Good Comedies are such rare productions,
that notwithstanding the wealth of our literature
in the Comic element, it would not occupy us long
to run over the English list. If they are brought
to the test I shall propose, very reputable Comedies
will be found unworthy of their station, like the
ladies of Arthur’s Court when they were reduced
to the ordeal of the mantle.
There are plain reasons why the Comic
poet is not a frequent apparition; and why the great
Comic poet remains without a fellow. A society
of cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas
are current and the perceptions quick, that he may
be supplied with matter and an audience. The
semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish
emotional periods, repel him; and also a state of
marked social inequality of the sexes; nor can he
whose business is to address the mind be understood
where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual
activity.
Moreover, to touch and kindle the
mind through laughter, demands more than sprightliness,
a most subtle delicacy. That must be a natal gift
in the Comic poet. The substance he deals with
will show him a startling exhibition of the dyer’s
hand, if he is without it. People are ready to
surrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast,
and sides; all except the head: and it is there
that he aims. He must be subtle to penetrate.
A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him.
The necessity for the two conditions will explain
how it is that we count him during centuries in the
singular number.
’C’est une étrange
entreprise que celle de faire
rire les honnêtes gens,’ Moliere
says; and the difficulty of the undertaking cannot
be over-estimated.
Then again, he is beset with foes
to right and left, of a character unknown to the tragic
and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers.
We have in this world men whom Rabelais
would call agelasts; that is to say, non-laughers;
men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which
if you prick them do not bleed. The old grey boulder-stone
that has finished its peregrination from the rock
to the valley, is as easily to be set rolling up again
as these men laughing. No collision of circumstances
in our mortal career strikes a light for them.
It is but one step from being agelastic to misogelastic,
and the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], the
laughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his dislike
as an objection in morality.
We have another class of men, who
are pleased to consider themselves antagonists of
the foregoing, and whom we may term hypergelasts; the
excessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers
of a bell, that may be rung by a breeze, a grimace;
who are so loosely put together that a wink will shake
them.
‘... C’est n’estimer rien qu’estioner
tout lé monde,’
and to laugh at everything is to have
no appreciation of the Comic of Comedy.
Neither of these distinct divisions
of non-laughers and over-laughers would be entertained
by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a performance
of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they
have taken in our land the form and title of Puritan
and Bacchanalian. For though the stage is no
longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been
revived on it, to give it nobility, we have not yet
entirely raised it above the contention of these two
parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedy
will appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while
the other will think that the speaking of it seriously
brings us into violent contrast with the subject.
Comedy, we have to admit, was never
one of the most honoured of the Muses. She was
in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest expression
of the little civilization of men. The light of
Athene over the head of Achilles illuminates the birth
of Greek Tragedy. But Comedy rolled in shouting
under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar,
as Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by Aristophanes.
Our second Charles was the patron, of like benignity,
of our Comedy of Manners, which began similarly as
a combative performance, under a licence to deride
and outrage the Puritan, and was here and there Bacchanalian
beyond the Aristophanic example: worse, inasmuch
as a cynical licentiousness is more abominable than
frank filth. An eminent Frenchman judges from
the quality of some of the stuff dredged up for the
laughter of men and women who sat through an Athenian
Comic play, that they could have had small delicacy
in other affairs when they had so little in their choice
of entertainment. Perhaps he does not make sufficient
allowance for the regulated licence of plain speaking
proper to the festival of the god, and claimed by
the Comic poet as his inalienable right, or for the
fact that it was a festival in a season of licence,
in a city accustomed to give ear to the boldest utterance
of both sides of a case. However that may be,
there can be no question that the men and women who
sat through the acting of Wycherley’s Country
Wife were past blushing. Our tenacity of national
impressions has caused the word theatre since then
to prod the Puritan nervous system like a satanic
instrument; just as one has known Anti-Papists, for
whom Smithfield was redolent of a sinister smoke,
as though they had a later recollection of the place
than the lowing herds. Hereditary Puritanism,
regarding the stage, is met, to this day, in many
families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety.
It has subsided altogether as a power in the profession
of morality; but it is an error to suppose it extinct,
and unjust also to forget that it had once good reason
to hate, shun, and rebuke our public shows.
We shall find ourselves about where
the Comic spirit would place us, if we stand at middle
distance between the inveterate opponents and the
drum-and-fife supporters of Comedy: ’Comme
un point fixe fait remarquer l’emportement
des autres,’ as Pascal says. And
were there more in this position, Comic genius would
flourish.
Our English idea of a Comedy of Manners
might be imaged in the person of a blowsy country
girl say Hoyden, the daughter of Sir Tunbelly
Clumsy, who, when at home, ’never disobeyed
her father except in the eating of green gooseberries’ transforming
to a varnished City madam; with a loud laugh and a
mincing step; the crazy ancestress of an accountably
fallen descendant. She bustles prodigiously and
is punctually smart in her speech, always in a fluster
to escape from Dulness, as they say the dogs on the
Nile-banks drink at the river running to avoid the
crocodile. If the monster catches her, as at
times he does, she whips him to a froth, so that those
who know Dulness only as a thing of ponderousness,
shall fail to recognise him in that light and airy
shape.
When she has frolicked through her
five Acts to surprise you with the information that
Mr. Aimwell is converted by a sudden death in the world
outside the scenes into Lord Aimwell, and can marry
the lady in the light of day, it is to the credit
of her vivacious nature that she does not anticipate
your calling her Farce. Five is dignity with a
trailing robe; whereas one, two, or three Acts would
be short skirts, and degrading. Advice has been
given to householders, that they should follow up
the shot at a burglar in the dark by hurling the pistol
after it, so that if the bullet misses, the weapon
may strike and assure the rascal he has it. The
point of her wit is in this fashion supplemented by
the rattle of her tongue, and effectively, according
to the testimony of her admirers. Her wit is
at once, like steam in an engine, the motive force
and the warning whistle of her headlong course; and
it vanishes like the track of steam when she has reached
her terminus, never troubling the brains afterwards;
a merit that it shares with good wine, to the joy
of the Bacchanalians. As to this wit, it is warlike.
In the neatest hands it is like the sword of the cavalier
in the Mall, quick to flash out upon slight provocation,
and for a similar office to wound.
Commonly its attitude is entirely pugilistic; two blunt
fists rallying and countering. When harmless,
as when the word ‘fool’ occurs, or allusions
to the state of husband, it has the sound of the smack
of harlequin’s wand upon clown, and is to the
same extent exhilarating. Believe that idle empty
laughter is the most desirable of recreations, and
significant Comedy will seem pale and shallow in comparison.
Our popular idea would be hit by the sculptured group
of Laughter holding both his sides, while Comedy pummels,
by way of tickling him. As to a meaning, she
holds that it does not conduce to making merry:
you might as well carry cannon on a racing-yacht.
Morality is a duenna to be circumvented. This
was the view of English Comedy of a sagacious essayist,
who said that the end of a Comedy would often be the
commencement of a Tragedy, were the curtain to rise
again on the performers. In those old days female
modesty was protected by a fan, behind which, and
it was of a convenient semicircular breadth, the ladies
present in the theatre retired at a signal of decorum,
to peep, covertly askant, or with the option of so
peeping, through a prettily fringed eyelet-hole in
the eclipsing arch.
’Ego limis specto sic per flabellum
clanculum.’-Terence.
That fan is the flag and symbol of
the society giving us our so-called Comedy of Manners,
or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders under
city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask
without the face behind it.
Elia, whose humour delighted in floating
a galleon paradox and wafting it as far as it would
go, bewails the extinction of our artificial Comedy,
like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of
Cleopatra’s Nile-barge; and the sedateness of
his plea for a cause condemned even in his time to
the penitentiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous.
When the realism of those ‘fictitious half-believed
personages,’ as he calls them, had ceased to
strike, they were objectionable company, uncaressable
as puppets. Their artifices are staringly naked,
and have now the effect of a painted face viewed,
after warm hours of dancing, in the morning light.
How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have
been praised for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics,
apparently sober, and of high reputation, held up
their shallow knaveries for the world to admire.
These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes,
Miss Prue, Peggy, Hoyden, all of them save charming
Milamant, are dead as last year’s clothes in
a fashionable fine lady’s wardrobe, and it must
be an exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period
that would look on them with the wish to appear in
their likeness. Whether the puppet show of Punch
and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant
recourse to their fists in a dispute, after the fashion
of every one of the actors in that public entertainment
who gets possession of the cudgel, is open to question:
it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced
the national taste for tales of crime to the smell
of blood in our nursery-songs. It will at any
rate hardly be questioned that it is unwholesome for
men and women to see themselves as they are, if they
are no better than they should be: and they will
not, when they have improved in manners, care much
to see themselves as they once were. That comes
of realism in the Comic art; and it is not public caprice,
but the consequence of a bettering state. The
same of an immoral may be said of realistic exhibitions
of a vulgar society.
The French make a critical distinction
in ce qui remue from ce qui
emeut that which agitates from that which
touches with emotion. In the realistic comedy
it is an incessant remuage no calm, merely
bustling figures, and no thought. Excepting Congreve’s
Way of the World, which failed on the stage, there
was nothing to keep our comedy alive on its merits;
neither, with all its realism, true portraiture, nor
much quotable fun, nor idea; neither salt nor soul.
