edy, 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 conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest
language, the simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear
reason: it is a fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate
reason, common-sense, rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ev