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+Project Gutenberg Etext of An Essay on Comedy by George Meredith
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+An Essay on Comedy
+
+by George Meredith
+
+February, 1998  [Etext #1219]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext of An Essay on Comedy by George Meredith
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+
+
+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 which cannot be reproduced], the laughter-hating,
+soon learns to dignify his dislike as an objection in morality.
+
+We have another class of men, who are pleased to consider themselves
+antagonists of the foregoing, and whom we may term hypergelasts; the
+excessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell,
+that may be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so loosely put
+together that a wink will shake them.
+
+
+'. . . C'est n'estimer rien qu'estioner tout 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 e dire de bons mots.'
+
+
+He drives the poor hack word, 'fool,' as cruelly to the market for
+wit as any of his competitors.  Here is an example, that has been
+held up for eulogy:
+
+
+WITWOUD:  He has brought me a letter from the fool my brother, etc.
+etc.
+
+MIRABEL:  A fool, and your brother, Witwoud?
+
+WITWOUD:  Ay, ay, my half-brother.  My half-brother he is; no
+nearer, upon my honour.
+
+MIRABEL:  Then 'tis possible he may be but half a fool.
+
+
+By evident preparation.  This is a sort of wit one remembers to have
+heard at school, of a brilliant outsider; perhaps to have been
+guilty of oneself, a trifle later.  It was, no doubt, a blaze of
+intellectual fireworks to the bumpkin squire, who came to London to
+go to the theatre and learn manners.
+
+Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary
+force, and a succinctness of style peculiar to him.  He had correct
+judgement, a correct ear, readiness of illustration within a narrow
+range, in snapshots of the obvious at the obvious, and copious
+language.  He hits the mean of a fine style and a natural in
+dialogue.  He is at once precise and voluble.  If you have ever
+thought upon style you will acknowledge it to be a signal
+accomplishment.  In this he is a classic, and is worthy of treading
+a measure with Moliere.  The Way of the World may be read out
+currently at a first glance, so sure are the accents of the emphatic
+meaning to strike the eye, perforce of the crispness and cunning
+polish of the sentences.  You have not to look over them before you
+confide yourself to him; he will carry you safe.  Sheridan imitated,
+but was far from surpassing him.  The flow of boudoir Billingsgate
+in Lady Wishfort is unmatched for the vigour and pointedness of the
+tongue.  It spins along with a final ring, like the voice of Nature
+in a fury, and is, indeed, racy eloquence of the elevated fishwife.
+
+Millamant is an admirable, almost a lovable heroine.  It is a piece
+of genius in a writer to make a woman's manner of speech portray
+her.  You feel sensible of her presence in every line of her
+speaking.  The stipulations with her lover in view of marriage, her
+fine lady's delicacy, and fine lady's easy evasions of indelicacy,
+coquettish airs, and playing with irresolution, which in a common
+maid would be bashfulness, until she submits to 'dwindle into a
+wife,' as she says, form a picture that lives in the frame, and is
+in harmony with Mirabel's description of her:
+
+
+'Here she comes, i' faith, full sail, with her fan spread, and her
+streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.'
+
+
+And, after an interview:
+
+
+'Think of you!  To think of a whirlwind, though 'twere in a
+whirlwind, were a case of more steady contemplation, a very
+tranquillity of mind and mansion.'
+
+
+There is a picturesqueness, as of Millamant and no other, in her
+voice, when she is encouraged to take Mirabel by Mrs. Fainall, who
+is 'sure she has a mind to him':
+
+
+MILLAMANT:  Are you?  I think I have--and the horrid man looks as if
+he thought so too, etc. etc.
+
+
+One hears the tones, and sees the sketch and colour of the whole
+scene in reading it.
+
+Celimene is behind Millamant in vividness.  An air of bewitching
+whimsicality hovers over the graces of this Comic heroine, like the
+lively conversational play of a beautiful mouth.
+
+But in wit she is no rival of Celimene.  What she utters adds to her
+personal witchery, and is not further memorable.  She is a flashing
+portrait, and a type of the superior ladies who do not think, not of
+those who do.  In representing a class, therefore, it is a lower
+class, in the proportion that one of Gainsborough's full-length
+aristocratic women is below the permanent impressiveness of a fair
+Venetian head.