The French have a school of stately
comedy to which they can fly for renovation whenever
they have fallen away from it; and their having such
a school is mainly the reason why, as John Stuart Mill
pointed out, they know men and women more accurately
than we do. Moliere followed the Horatian precept,
to observe the manners of his age and give his characters
the colour befitting them at the time. He did
not paint in raw realism. He seized his characters
firmly for the central purpose of the play, stamped
them in the idea, and by slightly raising and softening
the object of study (as in the case of the ex-Huguenot,
Duke de Montausier, for the study of the Misanthrope,
and, according to St. Simon, the Abbe Roquette
for Tartuffe), generalized upon it so as to make it
permanently human. Concede that it is natural
for human creatures to live in society, and Alceste
is an imperishable mark of one, though he is drawn
in light outline, without any forcible human colouring.
Our English school has not clearly imagined society;
and of the mind hovering above congregated men and
women, it has imagined nothing. The critics who
praise it for its downrightness, and for bringing
the situations home to us, as they admiringly say,
cannot but disapprove of Moliere’s comedy, which
appeals to the individual mind to perceive and participate
in the social. We have splendid tragedies, we
have the most beautiful of poetic plays, and we have
literary comedies passingly pleasant to read, and
occasionally to see acted. By literary comedies,
I mean comedies of classic inspiration, drawn chiefly
from Menander and the Greek New Comedy through Terence;
or else comedies of the poet’s personal conception,
that have had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations,
happy or otherwise. These are the comedies of
Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher. Massinger’s
Justice Greedy we can all of us refer to a type, ‘with
fat capon lined’ that has been and will be;
and he would be comic, as Panurge is comic, but only
a Rabelais could set him moving with real animation.
Probably Justice Greedy would be comic to the audience
of a country booth and to some of our friends.
If we have lost our youthful relish for the presentation
of characters put together to fit a type, we find
it hard to put together the mechanism of a civil smile
at his enumeration of his dishes. Something of
the same is to be said of Bobadil, swearing ‘by
the foot of Pharaoh’; with a reservation, for
he is made to move faster, and to act. The comic
of Jonson is a scholar’s excogitation of the
comic; that of Massinger a moralist’s.
Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters
which are saturated with the comic spirit; with more
of what we will call blood-life than is to be found
anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world,
but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace
by imagination, and by great poetic imagination.
They are, as it were I put it to suit my
present comparison creatures of the woods
and wilds, not in walled towns, not grouped and toned
to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world
of society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment,
the varied troop of Clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans
and Fluellen marvellous Welshmen! Benedict
and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects
of a special study in the poetically comic.
His Comedy of incredible imbroglio
belongs to the literary section. One may conceive
that there was a natural resemblance between him and
Menander, both in the scheme and style of his lighter
plays. Had Shakespeare lived in a later and less
emotional, less heroical period of our history, he
might have turned to the painting of manners as well
as humanity. Euripides would probably, in the
time of Menander, when Athens was enslaved but prosperous,
have lent his hand to the composition of romantic
comedy. He certainly inspired that fine genius.
Politically it is accounted a misfortune
for France that her nobles thronged to the Court of
Louis Quatorze. It was a boon to the
comic poet. He had that lively quicksilver world
of the animalcule passions, the huge pretensions,
the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full activity;
vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers,
extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians,
sonneteering marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded
maids, inter-threading as in a loom, noisy as at a
fair. A simply bourgeois circle will not furnish
it, for the middle class must have the brilliant,
flippant, independent upper for a spur and a pattern;
otherwise it is likely to be inwardly dull as well
as outwardly correct. Yet, though the King was
benevolent toward Moliere, it is not to the French
Court that we are indebted for his unrivalled studies
of mankind in society. For the amusement of the
Court the ballets and farces were written, which are
dearer to the rabble upper, as to the rabble lower,
class than intellectual comedy. The French bourgeoisie
of Paris were sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened
by education to welcome great works like Le Tartuffe,
Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Misanthrope, works that
were perilous ventures on the popular intelligence,
big vessels to launch on streams running to shallows.
The Tartuffe hove into view as an enemy’s vessel;
it offended, not Dieu maïs les dévots,
as the Prince de Conde explained the cabal raised
against it to the King.
The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance
of the uses of comedy in teaching the world to understand
what ails it. The farce of the Precieuses ridiculed
and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon made
popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of
the Femmes Savantes exposed the later and less apparent
but more finely comic absurdity of an excessive purism
in grammar and diction, and the tendency to be idiotic
in precision. The French had felt the burden of
this new nonsense; but they had to see the comedy
several times before they were consoled in their suffering
by seeing the cause of it exposed.
The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly
received. Moliere thought it dead. ‘I
cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,’
he said. It is one of the French titles to honour
that this quintessential comedy of the opposition
of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and
applauded. In all countries the middle class presents
the public which, fighting the world, and with a good
footing in the fight, knows the world best. It
may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading
us into sophistries. Cultivated men and women,
who do not skim the cream of life, and are attached
to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make
acute and balanced observers. Moliere is their
poet.
Of this class in England, a large
body, neither Puritan nor Bacchanalian, have a sentimental
objection to face the study of the actual world.
They take up disdain of it, when its truths appear
humiliating: when the facts are not immediately
forced on them, they take up the pride of incredulity.
They live in a hazy atmosphere that they suppose an
ideal one. Humorous writing they will endure,
perhaps approve, if it mingles with pathos to shake
and elevate the feelings. They approve of Satire,
because, like the beak of the vulture, it smells of
carrion, which they are not. But of Comedy they
have a shivering dread, for Comedy enfolds them with
the wretched host of the world, huddles them with
us all in an ignoble assimilation, and cannot be used
by any exalted variety as a scourge and a broom.
Nay, to be an exalted variety is to come under the
calm curious eye of the Comic spirit, and be probed
for what you are. Men are seen among them, and
very many cultivated women. You may distinguish
them by a favourite phrase: ‘Surely we
are not so bad!’ and the remark: ’If
that is human nature, save us from it!’ as if
it could be done: but in the peculiar Paradise
of the wilful people who will not see, the exclamation
assumes the saving grace.
Yet should you ask them whether they
dislike sound sense, they vow they do not. And
question cultivated women whether it pleases them to
be shown moving on an intellectual level with men,
they will answer that it does; numbers of them claim
the situation. Now, Comedy is the fountain of
sound sense; not the less perfectly sound on account
of the sparkle: and Comedy lifts women to a station
offering them free play for their wit, as they usually
show it, when they have it, on the side of sound sense.
The higher the Comedy, the more prominent the part
they enjoy in it. Dorine in the Tartuffe is common-sense
incarnate, though palpably a waiting-maid. Celimene
is undisputed mistress of the same attribute in the
Misanthrope; wiser as a woman than Alceste as man.
In Congreve’s Way of the World, Millamant overshadows
Mirabel, the sprightliest male figure of English
comedy.
But those two ravishing women, so
copious and so choice of speech, who fence with men
and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not
preferable to be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty,
the adorable bundle of caprices, very feminine,
very sympathetic, of romantic and sentimental fiction?
Our women are taught to think so. The Agnes of
the Ecole des Femmes should be a lesson
for men. The heroines of Comedy are like women
of the world, not necessarily heartless from being
clear-sighted: they seem so to the sentimentally-reared
only for the reason that they use their wits, and
are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a
pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle
with men, and that of men with them: and as the
two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely,
Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must
bring them to some resemblance. The Comic poet
dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual
likeness; he is for saying that when they draw together
in social life their minds grow liker; just as the
philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and girl,
until the girl is marched away to the nursery.
Philosopher and Comic poet are of a cousinship in the
eye they cast on life: and they are equally unpopular
with our wilful English of the hazy region and the
ideal that is not to be disturbed.
Thus, for want of instruction in the
Comic idea, we lose a large audience among our cultivated
middle class that we should expect to support Comedy.
The sentimentalist is as averse as the Puritan and
as the Bacchanalian.
Our traditions are unfortunate.
The public taste is with the idle laughers, and still
inclines to follow them. It may be shown by an
analysis of Wycherley’s Plain Dealer, a coarse
prose adaption of the Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps
of realism in a vulgarized theme to hit the mark of
English appetite, that we have in it the keynote of
the Comedy of our stage. It is Moliere travestied,
with the hoof to his foot and hair on the pointed
tip of his ear. And how difficult it is for writers
to disentangle themselves from bad traditions is noticeable
when we find Goldsmith, who had grave command of the
Comic in narrative, producing an elegant farce for
a Comedy; and Fielding, who was a master of the Comic
both in narrative and in dialogue, not even approaching
to the presentable in farce.
These bad traditions of Comedy affect
us not only on the stage, but in our literature, and
may be tracked into our social life. They are
the ground of the heavy moralizings by which we are
outwearied, about Life as a Comedy, and Comedy as
a jade, when popular writers, conscious of fatigue
in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a modish cynicism:
perversions of the idea of life, and of the proper
esteem for the society we have wrested from brutishness,
and would carry higher. Stock images of this
description are accepted by the timid and the sensitive,
as well as by the saturnine, quite seriously; for not
many look abroad with their own eyes, fewer still
have the habit of thinking for themselves. Life,
we know too well, is not a Comedy, but something strangely
mixed; nor is Comedy a vile mask. The corrupted
importation from France was noxious; a noble entertainment
spoilt to suit the wretched taste of a villanous age;
and the later imitations of it, partly drained of
its poison and made decorous, became tiresome, notwithstanding
their fun, in the perpetual recurring of the same
situations, owing to the absence of original study
and vigour of conception. Scene v. Act 2
of the Misanthrope, owing, no doubt, to the fact of
our not producing matter for original study, is repeated
in succession by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan,
and as it is at second hand, we have it done cynically or
such is the tone; in the manner of ‘below stairs.’
