An Essay on Comedy

by George Meredith
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 feverishemotional" target="_blank" title="a.易动感情的；情感的">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 startlingexhibition 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 mortalcareer 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 the other will think that the

speaking of it seriously brings us into violentcontrast with the
subject.

Comedy, we have to admit, was never one of the most honoured of the
Muses. She was in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest

expression of the little civilization of men. The light of Athene
over the head of Achilles illuminates the birth of Greek Tragedy.

But Comedy rolled in shouting under the divineprotection of the Son
of the Wine-jar, as Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by

Aristophanes. Our second Charles was the patron, of like benignity,
of our Comedy of Manners, which began similarly as a combative

performance, under a licence to deride and outrage the Puritan, and
was here and there Bacchanalian beyond the Aristophanic example:

worse, inasmuch as a cynical licentiousness is more abominable than
frank filth. An eminent Frenchman judges from the quality of some

of the stuff dredged up for the laughter of men and women who sat
through an Athenian Comic play, that they could have had small

delicacy in other affairs when they had so little in their choice of
entertainment. Perhaps he does not make sufficient allowance for

the regulated licence of plain speaking proper to the festival of
the god, and claimed by the Comic poet as his inalienable right, or

for the fact that it was a festival in a season of licence, in a
city accustomed to give ear to the boldest utterance of both sides

of a case. However that may be, there can be no question that the
men and women who sat through the acting of Wycherley's Country Wife

were past blushing. Our tenacity of national impressions has caused
the word theatre since then to prod the Puritan nervoussystem like

a satanic instrument; just as one has known Anti-Papists, for whom
Smithfield was redolent of a sinister smoke, as though they had a

later recollection of the place than the lowing herds. Hereditary
Puritanism, regarding the stage, is met, to this day, in many

families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety. It has subsided
altogether as a power in the profession of morality; but it is an

error to suppose it extinct, and unjust also to forget that it had
once good reason to hate, shun, and rebuke our public shows.

We shall find ourselves about where the Comic spirit would place us,
if we stand at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and

the drum-and-fife supporters of Comedy: 'Comme un point fixe fait
remarquer l'emportement des autres,' as Pascal says. And were there

more in this position, Comic genius would flourish.
Our English idea of a Comedy of Manners might be imaged in the

person of a blowsy country girl--say Hoyden, the daughter of Sir
Tunbelly Clumsy, who, when at home, 'never disobeyed her father

except in the eating of green gooseberries'--transforming to a
varnished City madam; with a loud laugh and a mincing step; the

crazy ancestress of an accountably fallen descendant. She bustles
prodigiously and is punctually smart in her speech, always in a

fluster to escape from Dulness, as they say the dogs on the Nile-
banks drink at the river running to avoid the crocodile. If the

monster catches her, as at times he does, she whips him to a froth,
so that those who know Dulness only as a thing of ponderousness,

shall fail to recognise him in that light and airy shape.
When she has frolicked through her five Acts to surprise you with

the information that Mr. Aimwell is converted by a sudden death in
the world outside the scenes into Lord Aimwell, and can marry the

lady in the light of day, it is to the credit of her vivacious
nature that she does not anticipate your calling her Farce. Five is

dignity with a trailing robe; whereas one, two, or three Acts would
be short skirts, and degrading. Advice has been given to

householders, that they should follow up the shot at a burglar in
the dark by hurling the pistol after it, so that if the bullet

misses, the weapon may strike and assure the rascal he has it. The
point of her wit is in this fashion supplemented by the rattle of

her tongue, and effectively, according to the testimony of her
admirers. Her wit is at once, like steam in an engine, the motive

force and the warningwhistle of her headlong course; and it
vanishes like the track of steam when she has reached her terminus,

never troubling the brains afterwards; a merit that it shares with
good wine, to the joy of the Bacchanalians. As to this wit, it is

warlike. In the neatest hands it is like the sword of the cavalier
in the Mall, quick to flash out upon 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 femalemodesty 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