I alighted at the Colombina, after four hours’ ride, to give the

horses time to rest a little. The Albergo della Colombina was a great

disappointment, for there was nothing there that could be eaten. I

decided upon waiting most patiently, but most unlike a few cavalry

officers, who, all covered with dust, and evidently as hungry and as

thirsty as they could be, began to swear to their hearts’ content. In an

hour some eggs and some salame, a kind of sausage, were brought up,

and quickly disposed of. A young lieutenant of the thirtieth infantry

regiment of the Pisa brigade took his place opposite, and we were soon

engaged in conversation. He had been in the midst and worst part of the

battle of Custozza, and had escaped being taken prisoner by what seemed

a miracle. He told me how, when his regiment advanced on the Monte Croce

position, which he practically described to me as having the form of an

English pudding, they were fired upon by batteries both on their flanks

and front. The lieutenant added, however, rather contemptuously, that

they did not even bow before them, as the custom appears to be--that

is, to lie down, as the Austrians were firing very badly. The cross-fire

got, however, so tremendous that an order had to be given to keep down

by the road to avoid being annihilated. The assault was given, the

whole range of positions was taken, and kept too for hours, until

the infallible rule of three to one, backed by batteries, grape, and

canister, compelled them to retreat, which they did slowly and in order.

It was then that their brigade commander, Major General Rey de Villarey,

who, though a native of Mentone, had preferred remaining with his king

from going over to the French after the cession, turning to his son, who

was also his aide-de-camp, said in his dialect, ‘Now, my son, we must

die both of us,’ and with a touch of the spurs was soon in front of

the line and on the hill, where three bullets struck him almost at once

dead. The horse of his son falling while following, his life was spared.

My lieutenant at this moment was so overcome with hunger and fatigue

that he fell down, and was thought to be dead. He was not so, however,

and had enough life to hear, after the fight was over, the Austrian

Jagers pass by, and again retire to their original positions, where

their infantry was lying down, not dreaming for one moment of pursuing

the Italians. Four of his soldiers--all Neapolitans he heard coming in

search of him, while the bullets still hissed all round; and, as soon as

he made a sign to them, they approached, and took him on their shoulders

back to where was what remained of the regiment. It is highly creditable

to Italian unity to hear an old Piedmontese officer praise the levies

of the new provinces, and the lieutenant took delight in relating that

another Neapolitan was in the fight standing by him, and firing as fast

as he could, when a shell having burst near him, he disdainfully gave it

a look, and did not even seek to save himself from the jattatura.

The gallant lieutenant had unfortunately to leave at last, and I was

deprived of many an interesting tale and of a brave man’s company. I

started, therefore, for Viadana, where I purposed passing the Po, the

left bank of which the road was now following parallel with the stream.

At Viadana, however, I found no bridge, as the military had demolished

what existed only the day before, and so had to look out for in

formation. As I was going about under the porticoes which one meets in

almost all the villages in this neighbourhood, I was struck by the sight

of an ancient and beautiful piece of art--for so it was--a Venetian

mirror of Murano. It hung on the wall inside the village draper’s shop,

and was readily shown me by the owner, who did not conceal the pride he

had in possessing it. It was one of those mirrors one rarely meets

with now, which were once so abundant in the old princes’ castles and

palaces. It looked so deep and true, and the gilt frame was so light,

and of such a purity and elegance, that it needed all my resolution to

keep from buying it, though a bargain would not have been effected very

easily. The mirror, however, had to be abandoned, as Dosalo, the nearest

point for crossing the Po, was still seven miles distant. By this

time the sun was out in all its force, and the heat was by no means

agreeable. Then there was dust, too, as if the carrettieri had been

passing in hundreds, so that the heat was almost unbearable. At last the

Dosalo ferry was reached, the road leading to it was entered, and the

carriage was, I thought, to be at once embarked, when a drove of oxen

were discovered to have the precedence; and so I had to wait. This under

such a sun, on a shadeless beach, and with the prospect of having to

stay there for two hours at least, was by no means pleasant. It took

three-quarters of an hour to put the oxen in the boat, it took half an

hour to get them on the other shore, and another hour to have the ferry

boat back. The panorama from the beach was splendid, the Po appeared in

all the mighty power of his waters, and as you looked with the glass at

oxen and trees on the other shore, they appeared to be clothed in

all the colours of the rainbow, and as if belonging to another world.

Several peasants were waiting for the boat near me, talking about the

war and the Austrians, and swearing they would, if possible, annihilate

some of the latter. I gave them the glass to look with, and I imagined

that they had never seen one before, for they thought it highly

wonderful to make out what the time was at the Luzzara Tower, three

miles in a straight line on the other side. The revolver, too, was a

subject of great admiration, and they kept turning, feeling, and staring

at it, as if they could not make out which way the cartridges were put

in. One of these peasants, however, was doing the grand with the others,

and once on the subject of history related to all who would hear how he

had been to St. Helena, which was right in the middle of Moscow, where

it was so very cold that his nose had got to be as large as his head.

The poor man was evidently mixing one night’s tale with that of the next

one, a tale probably heard from the old Sindaco, who is at the same time

the schoolmaster, the notary, and the highest municipal authority in the

place.

I started in the ferry boat with them at last. While crossing they got

to speak of the priests, and were all agreed, to put it in the mildest

way, in thinking extremely little of them, and only differed as to what

punishment they should like them to suffer.

On the side where we landed lay heaps of ammunition casks for the corps

besieging Borgoforte. Others were conveyed upon cars by my friends the

carrettieri, of whom it was decreed I should not be quit for some time

to come. Entering Guastalla I found only a few artillery officers,

evidently in charge of what we had seen carried along the route.

Guastalla is a neat little town very proud of its statue of Duke

Ferrante Gonzaga, and the Croce Rossa is a neat little inn, which may be

proud of a smart young waiter, who actually discovered that, as I wanted

to proceed to Luzzara, a few miles on, I had better stop till next

morning, I did not take his advice, and was soon under the gate of

Luzzara, a very neat little place, once one of the many possessions

where the Gonzagas had a court, a palace, and a castle. The arms over

the archway may still be seen, and would not be worth any notice but for

a remarkable work of terracotta representing a crown of pines and

pine leaves in a wonderful state of preservation. The whole is so

artistically arranged and so natural, that one might believe it to be

one of Luca della Robbia’s works. Luzzara has also a great tower, which

I had seen in the distance from Dosalo, and the only albergo in the

place gives you an excellent Italian dinner. The wine might please one

of the greatest admirers of sherry, and if you are not given feather

beds, the beds are at least clean like the rooms themselves. Here, as it

was getting too dark, I decided upon stopping, a decision which gave me

occasion to see one of the finest sunsets I ever saw. As I looked from

the albergo I could see a gradation of colours, from the purple red to

the deepest of sea blue, rising like an immense tent from the dark green

of the trees and the fields, here and there dotted with little white

houses, with their red roofs, while in front the Luzzara Tower rose

majestically in the twilight. As the hour got later the colours

deepened, and the lower end of the immense curtain gradually

disappeared, while the stars and the planets began shining high above.

A peasant was singing in a field near by, and the bells of a church were

chiming in the distance. Both seemed to harmonise wonderfully. It was a

scene of great loveliness.

At four a.m. I was up, and soon after on the road to Reggiolo, and then

to Gonzaga. Here the vegetation gets to be more luxuriant, and every

inch of ground contributes to the immense vastness of the whole. Nature

is here in full perfection, and as even the telegraphic wire hangs

leisurely down from tree to tree, instead of being stuck upon poles,

you feel that the romantic aspect of the place is too beautiful to be

encroached upon. All is peace, beauty, and happiness, all reveals to you

that you are in Italy.

In Gonzaga, which only a few days ago belonged to the Austrians, the

Italian tricolour is out of every window. As the former masters retired

the new advanced; and when a detachment of Monferrato lancers entered

the old castle town the joy of the inhabitants seemed to be almost

bordering on delirium. The lancers soon left, however. The flag only

remains.

July 11.

Cialdini began passing the Po on the 8th, and crossed at three points,

i.e., Carbonara, Carbonarola, and Follonica. Beginning at three o’clock

in the morning, he had finished crossing upon the two first pontoon

bridges towards midnight on the 9th. The bridge thrown up at Follonica

was still intact up to seven in the morning on the 10th, but the troops

and the military and the civil train that remained followed the Po

without crossing to Stellata, in the supposed direction of Ponte

Lagoscura.

Yesterday guns were heard here at seven o’clock in the morning, and up

to eleven o’clock, in the direction of Legnano, towards, I think,

the Adige. The firing was lively, and of such a nature as to make one

surmise that battle had been given. Perhaps the Austrians have awaited

Cialdini under Legnano, or they have disputed the crossing of the Adige.

Rovigo was abandoned by the Austrians in the night of the 9th and 10th.

They have blown up the Rovigo and Boara fortresses, have destroyed the

tete-de-pont on the Adige, and burnt all bridges. They may now seek to

keep by the left side of this river up to Legnano, so as to get under

the protection of the quadrilateral, in which case, if Cialdini can

cross the river in time, the shock would be almost inevitable, and would

be a reason for yesterday’s firing. They may also go by rail to Padua,

when they would have Cialdini between them and the quadrilateral. In any

case, if this general is quick, or if they are not too quick for him,

according to possible instructions, a collision is difficult to be

avoided.

Baron Ricasoli has left Florence for the camp, and all sorts of rumours

are afloat as to the present state of negotiations as they appear

unmistakably to exist. The opinions are, I think, divided in the high

councils of the Crown, and the country is still anxious to know the

result of this state of affairs. A splendid victory by Cialdini might

at this moment solve many a difficulty. As it is, the war is prosecuted

everywhere except by sea, for Garibaldi’s forces are slowly advancing in

the Italian Tyrol, while the Austrians wait for them behind the walls of

Landaro and Ampola. The Garibaldians’ advanced posts were, by the latest

news, near Darso.

The news from Prussia is still contradictory; while the Italian press is

unanimous in asking with the country that Cialdini should advance,

meet the enemy, fight him, and rout him if possible. Italy’s wishes are

entirely with him.

NOALE, NEAR TREVISO, July 17, 1866.

From Lusia I followed General Medici’s division to Motta, where I left

it, not without regret, however, as better companions could not easily

be found, so kind were the officers and jovial the men. They are now

encamped around Padua, and will to-morrow march on Treviso, where the

Italian Light Horse have already arrived, if I judge so from their

having left Noale on the 15th. From the right I hear that the advanced

posts have proceeded as far as Mira on the Brenta, twenty kilometres

from Venice itself, and that the first army corps is to concentrate

opposite Chioggia. This corps has marched from Ferrara straight on to

Rovigo, which the forward movement of the fourth, or Cialdini’s corps

d’armee, had left empty of soldiers. General Pianell has still charge

of it, and Major-General Cadalini, formerly at the head of the Siena

brigade, replaces him in the command of his former division. General

Pianell has under him the gallant Prince Amadeus, who has entirely

recovered from his chest wound, and of whom the brigade of Lombardian

grenadiers is as proud as ever. They could not wish for a more skilled

commander, a better superior officer, and a more valiant soldier. Thus

the troops who fought on the 24th June are kept in the second line,

while the still fresh divisions under Cialdini march first, as fast as

they can. This, however, is of no avail. The Italian outposts on the

Piave have not yet crossed it, for the reason that they must keep

distances with their regiments, but will do so as soon as these get

nearer to the river. If it was not that this is always done in regular

warfare, they could beat the country beyond the Piave for a good many

miles without even seeing the shadow of an Austrian. To the simple

private, who does not know of diplomatic imbroglios and of political

considerations, this sudden retreat means an almost as sudden retracing

of steps, because he remembers that this manoeuvre preceded both the

attacks on Solferino and on Custozza by the Austrians. To the officer,

however, it means nothing else than a fixed desire not to face the

Italian army any more, and so it is to him a source of disappointment

and despondency. He cannot bear to think that another battle is

improbable, and may be excused if he is not in the best of humour when

on this subject. This is the case not only with the officers but with

the volunteers, who have left their homes and the comfort of their

domestic life, not to be paraded at reviews, but to be sent against the

enemy. There are hundreds of these in the regular army-in the cavalry

especially, and the Aosta Lancers and the regiment of Guides are half

composed of them. If you listen to them, there ought not to be the

slightest doubt or hesitation as to crossing the Isongo and marching

upon Vienna. May Heaven see their wishes accomplished, for, unless

crushed by sheer force, Italy is quite decided to carry war into the

enemy’s country.

