oned 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
perceive and participate in the social. We have splendid tragedies, we
have the most beautiful of poetic plays, and we have literary comedies
passingly pleasant to read, and occasionally to see acted. By literary
comedies, I mean comedies of classic inspiratio