds upon what was going on _inside_. We had to
visualize a colony of much-twisted, sorely-tried intestines, screwed
this way and that, as they had never been screwed before. It was an
anatomical piece.

The unfortunate part was that the public could not _see_ these
intestines as they could see a figure suspended in the air, and liable
to crash. A mournful and respectful, a _dead_ silence, would have been
the ideal way, from his point of view, for the audience to have greeted
his pathetic skill. Instead of that, salvos of muscular applause shook
the air every time he completed one of the phases of this painful trick.
Hearing the applause, he would fling himself wildly into his next
posture, with a whistling sneer of hatred. The set finished, the last
knot tied and untied, he went back and leant against the cart, his head
in the hollow of his arm, coughing and spitting. A boy at my side said,
'Regarde--donc; il souffre!' This refusal of the magistrate to let his
little girl perform was an event that especially outraged him: it
wounded his french sense of the dignity of a fully-enfranchised person.
His wife was far less affected, but she seconded him with a lofty scowl.
Shortly afterwards, she provided a new and interesting feature of the
evening's entertainment.

Various insignificant items immediately succeeded the showman's dramatic
exploit, where he deputized for his daughter. A donkey appeared, whose
legs could be tied into knots. The clown extracted from its middle-class
comfortable primness of expression every jest of which it was
susceptible. The conundrums broke out again; they only ceased after a
discharge that lasted fully a quarter of an hour. There was a little
trapeze. For some time already we had been aware of a restless figure in
the background. A woman with an expression of great dissatisfaction on
her face, stood with muffled arms knotted on her chest, holding a shawl
against the cold air. Next, we became aware of a harsh and indignant
voice. This woman was slowly advancing, talking all the while, until she
arrived in the centre of the circle made by the seats. She made several
slow gestures, slightly raising her voice. She spoke as a person who had
stood things long enough. 'Here are hundreds of people standing round,
and there are hardly a dozen sous on the carpet! We give you
entertainment, but it is not for nothing! We do not work for nothing! We
have our living to make as well as other people! This is the third
performance we have given today. We are tired and have come a long way
to appear before you this evening. You want to enjoy yourselves; but you
don't want to pay! If you want to see any more, loosen your
purse-strings a little!'

While delivering this harangue her attitude resembled that seen in the
London streets, when women are quarrelling--the neck strained forward,
the face bent down, and the eyes glowering upwards at the adversary. One
hand was thrust stiffly out. In these classes of action the body,
besides, is generally screwed round to express the impulse of turning
on the heel in disgust and walking away. But the face still confronts
whoever is being apostrophized, and utters its ever-renewed maledictory
post-scriptums.

Several pieces of money fell at her feet. She remained silent, the arms
fiercely folded, the two hands bitterly dug into her sides. Eventually
she retired, very slowly, as she had advanced, as it were indolently,
her eyes still flashing and scowling resentfully round at the crowd as
she went. They looked on with amiable and gaping attention. They took
much more notice of her than of the man; she thoroughly interested them,
and they conceded to her unconditionally their sympathy. There was no
response to her attack--no gibing or discontent; only a few more sous
were thrown. Her husband, it appeared, had been deeply stimulated by her
speech. One or two volcanic conundrums followed closely upon her exit.
The audience seemed to relish the entertainment all the more after this
confirmation from the proprietress of its quality, instead of being put
in a more critical frame of mind.

Her indignant outburst carried this curious reflection with it; it was
plain that it did not owe its tone of conviction to the fact that she
conceived a high opinion of their performance. Apparently it was an
axiom of her mind that the public paid, for some obscure reason, not
for its proper amusement, but for the trouble, inconvenience, fatigue,
and in sum for all the ills of the showman's lot. Or rather did _not_
pay, sat and watched and did not pay. Ah a!--that was trying the
patience too far. This, it is true, was only the reasoning every gesture
of her husband forcibly expressed, but explicit, in black and white, or
well-turned forcible words.

Peasant audiences in latin countries, and no doubt in most places, are
herded to their amusements like children; the harsh experts of fun
barbarously purge them for a few pence. The spectacles provided are
received like the daily soup and weekly cube of tobacco of the convict.
Spending wages, it seems, is as much a routine as earning them. So in
their entertainment, when buying it with their own money, they support
the same brow-beating and discipline as in their work. Of this the
outburst of the proprietress was a perfect illustration. Such figures
represent for the spectators, for the moment, authority. In consequence
a reproof as to their slackness in spending is received in the same
spirit as a master's abuse at alleged slackness in earning it.

