AN ESSAY ON COMEDY AND THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRITby George Meredith

_This Essay was first published in 'The New Quarterly Magazine' for April1877_. 

ON THE IDEA OF COMEDY AND OF THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT {1}

Good Comedies are such rare productions, that notwithstanding the wealthof our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy us long torun over the English list. If they are brought to the test I shallpropose, very reputable Comedies will be found unworthy of their station, like the ladies of Arthur's Court when they were reduced to the ordeal ofthe 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 ofcultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current and theperceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotionalperiods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of thesexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understoodwhere there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity. 

Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter, demands morethan sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy. That must be a natal gift inthe Comic poet. The substance he deals with will show him a startlingexhibition of the dyer's hand, if he is without it. People are ready tosurrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast, and sides; allexcept the head: and it is there that he aims. He must be subtle topenetrate. A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him. Thenecessity for the two conditions will explain how it is that we count himduring 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 beover-estimated. 

Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a characterunknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers. 

We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call agelasts; that is tosay, non-laughers; men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which ifyou prick them do not bleed. The old grey boulder-stone that hasfinished its peregrination from the rock to the valley, is as easily tobe set rolling up again as these men laughing. No collision ofcircumstances in our mortal career strikes a light for them. It is butone step from being agelastic to misogelastic, and the [Greek text], thelaughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his dislike as an objection inmorality. 

We have another class of men, who are pleased to consider themselvesantagonists of the foregoing, and whom we may term hypergelasts; theexcessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, thatmay be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so loosely put together thata 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 ofComedy. 

Neither of these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over-laugherswould be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing aperformance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken inour land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For though thestage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived onit, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above thecontention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedywill appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while the other willthink that the speaking of it seriously brings us into violent contrastwith the subject. 

Comedy, we have to admit, was never one of the most honoured of theMuses. She was in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest expressionof the little civilization of men. The light of Athene over the head ofAchilles illuminates the birth of Greek Tragedy. But Comedy rolled inshouting under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar, asDionysus is made to proclaim himself by Aristophanes. Our second Charleswas the patron, of like benignity, of our Comedy of Manners, which begansimilarly as a combative performance, under a licence to deride andoutrage the Puritan, and was here and there Bacchanalian beyond theAristophanic example: worse, inasmuch as a cynical licentiousness is moreabominable than frank filth. An eminent Frenchman judges from thequality of some of the stuff dredged up for the laughter of men and womenwho sat through an Athenian Comic play, that they could have had smalldelicacy in other affairs when they had so little in their choice ofentertainment. Perhaps he does not make sufficient allowance for theregulated licence of plain speaking proper to the festival of the god, and claimed by the Comic poet as his inalienable right, or for the factthat it was a festival in a season of licence, in a city accustomed togive ear to the boldest utterance of both sides of a case. However thatmay be, there can be no question that the men and women who sat throughthe acting of Wycherley's Country Wife were past blushing. Our tenacityof national impressions has caused the word theatre since then to prodthe Puritan nervous system like a satanic instrument; just as one hasknown Anti-Papists, for whom Smithfield was redolent of a sinister smoke, as though they had a later recollection of the place than the lowingherds. Hereditary Puritanism, regarding the stage, is met, to this day, in many families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety. It hassubsided altogether as a power in the profession of morality; but it isan error to suppose it extinct, and unjust also to forget that it hadonce good reason to hate, shun, and rebuke our public shows. 

We shall find ourselves about where the Comic spirit would place us, ifwe stand at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the drum-and-fife supporters of Comedy: 'Comme un point fixe fait remarquerl'emportement des autres, ' as Pascal says. And were there more in thisposition, Comic genius would flourish. 

Our English idea of a Comedy of Manners might be imaged in the person ofa blowsy country girl--say Hoyden, the daughter of Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, who, when at home, 'never disobeyed her father except in the eating ofgreen gooseberries'--transforming to a varnished City madam; with a loudlaugh and a mincing step; the crazy ancestress of an accountably fallendescendant. She bustles prodigiously and is punctually smart in herspeech, always in a fluster to escape from Dulness, as they say the dogson the Nile-banks drink at the river running to avoid the crocodile. Ifthe 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, shallfail to recognise him in that light and airy shape. 

When she has frolicked through her five Acts to surprise you with theinformation that Mr. Aimwell is converted by a sudden death in the worldoutside the scenes into Lord Aimwell, and can marry the lady in the lightof day, it is to the credit of her vivacious nature that she does notanticipate 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 theshot at a burglar in the dark by hurling the pistol after it, so that ifthe 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 hertongue, and effectively, according to the testimony of her admirers. Herwit is at once, like steam in an engine, the motive force and the warningwhistle of her headlong course; and it vanishes like the track of steamwhen 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 swordof the cavalier in the Mall, quick to flash out upon slight provocation, and for a similar office--to wound. Commonly its attitude is entirelypugilistic; two blunt fists rallying and countering. When harmless, aswhen the word 'fool' occurs, or allusions to the state of husband, it hasthe sound of the smack of harlequin's wand upon clown, and is to the sameextent exhilarating. Believe that idle empty laughter is the mostdesirable of recreations, and significant Comedy will seem pale andshallow in comparison. Our popular idea would be hit by the sculpturedgroup of Laughter holding both his sides, while Comedy pummels, by way oftickling him. As to a meaning, she holds that it does not conduce tomaking merry: you might as well carry cannon on a racing-yacht. Moralityis a duenna to be circumvented. This was the view of English Comedy of asagacious essayist, who said that the end of a Comedy would often be thecommencement of a Tragedy, were the curtain to rise again on theperformers. In those old days female modesty was protected by a fan, behind which, and it was of a convenient semicircular breadth, the ladiespresent in the theatre retired at a signal of decorum, to peep, covertlyaskant, or with the option of so peeping, through a prettily fringedeyelet-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-calledComedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders undercity veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask without the facebehind it. 

Elia, whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting itas far as it would go, bewails the extinction of our artificial Comedy, like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatra'sNile-barge; and the sedateness of his plea for a cause condemned even inhis time to the penitentiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous. Whenthe realism of those 'fictitious half-believed personages, ' as he callsthem, had ceased to strike, they were objectionable company, uncaressableas puppets. Their artifices are staringly naked, and have now the effectof a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing, in the morninglight. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been praisedfor ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently sober, and of highreputation, 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'sclothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe, and it must be anexceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on themwith the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet show ofPunch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant recourse totheir fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one of the actors inthat public entertainment who gets possession of the cudgel, is open toquestion: it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced thenational 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 unwholesomefor men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are no betterthan they should be: and they will not, when they have improved inmanners, care much to see themselves as they once were. That comes ofrealism in the Comic art; and it is not public caprice, but theconsequence of a bettering state. {2} The same of an immoral may be saidof realistic exhibitions of a vulgar society. 

The French make a critical distinction in _ce qui remue_ from _ce quiemeut_--that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In therealistic comedy it is an incessant _remuage_--no calm, merely bustlingfigures, and no thought. Excepting Congreve's Way of the World, whichfailed on the stage, there was nothing to keep our comedy alive on itsmerits; neither, with all its realism, true portraiture, nor muchquotable fun, nor idea; neither salt nor soul. 

