Essay on Comedy, Comic Spirit | Page 5

slight

provocation, and for a similar office--to wound. Commonly its attitude
is entirely pugilistic; two blunt fists rallying and countering. When
harmless, as when the word 'fool' occurs, or allusions to the state of
husband, it has the sound of the smack of harlequin's wand upon clown,
and is to the same extent exhilarating. Believe that idle empty laughter
is the most desirable of recreations, and significant Comedy will seem
pale and shallow in comparison. Our popular idea would be hit by the
sculptured group of Laughter holding both his sides, while Comedy
pummels, by way of tickling him. As to a meaning, she holds that it
does not conduce to making merry: you might as well carry cannon on
a racing-yacht. Morality is a duenna to be circumvented. This was the
view of English Comedy of a sagacious essayist, who said that the end
of a Comedy would often be the commencement of a Tragedy, were the
curtain to rise again on the performers. In those old days female
modesty was protected by a fan, behind which, and it was of a
convenient semicircular breadth, the ladies present in the theatre retired
at a signal of decorum, to peep, covertly askant, or with the option of so
peeping, through a prettily fringed eyelet-hole in the eclipsing arch.
'Ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum.' - TERENCE.
That fan is the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so- called
Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders
under city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask without
the face behind it.
Elia, whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting
it as far as it would go, bewails the extinction of our artificial Comedy,
like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatra's
Nile-barge; and the sedateness of his plea for a cause condemned even
in his time to the penitentiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous. When
the realism of those 'fictitious half-believed personages,' as he calls
them, had ceased to strike, they were objectionable company,
uncaressable as puppets. Their artifices are staringly naked, and have
now the effect of a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing,
in the morning light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever
have been praised for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently
sober, and of high reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the
world to admire. These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes,
Miss Prue, Peggy, Hoyden, all of them save charming Milamant, are

dead as last year's clothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe, and it
must be an exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would
look on them with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the
puppet show of Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have
instant recourse to their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one
of the actors in that public entertainment who gets possession of the
cudgel, is open to question: it has been hinted; and angry moralists
have traced the national taste for tales of crime to the smell of blood in
our nursery-songs. It will at any rate hardly be questioned that it is
unwholesome for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they
are no better than they should be: and they will not, when they have
improved in manners, care much to see themselves as they once were.
That comes of realism in the Comic art; and it is not public caprice, but
the consequence of a bettering state. {2} The same of an immoral may
be said of realistic exhibitions of a vulgar society.
The French make a critical distinction in ce qui remue from ce qui
emeut--that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In
the realistic comedy it is an incessant remuage--no calm, merely
bustling figures, and no thought. Excepting Congreve's Way of the
World, which failed on the stage, there was nothing to keep our
comedy alive on its merits; neither, with all its realism, true portraiture,
nor much quotable fun, nor idea; neither salt nor soul.
The French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly for
renovation whenever they have fallen away from it; and their having
such a school is mainly the reason why, as John Stuart Mill pointed out,
they know men and women more accurately than we do. Moliere
followed the Horatian precept, to observe the manners of his age and
give his characters the colour befitting them at the time. He did not
paint in raw realism. He seized his characters firmly for the central
purpose of the play, stamped them in the idea, and by slightly raising
and softening the object of study (as in the case