Comedy thus treated may be accepted as a version of
the ordinary worldly understanding of our social life;
at least, in accord with the current dicta concerning
it. The epigrams can be made; but it is uninstructive,
rather tending to do disservice. Comedy justly
treated, as you find it in Moliere, whom we so clownishly
mishandled, the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous
reflection upon life. It is deeply conceived,
in the first place, and therefore it cannot be impure.
Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield
so shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate
self-mastery is not shaken while administering it.
Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each
to whip himself and his class, the false pietists,
and the insanely covetous. Moliere has only set
them in motion. He strips Folly to the skin,
displays the imposture of the creature, and is content
to offer her better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale
reads to Philaminte and Belise. He conceives
purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language,
the simplest of French verse. The source of his
wit is clear reason: it is a fountain of that
soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense,
rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever.
The wit is of such pervading spirit that it inspires
a pun with meaning and interest. His moral does
not hang like a tail, or preach from one character
incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent
realistic French Plays: but is in the heart of
his work, throbbing with every pulsation of an organic
structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of
Moliere, there is no scandal in the comparison.
Congreve’s Way of the World
is an exception to our other comedies, his own among
them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the
writing, and the figure of Millamant. The comedy
has no idea in it, beyond the stale one, that so the
world goes; and it concludes with the jaded discovery
of a document at a convenient season for the descent
of the curtain. A plot was an afterthought with
Congreve. By the help of a wooden villain (Maskwell)
marked Gallows to the flattest eye, he gets a sort
of plot in The Double Dealer. His Way of the World
might be called The Conquest of a Town Coquette, and
Millamant is a perfect portrait of a coquette, both
in her resistance to Mirabel and the manner of
her surrender, and also in her tongue. The wit
here is not so salient as in certain passages of Love
for Love, where Valentine feigns madness or retorts
on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices in the harmlessness
of wounds to a woman’s virtue, if she ‘keeps
them from air.’ In The Way of the World,
it appears less prepared in the smartness, and is more
diffused in the more characteristic style of the speakers.
Here, however, as elsewhere, his famous wit is like
a bully-fencer, not ashamed to lay traps for its exhibition,
transparently petulant for the train between certain
ordinary words and the powder-magazine of the improprieties
to be fired. Contrast the wit of Congreve with
Moliere’s. That of the first is a Toledo
blade, sharp, and wonderfully supple for steel; cast
for duelling, restless in the scabbard, being so pretty
when out of it. To shine, it must have an adversary.
Moliere’s wit is like a running brook, with
innumerable fresh lights on it at every turn of the
wood through which its business is to find a way.
It does not run in search of obstructions, to be noisy
over them; but when dead leaves and viler substances
are heaped along the course, its natural song is heightened.
Without effort, and with no dazzling flashes of achievement,
it is full of healing, the wit of good breeding, the
wit of wisdom.
‘Genuine humour and true wit,’
says Landor, ’require a sound and capacious
mind, which is always a grave one. Rabelais and
La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have
been reveurs. Few men have been graver than Pascal.
Few men have been wittier.’
To apply the citation of so great
a brain as Pascal’s to our countryman would
be unfair. Congreve had a certain soundness of
mind; of capacity, in the sense intended by Landor,
he had little. Judging him by his wit, he performed
some happy thrusts, and taking it for genuine, it is
a surface wit, neither rising from a depth nor flowing
from a spring.
‘On voit qu’il se travaille
e dire de bons mots.’
He drives the poor hack word, ‘fool,’
as cruelly to the market for wit as any of his competitors.
Here is an example, that has been held up for eulogy:
Witwoud: He has brought
me a letter from the fool my brother, etc. etc.
Mirabel: A fool, and your brother, Witwoud?
Witwoud: Ay, ay, my half-brother.
My half-brother he is; no nearer, upon my honour.
Mirabel: Then ’tis possible he may
be but half a fool.
By evident preparation. This
is a sort of wit one remembers to have heard at school,
of a brilliant outsider; perhaps to have been guilty
of oneself, a trifle later. It was, no doubt,
a blaze of intellectual fireworks to the bumpkin squire,
who came to London to go to the theatre and learn
manners.
Where Congreve excels all his English
rivals is in his literary force, and a succinctness
of style peculiar to him. He had correct judgement,
a correct ear, readiness of illustration within a narrow
range, in snapshots of the obvious at the obvious,
and copious language. He hits the mean of a fine
style and a natural in dialogue. He is at once
precise and voluble. If you have ever thought
upon style you will acknowledge it to be a signal
accomplishment. In this he is a classic, and
is worthy of treading a measure with Moliere.
The Way of the World may be read out currently at
a first glance, so sure are the accents of the emphatic
meaning to strike the eye, perforce of the crispness
and cunning polish of the sentences. You have
not to look over them before you confide yourself
to him; he will carry you safe. Sheridan imitated,
but was far from surpassing him. The flow of boudoir
Billingsgate in Lady Wishfort is unmatched for the
vigour and pointedness of the tongue. It spins
along with a final ring, like the voice of Nature in
a fury, and is, indeed, racy eloquence of the elevated
fishwife.
Millamant is an admirable, almost
a lovable heroine. It is a piece of genius in
a writer to make a woman’s manner of speech portray
her. You feel sensible of her presence in every
line of her speaking. The stipulations with her
lover in view of marriage, her fine lady’s delicacy,
and fine lady’s easy evasions of indelicacy,
coquettish airs, and playing with irresolution, which
in a common maid would be bashfulness, until she submits
to ‘dwindle into a wife,’ as she says,
form a picture that lives in the frame, and is in harmony
with Mirabel’s description of her:
‘Here she comes, i’ faith,
full sail, with her fan spread, and her streamers
out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.’
And, after an interview:
’Think of you! To think
of a whirlwind, though ’twere in a whirlwind,
were a case of more steady contemplation, a very tranquillity
of mind and mansion.’
There is a picturesqueness, as of
Millamant and no other, in her voice, when she is
encouraged to take Mirabel by Mrs. Fainall, who
is ’sure she has a mind to him’:
Millamant: Are you?
I think I have and the horrid man looks
as if he thought so too, etc. etc.
One hears the tones, and sees the
sketch and colour of the whole scene in reading it.
Celimene is behind Millamant in vividness.
An air of bewitching whimsicality hovers over the
graces of this Comic heroine, like the lively conversational
play of a beautiful mouth.
But in wit she is no rival of Celimene.
What she utters adds to her personal witchery, and
is not further memorable. She is a flashing portrait,
and a type of the superior ladies who do not think,
not of those who do. In representing a class,
therefore, it is a lower class, in the proportion
that one of Gainsborough’s full-length aristocratic
women is below the permanent impressiveness of a fair
Venetian head.
Millamant side by side with Celimene
is an example of how far the realistic painting of
a character can be carried to win our favour; and
of where it falls short. Celimene is a woman’s
mind in movement, armed with an ungovernable wit;
with perspicacious clear eyes for the world, and a
very distinct knowledge that she belongs to the world,
and is most at home in it. She is attracted to
Alceste by her esteem for his honesty; she cannot
avoid seeing where the good sense of the man is diseased.
Rousseau, in his letter to D’Alembert
on the subject of the Misanthrope, discusses the character
of Alceste, as though Moliere had put him forth for
an absolute example of misanthropy; whereas Alceste
is only a misanthrope of the circle he finds himself
placed in: he has a touching faith in the virtue
residing in the country, and a critical love of sweet
simpleness. Nor is he the principal person of
the comedy to which he gives a name. He is only
passively comic. Celimene is the active spirit.
While he is denouncing and railing, the trial is imposed
upon her to make the best of him, and control herself,
as much as a witty woman, eagerly courted, can do.
By appreciating him she practically confesses her
faultiness, and she is better disposed to meet him
half.way than he is to bend an inch: only she
is une âme de vingt ans,
the world is pleasant, and if the gilded flies of the
Court are silly, uncompromising fanatics have their
ridiculous features as well. Can she abandon
the life they make agreeable to her, for a man who
will not be guided by the common sense of his class;
and who insists on plunging into one extreme equal
to suicide in her eyes to avoid another?
That is the comic question of the Misanthrope.
Why will he not continue to mix with the world smoothly,
appeased by the flattery of her secret and really
sincere preference of him, and taking his revenge in
satire of it, as she does from her own not very lofty
standard, and will by and by do from his more exalted
one?
Celimene is worldliness: Alceste
is unworldliness. It does not quite imply unselfishness;
and that is perceived by her shrewd head. Still
he is a very uncommon figure in her circle, and she
esteems him, l’homme aux rubans verts,
’who sometimes diverts but more often horribly
vexes her,’ as she can say of him when her satirical
tongue is on the run. Unhappily the soul of truth
in him, which wins her esteem, refuses to be tamed,
or silent, or unsuspicious, and is the perpetual obstacle
to their good accord. He is that melancholy person,
the critic of everybody save himself; intensely sensitive
to the faults of others, wounded by them; in love
with his own indubitable honesty, and with his ideal
of the simpler form of life befitting it: qualities
which constitute the satirist. He is a Jean Jacques
of the Court. His proposal to Celimene when he
pardons her, that she should follow him in flying humankind,
and his frenzy of detestation of her at her refusal,
are thoroughly in the mood of Jean Jacques. He
is an impracticable creature of a priceless virtue;
but Celimene may feel that to fly with him to the desert:
that is from the Court to the country
‘Ou d’etre homme d’honneur
on ait la liberté,’
she is likely to find herself the
companion of a starving satirist, like that poor princess
who ran away with the waiting-man, and when both were
hungry in the forest, was ordered to give him flesh.