The French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly forrenovation whenever they have fallen away from it; and their having sucha school is mainly the reason why, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, theyknow men and women more accurately than we do. Moliere followed theHoratian precept, to observe the manners of his age and give hischaracters the colour befitting them at the time. He did not paint inraw realism. He seized his characters firmly for the central purpose ofthe play, stamped them in the idea, and by slightly raising and softeningthe object of study (as in the case of the ex-Huguenot, Duke deMontausier, {3} for the study of the Misanthrope, and, according to St. Simon, the Abbe Roquette for Tartuffe), generalized upon it so as to makeit permanently human. Concede that it is natural for human creatures tolive in society, and Alceste is an imperishable mark of one, though he isdrawn in light outline, without any forcible human colouring. OurEnglish school has not clearly imagined society; and of the mind hoveringabove congregated men and women, it has imagined nothing. The criticswho praise it for its downrightness, and for bringing the situations hometo us, as they admiringly say, cannot but disapprove of Moliere's comedy, which appeals to the individual mind to perceive and participate in thesocial. We have splendid tragedies, we have the most beautiful of poeticplays, and we have literary comedies passingly pleasant to read, andoccasionally to see acted. By literary comedies, I mean comedies ofclassic inspiration, drawn chiefly from Menander and the Greek New Comedythrough Terence; or else comedies of the poet's personal conception, thathave had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations, happy orotherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, andFletcher. 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 realanimation. Probably Justice Greedy would be comic to the audience of acountry booth and to some of our friends. If we have lost our youthfulrelish for the presentation of characters put together to fit a type, wefind it hard to put together the mechanism of a civil smile at hisenumeration of his dishes. Something of the same is to be said ofBobadil, swearing 'by the foot of Pharaoh'; with a reservation, for he ismade to move faster, and to act. The comic of Jonson is a scholar'sexcogitation of the comic; that of Massinger a moralist's. 

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with thecomic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to befound anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but theyare of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by greatpoetic imagination. They are, as it were--I put it to suit my presentcomparison--creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, notgrouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world ofsociety. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of Clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen--marvellous Welshmen!--Benedict andBeatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in thepoetically comic. 

His Comedy of incredible imbroglio belongs to the literary section. Onemay conceive that there was a natural resemblance between him andMenander, both in the scheme and style of his lighter plays. HadShakespeare lived in a later and less emotional, less heroical period ofour history, he might have turned to the painting of manners as well ashumanity. Euripides would probably, in the time of Menander, when Athenswas enslaved but prosperous, have lent his hand to the composition ofromantic comedy. He certainly inspired that fine genius. 

Politically it is accounted a misfortune for France that her noblesthronged to the Court of Louis Quatorze. It was a boon to the comicpoet. He had that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions, the huge pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in fullactivity; vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers, extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians, sonneteeringmarquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids, inter-threading asin a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois circle will notfurnish it, for the middle class must have the brilliant, flippant, independent upper for a spur and a pattern; otherwise it is likely to beinwardly dull as well as outwardly correct. Yet, though the King wasbenevolent toward Moliere, it is not to the French Court that we areindebted for his unrivalled studies of mankind in society. For theamusement of the Court the ballets and farces were written, which aredearer to the rabble upper, as to the rabble lower, class thanintellectual comedy. The French bourgeoisie of Paris were sufficientlyquick-witted and enlightened by education to welcome great works like LeTartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Misanthrope, works that wereperilous ventures on the popular intelligence, big vessels to launch onstreams running to shallows. The Tartuffe hove into view as an enemy'svessel; it offended, not _Dieu mais les devots_, as the Prince de Condeexplained the cabal raised against it to the King. 

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy inteaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of thePrecieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon madepopular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantesexposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity of anexcessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to be idioticin precision. The French had felt the burden of this new nonsense; butthey had to see the comedy several times before they were consoled intheir 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 oneof the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of theopposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood andapplauded. In all countries the middle class presents the public which, fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the worldbest. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading us intosophistries. Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream oflife, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, makeacute 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. Theytake up disdain of it, when its truths appear humiliating: when the factsare not immediately forced on them, they take up the pride ofincredulity. They live in a hazy atmosphere that they suppose an idealone. Humorous writing they will endure, perhaps approve, if it mingleswith pathos to shake and elevate the feelings. They approve of Satire, because, like the beak of the vulture, it smells of carrion, which theyare not. But of Comedy they have a shivering dread, for Comedy enfoldsthem with the wretched host of the world, huddles them with us all in anignoble assimilation, and cannot be used by any exalted variety as ascourge and a broom. Nay, to be an exalted variety is to come under thecalm curious eye of the Comic spirit, and be probed for what you are. Menare seen among them, and very many cultivated women. You may distinguishthem 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: butin the peculiar Paradise of the wilful people who will not see, theexclamation assumes the saving grace. 

Yet should you ask them whether they dislike sound sense, they vow theydo not. And question cultivated women whether it pleases them to beshown moving on an intellectual level with men, they will answer that itdoes; numbers of them claim the situation. Now, Comedy is the fountainof sound sense; not the less perfectly sound on account of the sparkle:and Comedy lifts women to a station offering them free play for theirwit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of soundsense. The higher the Comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy init. Dorine in the Tartuffe is common-sense incarnate, though palpably awaiting-maid. Celimene is undisputed mistress of the same attribute inthe Misanthrope; wiser as a woman than Alceste as man. In Congreve's Wayof the World, Millamant overshadows Mirabel, the sprightliest male figureof English comedy. 

But those two ravishing women, so copious and so choice of speech, whofence with men and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not preferableto be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty, the adorable bundle ofcaprices, very feminine, very sympathetic, of romantic and sentimentalfiction? Our women are taught to think so. The Agnes of the Ecole desFemmes should be a lesson for men. The heroines of Comedy are like womenof the world, not necessarily heartless from being clear-sighted: theyseem so to the sentimentally-reared only for the reason that they usetheir wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or apilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and that of menwith them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely, Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring themto some resemblance. The Comic poet dares to show us men and womencoming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they drawtogether in social life their minds grow liker; just as the philosopherdiscerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched awayto the nursery. Philosopher and Comic poet are of a cousinship in theeye they cast on life: and they are equally unpopular with our wilfulEnglish 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 audienceamong our cultivated middle class that we should expect to supportComedy. The sentimentalist is as averse as the Puritan and as theBacchanalian. 

Our traditions are unfortunate. The public taste is with the idlelaughers, and still inclines to follow them. It may be shown by ananalysis of Wycherley's Plain Dealer, a coarse prose adaption of theMisanthrope, stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized theme to hitthe mark of English appetite, that we have in it the keynote of theComedy of our stage. It is Moliere travestied, with the hoof to his footand hair on the pointed tip of his ear. And how difficult it is forwriters to disentangle themselves from bad traditions is noticeable whenwe find Goldsmith, who had grave command of the Comic in narrative, producing an elegant farce for a Comedy; and Fielding, who was a masterof the Comic both in narrative and in dialogue, not even approaching tothe presentable in farce. 

These bad traditions of Comedy affect us not only on the stage, but inour literature, and may be tracked into our social life. They are theground of the heavy moralizings by which we are outwearied, about Life asa Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, {4} when popular writers, conscious offatigue in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a modish cynicism:perversions of the idea of life, and of the proper esteem for the societywe have wrested from brutishness, and would carry higher. Stock imagesof this description are accepted by the timid and the sensitive, as wellas by the saturnine, quite seriously; for not many look abroad with theirown eyes, fewer still have the habit of thinking for themselves. Life, we know too well, is not a Comedy, but something strangely mixed; nor isComedy a vile mask. The corrupted importation from France was noxious; anoble entertainment spoilt to suit the wretched taste of a villanous age;and the later imitations of it, partly drained of its poison and madedecorous, became tiresome, notwithstanding their fun, in the perpetualrecurring of the same situations, owing to the absence of original studyand vigour of conception. Scene v. Act 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, nodoubt, to the fact of our not producing matter for original study, isrepeated in succession by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it isat second hand, we have it done cynically--or such is the tone; in themanner of 'below stairs. ' Comedy thus treated may be accepted as aversion of the ordinary worldly understanding of our social life; atleast, in accord with the current dicta concerning it. The epigrams canbe made; but it is uninstructive, rather tending to do disservice. Comedyjustly treated, as you find it in Moliere, whom we so clownishlymishandled, the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous reflection uponlife. It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore itcannot be impure. Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield soshrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is notshaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are madeeach to whip himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanelycovetous. Moliere has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to theskin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer herbetter clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and Belise. He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language, thesimplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear reason: it is afountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense, rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever. The wit is of suchpervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning and interest. {5}His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one characterincessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic FrenchPlays: but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation ofan organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, thereis no scandal in the comparison. 

