The argument would have been relevant if the question had been a practical one of this kind: shall we put this comedy on the stage to-day for our boys and girls to see it? As against Lamb’s plea it seems to me to be a curious case of missing the point. When, for example, Macaulay complains that in these comedies the husbands are treated {373} as objects of contempt and aversion, whereas the gallants are decked out with all the graces, he might have remembered the old Contes and bethought him that this was an elementary condition of the artificial world, which is created solely for amusement. His answer to Lamb, that recollections of morality do steal now and then into this fantastic world, does not touch the latter’s main contention, and only shows (so far as it is just) that the creators were not perfect architects, and tried to combine incompatible styles. The moral order is still in the background, dimly perceived, even here: the fun of the thing is at bottom, as Lamb says, a sense of momentary escape from rules which we know cannot be set aside in the real world. But this idea of an escape implies that what we fly from must not be dragged into the show.
Our study of comedy and of the sources of laughter has prepared us to accept Lamb’s view. The comic spectacle appeals to the man in the play-mood. When there, he may see the fun of the turbulent world of Aristophanes and not be troubled by the thought of the undesirability of its realisation. Even when he is entertained by a play of Molière he does not take the background quite seriously, waxing indignant, say, in sympathy with Harpagon’s ill-used son, or with M. Jourdain’s ill-used wife. The least swerving from the point of view of comedy, a turn of the mental “eye-glass,” would spoil all. He would begin, with Rousseau, to protest against presenting so good a man as Alceste in a ludicrous light. The Restoration comedy appeals to the same playful mood simplified by the temporary inhibition of all outside tendencies.
It is, I conceive, a profound error to suppose that either the writer of a comedy or his audience is at the moral point of view, envisaging behaviour as morally {374} commendable or the opposite. Possibly, the influence of the didactic morality on early modern comedy may have helped to foster this error. It is true that Molière finds his comic material in certain defects of character. Yet the selections made by comic art are not determined by degrees of moral turpitude. As hinted above, very small and comparatively harmless vices may be preferred as having the drollest look on the stage.[311] Vanity, the richest of all moral blemishes in its comic possibilities, and therefore greatly employed by comedy, both ancient and modern, is not judged as heinously immoral, like hatred and cruelty, for example.[312] This may suffice to show how wide an interval separates the point of view of the spectator of a comedy from that of the moral judge.
It seems to me to be much more correct to say, with M. Bergson, that comedy takes up the social rather than the moral point of view. By this I mean that the comic poet is thinking of the look of things to the trained apperceptive organ of the social kind of person, according as they appear to be well or ill adapted to the common practices and opinions of society as discerned and interpreted by its more intelligent representatives. Yet, in speaking of the social point of view, I must not be taken to mean that either the author or the spectator of the comic scene is seriously judging of the behaviour of its figures by a reference to social values. There is, undoubtedly, an approach to this, not only in the early modern comedy, but in the later serious variety, including some plays of Molière; but the art-impulse of the writer, where it is clear, prevents the approximation {375} of points of view from becoming a loss of distinctness. Comedy addresses itself to a mood of æsthetic contemplation which, though it has room for keen penetration, and even for a dim discernment of a serious import in the background of the puppet show, remains on the whole a playful attitude. The spectator is agreeably occupied with the look of things; and such social consciousness as is awake in him serves merely to give to his perceptions a precise measure of the seemly, or at most to enable him to glimpse something of a sharply corrective expression in the puckered visage of the comic showman.[313]
In comedy, the moral comes into view as “mores,” as a part, and a principal part, of the customary, as we have it in a civilised society. Yet it is not disengaged and held up as moral. Molière, the Comedian of Society par excellence, shows us clearly enough that he is not trying to distinguish the more permanent and universal basis of society in morality from the variable accidents which enter into the manners of a particular society at a given date. The “gushing” mode of accost adopted by mere acquaintances which irritates Alceste is accepted by the poet as a standard of the fitting, just because as a fashion it is a social institution, to be good-naturedly accepted by the social kind of person. When M. Jourdain tries to step out of his bourgeois rank, the laughter he provokes depends primarily on the unseemliness of his ambition. Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris or London, such ambition is so common and meets with so large a success that we have almost forgotten to smile at it. Hence, when Taine talks of Molière as a “philosopher” illustrating “universal truths,” he commits an error which may be pardoned, as due to the natural inclination to stretch the achievement of a great {376} compatriot.[314] What Molière does is to secure for the rather oddly formed group of customs and practices adopted by the particular society he is depicting, adequate exponents, who, in their advocacy of the social system against the socially perverse, not only disengage and give clearness to the unwritten laws, but may—so long as they do not raise the question of their deeper grounds—seek to recommend them by the most enlightened presentment of the common-sense attitude.