She is a fieffee coquette, rejoicing in her wit and
her attractions, and distinguished by her inclination
for Alceste in the midst of her many other lovers;
only she finds it hard to cut them off what
woman with a train does not? and when the
exposure of her naughty wit has laid her under their
rebuke, she will do the utmost she can: she will
give her hand to honesty, but she cannot quite abandon
worldliness. She would be unwise if she did.
The fable is thin. Our pungent
contrivers of plots would see no indication of life
in the outlines. The life of the comedy is in
the idea. As with the singing of the sky-lark
out of sight, you must love the bird to be attentive
to the song, so in this highest flight of the Comic
Muse, you must love pure Comedy warmly to understand
the Misanthrope: you must be receptive of the
idea of Comedy. And to love Comedy you must know
the real world, and know men and women well enough
not to expect too much of them, though you may still
hope for good.
Menander wrote a comedy called Misogynes,
said to have been the most celebrated of his works.
This misogynist is a married man, according to the
fragment surviving, and is a hater of women through
hatred of his wife. He generalizes upon them
from the example of this lamentable adjunct of his
fortunes, and seems to have got the worst of it in
the contest with her, which is like the issue in reality,
in the polite world. He seems also to have deserved
it, which may be as true to the copy. But we
are unable to say whether the wife was a good voice
of her sex: or how far Menander in this instance
raised the idea of woman from the mire it was plunged
into by the comic poets, or rather satiric dramatists,
of the middle period of Greek Comedy preceding him
and the New Comedy, who devoted their wit chiefly
to the abuse, and for a diversity, to the eulogy of
extra-mural ladies of conspicuous fame. Menander
idealized them without purposely elevating. He
satirized a certain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus
of Terence is neither professionally attractive nor
repulsive; his picture of the two Andrians, Chrysis
and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for tenderness.
But the condition of honest women in his day did not
permit of the freedom of action and fencing dialectic
of a Celimene, and consequently it is below our mark
of pure Comedy.
Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost
of Menander, saying: For the love of me love
Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns
are able to love Menander; and what is preserved of
Terence has not apparently given us the best of the
friend of Epicurus. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
the lover taken in horror, and [Greek text] the damsel
shorn of her locks, have a promising sound for scenes
of jealousy and a too masterful display of lordly
authority, leading to regrets, of the kind known to
intemperate men who imagined they were fighting with
the weaker, as the fragments indicate.
Of the six comedies of Terence, four
are derived from Menander; two, the Hecyra and the
Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are inferior
in comic action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander
to the Andria, the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus,
and the Eunuchus: but Phormio is a more
dashing and amusing convivial parasite than the Gnatho
of the last-named comedy. There were numerous
rivals of whom we know next to nothing except
by the quotations of Athenaeus and Plutarch, and the
Greek grammarians who cited them to support a dictum in
this as in the preceding periods of comedy in Athens,
for Menander’s plays are counted by many scores,
and they were crowned by the prize only eight times.
The favourite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome,
was Menander; and if some of his rivals here and there
surpassed him in comic force, and out-stripped him
in competition by an appositeness to the occasion that
had previously in the same way deprived the genius
of Aristophanes of its due reward in Clouds and Birds,
his position as chief of the comic poets of his age
was unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily
drags Aristophanes into a comparison with him, to
the confusion of the older poet. Their aims,
the matter they dealt in, and the times, were quite
dissimilar. But it is no wonder that Plutarch,
writing when Athenian beauty of style was the delight
of his patrons, should rank Menander at the highest.
In what degree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander,
whether, as he states of the passage in the Adelphi
taken from Diphilus, verbum de verbo
in the lovelier scenes the description of
the last words of the dying Andrian, and of her funeral,
for instance remains conjectural.
For us Terence shares with his master the praise of
an amenity that is like Elysian speech, equable and
ever gracious; like the face of the Andrian’s
young sister:
‘Adeo modesto, adeo venusto,
ut nihil supra.’
The celebrated ‘flens quam
familiariter,’ of which the closest rendering
grounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the sorrowful
confidingness of a young girl who has lost her sister
and dearest friend, and has but her lover left to
her; ’she turned and flung herself on his bosom,
weeping as though at home there’: this our
instinct tells us must be Greek, though hardly finer
in Greek. Certain lines of Terence, compared
with the original fragments, show that he embellished
them; but his taste was too exquisite for him to do
other than devote his genius to the honest translation
of such pieces as the above. Menander, then;
with him, through the affinity of sympathy, Terence;
and Shakespeare and Moliere have this beautiful translucency
of language: and the study of the comic poets
might be recommended, if for that only.
A singular ill fate befell the writings
of Menander. What we have of him in Terence was
chosen probably to please the cultivated Romans;
and is a romantic play with a comic intrigue, obtained
in two instances, the Andria and the Eunuchus,
by rolling a couple of his originals into one.
The titles of certain of the lost plays indicate the
comic illumining character; a Self-pitier, a Self-chastiser,
an Ill-tempered man, a Superstitious, an Incredulous,
etc., point to suggestive domestic themes.
Terence forwarded manuscript translations
from Greece, that suffered shipwreck; he, who could
have restored the treasure, died on the way home.
The zealots of Byzantium completed the work of destruction.
So we have the four comedies of Terence, numbering
six of Menander, with a few sketches of plots one
of them, the Thesaurus, introduces a miser, whom we
should have liked to contrast with Harpagon and
a multitude of small fragments of a sententious cast,
fitted for quotation. Enough remains to make
his greatness felt.
Without undervaluing other writers
of Comedy, I think it may be said that Menander and
Moliere stand alone specially as comic poets of the
feelings and the idea. In each of them there is
a conception of the Comic that refines even to pain,
as in the Menedemus of the Heautontimorumenus, and
in the Misanthrope. Menander and Moliere have
given the principal types to Comedy hitherto.
The Micio and Demea of the Adelphi, with their
opposing views of the proper management of youth,
are still alive; the Sganarelles and Arnolphes of the
Ecole des Maris and the Ecole
des Femmes, are not all buried. Tartuffe
is the father of the hypocrites; Orgon of the dupes;
Thraso, of the braggadocios; Alceste of the ‘Manlys’;
Davus and Syrus of the intriguing valets, the
Scapins and Figaros. Ladies that soar in
the realms of Rose-Pink, whose language wears the
nodding plumes of intellectual conceit, are traceable
to Philaminte and Belise of the Femmes Savantes:
and the mordant witty women have the tongue of Celimene.
The reason is, that these two poets idealized upon
life: the foundation of their types is real and
in the quick, but they painted with spiritual strength,
which is the solid in Art.
The idealistic conceptions of Comedy
gives breadth and opportunities of daring to Comic
genius, and helps to solve the difficulties it creates.
How, for example, shall an audience be assured that
an evident and monstrous dupe is actually deceived
without being an absolute fool? In Le Tartuffe
the note of high Comedy strikes when Orgon on his return
home hears of his idol’s excellent appetite.
‘Le pauvre homme!’ he exclaims.
He is told that the wife of his bosom has been unwell.
’Et Tartuffe?’ he asks, impatient to hear
him spoken of, his mind suffused with the thought
of Tartuffe, crazy with tenderness, and again he croons,
‘Le pauvre homme!’ It is
the mother’s cry of pitying delight at a nurse’s
recital of the feats in young animal gluttony of her
cherished infant. After this masterstroke of
the Comic, you not only put faith in Orgon’s
roseate prepossession, you share it with him by comic
sympathy, and can listen with no more than a tremble
of the laughing muscles to the instance he gives of
the sublime humanity of Tartuffe:
’Un rien presque
suffit pour lé scandaliser, Jusque-lé,
qu’il se vint l’autre jour accuser
D’avoir pris une puce en
faisant sa prière, Et de l’avoir
tuee avec trop de colère.’
And to have killed it too wrathfully!
Translating Moliere is like humming an air one has
heard performed by an accomplished violinist of the
pure tones without flourish.
Orgon, awakening to find another dupe
in Madame Pernelle, incredulous of the revelations
which have at last opened his own besotted eyes, is
a scene of the double Comic, vivified by the spell
previously cast on the mind. There we feel the
power of the poet’s creation; and in the sharp
light of that sudden turn the humanity is livelier
than any realistic work can make it.
Italian Comedy gives many hints for
a Tartuffe; but they may be found in Boccaccio, as
well as in Machiavelli’s Mandragola. The
Frate Timoteo of this piece is only a very oily friar,
compliantly assisting an intrigue with ecclesiastical
sophisms (to use the mildest word) for payment.
Frate Timoteo has a fine Italian priestly pose.
Donna: Credete voi,
che’l Turco passi questo anno
in Italia?
F. Tim.: Se voi non fate
orazione, si.
Priestly arrogance and unctuousness,
and trickeries and casuistries, cannot be painted
without our discovering a likeness in the long Italian
gallery. Goldoni sketched the Venetian manners
of the decadence of the Republic with a French pencil,
and was an Italian Scribe in style.