Congreve's Way of the World is an exception to our other comedies, hisown among them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the writing, and the figure of Millamant. The comedy has no idea in it, beyond thestale one, that so the world goes; and it concludes with the jadeddiscovery of a document at a convenient season for the descent of thecurtain. A plot was an afterthought with Congreve. By the help of awooden villain (Maskwell) marked Gallows to the flattest eye, he gets asort of plot in The Double Dealer. {6} His Way of the World might becalled The Conquest of a Town Coquette, and Millamant is a perfectportrait of a coquette, both in her resistance to Mirabel and the mannerof her surrender, and also in her tongue. The wit here is not so salientas in certain passages of Love for Love, where Valentine feigns madnessor retorts on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices in the harmlessness ofwounds to a woman's virtue, if she 'keeps them from air. ' In The Way ofthe World, it appears less prepared in the smartness, and is morediffused in the more characteristic style of the speakers. Here, however, as elsewhere, his famous wit is like a bully-fencer, not ashamedto lay traps for its exhibition, transparently petulant for the trainbetween certain ordinary words and the powder-magazine of theimproprieties to be fired. Contrast the wit of Congreve with Moliere's. That of the first is a Toledo blade, sharp, and wonderfully supple forsteel; cast for duelling, restless in the scabbard, being so pretty whenout of it. To shine, it must have an adversary. Moliere's wit is like arunning brook, with innumerable fresh lights on it at every turn of thewood through which its business is to find a way. It does not run insearch of obstructions, to be noisy over them; but when dead leaves andviler substances are heaped along the course, its natural song isheightened. 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 andcapacious mind, which is always a grave one. Rabelais and La Fontaineare recorded by their countrymen to have been _reveurs_. Few men havebeen graver than Pascal. Few men have been wittier. '

To apply the citation of so great a brain as Pascal's to our countrymanwould 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 asurface wit, neither rising from a depth nor flowing from a spring. 

 'On voit qu'il se travaille a dire de bons mots. '

He drives the poor hack word, 'fool, ' as cruelly to the market for wit asany of his competitors. Here is an example, that has been held up foreulogy:

 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 haveheard at school, of a brilliant outsider; perhaps to have been guilty ofoneself, a trifle later. It was, no doubt, a blaze of intellectualfireworks to the bumpkin squire, who came to London to go to the theatreand 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, acorrect ear, readiness of illustration within a narrow range, insnapshots of the obvious at the obvious, and copious language. He hitsthe mean of a fine style and a natural in dialogue. He is at onceprecise and voluble. If you have ever thought upon style you willacknowledge 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 Worldmay be read out currently at a first glance, so sure are the accents ofthe emphatic meaning to strike the eye, perforce of the crispness andcunning polish of the sentences. You have not to look over them beforeyou confide yourself to him; he will carry you safe. Sheridan imitated, but was far from surpassing him. The flow of boudoir Billingsgate inLady 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, andis, indeed, racy eloquence of the elevated fishwife. 

Millamant is an admirable, almost a lovable heroine. It is a piece ofgenius in a writer to make a woman's manner of speech portray her. Youfeel sensible of her presence in every line of her speaking. Thestipulations with her lover in view of marriage, her fine lady'sdelicacy, and fine lady's easy evasions of indelicacy, coquettish airs, and playing with irresolution, which in a common maid would bebashfulness, 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'sdescription 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 shehas 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 inreading it. 

Celimene is behind Millamant in vividness. An air of bewitchingwhimsicality hovers over the graces of this Comic heroine, like thelively conversational play of a beautiful mouth. 

But in wit she is no rival of Celimene. What she utters adds to herpersonal witchery, and is not further memorable. She is a flashingportrait, and a type of the superior ladies who do not think, not ofthose who do. In representing a class, therefore, it is a lower class, in the proportion that one of Gainsborough's full-length aristocraticwomen is below the permanent impressiveness of a fair Venetian head. 

Millamant side by side with Celimene is an example of how far therealistic painting of a character can be carried to win our favour; andof where it falls short. Celimene is a woman's mind in movement, armedwith an ungovernable wit; with perspicacious clear eyes for the world, and a very distinct knowledge that she belongs to the world, and is mostat home in it. She is attracted to Alceste by her esteem for hishonesty; she cannot avoid seeing where the good sense of the man isdiseased. 

Rousseau, in his letter to D'Alembert on the subject of the Misanthrope, discusses the character of Alceste, as though Moliere had put him forthfor an absolute example of misanthropy; whereas Alceste is only amisanthrope of the circle he finds himself placed in: he has a touchingfaith in the virtue residing in the country, and a critical love of sweetsimpleness. Nor is he the principal person of the comedy to which hegives a name. He is only passively comic. Celimene is the activespirit. While he is denouncing and railing, the trial is imposed uponher to make the best of him, and control herself, as much as a wittywoman, eagerly courted, can do. By appreciating him she practicallyconfesses her faultiness, and she is better disposed to meet him half-waythan he is to bend an inch: only she is _une ame de vingt ans_, the worldis pleasant, and if the gilded flies of the Court are silly, uncompromising fanatics have their ridiculous features as well. Can sheabandon the life they make agreeable to her, for a man who will not beguided by the common sense of his class; and who insists on plunging intoone extreme--equal to suicide in her eyes--to avoid another? That is thecomic question of the Misanthrope. Why will he not continue to mix withthe world smoothly, appeased by the flattery of her secret and reallysincere preference of him, and taking his revenge in satire of it, as shedoes from her own not very lofty standard, and will by and by do from hismore exalted one?

Celimene is worldliness: Alceste is unworldliness. It does not quiteimply unselfishness; and that is perceived by her shrewd head. Still heis a very uncommon figure in her circle, and she esteems him, _l'hommeaux rubans verts_, 'who sometimes diverts but more often horribly vexesher, ' 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 betamed, or silent, or unsuspicious, and is the perpetual obstacle to theirgood accord. He is that melancholy person, the critic of everybody savehimself; intensely sensitive to the faults of others, wounded by them; inlove with his own indubitable honesty, and with his ideal of the simplerform of life befitting it: qualities which constitute the satirist. Heis a Jean Jacques of the Court. His proposal to Celimene when he pardonsher, that she should follow him in flying humankind, and his frenzy ofdetestation of her at her refusal, are thoroughly in the mood of JeanJacques. He is an impracticable creature of a priceless virtue; butCelimene may feel that to fly with him to the desert: that is from theCourt 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, likethat poor princess who ran away with the waiting-man, and when both werehungry in the forest, was ordered to give him flesh. She is a _fieffee_coquette, rejoicing in her wit and her attractions, and distinguished byher inclination for Alceste in the midst of her many other lovers; onlyshe finds it hard to cut them off--what woman with a train does not?--andwhen the exposure of her naughty wit has laid her under their rebuke, shewill do the utmost she can: she will give her hand to honesty, but shecannot quite abandon worldliness. She would be unwise if she did. 

The fable is thin. Our pungent contrivers of plots would see noindication of life in the outlines. The life of the comedy is in theidea. As with the singing of the sky-lark out of sight, you must lovethe bird to be attentive to the song, so in this highest flight of theComic Muse, you must love pure Comedy warmly to understand theMisanthrope: you must be receptive of the idea of Comedy. And to loveComedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enoughnot to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good. 