The decisions of the French government are looked for here with great

anxiety, and not a few men are found who predict them to be unfavourable

to Italy. Still, it is hard for every one to believe that the French

emperor will carry things to extremities, and increase the many

difficulties Europe has already to contend with.

To-day there was a rumour at the mess table that the Austrians had

abandoned Legnano, one of the four fortresses of the quadrilateral. I do

not put much faith in it at present, but it is not improbable, as we

may expect many strange things from the Vienna government. It would have

been much better for them, since Archduke Albert spoke in eulogistic

terms of the king, of his sons, and of his soldiers, while relating the

action of the 24th, to have treated with Italy direct, thus securing

peace, and perhaps friendship, from her. But the men who have ruled so

despotically for years over Italian subjects cannot reconcile themselves

to the idea that Italy has at last risen to be a nation, and they even

take slyly an opportunity to throw new insult into her face. You can

easily see that the old spirit is still struggling for empire; that the

old contempt is still trying to make light of Italians; and that the

old Metternich ideas are still fondly clung to. Does not this deserve

another lesson? Does not this need another Sadowa to quiet down

for ever? Yes; and it devolves upon Italy to do it. If so, let only

Cialdini’s army alone, and the day may be nigh at hand when the king may

tell the country that the task has been accomplished.

A talk on the present state of political affairs, and on the peculiar

position of Italy, is the only subject worth notice in a letter from the

camp. Everything else is at a standstill, and the movements of the fine

army Cialdini now disposes of, about 150,000 men, are no longer full of

interest. They may, perhaps, have some as regards an attack on Venice,

because Austrian soldiers are still garrisoning it, and will be obliged

to fight if they are assailed. It is hoped, if such is the case,

that the beautiful queen of the Adriatic will be spared a scene of

devastation, and that no new Haynau will be found to renew the deeds of

Brescia and Vicenza.

The king has not yet arrived, and it seems probable he will not come for

some time, until indeed the day comes for Italian troops to make their

triumphal entry into the city of the Doges.

The heat continues intense, and this explains the slowness in advancing.

As yet no sickness has appeared, and it must be hoped that the

troops will be healthy, as sickness tries the morale much more than

half-a-dozen Custozzas.

P.S.--I had finished writing when an officer came rushing into the inn

where I am staying and told me that he had just heard that an Italian

patrol had met an Austrian one on the road out of the village, and

routed it. This may or may not be true, but it was must curious to see

how delighted every one was at the idea that they had found ‘them’ at

last. They did not care much about the result of the engagement, which,

as I said, was reported to have been favourable. All that they cared

about was that they were close to the enemy. One cannot despair of an

army which is animated with such spirits. You would think, from the

joy which brightens the face of the soldiers you meet now about, that a

victory had been announced for the Italian arms.

DOLO, NEAR VENICE, July 20, 1866.

I returned from Noale to Padua last evening, and late in the night I

received the intimation at my quarters that cannon was heard in the

direction of Venice. It was then black as in Dante’s hell, and raining

and blowing with violence--one of those Italian storms which seem to

awake all the earthly and heavenly elements of creation. There was no

choice for it but to take to the saddle, and try to make for the front.

No one who has not tried it can fancy what work it is to find one’s way

along a road on which a whole corps d’amee is marching with an enormous

materiel of war in a pitch dark night. This, however, is what your

special correspondent was obliged to do. Fortunately enough, I had

scarcely proceeded as far as Ponte di Brenta when I fell in with an

officer of Cialdini’s staff, who was bound to the same destination,

namely, Dolo. As we proceeded along the road under a continuous shower

of rain, our eyes now and then dazzled by the bright serpent-like

flashes of the lightning, we fell in with some battalion or squadron,

which advanced carefully, as it was impossible for them as well as for

us to discriminate between the road and the ditches which flank it, for

all the landmarks, so familiar to our guides in the daytime, were in one

dead level of blackness. So it was that my companion and myself, after

stumbling into ditches and out of them, after knocking our horses’ heads

against an ammunition car, or a party of soldiers sheltered under some

big tree, found ourselves, after three hours’ ride, in this village of

Dolo. By this time the storm had greatly abated in its violence, and

the thunder was but faintly heard now and then at such a distance as

to enable us distinctly to hear the roar of the guns. Our horses

could scarcely get through the sticky black mud, into which the white

suffocating dust of the previous days had been turned by one night’s

rain. We, however, made our way to the parsonage of the village, for we

had already made up our minds to ascend the steeple of the church to get

a view of the surrounding country and a better hearing of the guns

if possible. After a few words exchanged with the sexton--a staunch

Italian, as he told us he was--we went up the ladder of the church

spire. Once on the wooden platform, we could hear more distinctly the

boom of the guns, which sounded like the broadsides of a big vessel.

Were they the guns of Persano’s long inactive fleet attacking some of

Brondolo’s or Chioggia’s advanced forts? Were the guns those of some

Austrian man-of-war which had engaged an Italian ironclad; or were they

the ‘Affondatore,’ which left the Thames only a month ago, pitching into

Trieste? To tell the truth, although we patiently waited two long hours

on Dolo church spire, when both I and my companion descended we were not

in a position to solve either of these problems. We, however, thought

then, and still think, they were the guns of the Italian fleet which had

attacked an Austrian fort.

CIVITA VECCHIA, July 22, 1866.

Since the departure from this port of the old hospital ship ‘Gregeois’

about a year ago, no French ship of war had been stationed at Civita

Vecchia; but on Wednesday morning the steam-sloop ‘Catinat,’ 180

men, cast anchor in the harbour, and the commandant immediately on

disembarking took the train for Rome and placed himself in communication

with the French ambassador. I am not aware whether the Pontifical

government had applied for this vessel, or whether the sending it was

a spontaneous attention on the part of the French emperor, but, at any

rate, its arrival has proved a source of pleasure to His Holiness, as

there is no knowing what may happen In troublous times like the present,

and it is always good to have a retreat insured.

Yesterday it was notified in this port, as well as at Naples, that

arrivals from Marseilles would be, until further notice, subjected to

a quarantine of fifteen days in consequence of cholera having made its

appearance at the latter place. A sailing vessel which arrived from

Marseilles in the course of the day had to disembark the merchandise

it brought for Civita Vecchia into barges off the lazaretto, where the

yellow flag was hoisted over them. This vessel left Marseilles five days

before the announcement of the quarantine, while the ‘Prince Napoleon’

of Valery’s Company, passenger and merchandise steamer, which left

Marseilles only one day before its announcement, was admitted this

morning to free pratique. Few travellers will come here by sea now.

MARSEILLES, July 24.

Accustomed as we have been of late in Italy to almost hourly bulletins

of the progress of hostilities, it is a trying condition to be suddenly

debarred of all intelligence by finding oneself on board a steamer for

thirty-six hours without touching at any port, as was my case in coming

here from Civita Vecchia on board the ‘Prince Napoleon.’ But, although

telegrams were wanting, discussions on the course of events were rife

on board among the passengers who had embarked at Naples and Civita

Vecchia, comprising a strong batch of French and Belgian priests

returning from a pilgrimage to Rome, well supplied with rosaries and

chaplets blessed by the Pope and facsimiles of the chains of St. Peter.

Not much sympathy for the Italian cause was shown by these gentlemen

or the few French and German travellers who, with three or four

Neapolitans, formed the quarterdeck society; and our Corsican captain

took no pains to hide his contempt at the dilatory proceedings of

the Italian fleet at Ancona. We know that the Prussian minister, M.

d’Usedom, has been recently making strenuous remonstrances at Ferrara

against the slowness with which the Italian naval and military forces

were proceeding, while their allies, the Prussians, were already near

the gates of Vienna; and the conversation of a Prussian gentleman

on board our steamer, who was connected with that embassy, plainly

indicated the disappointment felt at Berlin at the rather inefficacious

nature of the diversion made in Venetia, and on the coast of Istria by

the army and navy of Victor Emmanuel. He even attributed to his minister

an expression not very flattering either to the future prospects of

Italy as resulting from her alliance with Prussia, or to the fidelity of

the latter in carrying out the terms of it. I do not know whether this

gentleman intended his anecdote to be taken cum grano salis, but I

certainly understood him to say that he had deplored to the minister the

want of vigour and the absence of success accompanying the operations of

the Italian allies of Prussia, when His Excellency replied: ‘C’est bien

vrai. Ils nous ont tromps; mais que voulez-vous y faire maintenant? Nous

aurons le temps de les faire egorger apres.’

It is difficult to suppose that there should exist a preconceived

intention on the part of Prussia to repay the sacrifices hitherto made,

although without a very brilliant accompaniment of success, by the

Italian government in support of the alliance, by making her own

separate terms with Austria and leaving Italy subsequently exposed to

the vengeance of the latter, but such would certainly be the inference

to be drawn from the conversation just quoted.

It was only on arriving in the port of Marseilles, however, that the

full enmity of most of my travelling companions towards Italy and the

Italians was manifested. A sailor, the first man who came on board

before we disembarked, was immediately pounced upon for news, and

he gave it as indeed nothing less than the destruction, more or less

complete, of the Italian fleet by that of the Austrians. At this

astounding intelligence the Prussian burst into a yell of indignation.

‘Fools! blockheads! miserables! Beaten at sea by an inferior force! Is

that the way they mean to reconquer Venice by dint of arms? If ever they

do regain Venetia it will be through the blood of our Brandenburghers

and Pomeranians, and not their own.’ During this tirade a little old

Belgian in black, with the chain of St. Peter at his buttonhole by way

of watchguard, capered off to communicate the grateful news to a group

of his ecclesiastical fellow-travellers, shrieking out in ecstasy:

‘Rosses, Messieurs! Ces blagueurs d’Italiens ont ete rosses par

mer, comme ils avaient ete rosses par terre.’ Whereupon the reverend

gentlemen congratulated each other with nods, and winks, and smiles,

and sundry fervent squeezes of the hand. The same demonstrations would

doubtless have been made by the Neapolitan passengers had they belonged

to the Bourbonic faction, but they happened to be honest traders with

cases of coral and lava for the Paris market, and therefore they merely

stood silent and aghast at the fatal news, with their eyes and mouths as

wide open as possible. I had no sooner got to my hotel than I inquired

for the latest Paris journal, when the France was handed me, and I

obtained confirmation in a certain degree of the disaster to the Italian

fleet narrated by the sailor, although not quite in the same formidable

proportions.