I have described the nature of my own humour--how, as I said, it went
over into everything, making a drama of mock-violence of every social
relationship. Why should it be so _violent_--so mock-violent--you may
at the time have been disposed to enquire? Everywhere it has seemed to
be compelled to go into some frame that was always a simulacrum of
mortal combat. Sometimes it resembled a dilution of the Wild West film,
chaplinesque in its violence. Why always _violence_? However, I have
often asked that myself.

For my reply here I should go to the modern Circus or to the Italian
Comedy, or to Punch. Violence is of the essence of _laughter_ (as
distinguished of course from smiling wit): it is merely the inversion or
failure of _force_. To put it in another way, it is the _grin_ upon the
Deathshead. It must be extremely primitive in origin, though of course
its function in civilized life is to keep the primitive at bay. But it
hoists the primitive with its own explosive. It is a realistic firework,
reminiscent of war.

These strolling players I am describing, however, and their relation to
their audience, will provide the most convincing illustration of what I
mean. The difference and also the inevitable consanguinity between my
ideal of humour, and that of any other man whatever, will become plain.
For the primitive peasant audience the comic-sense is subject to the
narrowest convention of habit. Obviously a peasant would not see
anything ridiculous in, or at least never amuse himself over his pigs
and chickens: his constant sentiment of their utility would be too
strong to admit of another. Thus the disintegrating effect of the
laughing-gas, and especially the fundamentals of the absurd, that strike
too near the life-root, is instinctively isolated. A man who succeeds in
infuriating us, again, need never fear our ridicule, although he may
enhance our anger by his absurdity. A countryman in urging on his beast
may make some disobliging remark to it, really seizing a ludicrous point
in its appearance to envenom his epithet: but it will be caustic and
mirthless, an observation of his intelligence far removed from the
irresponsible emotion of laughter. It will come out of his anger and
impatience, not his gaiety. You see in the peasant of Brittany and other
primitive districts of France a constant tendency to sarcasm. Their
hysterical and monotonous voices--a variety of the 'celtic' screech--are
always with the Bretons pitched in a strain of fierce raillery and
abuse. But this does not affect their mirth. Their laughter is sharp and
mirthless and designed usually to wound. With their grins and quips they
are like armed men who never meet without clashing their weapons
together. Were my circus-proprietor and his kind not so tough, this
continual howl or disquieting explosion of what is scarcely mirth would
shatter them.

So (to return to the conventions of these forms of pleasure) it could be
said that if the clown and the manager consulted in an audible voice,
before cracking each joke--in fact, concocted it in their
hearing--these audiences would respond with the same alacrity. Any
rudiment of dcor or makeshift property, economy in make-up, or feeble
trick of some accredited acrobat, which they themselves could do twice
as well, or mirthless patter, is not enough to arouse criticism in them,
who are so critically acute in other matters. To criticize the
amusements that Fate has provided, is an anarchy to which they do not
aspire.

The member of a peasant community is trained by Fate, and his law is to
accept its manifestations--one of which is comic, one of love, one of
work, and so on. There is a little flowering of tenderness for a moment
in the love one. The comic is always strenuous and cruel, like the work.
It never flowers. The intermediary, the showman, knows that. He knows
the brutal _frisson_ in contact with danger that draws the laughter up
from the deepest bowel in a refreshing unearthly gush. He knows why he
and the clown are always black and blue, his children performing dogs,
his wife a caryatid. He knows Fate, since he serves it, better than even
the peasant.

The educated man, like the true social revolutionary, does not _accept_
life in this way. He is in revolt, and it is the laws of Fate that he
sets out to break. We can take another characteristic fatalism of the
peasant or primitive man. He can never conceive of anybody being
anything else but just what he is, or having any other name than that he
is known by. John the carpenter, or Old John (or Young John) the
carpenter, is not a person, but, as it were, a fixed and rigid
communistic convention. One of our greatest superstitions is that the
plain man, being so 'near to life,' is a great 'realist.' In fact, he
seldom gets close to reality at all, in the way, for instance, that a
philosophic intelligence, or an imaginative artist, does. He looks at
everything from the outside, reads the labels, and what he _sees_ is
what he has been told to see, that is to say, what he expects. What he
does not expect, he, of course, does not see. For him only the well-worn
and general exists.

