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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, An Essay on Comedy, by George Meredith
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: An Essay on Comedy
+       And the Uses of the Comic Spirit
+
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Release Date: May 13, 2005  [eBook #1219]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ESSAY ON COMEDY***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1897 Archibald Constable and Company edition by
+David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+AN ESSAY ON COMEDY AND THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT
+by George Meredith
+
+
+_This Essay was first published in 'The New Quarterly Magazine' for April
+1877_.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE IDEA OF COMEDY AND OF THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT {1}
+
+
+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 etrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes 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], 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 le 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. {2}  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, {3} 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 mais les devots_, 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, {4} 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. {5}
+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. {6}  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, {7} '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 a 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 ame 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 liberte,'
+
+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] 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; {8} 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 le scandaliser,
+   Jusque-la, qu'il se vint l'autre jour accuser
+   D'avoir pris une puce en faisant sa priere,
+   Et de l'avoir tuee avec trop de colere.'
+
+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. {9}  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
+idolatries, 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.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{1}  A lecture delivered at the London Institution, February 1st, 1877.
+
+{2}  Realism in the writing is carried to such a pitch in THE OLD
+BACHELOR, that husband and wife use imbecile connubial epithets to one
+another.
+
+{3}  Tallemant des Reaux, in his rough portrait of the Duke, shows the
+foundation of the character of Alceste.
+
+{4}  See Tom Jones, book viii. chapter I, for Fielding's opinion of our
+Comedy.  But he puts it simply; not as an exercise in the
+quasi-philosophical bathetic.
+
+{5}  Femmes Savantes:
+
+BELISE: Veux-tu toute la vie offenser la grammaire?
+
+MARTINE: Qui parle d'offenser grand'mere ni grand-pere?'
+
+The pun is delivered in all sincerity, from the mouth of a rustic.
+
+{6}  Maskwell seems to have been carved on the model of Iago, as by the
+hand of an enterprising urchin.  He apostrophizes his 'invention'
+repeatedly.  'Thanks, my invention.'  He hits on an invention, to say:
+'Was it my brain or Providence? no matter which.'  It is no matter which,
+but it was not his brain.
+
+{7}  Imaginary Conversations: Alfieri and the Jew Salomon.
+
+{8}  Terence did not please the rough old conservative Romans; they liked
+Plautus better, and the recurring mention of the _vetus poeta_ in his
+prologues, who plagued him with the crusty critical view of his
+productions, has in the end a comic effect on the reader.
+
+{9}  The exclamation of Lady Booby, when Joseph defends himself: '_Your
+virtue_!  I shall never survive it!' etc., is another instance.--Joseph
+Andrews.  Also that of Miss Mathews in her narrative to Booth: 'But such
+are the friendships of women.'--Amelia.
+
+
+
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