The Spanish stage is richer in such
Comedies as that which furnished the idea of the Menteur
to Corneille. But you must force yourself to believe
that this liar is not forcing his vein when he piles
lie upon lie. There is no preceding touch to
win the mind to credulity. Spanish Comedy is
generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick
movement, as of marionnettes. The Comedy
might be performed by a troop of the corps de ballet;
and in the recollection of the reading it resolves
to an animated shuffle of feet. It is, in fact,
something other than the true idea of Comedy.
Where the sexes are separated, men and women grow,
as the Portuguese call it, affaimados of one another,
famine-stricken; and all the tragic elements are on
the stage. Don Juan is a comic character that
sends souls flying: nor does the humour of the
breaking of a dozen women’s hearts conciliate
the Comic Muse with the drawing of blood.
German attempts at Comedy remind one
vividly of Heine’s image of his country in the
dancing of Atta Troll. Lessing tried his hand
at it, with a sobering effect upon readers. The
intention to produce the reverse effect is just visible,
and therein, like the portly graces of the poor old
Pyrenean Bear poising and twirling on his right hind-leg
and his left, consists the fun. Jean Paul Richter
gives the best edition of the German Comic in the
contrast of Siebenkas with his Lenette. A light
of the Comic is in Goethe; enough to complete the
splendid figure of the man, but no more.
The German literary laugh, like the
timed awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows
of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather monstrous never
a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes
of unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or
gross, like the peculiar humours of their little earthmen.
Spiritual laughter they have not yet attained to:
sentimentalism waylays them in the flight. Here
and there a Volkslied or Marchen shows a national
aptitude for stout animal laughter; and we see that
the literature is built on it, which is hopeful so
far; but to enjoy it, to enter into the philosophy
of the Broad Grin, that seems to hesitate between
the skull and the embryo, and reaches its perfection
in breadth from the pulling of two square fingers
at the corners of the mouth, one must have aid of ‘the
good Rhine wine,’ and be of German blood unmixed
besides. This treble-Dutch lumbersomeness of
the Comic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea
of Comedy, and the poor voice allowed to women in
German domestic life will account for the absence
of comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that land.
I shall speak of it again in the second section of
this lecture.
Eastward you have total silence of
Comedy among a people intensely susceptible to laughter,
as the Arabian Nights will testify. Where the
veil is over women’s-faces, you cannot have society,
without which the senses are barbarous and the Comic
spirit is driven to the gutters of grossness to slake
its thirst. Arabs in this respect are worse than
Italians much worse than Germans; just in
the degree that their system of treating women is
worse.
M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the excellent
French essayist and master of critical style, tells
of a conversation he had once with an Arab gentleman
on the topic of the different management of these difficult
creatures in Orient and in Occident: and the Arab
spoke in praise of many good results of the greater
freedom enjoyed by Western ladies, and the charm of
conversing with them. He was questioned why his
countrymen took no measures to grant them something
of that kind of liberty. He jumped out of his
individuality in a twinkling, and entered into the
sentiments of his race, replying, from the pinnacle
of a splendid conceit, with affected humility of manner:
’You can look on them without perturbation but
we!’... And after this profoundly comic
interjection, he added, in deep tones, ‘The
very face of a woman!’ Our representative of
temperate notions demurely consented that the Arab’s
pride of inflammability should insist on the prudery
of the veil as the civilizing medium of his race.
There has been fun in Bagdad.
But there never will be civilization where Comedy
is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social
equality of the sexes. I am not quoting the Arab
to exhort and disturb the somnolent East; rather for
cultivated women to recognize that the Comic Muse
is one of their best friends. They are blind to
their interests in swelling the ranks of the sentimentalists.
Let them look with their clearest vision abroad and
at home. They will see that where they have no
social freedom, Comedy is absent: where they are
household drudges, the form of Comedy is primitive:
where they are tolerably independent, but uncultivated,
exciting melodrama takes its place and a sentimental
version of them. Yet the Comic will out, as they
would know if they listened to some of the private
conversations of men whose minds are undirected by
the Comic Muse: as the sentimental man, to his
astonishment, would know likewise, if he in similar
fashion could receive a lesson. But where women
are on the road to an equal footing with men, in attainments
and in liberty in what they have won for
themselves, and what has been granted them by a fair
civilization there, and only waiting to
be transplanted from life to the stage, or the novel,
or the poem, pure Comedy flourishes, and is, as it
would help them to be, the sweetest of diversions,
the wisest of delightful companions.
Now, to look about us in the present
time, I think it will be acknowledged that in neglecting
the cultivation of the Comic idea, we are losing the
aid of a powerful auxiliar. You see Folly
perpetually sliding into new shapes in a society possessed
of wealth and leisure, with many whims, many strange
ailments and strange doctors. Plenty of common-sense
is in the world to thrust her back when she pretends
to empire. But the first-born of common-sense,
the vigilant Comic, which is the genius of thoughtful
laughter, which would readily extinguish her at the
outset, is not serving as a public advocate.
You will have noticed the disposition
of common-sense, under pressure of some pertinacious
piece of light-headedness, to grow impatient and angry.
That is a sign of the absence, or at least of the dormancy,
of the Comic idea. For Folly is the natural prey
of the Comic, known to it in all her transformations,
in every disguise; and it is with the springing delight
of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives
her chase, never fretting, never tiring, sure of having
her, allowing her no rest.
Contempt is a sentiment that cannot
be entertained by comic intelligence. What is
it but an excuse to be idly minded, or personally
lofty, or comfortably narrow, not perfectly humane?
If we do not feign when we say that we despise Folly,
we shut the brain. There is a disdainful attitude
in the presence of Folly, partaking of the foolishness
to Comic perception: and anger is not much less
foolish than disdain. The struggle we have to
conduct is essence against essence. Let no one
doubt of the sequel when this emanation of what is
firmest in us is launched to strike down the daughter
of Unreason and Sentimentalism: such being Folly’s
parentage, when it is respectable.
Our modern system of combating her
is too long defensive, and carried on too ploddingly
with concrete engines of war in the attack. She
has time to get behind entrenchments. She is
ready to stand a siege, before the heavily armed man
of science and the writer of the leading article or
elaborate essay have primed their big guns. It
should be remembered that she has charms for the multitude;
and an English multitude seeing her make a gallant
fight of it will be half in love with her, certainly
willing to lend her a cheer. Benevolent subscriptions
assist her to hire her own man of science, her own
organ in the Press. If ultimately she is cast
out and overthrown, she can stretch a finger at gaps
in our ranks. She can say that she commanded
an army and seduced men, whom we thought sober men
and safe, to act as her lieutenants. We learn
rather gloomily, after she has flashed her lantern,
that we have in our midst able men and men with minds
for whom there is no pole-star in intellectual navigation.
Comedy, or the Comic element, is the specific for the
poison of delusion while Folly is passing from the
state of vapour to substantial form.
O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais,
Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding, Moliere! These
are spirits that, if you know them well, will come
when you do call. You will find the very invocation
of them act on you like a renovating air the
South-west coming off the sea, or a cry in the Alps.
No one would presume to say that we
are deficient in jokers. They abound, and the
organisation directing their machinery to shoot them
in the wake of the leading article and the popular
sentiment is good.
But the Comic differs from them in
addressing the wits for laughter; and the sluggish
wits want some training to respond to it, whether in
public life or private, and particularly when the
feelings are excited.
The sense of the Comic is much blunted
by habits of punning and of using humouristic phrase:
the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables to
treat of the infinitely little. And it really
may be humorous, of a kind, yet it will miss the point
by going too much round about it.
A certain French Duke Pasquier died,
some years back, at a very advanced age. He had
been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later years
up to the period of his death. There was a report
of Duke Pasquier that he was a man of profound egoism.
Hence an argument arose, and was warmly sustained,
upon the excessive selfishness of those who, in a world
of troubles, and calls to action, and innumerable
duties, husband their strength for the sake of living
on. Can it be possible, the argument ran, for
a truly generous heart to continue beating up to the
age of a hundred? Duke Pasquier was not without
his defenders, who likened him to the oak of the forest a
venerable comparison.
The argument was conducted on both
sides with spirit and earnestness, lightened here
and there by frisky touches of the polysyllabic playful,
reminding one of the serious pursuit of their fun by
truant boys, that are assured they are out of the
eye of their master, and now and then indulge in an
imitation of him. And well might it be supposed
that the Comic idea was asleep, not overlooking them!
It resolved at last to this, that either Duke Pasquier
was a scandal on our humanity in clinging to life
so long, or that he honoured it by so sturdy a resistance
to the enemy. As one who has entangled himself
in a labyrinth is glad to get out again at the entrance,
the argument ran about to conclude with its commencement.
Now, imagine a master of the Comic
treating this theme, and particularly the argument
on it. Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of the
centenarian, with choric praises of heroical
early death, and the same of a stubborn vitality,
and the poet laughing at the chorus; and the grand
question for contention in dialogue, as to the exact
age when a man should die, to the identical minute,
that he may preserve the respect of his fellows, followed
by a systematic attempt to make an accurate measurement
in parallel lines, with a tough rope-yarn by one party,
and a string of yawns by the other, of the veteran’s
power of enduring life, and our capacity for enduring
him, with tremendous pulling on both sides.
Would not the Comic view of the discussion
illumine it and the disputants like very lightning?
There are questions, as well as persons, that only
the Comic can fitly touch.
Aristophanes would probably have crowned
the ancient tree, with the consolatory observation
to the haggard line of long-expectant heirs of the
Centenarian, that they live to see the blessedness
of coming of a strong stock. The shafts of his
ridicule would mainly have been aimed at the disputants.
