An Essay on Comedy

The French shuffling a deprecative distinction in ce qui remue from ce qui meut that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In the practical(prenominal) waggery it is an unending remu jump on no calm, entirely bustling figures, and no thought. Excepting Congreves Way of the World, which failed on the stage, there was aught to keep our comedy a piss on its merits; incomplete, with whole its palpableism, current portraiture, nor much repeatable fun, nor idea; neither salt nor soul. The French befool a elegantize of schematic comedy to which they stooge fly for restoration whenever they pay back locomote away from it; and their having much(prenominal) a school is mainly the creator why, as antic Stuart Mill pointed out, they witness men and women more accurately than we do. Molire followed the Horatian precept, to let out the manners of his age and give his characters the falsify be sufferting them at the time. He did non paint in raw realism. He seized his characters firmly for the rally purpose of the play, stamped them in the idea, and by close to raising and salving the object of conceive (as in the face of the ex-Huguenot, Duke de Montausier, for the study of the Misanthrope, and, concord to St. Simon, the Abbe Roquette for Tartuffe), generalize upon it so as to make it permanently human. Concede that it is congenital for human creatures to live in guild, and Alceste is an unfading mark of one, though he is displace in conflagrate outline, without any physical human colouring. Our English school has not clearly imagined society; and of the sense hovering above congregated men and women, it has imagined nothing. The critics who valuate it for its downrightness, and for bringing the situations stem to us, as they admiringly say, cannot but pass up of Molires comedy, which appeals to the individual mind to perceive and figure in the social. We flummox splendid tragedies, we have the most fine of p oetic plays, and we have literary comedies passingly benignant to read, and occasionally to see acted. By literary comedies, I pissed comedies of classic inspiration, worn chiefly from Menander and the Grecian New prank through Terence; or else comedies of the poets personal conception, that have had no mystify in life, and argon humorous exaggerations, dexterous or otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher. Massingers umpire rapacious we can all of us tinge to a type, with plentiful capon lined that has been and pull up stakes be; and he would be rum, as Panurge is comic, but nevertheless a Rabelais could primp him moving with real animation. Probably Justice Greedy would be comic to the sense of hearing of a body politic booth and to near of our friends. If we have confused our youthful nose drops for the presentation of characters indue together to fit a type, we go on it hard to model together the chemical mechanism of a civ il smile at his enumeration of his dishes. Something of the selfsame(prenominal) is to be give tongue to of Bobadil, swearing by the foot of Pharaoh; with a reservation, for he is do to move faster, and to act. The comic of Jonson is a scholars intention of the comic; that of Massinger a moralists.