+
+Millamant side by side with Celimene is an example of how far the
+realistic painting of a character can be carried to win our favour;
+and of where it falls short.  Celimene is a woman's mind in
+movement, armed with an ungovernable wit; with perspicacious clear
+eyes for the world, and a very distinct knowledge that she belongs
+to the world, and is most at home in it.  She is attracted to
+Alceste by her esteem for his honesty; she cannot avoid seeing where
+the good sense of the man is diseased.
+
+Rousseau, in his letter to D'Alembert on the subject of the
+Misanthrope, discusses the character of Alceste, as though Moliere
+had put him forth for an absolute example of misanthropy; whereas
+Alceste is only a misanthrope of the circle he finds himself placed
+in:  he has a touching faith in the virtue residing in the country,
+and a critical love of sweet simpleness.  Nor is he the principal
+person of the comedy to which he gives a name.  He is only passively
+comic.  Celimene is the active spirit.  While he is denouncing and
+railing, the trial is imposed upon her to make the best of him, and
+control herself, as much as a witty woman, eagerly courted, can do.
+By appreciating him she practically confesses her faultiness, and
+she is better disposed to meet him half .way than he is to bend an
+inch:  only she is une 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
+which cannot be reproduced] the lover taken in horror, and [Greek
+text] the damsel shorn of her locks, have a promising sound for
+scenes of jealousy and a too masterful display of lordly authority,
+leading to regrets, of the kind known to intemperate men who
+imagined they were fighting with the weaker, as the fragments
+indicate.
+
+Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two,
+the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus.  These two are
+inferior in comic action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander to
+the Andria, the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus:
+but Phormio is a more dashing and amusing convivial parasite than
+the Gnatho of the last-named comedy.  There were numerous rivals of
+whom we know next to nothing--except by the quotations of Athenaeus
+and Plutarch, and the Greek grammarians who cited them to support a
+dictum--in this as in the preceding periods of comedy in Athens, for
+Menander's plays are counted by many scores, and they were crowned
+by the prize only eight times.  The favourite poet with critics, in
+Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if some of his rivals here and
+there surpassed him in comic force, and out-stripped him in
+competition by an appositeness to the occasion that had previously
+in the same way deprived the genius of Aristophanes of its due
+reward in Clouds and Birds, his position as chief of the comic poets
+of his age was unchallenged.  Plutarch very unnecessarily drags
+Aristophanes into a comparison with him, to the confusion of the
+older poet.  Their aims, the matter they dealt in, and the times,
+were quite dissimilar.  But it is no wonder that Plutarch, writing
+when Athenian beauty of style was the delight of his patrons, should
+rank Menander at the highest.  In what degree of faithfulness
+Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of the passage in the
+Adelphi taken from Diphilus, verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenes-
+- the description of the last words of the dying Andrian, and of her
+funeral, for instance--remains conjectural.  For us Terence shares
+with his master the praise of an amenity that is like Elysian
+speech, equable and ever gracious; like the face of the Andrian's
+young sister:
+
+
+'Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.'
+
+
+The celebrated 'flens quam familiariter,' of which the closest
+rendering grounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the
+sorrowful confidingness of a young girl who has lost her sister and
+dearest friend, and has but her lover left to her; 'she turned and
+flung herself on his bosom, weeping as though at home there':  this
+our instinct tells us must be Greek, though hardly finer in Greek.
+Certain lines of Terence, compared with the original fragments, show
+that he embellished them; but his taste was too exquisite for him to
+do other than devote his genius to the honest translation of such
+pieces as the above.  Menander, then; with him, through the affinity
+of sympathy, Terence; and Shakespeare and Moliere have this
+beautiful translucency of language:  and the study of the comic
+poets might be recommended, if for that only.
+
+A singular ill fate befell the writings of Menander.  What we have
+of him in Terence was chosen probably to please the cultivated
+Romans; {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-le, 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of An Essay on Comedy by George Meredith
+
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