For the sole ground of the argument was the old man’s
character, and sophists are not needed to demonstrate
that we can very soon have too much of a bad thing.
A Centenarian does not necessarily provoke the Comic
idea, nor does the corpse of a duke. It is not
provoked in the order of nature, until we draw its
penetrating attentiveness to some circumstance with
which we have been mixing our private interests, or
our speculative obfuscation. Dulness, insensible
to the Comic, has the privilege of arousing it; and
the laying of a dull finger on matters of human life
is the surest method of establishing electrical communications
with a battery of laughter where the Comic
idea is prevalent.
But if the Comic idea prevailed with
us, and we had an Aristophanes to barb and wing it,
we should be breathing air of Athens. Prosers
now pouring forth on us like public fountains would
be cut short in the street and left blinking, dumb
as pillar-posts, with letters thrust into their mouths.
We should throw off incubus, our dreadful familiar by
some called boredom whom it is our present
humiliation to be just alive enough to loathe, never
quick enough to foil. There would be a bright
and positive, clear Hellenic perception of facts.
The vapours of Unreason and Sentimentalism would be
blown away before they were productive. Where
would Pessimist and Optimist be? They would in
any case have a diminished audience. Yet possibly
the change of despots, from good-natured old obtuseness
to keen-edged intelligence, which is by nature merciless,
would be more than we could bear. The rupture
of the link between dull people, consisting in the
fraternal agreement that something is too clever for
them, and a shot beyond them, is not to be thought
of lightly; for, slender though the link may seem,
it is equivalent to a cement forming a concrete of
dense cohesion, very desirable in the estimation of
the statesman.
A political Aristophanes, taking advantage
of his lyrical Bacchic licence, was found too much
for political Athens. I would not ask to have
him revived, but that the sharp light of such a spirit
as his might be with us to strike now and then on
public affairs, public themes, to make them spin along
more briskly.
He hated with the politician’s
fervour the sophist who corrupted simplicity of thought,
the poet who destroyed purity of style, the demagogue,
‘the saw-toothed monster,’ who, as he conceived,
chicaned the mob, and he held his own against them
by strength of laughter, until fines, the curtailing
of his Comic licence in the chorus, and ultimately
the ruin of Athens, which could no longer support the
expense of the chorus, threw him altogether on dialogue,
and brought him under the law. After the catastrophe,
the poet, who had ever been gazing back at the men
of Marathon and Salamis, must have felt that he had
foreseen it; and that he was wise when he pleaded
for peace, and derided military coxcombry, and the
captious old creature Demus, we can admit. He
had the Comic poet’s gift of common-sense which
does not always include political intelligence; yet
his political tendency raised him above the Old Comedy
turn for uproarious farce. He abused Socrates,
but Xenophon, the disciple of Socrates, by his trained
rhetoric saved the Ten Thousand. Aristophanes
might say that if his warnings had been followed there
would have been no such thing as a mercenary Greek
expedition under Cyrus. Athens, however, was
on a landslip, falling; none could arrest it.
To gaze back, to uphold the old times, was a most natural
conservatism, and fruitless. The aloe had bloomed.
Whether right or wrong in his politics and his criticisms,
and bearing in mind the instruments he played on and
the audience he had to win, there is an idea in his
comedies: it is the Idea of Good Citizenship.
He is not likely to be revived.
He stands, like Shakespeare, an unapproachable.
Swift says of him, with a loving chuckle:
‘But as for Comic Aristophanes,
The dog too witty and too profane is.’
Aristophanes was ‘profane,’
under satiric direction, unlike his rivals Cratinus,
Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are
to believe him, who in their extraordinary Donnybrook
Fair of the day of Comedy, thumped one another and
everybody else with absolute heartiness, as he did,
but aimed at small game, and dragged forth particular
women, which he did not. He is an aggregate of
many men, all of a certain greatness. We may
build up a conception of his powers if we mount Rabelais
upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley,
give him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with
the mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there
may be some Irish in him) a dash of Grattan, before
he is in motion.
But such efforts at conceiving one
great one by incorporation of minors are vain, and
cry for excuse. Supposing Wilkes for leading man
in a country constantly plunging into war under some
plumed Lamachus, with enemies periodically firing
the land up to the gates of London, and a Samuel Foote,
of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule,
I think it gives a notion of the conflict engaged
in by Aristophanes. This laughing bald-pate,
as he calls himself, was a Titanic pamphleteer, using
laughter for his political weapon; a laughter without
scruple, the laughter of Hercules. He was primed
with wit, as with the garlic he speaks of giving to
the game-cocks, to make them fight the better.
And he was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, with the
homely song of a jolly national poet, and a poet of
such feeling that the comic mask is at times no broader
than a cloth on a face to show the serious features
of our common likeness. He is not to be revived;
but if his method were studied, some of the fire in
him would come to us, and we might be revived.
Taking them generally, the English
public are most in sympathy with this primitive Aristophanic
comedy, wherein the comic is capped by the grotesque,
irony tips the wit, and satire is a naked sword.
They have the basis of the Comic in them: an
esteem for common-sense. They cordially dislike
the reverse of it. They have a rich laugh, though
it is not the gros rire of the Gaul tossing gros
sel, nor the polished Frenchman’s mentally
digestive laugh. And if they have now, like a
monarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many jesters kicking
the dictionary about, to let them reflect that they
are dull, occasionally, like the pensive monarch surprising
himself with an idea of an idea of his own, they look
so. And they are given to looking in the glass.
They must see that something ails them. How much
even the better order of them will endure, without
a thought of the defensive, when the person afflicting
them is protected from satire, we read in Memoirs of
a Preceding Age, where the vulgarly tyrannous hostess
of a great house of reception shuffled the guests
and played them like a pack of cards, with her exact
estimate of the strength of each one printed on them:
and still this house continued to be the most popular
in England; nor did the lady ever appear in print
or on the boards as the comic type that she was.
It has been suggested that they have
not yet spiritually comprehended the signification
of living in society; for who are cheerfuller, brisker
of wit, in the fields, and as explorers, colonisers,
backwoodsmen? They are happy in rough exercise,
and also in complete repose. The intermediate
condition, when they are called upon to talk to one
another, upon other than affairs of business or their
hobbies, reveals them wearing a curious look of vacancy,
as it were the socket of an eye wanting. The
Comic is perpetually springing up in social life, and,
it oppresses them from not being perceived.
Thus, at a dinner-party, one of the
guests, who happens to have enrolled himself in a
Burial Company, politely entreats the others to inscribe
their names as shareholders, expatiating on the advantages
accruing to them in the event of their very possible
speedy death, the salubrity of the site, the aptitude
of the soil for a quick consumption of their remains,
etc.; and they drink sadness from the incongruous
man, and conceive indigestion, not seeing him in a
sharply defined light, that would bid them taste the
comic of him. Or it is mentioned that a newly
elected member of our Parliament celebrates his arrival
at eminence by the publication of a book on cab-fares,
dedicated to a beloved female relative deceased, and
the comment on it is the word ‘Indeed.’
But, merely for a contrast, turn to a not uncommon
scene of yesterday in the hunting-field, where a brilliant
young rider, having broken his collar-bone, trots
away very soon after, against medical interdict, half
put together in splinters, to the most distant meet
of his neighbourhood, sure of escaping his doctor,
who is the first person he encounters. ‘I
came here purposely to avoid you,’ says the patient.
’I came here purposely to take care of you,’
says the doctor. Off they go, and come to a swollen
brook. The patient clears it handsomely:
the doctor tumbles in. All the field are alive
with the heartiest relish of every incident and every
cross-light on it; and dull would the man have been
thought who had not his word to say about it when riding
home.
In our prose literature we have had
delightful Comic writers. Besides Fielding and
Goldsmith, there is Miss Austen, whose Emma and Mr.
Elton might walk straight into a comedy, were the
plot arranged for them. Galt’s neglected
novels have some characters and strokes of shrewd
comedy. In our poetic literature the comic is
delicate and graceful above the touch of Italian and
French. Generally, however, the English elect
excel in satire, and they are noble humourists.
The national disposition is for hard-hitting, with
a moral purpose to sanction it; or for a rosy, sometimes
a larmoyant, geniality, not unmanly in its verging
upon tenderness, and with a singular attraction for
thick-headedness, to decorate it with asses’
ears and the most beautiful sylvan haloes. But
the Comic is a different spirit.
You may estimate your capacity for
Comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule
of them you love, without loving them less: and
more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous
in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image
of you proposes.
Each one of an affectionate couple
may be willing, as we say, to die for the other, yet
unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the right
moment; but if the wits were sufficiently quick for
them to perceive that they are in a comic situation,
as affectionate couples must be when they quarrel,
they would not wait for the moon or the almanac, or
a Dorine, to bring back the flood-tide of tender feelings,
that they should join hands and lips.
If you detect the ridicule, and your
kindliness is chilled by it, you are slipping into
the grasp of Satire.
If instead of falling foul of the
ridiculous person with a satiric rod, to make him
writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him under
a semi-caress, by which he shall in his anguish be
rendered dubious whether indeed anything has hurt
him, you are an engine of Irony.
If you laugh all round him, tumble
him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a
tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to
your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity
him as much as you expose, it is a spirit of Humour
that is moving you.
The Comic, which is the perceptive,
is the governing spirit, awakening and giving aim
to these powers of laughter, but it is not to be confounded
with them: it enfolds a thinner form of them,
differing from satire, in not sharply driving into
the quivering sensibilities, and from humour, in not
comforting them and tucking them up, or indicating
a broader than the range of this bustling world to
them.