Before quitting the subject of my fellow-passengers on board the ‘Prince

Napoleon’ I must mention an anecdote related to me, respecting the state

of brigandage, by a Russian or German gentleman, who told me he

was established at Naples. He was complaining of the dangers he had

occasionally encountered in crossing in a diligence from Naples to

Foggia on business; and then, speaking of the audacity of brigands in

general, he told me that last year he saw with his own eyes; in broad

daylight, two brigands walking about the streets of Naples with messages

from captured individuals to their relations, mentioning the sums which

had been demanded for their ransoms. They were unarmed, and in the

common peasants’ dresses, and whenever they arrived at one of the houses

to which they were addressed for this purpose, they stopped and opened a

handkerchief which one of them carried in his hand, and took out an ear,

examining whether the ticket on it corresponded with the address of the

house or the name of the resident. There were six ears, all ticketed

with the names of the original owners in the handkerchief, which were

gradually dispensed to their families in Naples to stimulate: prompt

payment of the required ransoms. On my inquiring how it was that the

police took no notice of such barefaced operations, my informant told me

that, previous to the arrival of these brigand emissaries in town,

the chief always wrote to the police authorities warning them against

interfering with them, as the messengers were always followed by spies

in plain clothes belonging to the band who would immediately report

any molestation they might encounter in the discharge of their delicate

mission, and the infallible result of such molestation would be first

the putting to death of all the hostages held for ransom; and next,

the summary execution of several members of gendarmery and police force

captured in various skirmishes by the brigands, and held as prisoners of

war.

Such audacity would seem incredible if we had not heard and read of so

many similar instances of late.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

A very doubtful benefit

Americans forgivingly remember, without mentioning

As becomes them, they do not look ahead

Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists

Fourth of the Georges

Here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate

Holy images, and other miraculous objects are sold

It is well to learn manners without having them imposed on us

Men overweeningly in love with their creations

Must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike

Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer

Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied

Statesman who stooped to conquer fact through fiction

The social world he looked at did not show him heroes

The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity

Utterance of generous and patriotic cries is not sufficient

We trust them or we crush them

We grew accustomed to periods of Irish fever

ON THE IDEA OF COMEDY AND OF THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT {1}

[This etext was prepared from the 1897 Archibald Constable and Company

edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk]

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, and Alceste is an imperishable mark of

one, though he is drawn in light outline, without any forcible human

colouring. Our English school has not clearly imagined society; and

of the mind hovering above congregated men and women, it has imagined

nothing. The critics who praise it for its downrightness, and for

bringing the situations home to us, as they admiringly say, cannot but

disapprove of Moliere’s comedy, which appeals to the individual mind to

perceive and participate in the social. We have splendid tragedies, we

have the most beautiful of poetic plays, and we have literary comedies

passingly pleasant to read, and occasionally to see acted. By literary

comedies, I mean comedies of classic inspiration, drawn chiefly from

Menander and the Greek New Comedy through Terence; or else comedies of

the poet’s personal conception, that have had no model in life, and are

humorous exaggerations, happy or otherwise. These are the comedies of

Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher. Massinger’s Justice Greedy we can

all of us refer to a type, ‘with fat capon lined’ that has been and

will be; and he would be comic, as Panurge is comic, but only a Rabelais

could set him moving with real animation. Probably Justice Greedy would

be comic to the audience of a country booth and to some of our friends.

If we have lost our youthful relish for the presentation of characters

put together to fit a type, we find it hard to put together the

mechanism of a civil smile at his enumeration of his dishes. Something

of the same is to be said of Bobadil, swearing ‘by the foot of Pharaoh’;

with a reservation, for he is made to move faster, and to act. The comic

of Jonson is a scholar’s excogitation of the comic; that of Massinger a

moralist’s.

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the

comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be

found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they

are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great

poetic imagination. They are, as it were--I put it to suit my present

comparison--creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not

grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of

society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of Clowns,

Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen--marvellous Welshmen!--Benedict

and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in

the poetically comic.

His Comedy of incredible imbroglio belongs to the literary section.

One may conceive that there was a natural resemblance between him

and Menander, both in the scheme and style of his lighter plays. Had

Shakespeare lived in a later and less emotional, less heroical period of

our history, he might have turned to the painting of manners as well as

humanity. Euripides would probably, in the time of Menander, when Athens

was enslaved but prosperous, have lent his hand to the composition of

romantic comedy. He certainly inspired that fine genius.

Politically it is accounted a misfortune for France that her nobles

thronged to the Court of Louis Quatorze. It was a boon to the comic

poet. He had that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions,

the huge pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full

activity; vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers,

extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians,

sonneteering marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids,

inter-threading as in a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois

circle will not furnish it, for the middle class must have the

brilliant, flippant, independent upper for a spur and a pattern;

otherwise it is likely to be inwardly dull as well as outwardly correct.

Yet, though the King was benevolent toward Moliere, it is not to the

French Court that we are indebted for his unrivalled studies of mankind

in society. For the amusement of the Court the ballets and farces were

written, which are dearer to the rabble upper, as to the rabble lower,

class than intellectual comedy. The French bourgeoisie of Paris were

sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened by education to welcome great

works like Le Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Misanthrope, works

that were perilous ventures on the popular intelligence, big vessels to

launch on streams running to shallows. The Tartuffe hove into view as an

enemy’s vessel; it offended, not Dieu mais les devots, as the Prince de

Conde explained the cabal raised against it to the King.

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy

in teaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of the

Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon

made popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantes

exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity

of an excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to

be idiotic in precision. The French had felt the burden of this new

nonsense; but they had to see the comedy several times before they were

consoled in their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received. Moliere thought it dead.

‘I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,’ he said. It is one

of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of

the opposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and

applauded. In all countries the middle class presents the public which,

fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the

world best. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading

us into sophistries. Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream

of life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows,

make acute and balanced observers. Moliere is their poet.

Of this class in England, a large body, neither Puritan nor

Bacchanalian, have a sentimental objection to face the study of the

actual world. They take up disdain of it, when its truths appear

humiliating: when the facts are not immediately forced on them, they

take up the pride of incredulity. They live in a hazy atmosphere that

they suppose an ideal one. Humorous writing they will endure, perhaps

approve, if it mingles with pathos to shake and elevate the feelings.

They approve of Satire, because, like the beak of the vulture, it smells

of carrion, which they are not. But of Comedy they have a shivering

dread, for Comedy enfolds them with the wretched host of the world,

huddles them with us all in an ignoble assimilation, and cannot be used

by any exalted variety as a scourge and a broom. Nay, to be an exalted

variety is to come under the calm curious eye of the Comic spirit,

and be probed for what you are. Men are seen among them, and very

many cultivated women. You may distinguish them by a favourite phrase:

‘Surely we are not so bad!’ and the remark: ‘If that is human nature,

save us from it!’ as if it could be done: but in the peculiar Paradise

of the wilful people who will not see, the exclamation assumes the

saving grace.

Yet should you ask them whether they dislike sound sense, they vow they

do not. And question cultivated women whether it pleases them to be

shown moving on an intellectual level with men, they will answer that it

does; numbers of them claim the situation. Now, Comedy is the fountain

of sound sense; not the less perfectly sound on account of the sparkle:

and Comedy lifts women to a station offering them free play for their

wit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of sound

sense. The higher the Comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy in

it. Dorine in the Tartuffe is common-sense incarnate, though palpably a

waiting-maid. Celimene is undisputed mistress of the same attribute in

the Misanthrope; wiser as a woman than Alceste as man. In Congreve’s

Way of the World, Millamant overshadows Mirabel, the sprightliest male

figure of English comedy.

But those two ravishing women, so copious and so choice of speech, who

fence with men and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not preferable

to be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty, the adorable bundle of

caprices, very feminine, very sympathetic, of romantic and sentimental

fiction? Our women are taught to think so. The Agnes of the Ecole des

Femmes should be a lesson for men. The heroines of Comedy are like women

of the world, not necessarily heartless from being clear-sighted: they

seem so to the sentimentally-reared only for the reason that they use

their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a

pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and that of men

with them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object,

namely, Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring

them to some resemblance. The Comic poet dares to show us men and women

coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they draw

together in social life their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher

discerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away

to the nursery. Philosopher and Comic poet are of a cousinship in the

eye they cast on life: and they are equally unpopular with our wilful

English of the hazy region and the ideal that is not to be disturbed.

Thus, for want of instruction in the Comic idea, we lose a large

audience among our cultivated middle class that we should expect to

support Comedy. The sentimentalist is as averse as the Puritan and as

the Bacchanalian.

Our traditions are unfortunate. The public taste is with the idle

laughers, and still inclines to follow them. It may be shown by an

analysis of Wycherley’s Plain Dealer, a coarse prose adaption of the

Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized theme to

hit the mark of English appetite, that we have in it the keynote of the

Comedy of our stage. It is Moliere travestied, with the hoof to his

foot and hair on the pointed tip of his ear. And how difficult it is for

writers to disentangle themselves from bad traditions is noticeable

when we find Goldsmith, who had grave command of the Comic in narrative,

producing an elegant farce for a Comedy; and Fielding, who was a master

of the Comic both in narrative and in dialogue, not even approaching to

the presentable in farce.

These bad traditions of Comedy affect us not only on the stage, but in

our literature, and may be tracked into our social life. They are the

ground of the heavy moralizings by which we are outwearied, about Life

as a Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, {4} when popular writers, conscious

of fatigue in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a modish cynicism:

perversions of the idea of life, and of the proper esteem for the

society we have wrested from brutishness, and would carry higher. Stock

images of this description are accepted by the timid and the sensitive,

as well as by the saturnine, quite seriously; for not many look

abroad with their own eyes, fewer still have the habit of thinking

for themselves. Life, we know too well, is not a Comedy, but something

strangely mixed; nor is Comedy a vile mask. The corrupted importation

from France was noxious; a noble entertainment spoilt to suit the

wretched taste of a villanous age; and the later imitations of it,

partly drained of its poison and made decorous, became tiresome,

notwithstanding their fun, in the perpetual recurring of the same

situations, owing to the absence of original study and vigour of

conception. Scene v. Act 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no doubt, to the

fact of our not producing matter for original study, is repeated in

succession by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it is at second

hand, we have it done cynically--or such is the tone; in the manner of

‘below stairs.’ Comedy thus treated may be accepted as a version of the

ordinary worldly understanding of our social life; at least, in accord

with the current dicta concerning it. The epigrams can be made; but

it is uninstructive, rather tending to do disservice. Comedy justly

treated, as you find it in Moliere, whom we so clownishly mishandled,

the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous reflection upon life. It is

deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it cannot be impure.

Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield so shrieking a

scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while

administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip

himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covetous.

Moliere has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the skin,

displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her

better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and

Belise. He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest

language, the simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear

reason: it is a fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate

reason, common-sense, rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever.

The wit is of such pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning

and interest. {5} His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from

one character incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent

realistic French Plays: but is in the heart of his work, throbbing

with every pulsation of an organic structure. If Life is likened to the

comedy of Moliere, there is no scandal in the comparison.

