In the later Greek and the Latin comedy we find ourselves in a less turbulent scene where the air is clearer, and things can be viewed with some steadiness. In Plautus, the poet of the masses and the taverns, the spirit of riotous buffoonery proved itself to be still alive. Yet the confinement of the scene not only to earth but to its familiar haunts, and the introduction of the love-motive, even though in its baser form, gave new scope for the exhibition of comic varieties of character. Even in Plautus we find sketches, not, indeed, of a moral type as we find elsewhere, but of a representation of some social class or calling, with {361} its characteristics forcibly set forth, as in the boastful soldier, the cheating servant, and the stingy money-lender. An approximation to the illustration of a moral type may, perhaps, be detected in the amorous old man in the Asinaria. It is, however, in the work of Menander and his Roman adapter Terence that we must look for the real advance. In the plays of Terence, written for the educated Romans, the figures assume something of respectability. Thus the father ceases, as with Plautus, to be a sort of football for filial buffoons to kick about, and grows into a character worthy of study; and the contrast between a foolish excess of authority and a wise lenience, given us in the two fathers in the Adelphi, has been the model for more than one modern writer. In Terence, too, the family begins to come by its own in its tussle with the rowdyism of the tavern, and this is no small gain for the comic delineation of character.[301]
The circumstance that modern comedy took its rise in the moralities, with their personifications of evil and the rest, readily explains how certain broad types of ignoble character were set in the forefront of its scene. These appear already in the later moralities, for example, “Like will to Like”. In the work which marks the full transition from the interlude of the didactic morality to the comedy, “Ralph Roister Doister” (c. 1550), we have outlined one of the valuable figures in the comic world, the vainglorious cowardly man, the victim of the most entertaining of delusions.[302]
In the comedy of the Elizabethans, Ben Jonson and Massinger, it is easy to trace this influence, disguised though {362} it is sometimes by that of classical comedy. In Jonson’s “Every Man in his own Humour,” said to be the first important comedy of character in our literature, the source of entertainment is laid, not in a merry plot, but in the presentation of a variety of characters which display themselves in odd fashions and novelties of conduct. It may be roughly true, as Taine says, with Molière present to his imagination, that the method pursued is to take an abstract quality and put together all the actions to which it gives rise.[303] In other words, the object-lesson of the morality is still too near, and the dramatist has not learned how to make his comic characters move and grow under the spectator’s eye. Yet, if we compare Bobadil with a braggart of Plautus, we may see that real progress has been made in the comic grasp and manipulation of character.
In the comedies of Shakespeare a superficial reader might, so far as drawing of purely comic characters is concerned, suppose himself to be moving backwards. The glowing air of romance, the removal of the scene from the workaday world, the partial abandonment to the moods of poetry and dream-delight, all this would seem to exclude the setting up of well-defined figures fitted to entertain the mood of a gay contemplation. The supposition would not be utterly wrong. The “mixture of tones,” which comes into the poet’s comedies as well as into his tragedies, does undoubtedly tend to limit the portrayal of purely comic traits.[304] The romantic background cannot, like the fixed arrangements of homely society, throw the follies and perversities of the figures into sharp relief. Think for a moment how different æsthetic significance and value {363} would have attached to the figure of the melancholy Jaques, if it had been encountered, not in the solitary forest, but in one of Molière’s orderly homes.
The mixture of tones introduces a softening, transforming influence which affects our attitude towards the queer figures themselves. Benedick and the other men who are gently brought to reason by schooling women have in their very perversity something amiable. Even Malvolio and the other figures, whose folly is exposed with something of the unsparing extravagance of an older comedy, catch a saving ray from the warm glow which is diffused over their world. We laugh heartily; yet the pre-dominant sentiment of the play moves us at the same time towards tender condonation.
Must we then say that because he rarely allows us to look on folly and vice in the pure attitude of amused observation, Shakespeare is no comic poet? It does not greatly matter how we answer the question so long as we reflect that in the world he has here created for us, at once beautiful and touched with a tender melancholy, and yet charged with the electric current of mirth, we possess something quite as delightful as the well-defined comic scenes of a Molière. Now and again, moreover, where the rosy warmth of romance gives place to the colder light of realities, as in “The Merry Wives” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” we see how keen an eye our poet could turn to the comic possibilities of character. Nor must we forget how great a contribution he made to comic character-drawing in his dialogue, where the man and the woman, at once attracted and repelled, use their witty tongues with excellent effect, and where woman, though now and then chastised, has a large part assigned her in curing man of his follies and developing what is best in him. {364}
For the comedy of character, in its highest and purest form, we are told, and rightly told, to go to Molière. In his world, not only is the uproarious, dust-raising mirth of classic comedy silenced, but the fun of extravagant plot with its disguises and errors, though not absent, is kept within measure. It is the familiar domestic world, into which we can readily transport ourselves. It is peopled for the most part with the sober and sensible. Upon this orderly scene is brought one or more of the great typical representatives of human folly. In some cases it is an old entertaining figure revived, the exacting and anxious miser, for example, or the voluble braggart. But the comic idea also incarnates itself in a rich variety of new forms, such as the faux dévot and his victim, the critic of society who turns a sour face on its conventions, the wrong-headed educator of woman, the ready-tongued quack, the crazy pedant and the others.
Nor is the enlargement of the gallery of portraits the only or the chief advance in the comedy of Molière. The fineness of the drawing is what fixes the eye. All trace of the old rigid abstractions has disappeared. Typical they all remain, as is their function: yet they are individualised in a way that satisfies all the conditions of the art.[305]
Molière’s supremacy in the comic use of character is seen, first of all, in the selection of his types, which have each a large amusing aspect inherent in the character itself, and capable of being set forth in a sufficient variety of manifestation. We see this at once by comparing his best-known characters with those of his predecessors. In Molière we have, what Coleridge tells us is wanting in Ben Jonson, the presentation of the laughable defect as “a prominence {365} growing out of, and nourished by, the character which still circulates in it”.[306] The simple-minded ambition of the Bourgeois gentilhomme, the pious over-confidence of Orgon, the intractable misanthropy of Alceste—these, as traits broad-based in the character, offer large possibilities of comic development.
The next point to be noted in this new art is the mode of presentation of the character which is to hold the eye in amused contemplation. The pointing effect of contrast is present, as in all good art; what is noteworthy is the admirable simplicity of the method of contrasting. This is rendered possible by the type selected and the point of view adopted. To Molière, the man taken with vain conceit, the opinionated prig, the unsociable critic of society and the rest, are aberrations from a normal type, the socially adapted person. The Harpagons, the Orgons, the Arnolphes, the Alcestes, the Sganarelles and the others, have their amusing lop-sidedness, their characteristic tendency swollen to the ridiculous proportions of a tumor, defined from the first by the antithesis in which they are set to the normal members of society. The orderly world, pleading for a reasonable accommodation to the usages of men, is sometimes represented by the judicious friend, e.g., Alceste, Arnolphe; not seldom by the wife, e.g., Madame Jourdain; at other times by the brother, e.g., of Sganarelle; and, now and again, even by the privileged and saucy maid, e.g., of Orgon, of M. Jourdain.