Menander wrote a comedy called Misogynes, said to have been the mostcelebrated of his works. This misogynist is a married man, according tothe fragment surviving, and is a hater of women through hatred of hiswife. He generalizes upon them from the example of this lamentableadjunct of his fortunes, and seems to have got the worst of it in thecontest with her, which is like the issue in reality, in the politeworld. He seems also to have deserved it, which may be as true to thecopy. But we are unable to say whether the wife was a good voice of hersex: or how far Menander in this instance raised the idea of woman fromthe mire it was plunged into by the comic poets, or rather satiricdramatists, of the middle period of Greek Comedy preceding him and theNew Comedy, who devoted their wit chiefly to the abuse, and for adiversity, to the eulogy of extra-mural ladies of conspicuous fame. Menander idealized them without purposely elevating. He satirized acertain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neitherprofessionally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two Andrians, Chrysis and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for tenderness. But thecondition of honest women in his day did not permit of the freedom ofaction and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and consequently it is belowour mark of pure Comedy. 

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the love ofme love Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns are able tolove Menander; and what is preserved of Terence has not apparently givenus the best of the friend of Epicurus. [Greek text] the lover taken inhorror, and [Greek text] the damsel shorn of her locks, have a promisingsound for scenes of jealousy and a too masterful display of lordlyauthority, leading to regrets, of the kind known to intemperate men whoimagined they were fighting with the weaker, as the fragments indicate. 

Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two, theHecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are inferior incomic action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander to the Andria, theAdelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: but Phormio is a moredashing and amusing convivial parasite than the Gnatho of the last-namedcomedy. There were numerous rivals of whom we know next tonothing--except by the quotations of Athenaeus and Plutarch, and theGreek grammarians who cited them to support a dictum--in this as in thepreceding periods of comedy in Athens, for Menander's plays are countedby many scores, and they were crowned by the prize only eight times. Thefavourite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and ifsome of his rivals here and there surpassed him in comic force, and out-stripped him in competition by an appositeness to the occasion that hadpreviously in the same way deprived the genius of Aristophanes of its duereward in Clouds and Birds, his position as chief of the comic poets ofhis age was unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily drags Aristophanesinto a comparison with him, to the confusion of the older poet. Theiraims, the matter they dealt in, and the times, were quite dissimilar. Butit is no wonder that Plutarch, writing when Athenian beauty of style wasthe delight of his patrons, should rank Menander at the highest. In whatdegree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states ofthe passage in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus, _verbum de verbo_ in thelovelier scenes--the description of the last words of the dying Andrian, and of her funeral, for instance--remains conjectural. For us Terenceshares with his master the praise of an amenity that is like Elysianspeech, equable and ever gracious; like the face of the Andrian's youngsister:

 'Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra. '

The celebrated 'flens quam familiariter, ' of which the closest renderinggrounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the sorrowful confidingnessof a young girl who has lost her sister and dearest friend, and has buther lover left to her; 'she turned and flung herself on his bosom, weeping as though at home there': this our instinct tells us must beGreek, though hardly finer in Greek. Certain lines of Terence, comparedwith the original fragments, show that he embellished them; but his tastewas too exquisite for him to do other than devote his genius to thehonest translation of such pieces as the above. Menander, then; withhim, through the affinity of sympathy, Terence; and Shakespeare andMoliere have this beautiful translucency of language: and the study ofthe comic poets might be recommended, if for that only. 

A singular ill fate befell the writings of Menander. What we have of himin Terence was chosen probably to please the cultivated Romans; {8} andis a romantic play with a comic intrigue, obtained in two instances, theAndria and the Eunuchus, by rolling a couple of his originals into one. The titles of certain of the lost plays indicate the comic illuminingcharacter; a Self-pitier, a Self-chastiser, an Ill-tempered man, aSuperstitious, an Incredulous, etc. , point to suggestive domestic themes. 

Terence forwarded manuscript translations from Greece, that sufferedshipwreck; he, who could have restored the treasure, died on the wayhome. The zealots of Byzantium completed the work of destruction. So wehave the four comedies of Terence, numbering six of Menander, with a fewsketches of plots--one of them, the Thesaurus, introduces a miser, whomwe should have liked to contrast with Harpagon--and a multitude of smallfragments of a sententious cast, fitted for quotation. Enough remains tomake his greatness felt. 

Without undervaluing other writers of Comedy, I think it may be said thatMenander and Moliere stand alone specially as comic poets of the feelingsand the idea. In each of them there is a conception of the Comic thatrefines even to pain, as in the Menedemus of the Heautontimorumenus, andin the Misanthrope. Menander and Moliere have given the principal typesto Comedy hitherto. The Micio and Demea of the Adelphi, with theiropposing views of the proper management of youth, are still alive; theSganarelles and Arnolphes of the Ecole des Maris and the Ecole desFemmes, 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. Ladiesthat soar in the realms of Rose-Pink, whose language wears the noddingplumes of intellectual conceit, are traceable to Philaminte and Belise ofthe Femmes Savantes: and the mordant witty women have the tongue ofCelimene. The reason is, that these two poets idealized upon life: thefoundation of their types is real and in the quick, but they painted withspiritual strength, which is the solid in Art. 

The idealistic conceptions of Comedy gives breadth and opportunities ofdaring to Comic genius, and helps to solve the difficulties it creates. How, for example, shall an audience be assured that an evident andmonstrous dupe is actually deceived without being an absolute fool? InLe Tartuffe the note of high Comedy strikes when Orgon on his return homehears of his idol's excellent appetite. '_Le pauvre homme_!' heexclaims. He is told that the wife of his bosom has been unwell. '_EtTartuffe_?' he asks, impatient to hear him spoken of, his mind suffusedwith the thought of Tartuffe, crazy with tenderness, and again he croons, '_Le pauvre homme_!' It is the mother's cry of pitying delight at anurse's recital of the feats in young animal gluttony of her cherishedinfant. After this masterstroke of the Comic, you not only put faith inOrgon'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 theinstance he gives of the sublime humanity of Tartuffe:

 'Un rien presque suffit pour le scandaliser, Jusque-la, qu'il se vint l'autre jour accuser D'avoir pris une puce en faisant sa priere, Et de l'avoir tuee avec trop de colere. '

And to have killed it too wrathfully! Translating Moliere is likehumming an air one has heard performed by an accomplished violinist ofthe pure tones without flourish. 

Orgon, awakening to find another dupe in Madame Pernelle, incredulous ofthe revelations which have at last opened his own besotted eyes, is ascene of the double Comic, vivified by the spell previously cast on themind. There we feel the power of the poet's creation; and in the sharplight of that sudden turn the humanity is livelier than any realisticwork can make it. 

Italian Comedy gives many hints for a Tartuffe; but they may be found inBoccaccio, as well as in Machiavelli's Mandragola. The Frate Timoteo ofthis piece is only a very oily friar, compliantly assisting an intriguewith ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the mildest word) for payment. FrateTimoteo 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 Italiangallery. Goldoni sketched the Venetian manners of the decadence of theRepublic with a French pencil, and was an Italian Scribe in style. 

The Spanish stage is richer in such Comedies as that which furnished theidea of the Menteur to Corneille. But you must force yourself to believethat this liar is not forcing his vein when he piles lie upon lie. Thereis no preceding touch to win the mind to credulity. Spanish Comedy isgenerally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as ofmarionnettes. The Comedy might be performed by a troop of the _corps deballet_; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to ananimated shuffle of feet. It is, in fact, something other than the trueidea of Comedy. Where the sexes are separated, men and women grow, asthe Portuguese call it, _affaimados_ of one another, famine-stricken; andall the tragic elements are on the stage. Don Juan is a comic characterthat sends souls flying: nor does the humour of the breaking of a dozenwomen's hearts conciliate the Comic Muse with the drawing of blood. 