Now, in substituting the social for the moral point of view, the writer of comedy necessarily tends to slacken the cords that bind us in society. Nothing comes out more plainly in Molière’s plays than the good-natured accommodation of social requirements to human infirmities. The author distinctly rejects the idea of going above this standard, of trying to improve on social customs—for example, in the comic treatment of Alceste and of Arnolphe. At heart, like his Roman predecessors, he takes sides with indulgence against all irksome restraint. He has the large tolerance, the readiness to excuse and to pass by, of the easy man of the world. Célimène’s coquetries, for example, are accepted as natural in one who “is twenty years old”. So it must be; for comedy is written to put us into an easy frame of mind, in which we are perfectly content with the world as it is.
From this point of view, we may see that the comedy of manners is not, fundamentally, so different from that of character as is often maintained. It breaks with the moral order of stable societies, no doubt, and turns its back rather rudely on this order. Yet it may still, in a sense, be said to adopt the social point of view. That is to say, it envisages {377} the seemly as that which falls in with the code of manners which happens to obtain at the time. Its standard of fitness is, like that of the savage and of Molière, the customs of the tribe. It is the sour-tempered and suspicious husband, for whom Macaulay expresses so droll a concern, who in this inverted world becomes the anti-social kind of person. The large indulgence of this society is but an expansion of the indulgence common to Terence and to Molière. A sub-conscious awareness of the topsy-turvyness of things is with us as we look; and the quaint fancifulness of the inversion—if only like Lamb we can refuse for a moment to take serious views—is distinctly refreshing.
In saying that we go to meet comedy in the play-mood, in which our habits of moral approbation and disapprobation, and even of estimation of social values, are lulled to a sleep more or less profound, it is not meant that these serious tendencies in us can be ignored by the writer of comedy. As implied above, they mould our forms of the seemly, unknowingly to us perhaps, even as we look. And more, though inhibited by the play-like mood, they have force; and should the showman go too far, say in the direction of stripping off the veil of decency, they may wake up and make an end of the comic enjoyment. Just as tragic fear and pity may give way to physical revulsion when horror obtrudes itself, so when in comedy the unclean thrusts into view its ugly head, a sort of physical revulsion may silence laughter. The latitude in these matters conceded from time to time to comic art will, it is evident, vary greatly with the particular ratio between the vigours of the mirthful and moral tendencies.
The presentation of the comic aspects of men’s behaviour on the stage is narrowly limited. As Sainte-Beuve reminds us, a whole people may have a fit (accès) of mania. If {378} this happen to be the war-fury we shall have given us, as pointed out above, unmistakable elements of comic situation and character. Indeed, if a person who has just been in the midst of a wild “Jingoism” without losing his head will read Molière’s plays he will not fail to be struck by numerous resemblances. And here, as in comedy, the figures have their comical contours and poses thrown into relief by a social background, as much superior to any single community at a particular moment, as a community to one of its members. Yet no national comedy could in these days follow Aristophanes and use such promising material, nor are we likely as yet to have a comedy for the civilised world.
Before leaving comedy, we may glance at other forms of literature which seem to approach its point of view. Of certain kinds of the so-called serious comedy of recent times I do not propose to speak. It seems more important to remark that prose fiction may now and again draw near the comic point of view. It sometimes presents us with a texture of fantastic situations and adventures which reminds us of the Aristophanean burlesque, as in the “Tartarin” series of Alphonse Daudet. This type of fiction gives us elemental laughter, uncomplicated by anything in the nature of sad reflection—though a little of the tenderness of humour may steal in. Or the tone of the story may approach that of the more sedate comedy, making, indeed, the one hardly distinguishable from the other, save through the narrative form. This holds good, for example, of the novels of Miss Austen. The social point of view is sharply defined and steadily adhered to, and critical reflection is confined to the rôle of giving a fuller and more lucid interpretation of the standards of the society illustrated.