





Transcribed from the 1897 Archibald Constable and Company edition by
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





AN ESSAY ON COMEDY AND THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT
by George Meredith


_This Essay was first published in 'The New Quarterly Magazine' for April
1877_.




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


Good Comedies are such rare productions, that notwithstanding the wealth
of our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy us long to
run over the English list.  If they are brought to the test I shall
propose, very reputable Comedies will be found unworthy of their station,
like the ladies of Arthur's Court when they were reduced to the ordeal of
the mantle.

There are plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent apparition;
and why the great Comic poet remains without a fellow.  A society of
cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current and the
perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience.
The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional
periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of the
sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understood
where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity.

Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter, demands more
than sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy.  That must be a natal gift in
the Comic poet.  The substance he deals with will show him a startling
exhibition of the dyer's hand, if he is without it.  People are ready to
surrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast, and sides; all
except the head: and it is there that he aims.  He must be subtle to
penetrate.  A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him.  The
necessity for the two conditions will explain how it is that we count him
during centuries in the singular number.

'C'est une etrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes gens,'
Moliere says; and the difficulty of the undertaking cannot be
over-estimated.

Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a character
unknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers.

We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call agelasts; that is to
say, non-laughers; men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which if
you prick them do not bleed.  The old grey boulder-stone that has
finished its peregrination from the rock to the valley, is as easily to
be set rolling up again as these men laughing.  No collision of
circumstances in our mortal career strikes a light for them.  It is but
one step from being agelastic to misogelastic, and the [Greek text], 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