German attempts at Comedy remind one vividly of Heine's image of hiscountry in the dancing of Atta Troll. Lessing tried his hand at it, witha sobering effect upon readers. The intention to produce the reverseeffect is just visible, and therein, like the portly graces of the poorold Pyrenean Bear poising and twirling on his right hind-leg and hisleft, consists the fun. Jean Paul Richter gives the best edition of theGerman Comic in the contrast of Siebenkas with his Lenette. A light ofthe Comic is in Goethe; enough to complete the splendid figure of theman, but no more. 

The German literary laugh, like the timed awakenings of their Barbarossain the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rathermonstrous--never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes ofunrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiarhumours of their little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yetattained to: sentimentalism waylays them in the flight. Here and there aVolkslied 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, thatseems to hesitate between the skull and the embryo, and reaches itsperfection in breadth from the pulling of two square fingers at thecorners of the mouth, one must have aid of 'the good Rhine wine, ' and beof German blood unmixed besides. This treble-Dutch lumbersomeness of theComic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea of Comedy, and the poorvoice allowed to women in German domestic life will account for theabsence of comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that land. I shallspeak of it again in the second section of this lecture. 

Eastward you have total silence of Comedy among a people intenselysusceptible to laughter, as the Arabian Nights will testify. Where theveil is over women's-faces, you cannot have society, without which thesenses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is driven to the gutters ofgrossness to slake its thirst. Arabs in this respect are worse thanItalians--much worse than Germans; just in the degree that their systemof treating women is worse. 

M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the excellent French essayist and master ofcritical style, tells of a conversation he had once with an Arabgentleman on the topic of the different management of these difficultcreatures in Orient and in Occident: and the Arab spoke in praise of manygood results of the greater freedom enjoyed by Western ladies, and thecharm of conversing with them. He was questioned why his countrymen tookno measures to grant them something of that kind of liberty. He jumpedout of his individuality in a twinkling, and entered into the sentimentsof his race, replying, from the pinnacle of a splendid conceit, withaffected humility of manner: '_You_ can look on them withoutperturbation--but _we_!' . . . And after this profoundly comicinterjection, he added, in deep tones, 'The very face of a woman!' Ourrepresentative of temperate notions demurely consented that the Arab'spride of inflammability should insist on the prudery of the veil as thecivilizing medium of his race. 

There has been fun in Bagdad. But there never will be civilization whereComedy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social equalityof the sexes. I am not quoting the Arab to exhort and disturb thesomnolent East; rather for cultivated women to recognize that the ComicMuse is one of their best friends. They are blind to their interests inswelling the ranks of the sentimentalists. Let them look with theirclearest vision abroad and at home. They will see that where they haveno 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 sentimentalversion of them. Yet the Comic will out, as they would know if theylistened to some of the private conversations of men whose minds areundirected by the Comic Muse: as the sentimental man, to hisastonishment, would know likewise, if he in similar fashion could receivea 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, andwhat has been granted them by a fair civilization--there, and onlywaiting to be transplanted from life to the stage, or the novel, or thepoem, pure Comedy flourishes, and is, as it would help them to be, thesweetest of diversions, the wisest of delightful companions. 

Now, to look about us in the present time, I think it will beacknowledged that in neglecting the cultivation of the Comic idea, we arelosing the aid of a powerful auxiliar. You see Folly perpetually slidinginto new shapes in a society possessed of wealth and leisure, with manywhims, many strange ailments and strange doctors. Plenty of common-senseis in the world to thrust her back when she pretends to empire. But thefirst-born of common-sense, the vigilant Comic, which is the genius ofthoughtful laughter, which would readily extinguish her at the outset, isnot serving as a public advocate. 

You will have noticed the disposition of common-sense, under pressure ofsome 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 Comicidea. For Folly is the natural prey of the Comic, known to it in all hertransformations, in every disguise; and it is with the springing delightof hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives her chase, neverfretting, 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, orcomfortably narrow, not perfectly humane? If we do not feign when we saythat we despise Folly, we shut the brain. There is a disdainful attitudein the presence of Folly, partaking of the foolishness to Comicperception: and anger is not much less foolish than disdain. Thestruggle we have to conduct is essence against essence. Let no one doubtof the sequel when this emanation of what is firmest in us is launched tostrike down the daughter of Unreason and Sentimentalism: such beingFolly's parentage, when it is respectable. 

Our modern system of combating her is too long defensive, and carried ontoo ploddingly with concrete engines of war in the attack. She has timeto get behind entrenchments. She is ready to stand a siege, before theheavily armed man of science and the writer of the leading article orelaborate essay have primed their big guns. It should be remembered thatshe has charms for the multitude; and an English multitude seeing hermake a gallant fight of it will be half in love with her, certainlywilling to lend her a cheer. Benevolent subscriptions assist her to hireher own man of science, her own organ in the Press. If ultimately she iscast 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 thoughtsober 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 andmen with minds for whom there is no pole-star in intellectual navigation. Comedy, or the Comic element, is the specific for the poison of delusionwhile 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 whenyou do call. You will find the very invocation of them act on you like arenovating 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. Theyabound, and the organisation directing their machinery to shoot them inthe wake of the leading article and the popular sentiment is good. 

But the Comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter; andthe sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether in publiclife or private, and particularly when the feelings are excited. 

The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of usinghumouristic phrase: the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables totreat of the infinitely little. And it really may be humorous, of akind, 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 advancedage. He had been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later years up tothe period of his death. There was a report of Duke Pasquier that he wasa man of profound egoism. Hence an argument arose, and was warmlysustained, upon the excessive selfishness of those who, in a world oftroubles, and calls to action, and innumerable duties, husband theirstrength for the sake of living on. Can it be possible, the argumentran, for a truly generous heart to continue beating up to the age of ahundred? Duke Pasquier was not without his defenders, who likened him tothe 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, thatare assured they are out of the eye of their master, and now and thenindulge in an imitation of him. And well might it be supposed that theComic idea was asleep, not overlooking them! It resolved at last tothis, that either Duke Pasquier was a scandal on our humanity in clingingto life so long, or that he honoured it by so sturdy a resistance to theenemy. As one who has entangled himself in a labyrinth is glad to getout again at the entrance, the argument ran about to conclude with itscommencement. 

Now, imagine a master of the Comic treating this theme, and particularlythe argument on it. Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of THE CENTENARIAN, with choric praises of heroical early death, and the same of a stubbornvitality, and the poet laughing at the chorus; and the grand question forcontention in dialogue, as to the exact age when a man should die, to theidentical minute, that he may preserve the respect of his fellows, followed by a systematic attempt to make an accurate measurement inparallel lines, with a tough rope-yarn by one party, and a string ofyawns by the other, of the veteran's power of enduring life, and ourcapacity for enduring _him_, with tremendous pulling on both sides. 

Would not the Comic view of the discussion illumine it and the disputantslike very lightning? There are questions, as well as persons, that onlythe Comic can fitly touch. 

Aristophanes would probably have crowned the ancient tree, with theconsolatory observation to the haggard line of long-expectant heirs ofthe Centenarian, that they live to see the blessedness of coming of astrong stock. The shafts of his ridicule would mainly have been aimed atthe disputants. For the sole ground of the argument was the old man'scharacter, and sophists are not needed to demonstrate that we can verysoon have too much of a bad thing. A Centenarian does not necessarilyprovoke the Comic idea, nor does the corpse of a duke. It is notprovoked in the order of nature, until we draw its penetratingattentiveness to some circumstance with which we have been mixing ourprivate interests, or our speculative obfuscation. Dulness, insensibleto the Comic, has the privilege of arousing it; and the laying of a dullfinger on matters of human life is the surest method of establishingelectrical communications with a battery of laughter--where the Comicidea is prevalent. 

