Essay on Comedy, Comic Spirit | Page 7

it to the King.
The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy in
teaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of the
Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon
made popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes
Savantes exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic
absurdity of an excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the
tendency to be idiotic in precision. The French had felt the burden of
this new nonsense; but they had to see the comedy several times before
they were consoled in their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received. Moliere thought it
dead. 'I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,' he said. It is
one of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of the
opposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and
applauded. In all countries the middle class presents the public which,
fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the
world best. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading us
into sophistries. Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the
cream of life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher
blows, make acute and balanced observers. Moliere is their poet.
Of this class in England, a large body, neither Puritan nor Bacchanalian,
have a sentimental objection to face the study of the actual world. They
take up disdain of it, when its truths appear humiliating: when the facts
are not immediately forced on them, they take up the pride of
incredulity. They live in a hazy atmosphere that they suppose an ideal
one. Humorous writing they will endure, perhaps approve, if it mingles
with pathos to shake and elevate the feelings. They approve of Satire,
because, like the beak of the vulture, it smells of carrion, which they
are not. But of Comedy they have a shivering dread, for Comedy
enfolds them with the wretched host of the world, huddles them with us
all in an ignoble assimilation, and cannot be used by any exalted
variety as a scourge and a broom. Nay, to be an exalted variety is to
come under the calm curious eye of the Comic spirit, and be probed for
what you are. Men are seen among them, and very many cultivated
women. You may distinguish them by a favourite phrase: 'Surely we
are not so bad!' and the remark: 'If that is human nature, save us from
it!' as if it could be done: but in the peculiar Paradise of the wilful
people who will not see, the exclamation assumes the saving grace.
Yet should you ask them whether they dislike sound sense, they vow
they do not. And question cultivated women whether it pleases them to
be shown moving on an intellectual level with men, they will answer
that it does; numbers of them claim the situation. Now, Comedy is the
fountain of sound sense; not the less perfectly sound on account of the
sparkle: and Comedy lifts women to a station offering them free play
for their wit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of
sound sense. The higher the Comedy, the more prominent the part they
enjoy in it. Dorine in the Tartuffe is common-sense incarnate, though

palpably a waiting-maid. Celimene is undisputed mistress of the same
attribute in the Misanthrope; wiser as a woman than Alceste as man. In
Congreve's Way of the World, Millamant overshadows Mirabel, the
sprightliest male figure of English comedy.
But those two ravishing women, so copious and so choice of speech,
who fence with men and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not
preferable to be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty, the adorable bundle
of caprices, very feminine, very sympathetic, of romantic and
sentimental fiction? Our women are taught to think so. The Agnes of
the Ecole des Femmes should be a lesson for men. The heroines of
Comedy are like women of the world, not necessarily heartless from
being clear-sighted: they seem so to the sentimentally-reared only for
the reason that they use their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying
for a captain or a pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with
men, and that of men with them: and as the two, however divergent,
both look on one object, namely, Life, the gradual similarity of their
impressions must bring them to some resemblance. The Comic poet
dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness; he is
for saying that when they draw together in social life their minds grow
liker; just as the philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and