Nor are his improvisations limited
by prose. If a theme call for nobler treatment, he becomes an
unflagging fountain of ludicrously adequate blank-verse. Or again, he
may deliver himself in rhyme. There is no form of utterance that comes
amiss to him for interpreting the human comedy, or for broadening the
farce into which that comedy is turned by him. Nothing can stop him
when once he is in the vein. No appeals move him. He goes from
strength to strength while his audience is more and more piteously
debilitated.
What a gift to have been endowed with! What a power to wield! And how
often I have envied Comus! But this envy of him has never taken root
in me. His mind laughs, doubtless, at his own conceptions; but not his
body. And if you tell him something that you have been sure will
convulse him you are likely to be rewarded with no more than a smile
betokening that he sees the point. Incomparable laughter-giver, he is
not much a laugher. He is vintner, not toper. I would therefore not
change places with him. I am well content to have been his beneficiary
during thirty years, and to be so for as many more as may be given us.
End of This Project Gutenberg Etext of And Even Now, by Max Beerbohm
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