Congreve’s Way of the World is an exception to our other comedies, his

own among them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the writing,

and the figure of Millamant. The comedy has no idea in it, beyond the

stale one, that so the world goes; and it concludes with the jaded

discovery of a document at a convenient season for the descent of the

curtain. A plot was an afterthought with Congreve. By the help of a

wooden villain (Maskwell) marked Gallows to the flattest eye, he gets

a sort of plot in The Double Dealer. {6} His Way of the World might

be called The Conquest of a Town Coquette, and Millamant is a perfect

portrait of a coquette, both in her resistance to Mirabel and the manner

of her surrender, and also in her tongue. The wit here is not so salient

as in certain passages of Love for Love, where Valentine feigns madness

or retorts on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices in the harmlessness of

wounds to a woman’s virtue, if she ‘keeps them from air.’ In The Way

of the World, it appears less prepared in the smartness, and is more

diffused in the more characteristic style of the speakers. Here,

however, as elsewhere, his famous wit is like a bully-fencer, not

ashamed to lay traps for its exhibition, transparently petulant for

the train between certain ordinary words and the powder-magazine of the

improprieties to be fired. Contrast the wit of Congreve with Moliere’s.

That of the first is a Toledo blade, sharp, and wonderfully supple for

steel; cast for duelling, restless in the scabbard, being so pretty when

out of it. To shine, it must have an adversary. Moliere’s wit is like a

running brook, with innumerable fresh lights on it at every turn of the

wood through which its business is to find a way. It does not run in

search of obstructions, to be noisy over them; but when dead leaves

and viler substances are heaped along the course, its natural song is

heightened. Without effort, and with no dazzling flashes of achievement,

it is full of healing, the wit of good breeding, the wit of wisdom.

‘Genuine humour and true wit,’ says Landor, {7} ‘require a sound and

capacious mind, which is always a grave one. Rabelais and La Fontaine

are recorded by their countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men have been

graver than Pascal. Few men have been wittier.’

To apply the citation of so great a brain as Pascal’s to our countryman

would be unfair. Congreve had a certain soundness of mind; of capacity,

in the sense intended by Landor, he had little. Judging him by his wit,

he performed some happy thrusts, and taking it for genuine, it is a

surface wit, neither rising from a depth nor flowing from a spring.

‘On voit qu’il se travaille e dire de bons mots.’

He drives the poor hack word, ‘fool,’ as cruelly to the market for wit

as any of his competitors. Here is an example, that has been held up for

eulogy:

WITWOUD: He has brought me a letter from the fool my brother, etc. etc.

MIRABEL: A fool, and your brother, Witwoud?

WITWOUD: Ay, ay, my half-brother. My half-brother he is; no nearer, upon

my honour.

MIRABEL: Then ‘tis possible he may be but half a fool.

By evident preparation. This is a sort of wit one remembers to have

heard at school, of a brilliant outsider; perhaps to have been guilty

of oneself, a trifle later. It was, no doubt, a blaze of intellectual

fireworks to the bumpkin squire, who came to London to go to the theatre

and learn manners.

Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary force,

and a succinctness of style peculiar to him. He had correct judgement,

a correct ear, readiness of illustration within a narrow range, in

snapshots of the obvious at the obvious, and copious language. He

hits the mean of a fine style and a natural in dialogue. He is at

once precise and voluble. If you have ever thought upon style you will

acknowledge it to be a signal accomplishment. In this he is a classic,

and is worthy of treading a measure with Moliere. The Way of the World

may be read out currently at a first glance, so sure are the accents of

the emphatic meaning to strike the eye, perforce of the crispness and

cunning polish of the sentences. You have not to look over them before

you confide yourself to him; he will carry you safe. Sheridan imitated,

but was far from surpassing him. The flow of boudoir Billingsgate in

Lady Wishfort is unmatched for the vigour and pointedness of the tongue.

It spins along with a final ring, like the voice of Nature in a fury,

and is, indeed, racy eloquence of the elevated fishwife.

Millamant is an admirable, almost a lovable heroine. It is a piece of

genius in a writer to make a woman’s manner of speech portray her.

You feel sensible of her presence in every line of her speaking.

The stipulations with her lover in view of marriage, her fine lady’s

delicacy, and fine lady’s easy evasions of indelicacy, coquettish

airs, and playing with irresolution, which in a common maid would be

bashfulness, until she submits to ‘dwindle into a wife,’ as she says,

form a picture that lives in the frame, and is in harmony with Mirabel’s

description of her:

‘Here she comes, i’ faith, full sail, with her fan spread, and her

streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.’

And, after an interview:

‘Think of you! To think of a whirlwind, though ‘twere in a whirlwind,

were a case of more steady contemplation, a very tranquillity of mind

and mansion.’

There is a picturesqueness, as of Millamant and no other, in her voice,

when she is encouraged to take Mirabel by Mrs. Fainall, who is ‘sure she

has a mind to him’:

MILLAMANT: Are you? I think I have--and the horrid man looks as if he

thought so too, etc. etc.

One hears the tones, and sees the sketch and colour of the whole scene

in reading it.

Celimene is behind Millamant in vividness. An air of bewitching

whimsicality hovers over the graces of this Comic heroine, like the

lively conversational play of a beautiful mouth.

But in wit she is no rival of Celimene. What she utters adds to her

personal witchery, and is not further memorable. She is a flashing

portrait, and a type of the superior ladies who do not think, not of

those who do. In representing a class, therefore, it is a lower class,

in the proportion that one of Gainsborough’s full-length aristocratic

women is below the permanent impressiveness of a fair Venetian head.

Millamant side by side with Celimene is an example of how far the

realistic painting of a character can be carried to win our favour; and

of where it falls short. Celimene is a woman’s mind in movement, armed

with an ungovernable wit; with perspicacious clear eyes for the world,

and a very distinct knowledge that she belongs to the world, and is

most at home in it. She is attracted to Alceste by her esteem for his

honesty; she cannot avoid seeing where the good sense of the man is

diseased.

Rousseau, in his letter to D’Alembert on the subject of the Misanthrope,

discusses the character of Alceste, as though Moliere had put him

forth for an absolute example of misanthropy; whereas Alceste is only a

misanthrope of the circle he finds himself placed in: he has a touching

faith in the virtue residing in the country, and a critical love of

sweet simpleness. Nor is he the principal person of the comedy to which

he gives a name. He is only passively comic. Celimene is the active

spirit. While he is denouncing and railing, the trial is imposed upon

her to make the best of him, and control herself, as much as a witty

woman, eagerly courted, can do. By appreciating him she practically

confesses her faultiness, and she is better disposed to meet him

half.way than he is to bend an inch: only she is une ame de vingt ans,

the world is pleasant, and if the gilded flies of the Court are silly,

uncompromising fanatics have their ridiculous features as well. Can she

abandon the life they make agreeable to her, for a man who will not be

guided by the common sense of his class; and who insists on plunging

into one extreme--equal to suicide in her eyes--to avoid another? That

is the comic question of the Misanthrope. Why will he not continue to

mix with the world smoothly, appeased by the flattery of her secret and

really sincere preference of him, and taking his revenge in satire of

it, as she does from her own not very lofty standard, and will by and by

do from his more exalted one?

Celimene is worldliness: Alceste is unworldliness. It does not quite

imply unselfishness; and that is perceived by her shrewd head. Still he

is a very uncommon figure in her circle, and she esteems him, l’homme

aux rubans verts, ‘who sometimes diverts but more often horribly vexes

her,’ as she can say of him when her satirical tongue is on the run.

Unhappily the soul of truth in him, which wins her esteem, refuses to

be tamed, or silent, or unsuspicious, and is the perpetual obstacle to

their good accord. He is that melancholy person, the critic of everybody

save himself; intensely sensitive to the faults of others, wounded by

them; in love with his own indubitable honesty, and with his ideal of

the simpler form of life befitting it: qualities which constitute the

satirist. He is a Jean Jacques of the Court. His proposal to Celimene

when he pardons her, that she should follow him in flying humankind, and

his frenzy of detestation of her at her refusal, are thoroughly in the

mood of Jean Jacques. He is an impracticable creature of a priceless

virtue; but Celimene may feel that to fly with him to the desert: that

is from the Court to the country

‘Ou d’etre homme d’honneur on ait la liberte,’

she is likely to find herself the companion of a starving satirist, like

that poor princess who ran away with the waiting-man, and when both were

hungry in the forest, was ordered to give him flesh. She is a fieffee

coquette, rejoicing in her wit and her attractions, and distinguished by

her inclination for Alceste in the midst of her many other lovers;

only she finds it hard to cut them off--what woman with a train does

not?--and when the exposure of her naughty wit has laid her under

their rebuke, she will do the utmost she can: she will give her hand to

honesty, but she cannot quite abandon worldliness. She would be unwise

if she did.

The fable is thin. Our pungent contrivers of plots would see no

indication of life in the outlines. The life of the comedy is in the

idea. As with the singing of the sky-lark out of sight, you must love

the bird to be attentive to the song, so in this highest flight of

the Comic Muse, you must love pure Comedy warmly to understand the

Misanthrope: you must be receptive of the idea of Comedy. And to love

Comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough

not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.

Menander wrote a comedy called Misogynes, said to have been the most

celebrated of his works. This misogynist is a married man, according to

the fragment surviving, and is a hater of women through hatred of his

wife. He generalizes upon them from the example of this lamentable

adjunct of his fortunes, and seems to have got the worst of it in the

contest with her, which is like the issue in reality, in the polite

world. He seems also to have deserved it, which may be as true to the

copy. But we are unable to say whether the wife was a good voice of her

sex: or how far Menander in this instance raised the idea of woman

from the mire it was plunged into by the comic poets, or rather satiric

dramatists, of the middle period of Greek Comedy preceding him and

the New Comedy, who devoted their wit chiefly to the abuse, and for

a diversity, to the eulogy of extra-mural ladies of conspicuous fame.

Menander idealized them without purposely elevating. He satirized a

certain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neither

professionally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two

Andrians, Chrysis and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for

tenderness. But the condition of honest women in his day did not permit

of the freedom of action and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and

consequently it is below our mark of pure Comedy.

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the love of

me love Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns are able to

love Menander; and what is preserved of Terence has not apparently

given us the best of the friend of Epicurus. [Greek text which cannot be

reproduced] the lover taken in horror, and [Greek text] the damsel shorn

of her locks, have a promising sound for scenes of jealousy and a too

masterful display of lordly authority, leading to regrets, of the

kind known to intemperate men who imagined they were fighting with the

weaker, as the fragments indicate.

Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two,

the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are inferior in

comic action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander to the Andria, the

Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: but Phormio is a more

dashing and amusing convivial parasite than the Gnatho of the

last-named comedy. There were numerous rivals of whom we know next to

nothing--except by the quotations of Athenaeus and Plutarch, and the

Greek grammarians who cited them to support a dictum--in this as in the

preceding periods of comedy in Athens, for Menander’s plays are counted

by many scores, and they were crowned by the prize only eight times. The

favourite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and

if some of his rivals here and there surpassed him in comic force, and

out-stripped him in competition by an appositeness to the occasion that

had previously in the same way deprived the genius of Aristophanes of

its due reward in Clouds and Birds, his position as chief of the comic

poets of his age was unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily drags

Aristophanes into a comparison with him, to the confusion of the older

poet. Their aims, the matter they dealt in, and the times, were quite

dissimilar. But it is no wonder that Plutarch, writing when Athenian

beauty of style was the delight of his patrons, should rank Menander

at the highest. In what degree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander,

whether, as he states of the passage in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus,

verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenes--the description of the last

words of the dying Andrian, and of her funeral, for instance--remains

conjectural. For us Terence shares with his master the praise of an

amenity that is like Elysian speech, equable and ever gracious; like the

face of the Andrian’s young sister:

‘Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.’

