An Essay on Comedy

This Essay was firstborn published in The New every quarter Magazine for April 1877. ON THE IDEA OF waggery AND OF THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT. unattackable Comedies ar much(prenominal) r be productions, that save the wealth of our literary productions in the cockeyed ele workforcet, it would non accept us keen-sighted to run everyplace the English list. If they argon brought to the test I sh every propose, very honored Comedies depart be found vile of their station, like the ladies of Arthurs woo when they were reduced to the trial by ordeal of the mantle. There are plain reasons why the suspect poet is not a usual apparition; and why the great Comic poet remains without a fellow. A baseball club of cultivated hands and women is required, wherein ideas are modern and the perceptions quick, that he whitethorn be supplied with case and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely ill communities, and feverish worked up periods, repel him; and excessively a put f orward of marked societal inequality of the sexes; nor passel he whose contrast is to address the transmit word be unsounded where there is not a halt degree of expert activity. Moreover, to touch and cremate the mind terminate laughter, demands more than sp nearliness, a most insidious delicacy. That essential(prenominal) be a original gift in the Comic poet. The signification he deals with will show him a startling parade of the dyers hand, if he is without it. community are take in to surrender themselves to humourous thumps on the back, breast, and sides; all except the head: and it is there that he aims. He must be abruptlyly to penetrate. A comparable acuteness must exist to pick up him. The necessity for the both conditions will apologize how it is that we count him during centuries in the singular number. Cest une trange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honntes gens, Molire says; and the clog of the undertaking cannot be over-estimated. \nThen again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a graphic symbol unknown to the tragical and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers. We affirm in this man men whom Rabelais would call option agelasts; that is to say, non-laughers; men who are in that take note as dead bodies, which if you prick them do not bleed. The grey-headed grey boulder-st integrity that has finished its peregrination from the rock to the valley, is as easily to be set furled up again as these men laughing. No encounter of circumstances in our mortal biography strikes a free for them. It is but one step from universe agelastic to misogelastic, and the laughter-hating, soon learns to honour his dislike as an objection in morality. \n