The down is the primitive comedian. Sometimes in the exuberance of
animal life a spirit of riot and frolic comes over a man; he leaps,
he dances, he tumbles head over heels, he grins, shouts, or leers,
possibly he pretends to go to pieces suddenly, and blubbers like a
child. A moment later he may look up wreathed in smiles, and hugely
pleased about nothing. All this he does hysterically, without any
reason, by a sort of mad inspiration and irresistible impulse. He
may easily, however, turn his absolute histrionic impulse, his pure
fooling, into mimicry of anything or anybody that at the moment happens
to impress his senses; he will crow like a cock, simper like a young
lady, or reel like a drunkard. Such mimicry is virtual mockery, because
the actor is able to revert from those assumed attitudes to his natural
self; whilst his models, as he thinks, have no natural self save
that imitable attitude, and can never disown it; so that the clown
feels himself immensely superior, in his rôle of universal satirist,
to all actual men, and belabours and rails at them unmercifully. He
sees everything in caricature, because he sees the surface only, with
the lucid innocence of a child; and all these grotesque personages
stimulate him, not to moral sympathy, nor to any consideration of
their fate, but rather to boisterous sallies, as the rush of a crowd,
or the hue and cry of a hunt, or the contortions of a jumping-jack
might stimulate him. He is not at all amused intellectually; he is
not rendered wiser or tenderer by knowing the predicaments into which
people inevitably fall; he is merely excited, flushed, and challenged
by an absurd spectacle. Of course this rush and suasion of mere
existence must never fail on the stage, nor in any art; it is to the
drama what the hypnotizing stone block is to the statue, or shouts and
rhythmic breathing to the bard; but such primary magical influences may
be qualified by reflection, and then rational and semi-tragic unities
will supervene. When this happens the histrionic impulse creates the
idyl or the tragic chorus; henceforth the muse of reflection follows
in the train of Dionysus, and the revel or the rude farce passes into
humane comedy.
Paganism was full of scruples and superstitions in matters of behaviour
or of _cultus_, since the _cultus_ too was regarded as a business or a
magic craft; but in expression, in reflection, paganism was frank and
even shameless; it felt itself inspired, and revered this inspiration.
It saw nothing impious in inventing or recasting a myth about no matter
how sacred a subject. Its inspiration, however, soon fell into classic
moulds, because the primary impulses of nature, though intermittent,
are monotonous and clearly defined, as are the gestures of love and of
anger. A man who is unaffectedly himself turns out to be uncommonly
like other people. Simple sincerity will continually rediscover the old
right ways of thinking and speaking, and will be perfectly conventional
without suspecting it. This classic iteration comes of nature, it is
not the consequence of any revision or censorship imposed by reason.
Reason, not being responsible for any of the facts or passions that
enter into human life, has no interest in maintaining them as they
are; any novelty, even the most revolutionary, would merely afford
reason a fresh occasion for demanding a fresh harmony. But the Old
Adam is conservative; he repeats himself mechanically in every child
who cries and loves sweets and is imitative and jealous. Reason,
with its tragic discoveries and restraints, is a far more precarious
and personal possession than the trite animal experience and the
ancestral grimaces on which it supervenes; and automatically even the
philosopher continues to cut his old comic capers, as if no such thing
as reason existed. The wiseacres too are comic, and their mask is
one of the most harmlessly amusing in the human museum; for reason,
taken psychologically, is an old inherited passion like any other, the
passion for consistency and order; and it is just as prone as the other
passions to overstep the modesty of nature and to regard its own aims
as alone important. But this is ridiculous; because importance springs
from the stress of nature, from the cry of life, not from reason and
its pale prescriptions. Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and
blind play are at the bottom of art and morals, and unless irrational
impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for
sheer emptiness. What tragedy could there be, or what sublime harmonies
rising out of tragedy, if there were no spontaneous passions to create
the issue, no wild voices to be reduced to harmony? Moralists have
habitually aimed at suppression, wisely perhaps at first, when they
were preaching to men of spirit; but why continue to harp on propriety
and unselfishness and labour, when we are little but labour-machines
already, and have hardly any self or any passions left to indulge?
Perhaps the time has come to suspend those exhortations, and to
encourage us to be sometimes a little lively, and see if we can invent
something worth saying or doing. We should then be living in the spirit
of comedy, and the world would grow young. Every occasion would don
its comic mask, and make its bold grimace at the world for a moment.
We should be constantly original without effort and without shame,
somewhat as we are in dreams, and consistent only in sincerity; and we
should gloriously emphasize all the poses we fell into, without seeking
to prolong them.
Objections to the comic mask--to the irresponsible, complete, extreme
expression of each moment--cut at the roots of all expression. Pursue
this path, and at once you do away with gesture: we must not point,
we must not pout, we must not cry, we must not laugh aloud; we must
not only avoid attracting attention, but our attention must not be
obviously attracted; it is silly to gaze, says the nursery-governess,
and rude to stare. Presently words, too, will be reduced to a
telegraphic code. A man in his own country will talk like the laconic
tourist abroad; his whole vocabulary will be _Où? Combien? All right!
Dear me!_ Conversation in the quiet home will dispense even with these
phrases; nothing will be required but a few pragmatic grunts and
signals for action. Where the spirit of comedy has departed, company
becomes constraint, reserve eats up the spirit, and people fall into
a penurious melancholy in their scruple to be always exact, sane, and
reasonable, never to mourn, never to glow, never to betray a passion
or a weakness, nor venture to utter a thought they might not wish to
harbour for ever.
Yet irony pursues these enemies of comedy, and for fear of wearing
a mask for a moment they are hypocrites all their lives. Their very
reserve becomes a pose, a convention imposed externally, and their
mincing speech turns to cant. Sometimes this evasion of impulsive
sentiment fosters a poignant sentimentality beneath. The comedy goes
on silently behind the scenes, until perhaps it gets the upper hand
and becomes positive madness; or else it breaks out in some shy,
indirect fashion, as among Americans with their perpetual joking.
Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for
direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang
and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to
sanity; and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by
saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is a
long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one. What, on the contrary,
could be more splendidly sincere than the impulse to play in real life,
to rise on the rising wave of every feeling and let it burst, if it
will, into the foam of exaggeration? Life is not a means, the mind is
not a slave nor a photograph: it has a right to enact a pose, to assume
a _panache_, and to create what prodigious allegories it will for the
mere sport and glory of it. Nor is this art of innocent make-believe
forbidden in the Decalogue, although Bible-reading Anglo-Saxondom
might seem to think so. On the contrary, the Bible and the Decalogue
are themselves instances of it. To embroider upon experience is not to
bear false witness against one's neighbour, but to bear true witness
to oneself. Fancy is playful and may be misleading to those who try
to take it for literal fact; but literalness is impossible in any
utterance of spirit, and if it were possible it would be deadly. Why
should we quarrel with human nature, with metaphor, with myth, with
impersonation? The foolishness of the simple is delightful; only the
foolishness of the wise is exasperating.
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