Essay on Comedy, Comic Spirit | Page 8

girl,
until the girl is marched away to the nursery. Philosopher and Comic
poet are of a cousinship in the eye they cast on life: and they are
equally unpopular with our wilful English of the hazy region and the
ideal that is not to be disturbed.
Thus, for want of instruction in the Comic idea, we lose a large
audience among our cultivated middle class that we should expect to
support Comedy. The sentimentalist is as averse as the Puritan and as
the Bacchanalian.
Our traditions are unfortunate. The public taste is with the idle laughers,
and still inclines to follow them. It may be shown by an analysis of
Wycherley's Plain Dealer, a coarse prose adaption of the Misanthrope,
stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized theme to hit the mark of
English appetite, that we have in it the keynote of the Comedy of our
stage. It is Moliere travestied, with the hoof to his foot and hair on the
pointed tip of his ear. And how difficult it is for writers to disentangle
themselves from bad traditions is noticeable when we find Goldsmith,
who had grave command of the Comic in narrative, producing an

elegant farce for a Comedy; and Fielding, who was a master of the
Comic both in narrative and in dialogue, not even approaching to the
presentable in farce.
These bad traditions of Comedy affect us not only on the stage, but in
our literature, and may be tracked into our social life. They are the
ground of the heavy moralizings by which we are outwearied, about
Life as a Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, {4} when popular writers,
conscious of fatigue in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a modish
cynicism: perversions of the idea of life, and of the proper esteem for
the society we have wrested from brutishness, and would carry higher.
Stock images of this description are accepted by the timid and the
sensitive, as well as by the saturnine, quite seriously; for not many look
abroad with their own eyes, fewer still have the habit of thinking for
themselves. Life, we know too well, is not a Comedy, but something
strangely mixed; nor is Comedy a vile mask. The corrupted importation
from France was noxious; a noble entertainment spoilt to suit the
wretched taste of a villanous age; and the later imitations of it, partly
drained of its poison and made decorous, became tiresome,
notwithstanding their fun, in the perpetual recurring of the same
situations, owing to the absence of original study and vigour of
conception. Scene v. Act 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no doubt, to the
fact of our not producing matter for original study, is repeated in
succession by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it is at
second hand, we have it done cynically--or such is the tone; in the
manner of 'below stairs.' Comedy thus treated may be accepted as a
version of the ordinary worldly understanding of our social life; at least,
in accord with the current dicta concerning it. The epigrams can be
made; but it is uninstructive, rather tending to do disservice. Comedy
justly treated, as you find it in Moliere, whom we so clownishly
mishandled, the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous reflection
upon life. It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it
cannot be impure. Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield so
shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not
shaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made
each to whip himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely
covetous. Moliere has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the
skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her

better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and Belise.
He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language, the
simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear reason: it is a
fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense,
rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever. The wit is of such
pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning and interest. {5}
His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one character
incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French
Plays: but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of
an organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, there
is no scandal in the comparison.
Congreve's Way of the World is an exception to our other comedies,
his own among them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the
writing, and the figure of Millamant. The comedy has no idea in it,
beyond