The celebrated ‘flens quam familiariter,’ of which the closest

rendering grounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the sorrowful

confidingness of a young girl who has lost her sister and dearest

friend, and has but her lover left to her; ‘she turned and flung herself

on his bosom, weeping as though at home there’: this our instinct

tells us must be Greek, though hardly finer in Greek. Certain lines of

Terence, compared with the original fragments, show that he embellished

them; but his taste was too exquisite for him to do other than devote

his genius to the honest translation of such pieces as the above.

Menander, then; with him, through the affinity of sympathy, Terence; and

Shakespeare and Moliere have this beautiful translucency of language:

and the study of the comic poets might be recommended, if for that only.

A singular ill fate befell the writings of Menander. What we have of him

in Terence was chosen probably to please the cultivated Romans; {8} and

is a romantic play with a comic intrigue, obtained in two instances, the

Andria and the Eunuchus, by rolling a couple of his originals into one.

The titles of certain of the lost plays indicate the comic illumining

character; a Self-pitier, a Self-chastiser, an Ill-tempered man, a

Superstitious, an Incredulous, etc., point to suggestive domestic

themes.

Terence forwarded manuscript translations from Greece, that suffered

shipwreck; he, who could have restored the treasure, died on the way

home. The zealots of Byzantium completed the work of destruction. So we

have the four comedies of Terence, numbering six of Menander, with a few

sketches of plots--one of them, the Thesaurus, introduces a miser, whom

we should have liked to contrast with Harpagon--and a multitude of small

fragments of a sententious cast, fitted for quotation. Enough remains to

make his greatness felt.

Without undervaluing other writers of Comedy, I think it may be said

that Menander and Moliere stand alone specially as comic poets of the

feelings and the idea. In each of them there is a conception of

the Comic that refines even to pain, as in the Menedemus of the

Heautontimorumenus, and in the Misanthrope. Menander and Moliere have

given the principal types to Comedy hitherto. The Micio and Demea of the

Adelphi, with their opposing views of the proper management of youth,

are still alive; the Sganarelles and Arnolphes of the Ecole des Maris

and the Ecole des Femmes, are not all buried. Tartuffe is the father of

the hypocrites; Orgon of the dupes; Thraso, of the braggadocios; Alceste

of the ‘Manlys’; Davus and Syrus of the intriguing valets, the Scapins

and Figaros. Ladies that soar in the realms of Rose-Pink, whose language

wears the nodding plumes of intellectual conceit, are traceable to

Philaminte and Belise of the Femmes Savantes: and the mordant witty

women have the tongue of Celimene. The reason is, that these two poets

idealized upon life: the foundation of their types is real and in the

quick, but they painted with spiritual strength, which is the solid in

Art.

The idealistic conceptions of Comedy gives breadth and opportunities of

daring to Comic genius, and helps to solve the difficulties it creates.

How, for example, shall an audience be assured that an evident and

monstrous dupe is actually deceived without being an absolute fool? In

Le Tartuffe the note of high Comedy strikes when Orgon on his return

home hears of his idol’s excellent appetite. ‘Le pauvre homme!’ he

exclaims. He is told that the wife of his bosom has been unwell. ‘Et

Tartuffe?’ he asks, impatient to hear him spoken of, his mind suffused

with the thought of Tartuffe, crazy with tenderness, and again he

croons, ‘Le pauvre homme!’ It is the mother’s cry of pitying delight at

a nurse’s recital of the feats in young animal gluttony of her cherished

infant. After this masterstroke of the Comic, you not only put faith in

Orgon’s roseate prepossession, you share it with him by comic sympathy,

and can listen with no more than a tremble of the laughing muscles to

the instance he gives of the sublime humanity of Tartuffe:

‘Un rien presque suffit pour le scandaliser, Jusque-le, qu’il se vint

l’autre jour accuser D’avoir pris une puce en faisant sa priere, Et de

l’avoir tuee avec trop de colere.’

And to have killed it too wrathfully! Translating Moliere is like

humming an air one has heard performed by an accomplished violinist of

the pure tones without flourish.

Orgon, awakening to find another dupe in Madame Pernelle, incredulous

of the revelations which have at last opened his own besotted eyes, is a

scene of the double Comic, vivified by the spell previously cast on the

mind. There we feel the power of the poet’s creation; and in the sharp

light of that sudden turn the humanity is livelier than any realistic

work can make it.

Italian Comedy gives many hints for a Tartuffe; but they may be found in

Boccaccio, as well as in Machiavelli’s Mandragola. The Frate Timoteo of

this piece is only a very oily friar, compliantly assisting an intrigue

with ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the mildest word) for payment.

Frate Timoteo has a fine Italian priestly pose.

DONNA: Credete voi, che’l Turco passi questo anno in Italia?

F. TIM.: Se voi non fate orazione, si.

Priestly arrogance and unctuousness, and trickeries and casuistries,

cannot be painted without our discovering a likeness in the long Italian

gallery. Goldoni sketched the Venetian manners of the decadence of the

Republic with a French pencil, and was an Italian Scribe in style.

The Spanish stage is richer in such Comedies as that which furnished the

idea of the Menteur to Corneille. But you must force yourself to believe

that this liar is not forcing his vein when he piles lie upon lie. There

is no preceding touch to win the mind to credulity. Spanish Comedy is

generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as of

marionnettes. The Comedy might be performed by a troop of the corps

de ballet; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an

animated shuffle of feet. It is, in fact, something other than the true

idea of Comedy. Where the sexes are separated, men and women grow, as

the Portuguese call it, affaimados of one another, famine-stricken; and

all the tragic elements are on the stage. Don Juan is a comic character

that sends souls flying: nor does the humour of the breaking of a dozen

women’s hearts conciliate the Comic Muse with the drawing of blood.

German attempts at Comedy remind one vividly of Heine’s image of his

country in the dancing of Atta Troll. Lessing tried his hand at it, with

a sobering effect upon readers. The intention to produce the reverse

effect is just visible, and therein, like the portly graces of the poor

old Pyrenean Bear poising and twirling on his right hind-leg and his

left, consists the fun. Jean Paul Richter gives the best edition of the

German Comic in the contrast of Siebenkas with his Lenette. A light of

the Comic is in Goethe; enough to complete the splendid figure of the

man, but no more.

The German literary laugh, like the timed awakenings of their

Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather

monstrous--never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes of

unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar

humours of their little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yet

attained to: sentimentalism waylays them in the flight. Here and there

a Volkslied or Marchen shows a national aptitude for stout animal

laughter; and we see that the literature is built on it, which is

hopeful so far; but to enjoy it, to enter into the philosophy of the

Broad Grin, that seems to hesitate between the skull and the embryo, and

reaches its perfection in breadth from the pulling of two square fingers

at the corners of the mouth, one must have aid of ‘the good Rhine wine,’

and be of German blood unmixed besides. This treble-Dutch lumbersomeness

of the Comic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea of Comedy, and

the poor voice allowed to women in German domestic life will account

for the absence of comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that land. I

shall speak of it again in the second section of this lecture.

Eastward you have total silence of Comedy among a people intensely

susceptible to laughter, as the Arabian Nights will testify. Where the

veil is over women’s-faces, you cannot have society, without which the

senses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is driven to the gutters of

grossness to slake its thirst. Arabs in this respect are worse than

Italians--much worse than Germans; just in the degree that their system

of treating women is worse.

M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the excellent French essayist and master

of critical style, tells of a conversation he had once with an Arab

gentleman on the topic of the different management of these difficult

creatures in Orient and in Occident: and the Arab spoke in praise of

many good results of the greater freedom enjoyed by Western ladies, and

the charm of conversing with them. He was questioned why his countrymen

took no measures to grant them something of that kind of liberty. He

jumped out of his individuality in a twinkling, and entered into the

sentiments of his race, replying, from the pinnacle of a splendid

conceit, with affected humility of manner: ‘YOU can look on them without

perturbation--but WE!’... And after this profoundly comic interjection,

he added, in deep tones, ‘The very face of a woman!’ Our representative

of temperate notions demurely consented that the Arab’s pride of

inflammability should insist on the prudery of the veil as the

civilizing medium of his race.

There has been fun in Bagdad. But there never will be civilization where

Comedy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social equality

of the sexes. I am not quoting the Arab to exhort and disturb the

somnolent East; rather for cultivated women to recognize that the Comic

Muse is one of their best friends. They are blind to their interests

in swelling the ranks of the sentimentalists. Let them look with their

clearest vision abroad and at home. They will see that where they have

no social freedom, Comedy is absent: where they are household drudges,

the form of Comedy is primitive: where they are tolerably independent,

but uncultivated, exciting melodrama takes its place and a sentimental

version of them. Yet the Comic will out, as they would know if they

listened to some of the private conversations of men whose minds

are undirected by the Comic Muse: as the sentimental man, to his

astonishment, would know likewise, if he in similar fashion could

receive a lesson. But where women are on the road to an equal footing

with men, in attainments and in liberty--in what they have won

for themselves, and what has been granted them by a fair

civilization--there, and only waiting to be transplanted from life to

the stage, or the novel, or the poem, pure Comedy flourishes, and is,

as it would help them to be, the sweetest of diversions, the wisest of

delightful companions.

Now, to look about us in the present time, I think it will be

acknowledged that in neglecting the cultivation of the Comic idea, we

are losing the aid of a powerful auxiliar. You see Folly perpetually

sliding into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth and leisure,

with many whims, many strange ailments and strange doctors. Plenty of

common-sense is in the world to thrust her back when she pretends to

empire. But the first-born of common-sense, the vigilant Comic, which is

the genius of thoughtful laughter, which would readily extinguish her at

the outset, is not serving as a public advocate.

You will have noticed the disposition of common-sense, under pressure

of some pertinacious piece of light-headedness, to grow impatient and

angry. That is a sign of the absence, or at least of the dormancy, of

the Comic idea. For Folly is the natural prey of the Comic, known to

it in all her transformations, in every disguise; and it is with the

springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives her

chase, never fretting, never tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no

rest.

Contempt is a sentiment that cannot be entertained by comic

intelligence. What is it but an excuse to be idly minded, or personally

lofty, or comfortably narrow, not perfectly humane? If we do not

feign when we say that we despise Folly, we shut the brain. There is

a disdainful attitude in the presence of Folly, partaking of the

foolishness to Comic perception: and anger is not much less foolish than

disdain. The struggle we have to conduct is essence against essence. Let

no one doubt of the sequel when this emanation of what is firmest in us

is launched to strike down the daughter of Unreason and Sentimentalism:

such being Folly’s parentage, when it is respectable.

Our modern system of combating her is too long defensive, and carried on

too ploddingly with concrete engines of war in the attack. She has time

to get behind entrenchments. She is ready to stand a siege, before the

heavily armed man of science and the writer of the leading article or

elaborate essay have primed their big guns. It should be remembered that

she has charms for the multitude; and an English multitude seeing her

make a gallant fight of it will be half in love with her, certainly

willing to lend her a cheer. Benevolent subscriptions assist her to hire

her own man of science, her own organ in the Press. If ultimately she is

cast out and overthrown, she can stretch a finger at gaps in our ranks.

