III
The French, who have an armory of critical terms both more exact and more abundant than ours, distinguish between three different kinds of stage humor. There is, first of all, the mere witticism, the sentence laughable in itself, the so-called epigram; and this they term the mot d’esprit. Second, there is the phrase which derives its comic effect not from itself but from its utterance at a given moment in the movement of the story; and this they speak of as the mot de situation. Thirdly, there is the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unexpectedly, unconsciously turning the flashlight on the unexplored recesses of his own soul; and they are wont to call this the mot de caractère.
It is the first of these, the witticism existing for its own sake and sufficient with itself, detachable from the dialog, not integrated with either character or situation, merely a merry jest at large, it is verbal glitter of this sort which is essentially juvenile, which we may expect in the piece of ’prentice playwrights and which we find in the early comedies of Shakspere; more especially in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost.’
Thomas Moore, in his brilliant biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, called attention to the fact that English comedy, from the ‘Way of the World’ to the ‘School for Scandal,’ was the work of young men, who either died before they attained intellectual maturity or abandoned the theater; and in the juvenility of these comic playwrights, from Congreve to Sheridan, we can see the explanation and the excuse for the verbal fireworks which explode all down their dialog. So the younger Dumas was under thirty when he wrote the ‘Demi-Monde’ with its elaborately paraded epigram; and he was over fifty when he composed ‘Françillon’ with its dialog bathed in wit and yet devoid of detachable dewdrops. So Oscar Wilde left us only the comedies composed when he was comparatively youthful; and he had perforce to give up playwriting before he had attained to artistic sincerity. His epigrams, often amusing in themselves, are half of them taken out of his note-book to be tacked arbitrarily into his dialog. They may glitter like spangles but they are only sewed on. The built up repartees and the manufactured retorts of Wilde’s characters are sometimes too rude to be probable in the polite society which the author took a snobbish pride in putting into his plays; but at least they lacked the bare brutality of the rejoinders we find in Congreve’s comedies and more particularly in Wycherly’s, rejoinders which recall Goldsmith’s criticism of Johnson as a conversationalist, that “whenever the doctor’s pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt.”
Even Sir Arthur Pinero in his juvenile pieces fell victim to a prevailing epidemic of epigram. At least, I can adduce one specimen of his youthful effort in his very youthful play, ‘Imprudence.’ As it was unsuccessful it has remained unpublished, and I must therefore rely on my memory. The lovers have quarreled and parted forever. This is at an afternoon tea; and when the time comes for the young lady to go home, the young gentleman approaches her with the courteously formal query, “Shall I call you a hansom?” To which she retorts, “You are mean enough to call me anything!” Many things, no doubt, must be pardoned to a young lady who is desperately in love and who has just broken with her devoted lover; but this impossible repartee is not one of them. Sir Arthur Pinero’s dialog in his later social dramas is nervous, tense, highly individual, and totally devoid of these outgrown artificialities; and in them he evokes laughter by the clash of character on character. His piercing sayings are the product of essential wisdom and not of external wit.
It is evidence of Molière’s early maturity that there are no mots d’esprit even in his most brilliant comedies. He eschewed the empty witticism; and in his ‘Criticism of the School for Wives’ he explained with conscious pride that the jokes in his dialog were not put there for their own sake; they were meant to illustrate situation and character. Molière has his clever sayings, his epigrams and his aphorisms, but they are always germane; they are mots de situation and mots de caractère, and never merely mots d’esprit. More than any other comic dramatist does Molière deserve the praise that William Archer once bestowed on Bronson Howard, that his good things grow out of his story, “like blossoms on a laburnum,” and are not “stuck on like candles on a Christmas tree.”
The same commendation may be given to Sir James Barrie, who has now come into his own and has conquered his juvenile tendency to get his laugh by whimsicalities lugged in by main strength,—like the husband’s amputation of the excrescences of his wife’s hat, in the ‘Professor’s Love Story.’ In the later ‘Dear Brutus’ the whole fabric of the story is whimsical and fantastic, fanciful and delightful. To a play like this we may apply Goethe’s characterization of Claude Lorraine’s faery palaces, that it was “absolute truth—without a sign of reality.” At its performance little ripples of intimate laughter ran around the audience, never breaking into a unanimous guffaw. The humor of the dialog may be, as indeed it must be, the humor of Barrie himself; but it seems to us the spontaneous utterance of the character from whose mouth it comes.