But if the Comic idea prevailed with us, and we had an Aristophanes tobarb and wing it, we should be breathing air of Athens. Prosers nowpouring forth on us like public fountains would be cut short in thestreet and left blinking, dumb as pillar-posts, with letters thrust intotheir mouths. We should throw off incubus, our dreadful familiar--bysome called boredom--whom it is our present humiliation to be just aliveenough to loathe, never quick enough to foil. There would be a brightand positive, clear Hellenic perception of facts. The vapours ofUnreason and Sentimentalism would be blown away before they wereproductive. Where would Pessimist and Optimist be? They would in anycase have a diminished audience. Yet possibly the change of despots, from good-natured old obtuseness to keen-edged intelligence, which is bynature merciless, would be more than we could bear. The rupture of thelink between dull people, consisting in the fraternal agreement thatsomething is too clever for them, and a shot beyond them, is not to bethought of lightly; for, slender though the link may seem, it isequivalent to a cement forming a concrete of dense cohesion, verydesirable in the estimation of the statesman. 

A political Aristophanes, taking advantage of his lyrical Bacchiclicence, was found too much for political Athens. I would not ask tohave him revived, but that the sharp light of such a spirit as his mightbe with us to strike now and then on public affairs, public themes, tomake them spin along more briskly. 

He hated with the politician's fervour the sophist who corruptedsimplicity of thought, the poet who destroyed purity of style, thedemagogue, 'the saw-toothed monster, ' who, as he conceived, chicaned themob, and he held his own against them by strength of laughter, untilfines, the curtailing of his Comic licence in the chorus, and ultimatelythe ruin of Athens, which could no longer support the expense of thechorus, threw him altogether on dialogue, and brought him under the law. After the catastrophe, the poet, who had ever been gazing back at the menof Marathon and Salamis, must have felt that he had foreseen it; and thathe was wise when he pleaded for peace, and derided military coxcombry, and the captious old creature Demus, we can admit. He had the Comicpoet's gift of common-sense--which does not always include politicalintelligence; yet his political tendency raised him above the Old Comedyturn for uproarious farce. He abused Socrates, but Xenophon, thedisciple of Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the Ten Thousand. Aristophanes might say that if his warnings had been followed there wouldhave been no such thing as a mercenary Greek expedition under Cyrus. Athens, however, was on a landslip, falling; none could arrest it. Togaze back, to uphold the old times, was a most natural conservatism, andfruitless. The aloe had bloomed. Whether right or wrong in his politicsand his criticisms, and bearing in mind the instruments he played on andthe audience he had to win, there is an idea in his comedies: it is theIdea of Good Citizenship. 

He is not likely to be revived. He stands, like Shakespeare, anunapproachable. 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 rivalsCratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are tobelieve him, who in their extraordinary Donnybrook Fair of the day ofComedy, 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 certaingreatness. We may build up a conception of his powers if we mountRabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, givehim 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 minorsare vain, and cry for excuse. Supposing Wilkes for leading man in acountry constantly plunging into war under some plumed Lamachus, withenemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and aSamuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I thinkit gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes. Thislaughing bald-pate, as he calls himself, was a Titanic pamphleteer, usinglaughter for his political weapon; a laughter without scruple, thelaughter of Hercules. He was primed with wit, as with the garlic hespeaks of giving to the game-cocks, to make them fight the better. Andhe was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, with the homely song of a jollynational poet, and a poet of such feeling that the comic mask is at timesno broader than a cloth on a face to show the serious features of ourcommon likeness. He is not to be revived; but if his method werestudied, some of the fire in him would come to us, and we might berevived. 

Taking them generally, the English public are most in sympathy with thisprimitive Aristophanic comedy, wherein the comic is capped by thegrotesque, irony tips the wit, and satire is a naked sword. They havethe basis of the Comic in them: an esteem for common-sense. Theycordially dislike the reverse of it. They have a rich laugh, though itis not the _gros rire_ of the Gaul tossing _gros sel_, nor the polishedFrenchman's mentally digestive laugh. And if they have now, like amonarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many jesters kicking the dictionaryabout, to let them reflect that they are dull, occasionally, like thepensive 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 seethat something ails them. How much even the better order of them willendure, without a thought of the defensive, when the person afflictingthem is protected from satire, we read in Memoirs of a Preceding Age, where the vulgarly tyrannous hostess of a great house of receptionshuffled the guests and played them like a pack of cards, with her exactestimate of the strength of each one printed on them: and still thishouse continued to be the most popular in England; nor did the lady everappear in print or on the boards as the comic type that she was. 

It has been suggested that they have not yet spiritually comprehended thesignification of living in society; for who are cheerfuller, brisker ofwit, in the fields, and as explorers, colonisers, backwoodsmen? They arehappy in rough exercise, and also in complete repose. The intermediatecondition, when they are called upon to talk to one another, upon otherthan affairs of business or their hobbies, reveals them wearing a curiouslook of vacancy, as it were the socket of an eye wanting. The Comic isperpetually springing up in social life, and, it oppresses them from notbeing perceived. 

Thus, at a dinner-party, one of the guests, who happens to have enrolledhimself in a Burial Company, politely entreats the others to inscribetheir names as shareholders, expatiating on the advantages accruing tothem in the event of their very possible speedy death, the salubrity ofthe site, the aptitude of the soil for a quick consumption of theirremains, etc. ; and they drink sadness from the incongruous man, andconceive indigestion, not seeing him in a sharply defined light, thatwould bid them taste the comic of him. Or it is mentioned that a newlyelected member of our Parliament celebrates his arrival at eminence bythe publication of a book on cab-fares, dedicated to a beloved femalerelative deceased, and the comment on it is the word 'Indeed. ' But, merely for a contrast, turn to a not uncommon scene of yesterday in thehunting-field, where a brilliant young rider, having broken his collar-bone, trots away very soon after, against medical interdict, half puttogether in splinters, to the most distant meet of his neighbourhood, sure of escaping his doctor, who is the first person he encounters. 'Icame here purposely to avoid you, ' says the patient. 'I came herepurposely to take care of you, ' says the doctor. Off they go, and cometo a swollen brook. The patient clears it handsomely: the doctor tumblesin. All the field are alive with the heartiest relish of every incidentand every cross-light on it; and dull would the man have been thought whohad not his word to say about it when riding home. 

In our prose literature we have had delightful Comic writers. BesidesFielding and Goldsmith, there is Miss Austen, whose Emma and Mr. Eltonmight walk straight into a comedy, were the plot arranged for them. Galt's neglected novels have some characters and strokes of shrewdcomedy. In our poetic literature the comic is delicate and gracefulabove the touch of Italian and French. Generally, however, the Englishelect excel in satire, and they are noble humourists. The nationaldisposition is for hard-hitting, with a moral purpose to sanction it; orfor a rosy, sometimes a larmoyant, geniality, not unmanly in its vergingupon tenderness, and with a singular attraction for thick-headedness, todecorate it with asses' ears and the most beautiful sylvan haloes. Butthe Comic is a different spirit. 

You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able todetect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and moreby being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, andaccepting the correction their image of you proposes. 

Each one of an affectionate couple may be willing, as we say, to die forthe other, yet unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the right moment;but if the wits were sufficiently quick for them to perceive that theyare in a comic situation, as affectionate couples must be when theyquarrel, they would not wait for the moon or the almanac, or a Dorine, tobring back the flood-tide of tender feelings, that they should join handsand lips. 

If you detect the ridicule, and your kindliness is chilled by it, you areslipping 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 whetherindeed 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 yourneighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as youexpose, it is a spirit of Humour that is moving you. 