She can say that she commanded an army and seduced men, whom we thought

sober men and safe, to act as her lieutenants. We learn rather gloomily,

after she has flashed her lantern, that we have in our midst able

men and men with minds for whom there is no pole-star in intellectual

navigation. Comedy, or the Comic element, is the specific for the

poison of delusion while Folly is passing from the state of vapour to

substantial form.

O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding,

Moliere! These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when

you do call. You will find the very invocation of them act on you like a

renovating air--the South-west coming off the sea, or a cry in the Alps.

No one would presume to say that we are deficient in jokers. They

abound, and the organisation directing their machinery to shoot them in

the wake of the leading article and the popular sentiment is good.

But the Comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter; and

the sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether in public

life or private, and particularly when the feelings are excited.

The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of using

humouristic phrase: the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables

to treat of the infinitely little. And it really may be humorous, of a

kind, yet it will miss the point by going too much round about it.

A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some years back, at a very advanced

age. He had been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later years up to

the period of his death. There was a report of Duke Pasquier that he

was a man of profound egoism. Hence an argument arose, and was warmly

sustained, upon the excessive selfishness of those who, in a world of

troubles, and calls to action, and innumerable duties, husband their

strength for the sake of living on. Can it be possible, the argument

ran, for a truly generous heart to continue beating up to the age of a

hundred? Duke Pasquier was not without his defenders, who likened him to

the oak of the forest--a venerable comparison.

The argument was conducted on both sides with spirit and earnestness,

lightened here and there by frisky touches of the polysyllabic playful,

reminding one of the serious pursuit of their fun by truant boys, that

are assured they are out of the eye of their master, and now and then

indulge in an imitation of him. And well might it be supposed that the

Comic idea was asleep, not overlooking them! It resolved at last

to this, that either Duke Pasquier was a scandal on our humanity

in clinging to life so long, or that he honoured it by so sturdy a

resistance to the enemy. As one who has entangled himself in a labyrinth

is glad to get out again at the entrance, the argument ran about to

conclude with its commencement.

Now, imagine a master of the Comic treating this theme, and particularly

the argument on it. Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of THE CENTENARIAN,

with choric praises of heroical early death, and the same of a stubborn

vitality, and the poet laughing at the chorus; and the grand question

for contention in dialogue, as to the exact age when a man should

die, to the identical minute, that he may preserve the respect of

his fellows, followed by a systematic attempt to make an accurate

measurement in parallel lines, with a tough rope-yarn by one party, and

a string of yawns by the other, of the veteran’s power of enduring

life, and our capacity for enduring HIM, with tremendous pulling on both

sides.

Would not the Comic view of the discussion illumine it and the

disputants like very lightning? There are questions, as well as persons,

that only the Comic can fitly touch.

Aristophanes would probably have crowned the ancient tree, with the

consolatory observation to the haggard line of long-expectant heirs of

the Centenarian, that they live to see the blessedness of coming of a

strong stock. The shafts of his ridicule would mainly have been aimed

at the disputants. For the sole ground of the argument was the old man’s

character, and sophists are not needed to demonstrate that we can very

soon have too much of a bad thing. A Centenarian does not necessarily

provoke the Comic idea, nor does the corpse of a duke. It is not

provoked in the order of nature, until we draw its penetrating

attentiveness to some circumstance with which we have been mixing our

private interests, or our speculative obfuscation. Dulness, insensible

to the Comic, has the privilege of arousing it; and the laying of a dull

finger on matters of human life is the surest method of establishing

electrical communications with a battery of laughter--where the Comic

idea is prevalent.

But if the Comic idea prevailed with us, and we had an Aristophanes

to barb and wing it, we should be breathing air of Athens. Prosers now

pouring forth on us like public fountains would be cut short in the

street and left blinking, dumb as pillar-posts, with letters thrust into

their mouths. We should throw off incubus, our dreadful familiar--by

some called boredom--whom it is our present humiliation to be just alive

enough to loathe, never quick enough to foil. There would be a bright

and positive, clear Hellenic perception of facts. The vapours of

Unreason and Sentimentalism would be blown away before they were

productive. Where would Pessimist and Optimist be? They would in any

case have a diminished audience. Yet possibly the change of despots,

from good-natured old obtuseness to keen-edged intelligence, which is by

nature merciless, would be more than we could bear. The rupture of the

link between dull people, consisting in the fraternal agreement that

something is too clever for them, and a shot beyond them, is not to

be thought of lightly; for, slender though the link may seem, it is

equivalent to a cement forming a concrete of dense cohesion, very

desirable in the estimation of the statesman.

A political Aristophanes, taking advantage of his lyrical Bacchic

licence, was found too much for political Athens. I would not ask to

have him revived, but that the sharp light of such a spirit as his might

be with us to strike now and then on public affairs, public themes, to

make them spin along more briskly.

He hated with the politician’s fervour the sophist who corrupted

simplicity of thought, the poet who destroyed purity of style, the

demagogue, ‘the saw-toothed monster,’ who, as he conceived, chicaned

the mob, and he held his own against them by strength of laughter, until

fines, the curtailing of his Comic licence in the chorus, and ultimately

the ruin of Athens, which could no longer support the expense of the

chorus, threw him altogether on dialogue, and brought him under the law.

After the catastrophe, the poet, who had ever been gazing back at the

men of Marathon and Salamis, must have felt that he had foreseen it;

and that he was wise when he pleaded for peace, and derided military

coxcombry, and the captious old creature Demus, we can admit. He had

the Comic poet’s gift of common-sense--which does not always include

political intelligence; yet his political tendency raised him above the

Old Comedy turn for uproarious farce. He abused Socrates, but Xenophon,

the disciple of Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the Ten

Thousand. Aristophanes might say that if his warnings had been followed

there would have been no such thing as a mercenary Greek expedition

under Cyrus. Athens, however, was on a landslip, falling; none could

arrest it. To gaze back, to uphold the old times, was a most natural

conservatism, and fruitless. The aloe had bloomed. Whether right or

wrong in his politics and his criticisms, and bearing in mind the

instruments he played on and the audience he had to win, there is an

idea in his comedies: it is the Idea of Good Citizenship.

He is not likely to be revived. He stands, like Shakespeare, an

unapproachable. Swift says of him, with a loving chuckle:

‘But as for Comic Aristophanes, The dog too witty and too profane is.’

Aristophanes was ‘profane,’ under satiric direction, unlike his rivals

Cratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are to

believe him, who in their extraordinary Donnybrook Fair of the day of

Comedy, thumped one another and everybody else with absolute heartiness,

as he did, but aimed at small game, and dragged forth particular women,

which he did not. He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain

greatness. We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount

Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, give

him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the

Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of

Grattan, before he is in motion.

But such efforts at conceiving one great one by incorporation of minors

are vain, and cry for excuse. Supposing Wilkes for leading man in a

country constantly plunging into war under some plumed Lamachus, with

enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and a

Samuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I

think it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes.

This laughing bald-pate, as he calls himself, was a Titanic pamphleteer,

using laughter for his political weapon; a laughter without scruple,

the laughter of Hercules. He was primed with wit, as with the garlic he

speaks of giving to the game-cocks, to make them fight the better. And

he was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, with the homely song of a jolly

national poet, and a poet of such feeling that the comic mask is at

times no broader than a cloth on a face to show the serious features

of our common likeness. He is not to be revived; but if his method

were studied, some of the fire in him would come to us, and we might be

revived.

Taking them generally, the English public are most in sympathy with

this primitive Aristophanic comedy, wherein the comic is capped by the

grotesque, irony tips the wit, and satire is a naked sword. They

have the basis of the Comic in them: an esteem for common-sense. They

cordially dislike the reverse of it. They have a rich laugh, though

it is not the gros rire of the Gaul tossing gros sel, nor the polished

Frenchman’s mentally digestive laugh. And if they have now, like a

monarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many jesters kicking the dictionary

about, to let them reflect that they are dull, occasionally, like the

pensive monarch surprising himself with an idea of an idea of his own,

they look so. And they are given to looking in the glass. They must see

that something ails them. How much even the better order of them will

endure, without a thought of the defensive, when the person afflicting

them is protected from satire, we read in Memoirs of a Preceding Age,

where the vulgarly tyrannous hostess of a great house of reception

shuffled the guests and played them like a pack of cards, with her exact

estimate of the strength of each one printed on them: and still this

house continued to be the most popular in England; nor did the lady ever

appear in print or on the boards as the comic type that she was.

It has been suggested that they have not yet spiritually comprehended

the signification of living in society; for who are cheerfuller, brisker

of wit, in the fields, and as explorers, colonisers, backwoodsmen?

They are happy in rough exercise, and also in complete repose. The

intermediate condition, when they are called upon to talk to one

another, upon other than affairs of business or their hobbies, reveals

them wearing a curious look of vacancy, as it were the socket of an eye

wanting. The Comic is perpetually springing up in social life, and, it

oppresses them from not being perceived.

Thus, at a dinner-party, one of the guests, who happens to have enrolled

himself in a Burial Company, politely entreats the others to inscribe

their names as shareholders, expatiating on the advantages accruing to

them in the event of their very possible speedy death, the salubrity

of the site, the aptitude of the soil for a quick consumption of their

remains, etc.; and they drink sadness from the incongruous man, and

conceive indigestion, not seeing him in a sharply defined light, that

would bid them taste the comic of him. Or it is mentioned that a newly

elected member of our Parliament celebrates his arrival at eminence by

the publication of a book on cab-fares, dedicated to a beloved female

relative deceased, and the comment on it is the word ‘Indeed.’ But,

merely for a contrast, turn to a not uncommon scene of yesterday in

the hunting-field, where a brilliant young rider, having broken his

collar-bone, trots away very soon after, against medical interdict,

half put together in splinters, to the most distant meet of his

neighbourhood, sure of escaping his doctor, who is the first person he

encounters. ‘I came here purposely to avoid you,’ says the patient. ‘I

came here purposely to take care of you,’ says the doctor. Off they

go, and come to a swollen brook. The patient clears it handsomely: the

doctor tumbles in. All the field are alive with the heartiest relish of

every incident and every cross-light on it; and dull would the man have

been thought who had not his word to say about it when riding home.

In our prose literature we have had delightful Comic writers. Besides

Fielding and Goldsmith, there is Miss Austen, whose Emma and Mr. Elton

might walk straight into a comedy, were the plot arranged for them.

Galt’s neglected novels have some characters and strokes of shrewd

comedy. In our poetic literature the comic is delicate and graceful

above the touch of Italian and French. Generally, however, the English

elect excel in satire, and they are noble humourists. The national

disposition is for hard-hitting, with a moral purpose to sanction it; or

for a rosy, sometimes a larmoyant, geniality, not unmanly in its verging

upon tenderness, and with a singular attraction for thick-headedness, to

decorate it with asses’ ears and the most beautiful sylvan haloes. But

the Comic is a different spirit.

You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to

detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and

more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and

accepting the correction their image of you proposes.

Each one of an affectionate couple may be willing, as we say, to die

for the other, yet unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the right

moment; but if the wits were sufficiently quick for them to perceive

that they are in a comic situation, as affectionate couples must be

when they quarrel, they would not wait for the moon or the almanac, or

a Dorine, to bring back the flood-tide of tender feelings, that they

should join hands and lips.

If you detect the ridicule, and your kindliness is chilled by it, you

are slipping into the grasp of Satire.

