Essay on Comedy, Comic Spirit | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1897 Archibald Constable and
Company edition by David Price, email [email protected]

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

Good Comedies are such rare productions, that notwithstanding the
wealth of our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy us
long to run over the English list. If they are brought to the test I shall
propose, very reputable Comedies will be found unworthy of their
station, like the ladies of Arthur's Court when they were reduced to the
ordeal of the mantle.
There are plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent apparition;
and why the great Comic poet remains without a fellow. A society of
cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current and
the perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an

audience. The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and
feverish emotional periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social
inequality of the sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the
mind be understood where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual
activity.
Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter, demands
more than sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy. That must be a natal
gift in the Comic poet. The substance he deals with will show him a
startling exhibition of the dyer's hand, if he is without it. People are
ready to surrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast, and
sides; all except the head: and it is there that he aims. He must be subtle
to penetrate. A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him.
The necessity for the two conditions will explain how it is that we
count him during centuries in the singular number.
'C'est une etrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes gens,'
Moliere says; and the difficulty of the undertaking cannot be
over-estimated.
Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a character
unknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers.
We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call agelasts; that is
to say, non-laughers; men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which
if you prick them do not bleed. The old grey boulder-stone that has
finished its peregrination from the rock to the valley, is as easily to be
set rolling up again as these men laughing. No collision of
circumstances in our mortal career strikes a light for them. It is but one
step from being agelastic to misogelastic, and the [Greek text which
cannot be reproduced], the laughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his
dislike as an objection in morality.
We have another class of men, who are pleased to consider themselves
antagonists of the foregoing, and whom we may term hypergelasts; the
excessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, that
may be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so loosely put together
that a wink will shake them.
'. . . C'est n'estimer rien qu'estioner tout le monde,'
and to laugh at everything is to have no appreciation of the Comic of
Comedy.
Neither of these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over- laughers

would be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a
performance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in
our land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For though the
stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived
on it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above the
contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedy
will appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while