Transcribed from the 1897 Archibald Constable and Company edition, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
This Essay was first published in ‘The New Quarterly Magazine’for April 1877.
Good Comedies are such rare productions, that notwithstanding thewealth of our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy uslong to run over the English list. If they are brought to thetest I shall propose, very reputable Comedies will be found unworthyof their station, like the ladies of Arthur’s Court when theywere 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 societyof cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current andthe perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotionalperiods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality ofthe sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understoodwhere there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity.
Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter, demandsmore than sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy. That must bea natal gift in the Comic poet. The substance he deals with willshow him a startling exhibition of the dyer’s hand, if he is withoutit. People are ready to surrender themselves to witty thumps onthe back, breast, and sides; all except the head: and it is there thathe aims. He must be subtle to penetrate. A correspondingacuteness must exist to welcome him. The necessity for the twoconditions will explain how it is that we count him during centuriesin the singular number.
‘C’est une étrange entreprise que celle de fairerire les honnêtes gens,’ Molière says; and the difficultyof the undertaking cannot be over-estimated.
Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a characterunknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers.
We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call agelasts; thatis 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-stonethat has finished its peregrination from the rock to the valley, isas easily to be set rolling up again as these men laughing. Nocollision of circumstances in our mortal career strikes a light forthem. It is but one step from being agelastic to misogelastic,and the μισοyελως,the laughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his dislike as an objectionin morality.
We have another class of men, who are pleased to consider themselvesantagonists of the foregoing, and whom we may term hypergelasts; theexcessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, thatmay be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so loosely put togetherthat a wink will shake them.
‘. . . C’est n’estimer rien qu’estionertout le monde,’
and to laugh at everything is to have no appreciation of the Comicof Comedy.
Neither of these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over-laugherswould be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a performanceof Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in ourland the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For thoughthe stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revivedon it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it abovethe contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the themeof Comedy will appear almost a liberti