Fielding’s Jonathan Wild presents
a case of this peculiar distinction, when that man
of eminent greatness remarks upon the unfairness of
a trial in which the condemnation has been brought
about by twelve men of the opposite party; for it
is not satiric, it is not humorous; yet it is immensely
comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his
own ‘party’ should have a voice in the
Law. It opens an avenue into villains’
ratiocination. And the Comic is not cancelled though
we should suppose Jonathan to be giving play to his
humour. I may have dreamed this or had it suggested
to me, for on referring to Jonathan Wild, I do not
find it.
Apply the case to the man of deep
wit, who is ever certain of his condemnation by the
opposite party, and then it ceases to be comic, and
will be satiric.
The look of Fielding upon Richardson
is essentially comic. His method of correcting
the sentimental writer is a mixture of the comic and
the humorous. Parson Adams is a creation of humour.
But both the conception and the presentation of Alceste
and of Tartuffe, of Celimene and Philaminte, are purely
comic, addressed to the intellect: there is no
humour in them, and they refresh the intellect they
quicken to detect their comedy, by force of the contrast
they offer between themselves and the wiser world
about them; that is to say, society, or that assemblage
of minds whereof the Comic spirit has its origin.
Byron had splendid powers of humour,
and the most poetic satire that we have example of,
fusing at times to hard irony. He had no strong
comic sense, or he would not have taken an anti-social
position, which is directly opposed to the Comic;
and in his philosophy, judged by philosophers, he
is a comic figure, by reason of this deficiency.
’So bald er philosophirt ist er ein
Kind,’ Goethe says of him. Carlyle
sees him in this comic light, treats him in the humorous
manner.
The Satirist is a moral agent, often
a social scavenger, working on a storage of bile.
The Ironeist is one thing or another,
according to his caprice. Irony is the humour
of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a moral
object, or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious.
The foppish irony fretting to be seen, and the irony
which leers, that you shall not mistake its intention,
are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures
of ambiguity.
The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing
laugher, giving tone to the feelings and sometimes
allowing the feelings to be too much for him.
But the humourist of high has an embrace of contrasts
beyond the scope of the Comic poet.
Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote,
and still you brood on him. The juxtaposition
of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, the
opposition of their natures most humorous. They
are as different as the two hemispheres in the time
of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound in one by
laughter. The knight’s great aims and constant
mishaps, his chivalrous valiancy exercised on absurd
objects, his good sense along the highroad of the
craziest of expeditions; the compassion he plucks
out of derision, and the admirable figure he preserves
while stalking through the frantically grotesque and
burlesque assailing him, are in the loftiest moods
of humour, fusing the Tragic sentiment with the Comic
narrative.
The stroke of the great humourist
is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy in his laughter.
Taking a living great, though not
creative, humourist to guide our description:
the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons
of festival; he sees visions of primitive man capering
preposterously under the gorgeous robes of ceremonial.
Our souls must be on fire when we wear solemnity,
if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve.
Finite and infinite flash from one to the other with
him, lending him a two-edged thought that peeps out
of his peacefullest lines by fits, like the lantern
of the fire-watcher at windows, going the rounds at
night. The comportment and performances of men
in society are to him, by the vivid comparison with
their mortality, more grotesque than respectable.
But ask yourself, Is he always to be relied on for
justness? He will fly straight as the emissary
eagle back to Jove at the true Hero. He will
also make as determined a swift descent upon the man
of his wilful choice, whom we cannot distinguish as
a true one. This vast power of his, built up
of the feelings and the intellect in union, is often
wanting in proportion and in discretion. Humourists
touching upon History or Society are given to be capricious.
They are, as in the case of Sterne, given to be sentimental;
for with them the feelings are primary, as with singers.
Comedy, on the other hand, is an interpretation of
the general mind, and is for that reason of necessity
kept in restraint. The French lay marked stress
on mesure et gout, and they own how
much they owe to Moliere for leading them in simple
justness and taste. We can teach them many things;
they can teach us in this.
The Comic poet is in the narrow field,
or enclosed square, of the society he depicts; and
he addresses the still narrower enclosure of men’s
intellects, with reference to the operation of the
social world upon their characters. He is not
concerned with beginnings or endings or surroundings,
but with what you are now weaving. To understand
his work and value it, you must have a sober liking
of your kind and a sober estimate of our civilized
qualities. The aim and business of the Comic
poet are misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor
his point of view taken, when he is accused of dishonouring
our nature and being hostile to sentiment, tending
to spitefulness and making an unfair use of laughter.
Those who detect irony in Comedy do so because they
choose to see it in life. Poverty, says the satirist,
has nothing harder in itself than that it makes men
ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to
Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags
conceal its bareness in a forlorn attempt at decency,
or foolishly to rival ostentation. Caleb Balderstone,
in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble
household in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely
comic character. In the case of ‘poor relatives,’
on the other hand, it is the rich, whom they perplex,
that are really comic; and to laugh at the former,
not seeing the comedy of the latter, is to betray dulness
of vision. Humourist and Satirist frequently
hunt together as Ironeists in pursuit of the grotesque,
to the exclusion of the Comic. That was an affecting
moment in the history of the Prince Regent, when the
First Gentleman of Europe burst into tears at a sarcastic
remark of Beau Brummell’s on the cut of his
coat. Humour, Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether
as their common prey. The Comic spirit eyes but
does not touch it. Put into action, it would
be farcical. It is too gross for Comedy.
Incidents of a kind casting ridicule
on our unfortunate nature instead of our conventional
life, provoke derisive laughter, which thwarts the
Comic idea. But derision is foiled by the play
of the intellect. Most of doubtful causes in
contest are open to Comic interpretation, and any
intellectual pleading of a doubtful cause contains
germs of an Idea of Comedy.
The laughter of satire is a blow in
the back or the face. The laughter of Comedy
is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer
a smile; often no more than a smile. It laughs
through the mind, for the mind directs it; and it
might be called the humour of the mind.
One excellent test of the civilization
of a country, as I have said, I take to be the flourishing
of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test of true
Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.
If you believe that our civilization
is founded in common-sense (and it is the first condition
of sanity to believe it), you will, when contemplating
men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than
the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but
luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond them,
nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to them
that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its
features are studied. It has the sage’s
brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the
corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness
of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped
like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr’s
laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted
by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it
will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered,
showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather
than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one
of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full
field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels,
without any fluttering eagerness. Men’s
future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty
and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever
they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious,
bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically
delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked,
given to run riot in idolâtries, drifting into
vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly,
plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance
with their professions, and violate the unwritten
but perceptible laws binding them in consideration
one to another; whenever they offend sound reason,
fair justice; are false in humility or mined with
conceit, individually, or in the bulk the
Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast
an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery
laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.
Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind
to the spiritual, and to deny the existence of a mind
of man where minds of men are in working conjunction.
You must, as I have said, believe
that our state of society is founded in common-sense,
otherwise you will not be struck by the contrasts the
Comic Spirit perceives, or have it to look to for your
consolation. You will, in fact, be standing in
that peculiar oblique beam of light, yourself illuminated
to the general eye as the very object of chase and
doomed quarry of the thing obscure to you. But
to feel its presence and to see it is your assurance
that many sane and solid minds are with you in what
you are experiencing: and this of itself spares
you the pain of satirical heat, and the bitter craving
to strike heavy blows. You share the sublime
of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but
merely demonstrate their foolishness. Moliere
was contented to revenge himself on the critics of
the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the
Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes, one
of the wisest as well as the playfullest of studies
in criticism. A perception of the comic spirit
gives high fellowship. You become a citizen of
the selecter world, the highest we know of in connection
with our old world, which is not supermundane.
Look there for your unchallengeable upper class!
You feel that you are one of this our civilized community,
that you cannot escape from it, and would not if you
could. Good hope sustains you; weariness does
not overwhelm you; in isolation you see no charms
for vanity; personal pride is greatly moderated.
Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you from
worlds of imagination or of devotion. The Comic
spirit is not hostile to the sweetest songfully poetic.
Chaucer bubbles with it: Shakespeare overflows:
there is a mild moon’s ray of it (pale with
super-refinement through distance from our flesh and
blood planet) in Comus. Pope has it, and it is
the daylight side of the night half obscuring Cowper.
It is only hostile to the priestly element, when that,
by baleful swelling, transcends and overlaps the bounds
of its office: and then, in extreme cases, it
is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp:
as, for example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the
dead body of Moliere: at which the dark angels
may, but men do not laugh.
We have had comic pulpits, for a sign
that the laughter-moving and the worshipful may be
in alliance: I know not how far comic, or how
much assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness
and the relief of its appearance: at least they
are popular, they are said to win the ear. Laughter
is open to perversion, like other good things; the
scornful and the brutal sorts are not unknown to us;
but the laughter directed by the Comic spirit is a
harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree
that it enlivens. It enters you like fresh air
into a study; as when one of the sudden contrasts
of the comic idea floods the brain like reassuring
daylight. You are cognizant of the true kind by
feeling that you take it in, savour it, and have what
flowers live on, natural air for food. That which
you give out the joyful roar is
not the better part; let that go to good fellowship
and the benefit of the lungs. Aristophanes promises
his auditors that if they will retain the ideas of
the comic poet carefully, as they keep dried fruits
in boxes, their garments shall smell odoriferous of
wisdom throughout the year. The boast will not
be thought an empty one by those who have choice friends
that have stocked themselves according to his directions.
