The dialogue of comedy and of the fiction which adopts the comic point of view will make use of these verbal sports, these doublings of the intellectual chase, at the hint of ambiguous language. They are refreshing, they enlarge the scope of the witty combat, and they help to maintain the mirthful temper of the spectator. Their use may be {357} illustrated throughout the history of comedy. Thus, we find in the comedy of Aristophanes much chaffing of the sexes and punning. The same is true of Plautus. In the merry comedy of Shakespeare we have still an abundance of puns, also a great advance in the art of the verbal foils, especially as crossed by man and woman, more particularly on the side of the latter. Molière’s quieter and more thoughtful discourse, though now and then it finds room for a pun, illustrates the finer art of witty combat, in which the foils seem to have been tipped with a softer button.
We have so far dwelt on those elements of comedy which seem plainly derivable from simple forms of fun, as seen in child’s play and the laughter of primitive folk. There remains what is in some ways the most interesting feature, the comic presentation of character in action and speech.
It is customary to classify comedies into those of Incident, of Manners and of Character. Such a division must not, however, mislead us. The three ingredients are present in every comedy. If Aristophanes depends largely on incident, he only gets his fun by choosing comic characters—the sophist, say, or the commercial explorer endowed with wings. In the so-called comedy of Manners of Congreve and his school, the persons, such as they are, undoubtedly form a main support of the entertaining action. Molière, though he relies chiefly on character, can only give us comedy by inventing situations in which his figures will have flashed on them the droll light of the comic stage. What is meant by the above classification is pretty plainly that in some comedies the characters are more central, are more finely evolved, and attract a much larger attention.
That the evolution of comedy has, in the main, been an advance in the presentment of character, as judged {358} both by the variety and the complexity of the personalities depicted, and by the fulness and definiteness of the presentation, is just what we might have expected. It seems certain that, with the progress of civilisation, men and women have grown more complex and more varied, both intellectually and morally, and further that the interest in character and the capability of understanding it have developed concurrently.
A word on the general conditions of a presentation of character in comedy. For one thing, dramatic construction, as compared with that of prose fiction, has certain obvious limits set to the delineation of character. The art is too wise to attempt a full presentment of so complex a group of traits as we find in a developed individuality. It illustrates, however, degrees of fulness in the presentation of personality, and the finer art of drama may produce its impression of a concrete person very much as a skilful painter does within the limits of a rough sketch by a few master strokes. Yet without the actor’s visible embodiment of the part, the full impression of a concrete individual would be difficult within the limits of dramatic construction.
In the case of comedy, moreover, there is another reason for the limitation of the art of developing individual character. The superlative æsthetic value of the ludicrous aspect of character imposes on the writer an unusual degree of simplification, of something like a reduction of the concrete personality to an abstraction. The comic entertainment afforded by the presentation, say, of a swelling vanity, springs from our keeping the mental eye fixed in merry expectation of the coming developments of the laughable trait. If, then, only this core of the character, as the mood of the spectator estimates it, is clearly presented and sufficiently illustrated, {359} both in its immediate manifestations and in its effects on the rest of the man, a very shadowy reinstatement of this remainder will suffice.
This conclusion seems clearly borne out by the common way of speaking of the great comic figures as “types”; for to view a character as typical means that we are interested in the person, less as a particular individual, than as an example of a certain sort of person. The common practice of writers of comedy, ancient and modern, of marking their characters by appropriate names, the Braggadocio, the Miser, the Misanthrope, and so forth, shows that authors recognise this typical function.
Such comic representation of type will always have in it something of the nature of exaggeration. The laughable trait, in order to raise the tide of merriment to its full height, must itself be raised to a higher power and displayed in the hypertrophic volume it tends to assume when the balancing forces of the normal man are greatly reduced. Yet, to say this is not to say that the common distinction between a lifeless abstraction and a living character has no meaning in comedy. There is a vast difference between the rigid abstractions of early modern comedy, before the art had extricated itself from the leading strings of the morality plays, and the relatively full and freely moving figures which we encounter in Molière’s plays. On the other side, the always controlled expansion of an amusing trait in the comic character is to be clearly marked off from that forcing of expression up to the dimensions of a distortion which is the essence of caricature.
A glance at the history of comedy will show us how, with its development, there has grown a finer recognition of the comic value of character and a corresponding skill in the presentation of it. {360}
The comedy of Aristophanes illustrates the art of comic character-drawing in its infancy. Here, where the comic muse has not yet left behind her the Bacchanalian rout; where the scene is apt to be violently transported, now to mid-air, now to the abode of the gods, and now to Hades; where the boisterous fun in its genial onslaught spares neither deity, poet nor statesman; and where the farcical reaches such a pass as to show us competitors for the favour of Demos offering to blow that worthy’s nose; there would seem to be no room for the portrayal of character. And, in truth, the problem of constructing character was in a way obviated by calling in living or historical personages familiar to the spectators. Yet even in this riotous atmosphere, where the eyes of the spectator must have been half-blinded by laughter, we may discern the dim beginnings of the art of comic portraiture. Not only have we now and again, as in the litigious old gentleman in the Wasps, hints of a typical comic figure, we have illustrated in the historical figures themselves, Socrates, Cleon, Euripides, a rude art of type-delineation.[300]