If instead of falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric rod,

to make him writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him under

a semi-caress, by which he shall in his anguish be rendered dubious

whether indeed anything has hurt him, you are an engine of Irony.

If you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a

smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to

your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you

expose, it is a spirit of Humour that is moving you.

The Comic, which is the perceptive, is the governing spirit, awakening

and giving aim to these powers of laughter, but it is not to be

confounded with them: it enfolds a thinner form of them, differing from

satire, in not sharply driving into the quivering sensibilities, and

from humour, in not comforting them and tucking them up, or indicating a

broader than the range of this bustling world to them.

Fielding’s Jonathan Wild presents a case of this peculiar distinction,

when that man of eminent greatness remarks upon the unfairness of a

trial in which the condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of

the opposite party; for it is not satiric, it is not humorous; yet it is

immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his own ‘party’

should have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue into villains’

ratiocination. {9} And the Comic is not cancelled though we should

suppose Jonathan to be giving play to his humour. I may have dreamed

this or had it suggested to me, for on referring to Jonathan Wild, I do

not find it.

Apply the case to the man of deep wit, who is ever certain of his

condemnation by the opposite party, and then it ceases to be comic, and

will be satiric.

The look of Fielding upon Richardson is essentially comic. His method

of correcting the sentimental writer is a mixture of the comic and the

humorous. Parson Adams is a creation of humour. But both the conception

and the presentation of Alceste and of Tartuffe, of Celimene and

Philaminte, are purely comic, addressed to the intellect: there is no

humour in them, and they refresh the intellect they quicken to detect

their comedy, by force of the contrast they offer between themselves and

the wiser world about them; that is to say, society, or that assemblage

of minds whereof the Comic spirit has its origin.

Byron had splendid powers of humour, and the most poetic satire that we

have example of, fusing at times to hard irony. He had no strong comic

sense, or he would not have taken an anti-social position, which

is directly opposed to the Comic; and in his philosophy, judged by

philosophers, he is a comic figure, by reason of this deficiency. ‘So

bald er philosophirt ist er ein Kind,’ Goethe says of him. Carlyle sees

him in this comic light, treats him in the humorous manner.

The Satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a

storage of bile.

The Ironeist is one thing or another, according to his caprice. Irony is

the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a moral object,

or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish irony fretting

to be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its

intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of

ambiguity.

The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the

feelings and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But

the humourist of high has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of

the Comic poet.

Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him.

The juxtaposition of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, the

opposition of their natures most humorous. They are as different as the

two hemispheres in the time of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound

in one by laughter. The knight’s great aims and constant mishaps, his

chivalrous valiancy exercised on absurd objects, his good sense along

the highroad of the craziest of expeditions; the compassion he plucks

out of derision, and the admirable figure he preserves while stalking

through the frantically grotesque and burlesque assailing him, are in

the loftiest moods of humour, fusing the Tragic sentiment with the Comic

narrative.

The stroke of the great humourist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy

in his laughter.

Taking a living great, though not creative, humourist to guide our

description: the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons of

festival; he sees visions of primitive man capering preposterously under

the gorgeous robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on fire when we wear

solemnity, if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve. Finite and

infinite flash from one to the other with him, lending him a two-edged

thought that peeps out of his peacefullest lines by fits, like the

lantern of the fire-watcher at windows, going the rounds at night. The

comportment and performances of men in society are to him, by the vivid

comparison with their mortality, more grotesque than respectable. But

ask yourself, Is he always to be relied on for justness? He will fly

straight as the emissary eagle back to Jove at the true Hero. He will

also make as determined a swift descent upon the man of his wilful

choice, whom we cannot distinguish as a true one. This vast power of

his, built up of the feelings and the intellect in union, is often

wanting in proportion and in discretion. Humourists touching upon

History or Society are given to be capricious. They are, as in the

case of Sterne, given to be sentimental; for with them the feelings

are primary, as with singers. Comedy, on the other hand, is an

interpretation of the general mind, and is for that reason of necessity

kept in restraint. The French lay marked stress on mesure et gout,

and they own how much they owe to Moliere for leading them in simple

justness and taste. We can teach them many things; they can teach us in

this.

The Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, of the

society he depicts; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of

men’s intellects, with reference to the operation of the social world

upon their characters. He is not concerned with beginnings or endings or

surroundings, but with what you are now weaving. To understand his work

and value it, you must have a sober liking of your kind and a sober

estimate of our civilized qualities. The aim and business of the Comic

poet are misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor his point of view

taken, when he is accused of dishonouring our nature and being hostile

to sentiment, tending to spitefulness and making an unfair use of

laughter. Those who detect irony in Comedy do so because they choose to

see it in life. Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself

than that it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to

Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness

in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation.

Caleb Balderstone, in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble

household in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely comic character. In

the case of ‘poor relatives,’ on the other hand, it is the rich, whom

they perplex, that are really comic; and to laugh at the former,

not seeing the comedy of the latter, is to betray dulness of vision.

Humourist and Satirist frequently hunt together as Ironeists in pursuit

of the grotesque, to the exclusion of the Comic. That was an affecting

moment in the history of the Prince Regent, when the First Gentleman of

Europe burst into tears at a sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell’s on the

cut of his coat. Humour, Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as

their common prey. The Comic spirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into

action, it would be farcical. It is too gross for Comedy.

Incidents of a kind casting ridicule on our unfortunate nature instead

of our conventional life, provoke derisive laughter, which thwarts the

Comic idea. But derision is foiled by the play of the intellect. Most

of doubtful causes in contest are open to Comic interpretation, and any

intellectual pleading of a doubtful cause contains germs of an Idea of

Comedy.

The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face. The laughter

of Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile;

often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind

directs it; and it might be called the humour of the mind.

One excellent test of the civilization of a country, as I have said, I

take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test of

true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.

If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and

it is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when

contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the

light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful;

never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached

to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features

are studied. It has the sage’s brows, and the sunny malice of a faun

lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness

of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was

once a big round satyr’s laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress

lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the

order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind,

mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one

of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having

leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness.

Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and

shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of

proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical,

pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived

or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities,

congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting

dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and

violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration

one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice;

are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually, or in the

bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique

light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the

Comic Spirit.

Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to

deny the existence of a mind of man where minds of men are in working

conjunction.

You must, as I have said, believe that our state of society is founded

in common-sense, otherwise you will not be struck by the contrasts the

Comic Spirit perceives, or have it to look to for your consolation.

You will, in fact, be standing in that peculiar oblique beam of light,

yourself illuminated to the general eye as the very object of chase and

doomed quarry of the thing obscure to you. But to feel its presence and

to see it is your assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you

in what you are experiencing: and this of itself spares you the pain of

satirical heat, and the bitter craving to strike heavy blows. You share

the sublime of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely

demonstrate their foolishness. Moliere was contented to revenge himself

on the critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique de

l’Ecole des Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest of

studies in criticism. A perception of the comic spirit gives high

fellowship. You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we

know of in connection with our old world, which is not supermundane.

Look there for your unchallengeable upper class! You feel that you are

one of this our civilized community, that you cannot escape from it,

and would not if you could. Good hope sustains you; weariness does not

overwhelm you; in isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride

is greatly moderated. Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you

from worlds of imagination or of devotion. The Comic spirit is not

hostile to the sweetest songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it:

Shakespeare overflows: there is a mild moon’s ray of it (pale with

super-refinement through distance from our flesh and blood planet)

in Comus. Pope has it, and it is the daylight side of the night half

obscuring Cowper. It is only hostile to the priestly element, when that,

by baleful swelling, transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office:

and then, in extreme cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils

the lamp: as, for example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body

of Moliere: at which the dark angels may, but men do not laugh.

We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and the

worshipful may be in alliance: I know not how far comic, or how much

assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of its

appearance: at least they are popular, they are said to win the ear.

Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful and

the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by

the Comic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree

that it enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when

one of the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like

reassuring daylight. You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that

you take it in, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air

for food. That which you give out--the joyful roar--is not the better

part; let that go to good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs.

Aristophanes promises his auditors that if they will retain the ideas

of the comic poet carefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their

garments shall smell odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year. The

boast will not be thought an empty one by those who have choice

friends that have stocked themselves according to his directions. Such

treasuries of sparkling laughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness

to the comic laugh is a step in civilization. To shrink from being an

object of it is a step in cultivation. We know the degree of refinement

in men by the matter they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but

we know likewise that the larger natures are distinguished by the great

breadth of their power of laughter, and no one really loving Moliere is

refined by that love to despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it

may be that the lover of Aristophanes will not have risen to the height

of Moliere. Embrace them both, and you have the whole scale of laughter

in your breast. Nothing in the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene

in The Frogs, when Bacchus and Xanthias receive their thrashings from

the hands of businesslike OEacus, to discover which is the divinity

of the two, by his imperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and

each, under the obligation of not crying out, makes believe that his

horrible bellow--the god’s iou--iou being the lustier--means only

the stopping of a sneeze, or horseman sighted, or the prelude to an

invocation to some deity: and the slave contrives that the god shall

get the bigger lot of blows. Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don

Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner of the Ancients, in Peregrine

Pickle, are of a similar cataract of laughter. But it is not

illuminating; it is not the laughter of the mind. Moliere’s laughter, in

his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light to our nature, as colour to

our thoughts. The Misanthrope and the Tartuffe have no audible laughter;

but the characters are steeped in the comic spirit. They quicken the

mind through laughter, from coming out of the mind; and the mind accepts

them because they are clear interpretations of certain chapters of the

Book lying open before us all. Between these two stand Shakespeare and

Cervantes, with the richer laugh of heart and mind in one; with much of

the Aristophanic robustness, something of Moliere’s delicacy.

The laughter heard in circles not pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound

harsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with

a sense of the distinction. You will fancy you have changed your

habitation to a planet remoter from the sun. You may be among

powerful brains too. You will not find poets--or but a stray one,

over-worshipped. You will find learned men undoubtedly, professors,

reputed philosophers, and illustrious dilettanti. They have in them,

perhaps, every element composing light, except the Comic. They read

verse, they discourse of art; but their eminent faculties are not under

that vigilant sense of a collective supervision, spiritual and present,

which we have taken note of. They build a temple of arrogance; they

speak much in the voice of oracles; their hilarity, if it does not dip

in grossness, is usually a form of pugnacity.

Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking outward has deprived them of

the eye that should look inward. They have never weighed themselves in

the delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to obtain a suspicion of

the rights and dues of the world; and they have, in consequence, an

irritable personality. A very learned English professor crushed an

argument in a political discussion, by asking his adversary angrily:

‘Are you aware, sir, that I am a philologer?’

The practice of polite society will help in training them, and the

professor on a sofa with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may

become their pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing it: he is at

least a fair and pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse. But the society

named polite is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will be

petting a bronzed soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a

spiritualist: ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is

besides addicted in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of

its rapidly revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their

attention on the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from

giddiness and preserve a notion of identity. The professor is better

out of a circle that often confounds by lionizing, sometimes annoys by

abandoning, and always confuses. The school that teaches gently what

peril there is lest a cultivated head should still be coxcomb’s, and the

collisions which may befall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more

to be recommended than the sphere of incessant motion supplying it with

material.

Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure overhead are rank with raw crops

of matter. The traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people not

covered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid so much that is fair and

cherishable, to come upon such curious barbarism. An Englishman paid

a visit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture, and was

introduced by him to another distinguished professor, to whom he took

so cordially as to walk out with him alone one afternoon. The first

professor, an erudite entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly

esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude the dagger) with the

vindictive jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty. After a short prelude

of gloom and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless

admirer the bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of flighty

caballeros:--‘Either I am a fit object of your admiration, or I am not.

Of these things one--either you are competent to judge, in which case

I stand condemned by you; or you are incompetent, and therefore

impertinent, and you may betake yourself to your country again,

hypocrite!’ The admirer was for persuading the wounded scholar that it

is given to us to be able to admire two professors at a time. He was

driven forth.

Perhaps this might have occurred in any country, and a comedy of The

Pedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would

not bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful that it was in

Germany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comic

training to warn them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft,

nor much of satirical. Heinrich Heine has not been enough to cause them

to smart and meditate. Nationally, as well as individually, when they

are excited they are in danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance,

they decline to listen to evidence, and raise a national outcry because

one of German blood has been convicted of crime in a foreign country.

They are acute critics, yet they still wield clubs in controversy.

Compare them in this respect with the people schooled in La Bruyere, La

Fontaine, Moliere; with the people who have the figures of a Trissotin

and a Vadius before them for a comic warning of the personal vanities

of the caressed professor. It is more than difference of race. It is the

difference of traditions, temper, and style, which comes of schooling.

The French controversialist is a polished swordsman, to be dreaded

in his graces and courtesies. The German is Orson, or the mob, or a

marching army, in defence of a good case or a bad--a big or a little.

His irony is a missile of terrific tonnage: sarcasm he emits like a

blast from a dragon’s mouth. He must and will be Titan. He stamps his

foe underfoot, and is astonished that the creature is not dead, but

stinging; for, in truth, the Titan is contending, by comparison, with a

god.

When the Germans lie on their arms, looking across the Alsatian frontier

at the crowds of Frenchmen rushing to applaud L’ami Fritz at the Theatre

Francais, looking and considering the meaning of that applause, which

is grimly comic in its political response to the domestic moral of the

play--when the Germans watch and are silent, their force of character

tells. They are kings in music, we may say princes in poetry, good

speculators in philosophy, and our leaders in scholarship. That so

gifted a race, possessed moreover of the stern good sense which collects

the waters of laughter to make the wells, should show at a disadvantage,

I hold for a proof, instructive to us, that the discipline of the comic

spirit is needful to their growth. We see what they can reach to in that

great figure of modern manhood, Goethe. They are a growing people;

they are conversable as well; and when their men, as in France, and

at intervals at Berlin tea-tables, consent to talk on equal terms with

their women, and to listen to them, their growth will be accelerated and

be shapelier. Comedy, or in any form the Comic spirit, will then come to

them to cut some figures out of the block, show them the mirror, enliven

and irradiate the social intelligence.

Modern French comedy is commendable for the directness of the study

of actual life, as far as that, which is but the early step in such a

scholarship, can be of service in composing and colouring the picture.

A consequence of this crude, though well-meant, realism is the collision

of the writers in their scenes and incidents, and in their characters.

The Muse of most of them is an Aventuriere. She is clever, and a certain

diversion exists in the united scheme for confounding her. The object of

this person is to reinstate herself in the decorous world; and either,

having accomplished this purpose through deceit, she has a nostalgie de

la boue, that eventually casts her back into it, or she is exposed in

her course of deception when she is about to gain her end. A very good,

innocent young man is her victim, or a very astute, goodish young man

obstructs her path. This latter is enabled to be the champion of the

decorous world by knowing the indecorous well. He has assisted in the

progress of Aventurieres downward; he will not help them to ascend. The

world is with him; and certainly it is not much of an ascension they

aspire to; but what sort of a figure is he? The triumph of a candid

realism is to show him no hero. You are to admire him (for it must be

supposed that realism pretends to waken some admiration) as a credibly

living young man; no better, only a little firmer and shrewder, than the

rest. If, however, you think at all, after the curtain has fallen, you

are likely to think that the Aventurieres have a case to plead against

him. True, and the author has not said anything to the contrary; he has

but painted from the life; he leaves his audience to the reflections of

unphilosophic minds upon life, from the specimen he has presented in the

bright and narrow circle of a spy-glass.

I do not know that the fly in amber is of any particular use, but the

Comic idea enclosed in a comedy makes it more generally perceptible and

portable, and that is an advantage. There is a benefit to men in taking

the lessons of Comedy in congregations, for it enlivens the wits; and to

writers it is beneficial, for they must have a clear scheme, and even

if they have no idea to present, they must prove that they have made the

public sit to them before the sitting to see the picture. And writing

for the stage would be a corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style,

into which some great ones fall at times. It keeps minor writers to a

definite plan, and to English. Many of them now swelling a plethoric

market, in the composition of novels, in pun-manufactories and in

journalism; attached to the machinery forcing perishable matter on a

public that swallows voraciously and groans; might, with encouragement,

be attending to the study of art in literature. Our critics appear to

be fascinated by the quaintness of our public, as the world is when

our beast-garden has a new importation of magnitude, and the creatures

appetite is reverently consulted. They stipulate for a writer’s

popularity before they will do much more than take the position of

umpires to record his failure or success. Now the pig supplies the most

popular of dishes, but it is not accounted the most honoured of animals,

unless it be by the cottager. Our public might surely be led to try

other, perhaps finer, meat. It has good taste in song. It might be

taught as justly, on the whole, and the sooner when the cottager’s view

of the feast shall cease to be the humble one of our literary critics,

to extend this capacity for delicate choosing in the direction of the

matter arousing laughter.

Footnotes:

{1} A lecture delivered at the London Institution, February 1st, 1877.

{2} Realism in the writing is carried to such a pitch in THE OLD

BACHELOR, that husband and wife use imbecile connubial epithets to one

another.

{3} Tallemant des Reaux, in his rough portrait of the Duke, shows the

foundation of the character of Alceste.

{4} See Tom Jones, book viii. chapter I, for Fielding’s opinion of

our Comedy. But he puts it simply; not as an exercise in the

quasi-philosophical bathetic.

{5} Femmes Savantes:

BELISE: Veux-tu toute la vie offenser la grammaire?

MARTINE: Qui parle d’offenser grand’mere ni grand-pere?’

The pun is delivered in all sincerity, from the mouth of a rustic.

{6} Maskwell seems to have been carved on the model of Iago, as by

the hand of an enterprising urchin. He apostrophizes his ‘invention’

repeatedly. ‘Thanks, my invention.’ He hits on an invention, to say:

‘Was it my brain or Providence? no matter which.’ It is no matter which,

but it was not his brain.

{7} Imaginary Conversations: Alfieri and the Jew Salomon.

{8} Terence did not please the rough old conservative Romans; they liked

Plautus better, and the recurring mention of the vetus poeta in

his prologues, who plagued him with the crusty critical view of his

productions, has in the end a comic effect on the reader.

{9} The exclamation of Lady Booby, when Joseph defends himself: ‘YOUR

VIRTUE! I shall never survive it!’ etc., is another instance.--Joseph

Andrews. Also that of Miss Mathews in her narrative to Booth: ‘But such

are the friendships of women.’--Amelia.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS FOR THE PG SHORT WORKS OF MEREDITH:

A wise man will not squander his laughter if he can help it

A woman is hurt if you do not confide to her your plans

A generous enemy is a friend on the wrong side

A very doubtful benefit

A great oration may be a sedative

A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle

Above Nature, I tell him, or, we shall be very much below

Adversary at once offensive and helpless provokes brutality

All are friends who sit at table

All flattery is at somebody’s expense

Americans forgivingly remember, without mentioning

As becomes them, they do not look ahead

As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos

Back from the altar to discover that she has chained herself

Be what you seem, my little one

Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues

Bed was a rock of refuge and fortified defence

But I leave it to you

Can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted

Causes him to be popularly weighed

Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists

Civil tongue and rosy smiles sweeten even sour wine

Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite

Dangerous things are uttered after the third glass

Distinguished by his not allowing himself to be provoked

Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war

Eccentric behaviour in trifles

Everywhere the badge of subjection is a poor stomach

Excess of a merit is a capital offence in morality

Excited, glad of catastrophe if it but killed monotony

Face betokening the perpetual smack of lemon

Fourth of the Georges

Generally he noticed nothing

Gentleman in a good state of preservation

Good jokes are not always good policy

Gratitude never was a woman’s gift

Happiness in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance

Here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate

His idea of marriage is, the taking of the woman into custody

Holy images, and other miraculous objects are sold

I who respect the state of marriage by refusing

I make a point of never recommending my own house

I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to breathe

I am a discordant instrument I do not readily vibrate

If I do not speak of payment

Imparting the usual chorus of yesses to his own mind

In every difficulty, patience is a life-belt

Indulged in their privilege of thinking what they liked

Infants are said to have their ideas, and why not young ladies?

Intellectual contempt of easy dupes

Invite indecision to exhaust their scruples

Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask for?

It was harder to be near and not close

It is well to learn manners without having them imposed on us

Knew my friend to be one of the most absent-minded of men

Lend him your own generosity

Love and war have been compared--Both require strategy

Loving in this land: they all go mad, straight off

Men love to boast of things nobody else has seen

Men overweeningly in love with their creations

Modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity

Must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike

Nature is not of necessity always roaring

Naughtily Australian and kangarooly

Never reckon on womankind for a wise act

No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters

Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer

Not in love--She was only not unwilling to be in love

Nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted

Only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers

Peace, I do pray, for the husband-haunted wife

Period of his life a man becomes too voraciously constant

Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied

Pitiful conceit in men

Primitive appetite for noise

Rapture of obliviousness

Rejoicing they have in their common agreement

Respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower

Rich and poor ‘s all right, if I’m rich and you’re poor

Self-incense

Self-worship, which is often self-distrust

She seems honest, and that is the most we can hope of girls

She sought, by looking hard, to understand it better

She might turn out good, if well guarded for a time

She began to feel that this was life in earnest

She dealt in the flashes which connect ideas

Sign that the evil had reached from pricks to pokes

So are great deeds judged when the danger’s past (as easy)

Soft slumber of a strength never yet called forth

Spare me that word “female” as long as you live

Statesman who stooped to conquer fact through fiction

Sunning itself in the glass of Envy

Suspects all young men and most young women

Suspicion was her best witness

Sweet treasure before which lies a dragon sleeping

Telling her anything, she makes half a face in anticipation

That which fine cookery does for the cementing of couples

The intricate, which she takes for the infinite

The social world he looked at did not show him heroes

The alternative is, a garter and the bedpost

The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity

The mildness of assured dictatorship

Their idol pitched before them on the floor

They miss their pleasure in pursuing it

This mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure

Tossed him from repulsion to incredulity, and so back

Two principal roads by which poor sinners come to a conscience

Utterance of generous and patriotic cries is not sufficient

We grew accustomed to periods of Irish fever

We like well whatso we have done good work for

We trust them or we crush them

Weak reeds who are easily vanquished and never overcome

Weak stomach is certainly more carnally virtuous than a full one

Were I chained, For liberty I would sell liberty

When we see our veterans tottering to their fall

When you have done laughing with her, you can laugh at her

Wins everywhere back a reflection of its own kindliness

Wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land

Woman descending from her ideal to the gross reality of man

Your devotion craves an enormous exchange