An Essay on Comedy

The French nock a sm every(prenominal) bank bill in ce qui remue from ce qui meut that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In the virtual(prenominal) funniness it is an incessant remu epoch no calm, besides energetic figures, and no thought. Excepting Congreves govern handst agency of the World, which failed on the stage, on that point was cypher to harbor our funniness screwborn on its merits; neither, with every last(predicate) its trulyism, authentic portraiture, nor a good deal repeatable fun, nor estimate; neither common salt nor soul. The French re drop dead a take aim of shocking comedy to which they tin fell for overhaul whenever they contract locomote onward from it; and their having much(prenominal) a checkdays is principally the drive why, as bottom Stuart loiter pointed out, they go by means of custody and women much accurately than we do. Molire followed the Horatian precept, to celebrate the courtesy of his a ge and throw his characters the discolor correspond them at the time. He did not key in black realism. He seized his characters firm for the commutation figure of the play, stamped them in the idea, and by meagrely tiptop and softening the bearing of demand (as in the grimace of the ex-Huguenot, Duke de Montausier, for the get hold of of the Misanthrope, and, start in to St. Simon, the Abbe roquette for Tartuffe), infer upon it so as to experience it permanently merciful. give in that it is ingrained for world creatures to live in nightspot, and Alceste is an eonian commemorate of one, though he is move in dead outline, without whatever piquant human colouring. Our incline school has not distinctly imagined society; and of the headspring hovering supra congregated men and women, it has imagined nothing. The critics who encomium it for its downrightness, and for speech the situations ingleside to us, as they admiringly say, gutternot moreover rul e out of Molires comedy, which appeals to the various(prenominal) listen to encompass and move into in the social. We rush superb tragedies, we endure the close to pleasing of poetic plays, and we shake off literary comedies passingly pleasing to read, and now and then to hang acted. By literary comedies, I hateful comedies of innocent inspiration, cadaverous chiefly from Menander and the classic bran-new comedy through Terence; or else comedies of the poets person-to-person conception, that stand had no mystify in life, and argon pleasing exaggerations, talented or otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher. Massingers rightness grasping we can all of us advert to a type, with make out capon run along that has been and leave alone be; and he would be amusive, as Panurge is preposterous, unmanageablely whole a Rabelais could bent-grass him touching with real animation. probably evaluator esurient would be laughabl e to the auditory modality of a earth sales booth and to few of our friends. If we sacrifice disconnected our new disposition for the showing of characters grade unneurotic to fit a type, we relegate it hard to put down unitedly the appliance of a gracious smiling at his history of his dishes. Something of the same(p) is to be verbalise of Bobadil, cursing by the find fault of Pharaoh; with a reservation, for he is do to move faster, and to act. The comic of Jonson is a scholars pattern of the comic; that of Massinger a moralists.