The Comic, which is the perceptive, is the governing spirit, awakeningand giving aim to these powers of laughter, but it is not to beconfounded with them: it enfolds a thinner form of them, differing fromsatire, in not sharply driving into the quivering sensibilities, and fromhumour, in not comforting them and tucking them up, or indicating abroader 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 trialin which the condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of theopposite party; for it is not satiric, it is not humorous; yet it isimmensely 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 shouldsuppose Jonathan to be giving play to his humour. I may have dreamedthis or had it suggested to me, for on referring to Jonathan Wild, I donot find it. 

Apply the case to the man of deep wit, who is ever certain of hiscondemnation by the opposite party, and then it ceases to be comic, andwill be satiric. 

The look of Fielding upon Richardson is essentially comic. His method ofcorrecting the sentimental writer is a mixture of the comic and thehumorous. Parson Adams is a creation of humour. But both the conceptionand the presentation of Alceste and of Tartuffe, of Celimene andPhilaminte, are purely comic, addressed to the intellect: there is nohumour in them, and they refresh the intellect they quicken to detecttheir comedy, by force of the contrast they offer between themselves andthe wiser world about them; that is to say, society, or that assemblageof minds whereof the Comic spirit has its origin. 

Byron had splendid powers of humour, and the most poetic satire that wehave example of, fusing at times to hard irony. He had no strong comicsense, or he would not have taken an anti-social position, which isdirectly opposed to the Comic; and in his philosophy, judged byphilosophers, he is a comic figure, by reason of this deficiency. 'Sobald er philosophirt ist er ein Kind, ' Goethe says of him. Carlyle seeshim in this comic light, treats him in the humorous manner. 

The Satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on astorage of bile. 

The Ironeist is one thing or another, according to his caprice. Irony isthe 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 tobe seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake itsintention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures ofambiguity. 

The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to thefeelings and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. Butthe humourist of high has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of theComic poet. 

Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him. Thejuxtaposition of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, theopposition of their natures most humorous. They are as different as thetwo hemispheres in the time of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound inone by laughter. The knight's great aims and constant mishaps, hischivalrous valiancy exercised on absurd objects, his good sense along thehighroad of the craziest of expeditions; the compassion he plucks out ofderision, and the admirable figure he preserves while stalking throughthe frantically grotesque and burlesque assailing him, are in theloftiest moods of humour, fusing the Tragic sentiment with the Comicnarrative. 

The stroke of the great humourist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedyin his laughter. 

Taking a living great, though not creative, humourist to guide ourdescription: the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons offestival; he sees visions of primitive man capering preposterously underthe gorgeous robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on fire when we wearsolemnity, if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve. Finite andinfinite flash from one to the other with him, lending him a two-edgedthought that peeps out of his peacefullest lines by fits, like thelantern of the fire-watcher at windows, going the rounds at night. Thecomportment and performances of men in society are to him, by the vividcomparison with their mortality, more grotesque than respectable. Butask yourself, Is he always to be relied on for justness? He will flystraight as the emissary eagle back to Jove at the true Hero. He willalso make as determined a swift descent upon the man of his wilfulchoice, whom we cannot distinguish as a true one. This vast power ofhis, built up of the feelings and the intellect in union, is oftenwanting in proportion and in discretion. Humourists touching uponHistory or Society are given to be capricious. They are, as in the caseof Sterne, given to be sentimental; for with them the feelings areprimary, as with singers. Comedy, on the other hand, is aninterpretation of the general mind, and is for that reason of necessitykept in restraint. The French lay marked stress on _mesure et gout_, andthey own how much they owe to Moliere for leading them in simple justnessand 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 societyhe depicts; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of men'sintellects, with reference to the operation of the social world upontheir characters. He is not concerned with beginnings or endings orsurroundings, but with what you are now weaving. To understand his workand value it, you must have a sober liking of your kind and a soberestimate of our civilized qualities. The aim and business of the Comicpoet are misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor his point of viewtaken, when he is accused of dishonouring our nature and being hostile tosentiment, tending to spitefulness and making an unfair use of laughter. Those who detect irony in Comedy do so because they choose to see it inlife. Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than thatit makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to Comicperception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in aforlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation. CalebBalderstone, in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble householdin 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 comedyof the latter, is to betray dulness of vision. Humourist and Satiristfrequently hunt together as Ironeists in pursuit of the grotesque, to theexclusion of the Comic. That was an affecting moment in the history ofthe Prince Regent, when the First Gentleman of Europe burst into tears ata sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell's on the cut of his coat. Humour, Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their common prey. The Comicspirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into action, it would befarcical. It is too gross for Comedy. 

Incidents of a kind casting ridicule on our unfortunate nature instead ofour conventional life, provoke derisive laughter, which thwarts the Comicidea. But derision is foiled by the play of the intellect. Most ofdoubtful causes in contest are open to Comic interpretation, and anyintellectual pleading of a doubtful cause contains germs of an Idea ofComedy. 

The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face. The laughterof Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile;often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the minddirects it; and it might be called the humour of the mind. 

One excellent test of the civilization of a country, as I have said, Itake to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test oftrue Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter. 

If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and itis the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, whencontemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than thelight flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful;never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attachedto them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features arestudied. It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurksat the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of halftension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once abig round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress liftedby gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order ofthe smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richnessrather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitousobservation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart onits chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men's future uponearth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the presentdoes; 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 inidolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planningshort-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance withtheir professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws bindingthem 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 anoblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That isthe Comic Spirit. 

Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to denythe existence of a mind of man where minds of men are in workingconjunction. 

You must, as I have said, believe that our state of society is founded incommon-sense, otherwise you will not be struck by the contrasts the ComicSpirit perceives, or have it to look to for your consolation. You will, in fact, be standing in that peculiar oblique beam of light, yourselfilluminated to the general eye as the very object of chase and doomedquarry of the thing obscure to you. But to feel its presence and to seeit is your assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you in whatyou are experiencing: and this of itself spares you the pain of satiricalheat, and the bitter craving to strike heavy blows. You share thesublime of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merelydemonstrate their foolishness. Moliere was contented to revenge himselfon the critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique del'Ecole des Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest ofstudies in criticism. A perception of the comic spirit gives highfellowship. You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest weknow of in connection with our old world, which is not supermundane. Lookthere for your unchallengeable upper class! You feel that you are one ofthis our civilized community, that you cannot escape from it, and wouldnot if you could. Good hope sustains you; weariness does not overwhelmyou; in isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride is greatlymoderated. Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you from worldsof imagination or of devotion. The Comic spirit is not hostile to thesweetest songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it: Shakespeareoverflows: there is a mild moon's ray of it (pale with super-refinementthrough 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 isonly hostile to the priestly element, when that, by baleful swelling, transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office: and then, in extremecases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp: as, forexample, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere: at whichthe dark angels may, but men do not laugh. 

