g 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 conceiv