That the peasant, or any person living under primitive conditions, does
not appreciate the scenery so much as, say, John Keats, is a generally
accepted truth, which no available evidence gives us any reason to
question. His contact with the quickest, most vivid, reality, if he is
averagely endowed, is muffled, and his touch upon it strangely
insensitive; he is surrounded by signs, not things. It is for this
reason that the social revolutionary, who wishes to introduce the
unexpected and to awaken a faculty of criticism, finds the peasant such
unsatisfactory material.

Just as the peasant, then, has little sense of the beauty of his life,
so his laughter is circumscribed. The herd-bellow at the circus is
always associated with mock-violent events, however, and his true
laughter is always torn out of a tragic material. How this explains my
sort of laughter is that both our patterns are cut or torn out of
primitive stuff. The difference is that pure physical action usually
provides him with his, whereas mine deal with the phantoms of action and
the human character. For me _everything_ is tragically primitive:
whereas the peasant only feels 'primitively' at stated times. But both
our comedies are comedies of action, that is what I would stress.

This particular performance wound up rather strangely. The showman's
wife had occasion to approach and lash the public with her tongue again,
in the final phase. As the show approached its conclusion, the donkey
was led in once more, pretended to die, and the clown made believe to
weep disconsolately over it. All was quiet and preparation for a moment.

Then, from an unexpected quarter, came a sort of dnouement to our
evening. Every one's attention was immediately attracted to it. A small
boy in the front row began jeering at the proprietor. First, it was a
constant muttering, that made people turn idly to that quarter of the
ring. Then it grew in volume and intensity. It was a spontaneous action
it appeared, and extremely sudden. The outraged showman slouched past
him several times, looking at him from the tail of his eye, with his
head thrust out as though he were going to crow. He rubbed his hands as
he was accustomed to do before chastizing the clown. Here was a little
white-faced clown, an unprofessional imp of mischief! He would slap him
in a moment. He rubbed his horny hands but without conviction. This had
no effect: the small voice went steadily on like a dirge. This
unrehearsed number found him at a loss. He went over to the clown and
complained in a whisper. This personage had just revealed himself as a
serious gymnast. Baring his blacksmith's arms, and discarding his
ludicrous personality, he had accomplished a series of mild feats on the
trapeze. He benefited, like all athletic clowns, by his traditional
foolish incompetence. The public were duly impressed. He now surveyed
them with a solemn and pretentious eye. When his master came up to him,
supposing that the complaint referred to some disorderly booby, he
advanced threateningly in the direction indicated. But when he saw who
was the offender, finding a thoughtful-looking little boy in place of an
intoxicated peasant, he was as nonplussed as had been his master. He
looked foolishly round, and then fell to jeering back, the clown
reasserting itself. Then he returned with a shrug and grimace to his
preparations for the next and final event.

It is possible that this infant may never have thought comically before.
Or he may, of course, have visited travelling shows for the purpose of
annoying showmen, advertising his intelligence, or even to be taken on
as a clown. But he may have been the victim of the unaccountable
awakening of a critical vein, grown irresponsibly active all at once. If
the latter, then he was launched on a dubious career of offence. He had
one of the handsome visionary breton faces. His oracular vehemence,
though bitterly sarcastic, suggested the more romantic kind of
motivation. The showman prowled about the enclosure, grinning and
casting sidelong glances at his poet: his vanity tickled in some
fashion, perhaps: who knows? the boy persevering blandly, fixing him
with his eye. But suddenly his face would darken, and he would make a
rush at the inexplicable juvenile figure. Would this boy have met death
with the exultation of a martyr rather than give up his picture of an
old and despondent mountebank--like some stubborn prophet who would not
forgo the melodrama forged by his orderly hatreds--always of the gloom
of famine, of cracked and gutted palaces, and the elements taking on new
and extremely destructive shapes for the extermination of man?

At last that organism, 'the Public,' as there constituted, fell to
pieces, at a signal: the trapeze collapsed, the benches broke the circle
described for the performance, and were hurried away, the acetylene
lamps were extinguished, the angry tongues of the saltimbanques began
their evil retrospective clatter. There had been _two_ Publics, however,
this time. It had been a good show.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

Minor variations in spelling and punctuation have been preserved.




[End of The Cornac and his Wife, by Wyndham Lewis]