We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and theworshipful may be in alliance: I know not how far comic, or how muchassisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of itsappearance: at least they are popular, they are said to win the ear. Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful andthe brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by theComic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree thatit enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when one ofthe sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like reassuringdaylight. You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that you take itin, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air for food. Thatwhich you give out--the joyful roar--is not the better part; let that goto good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs. Aristophanes promiseshis auditors that if they will retain the ideas of the comic poetcarefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their garments shall smellodoriferous of wisdom throughout the year. The boast will not be thoughtan empty one by those who have choice friends that have stockedthemselves according to his directions. Such treasuries of sparklinglaughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is astep in civilization. To shrink from being an object of it is a step incultivation. We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter theywill laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but we know likewise that thelarger natures are distinguished by the great breadth of their power oflaughter, and no one really loving Moliere is refined by that love todespise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it may be that the lover ofAristophanes will not have risen to the height of Moliere. Embrace themboth, and you have the whole scale of laughter in your breast. Nothingin the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene in The Frogs, when Bacchusand Xanthias receive their thrashings from the hands of businesslikeOEacus, to discover which is the divinity of the two, by hisimperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and each, under theobligation of not crying out, makes believe that his horrible bellow--thegod'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: andthe 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 theManner of the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract oflaughter. But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of themind. Moliere's laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as lightto our nature, as colour to our thoughts. The Misanthrope and theTartuffe have no audible laughter; but the characters are steeped in thecomic spirit. They quicken the mind through laughter, from coming out ofthe mind; and the mind accepts them because they are clearinterpretations of certain chapters of the Book lying open before us all. Between these two stand Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the richer laughof 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 soundharsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with asense of the distinction. You will fancy you have changed yourhabitation to a planet remoter from the sun. You may be among powerfulbrains 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 readverse, they discourse of art; but their eminent faculties are not underthat vigilant sense of a collective supervision, spiritual and present, which we have taken note of. They build a temple of arrogance; theyspeak much in the voice of oracles; their hilarity, if it does not dip ingrossness, is usually a form of pugnacity. 

Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking outward has deprived them ofthe eye that should look inward. They have never weighed themselves inthe delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to obtain a suspicion of therights and dues of the world; and they have, in consequence, an irritablepersonality. A very learned English professor crushed an argument in apolitical 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 theprofessor on a sofa with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may becometheir pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing it: he is at least afair and pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse. But the society namedpolite is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will be petting abronzed soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a spiritualist:ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is besides addictedin self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of its rapidlyrevolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their attention onthe wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from giddiness andpreserve a notion of identity. The professor is better out of a circlethat often confounds by lionizing, sometimes annoys by abandoning, andalways confuses. The school that teaches gently what peril there is lesta cultivated head should still be coxcomb's, and the collisions which maybefall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more to be recommended thanthe sphere of incessant motion supplying it with material. 

Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure overhead are rank with raw cropsof matter. The traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people notcovered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid so much that is fair andcherishable, to come upon such curious barbarism. An Englishman paid avisit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture, and wasintroduced by him to another distinguished professor, to whom he took socordially as to walk out with him alone one afternoon. The firstprofessor, an erudite entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarlyesteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude the dagger) with thevindictive jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty. After a short preludeof gloom and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless admirerthe bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of flightycaballeros:--'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 Istand condemned by you; or you are incompetent, and thereforeimpertinent, and you may betake yourself to your country again, hypocrite!' The admirer was for persuading the wounded scholar that itis given to us to be able to admire two professors at a time. He wasdriven forth. 

Perhaps this might have occurred in any country, and a comedy of ThePedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, wouldnot bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful that it was inGermany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comictraining to warn them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft, nor much of satirical. Heinrich Heine has not been enough to cause themto smart and meditate. Nationally, as well as individually, when theyare excited they are in danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance, they decline to listen to evidence, and raise a national outcry becauseone 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, LaFontaine, Moliere; with the people who have the figures of a Trissotinand a Vadius before them for a comic warning of the personal vanities ofthe caressed professor. It is more than difference of race. It is thedifference of traditions, temper, and style, which comes of schooling. 

The French controversialist is a polished swordsman, to be dreaded in hisgraces and courtesies. The German is Orson, or the mob, or a marchingarmy, in defence of a good case or a bad--a big or a little. His ironyis a missile of terrific tonnage: sarcasm he emits like a blast from adragon'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, intruth, the Titan is contending, by comparison, with a god. 

When the Germans lie on their arms, looking across the Alsatian frontierat the crowds of Frenchmen rushing to applaud L'ami Fritz at the TheatreFrancais, looking and considering the meaning of that applause, which isgrimly comic in its political response to the domestic moral of theplay--when the Germans watch and are silent, their force of charactertells. They are kings in music, we may say princes in poetry, goodspeculators in philosophy, and our leaders in scholarship. That sogifted a race, possessed moreover of the stern good sense which collectsthe 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 comicspirit is needful to their growth. We see what they can reach to in thatgreat figure of modern manhood, Goethe. They are a growing people; theyare conversable as well; and when their men, as in France, and atintervals at Berlin tea-tables, consent to talk on equal terms with theirwomen, and to listen to them, their growth will be accelerated and beshapelier. Comedy, or in any form the Comic spirit, will then come tothem to cut some figures out of the block, show them the mirror, enlivenand irradiate the social intelligence. 

Modern French comedy is commendable for the directness of the study ofactual life, as far as that, which is but the early step in such ascholarship, can be of service in composing and colouring the picture. Aconsequence of this crude, though well-meant, realism is the collision ofthe writers in their scenes and incidents, and in their characters. TheMuse of most of them is an _Aventuriere_. She is clever, and a certaindiversion exists in the united scheme for confounding her. The object ofthis person is to reinstate herself in the decorous world; and either, having accomplished this purpose through deceit, she has a _nostalgie dela boue_, that eventually casts her back into it, or she is exposed inher 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 manobstructs her path. This latter is enabled to be the champion of thedecorous world by knowing the indecorous well. He has assisted in theprogress of Aventurieres downward; he will not help them to ascend. Theworld is with him; and certainly it is not much of an ascension theyaspire to; but what sort of a figure is he? The triumph of a candidrealism is to show him no hero. You are to admire him (for it must besupposed that realism pretends to waken some admiration) as a crediblyliving young man; no better, only a little firmer and shrewder, than therest. If, however, you think at all, after the curtain has fallen, youare likely to think that the Aventurieres have a case to plead againsthim. True, and the author has not said anything to the contrary; he hasbut painted from the life; he leaves his audience to the reflections ofunphilosophic minds upon life, from the specimen he has presented in thebright and narrow circle of a spy-glass. 

I do not know that the fly in amber is of any particular use, but theComic idea enclosed in a comedy makes it more generally perceptible andportable, and that is an advantage. There is a benefit to men in takingthe lessons of Comedy in congregations, for it enlivens the wits; and towriters it is beneficial, for they must have a clear scheme, and even ifthey have no idea to present, they must prove that they have made thepublic sit to them before the sitting to see the picture. And writingfor 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 adefinite plan, and to English. Many of them now swelling a plethoricmarket, in the composition of novels, in pun-manufactories and injournalism; attached to the machinery forcing perishable matter on apublic that swallows voraciously and groans; might, with encouragement, be attending to the study of art in literature. Our critics appear to befascinated by the quaintness of our public, as the world is when ourbeast-garden has a new importation of magnitude, and the creaturesappetite is reverently consulted. They stipulate for a writer'spopularity before they will do much more than take the position ofumpires to record his failure or success. Now the pig supplies the mostpopular 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 tryother, perhaps finer, meat. It has good taste in song. It might betaught as justly, on the whole, and the sooner when the cottager's viewof the feast shall cease to be the humble one of our literary critics, toextend this capacity for delicate choosing in the direction of the matterarousing 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 OLDBACHELOR, that husband and wife use imbecile connubial epithets to oneanother. 

{3} Tallemant des Reaux, in his rough portrait of the Duke, shows thefoundation of the character of Alceste. 

{4} See Tom Jones, book viii. Chapter I, for Fielding's opinion of ourComedy. But he puts it simply; not as an exercise in thequasi-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 thehand 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 likedPlautus better, and the recurring mention of the _vetus poeta_ in hisprologues, who plagued him with the crusty critical view of hisproductions, has in the end a comic effect on the reader. 

{9} The exclamation of Lady Booby, when Joseph defends himself: '_Yourvirtue_! I shall never survive it!' etc. , is another instance. --JosephAndrews. Also that of Miss Mathews in her narrative to Booth: 'But suchare the friendships of women. '--Amelia.