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 perc