Such treasuries of sparkling laughter are wells in
our desert. Sensitiveness to the comic laugh
is a step in civilization. To shrink from being
an object of it is a step in cultivation. We
know the degree of refinement in men by the matter
they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but
we know likewise that the larger natures are distinguished
by the great breadth of their power of laughter, and
no one really loving Moliere is refined by that love
to despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it
may be that the lover of Aristophanes will not have
risen to the height of Moliere. Embrace them
both, and you have the whole scale of laughter in
your breast. Nothing in the world surpasses in
stormy fun the scene in The Frogs, when Bacchus and
Xanthias receive their thrashings from the hands of
businesslike OEacus, to discover which is the divinity
of the two, by his imperviousness to the mortal condition
of pain, and each, under the obligation of not crying
out, makes believe that his horrible bellow the
god’s iou iou being the lustier means
only the stopping of a sneeze, or horseman sighted,
or the prelude to an invocation to some deity:
and the slave contrives that the god shall get the
bigger lot of blows. Passages of Rabelais, one
or two in Don Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner
of the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar
cataract of laughter. But it is not illuminating;
it is not the laughter of the mind. Moliere’s
laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as
light to our nature, as colour to our thoughts.
The Misanthrope and the Tartuffe have no audible laughter;
but the characters are steeped in the comic spirit.
They quicken the mind through laughter, from coming
out of the mind; and the mind accepts them because
they are clear interpretations of certain chapters
of the Book lying open before us all. Between
these two stand Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the
richer laugh of heart and mind in one; with much of
the Aristophanic robustness, something of Moliere’s
delicacy.
The laughter heard in circles not
pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound harsh and soulless,
like versified prose, if you step into them with a
sense of the distinction. You will fancy you have
changed your habitation to a planet remoter from the
sun. You may be among powerful brains too.
You will not find poets or but a stray one,
over-worshipped. You will find learned men undoubtedly,
professors, reputed philosophers, and illustrious
dilettanti. They have in them, perhaps, every
element composing light, except the Comic. They
read verse, they discourse of art; but their eminent
faculties are not under that vigilant sense of a collective
supervision, spiritual and present, which we have
taken note of. They build a temple of arrogance;
they speak much in the voice of oracles; their hilarity,
if it does not dip in grossness, is usually a form
of pugnacity.
Insufficiency of sight in the eye
looking outward has deprived them of the eye that
should look inward. They have never weighed themselves
in the delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to
obtain a suspicion of the rights and dues of the world;
and they have, in consequence, an irritable personality.
A very learned English professor crushed an argument
in a political discussion, by asking his adversary
angrily: ‘Are you aware, sir, that I am
a philologer?’
The practice of polite society will
help in training them, and the professor on a sofa
with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may become
their pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing
it: he is at least a fair and pleasing spectacle
to the Comic Muse. But the society named polite
is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will
be petting a bronzed soldier, or a black African,
or a prince, or a spiritualist: ideas cannot
take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is besides
addicted in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the
affairs of its rapidly revolving world, as children
on a whirligoround bestow their attention on the wooden
horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from giddiness
and preserve a notion of identity. The professor
is better out of a circle that often confounds by
lionizing, sometimes annoys by abandoning, and always
confuses. The school that teaches gently what
peril there is lest a cultivated head should still
be coxcomb’s, and the collisions which may befall
high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more to be recommended
than the sphere of incessant motion supplying it with
material.
Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure
overhead are rank with raw crops of matter. The
traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people
not covered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid
so much that is fair and cherishable, to come upon
such curious barbarism. An Englishman paid a
visit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture,
and was introduced by him to another distinguished
professor, to whom he took so cordially as to walk
out with him alone one afternoon. The first professor,
an erudite entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly
esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude
the dagger) with the vindictive jealousy of an injured
Spanish beauty. After a short prelude of gloom
and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless
admirer the bolts of passionate logic familiar to the
ears of flighty caballeros: ’Either
I am a fit object of your admiration, or I am not.
Of these things one either you are competent
to judge, in which case I stand condemned by you;
or you are incompetent, and therefore impertinent,
and you may betake yourself to your country again,
hypocrite!’ The admirer was for persuading the
wounded scholar that it is given to us to be able
to admire two professors at a time. He was driven
forth.
Perhaps this might have occurred in
any country, and a comedy of The Pedant, discovering
the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would
not bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful
that it was in Germany, when I observe that the Germans
have gone through no comic training to warn them of
the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft, nor
much of satirical. Heinrich Heine has not been
enough to cause them to smart and meditate. Nationally,
as well as individually, when they are excited they
are in danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance,
they decline to listen to evidence, and raise a national
outcry because one of German blood has been convicted
of crime in a foreign country. They are acute
critics, yet they still wield clubs in controversy.
Compare them in this respect with the people schooled
in La Bruyere, La Fontaine, Moliere; with the people
who have the figures of a Trissotin and a Vadius before
them for a comic warning of the personal vanities
of the caressed professor. It is more than difference
of race. It is the difference of traditions,
temper, and style, which comes of schooling.
The French controversialist is a polished
swordsman, to be dreaded in his graces and courtesies.
The German is Orson, or the mob, or a marching army,
in defence of a good case or a bad a big
or a little. His irony is a missile of terrific
tonnage: sarcasm he emits like a blast from a
dragon’s mouth. He must and will be Titan.
He stamps his foe underfoot, and is astonished that
the creature is not dead, but stinging; for, in truth,
the Titan is contending, by comparison, with a god.
When the Germans lie on their arms,
looking across the Alsatian frontier at the crowds
of Frenchmen rushing to applaud L’ami Fritz
at the Theatre Francais, looking and considering the
meaning of that applause, which is grimly comic in
its political response to the domestic moral of the
play when the Germans watch and are silent,
their force of character tells. They are kings
in music, we may say princes in poetry, good speculators
in philosophy, and our leaders in scholarship.
That so gifted a race, possessed moreover of the stern
good sense which collects the waters of laughter to
make the wells, should show at a disadvantage, I hold
for a proof, instructive to us, that the discipline
of the comic spirit is needful to their growth.
We see what they can reach to in that great figure
of modern manhood, Goethe. They are a growing
people; they are conversable as well; and when their
men, as in France, and at intervals at Berlin tea-tables,
consent to talk on equal terms with their women, and
to listen to them, their growth will be accelerated
and be shapelier. Comedy, or in any form the
Comic spirit, will then come to them to cut some figures
out of the block, show them the mirror, enliven and
irradiate the social intelligence.
Modern French comedy is commendable
for the directness of the study of actual life, as
far as that, which is but the early step in such a
scholarship, can be of service in composing and colouring
the picture. A consequence of this crude, though
well-meant, realism is the collision of the writers
in their scenes and incidents, and in their characters.
The Muse of most of them is an Aventuriere. She
is clever, and a certain diversion exists in the united
scheme for confounding her. The object of this
person is to reinstate herself in the decorous world;
and either, having accomplished this purpose through
deceit, she has a nostalgie de la boue,
that eventually casts her back into it, or she is exposed
in her course of deception when she is about to gain
her end. A very good, innocent young man is her
victim, or a very astute, goodish young man obstructs
her path. This latter is enabled to be the champion
of the decorous world by knowing the indecorous well.
He has assisted in the progress of Aventurieres downward;
he will not help them to ascend. The world is
with him; and certainly it is not much of an ascension
they aspire to; but what sort of a figure is he?
The triumph of a candid realism is to show him no
hero. You are to admire him (for it must be supposed
that realism pretends to waken some admiration) as
a credibly living young man; no better, only a little
firmer and shrewder, than the rest. If, however,
you think at all, after the curtain has fallen, you
are likely to think that the Aventurieres have a case
to plead against him. True, and the author has
not said anything to the contrary; he has but painted
from the life; he leaves his audience to the reflections
of unphilosophic minds upon life, from the specimen
he has presented in the bright and narrow circle of
a spy-glass.
I do not know that the fly in amber
is of any particular use, but the Comic idea enclosed
in a comedy makes it more generally perceptible and
portable, and that is an advantage. There is a
benefit to men in taking the lessons of Comedy in
congregations, for it enlivens the wits; and to writers
it is beneficial, for they must have a clear scheme,
and even if they have no idea to present, they must
prove that they have made the public sit to them before
the sitting to see the picture. And writing for
the stage would be a corrective of a too-incrusted
scholarly style, into which some great ones fall at
times. It keeps minor writers to a definite plan,
and to English. Many of them now swelling a plethoric
market, in the composition of novels, in pun-manufactories
and in journalism; attached to the machinery forcing
perishable matter on a public that swallows voraciously
and groans; might, with encouragement, be attending
to the study of art in literature. Our critics
appear to be fascinated by the quaintness of our public,
as the world is when our beast-garden has a new importation
of magnitude, and the creatures appetite is reverently
consulted. They stipulate for a writer’s
popularity before they will do much more than take
the position of umpires to record his failure or success.
Now the pig supplies the most popular of dishes, but
it is not accounted the most honoured of animals,
unless it be by the cottager. Our public might
surely be led to try other, perhaps finer, meat.
It has good taste in song. It might be taught
as justly, on the whole, and the sooner when the cottager’s
view of the feast shall cease to be the humble one
of our literary critics, to extend this capacity for
delicate choosing in the direction of the matter arousing
laughter.