|
AN ESSAY ON COMEDY
AN ESSAY ON COMEDY 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 feverish 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 startling exhibition 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 mortal career 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 violent contrast 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 divine protection 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 nervous system 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 warning whistle 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 female modesty 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
prettily fringed eyelet-hole in the eclipsing arch.
'Ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum.' -
TERENCE.
That fan is the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-
called Comedy of Manners or Comedy of the manners of South-sea
Islanders under city veneer; and as to Comic idea vacuous as the
mask without the face behind it.
Elia whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and
wafting it as far as it would go bewails the extinction of our
artificial Comedy like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour
of Cleopatra's Nile-barge; and the sedateness of his plea for a
cause condemned even in his time to the penitentiary is a novel
effect of the ludicrous. When the realism of those 'fictitious
half-believed personages' as he calls them had ceased to strike
they were objectionable company uncaressable as puppets. Their
artifices are staringly naked and have now the effect of a painted
face viewed after warm hours of dancing in the morning light. How
could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been praised for
ingenuity in wickedness? Critics apparently sober and of high
reputation held up their shallow knaveries for the world to admire.
These Lurewells Plyants Pinchwifes Fondlewifes Miss Prue Peggy
Hoyden all of them save charming Milamant are dead as last year's
clothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe and it must be an
exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on
them with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet
show of Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant
recourse to their fists in a dispute after the fashion of every one
of the actors in that public entertainment who gets possession of
the cudgel is open to question: it has been hinted; and angry
moralists have traced the national taste for tales of crime to the
smell of blood in our nursery-songs. It will at any rate hardly be
questioned that it is unwholesome for men and women to see
themselves as they are if they are no better than they should be:
and they will not when they have improved in manners care much to
see themselves as they once were. That comes of realism in the
Comic art; and it is not public caprice but the consequence of a
bettering state. {2} The same of an immoral may be said of
realistic exhibitions of a vulgar society.
The French make a critical distinction in ce qui remue from ce qui
emeut--that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In
the realistic comedy it is an incessant remuage--no calm merely
bustling figures and no thought. Excepting Congreve's Way of the
World which failed on the stage there was nothing to keep our
comedy alive on its merits; neither with all its realism true
portraiture nor much quotable fun nor idea; neither salt nor soul.
The French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly for
renovation whenever they have fallen away from it; and their having
such a school is mainly the reason why as John Stuart Mill pointed
out they know men and women more accurately than we do. Moliere
followed the Horatian precept to observe the manners of his age and
give his characters the colour befitting them at the time. He did
not paint in raw realism. He seized his characters firmly for the
central purpose of the play stamped them in the idea and by
slightly raising and softening the object of study (as in the case
of the ex-Huguenot Duke de Montausier {3} for the study of the
Misanthrope and according to St. Simon the Abbe Roquette for
Tartuffe) generalized upon it so as to make it permanently human.
Concede that it is natural for human creatures to live in society
...
|
